---
-Abigale POV-
The bus took ten hours.
The city went first. Then the edges of the city, where the buildings got shorter and the gaps between them got wider. Then nothing but road, and wind, and a long brown line where the land met the sky.
Around noon, the sand started. A drift against a guardrail. A gas station with sand piled up to its windows. A whole neighborhood of houses with dunes in their front yards, the doors all shut, the windows all dark.
Nobody lived out here anymore. The sand had stopped being polite about it.
I sat by the window with the Winchester across my knees and counted things. I always count things. Seven buses passed us going the other way, all of them full. None passed us going this way. Once, very far off, I heard a long burst of automatic fire, and the old lady two seats up didn't even look up from her knitting.
'Desert is loud,' I thought.
I'd text Melissa that in the morning. She liked it when I said things short.
. . .
I got off at the last stop, a little after dark.
A bus shelter, in the middle of what used to be a main street. A ramen place, a bookstore, a clinic, all shuttered for so long the paint had gone pale.
The bus turned around and left. I stood there and listened to everything else.
Wind. Sand ticking against the shutters. And, about a kilometer to the east, voices. Laughing. A radio playing music badly.
Melissa had rented me two safehouses out here. One of them was close. I could go there, lock the door, eat one of Eli's rice balls, and sleep.
I put my helmet on instead and walked east.
---
They'd set up in an old gas station.
The pumps were dead. Someone had dragged a metal drum out onto the concrete and lit a fire in it, and six girls in helmets sat around it on crates and tires, passing a bag of chips back and forth.
Their helmets were a mess. Dented. Painted over. One was covered in so many stickers I couldn't tell what color it had been underneath.
Their guns were new.
That was the first thing I noticed. Old jackets, old boots, the cheapest chips. But every one of them had a rifle that still had the shine on it. Better than anything a crew like this should have been able to buy.
Somebody had bought them.
. . .
I walked into the light.
The girl with the sticker helmet saw me first. She stood up so fast she knocked over her crate. "Hey! Who are you?"
I didn't answer. I looked at where their hands were. I looked at the pump island, and the dead metal sign over the station, and the angle between them.
"This is our spot," said a taller girl, getting up slowly. "Kaiser's paying us for this whole street. You want to work, go find your own."
"I don't want to work," I said. "I want to talk."
The tall girl laughed. A couple of the others laughed too.
I knew that laugh. I'd heard it before, from girls in helmets a lot like these.
"Talk," said the tall girl. "Sure. Put the antique down, and we'll talk."
So I didn't.
---
It took about forty seconds.
They were six girls who'd never had to fight anyone who could fight back. They stood in the light of their own fire. They bunched up. They all looked at me, and none of them looked at anything else.
Two went down before they got their rifles off their shoulders. The tall girl got off a burst that went where I'd been a second ago. A third dove behind a pump and crouched there, with steel and concrete between us, waiting for me to walk around and find her.
I didn't walk around.
I fired at the old metal sign over the station, a hand's width left of center. The round hit it with a bright spang, came off at an angle, and dropped down behind the pump like a stone into a well.
She yelped and went over.
After that, nobody shot at me anymore. They were all staring at the sign.
. . .
"How," said the tall girl, from flat on her back, "did you do that."
I worked the lever. Then I walked over to the fire, set the Winchester down against a tire, where they could all see it, and sat on a crate.
I unzipped the side pocket of my duffel bag. Eli had hidden rice balls in it. Dried mango. A sleeve of the good crackers. And a paper bag of small cookies, far more than one girl could ever eat.
I held out the bag.
"I said I wanted to talk," I said.
---
Their names were Nao, and Chie, and Tomo, and the tall one was Ritsu, and two others who were too shy to say theirs until much later.
Nao was the one with the sticker helmet. She talked more than the other five put together.
"A robot came around," she told me, through a mouthful of mango. "Black Market guy. Kaiser money, everybody knows. He said, 'Here's guns. Here's money. Go hang around Abydos and make noise.' So we did. You know how long it's been since we had money?"
"Do you like it?" I asked. "Making noise at a school?"
The six of them looked at each other.
"It's money," said Ritsu finally.
"That's not what I asked."
. . .
I told them what I'd come to tell them. It wasn't long. Melissa says I'm good at short.
Every crew in this desert was small, and every crew thought it was tougher than the next, and every crew always broke. Kaiser wasn't paying them because they were good. Kaiser was paying them because they were cheap. And cheap things get thrown away.
There didn't have to be fifty crews out here. There could be one. One gang, too big to buy, and too proud to want to be bought.
"And who's in charge of this one gang?" Ritsu asked. "You?"
"For now."
"Why should we follow you?"
I thought about it.
"Because I put my rifle down," I said. "And you'd have shot me if you could. And I still gave you cookies."
. . .
In the end, five of them stayed.
The sixth, one of the shy ones, waited until the others were arguing over the last rice ball. Then she sat next to me and said, very quietly, that she didn't want to be in any gang. Not even a good one. She just wanted to go home, and she didn't have one.
