I don’t come back from the quarter break.

Not right away anyway.  

I miss  nearly a month of class before Ma tells me I have to go back to school. It feels too soon but I don’t even fight it because I’m too scared of making her mad.

On the day I come back to Arkham, Eden and Summer meet me in the sophomore class garden. We were still being punished and I notice they added some new hydrangea bushes and an apple tree to the garden while I was gone.

We sit around the little stone table in the middle of the  garden and Hotako brings a tray of tea out and sits with us. He looks out of place at the table, sitting with three students, but we can’t just tell him to leave. I think part of him feels guilty for never meeting his nephew.

Hotako was being oddly nice to me--they were all being oddly nice because my baby brother got kidnapped and was probably dead. And for all my talk I’d just let it happen.  

“Being in school really feels like a waste of time,” I tell Hotako. “No offense.”

“It may feel that way, but there’s nothing you can do back home,” he says

“Sure there is,” I argue. “ Did you know they sent Alan Gray undercover to check out a Mjollner lead ? I mean seriously, Alan Gray ? He won’t do what has to be done.”

“Wait...Whose Alan Gray ?,” Summer asks.

“Exactly,” I say and everyone looks even more confused.

Alan may have proved loyal to Rayne by being a good errand boy, but we still didn’t know much about him or where his loyalties really lay. He was a god damn science project.

“If Rayne trusts this Alan Gray then I’m sure he will do what needs to be done,” Hotako says.

“That’s the worst part. This isn’t Rayne’s idea,” I explain. “This is Ma’s idea. She trusts that idiot for some reason. She’s not thinking right.”

I get one more day to grieve and then I have to go to class.

For the first few weeks Eden and Summer don’t leave my side--Eden even gets one of her male friends to tell the other guys to knock off any pranks in the dorm. Somehow, back in the Sprawl, Minnie becomes Rayne’s assistant and I hate that the high school drop out joygirl is actually doing something important while I’m writing papers and studying my ass off for tests.

I’m right about Alan Gray though.

He fucks it up big time.

It’s lights out in the dorm  when there’s a knock on my door and I open it to see Hotako in his pajamas. It’s so fucking bizarre. They’re not even fancy pajamas--it’s just striped pajama pants and a Arkham Academy t-shirt under a robe.

Hotako tells me that something went down in the Sprawl and Alan Gray was coming here and he should see a friendly face when he gets here.

Beats me why he thinks that would be me.

“What did he do ?,” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Hotako says. “Your mother didn’t explain much.”

I get on the back of the Arkham Academy electric scooters, usually reserved for grad students, with Hotako and we drive out to the campus front gate. The front gate is made of spindling dark iron and raises high into the air. It was good for keeping random wild animals out and  the complicated key code  did a good job of keeping underage Arkham students in.

Hotako enters a series of numbers and runs his fingerprints over the scanner  before the gate lurches open.

He lays his robe out in the grass and we just sit outside the gate.

Waiting.

 We wait for hours, Hotako sips out of a bottle of wine he had in the back of the scooter and when I ask for some he just gives me a bottle of water.

When I hear the sounds of a car rolling towards us I instinctively reach for a weapon but then I remember  I don’t have one. The  red Mjollner Mustang makes me anxious, but the headlights are busted out and the car has clearly seen better days.

The car sputters to a stop in front of the gate and the computer voice announces “arrived at destination.”

Hotako puts his arm in front of me so I won’t go follow him as he slowly approaches the Mustang and shines a light into the door.

Hotako makes a distressed sound and I jump up to see what he was looking at. I press my face  into the car window and see Alan Gray. He’s passed out across the front seat, his face is bloody and scarred and his arms had been disfigured to have blades protruding out of the skin.

“Gross,” I say under my breath without thinking.

“Stay here, with him,” Hotako barks. “I’ll get a gurney.”

He rides the scooter back into campus before I can protest, it was freaky being out here by myself. I jump when I hear a noise coming from the trunk. It’s a quiet, steady thumping the unsettles me.

