---
The first problem with being a secret spy girl in a video game world was the hair dye remover.
I'd finished my apple, washed my face in a sink that came up to my chest, and was standing in front of the bedroom mirror again, holding a bottle of dye labeled with a tiny handwritten code that the tap in my head translated as "white, cool tone, very stubborn."
'If I use this, I'm stuck with it. Unless I find where she hid all the remover.'
So I closed my eyes and tried to remember where she'd hidden it.
That fuzzy, not-quite-memory feeling came back. I didn't see a place. I didn't get an address, or a shelf, or a locker number. What I got was a feeling of putting something down and having it just... not be anywhere anymore. Safe. Gone and safe at the same time. Like dropping a coin into a pocket that didn't have a bottom.
'Where?' I pushed. 'Where did you put it?'
Ding.
I opened my eyes.
A window was hanging in the air in front of my face.
A flat, slightly see-through panel, about the size of a laptop screen, framed in thin gold lines. It was split into a neat grid of little squares, like a bag screen in an RPG. Some of the squares were empty. Most of them were not.
"..."
I waved a hand through it. My hand passed right through. The window stayed exactly where it was, patient as a vending machine.
'Oh, come on.'
. . .
I sat down on the bed and stared at it for a solid minute.
'Is this a System?'
I knew about Systems. Everyone who had ever read a web novel at two in the morning knew about Systems. A voice in your head, quests, stat points, a cheerful little "Congratulations, Host!" every time you stepped on a bug.
I waited for the cheerful little voice.
Nothing.
I looked for a status screen. No status screen. No quest log. No level. No "Host." No shop. Just the grid, sitting there in the air, and a tiny label in the top corner that said, in plain letters:
Storage
'That's it? That's the whole System? It's just a bag?'
I felt strangely disappointed for a second. Then the calm in my chest gave me a look, the inner equivalent of a raised eyebrow, and I reconsidered.
'Okay. It's a bag that floats in the air and that nobody else can see. Fine. It's a very good bag.'
I reached out and touched one of the squares.
The window understood immediately. A little label popped up beside my fingertip: Hair Dye Remover (White Cool Tone) x41.
Forty-one.
I scrolled. Every color had its own stack. Black x38. Brown x45. Pink x29. Some poor color called "Sunset Coral" x60, which meant she'd bought sixty bottles of remover for a color I couldn't imagine her ever using.
'You absolute hoarder.'
I kept scrolling, and the hoard kept going.
Spare clothes, folded and labeled by size. Forty cans of peaches, which was a very interesting choice for someone whose fridge held exactly one apple. Batteries. Duct tape. A coil of rope long enough to tie up a small building. A box of portable stage lights, for reasons I couldn't begin to guess. Three different kinds of lock picks. A toolbox. Another toolbox inside the toolbox.
And, near the end of the row, a single square with a small black rectangle in it.
Phone (Unregistered) x1.
I pulled it out. It was a plain, cheap-looking smartphone, the kind you could buy at any corner store in Kivotos and throw away after a week. When I held the power button, it woke up on the first try, fully charged.
No contacts. No messages. No photos. Just the basic apps and a clean, empty home screen.
Before I could stop myself, my thumb swiped across the screen, looking for six familiar little icons.
They weren't there, of course. No gacha games. No event timers. No little droopy-eyed icon waiting for me to clear my dailies. They existed in a world I'd fallen asleep in, and this wasn't it.
I stared at the empty screen for a second longer than I meant to.
'Huh,' I thought. 'I really am never going to finish that event.'
It was a stupid thing to feel sad about. I felt a little sad about it anyway. Then I put the phone in my pocket, because a girl who was about to start a whole new life was going to need a phone, and went back to the window.
Then I scrolled down further, and stopped laughing.
. . .
Halos.
Row after row after row of halos.
Each one sat in its own little square, glowing softly, slowly turning in place. Single rings, double rings, broken rings. Gold, silver, red, black, a blue so pale it was almost white. A ring with tiny gears along its edge. A ring that looked like a crown of thorns. A hexagon. A star. A square, which I didn't even know was allowed.