I gave her one of the cards Eli had made me. A plain white card with an address, and a little drawing of a noodle bowl.
"Go here. Ask for Eli. Tell her Abigale sent you."
"What's there?"
"Somebody who'll let you sit with her at lunch."
She held the card in both hands like it might blow away.
---
At six in the morning, I sat on the gas station roof with five sleeping girls below me and the sun coming up red over the sand.
Arrived. Desert is loud. Found the first crew. Morning.
She answered in less than a minute. She'd been awake. I knew she would be.
Did you eat?
Rice ball.
Eat two.
I ate two.
---
The second crew was the next afternoon.
Eight girls in a parking garage, three blocks from the Abydos school. Nao had heard about them. Nao had heard about everyone. She was the kind of girl who knew who'd stolen whose motorcycle, and who still owed who for a pizza from three months ago.
The garage had concrete pillars. I like concrete pillars.
The last girl was hiding at the very back, two pillars between us, no line at all. I fired anyway. I didn't think about it. I just knew the shape, the way you know where a step is in the dark.
Off the first pillar. Off the ceiling. Down behind the second one.
Two bounces. Like at the depot, on the last day. Except at the depot, I'd planned it for a full minute, and wanted it so badly my hands shook. This time, I'd done it the way you'd toss your keys onto a table.
Seven of them stayed. The eighth got a card.
Second crew. Eight. One went to Eli.
Good. Did you eat?
Yes.
Two?
...Yes.
---
By Tuesday, they had a name for me.
I didn't pick it. Nobody asks you about your name in the desert. It just turns up one morning, the way the sand does.
"Ricochet," Nao told me, very pleased, as if she'd made it up. She probably had. "That's what the other crews are calling you. 'Don't go near the gas station. Ricochet's there. She shoots around corners.'"
"I don't shoot around corners."
"You literally shot around a corner yesterday."
"I shot off a pillar."
"That's a corner, Abigale!"
I thought about it. "...Okay."
That afternoon, the third crew came to us. Twelve of them. They'd heard about the cookies.
. . .
One of them didn't believe any of it. A big girl in a scratched orange helmet. She said it was all lies, and she'd prove it.
We went out to the empty lot behind the gas station. She hid behind a burned-out car, low and long, with flat sand all around it. No signs. No walls. Nothing to bounce off.
I looked for a long time.
Then I saw a bottle cap. Ten meters left of the car, upside down, half buried in the sand.
I fired at it.
. . .
That shouldn't have worked.
A bottle cap in soft sand doesn't bounce anything. It should have kicked up a puff of dust and gone flying. I know how bullets work.
But the round touched the edge of that cap and turned, sharp and clean, like it had hit a steel plate set at exactly the right angle. It went low across the sand and around the end of the car.
The big girl yelped. Everyone else went very quiet.
I stood there with the Winchester still raised and felt something I'd never felt before. Not in my hands. Not in my eyes. Somewhere deeper. Like the shot had leaned. Like, for half a second, the world had looked at what I wanted and decided to agree.
The big girl in the orange helmet stayed.
. . .
That night, I texted Melissa something that wasn't short.
Something's different with my shots. The bounces aren't bounces anymore. Today I hit a bottle cap in sand and it turned like a steel plate. It shouldn't have. It felt like it leaned. Like it was listening to me.
I almost deleted it. It was a lot of words for me. I sent it anyway.
She answered faster than usual.
I believe you. Don't push it. Don't show off with it. Just let it grow. I'll explain what I can when I see you.
Then, almost right away:
Also. Have you tried coins?
I looked at that one for a long time.
Coins?
Never mind. Something I saw a long time ago. A little robot who used to flip coins in the air and bounce his shots off them. You're reminding me of him.
I didn't know any robots like that. I didn't ask.
And then, a minute later:
I'm really proud of you.
I read that one a few times. Then I lay on the roof looking at the stars, which were so much brighter out here than in the city, and didn't sleep for a while.
The next morning, I put a handful of coins in my jacket pocket. Just in case.
---
There was one crew I didn't go near.
The Kata-Kata Helmet Gang. The biggest crew in Abydos, the oldest, the meanest, and the only one Kaiser didn't just pay. Kaiser armed them. They had trucks. Nao swore they even had a tank. They were the ones who hit the school the most.
"We could take them," Nao said on Wednesday, the way you'd say we could take the bus. "We've got, like, twenty-five girls now. And you."
"No," I said.
"Why not? They're the worst ones!"
Because Melissa had said so. On the second morning. Whatever you do, leave the Kata-Kata Helmet Gang alone. Not them. Not yet. I'll explain later. She hadn't explained. I hadn't asked. I'd known her long enough to know "later" meant she'd already seen something I hadn't.
"Not them," I told Nao. "Not yet."
Nao looked at me through her stickers. Then she shrugged. "Okay, boss."
. . .
The fourth crew found us that night. Eleven girls from the overpass, and a very large, very friendly dog that nobody would admit belonged to them.
Fourth crew. Eleven. And a dog.
Is the dog okay?
The dog is the happiest one here.
