"Sky! Sky, wake up!"

I pulled my Morpheus M15 from my eyes and bolted upright in my bed, my heart racing. It took me a few seconds to find my bearings, and realize that I was staring right at Moon's face. She stood over me, her hands on my shoulders.

"Man, you're totally out of it when you take those pills, you know that?" she said.

"Well, yeah, that's kinda the point," I grumbled, rubbing my eyes as they were assaulted by the morning light. I felt quite annoyed at being awoken before the sleep mask could to its magic.

"Sorry, but there's something you should see." She climbed from my bed and walked to the door of our room.

Groggily, I followed her outside, unsure what to expect. I thought she might lead me to the common room, but when the door closed behind us, she turned around and pointed at it. As I followed her motion with my gaze, I was suddenly wide awake.

"Wow. That's..."

I was at a loss for words for a moment, as I stared at the crude, blood red letters that somebody had sprayed on our door. The writing was swirly and elaborate, but the graffiti had been done in a hurry, so it looked off.

"...a pretty terrible tag," I concluded.

"Are you kidding me? It's fucking outrageous. I already called the campus Enforcers."

"Mhm, great. Why exactly did you wake me for this?" I asked her. I was longing to be in my bed again to get another half hour of sleep before I had to go to class.

"Because, well... do you have any idea who could have done it?"

"Why would I? Wait, you think this has something to do with me?"

"Well, no offense, but there's a certain... parallel to recent events."

I looked at the lettering again, pretending to be oblivious to her remarks.

"It could be 'Queen of Slats'" I suggested. "If you kinda tilt your head a little bit to the side, that looks like a lower case 'a'-"

"You know that's not what it says," she snapped, "Besides, what would that even mean?"

She was clearly very irritated at how casually I dismissed the act of vandalism. But there was no sense in getting upset at something I couldn't change right now. I had no idea who had done it. While I did have a hunch what it was about, that still left about three hundred of Blaze's scorned lovers as potential culprits.

"I really wouldn't worry about it," I said and yawned demonstratively, "Let the enforcers handle it."

She eyed me with skepticism. It wasn't easy to deceive her, but I really wasn't in the mood to talk about this now, so I kept my best impression of a poker face.

"You really don't know what this is about?" she asked, "Nothing at all you might want to share?"

"For somebody so reluctant to talk about your own love life, you're pretty nosy about mine."

She opened her mouth to express her dissent, but then she closed it again and heaved a sigh.

"Alright, point taken... I'll be in the factory quite long today, so... see you later tonight," she just said, before she walked away.

I thought my morning couldn't get any worse than being awoken by profanities sprayed on my door, but just when I had gone back to bed to spend another half hour ignoring the world outside before I would have to face it, my com buzzed again.

"Ugh, what now?" I groaned in irritation as I picked up the call.

"Good morning, Sky," the voice of the Artificial nurse resounded at the other end of the connection.

"Oh. Sorry. Good morning." I sat up and cleared my throat. Rationally, I knew that he wouldn't care even if I hurled insults at him, yet somehow I felt compelled to return his perfectly polite demeanor whenever we talked.

"So that name you gave me yesterday – Doctor Line – I was able to verify that this is the name of the chief neurosurgeon in the North District hospital at the time of your stay there five years ago," he said. "But I could not reach the man himself as of now."

"A neurosurgeon? Why would he be involved in a drug trial?" I wondered.

I got out of bed and began to pace around my room anxiously, slowly getting dressed and preparing for today's classes. Of course, after my mother had texted me, I hadn't been able to just let it go. I needed some peace of mind, but I already had a feeling that the nurse wouldn't be able to give that to me this morning.

"I don't know," the nurse admitted. "The hospital confirmed that they, too, don't have your full medical records. It seems like they were taken from their servers around the time Doctor Line left their services and switched to the private sector."

A private company that employs neurosurgeons? What kind of work would that be? I wondered.

Then I noticed something odd about the words the nurse had chosen. "Wait a second, are they implying that he took the data with him?"

"They didn't explicitly say so, but at the moment, it seems reasonable to assume so," the nurse said. "It seems he either took them, or deleted them. I am still looking into the possibility of retrieving your files from the backup servers, but with the recent recall and all going on-"

As I looked at my own reflection in the mirror and straightened my uniform, something on my desk behind me caught my eye. It was another one of those origami butterflies I had been folding and leaving all over the place without realizing it lately. I couldn't recall when, but it seemed that I had made this one from some silver candy wrapping paper that Moon had left lying around, and it had turned out quite pretty, so I decided not to trash this one. Perplexed by my own behavior, I put it on our trophy shelf, next to the empty bottle Moon had taken from the hangar, and the laurel I had won at the Colosseum.

"Do you happen to know which company he works for now?" I asked, focusing on our conversation again.

"Yes. The name is Weaver Corp."

~ ~ ~

It's all a coincidence, I thought. Nothing to be so upset about.

Sitting in class, once again rendered completely unable to focus on the lecture, I tried to tell myself that, over and over again, hoping I might start to believe it at some point. But all I could think about was that warning from the advertisement for the M17 sleep mask that Weaver Corp had developed. And the words of the nurse resounded in my head once more.

