Nagoya, Japan

Friday, August 12th, 2050

The morning started off extremely promising. Once I had figured out that the disguise wand was based on a standard memory card, it had been simple enough to trade in some of my excess credits from the Headmaster for a few spares.

It wasn’t quite as easy to decipher how the fabricata read the images inside. Back before Kiyo and I had been found out, I might have chanced things and asked her for help. It would have been easy enough to say I had salvaged the wand from Haru after the fight on the rooftop. However, Kiyo had been out of sorts, and I didn’t feel like lying to her more than I had to. She was starting to worry me, and giving her more half-truths to mull over didn’t help my cover or her mood. She was a clever one; I doubted she would buy something as ridiculous as my snakebite story a second time.

I had eventually learned how to check a file format, thanks to a helpful website of computer tips for seniors. Then it was a matter of finding somebody nondescript with a good sample of photos online. I considered picking a staff member, but Maggie had rolled the dice strolling around wearing Headmaster Tachibana’s face before, and I didn’t want to trust anything to luck. After searching SatoPic for a while (I wondered if there was an industry Yukiko’s family didn’t have their tentacles in), I picked an Indonesian accountant who seemed very taken with himself. He had more pictures of himself from any given day than I had for my whole life to that point.

The results were… mixed. I didn’t have any voice clips, so I still sounded exactly like myself. Also, the fabricata’s ability to stitch together disparate images was impressive, but not flawless. Nurse Kazushi’s pictures had been taken in a short period from a variety of angles. My donor had so many selfies that I looked convincing from the front. However, he had posted no images of himself from behind. If I turned around and looked over my shoulder in the mirror, I could see my pajamas and all of the exposed skin in my natural color, instead of his darker tone. I also found that if I faced the mirror in a profile, the gray suit he wore switched to a tank top and set of swim trunks.

“I wonder where Maggie got enough pictures of Tachibana,” I mused as I got ready for my other early morning appointment. He was a public figure and he didn’t change his clothes often, but there had to be some sort of trick to it. I couldn’t very well ask her, of course, since that would defeat the point of the wand being my ace in the hole.

“How could I get enough footage to mimic somebody without them wondering why I was photographing them from every conceivable angle…” Ah, well. It wasn’t a pressing concern, and it was fun having a puzzle to ponder that I could take my time on.

I had another appointment to attend to anyway. I changed into my jogging clothes, musing that I wore more clothing to sleep than to run. It felt strange to walk to the elevator in a tank top and shorts, but then, fashion back home tended to be more conservative. Not out of any sense of propriety, of course, but for efficiency. We had destroyed most of Europe’s infrastructure, and one of the luxuries we had lost was central heating. If one didn’t have the energy for a spell or a fabricata, it was easier to just throw on a sweater.

I couldn’t resist a detour into the mailroom. I had begun checking it twice a day since the failed attack on Sumatra. Logically, it would be at least another week before I heard back, but it eased my mind.

Or, so I thought. “Well, I’ll be.” Hidden amongst the credit card offers and junk mail was a letter from Harriet Oswald. I shouldn’t have opened it right away, but my curiosity got the better of me. I found more questions than answers inside. For once, the letter didn’t have the distinctive metallic trim of the fabricata sheets Harriet had sent me to that point. It also wasn’t a formal letter. All it gave was a time, eight o’clock that evening, an address in Nagoya written in English characters, a phone number, instructions to dress nicely and bring my notes, and the name Dante.

“Who’s Dante?”

I let out a startled cry and searched the room. If I strained, I could just make out a hint of vanilla. “Kiyo?”

She shimmered back into view to my side. “You gotta watch yourself, Magpie. You almost hit me with your arm.”

“Excuse you! Were you reading over my shoulder?”

She shrugged. “You were running late, so I thought you’d be here. You check your mail a lot.”

“That doesn’t answer my question at all!” I said.

“We don’t have any secrets from each other,” Kiyo said. “Boyfriend/girlfriend contract. So, who’s Dante?”

“You also have promised me more than once that you wouldn’t sneak around on me! That’s in the contract too.”

“Hiro and Yukiko were hanging out on a bench outside, and you’re already making us late for the run,” she said. “They were going to make me late saying hi. It was a one-time thing.”

“It had better be,” I said. Blast it all, I’d have to be even more careful. Apparently her word on the subject didn’t mean much. “Mr. Dante is a friend of the family. One of Harriet’s relatives, a cousin, I think. She was writing to let me know he was in town.”

She let out a long sigh and shoved her hands into her pants pocket. “And you’re going to go into town and meet up with him instead of taking me out or even just staying in and playing video games. I get it, man. You have time for everyone but me lately.”

“I…” The tone in her voice had given me pause. She had sounded utterly crestfallen. I could have fought back against anger, but her resignation pierced my heart. Empathy is extremely overrated. It makes one do foolish things.

At least, it had that effect on me. “I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear. We’ll make a night of it. Dinner, a movie, whatever else sounds good.”

Kiyo raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, you don’t want to?” I leaned back against the wall of mailboxes, trying to look nonchalant.

She emphatically shook her head and waved her hands in front of her. “No, no, that isn’t it. I just… the school’s still locked down, right? Especially after that hack the other day. Did Dante know about that before he told you to meet him in the city?”

“I did mention that in my last… letter to Harriet,” I said, nearly slipping up and calling it a report. “You let me worry about that, Angel.” I had to figure out a way to meet up with this Dante anyhow. Having somebody on hand who could turn me invisible could only be to my benefit. “In fact, you go tell Rose I won’t be joining you today for the run. I’ll get right on it.”

“Are you sure you can handle that, man? You don’t know your way around the big cities. I had to take care of everything that time we went to Tokyo.”

“And it was a wonderful learning experience,” I replied. “What did you tell me once? I’m the guy, so it’s my job to come up with something to entertain you.”

Kiyo stood up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. “This is going to be great! We haven’t done anything like this in ages. And uh…” She fidgeted shyly, her face turning a bright crimson. “I know I said this is your job, but uh, look up something called a ‘love hotel.’”

“What’s a love hotel?”

“It’s a…” She covered her face. “I don’t want to say it out loud. You don’t have them in England, but knowing you, you’ll like them. We can go after dinner.”

“It sounds promising.” I shooed her away. “Now move along, or else I’ll be so distracted that I shan’t be able to get my work done.”

She giggled again. “Shan’t. I love it when you talk like that. It’s like one of the vampires in mom’s novels.” Before I could respond, she had already dashed out the door to the mail room.

That was one crisis averted. Now all I had to do was figure out how to escape the Tower, get into the city, and figure out how I was going to explain Kiyo to this Dante fellow.

Well, I knew how to fix two of the three. It was time to cash in a few favors.