Fuck,was someone back there ?

I swallow my fear and go to the trunk of the Mustang, I feel around for the manual trunk lock and it pops open. The trunk is backlit and I’m so startled by what I see that I shut the trunk on instinct.

Shaking it off I open the trunk again.

The thumping sound was being made by the congealed preservation liquid sloshing against a tank, that all made sense.

But I couldn’t wrap my head around what was inside the tank. It was something that had very clearly been a girl, withering half dead and ghostly against the tank.

***

Hotako picks 4 medical school  faculty members to put Alan Gray back together again. Hotako doesn’t tell me everything but I know he had to have paid them off pretty well to never talk about what they were doing.

Android boy comes to after about a week and Hotako enrolls him as a graduate student. I pick out his new name, Peter Strange. Apparently Alan has to lay low because the new Mjollner Rektor and the Santoro Family Dom wanted him dead.

The former because he killed their Synthesizer and stole a prototype of some drug, the latter because he killed 3 of their assassins trying to protect said Synthesizer.

What a fuck up.

The first thing Alan wants is a private lab space and he  actually gets it.

During my free period I decide to make a surprise visit  down to his private lab, the entrance is sealed and has an encryption lock but it’s an easy hack.

When I hack the door open Alan turns on me, the blades on his arm suddenly raised.

I step back.

“I thought they got rid of those ?,” I say

“We just modified them,” he replies

He moves some tiny muscle in his arm and the blades move flat against his skin, the coating on them camouflaging to his skin.

“You’ve been here three weeks,” I remind him.

“Two of which were spent in a hospital bed,” he says because he knows where I’m going.

“So, let me get this straight,” I say walking towards his exam table. There were a lot of body parts on it.

“You kill the old Rektor, kill a top Mjollner synthesizer, kill 3 of the Santoro Family assassins at once, stormed a Harvest Center but you still couldn’t find a baby ?”

He shakes his head and also smiles a little. It is ridiculous how unnervingly handsome he is. It’s like I’m looking at a touched up image of a person instead of a real person.

“It was  mess. I had to do what I had to do.” he sighs. “But we can still find out what happened to Rias.”

“How ?”

“We’ll ask her.”

He taps on the glass of the state of the art preservation tank where the girl, Sage, a former Mjollner hooker floats lifelessly.

“She’s dead, idiot.”

“Not for long,” Alan Gray smiles.

Ma moves on quickly.

She goes back to killing and even though she won't tell me about it, Minnie says she’s got more bloodlust than she used to.

With the Mjoller Synthesizer’s patent in our hands, Rayne and fucking Minnow started producing a new drug called Clarity and the other gangs weren’t happy about his new success.

Ma got a lot of work.

After six months of him being gone Ma stops saying his name.  Nobody tells me, but I know we weren’t looking for him anymore, we were just looking for revenge.

Sometimes it was easier to pretend like he never existed, sometimes I forgot I ever had a brother but I always get sad on his birthday. I planted some blue hydrangeas in the garden on the day that would have been his first birthday. And every year after.

Eden, Summer and I caused some trouble at Arkham.

Well, mostly Summer and I. Eden was always kind of a goody two shoes.

Eden and I do learn more about my cybernetics. I used to think my life had an early expiration date, but there was a chance that wasn't the case. I start to care about Eden and Summer  in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

We start to let other people in, we make some new friends, we lose some friends but there is always the three of us. Sometimes we get leads on where my brother could be but they all lead nowhere.

Senior year I get an academic excellence pin and everyone teases me about it relentlessly-- as they should. I also get an acceptance letter from Stanford, the same school my Dad went to. I had  a fellowship grant to study political science. Ma says she is proud of me.

Which isn’t a thing she’d ever said before.