I started counting and gave up somewhere after a hundred.
'How do you have more than one halo? Isn't the halo the whole... thing? Isn't it how everyone here knows who you are?'
That was the part that made my stomach go cold. In Kivotos, a halo wasn't an accessory. It was you. It was the most personal, identifiable thing a student had. You could change your hair. You could change your clothes. You could change your school. Nobody changed their halo. Not that I'd ever heard of.
Except, apparently, I could.
I pinched one of them, a single ring, dark blue, plain and unremarkable, the kind of halo that floated over half the background students in Kivotos, and pulled it out of its square. A tiny window asked me a polite question.
Equip?
'Sure. Why not. Let's ruin my understanding of this world's metaphysics before lunch.'
I tapped it.
There was no flash, no sound, no pain. I just felt a light, cool pressure above my head, like someone had set a crown there and walked away. I looked at the mirror.
My double gold ring was gone. In its place hung a single ring of dark blue, turning slowly, perfectly ordinary.
I didn't look like me anymore.
I looked like any girl you'd pass on the street. One of the nameless students you saw in the crowd behind the main cast, the ones nobody ever looked at twice.
The calm in my chest let out what I can only describe as a satisfied sigh, like a carpenter running a thumb along a perfect joint.
'You did this a lot, didn't you,' I said to the empty room.
. . .
After that, I started testing it.
I put my hand on the apple core I'd carried back upstairs and left on the desk, and thought, 'In.' It vanished, and a square in the grid lit up: Apple Core x1. I thought, 'Out,' and it was in my hand again, still a little wet.
'Gross. Okay. Works.'
I put my hand on the desk itself. It disappeared, mirror and all, and the floor where it stood was suddenly very empty. Out again. Back, exactly where it had been, not an inch off.
I went downstairs, put my palm flat against the side of the forklift, and thought, 'In.'
The forklift was gone.
I stared at the spot where it had been. Then I stared at the window. Forklift (Used) x1.
'There's no weight limit.'
I put the forklift back very carefully and sat down on the cold concrete for a minute, because I had just picked up a forklift with my mind and put it in a bag in the air, and even the calm thing in my chest seemed to think a short sit-down was reasonable.
'No weight limit. No visible size limit. Nobody can see the window but me. She has more than a hundred halos in there, and she can swap them like hats.'
'Who were you?'
The calm didn't answer, but I got the feeling it was smiling.
. . .
By the afternoon I'd found some proper clothes in a crate (also hers, also suspiciously plain, also exactly my size), and I'd claimed the back of a flattened cardboard box and a marker for what I was calling, in my head, the Planning Board.
I set it on the folding chair, sat cross-legged in front of it on the floor and uncapped the marker.
At the top I wrote: WHAT NOW.
Then I sat there for a while.
'Okay. Facts first. I'm in Kivotos. The city looks normal. Nobody's talking about Schale, or a new adult in the city, or anything big. So Sensei hasn't shown up.'
That was the one thing I couldn't pin down, and it was going to bug me. The game never put a calendar on anything. Sensei arrives when the story starts, and the story starts when it starts. I'd checked the date on an old screen in the warehouse office, and it meant absolutely nothing to me.
'Could be a week. Could be a month. Could be a year. Could be tomorrow.'
I underlined WHAT NOW twice.
'So whatever I do, I need to be set up before it starts. Somewhere in the middle of things, but quiet.'
. . .
I wrote down the schools I knew and started crossing them out.
ABYDOS. I drew a little sun and a cactus next to it. 'Five students. Five. Drowning in debt, half the town's under sand. I can't just "sneak in" to a school with five students. "Hi, I'm new, I transferred into your nearly-dead school for no reason, please ignore that I'm suspicious." They'd shoot me. Shiroko would shoot me, then ask if I wanted to rob a bank.'
