I pulled on compression shorts, a training shirt, and the leather boots Aurora bought me. The silver ring Yumi gave me sat warm on my right middle finger, humming its steady monitoring frequency to a copper-haired woman in Santa Barbara who kept dead birds in jars and wanted to take me apart for science. I laced the boots and headed for the door.
Hikaru's bedroom was dark, but her mug was already on the rack when I passed the kitchen. Dry. Two centimeters from the edge. She had been up and gone before I woke. On a normal morning, she would be at the gym already, running through forms with the kind of focus that made other students switch training rooms. But today the mug sat further back on the rack than usual, pushed almost to the wall, and a single protein bar waited on the counter with a sticky note attached in Hikaru's handwriting.
The note said: Eat this.
