---
-Melissa POV-
Kotori did not let go of my hand the entire way there.
I didn't mind. It was a different kind of hand-holding from Yuuka's. Yuuka held on like she was escorting a suspect. Kotori held on like she was showing a friend a secret clubhouse, which, I suppose, she was.
"The Engineering Department is the oldest technical club at Millennium," she said, steering me down a side corridor without even looking. "Well, technically it's the second-oldest, because the first one exploded, but the people who survived the explosion founded the Engineering Department, so if you count the people instead of the paperwork, it's the oldest. And we've built more things that are used across Kivotos than any other club! The drones that deliver packages in this district? Engineering. The automatic door sensors in half the school? Engineering. The self-cleaning lab benches? Engineering, although those were recalled, because they sometimes cleaned whoever was leaning on them."
"Recalled?"
"Only a little recalled." She waved her free hand. "The point is, we make things. Whatever we want. Whatever we can think of. And then we add the features that make them better."
"What kind of features?"
"Oh, you know." She considered it seriously. "Drills. Lights. Speakers. Rocket boosters. Self-destruct functions."
"Self-destruct functions?"
"Hibiki-chan likes those." She said it the way someone else might say Hibiki-chan likes cats. "She says every good invention should be able to decide its own fate."
'Oh yeah. Hibiki does that,' I thought. In her bond story, she'd nearly installed one in Sensei's phone. 'Gotta make sure she doesn't do it to my stuff.'
We talked the whole way. And I mean the whole way. Kotori told me about the history of the screw thread, starting with the ancient world. I told her about a better way to wire a battery bank. She told me about the time Utaha-senpai built a pencil holder and reprinted it fourteen times because the edges were "emotionally uneven." I told her about a self-tightening bolt idea I'd had in the warehouse at two in the morning. She gasped. I gasped back. Somewhere around the fourth corridor, a student coming the other way took one look at the two of us, both talking at once, and turned around and went back the way she came.
If someone had been writing all this down, they'd have given up on the conversation after a page and skipped straight to the good part.
So let's skip to the good part.
. . .
"Here we are!"
Kotori stopped in front of a door.
It was a normal door. A completely normal door. A gray metal sliding door with a little sign that said ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT, and a second, smaller sign underneath it, handwritten, that said NO, WE CANNOT FIX YOUR PHONE. (WE CAN, BUT WE WILL ADD A DRILL TO IT.)
I stared at it.
'Why is the door so small?'
In the game, the Engineering Department's clubroom was huge. A big, open workshop that looked more like a hangar than a classroom. This door looked like it led to a broom closet.
"I'm really excited to meet everyone," I said, which wasn't a lie, and put on my best new-member smile.
It also wasn't the only reason I was excited. This body's hands had been itching all day. Back in the warehouse, they'd taken apart a broken phone, its cracked little battery and half a crate of mystery components, and they'd put them back together as something that stopped bullets. They knew engines, firearms, circuits. And somewhere in the not-quite-memories, I'd found flashes of them taking apart much stranger things too. Vehicles. Weapons. The big, ugly machines that sometimes crawled out of the desert, the kind with a red glow where their brains should be.
Those hands wanted a real workshop.
The door slid open.
And kept going.
. . .
It wasn't a clubroom. It was a hangar.
The tiny door opened onto a catwalk, and below the catwalk the floor dropped away into a space so big I couldn't see the back wall clearly. High ceilings crossed with steel beams and hanging cranes. Rows of workbenches, each one buried under tools, half-built gadgets, coils of wire and coffee mugs in various stages of abandonment. Racks of firearms along one wall, some perfectly ordinary, some very much not, like the shotgun with what looked like a toaster bolted to the side. A wall of drawers labeled things like RESISTORS, SPRINGS, MISC (SMALL), MISC (LARGE) and MISC (DO NOT). A 3D printer the size of a car was humming quietly in one corner, slowly printing what looked like a giant pencil holder.
It smelled like machine oil, solder and burnt sugar. Somebody had been making caramel. I didn't ask.
'Okay,' I thought. 'The game didn't show half of this.'
Then my eyes found the far wall.
And I stopped breathing.
. . .
Hanging from a reinforced rack on the wall, a little apart from everything else, as if the clutter was keeping a respectful distance, was a gun.