Not crossed out. Just circled, with HELP LATER, DISGUISE? next to it.
TRINITY. 'Tea parties, factions and politics up to the ceiling. The Tea Party's already stressed. One wrong move and I'm a "suspicious element" in somebody's report.' Circled. LATER, DIFFERENT ID.
GEHENNA. 'Chaos. Lovely chaos. Explosions every day. The Prefect Team would notice a new face fast, because they notice everything, mostly because everything is on fire.' A small question mark.
ARIUS. I stopped with the marker hovering over the cardboard.
Arius was the one that hurt. Kids raised in the dark, taught that everything is in vain, sent out like weapons by someone who saw them as tools. Saori. Atsuko. Misaki. Hiyori. Azusa, who'd end up at Trinity on a mission she'd come to hate.
I didn't write anything next to Arius. I just drew a small star.
'I'll get to you. I don't know how yet. But I will.'
SRT. 'Shut down? Still running? I don't even know where the story is with them yet. Need to check.'
And then, last:
MILLENNIUM.
I tapped the marker against it.
'Millennium Science School. One of the big three, right up there with Trinity and Gehenna. Full of geniuses, robots, labs and money. Second big stop in Sensei's story.'
If I wanted to be close to the story without being in the middle of it, Millennium was the obvious choice. The Game Development Department would get dragged into a disaster sooner or later. The Seminar was sitting on things it shouldn't be. And Millennium had parts. Lots of parts. A whole school's worth of labs, tools and scrap I could put my new mechanic's hands to work on. Parts for things I hadn't fully figured out yet.
The problem was obvious too.
'Millennium is full of hackers. The best in the city. If my fake identity has a single hole in it, someone like Veritas is going to find it on a bored Tuesday afternoon.'
The calm in my chest stirred, and something like confidence came with it. Not arrogance. The quiet kind. The kind that said, 'Then don't leave a hole.'
I circled MILLENNIUM three times.
---
Building a fake student turned out to be a three-day job.
There was a laptop in one of the crates, wrapped in a static bag like it was a newborn. The moment I opened it, my fingers started moving on their own again, and I just sat back mentally and watched like a passenger in a very fast car.
I didn't break into Millennium. That was the first thing my hands knew not to do. Breaking in leaves footprints, and footprints get found.
Instead, I went in through the front door, the boring way.
Kivotos has thousands of schools. Some of them are giants like Millennium. A lot of them are tiny, the kind with a single building and twenty students, and a lot of those close every year when the money runs out. My hands went looking for one of those, and found a little one in an outer district that had shut down last spring. Its records had been archived and forgotten, and all its students had transferred out to other schools.
All of them, plus one.
On the second night, I made a girl.
FRAZURE CHRISTINA. First year. Transferred from a closed school in good standing, grades good but not suspiciously good, no club history, no disciplinary record, a few months out of school after the closure for "family reasons," one note from a teacher that said she was "quiet but dependable." A medical record so boring that no one would ever read past the first page. A student photo of a white-haired girl with blue eyes who looked a little tired, because I was a little tired.
'Why Christina?'
I didn't know. I'd just typed it, and it felt right, like a name I'd worn before. Frazure came from the label on a crate in the warehouse that said FRAZURE INDUSTRIAL SUPPLY, because I am not a creative person after midnight.
Then I submitted a transfer application to Millennium through the normal public form, with the number of my brand-new, completely empty phone in the contact box, attached the records and paid the fee from an account the calm remembered the password to. It had just enough in it for the fee and about a month of groceries, which I noted on the Planning Board under MONEY, with three question marks and a sad face.
And then I waited.
On the third morning, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was the first time it had made a sound. I nearly dropped it.
Millennium Science School: Transfer Approved. Welcome, Frazure Christina.
I read it four times. Then I got up and did a very small, very undignified dance on the concrete, with nobody watching but the forklift.
. . .
"Okay," I told the mirror. "Let's make Chris."
