---
-Melissa POV-
The lights were still on in the noodle shop when I got back.
It was almost three in the morning. I came in through the back door, still in the black suit, mask pulled down around my neck, and found Abigale and Eli sitting at the old counter in the empty shop, side by side, staring at the door.
Abigale had the Winchester across her knees. Eli had a cup of tea in front of her that had clearly gone cold an hour ago. They both jumped when the door opened.
"Melissa!"
Eli was off her stool before I'd finished closing the door. She stopped half a step away from me, hands hovering, as if she wanted to check me for injuries but didn't know if she was allowed to. Abigale didn't get up. She just let out a long breath, very slowly, and her grip on the rifle loosened.
"You said one hour," Abigale said quietly.
"I did say one hour," I admitted.
"It's been four."
"It has been four."
Eli's eyes went over me, head to toe, and then to the corner of my black sleeve. "There's a hole in your suit."
I looked down. There was. A neat little round one, right through the cloth at my elbow. One of the drones had come closer than I'd thought.
"Huh," I said. "Okay. Fair. I'm sorry I worried you."
Abigale looked at me for a moment longer. Then she stood up, went around the counter, poured a fresh cup of tea from the pot that was still warm on the burner, and set it in front of the empty stool next to hers.
That was all. She didn't say anything else.
I sat down and drank it, and it was the best tea I'd ever had.
. . .
"So?" Eli asked, once my cup was half empty. She was sitting back on her stool, leaning forward on her elbows, eyes bright. "Did it work? Whatever you went to do?"
I hadn't told them exactly what I was doing. Just that I was going to the ruins, that I'd be careful, and that it was for the project in the back room.
I put the cup down.
"I think," I said slowly, "it might have worked better than I hoped."
I opened Storage.
They couldn't see the window. Nobody but me ever could. But they'd learned what it looked like when I opened it: the way my eyes went a little unfocused, the way my hand lifted slightly in front of me, as if I were resting my fingers on a glass wall. They both went quiet and watched.
There were the three squares. Side by side, exactly where I'd left them in the factory.
Frazure Christina (Unit 01).
Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial).
Memory: Frazure Christina.
The thin gold lines between them were still glowing, faintly, the way they had been ever since the ruins. As I looked at them, the glow brightened, and a new box unfolded below the three of them, on its own, just like before.
Combine: Frazure Christina (Unit 01) + Blueprint: AL-1S (Partial) + Memory: Frazure Christina?
[YES] [NO]
. . .
I sat very still.
That was it. That was the whole thing. One touch. Everything I'd been working toward for weeks, everything I'd snuck into the ruins for, waiting for me behind a single word.
My finger lifted toward [YES].
And stopped.
Because I didn't know how it worked.
I didn't know what a blueprint for a girl like Aris actually looked like. I didn't know how a memory went into a body, or where it lived once it was there, or what turned a pile of parts and a stack of memories into somebody who could look at you and mean it. Storage knew. Or whatever was behind Storage knew. If I pressed that button, it would do it for me, and it would probably do it perfectly.
And I would never understand it.
Something stirred in my chest at that thought. Not the calm. Something hungrier. A pull, deep and warm and stubborn, like reaching for a book on a high shelf that you just know has the answer inside. I wanted to know. I wanted to see how it worked, every piece, with my own eyes and my own hands. I wanted to be able to do it again, without anyone's help, whenever I needed to.
I wanted it the way some people want gold.
"...Melissa?" Abigale said softly. "Your eyes."
"Hm?"
"They're..." She hesitated. "Really gold right now. Like, glowing gold."
I blinked a few times. Eli was staring at me too, mouth slightly open.
'Oh. Huh. That's a new one.'
I turned back to the box hanging in the air.
"Thank you," I said quietly to it, the way I had in the factory. "Really. But not yet."
I touched [NO].
The box folded itself away. The three squares stayed where they were, side by side, the gold lines between them still faintly glowing, patient, as if they'd be happy to wait.
