Chapter 3 — Homework for a Secret

Ren's face went through four separate stages in under two seconds.

Confusion. Recognition, or something adjacent to it. Blank, screaming terror. Then nothing at all, because he'd already turned and was sprinting back down the hall before his brain had fully processed what his eyes reported.

"TWO OF THEM." His voice carried from somewhere near the stairwell, cracking on the last word. "THERE'S TWO OF THEM, IT'S REAL, THE LOCKER ROOM GHOST IS REAL, I SAW IT WITH MY OWN—"

A door slammed somewhere far away. Then silence.

Nobody in the room moved.

"Is he going to be a problem," Mio said, in the same tone she'd use to ask if a printer was low on toner.

"He thinks he saw a ghost," I said. "Give it a week. He'll have a full theory, a diagram, probably a podcast."

Hina peeked toward the door like Ren might still be lurking there, ready to pounce with more questions. "Should we go after him? Explain?"

"No," Mio and I said at the same time.

Hina blinked at us both. "Oh. Okay. Never mind then."

By the next morning, half the school had heard some version of the story. The old locker room is haunted. There's a ghost that duplicates itself. Someone saw two of the same person standing there at once. By lunch it had picked up a subplot involving a curse and, for reasons nobody could understand, a missing shoe.

Ren told it to at least six different groups of students with six different levels of detail, none of which involved the words twin, Sakuraba, or Sora, which was, historically speaking, the only lucky break I'd caught all week.

Lunch found me in my usual spot, a bench tucked behind the science building where nobody really went because it wasn't near anything useful, just a lone sakura tree and a koi pond some alumni club had donated decades ago and everyone had since forgotten existed. Not much to look at in exam season, no petals, no koi doing anything interesting, but it was quiet, and quiet was the whole appeal.

I had my rice ball in one hand, the cheap kind wrapped in plastic from the convenience store, seaweed on the outside, plain salted filling because I wasn't picky, and my phone propped against my knee running a gacha event I'd been grinding since the servers reset. Extremely niche, extremely uncool, exactly the kind of thing I didn't need Ren narrating out loud to a group chat.

Footsteps approached. I looked up, ready to relocate immediately if it turned out to be Mio, because I had learned in roughly twenty-four hours that Mio showing up unannounced usually meant paperwork, threats, or both.

Whoever it was sat down next to me and immediately slipped sideways off the edge of the bench with a small, undignified "bwah—" sound before catching herself with both hands on the grass.

I relaxed instantly. There was exactly one person in this school who could fall while sitting down.

"You good?" I asked.

"Toootally fine." The word stretched out way past where it needed to. Hina scrambled back onto the bench, grass stuck to one knee, hands smoothing her skirt down like that would erase the last three seconds. "That was balance training. On purpose. I do that on purpose sometimes."

"For sitting?"

"For sitting, yeah. Very advanced. You probably wouldn't get it."

"I think I'd get it."

"You so wouldn't."

She spotted my rice ball then, and her whole face did something complicated, somewhere between concern and personal offense.

"...That's it? That's really your whole lunch?"

"It's efficient."

"It's sad, is what it is." She didn't argue further, just reached into her bag and pulled out a proper two-tier lunch box, wrapped in a cloth patterned with tiny round-faced cats, tied off in a bow at the top. She set it in my lap and started untying it herself before I could object. "Here. I made extra."

"You made extra... For me? Specifically?"

"...Maybe." She wouldn't look at me while she said it, suddenly very focused on the knot. Her voice dropped, quieter than anything she'd said so far. "I wasn't sure what you liked. So I kind of made two versions and figured I'd bring whichever one turned out better."

"There were two versions?"

"There were two versions," she said, and shoved the lid of the box further into my hands like that would end the conversation. "Okay! Eating now! We're eating now!"

The lid came off, and I actually paused for a second before doing anything else. Rice packed into a neat little dome on one side, a strip of nori laid across it in a shape that was almost, not quite, a smiling face, like she'd started confident and lost her nerve halfway through. Next to it, thin rolled slices of tamagoyaki, edges slightly uneven, a few cherry tomatoes cut into rough flower shapes that had clearly taken more effort than tomatoes deserved, and a small pile of glazed chicken that still had a little steam coming off it.

"You cut the tomatoes into flowers."

"That's a normal bento thing."

"Is it."

"It's a normal bento thing if you're trying," she said, and then made a small strangled noise like she wished she could reach out and grab the sentence back out of the air.

I picked up the chicken first. Took a bite. It was good, properly good, sweet and a little sticky in a way that told me she'd actually paid attention to the glaze instead of just dumping sauce on top and hoping.

"Well?" She'd gone completely still, watching me chew like the outcome of a court case depended on it.

"It's really good."

