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-Melissa POV-
Before anything else, I checked on Abigale.
She was curled up on the couch under the old blanket, her bandaged arm tucked against her chest, her helmet on the table beside her where she could reach it. Her face was still a little pink. I leaned over to fix the blanket where it had slipped off her shoulder.
Her eyes opened, just barely. Gray and amber, blurry with sleep.
"...Melissa?" she mumbled.
It was the first time anyone in Kivotos had said my name.
"Sleep," I said quietly. "I'll be right back."
She blinked at me once, slowly. Then her eyes slid closed again, and her breathing went slow and even, and she was out.
She'd said my name like she already believed I'd come back.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to.
. . .
The apartment's second room was supposed to be a bedroom. It had a bare mattress and one window, and that was it.
By the time I was done with it, it was an interrogation room.
The mattress went into Storage. Blackout fabric went over the window, out of Storage. Then a solid metal table, scuffed and heavy, the kind you'd find in a police station or a very serious garage. Out of Storage. Two chairs, one on each side of it. Storage again. I was starting to suspect the girl who'd owned this body before me had planned for this exact kind of afternoon, and I was trying not to think about that too hard.
The rope came out next. Then, after a pause and a long look at the masked girl snoring on the floor, a length of thin chain and a small padlock.
'Of course she had chains.'
I sat the masked girl in one of the chairs, ran the rope around her middle and the chair back, and looped the chain around her wrists behind it. Not tight. Just enough. I checked the knots twice. My hands tied them like they'd tied a hundred before, neat and flat and impossible to wriggle out of, and then loosened them half a notch when I noticed how small her wrists were.
The stage lights went last. I set one up in the corner, angled down so it would shine straight onto her chair and nowhere else, and left the rest of the room in darkness.
Then I stood back and looked at it.
A metal table. A chair. A spotlight. A tied-up delinquent in a dark room.
'Okay,' I thought. 'This is a little dramatic.'
The calm in my chest disagreed. The calm thought it was exactly dramatic enough.
. . .
That left the paperwork.
I went into the tiny kitchen, pulled a pad of paper and a pen out of Storage, perched on the one wobbly stool by the counter and started to write.
And that was the strangest part of the whole day. Stranger than the alley. Stranger than catching bullets. Because I knew how to do this. Not this body. Me. Melissa Cardon, office worker, keeper of the archive cabinets, survivor of a thousand vendor agreements and HR forms. I'd spent years of my life reading contracts nobody else wanted to read. I knew how they were built. Where the important things went. Where people hid the parts they didn't want you to notice.
So I wrote a contract.
A real one. Terms of employment. A salary, a reasonable one, paid weekly. Training, provided by me, at my expense. Housing, if she needed it. Medical care, which, given what I'd found in Storage, I could clearly provide for the next several decades. Confidentiality. A clause about not hurting people who couldn't fight back, written in very plain language, underlined twice.
And at the back, two blank pages with a single question at the top of each.
'What would you like to be?'
'What do you think you need?'
I read it over. Then I read it again, the way I'd read every contract at my old job, looking for anything unfair. There wasn't anything. It was a good deal. Honestly, it was a better deal than my old job had ever given me.
'Huh,' I thought. 'I'm a better boss than my boss.'
I slid the pages into a plain black folder, tucked it under my arm, and glanced at the couch on my way past. Abigale was still asleep, breathing slow and even, one hand resting on the edge of the table next to her helmet.
I closed the door to the second room quietly behind me.
---
-3rd POV-
"Ugh... wha-!"
The masked girl's eyes fluttered open. She was halfway into a groan, halfway into asking herself what had happened, when light hit her straight in the face and she squeezed her eyes shut again.
It was bright. White and hot and blinding, pouring down on her from somewhere above and to the side. She turned her head away from it, squinting, blinking, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
Slowly, they did.
She was sitting in a chair. She couldn't move her arms. Her hands were behind her, behind the chair back, and when she tried to pull them forward, something cold and metal clinked around her wrists. Chain. And across her middle, rough and tight, rope, holding her against the chair.
In front of her was a table. Solid metal, dented and scratched.
Beyond the edge of the light, there was nothing. The rest of the room was so dark that the circle of light around her chair seemed to float in empty space.
Her heart started to pound.
Then a voice spoke from the dark across the table.
"Welcome, troublemaker."
She flinched so hard the chair scraped the floor.
Across the table, at the very edge of the light, two eyes were looking at her. Golden. Shining faintly, the way a cat's eyes shine at night. That was all she could see. Just the eyes.
But it was enough. She knew exactly who it was. How could she not remember? The girl with no halo. The girl who caught bullets with her bare hands. The girl who'd looked at her in that alley until her legs gave out, and then made her bullet disappear in midair.
She'd fainted. She remembered that much. And then...