With every prototype technology, there might be unforeseeable side effects.

I sighed and buried my face in my hands for a moment.

Why did my parents put me in an experimental drug trial? I asked myself.

Because you tried to kill yourself, a voice inside me replied.

And what if that's not true? I really don't remember any of it.

That was the point, the voice reminded me.

Okay, but what about the nightmares? Where are they coming from all of a sudden?

The two sides inside of me continued their pointless argument over and over, turning in circles, leading absolutely nowhere.

Perhaps I should try to meet with that doctor, I thought.

But what if by digging into it all, you end up remembering why you wanted to kill yourself, and become suicidal again? another part of me asked worriedly.

That's ridiculous, I thought. That's not how it works. I have no reason to be unhappy right now.

I cast a sideways glance to the other side of the room, where Blaze sat. He was playing with that memory module of his again, twirling it around his fingers absentmindedly, while staring toward the front of the class room, where Captain Talon herself was giving today's lecture. Blaze seemed to feel my gaze on him, because he briefly looked to the side and met my blank-faced stare with a fleeting smile. For a painful second I could feel that invisible wall between us again, for whatever reason.

I tried to focus on the lecture again, but my head was a giant mess. At the end of class, I realized that I had almost no memory of what we had just talked about. As the classroom emptied, my eyes met with the Captain's across the room, and I could tell immediately that she had realized it too.

"Cadet," she said, as I approached her, like in a trance, "You seem a bit unfocused today. What can I do for you?"

There was no hostility or offense in her voice. In fact, it was devoid of any emotion. Many people thought that Captain Talon, the Ice Queen of the academy, was stern and cold-hearted. In reality, she was simply level-headed and rational in every situation. But I also knew that she had a very different side to her.

I could still remember that bewildered look on her face on that day when I had confided in her. It had never been my intent to talk to anyone about it all. I even tried to hide what was going on with me from Moon for the longest time. But that day, I had performed particularly poorly during training, and the Captain asked if something was wrong. And something inside of me just burst. I broke into tears, and that made it quite pointless to continue to pretend that I was fine. And so I told her. All the while, she just sat there calmly, listening to everything I said. And then she supported me with starting the emotional reprogramming.

Her composed attitude had been very comforting in its own way. Moon was my true shoulder to cry on, the antithesis to the Captain. She would take me in her arms and tell me something funny to make me laugh again. The Captain, on the other hand, would tell me that shit sucked and the world was unfair. But if the world didn't suck, we'd fall off. She was like an anchor, like a rock in a storm-whipped sea of emotions.

In hindsight, I regretted bringing down that rain of unbridled emotion on her. I thought she might resent me for dragging her into all of this. I wondered if she looked at me sometimes, fearing that I might burst into tears again and decay into an unstable emotional mess once more. But if the events of the past had changed her opinion of me in any way, she never let any of it show.

"Ma'am, I was wondering about something. About the Agalma project." I began to speak just before I realized that I hadn't even put my whilring thoughts into any words yet.

"I am certain that Doctor Way or Lieutenant Steel would be better suited to talk about it than me," Talon said, not even looking up from her tablet.

I took a deep breath, and tried to force myself into the same calm state of mind that I adapted before missions.

"Did you know about the compatibility issues?" I asked her, straightforwardly. "With the machine-brain interface?"

She raised her head and regarded me with an impassive look. "I had been informed that the technology was new and untested, but I was assured that the pilot would not be put in any danger. Do you think I would just allow any cadet of mine to be endangered by such an endeavor?"

"Not at all, ma'am. But I mean, were you aware..."

"That you were the only perfect match they could find, you mean?" she completed my sentence.

Hearing it put into blunt words like that made the last remaining sense of accomplishment I had felt for being chosen to participate in the project crumble.

"Aside from the fact that I would not have allowed just anyone to skip half of their classes to play in the dirt with some Enforcer cadets," she said, "it will probably interest you that you were, in fact, not the only match."

"I was not?"

"There were two other people with matching biometrics for the interface. One was only a partial match, and an ex vivo child merely in their infancy, so that was not an option. There was a second perfect match, a male Ker. But there were other compatibility issues with the suit. By the time they found out about the problems with the interface, the prototype suit had already been completed, and the man would have simply been too big. They considered scrapping it and building a new, bigger one. I suggested they let you try it, instead."

"Oh, I see." I was not sure whether I should feel surprised, relieved, or confused. Mostly, I felt confused.

"Hm. And here I thought you might hold it against me that I talked you into wasting your time with the Agalma project, now that it got scrapped," she remarked, raising an eye brow.

"Not at all, ma'am," I said. "I appreciate your trust in my abilities. Thank you. For everything."

She narrowed her eyes, as if my appreciative words irritated her for some reason.

"Anyway," she said, shooing me out of the room with a hand gesture, "If you have any more questions about it, perhaps you should talk to Doctor Way. He is way more qualified than I to talk about these matters. Carpe Diem."

"Of course. Thank you for your time, Captain. Carpe Diem."