The ride is quiet in the kind of way that isn't peace.
It's the hum of an engine that never misses. The whir of wheels over asphalt that could be anywhere. The soft click of the blinker three lanes before the exit because the driver never improvises. It's the White Room's silence, exported into a sedan with leather seats and tinted glass.
I lean back and watch the back of the chauffeur's neck. It's corded, tan, blank. His cap brim draws a straight line where his face should be. The mirror above him is angled down, not back; I get a slice of my own collar instead of his eyes. The car smells like mild citrus and something floral that pretends to be air. I drape one arm along the window ledge, palm open. The glass is cool through the glove.
Ichika sits beside me, restless. She's in the school's red vest uniform, crisp and new, sleeves perfect, tie knotted to a textbook diagram. Her legs swing a fraction, heel tapping the mat, not enough to be called noise. She hums. Off-key, on purpose, riding the same three notes until they fray. She watches the blur of guardrails as if they might turn into animals if she stares long enough.
I spare her a glance. She feels it and flashes me that sideways smirk—sharp, amused, unguarded in a way that is somehow a pose. She's always like this, a child standing on the furniture of any room, testing which parts wobble. In the White Room, that instinct should have been burned out. Somehow it grew teeth.
We talked a few times before this assignment. "Talked" is generous. She preached. She told me about the one who got out like a true believer retelling a miracle—Ayanokōji Kiyotaka, the lab's ghost story, the boy who made it past the door and turned into proof that door existed. Her voice changes when she says his name. The mischief drains out. What's left is devotion.
I close my eyes. Don't sleep. Just narrow the world.
The Director said the school was designed to "cultivate success," which is a polite way to say it trains people to walk toward a finish line while other people are made into the ground. He briefed us on the rules—points, surveillance, class partitions, incentives. The man can recite cruelty in a tone that suggests he's reading a recipe. We are to enter. We are to embed. We are to remove Ayanokōji from the system. "Expel," he said, like swatting a fly.
Expel Ayanokōji.
The word sits in my mouth like a penny. Metallic. Old. Someone else's. I roll it along my teeth until it loses shape.
Ichika cuts her hum and turns to the window again. The city thins outside, traded for manicured trees and long walls. Her breath fogs a tiny patch of glass and vanishes.
She's the one who caught me with the cookies. It was late. The pediatric wing's security office had a cabinet like a vending machine with a lock that only cared about right numbers. I had a girl in the corridor with cantaloupe-colored socks who wasn't keeping up with the laps because she was six and had the lungs of a bird. I stole what I could bribe her with to finish the day without getting caught. Ichika walked in on me with a plastic-wrapped fistful. She looked at the cookies like they were a revolution and at me like I had invented the crime of kindness.
"Yagami," she says now, my name soft at the edges. "Your face looks weird."
"That's my face," I say.
"Mm." She leans in a fraction, as if a better angle will show more truth. "You're tense."
"I'm considering my options," I say.
"Which are?"
"Arrive. Breathe. Don't kill anyone."
She laughs. It sounds like a chime that's been bent out of round. "You're funny when you pretend to be dangerous."
I don't answer. The car changes lanes. The city's voice lowers to a purr.
Outside, a sign flashes past. Advanced Nurturing High School is not on it in any language, but the trees get too clean and the sky gets wider and the space around the road gets emptier. That's how you can tell you are approaching a place rich people built for their children: the world steps back, and the ground stops arguing with the plan.
I watch the chauffeur's hand skate the wheel. No hesitation. No human in the movement. He must practice that control for hours. It's almost beautiful.
"Oi, Ichika.." I say.
She startles a little, as if she had forgotten sound. "What is it, Yagami~? Rebel-kun?"
"Don't call me that."
She grins. "But you are. You steal from lockboxes. You hide snacks under institutional sheets. You smuggle warmth into cold rooms." She tilts her head. "Or am I wrong?"
She was the only one who saw that part. Because she walks through walls. Because rules bounce off her if she wants them to. Because a lab can't teach a human not to be one if the human refuses the lesson in her bones.