White dye first. I worked it through my short blond hair in the bathroom sink, waited, rinsed, and watched the gold go down the drain. What was left was a clean, cool white, the kind of white that would look like a deliberate fashion choice and not a spy's disguise.
Then the contacts. My hands had them in before my eyes even realized they should be scared. When I blinked, two calm blue eyes blinked back at me instead of gold.
The dark blue halo hummed above my head.
Clothes next. A white shirt and a blue tie, knotted neatly by fingers that clearly had experience. A soft blue sweater over the top. A long skirt. And over all of it, a long white coat that reached my knees, roomy enough to hide a sidearm and a lot of other things besides, because apparently, that's how I dress now.
Last, the temporary student ID Millennium had sent with the approval, printed on a little card printer I'd found in yet another crate, still warm, clipped to a lanyard and tucked into my coat pocket.
I stepped back from the mirror.
The girl looking back at me had white hair, blue eyes and a plain dark blue halo. She looked like a normal first year at one of the hundreds of schools in Kivotos. A bit serious, maybe. A bit pale. The kind of girl you'd sit next to in class for a month before you realized you'd never actually heard her talk.
No gold anywhere. Nothing that said Melissa.
'Hi, Chris.'
The calm in my chest was humming. Not quite a song. More like someone who'd been cooped up for a long time and had just been told they could go outside.
. . .
Before I left, I went through the warehouse one more time, palm out, thinking 'In.'
The gun wall went first. Then the desk and its gadgets. Then the crates, one by one, until the floor of the warehouse was bare concrete and the only thing left in it was the forklift, the mini fridge and the folding chair, because I'd decided they had earned the right to stay.
'If this place gets found, there's nothing here. And I can set up a few more places like this around the city. Somewhere near Millennium. Somewhere near Trinity. Somewhere I can sleep without worrying.'
MORE SAFEHOUSES, said the Planning Board, right under MONEY.
It was a very honest Planning Board.
I pulled the warehouse door down behind me, locked it, and stepped out into Kivotos.
. . .
The city was loud.
I'd seen it from the window and through a phone screen a thousand times, but neither of those had the smell of hot asphalt and street food, or the hum of a city crammed with people and robots and things that were neither. A crepe stand on the corner was doing brisk business with a line of students. A pair of robot office workers argued about a spreadsheet at a bus stop, which made me feel a deep and personal kinship with them. A news screen on the side of a building was showing footage of a bank robbery in progress, with the reporter cheerfully noting that "no one has been seriously injured, as usual."
I caught a bus, got off two stops too early because I was staring out the window, and walked the rest of the way.
Millennium Science School announced itself well before I got there. The buildings around it got taller and sleeker, more glass, more steel, until the whole skyline looked like somebody had built a science fiction movie set and forgotten to take it down. Drones zipped overhead carrying packages. A girl on an electric scooter shot past me at a speed that couldn't possibly be legal, laughing.
Then the campus itself opened up in front of me: wide plazas, sharp white towers, screens on every wall, and a main gate big enough to drive a tank through.
I stopped at the edge of the plaza and just looked at it for a second.
'This is real. This is really real.'
I took a breath, put on my best I-belong-here face, and started toward the gate.
Which is when I saw her.
. . .
A girl was jogging out of the gate toward me, steady and easy, like she could keep that pace all day and was a little disappointed nobody would ask her to.
Long black hair tied up in a high ponytail with a purple scrunchie, so long that it still swung down past her waist. Purple eyes. A small violet flower pinned in her bangs. A sports bra with a flower pattern, black leggings and a shiny white jacket with a purple belt slung around her waist, plus an orange sun visor hanging from the front of her top like she'd forgotten she owned it. She had the kind of arms that made other people carry their own groceries out of respect.
Otohana Sumire.
The leader of Millennium's Training Club. One of the very first students I'd ever pulled in the game. One of my first three-stars. I'd been thrilled at the time.
I'd also read her bond story.