No. Not a gun. A cannon. A railgun.
It was enormous. Nearly as long as I was tall, thick and boxy, its frame a sleek, clean white where it was finished, and a skeleton of rails, coils and bare cables where it wasn't. Half of its outer shell was missing, the panels laid out on a bench beneath it like pieces of a puzzle. The accelerator gleamed blue through the gaps. At its heart, behind a half-closed housing, sat a dark yellow core, unlit, waiting. A little LCD screen on the back was blank.
The tap in my head opened, and this time it didn't pour. It roared.
'Electromagnetic accelerator. Twin-rail configuration, segmented. Power demand far beyond anything handheld. Originally scaled for a ship's mount, then cut down and lightened, badly, by people who didn't have the budget to do it properly. Missing: three capacitor banks, the rail alignment housing, most of the cooling. Recoil management is a joke. Nobody normal could carry it. Nobody normal could fire it. The core alone...'
I knew what it was before the tap finished.
'Supernova.'
The Sword of Light.
In the game, the Engineering Department had built it for a space project: an actual spaceship, an intergalactic battleship, because of course they had. The budget got cut, the ship never happened, and the railgun they'd made for it was left hanging on a wall, too heavy and too powerful for any ordinary student to lift.
Until a strange girl with impossibly long black hair, who'd just woken up in a ruin and learned to talk from video games, walked in one day and picked it up like it weighed nothing.
Aris.
And from that moment on, that railgun would follow her through all of it. Her first fight. The Game Development Department's desperate little rebellion. Rio, and the cold room, and the Key. And further than that, much further, all the way to the end of everything, when a gun built for a battleship that never existed would turn out to matter more than anyone could possibly have guessed.
It was right there.
Unfinished. Unloved. Hanging on a wall like a broken appliance.
I didn't realize I'd moved until I was standing at the edge of the catwalk railing, staring at it, my hands already half-raised as if I could reach across the whole hangar and touch it.
'Three capacitor banks,' I thought. 'And the rail alignment. And somebody needs to fix that cooling before it cooks whoever pulls the trigger. And the back doors. No one gets a back door. No one.'
"Kotori. Who's this?"
. . .
The voice came from right behind me. Soft, calm and a little bit sleepy, like warm tea.
I turned.
Kotori had stepped back to stand beside an older girl, who must have come up the catwalk stairs while I was busy having a spiritual experience at a railgun.
She was taller than me by a head, with long violet hair that went all the way down past her knees, tied at the very end with a little ornament shaped like a mechanical wing. Her eyes were violet too, unhurried and observant. She wore the standard Millennium uniform under a shiny, slightly oil-stained lab coat: a black sweater with an access badge clipped to it, a white shirt, a blue tie, a pleated white skirt, black tights and black indoor shoes. In her right hand, she held a large wrench, as casually as someone else might hold a pen.
Above her head floated a pink halo shaped like a digital hexagon, with a rhombus at its center and a small cybernetic wing on either side.
Shiraishi Utaha.
President of the Engineering Department. The meister. A genius, a perfectionist, and, according to her bond story, a girl who thought real puppies were probably just very advanced robots.
Behind her, half-hidden by the coat, something squat and metallic was trundling along after her on a set of little treads, like a loyal dog. It was a turret, more or less: a sturdy, rounded body with a cluster of three stubby barrels sticking out of the front, and a flat top that looked suspiciously like a seat. As I watched, it turned its barrels toward me, considered me for a moment, and turned them politely away again.
'And that's Ikazuchi-chan. Thundergun. Rai-chan. Her robot.'
In the game, it was a turret she summoned in battle. The lore said it could hold its own against several hundred PMC combat robots. It was also, technically, supposed to be a combat-ready chair, which told you everything you needed to know about the Engineering Department's design philosophy.
I was starstruck. I was thoroughly, completely starstruck.
"This is someone who's not only interested in joining the club," Kotori announced, with the pride of a cat bringing home a bird, "but who is just as enthusiastic about everything as I am!"
Utaha's eyes moved from Kotori to me. A small, polite question formed in them.
"Ah, yes! Hello!" I said quickly. "I'm Frazure Christina, a transfer student. First year. I'm a hobbyist. I like messing around with things and making something new out of something old."
