---
'Ah... finally home.'
I kicked the door shut behind me with my heel, which was the only part of my body that still had any energy left. The click of the lock was the most beautiful sound I'd heard all day. Better than the coffee machine. Better than my manager saying, "Good work today, Cardon," right before handing me another stack of files "for tomorrow, no rush."
There was always a rush.
I stepped out of my heels and left them wherever they landed. Coat on the hook. Bag on the floor. Two buttons of my blouse popped open so I could finally breathe. The apartment was dark, small and quiet, and right then I loved every square inch of it.
Melissa Cardon. Twenty-something. Office worker. Professional paper-pusher, part-time spreadsheet wrangler, full-time person who said "per my last email" in a tone that could peel paint.
I padded into the kitchen and tied my blond hair into a messy ponytail while I stared into the fridge like it owed me money.
'Instant noodles... leftover chicken... rice that's been there since... hm. No.'
The fridge hummed at me. I hummed back. With a finger tapping my lips, I ran through the options again and snapped my fingers.
'Porridge.'
Warm, easy, and it wouldn't sit in my stomach like a brick when I lay down. Tired-me made a good call for once.
. . .
One decent bowl of porridge later, I dropped the dishes in the sink with a promise to deal with them "tomorrow" (I would not) and dragged myself to the bathroom. I undid my ponytail, twisted my hair up into a bun instead and turned the shower on hot.
'Just a shower tonight. No long soak. Soaking is how I fall asleep in the tub and wake up as a prune.'
The water hit my shoulders and I let out a groan that came from somewhere around my soul. For a while I just stood there and let the day wash off.
'Tomorrow I need to come in early. The archive cabinets are a war crime. If I sort the old contracts by year, then the next time someone asks for a file from three years ago I won't have to dig through...'
I was planning my morning. I knew I wasn't going to follow the plan. I'd hit snooze twice, grab a pastry on the way in, and get distracted by someone's printer jam. But the planning felt productive, and productive was nice.
Eleven calm minutes later, I turned the water off, toweled dry and pulled on my sleep clothes: undergarments, a white tank top and a pair of light blue shorts I'd owned since college. Then I grabbed my phone off the counter like a sacred relic and shuffled to the bedroom.
'Dailies.'
. . .
I had six gacha games on my phone.
Six.
Was it healthy? No. Was it my one hobby left after work ate everything else? Also no, I had two hobbies. The other one was complaining about the gacha games.
The plan was simple. Log in, clear the dailies, collect the free stuff, go to sleep like a responsible adult.
. . .
Four hours later, it was eleven at night.
I had, technically, done the dailies. I had also farmed an event stage forty times for a material I didn't need, rerolled a substat that rolled worse, and read three event stories I'd been "saving for later." I stared at the clock in the corner of my screen with the hollow eyes of a woman who had made choices.
'It's fine. It's fine. One more. The important one.'
I tapped the last icon, the one with the little droopy-eyed girl on it, and waited for it to load.
Blue Archive.
The title screen faded in, and Hina stood there on it with her long white hair and her serious little face, looking like she'd just finished filing someone's discipline report at three in the morning. Relatable. I smiled despite myself.
'Cute but deadly. The Prefect Team's president has the work ethic of my entire office combined.'
I cleared the daily tasks, sent the students out on their busywork, and swiped over to the main screen. Arona was sitting on her desk in that blue-and-white classroom, swinging her legs. I tapped her because I always tapped her. She brightened up, popped forward to the front of the screen and greeted me by my username.
"Mel-Sensei! Welcome back! What are we doing today?"
'Going to sleep, Arona. That's what we're doing today.'
I liked this game. I'd liked it from the first chapter. It looked like a cute school game with guns, and it was, but underneath the cute was a story about a single adult who showed up in a city full of kids with guns and decided, every single day, to be the grown-up who took responsibility. I'd cried at that story. More than once. In public, once, on a bus.
My eyelids were getting heavy. The screen blurred at the edges.
I set the phone down gently next to my pillow, still glowing, Arona still waiting for an order I'd never give.
'Dailies...'
That was my last thought before I shut down for the night.
---
BRRRRRRRRINGGGGGGGG
My body moved before my brain did.
