---
-3rd POV-
Deep in the Millennium ruins, where the old factory districts had been left to rust, a small figure was running across the rooftops.
Behind her, a swarm of floating machines followed: old security drones, round and gray and patched with years of grime, their single red lenses locked onto her back. They fired as they flew. Each burst was fast and precise. Each bullet was perfectly aimed.
And each one, mysteriously, vanished just before it reached her.
The figure was dressed head to toe in black: a fitted black suit, a black cloth wrapped over it at the shoulders and waist, and a black mask covering everything but her eyes. She looked, in short, like the most generic ninja imaginable. All that was missing was a throwing star and a dramatic pose.
She leapt a gap between two buildings, landed without a sound, and kept running.
'Ah,' she said, in her head, to no one in the world, and directly to you. 'You're back.'
She vaulted a broken air vent.
'It's been a while, hasn't it?'
She checked her wrist. A plain digital watch glowed there in the dark. 1:24 a.m.
'For you, I don't know. For me? A few weeks. Maybe more. I stopped counting somewhere around the third bracket.' She leapt a low wall without slowing down. 'Oh, and if you've been here before, you might notice things look a little different. Everything before this got rewritten. New scenes, more of me, fewer typos. Go take a look sometime. I promise I'm much cooler now.'
She dropped into a crouch behind a rusted water tank as another burst hissed past and vanished.
'And yes. The ninja suit.' She adjusted her mask. 'I may have read Izuna's bond stories one too many times. Don't judge me.' She ducked under a sagging power line, and a burst of fire passed through the space where her head had been and disappeared into nothing. 'A lot's happened. I'm in the middle of something big right now, actually. Very big. Possibly the biggest thing I've done since I got here.'
She jumped off the edge of the roof, dropped two stories, rolled, came up running, and sprinted across a cracked loading yard toward a huge, dark, half-collapsed factory.
'But before I get to that...'
The drones screamed overhead.
She grinned under the mask.
'Let me catch you up on what I've been doing off camera.'
She turned a corner, leapt over a fallen wall, and dove through a gap in the factory's side.
Everything cut to black.
---
-A while ago, Melissa POV-
The morning after Eli signed the contract, I made breakfast for three.
That was a sentence I never thought I'd say. Back in my old life, I barely made breakfast for one. But the noodle shop under the apartment, it turned out, had a working kitchen that nobody had touched in years, and Storage, it turned out, had rice, eggs, frozen vegetables and an alarming number of instant noodle cups. So by the time the sun came up, I had three bowls of something that was technically fried rice and three cups of tea sitting on the low table in the living room.
Eli had been awake for an hour. She'd spent most of it sitting very straight on the kitchen stool with her hands in her lap, watching me cook, like a soldier waiting for orders. Every few minutes she'd ask, "Is there anything I can do?" and I'd say "Sit," and she'd sit even straighter.
Abigale woke up last.
I heard the couch springs creak, then a small sharp intake of breath, and I looked over just in time to see her sit bolt upright under the blanket, eyes wide, hands flying to her head.
She found hair. Just hair.
Then she saw the helmet on the table beside her, right where I'd left it, next to her Winchester. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled it into her lap, hugging it to her chest.
She didn't put it on.
I set down the spatula, walked over, and sat on the low table across from her, the way I had the day before.
"Good morning," I said. "I owe you an apology."
Abigale stared at me over the top of her helmet. Gray eyes, amber at the center.
"Yesterday, I took that off you without asking," I said. "I didn't think. I know what it means to people in your gang. I shouldn't have done it, and I'm sorry."
She was quiet for a long time. Her fingers moved slowly over the scratched black shell of the helmet in her lap.
"...You gave it back," she said finally. Her voice was very small. "Right away. You were going to give it back before I even..." She trailed off. Her ears went pink. "Before I fell over."
"I was."
"Nobody ever gives anything back," she said, to the helmet.
Then she looked up, past me, at the girl sitting on the kitchen stool.
Eli had gone completely still.
. . .
I'd told Eli the night before that Abigale was here. I'd told her that she'd be the first person Eli talked to, after me, and that the clause in the contract about not hurting people who couldn't fight back wasn't decoration. Eli had nodded very seriously and said, "Yes, Melissa." She'd been saying "Yes, Melissa" to everything since she'd signed. I was going to have to do something about that.
Now she slid off the stool and walked across the room, stiffly, like every step cost her something. She stopped in front of the couch. Without her mask, her face was younger than I'd expected, and very pale.
She bowed. All the way. Forehead nearly to her knees.
"I'm sorry," Eli said to the floor. "For the alley. For what I did to you. You didn't do anything wrong. I just... I'm sorry."