---
-3rd POV-
In a prefab office at the edge of a hole in the desert, a Kaiser PMC site officer read the reports for the third time.
He was a tall robot in gray body armor, with a scuffed faceplate and two narrow yellow optics that brightened when he was annoyed. They were very bright now.
Crew Fourteen had stopped answering their phones. So had Crew Nine. And Crew Six had sent back their payment. All of it, in the same envelope, with a note on the back in purple marker: NO THANKS. WE'RE WITH RICOCHET NOW.
There was a little drawing of a bullet bouncing off something, with motion lines.
. . .
"Ricochet," the officer said.
The soldier at attention in front of his desk shifted his weight. "A helmet girl, sir. Black helmet. Lever-action rifle. The gangs say she shoots around corners."
"Nobody shoots around corners."
"The gangs say she does, sir."
Under the floor, the drills thundered. They always did. Somewhere beneath all this sand was something the board wanted very badly, and the board didn't care how many bored teenagers it took to keep the school and the town too busy to come and look.
And now the bored teenagers were saying no thank you.
"Which crews are still ours?"
"The Kata-Kata, sir. They don't like this Ricochet. They say she's stealing their territory."
The officer's optics dimmed. Thinking.
"Then we make sure the Kata-Kata stay the biggest dog in the desert. Double their shipment. Heavier weapons. Pull two light tanks off the reserve list and give them those too." He picked up the note again. "And find out who she is. Nobody shows up out of nowhere and does this. Somebody sent her."
The soldier left. The officer sat alone with the drills thundering under his feet.
He didn't know it, but he'd just made a raid that hadn't happened yet a great deal worse.
---
-Abigale POV-
I saw two of them those first few days.
Not the gangs. The ones the gangs were being paid to make noise at.
The first was Tuesday, before sunrise. I'd climbed an old water tower at the edge of town to watch the sun come up. And a girl came flying down the long empty road on a bicycle.
Head low over the handlebars. Legs going like pistons. Short gray hair, gray wolf ears flattened back in the wind, a scarf trailing behind her.
Melissa had shown me pictures. Sunaookami Shiroko. Second year. Bikes absurd distances. Do not engage.
She was eight hundred meters away. I was lying flat on a water tower with the sun behind me. She couldn't possibly see me.
. . .
Her bike slowed.
Just a little. Her head came up. Her wolf ears rose and swiveled, one toward the town, one toward the water tower.
She didn't look at me. She looked at the empty streets, and the gas station, where a dozen of my girls were asleep. Her face was very still, and very careful.
Then she pedaled on, and was gone in a long line of dust.
She hadn't seen me. I was sure of it.
But some part of her had known something had changed.
. . .
The second one was Wednesday afternoon.
I went to look at the school. Just to look. I lay down on a roof four hundred meters away and looked at a campus built for thousands, half swallowed by sand. Only one wing still looked alive. A few classrooms on the second floor, windows open to the breeze.
In one of them, a small girl was asleep on her desk. Long, long pink hair spilling down the back of her chair almost to the floor. Head on her folded arms. Like a cat in a sunbeam.
Takanashi Hoshino. Third year, Melissa had written. And then, underlined twice: Do NOT let her see you. Ever.
I'd thought that was strange. She looked like the least dangerous person in the world.
. . .
She opened her eyes.
She didn't lift her head. She didn't move at all. She just opened her eyes on her folded arms and looked straight out the window. Across four hundred meters of sand and broken roofs. Straight at me.
One blue eye. One orange.
They weren't sleepy at all.
I couldn't move. It was like looking down the barrel of a rifle and finding someone already looking back up it. Everything Melissa had taught me was screaming at me to get down, and I couldn't make any of it work.
Three seconds.
Then the corner of her mouth went up. A small, lazy, sleepy smile.
And she closed her eyes, and went back to sleep.
. . .
I texted Melissa from behind a dumpster six streets away, once my hands stopped shaking.
The small one with the pink hair saw me. From 400 meters. She was asleep.
...Yeah, Melissa wrote. She does that. Are you okay?
She smiled at me.
A long pause.
That's actually a good sign. Probably. Stay away from the school for now.
I stayed away from the school.
---
The rest of my free time, I spent on the dig.
Melissa had asked me to watch it. Not go near it. Just watch. So in the evenings, I lay on top of a dune a kilometer and a half from the fence and looked. I don't need a scope. Melissa says my eyes are strange. She says it like a compliment, so I've decided it is.
A double fence with wire on top. Floodlight towers. Prefab buildings in rows, like a little town. Little drones sweeping the dunes in slow, lazy patterns. And in the middle, the hole, with cranes over it and dust coming up out of it all day and all night, with the sound of the drills.
I counted everything, in a notebook Chris had given me with a robot on the cover. Every night, I sent Melissa a picture of the page.
Shift change at 2 a.m. Twelve minutes. Drones go back to charge at the same time. South side has the fewest guards. They think nobody comes from the south because there's nothing south.
Good. Keep watching.
. . .
On Wednesday night, I saw the sand breathe.
Way out past the south fence. Three hundred meters beyond the last floodlight, where nobody went, because there was nothing there.