I knew I could be like Eden and Summer, who were going off to their own colleges and then on to get legit careers. I could be legit too. Part of me really wanted that but part of me still had the thirst. I still wanted blood on my hands. Every time I went back home and was closed out of cartel business I got angry all over again. I wanted to be involved. I wanted it so bad.

She’s awake

That’s the message I get on my Syndicate the day before my commencement ceremony almost two years after my baby brother goes missing.

I was picking apples off one of the apple trees with Eden and Summer. We knew no one would be looking after the class gardens once we graduated and if we didn’t pick the apples now they’d rot.

Summer had plans to take the apples and beg the cafeteria to make apple pie for dessert.

I double check the message on my Syndicate and without saying anything to my friends I bolt. I sprint to the far side of campus, I’d gotten enough of a reputation around campus that none of the monitors stop me.

Alan’s lab is at the farthest point on campus and down three cases of stairs. When I get to his door my chest is on fire from running. I slam my palm against the doors and they swing open for me, identifying my fingerprints.

Alan is sitting at an exam table with the girl from the tank, Sage. I’d never seen her out of the tank or looking anything less than 100% dead. She’s wrapped in a towel and her body is made of mostly clear tubes and metal. Her distance gaze is  facing my direction but her pupils are flickering with tiny pictures.

“Holy fuck,” I say.

He’d actually brought her back to life.  Six months with a Mjollner Synthesizer, one year with Blackbird and two years of study at Arkham and Alan Gray brought someone back from the dead.

Dammit, I couldn’t call him stupid anymore.

Alan ignores my entrance, he’s just staring at Sage intently.

“What--”

Alan shushes me.

“You,” Sage says, her voice is rough and the pictures in her eyes stop flickering.

Alan presses a button on his Syndicate and it projects the image in her pupils. It’s a close up of an older woman from  security cam footage of the The Tempus Valley Harvest Center, the place the former Rektor told Alan she had Rias’s kidnappers take him.

“Again,” Alan says.

Sage blinks , the projection disappears and her eyes go back to little flickering images.

“Why did you call me if you aren't going to tell me what you’re doing--,” I start

“I didn’t tell you to come, I just said she was awake. And I assume it’s obvious what I’m doing,” he says. I can tell he’s enjoying knowing something I don’t. “Sage is the only one who knows what the men who took Rias look like. We know one of them took him to this harvest center, so we’re cross referencing archival Valley Harvest Center security camera footage from that week with faces from her memory. I’m running the security footage through her new programming and she’ll pause it when she sees someone she recognizes--”

“What if she doesn’t remember what he looked like ?”

“She does,” Alan says confidently. “Even if she doesn’t know it, her brain and implant  do.”

We sit for 20 minutes, she recognizes 3 other faces but Alan quickly dismisses them because they are faces of her relatives. He’d found a picture of her family on her social profiles to cross-match them to. She’s been the girl in the tank  for so long that I’d forgotten she was just a girl who’d runaway to the Sprawl.

Most of her family had died from a radioactive experiment at the harvest center a few years back. They probably never knew  what happened to her when she left home to be a Mjoller hooker or that she was even still alive.

Alan seems confident the girl Sage was is gone and she’s mostly coding running on a human engine but I’m not so sure now that I’m  seeing her active like this.

“You,” Sage says.

Alan projects the image she stopped on.  I know it’s the face of one of Rias’s kidnappers before Alan even says anything.

“Blossom,” I say under my breath and my chest hurts a little.

“What ?,” Alan says.

The baby in the man’s arms is wrapped a pink blanket and has a bow in it’s hair  but it has to be Rias, dressed to look like a baby girl.

I point to the blurry still projection.

I circle the pink lamb tucked into the baby’s blanket. Blossom had been Ma’s when she was in the orphanage and mine during my surgeries and I smile thinking that Rias was holding something that had belonged to Ma and I during his final few hours before they did whatever the did to him in that place.

The kidnapper holding him is young and he looks panicked by what he is doing. We watch  as he walks in with the baby and before he can even talk to anyone in the Harvest Center he walks out.

