Tracker’s alarm made that hateful, infuriating noise—forcing her from the land of dreamless sleep.

She dragged herself from her bed, knowing full well that if she allowed herself to hit snooze—or god forbid, turn it off—she’d simply fall right back to sleep. Surprisingly, the journey from laying in her bed to laying on her bedroom floor was easier than usual.

She certainly hadn’t gotten a good night’s rest. Maybe a few hours, if she was feeling optimistic. She chewed on the thought as she forced herself from her floor and made her way through her routine on autopilot. Showering, skincare and mouthcare, coffee.

Before long she was wide awake, thanks in no small part to the linktech coffee machine she bowed at the feet of. Throughout her routine, Tracker had come up with a pet theory on why she didn’t feel quite so much like a wraith, chained to the mortal plane as torture.

She wasn’t using her link all that often, lately. Sure, she’d used it when Mirah was having a Remembrance, more for confirmation than anything, but other than that she’d done without. Tracker had always had the suspicion that her link wasn’t necessarily the radar she was able to see—if she focused on that spot in the back of her mind. Instead, she thinks that her link is the collection of positional information of Linked around her, including some general differentiating information like ‘complexity’ and ‘power’ as she’d named them.

It seems like a semantical difference, and maybe it was. But Tracker had a sneaking suspicion that her link had altered her brain to be able to parse this information, like some hypercognitives. There had been a few examples where someone had recovered a hypercognitive’s brain and found that it was massively restructured to quite literally be far more evolved than the regular human brain.

It wasn’t like that for every hypercognitive, or even info Linked. Each link has its own quirks and differences, some more bizarre than others. Either way, Tracker suspects that her brain was similarly restructured to handle the sort of information that her link throws at her, and due to the complexity of that data her brain was made more ‘power efficient’ so to speak. So, without using her link often, less energy is consumed and less sleep is needed.

‘Cause, to put it bluntly, there is no way that Tracker could have survived on as little sleep as she did—over as long a period as she had—if something close to this wasn’t true. Though, it didn’t stop her body from hating her in the mornings.

Tracker left her room, her stride as graceful and purposeful as it always was. Manufactured to be that way, of course, but it was the walk that got her into places she wasn’t meant to be in. No-one stopped someone who looked so perfectly comfortable being where they were.

In fact, Tracker was going to go into someplace she wasn’t meant to today.

Tracker slowed her walk as she passed by room two, Mirah’s room. She had been up with the extremely anxious girl for hours the night before. Tracker shook her head, pushing back the instinct to go in and check on her. She had things to do.

She strode towards the elevator and punched in the cafeteria floor.

Mirah was difficult for Tracker to handle. Not that Tracker was exactly a people person by nature, or a trained therapist or psychologist—but it didn’t take much to see that the girl was traumatized to hell and back.

Last night, Mirah had talked to her more than Tracker had heard her talk before, and almost surely more than Mirah had in years. Tracker had encouraged this as best she could, of course. For whatever reason, Mirah seemed to feel comfortable around her. While it was uncomfortable to be subject to the scattered, inconsistent and sometimes downright incoherent thoughts of someone as wounded as Mirah, Tracker found herself unable to separate emotionally from the situation.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done so before. She’d been a spy on multiple occasions, fucking over people who had trusted her. She’d done work for people she knew weren’t good people, knowing that her actions were contributing to a ghastly tapestry of their creation, just to see a bigger number in her bank account. She’d been a lot younger back then, and she’d never forgive herself for those years of ‘enlightened’ neutrality.

As if there is such thing as neutrality in a world like this.

Tracker strode out of the elevator, her sights set on the other end of the cafeteria, a set of white, handle-less double doors next to a long service window with a clean metal counter. It was the very early morning, and there was likely no-one even awake, beside those who had stayed up from the night before, training their little hearts out like good trainees.

Within moments she reached the double doors and pushed her way in and walking around a corner. She found the kitchen mostly empty, not entirely empty, otherwise she wouldn’t be here before any reasonable person was awake.

“Well, hello there, lover boy.” Tracker said in the smarmiest voice she could muster without sounding cartoonish. In the far corner of the room, there was a single man whose head rose from his workstation to look towards her.