It came out smoothly. It was also, I realized, not actually a lie. Not anymore. I really did like it. Watching my hands work in that warehouse had been the most fun I'd had in years, and that included the time I'd pulled a limited unit on a single ten-pull.
Utaha nodded slowly and walked closer. She had a very calming presence, like standing near a big, quiet machine that was running perfectly. She stopped in front of me and lifted the wrench, resting its head under her chin, thoughtfully.
"I'm Shiraishi Utaha. Third year. President of the Engineering Department."
"It's nice to meet you."
"Mm." She looked at me, then glanced, very briefly, past me at the railgun. Then she looked back. "You were looking at that."
"...Yes."
"It isn't finished." There was a small, unhappy crease between her eyebrows when she said it. "I don't like people looking at things that aren't finished."
"Sorry. I couldn't help it. It's..." I searched for a word that Chris, a hobbyist, would use. "It's beautiful."
Utaha's expression didn't change much. But the crease went away.
"Kotori says you built a barrier projector from spare parts."
"A small one."
"Yuuka sent me the range footage," Utaha said, and for a second I thought I'd misheard. "She wanted to know if it was ours. It isn't. She seemed very annoyed about that."
'Of course she sent it. Of course she did.'
"Can I see it?"
I took the disc out of my pocket and handed it to her. She turned it over in her fingers, examined the seams, the button, the little ring of lights, then held it up to her ear and tapped it, listening, like a doctor with a stethoscope. Her eyebrows rose a fraction.
"You built the casing by hand."
"I didn't have a printer."
"The seam on this side is slightly off." She ran a fingernail along it. "Half a millimeter."
"...I know," I admitted. "It was three in the morning."
Utaha looked at me for a long moment. And then, very slightly, she smiled. It was the smile of a perfectionist who'd just met someone else who noticed half a millimeter.
She handed the disc back.
"Are you sure you want to join?" she asked. Her voice was gentle, but it was a real question. "All we really do here is build things for the sake of our own satisfaction. We don't win prizes. The Seminar cuts our budget every term. Half of what we make, nobody else understands. Most people find us strange."
Behind her, Kotori nodded with total sincerity. Strange was a badge of honor here.
And I opened my mouth to give the polite, easy answer. Something like "I just really like building things," the kind of answer a background character would give.
That isn't what came out.
. . .
"I want to make a difference."
The words came from somewhere low in my chest, under the calm and under me. I didn't plan them.
"I want to make things with people I can call friends. And I want to help people with the things we make." I looked Utaha straight in the eyes. "Not just build them and hang them on a wall. Use them. Make things that change something. That's why I'm here."
The hangar went quiet. Even the giant 3D printer seemed to hold its breath for a second.
It was true. That was the scary part. I'd come to Millennium for cover, and to be close to the story, and for parts. Very specific parts. The kind you'd need to build a second me: a double that could sit in Chris's seat and answer to Chris's name while the real me was somewhere else. But standing there, with that unfinished railgun at my back and this sleepy genius in front of me, it was the truest thing I'd said since I woke up in this body.
I didn't feel anything happen.
But something behind my eyes went warm. Just for a moment. Like stepping into sunlight.
. . .
-3rd POV-
On the far side of the catwalk, half-hidden behind a stack of crates labeled MISC (DO NOT), two people were watching.
One was Kotori, who'd quietly retreated there so as not to interrupt, and was now listening with her hands clasped and her eyes shining.
The other was a girl with black wavy hair tied into ponytails on both sides of her head, held with a band that carried a pair of small yellow and purple orbs. A pair of engineering goggles sat pushed up on her forehead. Black floppy dog ears poked out from her hair, and a black tail with a white tip hung behind her, completely still. She wore a white-and-yellow hoodie over a black-and-gray tank top, short shorts, webbed stockings and black boots with the Millennium logo stamped on the rims. Her gray eyes were half-lidded and unreadable. Above her head hung a small yellow barred circle, wrapped inside two larger rings.
Nekozuka Hibiki, first year, Engineering Department. She had been in the middle of soldering something when the door opened, and she was still holding the soldering iron.
"Who's that," she said. It wasn't quite a question. Hibiki didn't really ask questions out loud. She just said things and let people decide whether to answer.