Abigale looked at the top of Eli's bowed head. Then at me. Then back at Eli.
I didn't say anything. This one wasn't mine to fix.
"...Your gun was loud," Abigale said finally.
Eli's head came up a fraction. "...Huh?"
"Your gun," Abigale said. "It was really loud. And you were holding it wrong."
Eli's face went through several emotions at once. "I... what?"
"Your elbow was out." Abigale lifted one hand and stuck her elbow out to show her. "It pulls everything to the right. If I'd moved, you would have missed."
"I... you were curled up! You couldn't move!"
"I'm just saying," said Abigale, with total sincerity. "It isn't hard. You just have to aim."
There was a pause.
I had to turn around and pretend to check on the rice so neither of them would see my face.
Behind me, very quietly, I heard Eli say, "...Okay. That's fair." And then, even more quietly, I heard Abigale do something I hadn't heard her do yet.
She laughed. Just once. A small, startled sound, like she'd surprised herself.
. . .
Over fried rice, I gave Abigale a contract too.
Same terms. Salary, training, housing, medical care. The clause about not hurting people, underlined twice. She read every single line, slowly, moving her lips a little, holding the paper close to her face. When she reached the back and found the two questions, she sat and looked at them for a very long time.
Then she wrote one line under each.
When she handed it back, I read them right there at the table.
'What would you like to be?'
Someone who doesn't miss.
'What do you think you need?'
Somewhere I can take my helmet off.
I looked up at her. She was looking very hard at her fried rice. Her helmet was on the couch behind her. She hadn't put it back on all morning.
"You've got it," I said. "Both of them."
---
After that, the days started to blur together. In a good way.
On weekdays, I was Chris.
White hair, blue eyes, a plain dark blue halo, a seat by the window in the first-year wing. I made one deliberate mistake on the board every day. I ate the cheap set lunch. I endured exactly one suspicious look from Yuuka per cafeteria visit, sometimes two, if she'd had a bad budget meeting. I sanded brackets until Utaha said "almost," and then I sanded them again, until one afternoon, she looked at the latest one for a long time and said, "Fine."
Just "fine."
Kotori screamed. Hibiki looked up, nodded, and gave me a second screwdriver. This one had two self-destruct buttons.
"Why two?" I asked.
"Redundancy," said Hibiki.
After that, I was allowed to touch real projects. Small ones. A sensor array that Kotori was building to measure, in her words, "exactly how loud Neru-senpai is when she's angry, for science." A repair on one of Ikazuchi-chan's treads, which Utaha watched me do from three feet away without blinking, and then quietly redid one bolt of, and then, very quietly, didn't redo anything else.
On weekends, and on most nights, I was Melissa.
. . .
The storage unit, Unit forty-two, the one whose shark-headed landlord didn't want me storing anything that ticked, became a shooting range.
It was long and narrow and had concrete walls, and nobody in the complex ever came down that row. I put targets at the far end, a bench by the door and a light over each lane, and the very first weekend, I brought Abigale down and handed her the Winchester and said, "Show me."
She showed me.
She was good. Really good. Not trained good. Natural good. The kind of good that comes from something in the eyes and the hands that nobody can teach. Her stance was wrong, her breathing was wrong, she jerked the lever like she was afraid of it, and she still put five rounds out of seven into a target the size of a dinner plate at the far end of the unit.
So I fixed the stance. I fixed the breathing. I showed her how to work the lever without moving her cheek off the stock, clack-clack, smooth, like a heartbeat. My hands knew all of it, and for once, I didn't mind letting them do the talking.
By the end of the second week, she was putting seven out of seven into a target the size of a coffee cup.
By the end of the third, she was taking her helmet off at the door of Unit forty-two without being asked, setting it on the bench, and picking up the rifle bareheaded.
I didn't say anything about it. I didn't want to scare it away.
. . .
Eli was harder.
Not because she didn't try. Because she tried too much. She'd written "A Wonderful Servant" on the contract, and she'd decided that meant doing absolutely everything, all the time, for everyone, without being asked. I came back to the noodle-shop apartment one evening to find she'd scrubbed every surface in it, reorganized the kitchen alphabetically, mended the couch cushions, and was standing on a chair trying to fix a light fixture with a butter knife.
"Eli."
"Yes, Melissa!"
"Get down before you electrocute yourself."
"Yes, Melissa!"
"And please stop saying 'Yes, Melissa' to everything."
There was a pause.
"...Yes, Mel..." She caught herself. Her face did something complicated. "...Okay."
It was a start.