I shift my attention away from her smile. "Your class?"
"A," she says immediately. "Obviously."
"B," I say.
She scrunches her mouth. "Aw. We'll have to pretend not to know each other." A beat. "Or pretend we hate each other."
"Do you?"
"Only when you pretend to be calm," she says, and goes back to the window. That's her mercy.
She starts humming again. Different notes now. A scrap of something that might be a lullaby. I recognize it and can't place the room where I heard it. That happens a lot lately. Memories smear when you drag them back and forth across two lives at once.
We're going to see him, she says without looking. "We're gonna see him," she repeats, letting the name hang like an ornament she doesn't want to touch for fear of breaking it. "Ayanokōji."
I swallow. My breath is a little too hot in my throat.
We are. The Fourth Generation. The template. The measure that never admits being measured. The one they used to smash us into shapes, and then taught us to hate the hammer so we wouldn't ask about the hands. What do I want when I see him? Jealousy? Recognition? A fight? A mirror? My mouth twists without permission.
"I wonder what he's like..." Ichika says, voice sly and soft, as if she's asking the car to confess.
"Me too.." I say before I can stop the truth.
She glances at me. The faint surprise is honest. She likes it when I let the leash slip.
Expel Ayanokōji, I think again, and the word expel shivers into other meanings—cut loose, eject, force into orbit, make someone a satellite of absence. The White Room didn't choose that verb by accident. It's clean. It keeps the blood off the report.
We pass a long fence with vertical bars that look like piano keys if you squint. The gates beyond it open before we fully stop, as if the school has a radar for expensive vehicles.
The chauffeur pulls to the curb. The car settles. The engine fades to a polite warmth.
"We're here," Ichika says, all brightness again, as if the last ten minutes didn't have anything to do with her. She smooths her skirt, flicks imaginary lint from her vest, and pats my knee with two fingers—mocking, approving, conspiratorial. "Don't trip," she adds, like she's blessing me with a curse.
I breathe once, slow. My hand finds the door handle. Cold metal. The simple shock of a thing that just does what it does.
The hinge answers with a soft gasp. Air slides in—blue and clean, smelling faintly of cut grass and the chemical nothing schools use to erase themselves.
The building waits in front of us, white and glass, windows like eyes that don't blink. Banners hang from the eaves, red and gold. A line of first-years moves in a tidy curve across the courtyard, uniforms crisp, hair regulation. They look like chess pieces arranged by someone who already knows the endgame.
I stand. The sun hits my vest. My shadow falls tidy on the path. Ichika steps out after me and stretches as if this were an amusement park and not a machine.
"Freedom," I say under my breath, and it tastes like a joke you tell yourself to stop your hands from shaking. "We'll see about that."
—
The homeroom teacher smiled like she'd rehearsed it a hundred times in an empty room.
"Welcome to the Advanced Nurturing High School. From today, you're Class 1-B. Do your best, enjoy your youth, and treat each other with respect."
She was the soft kind of strict—hair cut to regulation, blazer ironed flat enough to slice paper, voice pitched for calm authority. She talked about dorm rules, borrowing etiquette, cafeteria hours as if we were at an orientation camp. Half the room relaxed by the second minute. Smiles, whispering, shoulders unknotting. You could feel it: the collective exhale of kids who thought they'd landed on easy mode.
Then she mentioned the points.
"As you probably heard, the school provides each student with a monthly stipend—one hundred thousand private points. It functions as cash on campus. Vending machines, school store, even some off-campus affiliates."
A murmur rolled through the rows like wind through tall grass. Someone in the back actually whispered, "We're rich," and the people around him laughed. Screens lit up. Wallet apps opened. A few kids compared balances like they were suddenly salaried.
I kept my hands flat on the desk. My screen stayed dark.
If money's given, it can be taken. That's how control works.
She moved on, smooth as a line of text scrolling.
"About your classes: A, B, C, and D are simple labels for.. administrative grouping"
Right... Everyone always says not to overthink the thing they want you to swallow whole. There was definitely something going on with the classes.