The side of one dune sank. Slowly. Like something had let its breath out underneath it. A long, shallow dip, a few meters wide. Then, a minute later, it rose again.
And sank.
And rose.
I watched it for an hour.
There's a place south of the fence where the sand moves. Up and down. Like breathing. Nobody's even looking at it.
The answer took a long time.
Send me exactly where.
---
-Melissa POV-
While Abigale took the desert apart one crew at a time, I built phones.
. . .
On Monday morning, Lucie went to Trinity by herself for the first time.
She stood at the noodle shop door in her uniform, with her rifle and her bag and her crooked ribbon, and Chris straightened her collar, and Eli handed her a bento, and she said "Bye!" and turned around and walked straight into the doorframe.
"Every single time," said Chris.
Then she was gone, down the street toward the bus stop, waving the whole way.
I stood in the doorway and watched her go. It took everything I had not to follow her onto that bus. To find a rooftop near the gates. To just check.
'She isn't you,' I told myself. 'She doesn't need you on a rooftop.'
. . .
At twelve-forty, the turtle phone buzzed.
Mika fixed my ribbon!! She says I'm a disaster. Hifumi says hi. I only got lost twice. (On purpose.) (Mostly.)
I read it four times. Then I went into the back room and opened the crate.
. . .
It was the first page of Chris's parts list, made real. Everything she'd talked Engineering out of, one careful request at a time. Small servo motors. Circuit board offcuts. Cracked lenses. Battery cells that had failed testing. Antenna wire. Anything with a speaker or a microphone in it.
EXCLUSIVE PHONES. Underlined on my board for almost two weeks.
It was time.
. . .
We built them in the evenings, Chris and I, at the workbench, after she got home from Millennium.
The trick was making them need nothing. No tower. No network. No records anywhere. With each other, they just talked, straight from one to the next, over any distance I could test.
And when one of them talked to anyone outside the family, it still didn't go through anything. It opened a line of its own, just between those two phones, with nothing in the middle.
If Lucie texted Hifumi, it wouldn't land in a cloud or on a server or in some company's records. It would be saved right there on Hifumi's phone, and nowhere else. And when Hifumi texted back, Lucie's phone would catch it, keep it, and quietly update the conversation the next time the two of them connected.
Two phones holding the same conversation, and nobody else in Kivotos even knowing there was one.
I won't pretend I fully understood why my design worked as well as it did. Ever since Chris, my hands had been knowing things before my head caught up.
Though, looking back, it wasn't always my hands. More than once, I got stuck on a board that refused to do what I wanted. And Chris would lean over, frown at it, touch one wire, and say, "Oh. It wants to go this way."
And it would work. Every time. I thought she was just being clever.
Lucie helped, in the sense that she sorted our screws by size, knocked the tray off the bench, and sorted them all again, humming. Eli picked the colors, which was easy, because I'd only let her pick black.
. . .
By Wednesday night, there were six on the workbench.
Small. Plain. Smooth matte black, no logo, no name. On the back of each one, Chris had etched a single tiny mark with a needle.
A gear, for Chris.
A sun, for Lucie.
A little noodle bowl, for Eli.
A coin with a bullet bouncing off it, for Abigale. I'd told Chris about the coins. She'd laughed for a full minute.
One with no mark at all. For everyone after.
And one, for me, with a small closed umbrella on it. Chris had asked what I wanted, and that was what I'd said, before I'd even thought about it. I still hadn't thought about why.
. . .
I'd made a promise. Whenever I changed phones, she'd get the new number first. Before anyone else.
So the first message any of them ever sent went to a tablet in a basement across the city.
Arona. It's Mel. New phone. You're first, like I promised.
Mel changed phones AGAIN??
Last time. I made this one myself. It isn't going anywhere.
There was a pause.
Arona is putting it in the deepest part. Right where the old one was. And then: Arona is very proud of Mel's handiwork!!
You can't even see it.
Arona can TELL.
. . .
Then I handed them out.
Chris turned hers over and looked at the little gear for a long moment. She didn't say anything. She didn't put it down for the rest of the night, either.
Eli threaded hers onto a string and wore it around her neck, under her apron, like a locket.
Lucie dropped hers immediately. It bounced twice on the floor and didn't crack, because I'd built it knowing exactly whose it would be.
"Sorry!" she said, picking it up. "Thank you! Sorry!"
Abigale's went into my bag, for Thursday.
. . .
Later that night, the turtle phone buzzed one more time. A place south of the fence, where the sand moved. Up and down. Like breathing.
I read it standing at the workbench, with my new phone in my other hand and its little umbrella under my thumb.
And I knew where I'd be on Thursday night.
---
-Abigale POV-
The fifth crew was Thursday.
I'd known they'd be last. I hadn't been able to make myself go.
Kaiser paid them to sit out past the north fence and look tough, so the townspeople would see helmets and stay away. They had tents and a fire and a cooler of drinks and new rifles.
And I knew every one of their faces. I'd worn a helmet with them since middle school.
. . .
They knew me right away. Nobody else in the world has this rifle.
