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SGS Headquarters were dark and quiet. Sakura hefted her Accellular thoughtfully while she stared at the moving screen. "I know you're watching," she said aloud.
The pattern of polygons configuring and reconfiguring themselves on the screen flickered before resolving into the form of Mister Voice. "Well, then, please refrain from damaging my screen. Again."
Sakura ignored the peevish computer-generated voice. "I apologize for the lapse in my reports," she said evenly. She brandished a sealed manilla envelope. "I have a full account written up if you would care to read it."
Reading the body language of a stylized drill with arms wasn't the easiest thing Sakura had ever done, but something about the way it bounced suggested unhappiness. "So send it electronically. The way you sent the others."
Sakura laid the folder on the table at the center of the room and sat facing the screen. "I was hoping to speak to you. Face-to-face. It's been a while, hasn't it."
Mister Voice's mustaches turned downwards. "We are face-to-face. I'm not actually a teenage girl."
Sakura wished she could meet the eyes of the person she was talking to, but who knew which camera Giordana was using to watch her. Nothing for it: she leveled a glare at the screen instead. "At this point, that cartoon looks much more childish than anything you could do in a human body."
The drill bounced sharply, looking like nothing so much as an irritated stomp. "Fine. I'll be a minute."
It was closer to ten minutes, which was better than Sakura had feared. Giordana's face had sharpened in the many months since they had seen each other face-to-face, staggeringly older compared to how unchanged her teammates were—apart from Masumi's hair, of course.
"Well?" Giordana sat across the table and dragged the folder close but didn't open it. Sakura hadn't lied; compared to the girl sitting in front of her, the animated drill was openly emotional and easy to read.
"I am sorry I stopped writing right after you told me," Sakura said honestly. "It wasn't exactly something I meant to do."
***
The file was the most redundantly encrypted thing she had ever seen, and at first Sakura thought that must be because of the engine modifications included. They were, admittedly, brilliant and potentially life-saving, so she would happily spend the required hours making them, but SGS headquarters had sent the design for a cannon that would work for her in vacuum and the changes necessary to link it to the GoGoVoyager in basic commercial encryption. (She tried not to blame the original Giordana for having stored the designs for his parallel engines in plain text; it wasn't his fault that Renaissance Italy hadn't had electronic encryption, or that Satoru had opened Giordana's notes in plain sign of the enemy.) The point was—Sakura hauled her mind back on target—that using one of their precious, limited number of shared keys for engine modifications seemed a little overboard.
Then she had reached the typos in that brief paragraph about basing these modifications off of Leon Giordana's old ideas. Leona Giordana didn't make such mistakes; every time she interfaced with someone who knew the person behind Mister Voice, she was constantly proving that a high-school girl could be the chief engineer and planner behind an organization like SGS. It had taken weeks for Sakura to coax her into adding personal notes to her letters. There was no way she would be so careless as to include typos in her still stiff and uncomfortable notes.
Sakura needed two days to recall a conversation shortly before she and Satoru left the Earth about the potential in using the stroke count of kanji to indicate line number and word in a substitution code. She needed another day to find their last discussion of books with unusually many page references from Giordana, collect all the books, and parse the message.
The message was short for something so elaborate. "I am Leon Giordana, reborn into my descendant's body, memories and experience intact."
Sakura promised herself one more day to understand that the message was true, not a mistranslation or reading too deeply into simple mistakes, before she would write back to Giordana. The evil kenpō master's spirit took her over that night instead, and all she could do was hide in a corner of her mind and try to hoard any of her secrets that he hadn't already stripped away.
***
"You were possessed, I'm aware," Giordana replied. "I doubt you did it intentionally."
Sakura smiled. It wasn't as genuine as she would have liked. "Can I continue to call you Giordana-san, or would you rather I used something else?"
Giordana blinked, not quite indifferent anymore. "Giordana is fine. It's been my name for a long time."
"How long? Have you always been a Giordana?"
A headshake. "Too easy to track. The only reason I could do it this time is because, well," Giordana gestured at long black hair and clearly female tailoring, "no one would make the leap. I wouldn't have dared until recently: I needed the flexibility to control SGS."
Sakura grinned, and thankfully that felt a lot more natural. "Were you waiting for animation and cybernetics or gender equality?"
Giordana's laugh sounded almost startled. "Both. Even gender equality wouldn't help me much when I looked five years old."
"Is it worth it to be a Giordana again?"
Sakura watched Giordana consider whether to brush her off or answer seriously and had just resigned herself to nothing genuine when Giordana sighed. "Do you know how much has changed since fifteenth century Florence? Even if I tried to be Leon Giordana again, I wouldn't be the man I was raised to be. My words earlier aside, I didn't tell you because I wanted you to treat me differently. You've been more capable than most of treating me as both Mister Voice and Leona Giordana. Just...do that. Please."
Sakura nodded. "Well, then, I have a lot to tell you in person before Satoru and I take off again." She slid around the table, tugged the envelope out from under Giordana's fingers and broke the seal. Then she sneaked an arm around Giordana's shoulders and hugged. "The reports are for SGS, but the stories are for you."