Sumire was not dumb. Sumire was, in fact, very nice. Sumire also believed with every fiber of her being that all the world's problems could be solved with muscles and exercise, and she had a way of taking a polite "maybe" as an enthusiastic "yes, please make me run ten kilometers."
'Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact. You're a background character. You're scenery. You are a nice, quiet white-haired potted plant.'
I kept walking, eyes front, and passed her at a perfectly normal distance.
I made it two whole steps past her.
"Hey! Are you a new student?"
'Crud.'
I turned around with a smile already on my face. The calm had put it there for me, which was good, because I wasn't sure I could have managed one myself.
Sumire was jogging in place a few steps away, ponytail swinging, looking at me with genuine, friendly curiosity. She was also, I noticed, looking at my arms. Assessing.
"Yes," I said. My voice came out light and polite, a little softer than my normal one. "I'm a first year. Frazure Christina. I just transferred in."
I pulled out my ID on its lanyard and held it up, because a nervous new student would.
She leaned in, read it in one glance, and nodded. "Otohana Sumire! Second year. Training Club."
She was still jogging in place.
I bowed a little. "It's nice to meet you, Otohana-senpai."
She laughed. It was a big, easy laugh, the kind that didn't care who heard it. "No need for that! Sumire's fine. Senpai makes me feel old."
"Then call me Chris," I said, straightening up.
"Chris." She tried it out, then grinned. Then her eyes went back to my arms, then my shoulders, then my legs, with the critical look of a farmer at a livestock fair. "You're pretty light, aren't you? Good posture, though. You've done some kind of training before, haven't you?"
'Oh no. She can tell. How can she tell?'
"Um. A little," I said. "Here and there."
"I knew it!" She brightened like I'd told her she'd won a prize. "You know, the Training Club is always looking for new members. We do morning runs, strength work, flexibility, nutrition plans. I could put together a program for you if you want! You'd get stronger in no time. We could start with something light, like a five-kilometer..."
"I'll think about it!" I said, very quickly, with my brightest smile.
She paused. She looked at me. I looked at her. Somewhere far away, a bird sang.
"Okay!" Sumire said cheerfully, completely undiscouraged. "The offer's always open. Oh, and if you see the flower beds by the east building, don't step on them. I just planted the new ones."
"You garden?"
"Strong roots, strong plants!" She flexed one arm, proudly, as if the bicep was the thing doing the gardening. "Anyway, I've still got four laps. Nice to meet you, Chris!"
"Nice to meet you too!"
She jogged away, ponytail bouncing, and was gone around the corner in seconds.
I stood there and let out a long breath through my nose.
'Survived.'
I'd made it maybe twenty minutes into my undercover life before running straight into a named character. That had to be some kind of record.
. . .
'Careful,' I told myself as I finally walked through the gate. 'Making friends is fine. I need people to trust Chris. But no lingering words. No big speeches. No "trust me, something bad is going to happen to your school." If I start changing how the students think too early, I could mess up things that need to happen.'
Not everything in the story was nice. But a lot of the not-nice things were what made people stronger, and what brought them together, and I wasn't arrogant enough to think I knew exactly which pieces I could pull out without the whole thing falling over.
'Watch first. Help quietly. Fix what absolutely needs fixing.'
It was a good plan.
I had a very bad feeling about how long it would last.
. . .
Millennium on the inside was even more ridiculous than the outside.
The halls were wide and bright, with clean white floors you could have eaten off, and every few meters there was a screen showing a club announcement, a lab safety reminder or a countdown to something called "Robot Combat Prelims." A hallway lined with vending machines sold everything from juice to soldering kits. Two girls walked past arguing about quantum tunneling with the passion most people save for sports teams. A small robot on wheels rolled up beside me, scanned my ID with a beep and said, "WELCOME, FIRST YEAR," in a voice like an excited microwave, then rolled away.
I'd downloaded a map of the campus onto a tablet, and I walked the halls with it held up in front of me like a tourist, which wasn't even an act. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to know where the exits were, where the labs were, which halls had cameras and which didn't, where the Engineering Department kept its workshop and how far it was from the Game Development Department's clubroom.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to look.