And then she was here.
"Now," the voice said, calm and pleasant, "since you're awake, let me say what I have to say."
The light seemed to grow. It wasn't really growing; the girl across the table had simply stepped forward into it. Long golden hair. Golden eyes. A plain gray jacket. Small. Smaller than her. Standing behind the other chair, a black folder tucked under one arm.
There was still nothing above her head.
"But first," the golden-haired girl said, "a question."
She pulled out the chair across the table and sat down, folding her hands on top of the folder. In the light, her face was calm. Not angry. Not smiling either. Just... waiting.
"Why'd you do it?"
The masked girl blinked. "...What?"
"The girl in the alley. The one in the helmet." Her voice stayed perfectly even. "She wasn't carrying anything worth stealing. She wasn't on anyone's side. She was walking home with a rifle she liked. Why'd you put her up against a wall?"
The masked girl opened her mouth. Shut it again.
The first answer that came to her was the one she always used. Our turf. She was on our turf. That's how it works. You don't let people walk through your turf. Everyone knows that.
She opened her mouth to say it.
Those golden eyes looked at her across the table, patient and steady, and the words just... didn't come out. They felt stupid. They sounded stupid, even inside her own head.
"...Because nobody notices you," she heard herself say instead, very quietly, "unless you're scary."
The golden-haired girl didn't say anything. She just waited.
So the masked girl kept talking. She didn't know why. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the dark around it. Maybe it was that nobody had ever actually asked her before.
She'd joined her crew back in middle school. Not because she liked fighting. Because they'd been the only people who'd let her sit with them at lunch. And in a crew, there was only one way to matter: be the one people were afraid of. So she'd learned to be. She'd learned the voice, the stance, the mask. She'd learned to pick on whoever walked through alone. And every time she did, the others had nodded at her like she'd done something right, and for a minute she'd felt like somebody.
It never lasted. The next day, she was nobody again, and she had to do it again.
"I didn't even want to hurt her," she finished, staring at the metal table. "I just... I didn't want to be nobody."
For a long moment, the room was silent.
"Okay," the golden-haired girl said softly.
That was all. Just "okay." No lecture. No sneer. The masked girl looked up, surprised, and found those golden eyes still looking back at her. They didn't look angry anymore. They looked like they understood exactly what she meant, better than she did.
The golden-haired girl stood up again.
"Then you have two options."
She held up one finger.
"The first one is that I completely remove your existence from Kivotos." She brought her hands together in front of her, fingers touching, and then flicked them apart like a little explosion. "Poof. Gone. Just like that."
The masked girl remembered the alley floor. The bullet that had vanished an inch from this girl's face.
'She could,' she thought. 'She actually could.'
A gloomy, hopeless aura settled over her like a raincloud. She sagged in her ropes.
The golden-haired girl watched this happen with what looked suspiciously like a small smile.
Then she held up a second finger.
"Or... you join me."
She threw the folder down on the table. It landed open with a flat slap, papers fanning out under the light. Lines and lines of neat handwriting. Headings. Numbered clauses. Spaces for signatures. A contract.
The golden-haired girl came around the side of the table, unhurried, and leaned back against it beside the masked girl's chair, close enough to touch.
She snapped her fingers.
A pen fell out of the air and landed on the contract with a small, neat click.
The masked girl stared at it.
"I'll train you," the golden-haired girl said. "I'll pay you a salary. I'll make sure you have somewhere to live, and food, and someone to patch you up when you get hurt. I'll make your life better." She paused. "In exchange, you work for me."
She stepped behind the chair. The masked girl felt two small hands settle on her shoulders, light and warm.
"You'll be my pawn," the voice said, closer now, just behind her ear. "But I don't ask for much. I always want the best for the people under me."
A pause.
"After all, in chess, a pawn can become a queen."
. . .
Something happened to the room when she said it.
The masked girl couldn't have said what. The air seemed warmer. The voice seemed to sink into her, past her ears and into her head, and echo there, softly, over and over. A pawn can become a queen. A pawn can become a queen.
She didn't see it. She was facing the wrong way.
But behind her chair, in the darkness just outside the light, the golden-haired girl's eyes had changed color. The gold had melted into pink. A soft, bright, glowing pink, and inside it, where the pupils should have been, something sharp and faceted caught the light.
Melissa didn't know it was happening.
All she knew, standing behind that chair, was that she meant every word she was saying, more than she'd expected to. And that something warm was gathering behind her eyes again, the way it had in the Engineering Department, and that the girl in the chair had gone very still.
Her hands moved up from the masked girl's shoulders. Slowly. Gently. Her fingertips found the edge of the black mask with the white X, and she drew it down, away from the girl's face.
Underneath, the masked girl's cheeks were faintly pink. Her breath was caught in her throat.