My hand shot out, found the noise and swung.
CRUNCH. Tik- sssssshhhhhh-
The ringing died. Something hissed and clattered. I sat up with one hand on my forehead and blinked at the wall across from me.
There was an alarm clock in it.
Not on a shelf next to it. In it. Embedded in the drywall about a hand's width deep, the plastic split open, a single spring sticking out of it like a white flag of surrender.
"..."
I looked at the clock. Then I looked at my hand.
My hand was small.
Not "I've lost a little weight" small. Small small. The wrist was thin, the fingers were slender, and the arm attached to it looked like a noodle that had never once been forced to carry a grocery bag up three flights of stairs. I turned it over slowly. No scar on my thumb from the time I'd fought a can opener and lost. No faded pen ink on the side of my palm.
I brought my other arm up next to it.
'They're both thin...'
Then I looked at the room.
This was not my room. My room had a laundry pile with its own ecosystem and a poster I'd been meaning to frame for two years. This room was bare. Grey walls. A narrow bed with plain sheets. A single desk. One window with the blinds shut. It was so clean it looked like nobody lived here, or like whoever did had been trained to leave nothing behind.
'What the?'
There was a mirror standing on the desk, right next to the hole where the alarm clock used to be. I swung my legs off the bed. My feet hit the floor a lot sooner than they should have.
My legs were short.
I took a deep breath, walked to the desk and looked.
A girl looked back at me.
Short blond hair that fell just to her shoulders, a little messy from sleep. A small, slight frame. Arms and legs that looked like they'd snap if you sneezed on them, which was pretty rude of them, considering one of those arms had just punched an alarm clock into a wall. A modest chest, which, honestly, fair. And a pair of golden eyes that caught the light leaking through the blinds and shone like two coins at the bottom of a fountain.
She was cute. She was very cute.
She was also me.
"The fuck?"
The girl in the mirror said it with me, in a voice that was higher and softer than mine. Her eyes flickered, the gold sliding into a confused green, and for a split second her pupils weren't round. They were shaped like two little question marks.
I rubbed my eyes hard. When I looked again, they were gold.
'Nope. Didn't see that. Not dealing with that yet.'
. . .
Here's the thing.
I should have screamed. A normal person would have screamed. I was a normal person, as of last night. Normal office worker, normal porridge, normal amount of gacha games (six).
I could feel the scream. It was right there, bubbling up from my stomach, the full-body panic of a woman who went to sleep in her own bed and woke up in someone else's skin.
And then, like a hand on my shoulder, something else settled over it.
Calm.
Not my calm. Mine was the kind you fake in meetings. This was older and steadier, the calm of someone who had woken up in strange rooms before and knew the drill: don't panic, count the exits, take stock, then decide. It slid over the panic like a lid on a pot. The panic was still in there. It just wasn't in charge anymore.
'Okay. Okay. Who are you?'
I asked it the way you'd ask the stranger sitting next to you on a train. Nobody answered. But when I reached for an answer, things came.
Not memories, exactly. More like... habits. Knowledge with the labels peeled off. I knew this body could run for a long time without getting tired. I knew how it liked to sleep: light, with one ear open. I knew the weight of things it had carried, the feel of things it had done, the way its hands closed around certain objects without being told. It was like walking into a kitchen in the dark and knowing where every drawer was, without remembering ever having been in the kitchen.
What I didn't get was a name. Or a face, a family, a birthday. Whenever I reached for anything like that, it slid away like a dream you try to describe at breakfast.
'Great. I'm sharing a body with an amnesiac. Or she's sharing it with me. Or we're... both of us?'
I looked at the girl in the mirror again. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
'She's been through a lot, hasn't she.'
I didn't know how I knew that. I just did.
. . .
Then my eyes drifted up, above the girl's head, and stuck there.
Floating a few inches above her hair were two rings of light.
A gold-yellow one, solid and bright, and a second, paler yellow ring just inside it, turning slowly in the opposite direction. They didn't touch my head. They didn't cast a shadow. They just hung there, humming quietly, like they'd always been there.
A halo.