"Really?" The stillness broke all at once. She leaned in so fast I nearly dropped the chicken. "Not, like, being nice good. Actually good?"

"Actually good."

"I made the sauce three times." The words came out in a rush now, tumbling over each other. "The first one was too sweet, and the second one had way too much ginger, and then I panicked around ten last night and just started completely over—"

"Three times?"

"Three times! My sister said I was being ridiculous." Her voice pitched up, indignant on behalf of her past self. "But I told her it mattered."

"Why'd it matter?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Poked at her own half of the box instead of answering, and when she finally spoke it came out smaller. "I don't know. Just felt like it should be good. Not just... edible."

She bounced back fast anyway, leaning over to squint at my phone screen, which was still propped against my knee mid-battle.

"Wait." Her whole face lit up like a switch had flipped. "Is that Star Requiem?"

"You know this game?"

"I used to play it." Her voice dipped a little on used to. "Dropped it around ninth grade. Just kind of... ran out of time for it."

"Ran out how."

"You know. Schedule stuff." She waved a hand vaguely, the gesture doing a lot of work to avoid saying anything specific, and I didn't need the laminated cheat sheet to know that meant something to do with Sora, with two people splitting one life down the middle until neither half had enough hours left for anything extra.

"You could pick it back up," I said. "It's still running."

"Maybe." She said it lighter than she probably meant it, already reaching over and stealing a piece of my rice ball without asking, like changing the subject through action instead of words. "Can I have some of this? Trade's fair, I gave you a whole lunch box."

"Go ahead."

"I wasn't actually asking."

"I noticed."

She grinned around the bite, easy again, all the weight from a second ago tucked back somewhere out of sight, and for a while we just sat there like that, trading pieces back and forth, her telling me way too much about how tamagoyaki was supposed to be rolled in layers and not all at once, sunlight coming down through the sakura branches, the koi doing absolutely nothing in the pond like always.

It was, against every expectation I'd built over the last two days, kind of nice.

That was when a shadow fell over both of us, and Hina looked up first, all the momentum draining out of her in an instant.

"...Wait. Why is she—"

I looked up too, and had to blink twice.

Standing at the end of the bench was Mio, wearing what I could only describe as a full-body disguise assembled by someone who had heard the concept of "blending in" secondhand and gotten most of it wrong. A hood shaped into two stiff, triangular points stuck up off the top of her head. Grey from head to toe. A rough zigzag pattern stitched along both sleeves that looked, unmistakably, like teeth.

She looked less like an undercover student and more like the mascot of an aquarium gift shop having a very bad day.

"We have a problem," she said, completely straight-faced, as if she were dressed in a totally normal school uniform and not, very clearly, cosplaying an apex predator.

Hina recovered first, mouth dropping open. "Mio. Mio, what are you wearing."

"Camouflage."

"Camouflage for WHAT. There is nothing in this entire school that looks like that, nothing, not one single thing—"

"It's effective. Nobody's looked at me directly once on the way here."

"That's because they're scared, not because it's working—"

"Same result." Mio adjusted the hood with the same clipped efficiency she used for everything else, like it was a normal accessory and not two triangles of felt sewn onto grey fabric. "Ren has been telling the ghost story to a second-year homeroom for the last ten minutes. One of them asked if the ghost had a twin."

The rice ball I was still holding paused halfway to my mouth. "Someone actually said twin."

"As a joke. He laughed it off. But it's the first time anyone's said the word out loud in the same sentence as the story, and I don't like coincidences."

"So your solution was to become a shark."

"My solution was to move through the building without being recognized as myself, and this achieved that."

"By making people actively avoid you out of concern for their own safety."

"Also an acceptable outcome."

Hina buried her face in both hands, muffled voice coming out somewhere between a groan and a laugh. "You walked here like that. In public. On purpose."

"I checked the hallway cameras first."

"We have hallway cameras!?"

"Two of them. Blind spot by the vending machines." Mio said it the way other people give directions to the bathroom.

I set the lunch box down, because it had become very clear this conversation needed both my hands free for gesturing helplessly. "Okay. Setting aside the fact that you apparently know our security blind spots. Why are you actually here."

Mio reached into whatever pocket that outfit had and magically produced a manila folder, holding it against her chest the same way she'd probably hold evidence in a trial she was already certain she'd win.

"You," she said, looking straight at me, "are a liability."

"Rude... Continue."

"You've spent two days near us without incident, which statistically won't hold. If a teacher, a classmate, or Ren, hears you slip and call one of us the wrong name in public, this stops being a ghost story and starts being about a very specific pair of sisters." She opened the folder. "So you're going to learn to tell us apart properly. Today."

She pulled out a single sheet, laminated, color-coded, two columns ruled so neatly it looked like she'd used an actual straightedge. Which, at this point, I fully believed she had.