"I'll make you into whatever you want to be," Melissa said softly. "An idol. A soldier. An ace student. Even someone who can stand toe to toe with the head of Gehenna's Prefect Team."
Each word landed like a coin in a well. Like a devil at a crossroads offering a scholar anything he wanted, if only he'd sign.
And the worst part, the strangest part, was that none of it was a lie.
Every one of those things was possible. Some of them would take years. An idol needed singing, dancing and nerve. A soldier needed training, marksmanship and a temper that could be pointed in a useful direction. An ace student needed books, study and someone who believed she could. And standing toe to toe with Sorasaki Hina... well. That one was a stretch. But with enough time, and enough training, and enough resources, and a teacher who'd once fought monsters that made Hina look like a kitten...
It was possible.
"R-really?"
The masked girl's voice came out small and cracked. She wanted to believe it. She was scared to believe it. Would all of that really happen, if she signed? Or was this a trick? Would this girl, who could make people disappear, make her disappear the moment she said no?
The golden-haired girl only nodded.
Then she walked back around the table, unhurried, pulled out the chair on the other side, and sat down across from her. She gestured at the contract with one open hand.
"I'm Melissa," she said. "Will you tell me your name?"
"I... wait..."
Everything was going too fast. The masked girl's thoughts were tumbling over each other. She needed to think. She needed to...
She moved her arms.
They came forward.
She looked down at her wrists. The chain was gone. She hadn't heard it go. She hadn't felt it. And the rope around her middle had gone slack, coiled loosely on the floor around the legs of her chair. She was free. She had been free, she realized, for a while now.
She looked back up, shocked, into the eyes of the girl across the table.
And that was a mistake.
Because those eyes were still pink. Soft, bright, glowing pink, with that tiny faceted diamond at the center of each.
And the moment the masked girl looked into them, she felt it.
Not a push. Not a voice in her head telling her what to do. It was something already inside her, something she'd buried so deep she'd forgotten it was there, being drawn up to the surface like water from a well. The want. The want she'd had since middle school, since the lunch table, since every time she'd pulled the mask up and made her voice hard. To be somebody. To matter to someone. To be wanted, and kept, and not thrown away the next day.
It rose up through her all at once, huge and warm and aching, and every voice that had ever told her she couldn't have it, hers included, simply went quiet.
All that was left was the want, and the girl across the table, who had just offered it to her.
Only one thought was left in her head, quiet and clear.
'Pretty...'
"I'm... Eli," she heard herself say. "Eli Witmore..."
She hadn't decided to say it. It just came out. And she didn't try to take it back. She didn't even try to hide the blush that was spreading across her face. She sat up straighter in her chair and leaned forward a little, toward the table, toward the light, toward those eyes, as if she wanted to see deeper into them.
Neither of them noticed what happened above Eli's head.
Her halo, which had always been a plain white ring, the most ordinary halo in the world, flickered. Just once. For a heartbeat, it bent, warping like a reflection in rippling water, and swelled slightly larger than it had been.
Then it settled.
It looked exactly the same as it always had.
Almost.
. . .
Melissa smiled. A real smile this time, not a performance, not a threat. She reached out and tapped the contract with one finger, and each tap rang out softly in the dark room.
"Well then, Eli," she said. "What would you like to be?"
Eli picked up the pen.
She didn't read the clauses. She didn't check the salary, or the training schedule, or the part about not hurting people who couldn't fight back, underlined twice. She just signed, slowly and carefully, in all the places marked for signing, the way you'd sign something in a dream.
When she reached the back, she found the two blank pages.
'What would you like to be?'
'What do you think you need?'
Anyone else might have thought they were a trick. A test of character. A personality quiz in disguise. They weren't. They were exactly what they looked like: Melissa asking what she should arrange for her new employee.
For the first time since she'd picked up the pen, Eli stopped.
She thought about it. Really thought about it, the pen hovering over the paper. Her thoughts came back into focus, a little at a time, like a picture coming out of fog.
Then she bent over the page and wrote. She wrote for a long time.
When she was done with the last page, she set the pen down. Then she reached up, slowly, and pulled the black X mask the rest of the way off, until it hung loose around her neck.
She smiled.
It was a clear, open, honest smile, with a faint blush underneath it, and with it, the delinquent who'd cornered a girl in an alley seemed to disappear. What was left looked like what she'd probably been all along: just a girl, a little lost, who'd gone down the wrong road and been waiting a long time for somebody to tell her there was another one.
Melissa gathered up the folder and leafed through it. She checked every signature. Every page. Every line. Just to make sure it was all in order.
Then she reached the back, and the page with the first question, and stopped.
Something in her face went soft and pleased and very, very satisfied.
'What would you like to be?'
Underneath it, in careful, rounded handwriting, Eli had written three words.
A Wonderful Servant.