I raised a hand and waved it through the space above my head. My fingers passed under the rings without touching anything. The rings politely moved with me when I ducked.
I knew exactly one place where little girls with guns walked around with halos over their heads.
Some deep, lizard part of my gamer brain lit up like a slot machine.
'I'm in Blue Archive.'
I sat down on the edge of the bed. Hard.
'I'm in Blue Archive.'
It didn't get less ridiculous the second time.
'I fell asleep doing my dailies. Who wakes up in the game because they fell asleep doing their dailies? Is this a punishment for the forty event runs? Is this what happens when you ignore the "remember to take a break" pop-up?'
I pressed both hands against my face. My cheeks were soft. My hands were small. The halo hummed.
Weirdly, looking up at it didn't feel strange. It felt like glancing at a watch I'd worn for years. That calm thing in my chest didn't even twitch at it.
'So she's had this halo a long time,' I thought. 'Which means she's a student. Or was. Or...'
I didn't have a good end to that sentence, so I left it.
. . .
'Take stock,' said the calm. Or I said it to myself. It was getting hard to tell.
Fine. Taking stock.
I stood up and turned in a slow circle. Bed. Desk. Mirror. Wall with a dead alarm clock in it. Window. Door. The room was too clean, but clean in a deliberate way, the kind of clean you get from someone who didn't want anything in sight that could tell a stranger who they were.
So whatever mattered was hidden.
My eyes went to the bed.
Before I even thought about it, I was crouching at the head of it, running my fingers along the underside of the frame. There, by the left leg. A small button, flush with the metal. My thumb pressed it like it had pressed it a thousand times.
Click. Whirrrrr-
The whole mattress tilted up on hydraulic arms, smooth and quiet, and I took one step back on pure instinct.
Underneath the bed was a wall of guns.
Not a couple. Not a "just in case" shotgun. A wall. Racks lined the inside of the bed frame and went down into a recessed space in the floor, row after row, and every row was full. Handguns. Submachine guns. Assault rifles. Shotguns. A long sniper rifle in its own padded slot. At the bottom, lying sideways because it was too long for anything else, was a rocket launcher.
The calm in my chest looked at all this and went, 'Mm. Good. Still here.'
I, the office worker, went, 'WHO IN THE FRESH HELL DID THIS BODY BELONG TO?'
. . .
My hand reached out on its own and lifted one of the pistols off the rack.
The second my fingers closed around the grip, information poured into my head like someone had opened a tap.
'FN Five-seveN. Polymer frame, single-action. Fires 5.7x28mm, twenty rounds in a standard magazine. Light, low recoil, good penetration against armor. This one's been cleaned recently.'
While I was still processing that, my hands were already moving. Thumb on the release. The magazine dropped into my palm. A glance at the top round. Slide back to check the chamber. Empty. The slide snapped forward, and my hands slid the magazine back in with a clean click, racked it, and brought the gun up to eye level, pointed at the wall, both eyes open, the front sight resting perfectly level.
I hadn't decided to do any of that.
I stood there frozen in a firing stance, in a plain grey tank top and shorts that weren't mine, aiming a loaded pistol at a wall that hadn't done anything to me.
"..."
Very slowly, I lowered it, eased my finger out of the trigger guard, cleared it again, and put it back on the rack exactly where it had been.
'Okay. So she's trained.'
I picked up a submachine gun. Same thing: name, caliber, rate of fire, its little quirks, all of it there the moment I touched it. A shotgun. A rifle. The sniper. Every single one came with a full manual stapled to it, and my hands knew the manual better than my head did.
'She's trained in basically everything.'
I put the last one back, pressed the button, and watched the mattress lower itself over the arsenal like nothing had happened. Just a bed. A perfectly normal bed for a perfectly normal girl.
'Right. Sure.'
. . .
The desk was next. I didn't even pretend I didn't know where to look anymore.
I leaned over it, reached behind the mirror and found another button, flat and small, right where my fingers expected it. Click. The top of the desk slid back like a puzzle box, revealing a shallow compartment underneath.
Inside it, packed in neat rows:
Bottles of hair dye. A lot of them. Every color I could name and some I couldn't, labeled with tiny handwritten codes.