"Chris! She's a transfer student in my class. She built a kinetic-reactive barrier from a phone and Yuuka-senpai couldn't break it with two full magazines!"
Hibiki considered this.
"Hm."
"She wants to join!"
"I heard." Hibiki's ears twitched once. "She was staring at the railgun like she wanted to marry it."
Kotori opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again, because that was a very fair description.
They watched Christina look up at Utaha and say that she wanted to make a difference. Kotori sighed happily. Hibiki didn't make a sound.
But Hibiki had her goggles' magnifier half-flipped down out of habit, the way she always did when she watched something carefully, and so she saw something Kotori didn't.
For an instant, a blink, a single frame, the transfer student's blue eyes flashed.
Not blue. Pink.
A soft, bright pink, glowing from somewhere underneath the color of her eyes, as if there were a light behind them. And inside the pink, where the pupil should have been, for that one frame, there was a tiny shape. Sharp. Faceted.
A diamond.
Then it was gone. Just blue eyes again.
Hibiki flipped the magnifier up, then down again, and looked. Blue. Ordinary.
"Her contacts just reflected pink," she said.
"Huh?" Kotori blinked at her. "What do you mean?"
Hibiki looked at Christina a moment longer. Then she looked up at the hangar's ceiling lights, which were white. Then back at Christina.
"...Nothing," she said. "Lighting."
She went back to her soldering. But her tail, which had been still the entire time, gave one slow, thoughtful swish.
. . .
On the catwalk, Shiraishi Utaha was having an unusual afternoon.
Utaha did not get persuaded by speeches. She had heard a lot of speeches. Every term, students came to the Engineering Department with big eyes and bigger promises. They wanted to make a robot army. They wanted to build a flying car. They wanted to "change the world." Most of them left within a week, once they realized changing the world mostly meant sanding things for three hours and then sanding them again because the first sanding was wrong.
Utaha's policy was simple. She didn't listen to what people said they wanted to build. She watched what their hands did.
And she had been planning to do exactly that. Hand the new girl a broken servo, maybe. See what happened. Make her earn it.
But this girl had looked her straight in the eyes and said "use them," and something in Utaha had simply... agreed.
It was strange. She felt warm, and a little lighter, as if somebody had opened a window in a stuffy room. She felt, with quiet and complete certainty, that this person belonged here. That she'd been missing from this hangar the whole time, and nobody had noticed the empty space until she walked into it.
Utaha didn't trust feelings like that. She was an engineer. Feelings didn't have tolerances.
She trusted the half-millimeter seam, though. And the girl's face when she'd admitted to it.
Utaha let out a breath and, despite herself, smiled.
"Sure," she said. "We'd be glad to have another member."
She held out her hand.
. . .
-Melissa POV-
"Thank you for having me, Utaha-senpai~"
It came out a little more smugly than I'd meant it to. But it was honest, too, and I shook her hand with both of mine. Her fingers were calloused and faintly stained with grease, and she didn't seem the least bit embarrassed about it. If anything, she seemed proud.
The warm feeling behind my eyes had faded. I blinked a couple of times. My contacts felt fine. Probably just the dry air in here.
'Okay. I'm in. I'm in the Engineering Department. I'm in, and that railgun is in the same room as me.'
I tried not to look at it. I failed. I looked at it.
Then I looked away and caught sight of a pair of black dog ears over the top of a stack of crates.
'Ah.'
I glanced at Utaha with a small smile, and Utaha, who seemed to have stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago, turned around and called out mildly.
"Hibiki."
The ears went still. Then, slowly, a girl stood up from behind the crates, holding a soldering iron, with the expression of a cat that had been caught on the kitchen counter and had decided to act like it had meant to be there.
"Hibiki, this is Frazure Christina. She's joining us." Utaha glanced at the ID hanging around my neck. "She's a first year, like you."
'This is it,' I thought. 'Hibiki. The quiet genius. The self-destruct girl.'
I decided to do it the way Kotori would. All gusto, no brakes.
"Nice to meet you!" I said brightly, crossing the catwalk toward her. "I'm Frazure Christina! New transfer! I like building things with friends! Chris is fine!"
'Please don't scare her. Please don't scare her.'
