Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The tote bag was the first lie.

It was a nice tote bag. Heavy canvas, the Blue Lock crest embroidered in actual thread, a little woven tag that said MADE FOR THE FUTURE'S BEST. Isagi Yoichi carried it off the shuttle with her suitcase rattling behind her over the cobblestones and thought, embarrassingly, about how her mom was going to love the tote bag.

The second lie was the gates. They looked exactly like the brochure, which should have been comforting and instead felt like being catfished by a building.

Inside the tote: a handbook, a water bottle, a schedule, a protein bar, and a coupon for one complimentary welcome smoothie at the Apex Café. Retail value, fourteen dollars. Isagi had never drunk fourteen dollars in her life. That was, like, three tacos. She put the coupon in her pocket like it was an unfound treasure.

The atrium was already full when she got there, and it was making a sound she'd never heard before — three hundred girls discovering, at the exact same time, what they were worth.

Why? Because there was a board.

Of course there was a board. It took up the whole far wall, a screen the size of a movie theater's, and on it, in clean unbothered font, was the entire first-year class. Ranked with their student ID photos. Isagi's eyes went to the top first, like everyone's did, like iron filings to a magnet:

1. Itoshi Rin.
2. Mikage Reo.
3. Ryusei Shidou.

"That's Itoshi Rin," a girl nearby whispered, in the tone people use for celebrities. "Sae Itoshi's little sister."

"Then why's she tagged Sovereign and not Apex?"

Nobody answered that.

Number nine was a girl named Nagi Seishiro whose photo appeared to have been taken... mid-nap. Someone was already crying, loudly, with the slight theatrical lag of a person checking whether the crying was working. Someone else was filming her own reaction to her own rank. A girl in front of Isagi said, "Who even is three hundred?" and laughed, and Isagi thought: somebody is. Somebody is standing right here in this room with you, breathing your air.

She looked for herself alphabetically at first, which was adorable of her, in retrospect. Then she understood it was ranked, and her eyes started the long scroll down. Past the 100s, where the photos started looking less polished. Past the 200s, where the crowd noise thinned into a bad silence, the kind of silence that pools. Sunday-night silence. The kind you get before a Monday nobody's ready for.

299. Isagi Yoichi.

Her ID photo was the one where the photographer had said "ready?" and then taken it before she could answer. She looked startled. She looked-—she looked like a girl who had just been told her number.

The weird thing — the thing she'd turn over later in the dark, was that her first instinct wasn't to cry. It was to look at everyone else. To check who was performing. To note that the crying girl's eyes were dry at the corners, that the selfie girl had checked her angles before her feelings, that the laughter near the bottom of the board had a specific, familiar pitch: the sound of people locating the one person below them and feeling, briefly, medically, better.

Shame wasn't a side effect of the board. Shame was the board's job. She understood that immediately.

Then a volunteer with a senior's armband pressed a lanyard into her hand. "Wear it at all times! It's your keycard!"

It was her keycard. It was also her rank, printed in a font size visible from across a room. Isagi watched the volunteer's eyes flick down to the number, do the entire math of not-caring, and flick back up. The woman's smile didn't change. That was the frightening part. It was already calibrated.

Isagi escaped to a bench outside and did what any normal, well-adjusted person would do.

She lied to her mother.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

Isagi typed 299 out of 300 and stared at it. The cursor blinked. Her mom had framed the acceptance letter — it was hanging in the hallway at home, between a graduation photo and a drawing Isagi had made when she was seven.

She deleted the message letter by letter and sent a heart instead.

Delivered.

Genesis Hall was the last stop on the shuttle route, and the driver had to think about it. "Genesis?" he'd said. "...oh. Yeah."

The building sat at the far edge of campus, past the athletics complex, past the good dorms, past a café that smelled like money and vanilla. Five floors. One elevator, wearing an OUT OF ORDER sign that had been there long enough to develop its own fungus. In the lobby, a screen displayed the hall's collective point pool — GENESIS: 500 — and under it someone had already taped a sticky note that said lol.

A banner over the common room said WELCOME GENESIS! in a font that had been chosen... quickly.