"No way," said Mayu. She'd always been the leader. The loudest. When I'd shown up with the Winchester, three months of part-time pay wrapped in brown paper, she'd been the one who laughed first. "You're Ricochet? Little Abi? With the cowboy gun?"
Some of the others laughed too. Fewer than I'd expected.
"Hi, Mayu," I said.
. . .
I took a coin out of my jacket pocket and flicked it into the air.
It went up spinning, high over the camp, and the afternoon sun caught it and flashed. Every one of them looked up. They couldn't help it.
And my hands did something I didn't know they knew how to do. I spun the Winchester once around by its lever, like a gunslinger in an old western, caught it one-handed, pointed it at the sky, and fired.
One bullet, one coin, and their helmets were all it took. The ricochet bounced off every single one of them.
I'd imagined that fight so many times, back when I wore my helmet everywhere so nobody could see my face. I'd thought it would be more emotional. Tense. Filled with all the things we'd never said to each other, every one of them fueling it on.
But now...
Now it was just over. And all I felt was tired.
After, Mayu sat in the sand with her helmet in her lap and a fresh dent in the side of it. She looked smaller than I remembered.
"You laughed at my rifle," I said.
Mayu looked at the Winchester. Then away.
"...Yeah."
"It's a good rifle."
A long silence.
"Yeah," Mayu said quietly. "I guess it is."
. . .
I sat down across from her, put the Winchester down where she could see it, and took the last of Eli's cookies out of the very bottom of my bag.
Mayu stared at them. "Seriously? Why? After everything?"
I thought about Melissa, the first night, sitting across from me with my arm freshly bandaged, talking to me like I was a person. About Eli, who'd joined a crew because they let her sit with them.
"Because somebody did it for me," I said.
Mayu took a cookie.
---
That night, they all came.
Five crews. Forty-three girls. Nao counted them twice, out loud, standing on a cooler, because she didn't believe it the first time.
Around the biggest fire I'd ever seen, Mayu's old crew told us everything about the dig. Guard schedules. Camera blind spots. Which drones had bad batteries. They'd been sitting out there for days on end, bored, watching. It all matched my notebook, almost to the minute.
At midnight, I sent Melissa the last page.
Everything's ready. Two a.m. We'll be loud.
Thank you. Be careful.
You be careful. You're the one going down a hole.
---
-Melissa POV-
At one-fifty in the morning, I lay on my stomach in the sand three hundred meters south of the fence, in the black ninja suit I hadn't worn since Schale.
The desert at night is cold. The stars were so thick overhead they looked like spilled sugar.
Ten meters in front of me, the dune breathed. In. Out. Like something very, very large was asleep underneath it.
'Something is,' I thought.
. . .
At one fifty-eight, the north side of the dig lit up.
Red flares first, three of them, hanging in the sky like small suns. Then fireworks. Then gunfire from every direction. Then, faint across nearly a kilometer of sand, forty-three girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Mostly cheering, I think.
Every floodlight swung north. The guards on the south fence started running. And six little drones above me hung in the air for a confused moment, then went streaking off toward the noise.
'Thank you, Abigale,' I thought. 'You're loud.'
I ran for the breathing sand.
. . .
The tunnel mouth was barely there. A soft spot in the dune, sinking slowly as I reached it, with warm air moving up from below. I pushed my hands in. Under a thin crust of sand, there was nothing at all.
I took a breath, and dropped through.
I fell for three seconds, which is a long time in the dark. Then my feet hit something smooth and slanted, and I slid, and slid, and came to a stop on my back with sand pattering down on my face.
I took a flashlight out of Storage.
. . .
The word "tunnel" isn't big enough.
It was perfectly round, like the inside of a pipe, big enough to drive two of Kaiser's trucks through side by side. The walls were rock that had been ground or polished until it was smooth and glassy and dark, shining in my light like the inside of a vein.
And running along them, all the way around, were marks. Long, shallow grooves, evenly spaced, curving down into the dark, the way a snake's scales leave marks in mud.
I put my hand in one. It was as wide as my arm.
'Coil marks,' I thought. 'Going down.'
I followed them.
---
The tunnel branched again and again. I marked every turn with a dot of reflective tape and kept to the deepest coil marks. Twice, I heard Kaiser's drills, far off and above, a deep thunder in the rock. Close. But not as deep as I was going.
After twenty minutes, the tunnel opened on one side into a cavern.
About the size of the noodle shop, with the apartment upstairs. Flat, dry floor. High ceiling. The same smooth, glassy walls. No sand. No dripping water. The coil marks didn't go in. Whatever had made the tunnel had passed this pocket by and never looked inside.
I turned in a slow circle with my flashlight.
A workbench there. Shelves along that wall. Lights. A generator. A door over the opening, hidden so well that anything passing would just see more rock.
'Base,' I thought.
I'd underlined that word three times on my board, more than two weeks ago, without knowing where it would be.
Now I knew.
. . .
I should have stopped there.
But the coil marks kept going down. And the same quiet tug that had turned my feet toward the basement at Schale was there again, just behind my ribs. Not yet. There's more.