"This semester will also introduce a cooperative assessment with the second years," she said, chalk tapping the board as if the syllabus lived there. "Each first-year student must partner with a second-year student for a joint examination. Two-person teams: one from Year One, one from Year Two."
A boy in the front row raised a hand. "Can we pick anyone?"
"Within availability. Pairing is student-initiated. Consider compatibility." She wrote in tidy block print: ONE 1st YEAR + ONE 2nd YEAR = TEAM. "Students who fail to secure a partner may sit the assessment alone. In that case, your score will be doubled to compensate for missing a partner, but a five-percent penalty will be applied."
More murmurs. Phones came out again. Already, the room was splitting: talkers and listeners; the kids forming plans and the ones becoming plans.
Forced cooperation on a clock. Incentivize urgency. Let scarcity do the teaching.
"And finally," she said, holding up her own phone, "please download the OAA—Overall Ability Assessment—if you haven't already. You'll receive your personal metrics: academic ability, adaptability, physical ability, and social contribution. These combine into an overall rating that helps you track growth and find partners with complementary strengths."
Teachers love acronyms. It hides teeth behind letters.
I thumbed the app open. Registration had already been done—the school had our faces, our prints, our birthdays. The profile appeared in pale blue with clean sans-serif type, a friendly UI like exercise apps that tell you to drink more water.
Name: Yagami Takuya
Year: 1
Class: B
Academic Ability — 93
Adaptability — 74
Physical Ability — 51
Social Contribution — 77
Overall — 73 (Rank: B)
Letters again. Numbers feeding letters feeding placement. A, B, C, D looping everywhere like someone's favorite trick. Give the kids a scoreboard; they'll climb it without ever asking who set it up.
The boy next to me—messy hair, brand-new watch—leaned over his screen to a girl. "I got a 62 physical," he said, trying to make it sound like a joke. "Guess I'll do push-ups."
"Mine's 48," she said, shrinking even while she smiled. "I'll cheer you on."
Data becomes truth if you let it.
"Enjoy your school life!" our teacher said brightly, as if that simple sentence could hold the weight of everything she'd left out. "Make friends, and remember—we're here to support you."
The room broke like a wave. Chairs scraped. People stood to compare stats out loud. A cluster formed at the windows, talking about where to spend their points. Someone proposed a shopping trip. Someone else started speculating about the second years: "We should aim for Class A partners, right?" Laughter. A brag about track speed. A groan about a 39 in academics. Phones flashed and dinged and took pictures of screens, as if a number today would be a story tomorrow.
I let the noise pass over me. The OAA screen sat in my palm like a mirror I didn't owe anything to.
One hundred thousand points appeared in my school wallet with a cheerful animation, confetti bursting across the display. The kind of design that makes it feel like a gift instead of a leash.
Behavior equals points. Exams equal points. Points equal privilege. Privilege becomes the air some breathe and others fight for. All it takes is a hidden rubric and enough smiles.
I stood, quiet enough that my chair slid without complaint. No one noticed; why would they? The loudest people were painting reality for the rest. I pocketed my phone and walked to the door.
In the hallway, the brightness felt staged, like a catalog photo. Wide windows, clipped hedges outside, a sky too blue to be an accident. On the wall, a poster about "Collaborative Excellence" showed a circle of hands, anonymous skin tones chosen with marketing-careful diversity. The school's ethos was everywhere: cooperate, compete, conform.
The points still glowed on my balance through my pocket like a soft hot stone. Ten thousand yen, a hundred thousand, a million—numbers only matter because someone promises you what they can buy.
Partner with a second-year. Learn the real rules. Pay for answers if I have to.
I took the first corner slow, listening. Noise told you about a place: the hollow clatter of shoes, the flood-and-fade of groups, the hush pockets where people hid. On the second corner, a bulletin board caught me—club flyers pinned in clean columns. Music, athletics, debate, tea ceremony, volunteer corps. The words said "join." The subtext said "be measured."