Hibiki looked at me. Then at my outstretched hand. Then at my face again.
"Nekozuka Hibiki," she said. "First year." A pause. "Don't touch my stuff without asking."
"Okay!"
"Especially the crate with the red tape on it."
"Okay. What's in it?"
"Mortar shells."
"...Okay."
Hibiki looked at me for one more second. Then she put the soldering iron down, wiped her hand on her hoodie and shook mine. Her grip was brief and firm.
"Welcome," she said.
And then, before I could say anything else, she reached into her hoodie pocket, pulled out a small, beautifully made screwdriver with a yellow handle and pressed it into my palm.
"Welcome present," she said.
I looked down at it. It was gorgeous. Perfect balance. Interchangeable bits stored in the handle. A tiny LED in the tip. A little red button on the bottom.
"What's the button do?"
"Self-destruct."
I stared at her.
"...Why?"
Hibiki tilted her head, as if I'd asked something very silly.
"Why not?"
Behind me, Kotori burst out laughing. Utaha sighed the deep, peaceful sigh of a club president who had lived through this conversation many times. And I stood there on the catwalk of the Engineering Department, holding a self-destructing screwdriver, grinning like an idiot.
'I'm going to like it here.'
. . .
They gave me the tour after that, which in the Engineering Department meant being walked from bench to bench while three people explained what was on each one at the same time.
Kotori's bench was buried under books, notes and a half-disassembled minigun that she was, in her words, "teaching to be more polite." Hibiki's corner was neat to the point of being alarming, every tool outlined in marker on a pegboard, and in the middle of it sat a machine that looked like a mortar crossed with a popcorn maker.
"Fireworks launcher," Hibiki said, before I could ask.
"For the festival?"
"For whenever."
"Does it have a self-destruct?"
She gave me a look that said I was learning.
Utaha's bench was the cleanest of all, and she didn't let me get very close to it. There was a cloth thrown over something on it, and when I glanced at the cloth, she stepped, very casually, between it and me.
"Unfinished," she said.
"Got it."
Along the back wall ran another bank of drawers, and my eyes caught on the labels before I could stop them. ACTUATORS. SERVOS (SMALL). SERVOS (LARGE). SYNTHETIC MUSCLE (EXPERIMENTAL, DO NOT POKE).
I started counting without meaning to. A shoulder needed three axes of motion. An elbow, one. A wrist, two. A hand was a nightmare, more than twenty joints all by itself. Then a neck, a spine, hips, knees, ankles, the small muscles of a face that would have to smile at Sumire and look appropriately terrified of Yuuka...
'A couple hundred actuators,' I thought. 'Give or take. And a power source that doesn't need a forklift battery. And skin. And hair I can dye white.'
It was a lot. But it was all here, or could be.
The part that wasn't here was the part that worried me. Yuuka had looked at me for two seconds and felt like she'd known me for years. Whatever I built to sit in Chris's seat would have to survive that. It wouldn't just need a body. It would need to be someone.
Parts could make a body. I had no idea what made a someone.
I filed that thought away for later, under PROBLEMS, right below MONEY.
There was a crate at the end of the row with a strip of red tape on it, which I gave a wide berth. Next to it was another crate, unmarked except for the word PEPPERS scrawled on the side in marker, followed by three exclamation marks. I decided not to ask about that one either. Some things you're better off discovering when it's too late.
At the end of the tour, we were standing under the railgun again.
I didn't mean to end up there. My feet just brought me back, like water running downhill.
"Can I ask about it?" I said.
Utaha looked up at it with me for a while before she answered.
"It was for a ship," she said. "A real one. Not a model. A spaceship, the kind you'd see in a movie, the kind that crosses a galaxy." She said it without a single hint of a joke. "That was the club project, a while back. We designed the hull. We designed the engines. And we designed the main gun. That's what this was supposed to be."
"What happened to the ship?"
Kotori and Hibiki said it at the same time, in exactly the same flat tone.
"Budget."
"The Seminar cut the funding before we finished the hull," Utaha said. "So there was no ship. Just a gun for a ship. We scaled it down, so it could at least be fired by hand." She paused. "In theory."
"In theory?"
"Nobody can lift it," Hibiki said.
"Two of us can lift it," Kotori corrected. "For about four seconds."