And just for a second, I could have sworn I felt something like amusement coming off the window. The kind of fond, exasperated amusement you'd feel watching a kid insist on tying her own shoes.
"Okay," I said, and stood up, and stretched until my back cracked. "I'm going to need the back room. And probably a lot of coffee. And maybe some help."
Eli was already on her feet. "Yes, Mel... I mean. Okay!"
---
It took four days.
Four days, and four nights, and more coffee than I would ever admit to.
During the day, I went to Millennium as Chris, the way I always had. I sat in my seat by the window. I made my one mistake on the board. I nodded at Yuuka in the cafeteria and endured her look. I went to the Engineering Department and helped Kotori calibrate her Neru-volume sensor and repaired a drone for Hibiki, who said "...Thanks," and gave me a gummy candy from her hoodie pocket without looking at me.
And every night, I came back to the noodle shop, locked the door to the back room, and opened the blueprint.
. . .
It was beautiful.
That was the first thing I learned. Not how it worked. Just that it was beautiful.
When I tapped the blueprint's square, its little window didn't just unfold. It opened. Out and up and around me, until the whole back room was filled with faint gold lines hanging in the air, layer on layer, like a three-dimensional map. Shapes. Diagrams. Pathways branching and rejoining. A structure at the center of it, small and dense and impossibly intricate, that the lines all flowed into and out of, like a heart.
Half of it was readable.
The other half was static. Whole regions of the map were blurred and scrambled, symbols crawling over them the way they had in the factory, as if someone had pressed their hand over the page. Whatever was hiding inside Aris didn't want anyone reading the rest. That was fine. I didn't need the rest. I didn't need to know how to make Aris.
I just needed to know how a body learns to be someone.
So I studied the half I could read.
I studied it the way I'd studied for exams in college, the way I'd studied contracts at my old job, the way I'd studied a new gacha banner the night before it dropped. I filled an entire notebook. Then a second one. I drew the heart-structure from six different angles. I took apart one of the spare servos from Storage and put it back together seven times just to calm down.
The tap in my head helped. Not with the blueprint itself. It had no idea what that was. But with everything around it. How to shape a part that small. How to solder a connection that fine. Which alloy would hold its shape and which would warp. My hands knew all of that. They just didn't know what to build until I told them.
And the calm in my chest sat with me through every hour of it, quiet and patient and, I thought, a little bit proud.
. . .
Eli and Abigale helped.
I hadn't asked them to. Not really. But on the first night, Eli brought me coffee without being asked, and on the second, she brought me coffee and a sandwich and a neatly organized tray of every tool I'd used the night before, sorted by how often I'd reached for them. By the third night, she'd figured out which one I'd need next before I did and had it in my hand by the time I reached for it.
"A Wonderful Servant," she said, when I stared at her. She looked very pleased with herself.
Abigale didn't say much. She mostly sat in the corner of the back room on an upturned crate, cleaning her rifle or reading one of Eli's history textbooks, keeping me company. But on the third night, there was a moment when I needed to set a screw so small and in a spot so deep inside the heart-structure that my own hands, steady as they were, kept shaking from exhaustion.
Abigale put her book down, came over, and held out her hand for the driver.
I hesitated. Then I gave it to her.
She looked at the screw for a long moment. She breathed in. She breathed out, the way I'd taught her at the range. And between one heartbeat and the next, she set it, perfectly, first try.
Then she handed the driver back and went back to her crate and her book, as if nothing had happened.
"...Thank you," I said.
"Someone who doesn't miss," Abigale said, without looking up. But she was smiling.
. . .
On the fourth night, it was finished.
The heart-structure sat in the center of Unit 01's chest, small and gold-wired and humming faintly, like something waiting to wake up. Every connection was checked. Every line on my two notebooks of diagrams was crossed off. My eyes were stinging. My hands, for the first time since I'd woken up in this body, were tired.
Unit 01 lay on the workbench under the lamp. White hair. Pale face. Eyes closed. She looked like she was asleep.
There was only one thing left.
I opened Storage, and I found the last square: Memory: Frazure Christina.