A trio of first-years passed me, laughing about which café took points. A second-year leaned against a locker, scanning his own OAA as if the numbers might blink and change if he stared long enough. He glanced up at me; I looked away first on purpose. Better to be forgettable before you ask strangers for help.
My thumb flicked through OAA's menus while I walked. The search filters were almost good enough to be honest: browse by department, by club, by "recommended partners," which suspiciously sorted by Overall rating first. There was even a "matchmaking" tab that suggested second-years with complementary stats based on mine. Data-driven compatibility. Some engineer here had had fun.
I dismissed it. Algorithms are only as trustworthy as the people who build them. And the people here loved letters more than they loved truth.
The staircase down to the first-floor atrium opened like a throat. Voices multiplied. The glass doors at the far end leaked light and a view of the quad, neatly sliced by paths. A vending machine hummed by the entrance like a domesticated animal. It took points, obviously.
I could go spend money and pretend this place wanted my happiness. Or I could ask the only question that mattered: what happens when the month ends?
A second-year boy brushed past me, phone to his ear, voice low. "No, if they didn't explain it in your class, they'll learn. Don't spoon-feed them." He saw me looking and veered away, grin polite and empty.
Good. There were seniors who knew, and they wanted leverage more than they wanted company.
I checked the time. The partnership exam wasn't today; the school had been careful not to say when it would hit. Uncertainty breeds compliance. I had hours to map routes, pick a place to watch the second-years, maybe pick one who didn't blink at hard questions.
In the atrium, a girl from 1-B waved a hand at me as if we'd already agreed to be friends. "Yagami-kun, do you want to go to the store later? We're making a list!"
"I'll catch up," I told her, which was not a lie; catching up to lists was easy when you already knew the price of a favor.
I stepped into the sun. The heat slid over my blazer in a way that made the inside of the building feel artificial. A pair of sparrows bickered on a branch. The quad smelled like cut grass and a little bit of asphalt. If I squinted, I could pretend this was a normal school.
A notification buzzed. The OAA had "suggested" three second-years based on my profile. Class 2-C, girl with an Academic 88 / Social 81. Class 2-A, boy with Physical 90 / Adaptability 85. Class 2-D, girl with Adaptability 92 / Social 84. Pretty letters. Useful bait.
I dismissed it and opened a blank note instead. Real partners aren't chosen by an app. They're chosen by what they stand to lose—and what they're willing to trade.
The bench near the path had a line of warm sunlight across it. I sat on the edge, elbows on knees, and watched the flow of uniforms. You learn more from how people move than what they say. A Class A second-year turned down the path without checking her phone even once—habit of someone who already knows she's late and doesn't have to apologize. A Class C boy checked over his shoulder twice before crossing the quad—as if permission lived behind him.
Find someone ambitious enough to bargain, but not naive enough to break. Someone who understands debt. Preferably someone outside A. People at the top rarely believe the floor can vanish.
The points on my phone blinked again, as if the app wanted attention. One hundred thousand. Confetti waiting to fall.
If they give you this on day one, it's because they're going to take something more expensive on day thirty.
I stood, put the note away, and aimed back toward the buildings where the second-years had their homerooms. Class plaques hung outside each door in neat serif font: 2-A, 2-B, 2-C. A teacher closed a classroom behind me with the soft click of institutional wood. Control sounds like that—quiet, inevitable, routine.
Pairs of first-years laughed as they took photos of each other in the hallway. Someone practiced a smile for a story post. I walked between them like a shadow in a place designed to banish shadows.
Partner first. Rules second. Answers wherever they sell them.
The door to the 2-B corridor stood open. I paused at the threshold, the smell of floor polish cleaner than air has any right to be, and looked down at the OAA screen one more time—not for numbers, but for the reflection it threw back at me.
The boy in the glass didn't look excited. He looked awake.
"So much to unpack," I said under my breath. "A–B–C–D. Numbers on screens. Money from nowhere. Smiles that cost something." I slid the phone into my pocket and stepped forward.
Now... to find a partner.