'I'm here. I'm actually here.'
I was so busy looking that I didn't notice the footsteps behind me until they were right on top of me.
"Excuse me."
I felt it more than heard it: a hand, rising toward my shoulder from behind, about to tap me.
My body made a decision before I did. Without hurrying, I turned around with the tablet still in my hands, smooth and casual, so the hand found nothing but air and its owner found herself looking me in the face instead.
"Yes?"
. . .
The girl in front of me blinked, her hand still up, then slowly lowered it.
Long navy-blue hair that fell to her waist, tied into two tails with little triangular clips that matched her halo. Bright blue eyes with thin, red, snake-like slits for pupils, already narrowing just a little, the way a calculator's screen might narrow if it could. A black-and-white blazer with a Millennium access badge clipped to it, worn over a white-and-blue hoodie, a white shirt and a blue tie, and a black pleated skirt with a white belt lined with ammo pouches. Not a single crease anywhere. And above her head, a halo I would have recognized in my sleep: a black ring with a blue line running through it like a visor.
Hayase Yuuka.
Seminar's treasurer. The scariest person at Millennium if you had ever spent money on anything. The girl who counted on an abacus when she got stressed, and who got stressed a lot, mostly because of people like the Game Development Department and the Engineering Department.
The Engineering Department, which I was very much planning to join.
'Oh no.'
There was a short silence. I could see her looking at me. Not looking. Checking. Her eyes went from my white hair to my blue eyes, to my halo, to my coat, to the tablet in my hands with the campus map on it, and then back up to my face again, adding everything up.
"Do you need help?" she asked.
'Stay calm. You're a lost first year. Be a lost first year.'
I scratched the back of my head with a nervous little laugh that I didn't entirely have to fake. "Ah, well... I'm new here, so..."
I fished out the student ID and held it up.
She took it from me, which I hadn't expected, and read it properly. Not a glance, like Sumire. She read every line.
"Frazure Christina," she read aloud. "First year. Transfer."
She handed it back.
"I'm Hayase Yuuka, second year. I'm the treasurer of Millennium's Seminar." She smiled, polite and professional. "I sign off on the budget allocations for new students. Your paperwork crossed my desk yesterday."
'It crossed her desk.'
'Of course it crossed her desk. She signs off on EVERYTHING.'
"Oh," I said. "Thank you for, um, signing it."
"Mm." Her smile didn't change. "A transfer from a school that closed last spring, a few months out of school, then a transfer in the middle of the term. That's not common. Your grades were good, but not too good, and your teacher only wrote one sentence about you. 'Quiet but dependable.'" She tilted her head slightly. "I remembered it because it was so short."
The calm in my chest didn't even flicker. My heart did a little cartwheel.
"Sorry," I said, letting myself look a bit sheepish. "My old school wasn't really... big on paperwork."
Yuuka looked at me for one more second.
Then she held out her hand, and her smile turned warmer. Slightly.
"Well, welcome to Millennium, Christina."
For some reason, that smile scared me more than the questions had.
"Thank you, Hayase-senpai," I said, and took her hand.
The second my fingers closed around hers, she tightened her grip, turned on her heel and started walking.
Pulling me with her.
"Wait, what..."
"You're holding a map like a tourist," Yuuka said over her shoulder, not slowing down. "And you've walked past the first-year wing twice. You're going to be late to class, and if you're late on your first day you'll get flagged, and if you get flagged, it's more paperwork. For me."
"I can just..."
"I'll show you around." She glanced back at me. Her eyes were still a little narrowed. "I have time."
She did not have time. Yuuka never had time. I knew that for a fact. She was the busiest person at this entire school.
And she was dragging me down the hall by the hand like a lost puppy, a girl she'd met thirty seconds ago and had already noticed three things about that she shouldn't have.
'What the... This isn't how she's supposed to be, is it?'