So I gave her a schedule. Cleaning in the mornings, because she was frighteningly good at it and seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Combat training in the afternoons, at Unit forty-two, next to Abigale. And in the evenings, schoolwork. Real schoolwork, from real textbooks, because when I'd asked her what she remembered from her classes, she'd stared at me like I'd asked her to recite the moon.
She was terrible at math.
She was surprisingly good at history.
She cried, a little, the first time she got a whole page of problems right, and then pretended she had something in her eye. I pretended I believed her.
That evening, while she was bent over the next worksheet, frowning ferociously at a fraction, I glanced up and noticed her halo.
It was the same plain white ring it had always been. But it looked... bigger. Not by much. A little brighter, too, maybe. Like someone had turned it up half a notch.
I squinted at it. It looked normal.
'Lighting,' I decided, and went back to grading.
. . .
One night, I was sitting on the floor of the noodle-shop apartment, checking over Eli's homework, while Abigale cleaned the Winchester at the table and Eli made tea in the kitchen, humming. It was quiet. Warm. The window was open, and the sounds of Kivotos drifted in: traffic, distant music, somebody, somewhere, shooting at somebody else.
I looked down at the worksheet in my lap, with my red pen marks all over it.
Then I looked up at the two of them.
'I'm teaching,' I thought. 'I'm actually teaching. I have students.'
Two students. A schedule. A shooting range, a classroom made out of a noodle shop, and a stack of textbooks. It wasn't much. It was barely anything.
But it felt like the start of something.
Something bigger, someday. Somewhere hidden, somewhere safe, where nobody would think to look. A place for girls who'd walked down the wrong road, or the lonely one, or who'd just never had anywhere to take their helmet off.
I didn't know where yet. But that night, I got up and added it to the Planning Board.
The Planning Board lived on the wall of the noodle shop's back room now, a big flattened sheet of cardboard covered in marker. It had come a long way since WHAT NOW.
MONEY. (Done. Don't ask.)
MORE SAFEHOUSES. (Done. Three. One has a cat landlady.)
CHRIS'S APARTMENT. (Pending. Kotori still thinks I live "the other way.")
ROBOT DOUBLE. (Stuck.)
And underneath, in fresh ink, a new line.
BASE?
. . .
And in the corner of all of it, never far from my mind, was the double.
I'd been building her in pieces. In the back room of the noodle shop, behind a door Eli was under strict orders not to alphabetize. Every spare part I could find went into Storage, and every evening, I'd open her little window and pull out what I needed.
The Engineering Department, it turned out, threw away an incredible amount of perfectly good material. Servos with one stripped gear. Actuators that were "emotionally unbalanced." Whole robot arms rejected because one finger was half a millimeter off. Utaha threw out things other clubs would have killed for, and I rescued them, quietly, one at a time, from the scrap bins behind the hangar.
Only once did anyone catch me.
I was elbow-deep in a bin, a rejected servo in each hand and three more tucked under my arm, when I heard footsteps and looked up into a pair of half-lidded gray eyes. Black floppy dog ears. A soldering iron, held loosely, like a cigarette.
Hibiki looked at me. She looked at the armful of servos. She looked at the bin.
I waited for the questions.
"...Ask next time," Hibiki said.
Then she turned around and walked back into the hangar. Her tail swished once behind her.
I stood there holding five servos and decided I'd definitely ask next time.
And then there was the scrap that didn't come from Millennium at all. Wrecked drones from gang fights. A broken security robot I'd found dumped in an alley, which I'd stored whole and then opened up in its little window and taken apart piece by piece, without ever touching a screwdriver. Motor. Joints. Sensors. Wiring. Every bit of it went into the grid, sorted, labeled, ready.
Piece by piece, she came together.
A skeleton of light alloy. Joints in all the places a body has joints. Over two hundred actuators, give or take. Synthetic muscle from a drawer in the Engineering Department labeled DO NOT POKE, which I had poked, extensively, with permission. A face. A very good face. My face, or rather Chris's: the same height, the same build, the same pale skin, with white hair that I'd dyed myself out of one of my own bottles.
Three and a half weeks in, I powered her on for the first time.
Her eyes opened. Blue. She sat up on the workbench, smooth and steady, every motor perfectly balanced. She turned her head to look at me.
"Hello," she said, in Chris's voice. "I am Frazure Christina."
It was perfect.
It was completely empty.
There was nothing behind the eyes. She sat on the bench and looked at me with the bright, flat, patient attention of a vending machine waiting for a coin. She could walk. She could talk. She could, if I programmed it carefully enough, sit in class and say "Present" and eat a set lunch.
And Yuuka would see through her in about two seconds.