Little cases of colored contact lenses, stacked like poker chips.
And a scattering of strange gadgets. Small, round, matte-black things about the size of a coin. A pen that was obviously not a pen. A thin roll of something that looked like skin-colored tape.
I picked up one of the round discs, and the tap opened again.
'Voice changer. Stick one on each side of the throat, under the jaw. It sits over the larynx and shifts your pitch and tone. Range: child to old man. Battery lasts about a week.'
'A voice changer. She has a spy voice changer.'
I put it down and picked up one of the dye bottles. The tap filled my head with chemistry I didn't ask for and then delivered the punchline.
'Semi-permanent. Doesn't wash out with soap, sweat or water. Doesn't fade. Comes out only with the matching remover.'
I checked the compartment for the matching remover.
There wasn't any.
I reached for where the remover would be, in that fuzzy not-quite-memory way, and got a very clear impression of a store shelf being cleared out. Then another store. Then a warehouse order. Then a very smug feeling of "nobody else gets this."
'She bought all of it. She bought ALL of the remover and then hid it somewhere I can't remember. So if I dye my hair, I'm stuck with it unless I find her stash.'
I looked at the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror looked back at me with an expression I recognized from every time I'd caught myself in a dark window after a twelve-hour shift.
'Whoever you were, your life must've been something.'
. . .
I closed the desk and sat back down on the bed to think, because "take stock" was step one and "decide" was step two, and I'd been stuck on step one for a while.
'Facts.'
I counted on my small, thin fingers.
'One. I'm in Blue Archive. Halo, guns, a world where a girl my size can punch a clock through drywall.'
'Two. This girl is basically a spy. Weapons, disguises, gadgets, and a room built so nobody could learn anything about her by looking at it.'
'Three. Her skills and instincts fused with mine. Her hands know things. Her calm is sitting on my panic like a cat sitting on a laptop.'
'Four. I don't know her name.'
That last one bothered me more than I expected. I could feel the shape of a name, like the gap where a tooth used to be. But when I pushed on it, nothing came.
'Fine. Then until I know better, I'm Melissa. I'm Melissa Cardon, and this is my body now, and that's that.'
The calm didn't argue. If anything, it felt... relieved? Like it had been waiting for me to say that.
. . .
Then a colder thought crept in.
'Which Blue Archive?'
Because there were two.
There was the story I'd played. The one where Sensei arrives in Kivotos, takes over Schale, and helps student after student out of one disaster after another. A messy, loud, wonderful story with a lot of explosions and a happy ending clawed out the hard way.
And then there was the other one. The world the game whispers about later. The timeline where things went wrong. Where Sensei didn't make it, where the city ended, where the people I liked ended up broken or gone. I had very strong feelings about that timeline, and all of them were "no."
I got up and went to the window. My heart was beating faster than the calm wanted it to.
I grabbed the cord and pulled the blinds open.
. . .
Light hit my face. Warm, bright, ordinary morning light.
I squinted against it and looked out.
A city.
A big, bright, busy city, glittering under a sky so blue it looked edited. Tall buildings in every direction, shining glass and white concrete. Closer in, rows of squat warehouses and loading docks, the kind of industrial block you only drive through on the way to somewhere better. And way off in the distance, rising above everything else, a tower so tall and so white that it seemed to hold the sky up.
I knew that tower. I'd seen it on a loading screen a hundred times.
'The Sanctum Tower.'
Something tugged in my chest.
It was small and quick, like a hand catching my sleeve in a crowd. For a heartbeat, the calm inside me went completely still. Not tense. Quiet. The way a room goes quiet when someone says a name nobody has said in a long time.
Then it passed, and the tower was just a tower again: very tall, very white, very far away.
'Wow,' I thought, a little shakily. 'Okay. Starstruck. I'm starstruck by a building. That's normal. That's a normal reaction to seeing a building from a loading screen in real life.'
I decided that was what it was, and looked down at the street.
Down in the street below, a delivery truck rumbled past. Its driver had a large, friendly-looking dog head, and he waved to a robot in a business suit who was waiting at the crosswalk. The robot waved back with a briefcase.