"And then it falls on whoever's on the left," Hibiki said, without blinking.
I thought about a small girl with impossibly long black hair, one day in the not-so-far future, picking this up with one hand and saying something about a legendary sword.
I didn't say anything about that.
"It's missing a few things," I said instead, carefully. "The capacitors, the rail alignment. And the cooling looks like it would..." I caught myself. Chris was a hobbyist. Chris shouldn't be able to diagnose a railgun from across a hangar. "...like it would be hard to get right," I finished weakly.
Utaha turned her head and looked at me. Really looked, the way she'd looked at the seam on my barrier.
"It is," she said quietly. "It's the hardest thing I've ever tried to build."
"I'd love to help with it someday."
I meant someday. I meant it the way you say "we should get coffee sometime."
Utaha considered it for a long moment, eyes on the railgun.
"Someday," she agreed. "First, you sand things."
"Sand things?"
"Everyone sands things for their first month." She turned and started walking back toward the stairs, coat swaying. "Kotori. Get her a block and some paper. Three-hundred grit."
"Yes, senpai!"
So the first thing I did as an official member of the Millennium Science School Engineering Department, as a girl with a Storage full of guns, a body that could identify a railgun's missing parts from fifty meters away, and plans for half of Kivotos written in the back of a notebook...
...was sit on a stool for two hours and sand a bracket.
I sanded it until it was perfect. Then Utaha looked at it, said "almost," and handed it back.
I sanded it again.
It was, honestly, the best afternoon I'd had in years.
. . .
The campus closing announcement finally chased us out, a pleasant robotic voice reminding all students that the buildings would lock in fifteen minutes and that "anyone found sleeping in a lab will be gently relocated."
Kotori walked me to the main gate. She talked the whole way, about bearings this time, and I talked back, and the sun went down orange behind the white towers of Millennium while we argued cheerfully about whether ball bearings or roller bearings were the more honest invention.
At the gate, she stopped and bounced on her heels. "Which way do you live, Chris? If it's toward the east station, we could walk together!"
'Ah.'
Frazure Christina did not, technically, live anywhere. Frazure Christina had a student ID, a lanyard and a transfer record, and she went home every night to a nearly empty warehouse on the other side of the city, which belonged to somebody who, on paper, didn't exist.
"The other way," I said, pointing vaguely in a direction that was mostly buildings. "Sorry! Tomorrow, though?"
"Tomorrow!" Kotori beamed. "Bring the barrier! Utaha-senpai wants to see the inside! Oh, wait, wait, MomoTalk! Give me your MomoTalk!"
She already had her phone out. I pulled out mine, and for a second, I just looked at it. The plain black phone from Storage, with its clean, empty home screen. No contacts. No messages. Nothing.
Kotori tapped her phone against mine with a cheerful little chime.
And there it was. The first name on the list.
Toyomi Kotori
Her icon was a blurry photo of a gear. Before I'd even put the phone away, it buzzed with a message: three exclamation marks and a picture of a roller bearing.
'Okay,' I thought, and something warm and silly settled in my chest. 'Okay. That's better than a gacha icon.'
She waved and headed off toward the station, her coat flapping, already muttering to herself about roller bearings.
I waved until she turned the corner. Then I started walking the long way around, toward a bus that would take me most of the way across Kivotos.
'Note to self,' I thought. 'Chris needs an apartment. Somewhere near Millennium. With a door that locks and a room big enough for a workbench.'
Another line for the Planning Board.
It was getting to be a very long Planning Board.
---
-3rd POV-
Back in the empty hangar, the lights dimmed to their evening setting.
Utaha's 3D printer finished the pencil holder, examined it with its little camera, and decided on its own that the edges were emotionally uneven. It began again.
Ikazuchi-chan trundled off to its charging dock.
And on the far wall, the unfinished railgun hung in the half-dark, shell open, core unlit, exactly where it had hung for a long, long time.
Nobody knew it yet. Not Utaha, not Kotori, not Hibiki. Not even the girl with the white hair and the blue contacts, who was at that very moment riding a bus across Kivotos toward an empty warehouse, making a list in her head of capacitor banks, servos and apartments near Millennium.
But after that afternoon, the future of Kivotos had started to change.