“How’s the kitten from yesterday?”
The moment Mi Xiaoliu walked into class, Yiwen hurried over and grabbed her by the collar, not even minding that the bell had rung the instant Mi Xiaoliu came in.
The dark circles under her eyes were pronounced.
Even after chronic sleeplessness, only today did she look this haggard—which broke the hearts of a few of the looks-obsessed girls.
“I set food aside this morning,” Mi Xiaoliu answered, eyes fixed unblinkingly on the paper in her hands.
“You set it aside to eat this morning?!” Yiwen was aghast.
“I set food aside for it,” Mi Xiaoliu corrected.
Meaning: so it’s fine, then?
Yiwen breathed a sigh of relief.
She really couldn’t work out which of this boy’s words were serious and which were jokes; she always felt his defect lay somewhere in his personality.
“Lao-Liu, what are you looking at?” Jim leaned in beside Mi Xiaoliu to look at the stack of uneven little ads she’d torn off the wall.
Recruitment ads.
Fake IDs.
Escort services.
Jim’s face changed.
He snatched the papers away and tossed them.
“Lao-Liu, you’re still young—don’t lose yourself on the road to crime.”
“I’m looking for a job,” Mi Xiaoliu said with a frown.
“Are you out of money?” Yiwen wondered.
“Can’t you tell your family?”
“Family?” Mi Xiaoliu repeated the word, puzzled.
Yiwen went quiet.
She seemed to be spinning up some strange backstory in her head, and looked at Mi Xiaoliu again with pitying eyes.
“The money disappeared.” Keeping her wooden expression, Mi Xiaoliu took the bank card out of her pocket.
“The money in the bank card.”
Jim patted her shoulder.
“Bro, did you get scammed?
Let me teach you a trick—Fallen Bank’s cards have no limit.
You just do what I did, open a hundred-some cards at that bank, put ten Mila in each…”
“…”
“Master, a new text just came in on your phone,” Sasha reminded her.
Because the phone was kept in the System Storage, Sasha knew the instant anything changed with the items inside.
It seemed the System Storage didn’t block signals.
“Master, when you look at the organization’s messages, please find somewhere with no one around.
It could be a lot of trouble if someone sees,” Sasha went on.
“Mm.”
Right in the middle of class, Mi Xiaoliu stood straight up, meaning to find somewhere empty.
“Student Mi, is there something wrong with what I’m teaching?” The heavyset teacher on the podium wiped the cold sweat from his temple.
For a middle school with a packed schedule, most students bought lunch and ate it right in the classroom; plenty had bentos and the like prepared at home in advance.
Some students didn’t even take a proper lunch break, just slumped over their desks.
The Esper Academy’s schedule wasn’t nearly that tight, but there were still many students who spent the lunch break running all the way home.
You could spot a few transfer students who, like Mi Xiaoliu, wore blank expressions—but unlike her unreadable three-nos look, theirs carried more of a despair and numbness.
Most transfer students had just awakened their abilities and been forcibly moved here from regular schools…
It wasn’t rare for someone, once they became a Mutant, to be treated as a plague god even by their own closest family.
“Buns again today?
Even if you like them, eating the same thing over and over gets old,” Yiwen said, looking at Mi Xiaoliu, mystified.
These past two days, Yiwen had only ever seen her eat buns—morning, noon, and night.
“There’s carrot too.” Mi Xiaoliu produced a raw carrot.
Sasha had said she shouldn’t only eat meat; eating more vegetables was good for nutrition too.
The most basic of foods—yet obtained only with great difficulty.
The moment she stood there, customers didn’t want to come near, and the clerk just prayed she’d leave soon.
Right now they were on the rooftop.
Yes—that place where, in anime, basically no one but the protagonist ever goes.
Like hell no one comes.
If the rooftop’s open, that means countless people come up here to cluster and smoke; at lunchtime it’s packed to death, and even with a trash can, a single lunch break leaves plenty of garbage piled on the ground.
Every morning the students on rooftop-cleaning duty curse up a storm.
Mi Xiaoliu turned to look at the lunchbox in Yiwen’s hands.
The smell coming off it seemed to trigger some mysterious reaction in her stomach—one that made the buns in her hands seem no longer fragrant at all.
“Want a taste?” Yiwen looked a little reluctant.
She wasn’t some Japanese-style heroine who made an extra portion of bento on purpose.
It was really just a polite thing to ask—please don’t say yes, please don’t say yes…
“Yes.” Mi Xiaoliu nodded earnestly.
Oh.
Great.
She’d never ask again.
Worst of all, Yiwen could never have guessed why this boy took the biggest piece of meat from her lunchbox—and used her utensils to do it!