Kotori would see through her in about one, because the first thing she'd do is ask a question, and this Chris wouldn't have anything to say back.
I sat on the floor of the back room and looked up at her for a long time.
'Parts can make a body,' I thought. 'I still have no idea what makes a someone.'
I shut her down. Her eyes closed. I put her back into Storage, very gently, into a square of her own: Frazure Christina (Unit 01). Then I sat there in the quiet for a while.
. . .
I knew of exactly one person in Kivotos who had been a body first, and become a someone after.
A girl who had been lying asleep in the ruins at the edge of Millennium for who knew how long. A girl who, one day soon, would be found by three members of a failing game club and a very tired adult. A girl who'd wake up with nothing at all inside her, and learn to talk by playing old video games all night, and end up a hero.
Aris.
She was a body that became a person. Exactly what I needed to understand.
'If I can just look at her,' I thought. 'Really look. With these eyes. With whatever this body knows. Maybe I can figure out how she works. And how to make Chris work, too.'
There was one rule, and I underlined it twice in my head, the way I'd underlined the clause in Eli's contract.
Don't wake her.
Don't touch anything. Don't move anything. Don't change a single thing. She had to be exactly where she was, exactly how she was, when Momoi and Midori and Yuzu came through that door. Whatever happened after that was her story, and theirs, and Sensei's.
I was just going to look.
I opened Storage, scrolled past the halos, and pulled out a black suit, a black cloth, and a black mask.
'Okay,' I thought, looking down at them. 'Maybe I'll also look a little cool while I do it.'
---
-Present, Melissa POV-
The inside of the factory was dark, and silent, and very, very big.
I'd lost the drones at the gap in the wall. They'd circled outside for a while, their red lenses sweeping across the openings, and then drifted off to patrol somewhere else. The bullets they'd fired at me were sitting in a neat little pile in a square of my Storage grid: Security Drone Round (Used) x184.
I moved through the dark without a light. My eyes adjusted. My body knew how to do this, how to walk on broken concrete without making a sound, how to keep to the shadows of fallen beams, how to breathe.
Past rows of dead machines. Past conveyor belts frozen mid-motion for years. Down a staircase that had half collapsed, across a catwalk that groaned but held, through a doorway with no door.
And there she was.
. . .
The room was small, compared to the rest of the factory. Quiet. Clean, almost, in a way the rest of the ruins weren't, as if the dust had decided out of respect not to settle here.
In the center of it, in a nest of old cables and dark machinery, a girl lay sleeping.
She was small. Pale. Her eyes were closed, her face peaceful and completely still. And all around her, spread across the cables and the floor and the old metal like spilled ink, was her hair. Black and glossy and impossibly long. It went on and on, far longer than she was tall.
She didn't breathe. She didn't need to.
Aris.
Seeing her in the game had been one thing. Seeing her here, in the dark, so small and so alone, was another. My chest went tight.
'Hi,' I thought, very quietly. 'You don't know me. You won't remember this. That's okay. Some people are coming for you soon. They're going to be loud, and silly, and they're going to love you so much. Just hang on a little longer.'
Then I crouched down at the edge of the nest of cables, very carefully, and looked.
. . .
I looked with everything I had.
I narrowed my eyes and tried to make them do whatever it was they did. Green, red, warm, anything. I stared until my eyes watered. I tried being curious. I tried being determined. I tried, a little desperately, wanting it really, really badly.
Nothing happened.
My eyes stayed gold. Aris stayed asleep. The room stayed dark.
'...Oh,' I thought. 'Huh.'
I'd been so sure. It had worked in the alley. It had worked at the Engineering Department. Something had always happened.
Not this time.
I swallowed the disappointment and tried the other thing. The calm in my chest. The experience in this body, the thing that knew guns and knots and medicine and how to walk through a ruin in silence. I reached out, slowly, and with one fingertip, as lightly as I could, I touched the very end of one strand of Aris's long, spilled hair.
I waited for the tap to open. For the knowledge to come pouring in, the way it always did when I picked up a gun.
Nothing.
The calm in my chest looked at Aris, and for the first time since I'd woken up in this body, it seemed to have nothing to say. Whatever she was, it had never seen anything like her.
I took my finger back and sat down on the cold floor.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Okay. That's... fine. That's fine. It was a long shot.'
It wasn't fine. I'd spent three and a half weeks building a body, and I'd snuck into the ruins in a ninja suit, and I'd dodged a hundred and eighty-four bullets for this, and I had nothing.
Out of habit more than hope, I opened Storage.