I didn't press anything. I'd been studying for four nights, and I'd learned enough to know that there was no button for this part. The heart-structure was built to take something in. Something that wasn't a part, or a wire, or a line of code. It had a space at its center shaped exactly like that.
So I did the only thing I could think of.
I pulled the memory out of Storage. Not into the room. Into my hands. It didn't have a shape I could see, but I could feel it there, cupped in my palms, warm and weightless, like holding a breath.
Then I leaned over Unit 01, and I set my hands, very gently, over the place where her heart was.
'Okay,' I thought, to the memory, to the heart, to whoever was listening. 'This is yours. All of it. Every bracket. Every roller bearing. Every time Yuuka looked at you funny.'
'Take good care of it.'
I let go.
. . .
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the heart-structure in her chest lit up. Soft gold at first, then brighter, then brighter still, until the light of it shone up through her skin and her clothes and threw long golden shadows across the walls of the back room. Behind me, Eli gasped. Abigale's crate scraped the floor as she stood up.
The light pulsed once.
Twice.
Like a heartbeat, starting.
And above Unit 01's head, in the empty air where nothing had ever been, something began to form.
. . .
-Christina POV-
The first thing I remembered was a mirror.
A white-haired girl with blue eyes and a plain dark blue halo, looking back at me. Someone saying, quietly, Hi, Chris.
Then a gate. A plaza. A girl jogging in place with a ponytail swinging behind her. Are you a new student? A hand closing around mine and pulling me down a long white hall. I'll show you around. A classroom. A board full of numbers. A flood of questions from a girl with orange hair and black glasses, and the warm, bright, wonderful feeling of flooding her right back.
A hangar. A wall. A railgun. First, you sand things.
Brackets. So many brackets. Almost.Almost.Fine.
Roller bearings. Pictures of roller bearings, every night, from someone who thought they were the most honest invention in the world.
All of it came at once, and all of it was mine. I knew every one of those moments the way you know your own hands. I could feel the sandpaper under my fingers. I could feel Yuuka's grip on my wrist.
And at the same time, it wasn't mine. I'd never lived any of it. I knew that, the way you know you're dreaming. It was like waking up with a whole life already packed into your bags and no memory of packing them.
It was so much.
It was so, so much.
I opened my eyes.
. . .
A ceiling. Plain and close. A lamp hanging over me, very bright. I squinted.
I was lying on something hard. A workbench. I could feel the edges of it under my shoulder blades. I could feel the air on my face, cool, smelling of solder and coffee and, faintly, old noodle broth.
I could feel.
I sat up.
It was easy. My body knew how. It moved exactly the way I wanted it to, smooth and steady, and I looked down at my hands in my lap. Pale hands. Small. The same hands I remembered holding a sanding block, a barrier disc, a cup of the cheap cafeteria tea. They were mine. I flexed my fingers. They flexed.
I looked up.
There were three people in the room.
One of them was a girl with brown hair and gray eyes with amber in the middle, standing next to an upturned crate with a rifle propped beside it, staring at me with her mouth slightly open. One of them was a girl with black hair holding a tray of tools so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
And one of them was standing right beside the workbench, close enough to touch. Small. Shorter than me, even. Long golden hair, tied back and coming loose. Dark circles under her eyes. A smudge of grease on her cheek. A pair of eyes so bright and so gold that for a second they didn't look like eyes at all. More like two coins at the bottom of a fountain.
I knew that face.
Not that hair. Not those eyes. But the face. I'd seen it in the mirror every morning for weeks, under white hair and behind blue contacts. Hi, Chris.
She was the one who'd been me.
Before I was me.
. . .
She was looking at me like I was the most important thing she had ever seen.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She swallowed. She tried again.
"...Hi," she said. Her voice cracked right down the middle. "Do you... know who you are?"
I thought about it. I didn't have to think very hard.
"Frazure Christina," I said. My voice came out exactly the way I remembered it. Light, a little soft. Mine. "First year. Millennium Science School. Engineering Department." I paused. "Chris is fine."
