PRESENT DAY

  Ringggg.

  "Okay, kids. That's all for today. Make sure to complete the work tomorrow."

  The bell pulled me back from somewhere far away.

  I sat there for a moment, blinking, letting the cssroom reassemble itself around me at its own pace. The scraping of chairs. The rustling of bags. The sound of thirty conversations starting at once, filling the air the way water fills a gss — quickly, completely, leaving no room for anything else.

  I hadn't noticed the lesson ending. I wasn't entirely sure I had noticed the lesson begining.I looked around slowly.

  All girls. Not a single other boy anywhere in the room.

  It wasn't an all-girls school. Technically. But there was a difference between a fact existing on paper and a fact making itself felt in a room, and this one made itself felt every single day. Boys existed here the way rare things exist anywhere — present enough to be known about, scarce enough to be noticed every time, without exception, without getting used to.

  Four months in and I still did the quiet count whenever I entered a room. I wasn't sure I'd ever stop.

  I turned my gaze toward Mia.

  She was at her desk, arranging things with a focus that didn't quite match the task. Her movements had a particur deliberateness to them — the kind that appears when someone is trying to look occupied while thinking about something else entirely. Her lunch bag was already out, already within reach, already positioned for a quick exit.

  And there it was. The blush. Faint, sitting high on her cheeks, giving away everything she was trying not to show. It appeared every time we were about to head to the roof, reliable as clockwork, impossible to miss once you knew to look for it.

  She hadn't gnced at me yet. But I had the distinct impression she was very aware of exactly where I was.

  "What did you bring today?" I asked.

  She looked up. Aimed for casual. Landed somewhere just beside it.

  "Nothing much." A small pause. "Bento and mango juice."

  "Then let's go to the roof."

  She started pulling her lunch out immediately, with an efficiency that completely contradicted the nothing much. I looked away before she could catch me smiling, and reached into my own bag.

  Just a sandwich. Pin, a little uninspired. Mom had already left for work by the time I came downstairs this morning — I had found the kitchen quiet and a note on the counter and made do.

  I packed up slowly, and somewhere in the quiet space between actions, my thoughts drifted. The way they did sometimes, in the gaps between things, when there was nothing immediate requiring my attention.

  I don't know if women from my past world were like that too- clumsy , aggressive. I started thinking about the particur shape of the world I had nded in.

  Artificial reproduction was common here. Not just accepted — normalized, woven into the fabric of daily life so thoroughly that most people didn't think about it any more than they thought about anything else that had always been true. The scarcity of men had made it necessary, and necessity had made it ordinary, and ordinary things stopped requiring expnation after a while.

  My mother had gone through the process twice. My sister first. Then me, some years ter. My father existed somewhere as a file number in an MSA database, confidential by design, protected by protocols whose entire purpose was to prevent donors from becoming entangled in the complicated web of want that their scarcity tended to create.

  The MSA — Male Safety Association. They handled the records. The protections. The monthly arrangements. They existed to keep men safe in a world that had, over generations, developed a very complicated retionship with the idea of male freedom.

  I was, by most practical measures, exactly the kind of person that organization had been designed to look after.

  I wasn't always sure how I felt about that.

  "What are you thinking about again, Rio?"

  I looked up.

  Mia was watching me. Bento already in hand, posture carrying that slight rigidity she got when she thought my attention had gone somewhere she couldn't follow. Her eyes moved across my face with a careful attention that she never quite managed to make look accidental.

  I had noticed early on that Mia watched me. Not obtrusively — she was far too self-aware for anything that obvious. But there was a pattern to it that I had picked up on gradually, the way you pick up on anything that repeats. Whenever I gnced at her, she was already mid-look, already somewhere in the middle of a thought that involved me. She would redirect smoothly, change the angle of her gaze, let the moment pass without acknowledging it.

  She thought she was subtle.

  She was not particurly subtle.

  "Are you thinking about someone else?" A slight edge in it now. "Hey. Are you even listening to me?"

  I could have deflected. I could have given her something easy and moved on. But it was fun teasing her and seeing her getting embarrased at the end. It has always been like that.

  I found myself thinking instead about the first week. Sitting in a cssroom full of strangers, every face belonging to a world I was still trying to decode. The particur kind of silence that comes from being surrounded by people who aren't sure what category to put you in, so they choose distance as the safest option. Nobody moving toward me. Nobody quite sure where to start.

  And then Mia.

  Pulling out the chair beside me without asking. Opening her lunch like we had been doing this for years. Saying so what do you actually like to eat in the tone of someone continuing a conversation rather than beginning one. Not treating me like a curiosity. Not treating me like something that needed to be handled carefully.

  Just talking to me. Like a person.

  In a world where being male often meant being treated as something between a protected species and a public event — that had mattered. More than she probably knew. More than I had ever said directly.

  "Nothing," I said. "I was just thinking about how beautiful you are."

  The reaction, as always, was immediate and complete.

  The color started at her ears and traveled inward, her eyes going wide, four months of composed friendship dissolving in approximately two seconds. She pointed at me.

  "What — stop talking nonsense—"

  "I genuinely thought it."

  "You shouldn't say things like that to a woman." Her voice pitched slightly higher than she intended. "It can be taken differently."

  "You look cute when you're embarrassed."

  "Stop—" She pushed my arm. The blush deepened. Her dignity made a valiant effort to reassemble itself. "Don't tease me."

  "Okay, okay." I held up a hand. "I'm sorry."

  She composed herself with visible effort — pressing her lips together, lifting her chin, smoothing her expression back into something that resembled dignity. The blush remained, entirely unbothered by any of this.

  We moved out into the corridor, and within a few steps her arm had found mine, looping through it in that easy, unannounced way she had. Like the space beside me was somewhere she had long ago decided belonged to her, and had simply stopped expining the decision.