I kept going.
---
The walls on my left started to change.
At first I thought it was just darker rock. Then my light caught it at an angle and it gleamed. A long, clean, metallic gleam.
Metal. A wall of it, curving away above and below me, set right into the side of the tunnel, as if the tunnel had been dug past it and couldn't get through. No rust. No dents. It wasn't anything I had in Storage, and I had a lot in Storage. It was faintly warm to the touch.
I walked along it. Ten meters. Fifty. It kept going. A long, smooth curve, like the side of a whale.
Like the side of a ship.
. . .
I knew what it was.
I'd seen it on a phone screen, in a story that hadn't happened yet. A treasure buried under the Abydos desert, that the Kaiser board would drown a whole school in debt to dig toward. And months from now, when the sky filled with things that shouldn't be there, tired girls from Abydos would come down here and bring up a battleship. The only thing in Kivotos that could fly high enough to reach the end of the world.
Utnapishtim's Ship.
. . .
'Don't touch it,' I told myself. 'Don't store it. Don't move it. Don't even think about it.'
It was the hardest thing I'd ever told myself.
Because I thought about Engineering, building a railgun far too big for anyone to carry, made to mount on a battleship that didn't exist. Aris would pick it up one day and call it the Sword of Light.
And here was the battleship. Under my hand.
And if Chris ever found out about this, she'd come down here with a wrench and a notebook and never, ever leave.
'I'm not telling Chris,' I thought firmly. 'Not for a long time.'
. . .
There was one more thing.
In the story, Kaiser wasn't the only one who'd searched this desert for treasure. Two girls had, a long time ago. A senior who believed there was something buried out here that could save their school, and a junior who went along, grumbling, because she couldn't stand to let her go alone.
Yume, and Hoshino.
They'd never found it. And it had been right here, the whole time, under the sand they'd walked across.
I thought about YUME? written small under ABYDOS on my board. I took my hand off the hull.
'At arm's length,' I thought. 'But not forgotten.'
I kept going down.
---
The tunnel ended in a hollow so big my flashlight got tired before it reached the other side. The air was very still. Very warm.
And it was full.
. . .
Binah was asleep.
It lay coiled at the bottom of the hollow in great white loops, each as thick as a train car, its plates the color of old bone. Its long, armored head rested on one of its own coils, the size of a house.
Its four eyes were dark.
No storm. No lightning crawling over its plates. Nothing moved, except, almost too slowly to see, its coils rose and fell. Far above me, a dune breathed in and out in the desert night.
I kept my flashlight pointed at the floor, so the light wouldn't touch its face.
. . .
I'd seen it in my dream.
In the dream, it had come up out of the sand like a white wall, wrapped in a storm, its armor banded with orange light. And through the orange, there'd been something pink. Something that hummed and pulsed and made it stronger than anything had a right to be.
This wasn't that Binah.
This Binah was clean. White and quiet and sleeping, the way it must have slept for a very long time before anyone came to dig. Nothing pink anywhere on it.
The calm beside me went still. A watchful stillness. The way you go still next to a sleeping dog you don't know.
'Okay,' I thought. 'It's just asleep. That's the best thing it could be.'
I started to turn back.
That was when I felt it.
---
It wasn't a sound. It was lower than a sound. A hum I felt more than heard, in my teeth and the bones of my fingers. Slow. Steady.
Like a pulse.
My whole body went cold.
Not my thoughts. My body. My hands first, then my arms, then the back of my neck, as if the skin there remembered something I didn't. My heart stumbled and sped up, and I hadn't told it to do either.
I didn't know what it was. I didn't know its name. But this body did. It had felt this before, many, many times, somewhere I'd only seen in a dream. It knew it the way you'd know the smell of a house you grew up in.
Familiar. Deep-down familiar.
And so wrong.
. . .
I followed the feeling with my flashlight, slowly, around the outermost loop of Binah's coils. The hum got stronger as I went. Not louder. Stronger. Like walking toward a fire with your eyes closed.
On the far side of it, in the floor of the hollow, there was a crack. Hairline thin, three or four meters long, running under the edge of one of its coils.
And deep inside it, very faint, there was light.
Pink light.
A soft, rosy glimmer, far down. As I watched, it brightened, very slightly, and faded, and brightened again. In time with the hum.
In time, I realized, with the slow rise and fall of Binah's sleeping coils.
. . .
I didn't touch it. I didn't go any closer. I just stood there with my cold hands and my racing heart and thought about the pink in my dream. Threaded through Binah's armor. Through Chesed's soldiers. Through a golden halo, burning in a crypt.
Whatever had made that world so much worse, I didn't know what it was, or where it came from, or if this was the same thing or only felt like it.
But it was here. Right under Binah. Quiet. Not inside. Not yet.
And Kaiser was digging toward it.
. . .
'Okay,' I thought. 'Then my base doesn't go in that nice dry pocket up the tunnel.'
High in the curve of the hollow's wall, halfway between Binah and the tunnel I'd come down, there was a wide ledge with a dark opening behind it. Another pocket. Smaller. Closer.