Isagi's suitcase lost a wheel on the second step of the stairs, because of course it did, and she was standing there negotiating with it when a hand closed around the handle and lifted the whole thing like it was a tote bag.

"Second floor?" the girl said. She had a boxer-build and a lanyard that read 291 — Kunigami Rensuke, which she wore facing out, which Isagi immediately understood was a decision.

"Yeah. Thanks — you don't have to—"

"It's fine." Kunigami took the stairs two at a time, suitcase and all, and set it down outside 214 like she was delivering something. Then she saw Isagi looking at her lanyard and her jaw did a small, controlled thing. "Where you start isn't where you end up," she said. "That's the whole point of a ranking that updates. Work hard. Be decent. It sorts itself out."

She said it the way people say things they need. Isagi had heard that tone before — it was the tone her mom used about money. It wasn't a lie, exactly. It was a load-bearing belief.

"Right," Isagi said, instead of any of that.

In the common room, a girl with a clipboard was handing out name tags.

Name tags. In a school that had ranked them all publicly an hour ago, this girl was making name tags, and Isagi honestly could not tell if it was the kindest thing she'd ever seen or the scariest.

"Hi! I'm Kira — Kira Ryosuke!" The smile was warm, practiced, chosen. Isagi had watched her make it three times now, once per arrival, identical each time, like a smile pulled from a rack that morning. "I know name tags are dorky, but if we're all living together, we should at least be a team about it. We're all in the same boat. If Genesis sticks together, we all rise together."

283 — Kira Ryosuke. Football Tactics and Performance Analysis.

Same major as Isagi. She didn't know why that felt like a warning.

On the floor by the broken vending machine, a small girl sat cross-legged with the student handbook and a highlighter, serenely annotating. Her lanyard said 300 — Igaguri Gurimu, and everyone who walked past her did a little wince, the way you wince at a dead girl in the first ten minutes of a movie.

"You're—" Isagi stopped herself.

"Last. Yeah." Igaguri didn't look up. She highlighted something. "Section twelve, subsection c. An enrolled student can't be removed without a formal review, and the review board doesn't convene until after add-drop. That's six weeks. And I filed a religious accommodation request this morning, which opens a mandatory mediation window."

"...So you're safe?"

"I'm pending," Igaguri said, with deep calm. "It's different. Pending is a place and I live there now." She finally looked up. "God is slow. LEGALLY."

Isagi decided she liked her, which was, she was starting to realize, a thing she did with her face before her brain finished voting.

A girl with long red hair went past the doorway taking the stairs one at a time, jaw set like a locked door, a brace visible under her skirt hem. Kunigami, coming back down, watched her go with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and failing at it in a specific direction. Somewhere down the hall, someone was yelling at the vending machine in a way that suggested a personal history.

Room 214 had two bunks, one window that opened with encouragement, and a girl hanging upside down off the top bunk like a bat in a school uniform.

"You're the one from the atrium," the girl said, by way of hello.

Isagi looked up at her. "You're going to get a headache."

"You looked at everyone else first." The girl dropped off the bunk, landed wrong, didn't care. Her lanyard was inside out and covered in pen doodles; when she flipped it, it said 296 — Bachira Meguru. "When the board went up. Everyone else looked at themselves — obviously — and then at whoever was standing closest, to figure out how embarrassed they were allowed to be. You skipped step one. You were reading the room like Patrick Jane!”

Isagi's face did something. She could feel it do something.

"I decided in the atrium that you were the most interesting person here," Bachira said, cheerfully, "and then I found out we're roommates, which means the school is occasionally correct. When you saw your number, what did you do first?"

"...Looked at everyone else."

"Correct." Bachira grinned, and it was the first uncalibrated smile Isagi had seen all day. It was a little much. It had too many teeth and was a little crooked at the canines. "Everyone here is so busy being scared that they forgot to be hungry. But you, you're hungry. I can tell."

"I'm ranked two hundred and ninety-ninth."