  The stares started immediately.

  They always did.

  I had spent four months learning the particur texture of this kind of attention. The way it followed without being hostile. The way conversations paused, just fractionally, as you passed — a half-beat of adjustment before resuming. The way eyes tracked and held and didn't quite look away. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't even unkind. It was just the weight of being uncommon in a space that hadn't figured out how to be ordinary about it yet.

  My sister had clocked it before I fully had. A few weeks in there had been an incident — someone staring a beat too long, Sia's response characteristically unambiguous — and after that, people had generally exercised more discretion.

  But the awareness never truly left. It just learned to wear different clothes.

  I was moving through it, Mia's arm warm and steady against mine, when the voice came from behind us.

  "Hey. Stop, both of you."

  I knew it before I turned.

  A girl was cutting through the corridor toward us, moving with that particur purposefulness she reserved for situations she had already decided required her attention. Her eyes found mine first, scanning my face with the practiced efficiency of someone checking for something specific — any trace of discomfort, any detail I might not have volunteered on my own.

  Sia reached us and her gaze moved to Mia, briefly, then back to me.

  "Oh." Something shifted in her expression. Small. Contained. "It's Mia." A pause. "I thought some other girl was following you."

  "We're going to the rooftop to eat lunch," I said. "That's all."

  I watched it pass through her — something she caught quickly and pressed down before it could fully surface. She was good at that. But I had spent enough time watching Sia to recognize the edge of it. A flicker of something that wasn't quite worry and wasn't quite disapproval but lived somewhere between the two.

  She drew herself up slightly. "Don't you think it's a little inappropriate? A boy and a girl, alone on the rooftop." Her voice was measured. Reasonable. "It can be dangerous."

  "What we choose to do isn't really your concern." Mia's tone was polite but steady. "I understand that he's a boy. But he's allowed to have his own freedom."

  Sia's jaw tightened. Just slightly.

  "I'm his sister," she said, and there was something careful in the way she said it, like she was selecting the words with more attention than the sentence seemed to require. "He's min..—" A pause. Brief. Almost unnoticeable. "..my brother. I have a say in where he goes."

  I looked between them.

  I understood both positions. That was the uncomfortable part — standing in the middle of two people who were both, in their own ways, coming from somewhere real.

  Sia's protectiveness wasn't performance. I knew where it came from. I knew what this world did with men who weren't careful, and I knew she had been watching out for me since before I was aware enough to watch out for myself. The alert button in my pocket was her idea. The routes she had quietly suggested for walking home were her idea. The way she appeared, like now, whenever something registered on whatever internal arm system she ran — all of it came from a pce I couldn't dismiss just because it was inconvenient.

  But Mia had been beside me for four months. Steady, consistent, uncomplicated in the ways that mattered. She had never given me a single reason to doubt her. I know she likes me a bit, but she never acts on her impulse.

  Sia turned to me directly.

  "Rio." No shade in it. No pressure applied from the side. Just my name, and her eyes on mine, and the question pced exactly where it belonged. "Do you want to go with her?"

  The corridor felt quieter than it was.

  I felt the weight from both directions — not heavy, just present. Evenly distributed. Waiting.

  "I want to go with her, Sia," I said. I kept my voice steady and let a small smile through. "I've been telling you for a long time — she's not someone you need to be worried about."

  I put a little weight on the st part. Enough that she would know I meant it, not as reassurance but as something more considered than that.

  I watched her absorb it. Watched the small, quiet adjustment she made somewhere behind her expression.

  "Fine," she said. After a moment that sted exactly as long as it needed to. "You have the alert button?"

  "I have it."

  "If anything feels off—"

  "It won't. But I have it."

  She held my gaze for one more beat. The final check on something she couldn't quite name. Then she stepped back, and I knew she was letting it go — not because she had stopped caring, but because she had decided to trust me.

  I waved. She didn't wave back, but something in her expression softened by a fraction, and that was Sia's version of it.

  Mia and I turned toward the stairs.

  The stairwell was quiet. Our footsteps echoed in the narrow space, the sound following us up each nding in a way that made the silence between us more noticeable than it might have been somewhere louder.

  I could feel the shift in her.

  She hadn't taken my arm again after the corridor. Hadn't said anything since we started climbing. She was holding her bento with both hands now, her gaze on the stairs ahead, her expression carrying something that had settled in during the confrontation and hadn't left yet.

  "Mia." I kept my voice easy. "Did Sia upset you?"

  She didn't answer right away.

  "You know how she is," I continued, giving her time. "She doesn't mean anything by it. She just — that's how she shows up for people she cares about. It comes out sideways sometimes."

  "I know," she said. Quiet. Not closed off — just contained. Like she was holding something carefully and hadn't decided yet whether to set it down.

  "She trusts you more than you think. She wouldn't have let me come if she didn't. You should see how she is around other girls." I paused. "Around most other girls, I don't get to make my own lunch pns."

  A sound that was almost a ugh. Small, reluctant, but there.

  I was still searching for the right angle on it when she stopped.

  We were on the nding just below the rooftop door. I stopped too, a step below her, and waited.

  She was looking at the floor. Her fingers had tightened slightly around her bento. Whatever she was carrying, she had been carrying it for a while — longer than the corridor, maybe. Maybe longer than today.

  Then she looked up at me.

  And the question she asked was so simple, and so direct, and so completely without warning, that I felt it nd somewhere deeper than I expected.

  "Do you trust me, Rio?"

  .

  .

  .

  .

  AnnouncementIt was a weak one. but upcoming chapters will have other POV's with their inner battles and thoughts. Do let me know about your thoughts on this chapter..