Close enough to see the crack. Close enough to feel the hum.
'It goes there,' I thought. 'Where I can watch it. Study it. Where, if that light ever starts to climb into Binah, I'll be the first one to know.'
And maybe, if I was lucky, the first one to stop it.
---
It took an hour to climb up and check the pocket. Dry. Warm. About the size of my back room, with a natural shelf of rock along one wall and a crack in the ceiling that breathed a little moving air.
I set out three spare dust-fleck sensors, the same kind I'd hidden all over Schale. One facing the crack. One facing Binah's head. One facing the tunnel.
Then I took a folded cot out of Storage. Plain green canvas, the twin of the one in the back room.
I unfolded it against the back wall, and sat down on it.
. . .
Far below, Binah breathed in its sleep. The pink light brightened and faded. The hum went on in my teeth. Off to my left, Kaiser's drills thundered. And somewhere far above, under a sky full of spilled sugar, forty-three girls were probably still cheering.
Danger, inside danger, being searched by danger.
I pulled my mask off, looked around at my bare rock walls, and let out a long, slow breath.
"...Home," I said.
It wasn't one yet. It was a cot and three specks of dust on a ledge in the dark.
But it would be. I could already see it. I'd build it somewhere else first, piece by piece, night by night. Walls and floors and doors. Beds and desks and shelves. Made in the back room, late at night, slipped into Storage one at a time, until one night I could come down here and set them all out like furniture in a dollhouse.
A base. A home.
And one day, something much bigger. Big enough for every girl who ever needed somewhere to go. With classrooms in it, and a kitchen that never ran out of rice balls.
A school. The one I'd caught myself building one breakfast at a time.
---
I was back at the noodle shop by noon on Friday, with sand in places I didn't know sand could get.
Eli made me eat. Chris and Lucie were still at school, which was just as well. Chris would want to know everything, and I'd tell her about the tunnels, and the coil marks, and the cavern, and the cot.
I wouldn't tell her about the ship. I wouldn't tell anyone about the light.
On my way out of the desert, I'd stopped at the first safehouse and left Abigale's phone on the kitchen table, with a note in my neat, small handwriting. EVERY MORNING. OR WHENEVER YOU WANT.
I slept until three. Then I went down to the back room and stood in front of the Planning Board.
Under ABYDOS, I wrote: THE PIT. FOUND. BASE. And under that, smaller: SOMETHING ELSE DOWN THERE. WATCH IT.
Then my eyes went where they'd been wanting to go all day.
ARIUS. Circled twice.
---
I want to be honest about how much I knew.
I knew almost everything.
I knew Arius had been a school long ago, before Trinity was Trinity, and had been driven underground, into the ancient catacombs that ran beneath Trinity like roots under a tree. I knew its students carried a grudge older than anyone alive, and that it wasn't really theirs. It had been handed to them, by a woman from Gematria who'd taken the district for herself. The students called her Madame.
I knew what they were taught. Not math. Not history. How to fight. How to obey. And one sentence, over and over, until it was the only thing left in their heads.
Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.
Nothing matters. So you may as well do what you're told.
. . .
I knew the girls, too.
Saori, who'd keep her squad alive no matter what it cost her. Atsuko, quiet, masked, more important than she knew. Misaki, who didn't think anything was worth anything. Hiyori, who apologized for everything. And Azusa, who'd be sent up into Trinity one day as a spy, and end up falling in love with it instead.
I knew what Madame wanted Atsuko for. I knew about the Eden Treaty, and the missiles. I knew about Mika.
I knew so much.
And none of it got me in the door.
. . .
Chris had been easy to place. Millennium wanted transfer students. It had forms. I filled them in.
Lucie had been harder, but I'd done it in one night. Trinity had records, and records could be written. Paperwork is just a story everyone has agreed to believe.
Arius didn't have paperwork.
You didn't transfer into Arius. You didn't apply. The girls there had been there their whole lives, born in the district's slums or swept up in its wars, raised in the dark and broken into shape. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone had been through the same things, in the same order.
A new girl would stand out like a lamp in a cave.
I could forge a hundred transcripts. There was nobody down there to show them to.
Every trick that had made Chris, and every trick that had made Lucie, was useless.
. . .
I wrote, under ARIUS:
FORGE ONE. I crossed it out immediately.
HIRE ONE? I left that. I didn't know any Arius girls who weren't in the story, and I wasn't touching the ones who were.
GET FOUND? Arius took in strays. But I didn't know how, or where, or who did the finding.
GET NOTICED. Someone outstanding, with a cute side. Someone who'd make the adults look at her instead of at Saori's squad.
. . .
And that was when the thought came.
Quietly, the way the worst thoughts do. Sliding in sideways, wearing a reasonable face.
'Madame wants Atsuko. For the ritual. Because Atsuko is special.'
'So what if she found someone more special? A girl who seemed more valuable. More perfect. And what if that girl wasn't really a girl, but a body? A body could survive things a person couldn't. A body could be put on an altar instead of Atsuko, and maybe...'
. . .
I put the marker down.