The grid unfolded in the air in front of me, glowing faintly gold in the dark. Peaches. Halos. Medical supplies. The double, asleep in her square. I started scrolling, not even sure what I was looking for. A scanner, maybe. A tool. Anything the old Mel might have kept that could help.
The window drifted a little as I scrolled. Just a little. Over toward Aris.
And something changed.
. . .
The edges of the window flickered.
The gold lines framing the grid brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again, as if something on the other side of them had just woken up. The grid didn't move. But a new, smaller box unfolded out of it, hanging in the air directly over the sleeping girl. Just like the drawer that had slid out of the masked girl's square, back in the apartment, except I hadn't tapped anything.
It had opened on its own.
Text appeared in it, line by line, as if someone were typing.
Store blueprint: AL-1S // #&%$!@*?? // ::[DATA UNREADABLE]:: // ?
[YES] [NO]
I stared at it.
The second line kept glitching. Symbols crawled across it, shuffled, rearranged themselves, as if something deep inside the sleeping girl did not want to be read and was pushing back. For a moment, just a moment, I had the strangest feeling that something in that room was looking at me. Not Aris. Something inside Aris. Something awake, and wary, and very, very old.
Then the feeling was gone, and there was just the box, waiting.
'Blueprint,' I thought, slowly. 'Not her. Just... how she's made. A copy.'
My hand had started shaking.
I moved the window, carefully, away from Aris, back toward myself. The blueprint box stayed where it was, hovering over her.
And as the main window passed in front of my own chest, a second box unfolded.
Store memory: Frazure Christina?
[YES] [NO]
. . .
I sat on the floor of the ruins and didn't breathe.
Memory.
Not things. Not guns or peaches or forklifts. Memory. Everything I'd done and seen and felt as Chris. The first day. Sumire jogging in place. Yuuka's hand around mine, dragging me down the hall. Kotori's flood of questions. The bracket. The "almost." The "fine." The roller bearings. Every one-sided argument about which kind of bearing was more honest.
Everything that made Chris someone.
'Storage can do that?' I thought. 'It can store... that?'
It had never done this before. Not once in all the weeks I'd been using it. I'd thought it was a bag. A very, very good bag.
But I didn't think the window was just a bag right now.
The gold lines around the edges were pulsing slowly, warmly, steadily, like a heartbeat. And there was a feeling coming off them, so faint I almost missed it. Not a voice. Not words. Just a feeling. Like a hand on my shoulder, from someone standing just out of sight. Someone who'd been with me for a very long time, and had watched me struggle for three and a half weeks, and had finally decided that enough was enough.
'Here,' the feeling seemed to say. 'Let me help.'
I didn't know who it was. I didn't know why it felt like I should.
The calm in my chest knew, though. For one moment, it went completely, utterly still, the way it had at the Sanctum Tower, the way it had at Yuuka's question. And then, so quietly I almost didn't feel it, it let out a long, slow breath, the way you'd breathe out when you see someone you thought you'd lost.
My eyes stung behind the mask.
I didn't know why.
. . .
"Okay," I whispered, out loud, to the window. To whoever was behind it. "Okay. Thank you."
I touched [YES] on the blueprint.
The glitching text flared, then went still. A new square lit up in the grid: Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial). Aris didn't move. Her hair didn't stir. Nothing in the room changed at all. It hadn't taken anything from her. It had only looked, the way I'd wanted to, and remembered what it saw.
I touched [YES] on the memory.
There was a strange, gentle pulling sensation, somewhere behind my eyes. Like someone carefully copying a page out of a book. It lasted about two seconds.
Then a new square lit up: Memory: Frazure Christina.
I checked, quickly, frantically. The first day. Sumire. Yuuka. Kotori. The bracket. It was all still there. All of it. It hadn't taken anything from me either.
It had made a copy.
I sat in the dark, holding my breath, and looked at the three squares sitting side by side in my grid.
Frazure Christina (Unit 01). The body.
Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial). How a body becomes someone.
Memory: Frazure Christina. Who that someone was.
And as I watched, very slowly, the gold lines between the three squares began to glow, faintly, as if they were reaching for each other.
---
-3rd POV-
Somewhere in the ruins at the edge of Millennium, a small figure in black slipped out of a gap in a factory wall and disappeared into the night, moving fast, the way people move when they've just been handed something precious and are terrified of dropping it.
Behind her, in a small, quiet room, a girl with impossibly long black hair went on sleeping, exactly as she had been, waiting for the people who would come for her.
And in a grid of light that only one person in all of Kivotos could see, three squares sat side by side, and the first of them, the one holding a body, pulsed, softly, in the dark.
Once.
Twice.
Like a heartbeat, waiting to start.