Tracker hadn’t expected a chef—no, the Chef—to be so… strikingly beautiful. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but a man so pretty that she’d believe he was a woman, if he weren’t so tall? Not on the list, no.

The man put down his knife, quickly washed his hands, and walked over towards Tracker with a confused look on his face. As he drew nearer, the man was only confirmed to be even more gorgeous than she had thought.

His face was long, but angled, making his features androgenous by nature—his pale, almost porcelain skin only complementing his facial structure further. His inky dark hair was glistening with a tasteful amount of natural oil, the hair pulled back perfectly without a loose strand. Then, as the man turned back towards his kitchen, she got a look at the intricate bun that it was pulled into.

Tracker had always liked long hair, on herself and on men, but the man before her put anything she could naturally grow to shame. If he let it out of that ludicrously complex bun—complete with braids strategically placed to look like a blooming flower—she had no doubt that it would be longer than, or as long as she was tall.

As the celestially beautiful man came to stand directly in front of her, she had to look up to meet his eye. He wasn’t as tall as Ajax, thankfully, but was only down a few inches from the gigantic Greek mountain. Though, Chef gave the distinct illusion of towering height with being so thinly built, despite the clear definition on his pale arms as he stood in front of her.

Chef, who had been standing in front of the mixed Indian-Caucasian lady for almost a full twenty seconds, raised a dark eyebrow questioningly. Tracker pulled herself from her mind and reconstructed her passive guise before continuing.

“You are Chef, correct?” She asked uselessly, desperately trying to rebuild the script of what she was going to say in her mind. The man nodded hesitantly; eyebrow still raised—regarding the intruding woman with a mild wariness.

“Then you must know out mutual friend, Mirah?” The tall, willowy man jolted with surprise, his eyebrows shooting upwards towards his hairline. He quickly turned to a nearby bench and grabbed a notepad and pen, his hands a blur across the paper, before he turned back to Tracker, the notepad held directly in front of her face.

How is she? Is she okay?

She looked at the notepad oddly, confused why he’d write before talking.

“I was with her for a few hours after that, talking with her. I don’t think she’s okay, but she’s surviving.” The man let out a heavy breath, one so pronounced that it was almost comical. She held back the giggle, asking a question instead.

“Why’d you write on the notepad?” She asked, dumbly, before she quickly amended, “If you don’t mind me asking.” The man looked at her, and with a look of realisation on his face, crossed his index fingers over his elegantly thin lips.

Chef was mute. With a dawning realisation and a hot shame, Tracker stammered out an apology, but the captivating man just smiled and waved a hand dismissively at her. Then it hit her. She almost smacked herself for how dumb she was being.

“Do you know Auslan?” She asked tentatively. The mute chef turned to her, surprised.

With a simple hand sign, he asked; ‘Do you?’

“Really poorly.” Tracker pulled her mind back to years ago, when she had a friend in high school who tried to teach her, though she never got close to fluency.

She tried to sign; ‘I sign badly.’ His face lit up into a full smile, his perfect white teeth showing just behind his light pink lips. Tracker readied herself to ask Chef more about how he knew about Mirah’s mental state, and his link, and even why he’d singled her out to help Mirah, but the double doors to the kitchen opened just behind them.

“Hey Chef!” The boisterous voice called, before stopping, “Who’s this?” She turned to see a much shorter Asian man, his arms far too long for his height, hanging just below his knees.

Chef turned to the man and let out a peal of rapid-fire signs, so fast that Tracker could barely catch them. By the time he was done with the elaborate finger work, she’d lost what the first few had said at all. The Asian man looked Tracker up and down suspiciously, before shrugging nonchalantly and sauntering into the kitchen.

“Eh, fair enough.”

Tracker turned to Chef with concern but was met with a wry grin on the comely man’s face. He sent a look down towards his hands, signalling her to pay attention to them and she hastily obliged. He signed the sentence slowly and methodically, making sure each and every action was visible and understandable for Tracker’s untrained eye.

“Talk about this, not now. Breakfast rush I start prep for. Us talk, different time?”