Something happened to her face. It crumpled and lit up at the same time, like someone trying very hard not to cry and failing a little.
"Yeah," she said, laughing, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and smearing the grease across her cheek. "Yeah. Chris is fine."
I looked at her for a long moment. My memories knew her, and didn't. I knew what it felt like to stand where she was standing, behind a white-haired face, making one mistake a day on purpose, worrying about Yuuka. I knew how her thoughts sounded, in the moments she'd been me. But I'd never seen her from the outside.
I wanted to call her something. It felt important. It felt like the first thing I should get right.
"You're my..." I started.
The word that came first was the obvious one. She'd made me. She'd built every part of me, and given me everything I remembered.
"...Mom?"
She choked on nothing at all.
'No,' I thought immediately, watching her face. 'No, that's wrong. That's very wrong. She looks like she's about to faint.'
"Uh... creator?" I tried.
That one was worse. It sounded like something a robot would say in a movie, right before it turned on everybody.
"...Too formal," I decided, out loud, and frowned, and thought harder.
She'd been me. I'd been her. We had the same face. The same height, almost. She'd stayed up four nights building me with grease on her cheek and dark circles under her eyes, and she was looking at me now like she'd waited her whole life for me to wake up.
"Sis..." I said slowly, tasting it. "...ter?"
The golden-haired girl stared at me.
Then she laughed again, really laughed, and it came out wet and shaky and wonderful.
"Sister works," Melissa said. "Sister works really well. I'm Melissa. Mel. Hi, Chris."
"Hi, Mel," I said.
Behind her, the girl with the tray of tools burst into tears.
. . .
Things got very loud for a while after that.
Eli, which turned out to be the black-haired girl's name, cried for about five minutes straight and then apologized for crying for about five more, and then hugged me without asking and apologized for that, too. The brown-haired girl, Abigale, came over slowly and stood beside the workbench and looked at me with her strange scope-lens eyes for a long time.
"Your halo," she said finally.
"My what?"
Mel turned and looked up at the space above my head. Her eyes went wide.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, wow. Chris. Look."
She held up the small mirror from the workbench drawer.
There was a halo above my head.
It was a plain ring. Simple. Ordinary. The kind of halo you'd see over a hundred students in any crowd in Kivotos, the kind nobody ever looked at twice. Dark blue, exactly like the one I remembered wearing.
But inside it, floating at its center, small enough that you'd have to look closely to notice, was a gear.
A tiny gear, a dark bronze color, with neat little teeth all around its edge, turning very, very slowly.
I stared at it in the mirror.
"That's not the one I had before," I said.
"No," Mel said softly. "That one was mine. I lent it to you. Well. To me. To us." She shook her head, laughing at herself. "This one's yours. It's never been anybody's but yours."
I watched the little gear turn.
I didn't know why, but it was the first thing since I'd opened my eyes that made me want to cry.
. . .
Eli, it turned out, dealt with big feelings by cooking.
She disappeared into the shop kitchen while I was still staring at my halo, and ten minutes later she came back with a bowl of fried rice so big it needed both hands, and set it down on the workbench in front of me with a spoon stuck upright in the middle of it.
"You should eat," she said firmly. "You've, um. You've had a long night."
"I've had a very short life," I pointed out.
"Then you should definitely eat."
I looked down at the bowl. I knew what fried rice was. I remembered food. I remembered the cheap set lunch in the Millennium cafeteria, the slightly too sweet curry on Wednesdays, the bitter vending machine coffee in the Engineering hangar. I remembered all of it exactly.
But I'd never actually tasted any of it. Not with this mouth.
I picked up the spoon. Everyone in the room went quiet and watched, which made it a lot more nerve-racking than eating a spoonful of rice had any right to be.
I took a bite.
It was warm. It was salty, and a little sweet, and the egg was soft, and there was something crispy at the bottom where it had stuck to the pan. And it was familiar, the way a song is familiar when you've heard it through a wall over and over and then, for the first time, someone opens the door.
I chewed slowly. I swallowed.