He walks out.

I fight a smile. It didn’t mean anything.

“Who is he ?,” I ask.

“Let’s find out,” Alan says. He cuts the loop and sends it to Minnie.

Despite all of the special treatment Alan got from Hotako he still wasn't allowed to hack into anything for cartel purposes while he was at Arkham. Every lead we’d ever gotten went to Minnow who hired someone on Rayne’s dime to investigate.

We’d cut Ma and Rayne out of the process a while ago. Ma had moved on and bringing Rias up only made Rayne angry.

Sage suddenly makes a tired sound and falls backward off the table like I rag doll,  I quickly rush and catch her. Her body feels delicate, pieces of her moist  flesh shear off on my hand. All the metal and plastic makes her weigh a ton. She stares up at me with vacant eyes, breathing raggedly through a tube in her chest.

“Are you going to put her out of her misery ?,” I ask him as I push Sage  up on the table, running my hands under the hottest water the sink could produce to get the feeling of  her skin off my hands.

“It’s just synthetic skin,” he tells me flippantly. “And no I can’t kill her….we might need her again.”

“For what ?”

He shrugs and I squint at him. In all the time he’s been in Arkham he’s never had a girlfriend and he only seems to call Minnie for business.

“Oh, ew.”

“Shut up,” he says. “It’s not like that.”

***

“Daniel Starling,” Minnow whispers.

We’re in Hotako’s office talking to her over a secure line. My chest rises a little, we’d had over a dozen leads in the last couple of years and this was finally a solid one.

“Where is he ?,” I ask.

Minnie stares at us. She’s at her office in the Mojave Blade Company building, eating nachos and  whispering into the screen so no one eavesdrops on her.

She played as Rayne’s assistant, although she was mostly his gopher and wife without the sex or love part.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“This is the part where you hire a hacker--,” I tell her.

“I can’t. I told you,  the RLA has made public information fucking inhackable. They store everything in these like, ethernet offline servers--”

“Offline Servers ? What does hell that mean ?,” I pushback

She shrugs.

“It means old school. They  keep digital paper files and they use ethernets to share data. It’s slow as fuck but kind of genius. The only way to get into their census database is to get an RLA soldier to turn. Preferably an officer with high clearance.”

“How hard is that ?,” Alan asks. “There’s got to be some bitter draftee we can pay off--,”

“We need an officer and most officers get paid too much to turn,” she explains.

“I saw an RLA officer at the Board meetings when I was undercover in the Mjollner. Maybe we can extort or bribe her  ?,” Alan suggests.

Minnow shakes her head and I want to strangle her through the screen.

“It’s too risky to let the Mjollner know we’re after something. Plus money is tight right now--”

“If you weren’t going to help then why the hell did you call us ?,” I ask Minnow, close to just hanging up on her.

She looks at us.

“Well…. I was thinking  that instead of finding an RLA officer we can turn, we can just put one of our own inside.”

Then she just stares at us, raising one eyebrow.

It takes me a minute for it to click.

“I’m not just going to join the RLA,” Alan finally says. “I’ve got work to do here.”

“Well...one of you has to do it,” Minnie says, her eyes going from me to Alan.

“Absolutely not,” Hotako says putting a hand on my shoulder. “Luce has a scholarship to Stanford--”

“Fuck that. I have to find out what happened to my brother--”

Hotako shakes his head.

“No, you don’t Luce,” he says sternly.  “This could just be another wild goose chase. You might be able to get a one year deferment from college, but going undercover  like this could take years and end up being a waste. I don't want to see you get hurt.”

“I don’t care. I have to try, Headmaster--”

“Whatever,” Alan says sharply. “I’ll do it. I’ve gone undercover before.”

“Yeah and you fucked it up,” I remind him. “He's my brother I should do it. I should go undercover.”