"That's not what I asked about." Bachira flopped backward onto the bottom bunk — Isagi's bunk, technically, but it seemed like a losing argument — and kicked her feet against the wall in a slow, happy rhythm. "It's okay. I like hungry people. Hungry people are honest." A pause. "We're going to be friends. I decided."

"You decided."

"Mm. You're interesting. That's rarer than smart."

The welcome assembly seated them by hall, which meant by worth, which nobody said out loud and everybody understood. Apex got padded seats completed with reclining in the front rows. Genesis got folding chairs in the back, near the exit, with a sightline that felt as if it was the cheaper seat in a football stadium.

The girl with golden hair dyed blue at the ends who wore a student council sash took the stage first, and the temperature of the room seemed to change.

Third-year. Apex. Michael Kaiser, student council president, the exchange student who'd arrived two years ago and never left the top of anything, the one whose single blue heart had eleven thousand likes — smiled at three hundred first-years like she had personally prepped them for butchering in the slaughterhouse.

"On behalf of the student council," Kaiser said, "we are so excited to watch you grow."

Watch was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Somewhere up front, a dark-haired third-year turned and stared down a first-year who'd whispered during the speech, and the whispering stopped like it had been switched off.

Then the lights dimmed, and Headmaster Ego Jinpachi walked out, and the scary thing about him was how calm he was. No theatrics. He had the posture of a man reading a grocery list, and the grocery list was them.

"The world outside these gates will tell you that potential is infinite," he said. "That everyone blooms in their own season. That comparison is the thief of joy." A pause. "The world outside these gates is being polite."

A slide came up behind him. THE FIVE PILLARS OF EGO: 1. Ambition. 2. Adaptability. 3. Ruthlessness. 5. Hunger.

Somewhere to Isagi's left, a girl whispered, "What happened to four?" and the girl next to her whispered, "*don't.*"

"At Blue Lock, we do not insult you with comfort. We measure. Your rank is not a judgment — judgments are personal, and I am not interested in you personally. Your rank is a measurement. It will determine your meals, your housing, your access to internships, equipment, and recommendations. It will update. Some of you will rise." He said the next part like it was the same sentence. "Some of you will be documented."

The screen behind him filled with numbers: APEX 10,000. SOVEREIGN 5,000. HOLLOW 2,500. VANGUARD 1,000. GENESIS 500. The back rows sat very still in a way that had nothing to do with discipline.

"As of this morning," Ego said, "your futures are measurable. Make them worth measuring."

He walked off without waiting for applause, which came anyway, late and confused, the way people clap when the plane lands—-relieved, a little embarrassed, already pretending they hadn't been scared.

Isagi didn't clap. Three seats down, Bachira did it though. Once, slowly, delighted, like she was applauding the concept of applause itself.

In the Apex rows, Itoshi Rin wasn't clapping either. She was looking at the empty stage like it had said something wrong. This, Isagi filed.

At the edge of the stage, a woman in a dark suit — not faculty-precise, faculty-*tired* — looked at the back rows the way you look at a dent you've decided not to report. Then she gathered her folder and followed Ego out.

Kaiser returned to the podium for exactly one sentence. "Dinner is at six! Wear your lanyards." She smiled like the lanyards had been her idea.

Dinner was the first lesson.

Okay, so — the dining hall was called The Table, which was the kind of name you give something when you intend to be quoted about it. It did not have tiers of seating. It had tiers of food, which was worse, because seating is where you are and food is what you're worth.

Apex's line had a chef. An actual chef, with a jacket and everything, searing salmon and making eye contact. Sovereign's had a pasta station. Hollow's had a theme — the theme appeared to be "bowls." Vanguard's had a salad bar and an apology. Genesis's line had a heat lamp, a tray of rice, a tray of curry, and a laminated sign that said TODAY'S FUEL, which Isagi felt was a word you used when you're at war.

The food itself wasn't bad. Which made it feel almost worse. It was fine the way a bus station sandwich is fine.

Above each line, a screen showed the hall's point pool. GENESIS: 500. While Isagi watched, it ticked down to 499, and a line of small print appeared beneath it: −1: FACILITIES SURCHARGE (ELEVATOR REPAIR ASSESSMENT).