Well, eating buns and carrots didn’t call for any utensils.
Tastier than buns.
Mi Xiaoliu’s limited vocabulary could only manage this simple review.
But for now the food she liked best had been reshuffled again in her ranking—even if that ranking could be counted on one hand, even if she had no idea what this thing even was.
“Master, this is hongshao rou—braised pork.
Master ate it before you turned seven; it’s a fairly common home-style dish,” Sasha piped up.
Humanity had recovered fairly well over these few hundred years.
Aside from a huge drop in population and habitable land, quality of life had bounced back to about where it was.
Resources had shrunk too, but that had reached a kind of balance with the now sharply reduced population.
“Here.” Mi Xiaoliu glanced a little reluctantly at the bun she’d already gnawed more than half of, and held it out to Yiwen in exchange.
“Uh…” With stiff movements Yiwen took the bun bearing her bite marks, then watched her leave the rooftop alone.
Still that solitary, odd personality.
A defect in her character—and not only that; was it better called no emotional intelligence, or no common sense?
Only after making sure she was gone did Yiwen toss the bun with Mi Xiaoliu’s bite marks into the rooftop trash can, then take out a tissue and wipe her utensils over and over.
“You haven’t actually fallen for him, have you?” The blonde girl with glasses walked over and asked, startled.
“That kind of joke isn’t funny at all,” Yiwen replied under her breath.
“I thought you pitied him because he’s a Defective.”
“I told you—I’m suspicious of him.” Expressionless, Yiwen walked to the railing at the edge of the garden and said quietly to the blonde who’d followed: “There are so many Defectives.
Am I supposed to pity them one by one?”
Looking down, she could see the Mi Xiaoliu who’d just left, cupping water from a faucet downstairs to drink.
The blonde girl with glasses handed her a pair of disposable chopsticks.
“Here.
If a bespectacled shut-in used my utensils, I’d be grossed out to death.”
“You don’t have to put it that harshly.”
“Says the one who threw out the bun he gave you.”
The black-haired girl who’d come to the restroom still had no idea she’d been found repulsive.
Hiding in a stall in the men’s room, she opened her phone to check the unread messages inside.
Hourglass: You there, Xiaohei?
Want to pick up some extra cash—just the two of us splitting it?
Princess: …
That period was all she’d send, because she couldn’t even figure out how to use a smartphone.
“Princess” was the code name the purple-haired big sister had given her.
Code names were important things—otherwise, on a job with distance between you and a comm device on the fritz, you couldn’t exactly shout “Mi Xiaoliu!” across a huge gap right in front of the police.
Hourglass: Just got out of class?
I really envy you students, still free to drift through the ocean of knowledge every day and face the delightful pressure of studying.
Princess: …
Hourglass: What time does your class start—free to come out and meet?
I found the feature for actively taking jobs to make money.
Princess: …
Hourglass: Six?
Sure, I’ll wait for you at Beika Restaurant.
Princess: .
Hourglass: One o’clock?
Fine.
A crowded restaurant, loud and rowdy, business booming.
There was always someone loud trying to make their friend hear them by drowning out the other noise—and then someone even louder would show up.
A place like this isn’t as suited to gathering intel as many books make it out to be, because unless you raise your voice a bit, you might not even catch what the person across from you is saying.
At the same time, in a way it’s rather well-suited to exchanging information that can’t see the light of day—even if now and then someone glances a couple times at the pretty girl over here, it doesn’t matter, because even the next table can’t make out what they’re discussing.
Mi Xiaoliu had her head down, shoveling down food, even though she’d already eaten.
She kept reshuffling the food ranking in her heart, all while slapping a “good person” label on Hayato—even though Sasha kept reminding her to be careful of this man who’d swindled her.
But he’d fed her so many delicious things.
Mi Xiaoliu had changed into that combat suit; Sasha said to wear it whenever she met anyone connected to the organization.
Mi Xiaoliu didn’t like wearing it, because this outfit didn’t allow colored contacts, which left the world before her eyes nothing but a field of gray and white.
Sasha also had her keep the trench coat zipped up tight when idle, because what was underneath was a little revealing.
The instant-outfit-change had taken off the badge too, so the people looking over were only doing so because of her outstanding looks—though she seemed a touch too young, making it awkward for anyone to ask her for her contact info.
“Did you look into the software on our phones?” Hayato kept up his ill-intentioned smile.
Mi Xiaoliu said nothing—you can’t talk with food in your mouth.
Hayato didn’t mind.
“Our Boss really is a sly one.
He never said we couldn’t take side jobs, but he never told us how to take them either.
Took me two whole days to figure it out.”