Then two girls in school uniforms came around the corner, laughing about something. Halos floated over both their heads. One had a rifle slung across her back like a handbag. The other was eating a crepe.
Further down the block, three other girls in matching masks burst out of an alley and started shooting at each other. Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa! Bullets sparked off a dumpster. The crepe girl didn't even look up. Her friend calmly stepped around a stray round without breaking the conversation. The dog-headed driver sighed, made a U-turn and took another street.
Nobody screamed. Nobody called the police. A girl got shot right in the chest, said "ow, hey!" and shot back.
It was chaos. It was absolutely normal chaos.
It was Kivotos on a perfectly regular morning.
I let out a breath I hadn't noticed I'd been holding. My shoulders came down from somewhere around my ears.
'It's the right one. It's the good one. Nobody looks like the world's ending. People are getting shot over what looks like a parking spot, and it's fine.'
I had never been so relieved to watch a gunfight.
. . .
I leaned my forehead against the cool glass and watched the city for a while.
'If it's the right timeline, then Sensei hasn't shown up yet... probably. No big disasters happening in the background. The city looks too normal for the story to have started.'
Which meant everything was still ahead. Every arc. Every crisis. Every crying kid I'd watched through a phone screen.
Abydos, drowning in debt. Millennium, sitting on secrets in a box. Trinity, tying itself in political knots. Gehenna, on fire on a daily basis. Arius, in the dark, where nobody was looking.
I'd always thought, while playing, 'If I were there, I'd...' Everyone does. Everyone sits on the bus and thinks they'd fix it.
The calm in my chest stirred, just slightly. Not panic. Interest.
'Okay,' I thought slowly. 'Okay. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time. First things first.'
. . .
First things first turned out to be food.
My stomach let out a growl so loud the window rattled. Apparently this body ran hot and burned through fuel like a sports car. I left the bedroom to find the kitchen and stopped two steps out the door.
There was no hallway.
The bedroom door opened onto a metal balcony. Below the balcony was a huge open floor of polished concrete, bigger than my old office, the whole department included. Steel beams crossed the ceiling high overhead. Rolling shutter doors lined the far wall, big enough to drive a truck through. A forklift sat parked in the corner like a sleeping animal. In the far corner, a small glassed-in office looked out over the floor, its desk empty and its old computer screen dark. Stacked crates, pallets and covered shapes I really didn't want to guess at filled about half the floor.
My bedroom was a little box built inside the corner of this enormous space, like a tiny house someone had dropped into a cave.
I looked down at the warehouse floor. The warehouse floor looked up at me.
'I live in a warehouse?'
I went down the metal stairs, my bare feet slapping on the steps, and the calm in my chest walked me straight past the crates without even a glance, which told me everything I needed to know about how many secrets were in them. Against the back wall, somebody had put together a tiny kitchen: a sink, a hot plate, a mini fridge and a single folding chair.
I opened the fridge.
Inside were three bottles of water, a pack of energy jelly and one sad apple.
"..."
'Spy. Weapons expert. Wall of guns. Bought out every bottle of hair dye remover in the city.'
I took the apple out and held it up to the light.
'And she eats like a college student.'
I bit into it. It was a good apple, actually. Crunchy. The best apple I'd had in years, maybe because I'd been eating porridge and vending machine snacks for so long I'd forgotten what fresh fruit tasted like.
I sat down on the folding chair in the middle of my enormous, secret-filled warehouse, in someone else's tank top and shorts, under a halo that didn't belong to me but felt like it always had, and chewed.
. . .
A thought floated up out of nowhere, and I almost choked.
'Wait. Work.'
My manager. The archive cabinets. The contracts sorted by year. My plan to come in early.
I didn't have a job here. I didn't have a manager. I didn't have a single email waiting for me that started with "per my last email."
I was, for the first time since I was nineteen, completely and gloriously unemployed.
The office worker inside me waited for the panic to come.
It didn't. The calm didn't even have to sit on it this time.
I started laughing instead. Quiet at first, then louder, until it bounced off the steel beams and echoed through the warehouse, a small blond girl in a folding chair cackling with half an apple in her hand.
'Okay, Kivotos.'
I took another bite.
'Let's see what we can do with you.'