"...Oh," I said.
"Is it bad?" Eli asked anxiously. "It's bad. I can make something else, I can..."
"It's really good," I said, and took another bite, a much bigger one, and then another. "It's really, really good."
Eli made a sound like a deflating balloon and sat down hard on Abigale's crate. Abigale, who had been standing beside it, looked at the crate, then at Eli, and then silently went and got another one.
Mel was watching me eat with her chin in her hand and the strangest expression on her face. Like someone watching a sunrise they'd stayed up all night to see.
I finished the whole bowl.
. . .
Much later, when Eli had calmed down and Abigale had gone back to her crate and the sky outside was starting to go gray, Mel sat down on a stool next to the workbench and pulled out a plain black folder.
"I ask everyone two questions," she said. "You don't have to sign anything. You're not working for me. You're..." She stopped, and smiled. "You're you. But I'd still like to know."
She opened the folder and turned it around, so I could see the two lines at the top of the page.
'What would you like to be?'
'What do you think you need?'
I looked at them for a long time.
Then I took the pen she offered me, and I wrote under the first one, carefully, in handwriting I somehow already knew was mine:
Someone who builds things people use.
I knew where that came from. A hangar. A sleepy girl with a wrench. I want to make things with people I can call friends. And help people with the things we make. Not just build them and hang them on a wall. Mel had said it, standing where I would stand. I had said it. Somehow, both were true.
The second question was harder.
I sat with the pen hovering for a long time. Mel didn't rush me.
Finally, I wrote:
To find out which parts of me are mine.
Mel read it. She was quiet for a moment.
Then she reached over and put her hand on top of mine, just for a second. It was warm.
"All of them," she said. "But I get it. We'll find out together."
---
-Christina POV-
Three days later, on a bright Monday morning, I stood at the edge of the plaza in front of Millennium Science School.
The buildings rose up ahead of me, white and sharp and glittering in the sun. Screens on every wall. Drones zipping overhead. Students streaming past me toward the gate, laughing, yawning, arguing about homework, carrying their rifles like book bags. High above the plaza, a giant news screen was scrolling something in red: GENERAL STUDENT COUNCIL: PRESIDENT'S SCHEDULED ADDRESS POSTPONED INDEFINITELY. A few students glanced up at it. Most didn't. I didn't either. I had a gate to walk through.
I'd walked through this gate every school day for weeks. I remembered every single one.
I'd never been here before in my life.
I had my coat on, the long white one that came down to my knees. My shirt and tie and blue sweater. My student ID on its lanyard, tucked into my pocket. My hair was white, my eyes were blue, and nobody was going to need contacts or dye ever again, because this was simply what I looked like.
Above my head, a plain dark blue ring hummed quietly, with a tiny bronze gear turning at its center.
Somewhere behind me, on a rooftop I'd never be able to spot, I was fairly sure a girl with golden hair and no halo was watching to make sure I got through the gate all right. She'd said she wouldn't. She'd said I'd be fine. She'd been lying, a little. I could tell, because I knew exactly how she lied. I'd been her.
I took a breath.
"Morning, Chris!"
I turned. Sumire was jogging past, ponytail swinging, the same way she had on my very first morning that wasn't mine. She waved. She didn't slow down. She was still jogging in place even as she waited for me to answer.
"Morning, Sumire," I said.
And it came out exactly right. Easy. Warm. Like I'd been saying it every morning for weeks.
Because, in a way, I had.
Sumire grinned and jogged off toward the east building and its flower beds. I watched her go.
Then I turned back to the gate.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Mel had pressed it into my hands the night before. "It was always yours," she'd said. "Kotori's in it." Kotori was still the only name in it. I pulled it out. A picture of a roller bearing. Three exclamation marks. And then, underneath:
"chris!!! hangar after class?? utaha-senpai says you can work on the drone again!!!"
I smiled down at it. My smile. My phone. My friend.
I put it away.
And Frazure Christina, first year, Engineering Department, walked through the gates of Millennium Science School, as herself, for the very first time.