"That elevator's been broken since July," said the girl behind her, with the quiet fury of a person who has already had this argument with several adults. Her lanyard said 277 — Raichi Jingo. "They're charging us to fix their elevator."

"Section nine," said Igaguri, loading her tray with the serene efficiency of a woman preparing for winter. "Maintenance costs are socialized across the affected hall. We're paying for the elevator and also, technically, for the sign that says the elevator is broken."

"I want it noted," Raichi said, "that I am being normal about this."

"You're vibrating," said Kunigami.

"I'm being normal at it."

Down the table, the rest of Genesis was introducing itself the way people do in lifeboats. A tall girl named Gagamaru ate in total silence with the focus of someone fueling an expedition. A girl named Imamura kept apologizing to the curry. A girl named Naruhaya had a napkin and a pen and the expression of a person discovering, line by line, what things cost.

Chigiri — the red-haired girl from the stairs, 264 — Chigiri Hyoma — sat alone at the end, moving rice around with her chopsticks in small, precise patterns, eating none of it. Kunigami's eyes kept going over there and coming back, like a moth with self-esteem.

Kira moved along the table like a perfected routine. A remembered name here, a touched shoulder there, warmth distributed evenly, democratically, thoroughly. When she reached Isagi she paused, and Isagi watched her clock the lanyard number and then very visibly not react to it, which was its own kind of reaction.

"Isagi, right? Football Tactics and Performance Analysis — same as me!" The smile came off the rack, freshly pressed. "Genesis girls have to stick together. Seriously. If you've got my back, I've got yours."

"Sure," Isagi said.

"Great!" Kira moved on, and Bachira watched her go with her head tilted, like a cat watching a ceiling fan.

"She's nice huh," Bachira said, in the tone of a person filing something.

"She's nice alright," Isagi agreed, in the tone of a person filing the same thing.

Igaguri, across from them, folded two dinner rolls into a napkin and then into her blazer pocket, unbothered. "It’s legal," she said, catching Isagi looking. “Don’t worry, I checked.”

Lights-out was at ten, announced by a chime that sounded expensive even in Genesis, where nothing else did.

Isagi lay on the bottom bunk — Bachira had migrated to the top one at some point without discussion which felt like a treaty, and her phone lit up in the dark.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

She set the phone face-down on her chest. Above her, Bachira was being quiet, which seemed physically difficult for her — a held note, a parked storm.

"Isagi," Bachira said finally, to the ceiling.

"Mm."

"When he said the part about being documented, the whole room got smaller. I watched it happen. Shoulders in, chins down — three hundred people flinching in slow motion." The bunk creaked. Bachira's head appeared over the edge, upside down, hair pooling toward the floor, eyes very dark and very awake. "You leaned in."

"I did not."

"It was like he'd finally said something in your language. Everyone's lying awake right now doing math about their number and points and whatever. You're doing math about them. I can hear it. It's loud."

"Go to sleep, Bachira."

"Mm." A rustle, retreating back to the hard mattress. Then, softer, pleased, like a secret being put away for later: "You sound like her already."

"Like who?"

But Bachira was done talking, and the room filled up with the particular silence of a building full of girls lying awake doing math.

Isagi stayed awake the longest. She couldn't shut out anything in her head: the board, the lanyards, Kira's rack of smiles, Kunigami's load-bearing decency, Igaguri's fortress of paperwork, the way three hundred girls had all looked at the top of the board first —- every single one of them. Her mind was running nonstop.

1. Itoshi Rin.

Isagi had looked at the top first too. She'd just done it the way you look at weather. Not because you can stop it, but because you're going to have to walk through it.

She got the handbook out of the tote bag 

her mom was going to love the tote bag 

and found a pen, and on the first blank page, by the light under the door, she wrote down everything she'd seen. Names. Numbers. Who performed. Who watched. Who was "hungry" as Bachira put it.

299 wasn't a verdict. Verdicts were personal, and the headmaster wasn't interested in her personally. He said so himself.

It was a starting position with a view of everyone.

At midnight, the board didn't update. She checked twice.

Then she went back to her list.