Tracker scrunched her face in concentration as she translated the man’s signing into mentally understandable sentences. As she chewed her lip, she finally decoded it within her mind and looked up to reply, seeing the enthrallingly beautiful man staring at her with a small, sly grin. She flushed with embarrassment. He turned to pick up the notepad.

“Uh, yes! I would like to talk to you. Whenever you’re free?” She said, stumbling over herself to display that she did understand him.

The tall man turned back to her with a big smile but stopped for a moment, searching his mind.

“Tomorrow after eleven?” Tracker understood this instantly and nodded.

“See you then!” She said, before turning on her heel and marching woodenly out of the double doors, continuing her march towards the elevators, ignoring the smattering of students now appearing in their allotted seating. She took the elevator up to the eight floor, entered her room, turned to the nearest wall, and thumped her forehead into it repeatedly.

Never in her unspecified number of years on this earth had she floundered that hard in front of someone. She didn’t even get any of the information she was looking for out of it! Tracker was so flushed with embarrassment that she could feel the heat radiating from her skin, making even her darker brown skin pink with blush.

“Oh. My. God, Tracker.” Tracker cursed herself. She’d been practically drooling over the man the entire time she’d been there! And it wasn’t even the cute ‘I’m sort-of slyly checking you out’, it was a full on, dead-brain, zombie-looking-at-a-juicy-brain sort of checking you out. Tracker groaned wordlessly for a moment before it hit her.

Was that meeting supposed to be a date?

And suddenly, there was a whole new assortment of anxieties assailing Tracker’s mind that morning.

Ajax sat at his table at the usual time he’d make his way down to the cafeteria. He was waiting on his standard poached eggs and bacon on toast. Today, though, he was preoccupied.

The day before, Willem had given Ajax a little toy for training. A shiny silver metal ball that fit comfortably within his huge palm, with a small display in its side. It was an almost insultingly simple device, all things considered. It was a grip strength reader, rated up to multiple tonnes worth of force.

Ajax felt at the axe that hung on his hip, silently asking for its power. It responded sluggishly, almost as if it were sleeping, and when Ajax tried to crush metal ball, the granted strength was pitiful. It beeped harshly, displaying ’82.7kg’. Ajax sighed deeply, his best had been just over one-hundred, and his worst had been only a few hundredths away from sixty. That was exactly why Willem had given Ajax this little, infuriating ball. To try and make the power granted more consistent.

Ajax let the ball and its numbers slip his mind for a moment, deciding to survey the room. ‘People watching’ as Aaliyah had so… bluntly put it. Imagine his surprise when he saw a collection of faces he’d never have expected to see down in the cafeteria at this hour.

A boy, just a few inches below Ajax’s own height, blonde with blue eyes, perpetual conniving, hateful smirk on his lips.

A much shorter, stony looking Asian man whose training uniform hugged tightly to his muscled form, a cold sneer gracing his inelegant features.

Another kid, only a little taller than his well-muscled comrade, who always wore a showy gold and silver hoodie with a branded beanie over his oily, medium length hair.

They were one of the two sets of gang kids here, according to Aaliyah. The other set were nobodies, but these three? They were the big boys. All expenses paid luxury at their family—and the gang’s—behest. There was a fourth in their group, a quiet, pudgy kid that looked about as uncomfortable as you’d hope any normal person would be in that group.

But, as Ajax passively watched the three that radiated their unpleasantness, he realised that they were sitting at the wrong table. The very same table that his amorphous, purple coloured acquaintance sat at. Ajax craned his neck to get a better look at the situation.

Scratch that; that his amorphous, purple coloured acquaintance was sitting at.

It was without thought that Ajax stood up, staring at the group as they loudly conversed between themselves, and as they touched, prodded, slapped and punched the target of their vileness. The target themselves was pulled tightly into a compact form, the normal light and pleasant purple was dark and cloudy, with each time they were touched their surface would shock an unpleasant blue.

Ajax’s hand wrapped around the little silver ball and squeezed. After but a moment, it loudly beeped, drawing the attention of one of the boys, whose eyes met with an expression of smouldering rage. Ajax gently placed the silver ball down on his table and began his walk over to that table.

He didn’t need to check the number that it displayed on its side.

He knew it was high.