Something under the calm went cold. The cold of looking down and realizing you've been walking along the edge of something without noticing.
Because I knew where that thought came from. It wasn't mine.
It was the kind of thought a girl has when she's tried everything else. When she's watched it all go wrong, over and over, and the only ideas left are the ones that cost something terrible. When all is lost, and a plan that works matters more than a plan she can live with.
The me from before might have had that thought. The one from the dream, who saved a world and lost everything she was doing it. She might have looked at it for a long time.
I wasn't her.
My sisters weren't bait. Not Chris. Not Lucie. Not anyone who hadn't been made yet. Not ever.
'No,' I thought, very clearly.
And I pushed it away. Down. Somewhere very deep.
---
"Sister?"
Lucie was standing in the doorway, still in her Trinity uniform, home from school, holding two cups of tea. Bangs down. Ribbon crooked. Her little sun glowing faintly over her head.
"Eli says you've been standing there for an hour," she said. "She said to bring you tea, and to watch you drink it."
I laughed. It came out tired. "That sounds like Eli."
She handed me a cup. It was hot. Properly hot, all the way through, much hotter than it should have been after the walk from the kitchen.
Neither of us said anything about that.
. . .
She looked at the board for a while. At ARIUS, and the circles, and the crossed-out lines.
"It's under Trinity, isn't it?" she said. "Arius."
"Under it, and past it. Through the catacombs."
"And nobody can get in."
"Nobody who isn't already one of them."
Lucie turned her cup around in her hands.
"I could get lost," she said.
. . .
I looked at her.
"In the catacombs," she said, very calmly. "There are old doors all over Trinity that go down there. Under the chapel. Under the library. Ui says half of them are locked and everybody's forgotten about the other half." She smiled a little. "And everybody already knows I get lost. If a girl like me turned up in the wrong tunnel, nobody would even think it was strange."
"No," I said.
It came out fast and flat, before I could think.
Lucie didn't flinch. She just waited.
. . .
And I stood there with the hot cup in my hands and felt something I'd never felt before.
Not even a week ago, Lucie had been me. If I'd decided Lucie should go down into the catacombs, she'd have gone, because I'd have been the one walking.
She wasn't me anymore.
She was standing in front of me with her own tea and her own face and her own little sun, offering something I didn't want to give her. And I couldn't just say no and have that be the end of it. Not to a sister.
I'd never had to ask myself anything before.
"Let me think about it," I said finally.
Lucie nodded, as if that was exactly what she'd expected.
. . .
"Oh!" she said, brightening. "And I won't be home tomorrow afternoon. Mika asked me to go into the D.U. with her."
I blinked. "Mika did?"
"Mm-hm. She wants to buy me a real ribbon. A proper one. She says this one's a crime." She touched the crooked white ribbon on the left side of her head. "But I like this one. So I'm going to let her buy me a new one, and then keep wearing this one, and she's going to be so mad." She beamed. "It'll be fun."
"It sounds fun," I said.
I meant it. After she'd gone back upstairs, I wrote it on the board, small, in the corner under TRINITY.
SAT. LUCIE + MIKA. D.U.
---
Then I stood there a while longer and thought about my sisters.
Chris had my curiosity. The part of me that wanted to understand everything, take it apart, and build it again better.
Lucie had my heart. All of it. The gentle part, and the warm part, and the part that would spill over one day and burn.
And if there were ever a girl in Arius who was me, what would she have?
. . .
I looked at the board. At more than two weeks of lines and circles and arrows, crossed-out words and the words underneath them. More than two weeks of nights spent standing right here, thinking, while everyone else slept.
The part of me that held.
That was the only way I could put it. The part that had woken up alone in a stranger's body in a dark warehouse, and hadn't screamed, and had just started counting what was in the boxes. The part that planned. That kept secrets. That decided, three steps ahead, that nobody was going to get hurt, and then made it so. That had looked at the worst idea it ever had an hour ago, and said no, and meant it.
Not the calm. The calm had come with this body. This was mine.
Arius taught its girls that nothing mattered.
A girl made of the part of me that held would never believe that. Not if they told her a thousand times.
. . .
Under ARIUS, under all the crossed-out lines, I wrote one word, and underlined it.
HOW?
And then, much smaller, beside it:
SOMEONE WHO HOLDS.
---
My new phone buzzed at eleven that night.
I was already on the cot. I almost didn't look. Abigale texted in the mornings. That was the rule.
I looked.
Found your phone. It has a coin on it.
Five crews. One gang. Forty-three. They call me Ricochet. Is that okay?
I sat up in the dark and read it twice. Then I smiled so hard it hurt.
It's perfect. Go to sleep.
You go to sleep.
I'm in bed.
So am I. In a tent. Nao snores.
I laughed out loud, alone in the dark. Then I lay back down with the phone on my chest.
Somewhere far away, under the sand, a cot was waiting for me, beside a sleeping serpent and a crack full of pink light.
Somewhere much closer, under Trinity, there was a door I didn't know how to open yet.
And tomorrow, Lucie was going shopping.
I fell asleep before I could think about any of it.