“I owe Rayne,” Alan says. “I messed up last time. Rayne  didn’t have to protect me and send me  here but he did. You’re not even in the cartel. Don’t give up your shot--”

“He’s my brother.” I tell him. “I’m going. End of story.”

“No,” Alan says. “I’ll do it. I’ve literally got nothing to lose.”

Minnow rolls her eyes.

“Look, I’ll work on the fake ID,” she says.  “But I’m going to need a birthdate soon so finish measuring your dicks and make up your minds.”

“Alan should go,” Hotako starts up again “He’s older--”

“That’s bullshit,” I shoot back.

Hotako glowers at me and then turns to Minnie.

“I can falsify documents that say Alan is as a medical student here,” Hotako explains. “They RLA has been hiring more soldiers with higher education and if he's a med student Alan can get a commission sooner and get better access. You’d be too young to pass, Luce.”

I don’t even recognize Hotako. He was  willing to lie, to put Arkham’s reputation on the line for Alan Gray who had never once done anything. I feel a familiar fury building in me at Alan taking the job that should be  mine.

“Sold,” Minnie smiles.

Minnie, Hotako and Alan start making plans about timeframe, how to get rid of his blades and how he can make sure his application into the RLA gets a lot of attention.

I storm out of the office, Miss Sojna, Hotako's assistant, doesn’t even blink when I slam the door anymore, I’d done it so many times.

Ma wears this curly black wig and some outfit Jean and Minnie must have put together for my commencement ceremony. It’s a long green floral dress and a white cardigan. She looks like... a mom, even though she’s  decades younger than the other parents.

Ma comes alone, which I appreciate.

Graduation is held on the rooftop garden of the Life Sciences building. All of the Upper School students are required to watch the ceremony on  screens in the common green area. Looking down at the rest of the Upper School students from the rooftop garden I notice for the first time that all the uniform jacket colors--red, burnt orange, dark blue and violet kind of looks like sunset when everyone is sitting together.

After the ceremony I introduce Ma  to my Eden and Summer. She and Summer asses each other quietly.  Eden’s parents are both officers in the RLA, Mrs. Collins was just appointed as the Undersecretary of Criminal Containment and Justice, so after a quick handshake Ma breaks away from the group in case she gets recognized.

Summer, Eden and I do one last tour around campus together. When Ma says we should be getting to the train so we can go to my graduation party at Treasure Island  I nod and  do something I’ve never done before.

I hug my friends. I hug them hard.

“You’re so dramatic, we’ll see each other again,” Summer says, wiping her eye.

“Yeah, Monterey College  isn’t that far from Stanford," Eden reminds me. "I'm going to visit you."

“I’m not going to Stanford,” I say.

 It was the first time I’d said it out loud.

“Luce,” Summer scolds me because she knows what it really means without me saying it out loud.

“I want power,” I tell her.

“You can still have power,” Eden pleads. “You can have it in a good way, in the right way, Maybe a career with the RLA--”

I shake my head and then I just smile a broken smile, still shaking my head.

My decision had been made the second Alan got to be the one to go undercover for my brother. Again.

I knew if I went to Stanford I’d always regret never joining the cartel. I’d always want to know what if. But I knew if I joined the cartel I’d be home. I’d be where I belonged.

Maybe I could be like Hotako and straddle both worlds.

Or maybe not.

***

-3-

I get my first kill mark, a small tally mark on my back,  a week after commencement. Pretty Boy inks it and it’s even more painful than I remembered from my first tattoos.

Ma isn’t proud of me anymore.

But Rayne. Rayne actually is.

All of my tattoos are kill marks. Except for the two small ladybug tattoos under my ribcage. For the two people I loved but never told. The End.

---

A/N

I really imagine this serial plays out like a graphic novel with individual stories about Luce, Eden and Summer while they are at Arkham, but also an overarching story arc about Luce trying to find his brother.

Also, Eden Collin's mother becomes a general in the RLA and is Maxwell's boss' boss' according to this org chart I made that one time.