The Knight Commander Falls into the Vice-Commander's Trap

It was that evening, after the sun had gone down.

Morning training had been survived on my voice alone.

On any other day I would have been the first one out on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the training yard, sweat-soaked, crossing wooden swords with the knights under my command. When that same commander stood on the platform with her arms folded and did nothing but call the cadence, the knights kept turning their heads up toward me even as they ran. Their puzzled stares pricked me one by one, until the looking itself began to sting.

It was Carmilla who drew those stares away.

"The Commander overdid her dawn training, just a little."

"Today she'll only be calling the drills. I'm a mage, so I can't run with you, but I'll help from the side."

Carmilla took her place beside the platform and smiled, and only then did the knights nod and fall back into their ranks. With the vice-commander explaining in my stead, they all seemed perfectly satisfied.

I ought to have been grateful. And yet, hearing words that should have been mine come out of Carmilla's mouth, I couldn't shake the feeling that my place had been taken from me.

In the end I never drew the sword at my hip. Valerion swordsmanship was meant to be swung on muscle alone, without mana, so a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blocked circuit was no reason I couldn't use a blade. The problem was my body. Since I had poured my blood out at dawn, strength refused to settle properly in my fingertips, and every time I closed my hand around the hilt my fingers trembled, fine and relentless. If I dropped the sword in front of the knights, it felt as though everything would be exposed on the spot.

In the afternoon I shut myself in the office and buried my head in the stacks of paperwork. Even a shaking hand could still hold a pen. For as long as I was writing my name down the lines for approval, I could forget the tremor in my fingers. For someone who had failed to do a single thing properly all day, that was the only comfort that came.

Barely a month remained until the commemorative festival. There was no room to put anything off, not even by a day. So when the day's work ended and Carmilla said we ought to go to the workshop that very night, I had no choice but to nod.

I drew the gray cloak Carmilla had given me down until it shadowed me to the brows, and walked the workshop street on the southern edge of the capital. The rasp of metal being cut and the stink of burning oil pooled in every alley, and each breath scraped my throat raw.

My legs were heavy. A body that had bled at dawn less than a day ago fit me no better than borrowed armor, hanging loose and wrong against my skin. Even a few steps I once would have taken in a single breath set my calves shaking. That the body they called the Sword Princess could collapse like this in a day was more wretched than the pain itself.

"Just a little farther, Commander."

Carmilla walked half a step ahead. Whenever I staggered, the hand that lightly braced my elbow was nothing but tender. I was grateful. Grateful—and yet every time that hand touched me, the nape of my neck went strangely cold.

"You never know where word might leak, in a large workshop."

"I'll take you somewhere I know. A friend of mine runs it. She knows how to keep her mouth shut."

At the end of the alley, beneath a sign scorched black, stood a worn iron door.

It wasn't large, but its craftsmanship was said to rank among the finest in the capital. More than once, in the knight order's dining hall, I had overheard the rumor that nobles came sneaking here at night to have the faces of their dead children copied.

With a long, grating creak, the door opened, and hot air struck me full in the face. On shelves that reached the ceiling, arms and legs and heads hung in rows. Faces with no eyes set into them seemed to look down at me all at once, and before I knew it I had drawn the cloak tight around myself.

"Who's there, at this hour..."

From beyond the workbench, a woman with her goggles pushed up on her forehead lifted her head. She looked about Carmilla's age: short brown hair, grease smeared all the way to her cheeks. The technician beside her, a ledger in her hands, stopped her pen and looked our way.

The woman's eyes went to Carmilla first. For the briefest moment, something seemed to pass between them. At the time I took it for the sort of glance friends exchange in greeting. Only then did her gaze drop to my waist. Between the folds of the cloak, the hilt of the sword I wore out of habit jutted into view—a hilt engraved with the Valerion crest.

"...Well, I'll be."

The woman shoved her chair back and shot to her feet.

"Isn't this Lady Adelia, the Sword Princess? Commander of the Second Knight Order, all the way out in a shabby hole like this."

There had been no point in drawing the cloak down to my brows. Heat flared all the way to my ears. I covered it with a dry cough.

"...I'd appreciate it if you kept your voice down. This is a private matter."

"Ah, yes, yes. Of course. Rita, bar the door."

The technician called Rita slid the bolt home without a word of protest. It struck me as a little odd that the commander of a knight order could arrive late at night and not rattle them in the slightest, but she had said the place was discreet, so I let it pass as the habit of people used to handling their clients' secrets.

The woman wiped her hands on her apron and came closer.

"I'm Nina, master of the workshop. Carmilla and I were classmates at the Academy."

"She joined the knight order and hasn't sent me a single word since."

"That's our technician, Rita. Taking measurements and writing them down is her job, so don't mind her."

Rita dipped only her head, the ledger still in her hands. Nina told me not to mind, but it meant one more pair of eyes would see my secret. That one extra pair felt unreasonably heavy.

"Nina."

Carmilla called her name, low. Nina shrugged and smiled at me. It was not the smile of someone greeting a customer. It was the face a person wears when something they have been waiting for finally arrives. That face snagged on me, strangely.

"So, what kind of android are you here to have made? If it's a training dummy, we've got a model with the mana-stone output cranked up to a knight's level."

"No, it's..."

My mouth wouldn't open. The request—a doll with my face—rolled on my tongue like a stone. I, a knight commander, was meant to order my own counterfeit with my own mouth.

Then Carmilla stepped forward.

"We'd like an android copied exactly from the Commander's appearance."

Nina's mouth fell open. For a split second the thought crossed me that it gaped far too wide for genuine surprise, but I didn't hold onto it.

"...Pardon? The Commander?"

"Down to a single hair. Down to a single mole. Stand her beside the Commander and no one should be able to tell which one is real."

I hurriedly caught Carmilla's sleeve. Even a tight-lipped friend—I hadn't expected her to say it so bluntly.

"Carmilla."

"It's all right, Commander. I came prepared."

Nina folded her arms and clicked her tongue.

"Carmilla, you know how this works. Copying someone else's appearance is a serious crime. Even for you, I can't put my neck on the—"

Instead of answering, Carmilla drew a document from inside her coat and spread it on the workbench.

The strokes I had drawn with a trembling hand in the underground laboratory at dawn were still there, unchanged. Facing them again, the realization that I had done something that could not be undone pressed late and hard into the pit of my stomach.

Nina lifted the document and held it to the lamplight. Seal, date, signature. She traced it line by line with a finger, then looked up and glanced between me and the page.

"...Your own consent checks out."

"Yes."

My throat had locked, and the answer came out cracked. Nina set the document down and slowly licked her lips.

"To think I get to copy the Sword Princess's body. This is going to be the masterpiece of my life."

The masterpiece of her life.

Words that ought to have landed as praise sent a strange chill crawling up my spine.

Past the curtain at the back of the workshop, a round room opened. A silver circle was inscribed on the floor, and eight crystal resonance pillars stood in a ring around it. Each one flickered with a faint blue light, like a pulse. I felt as though I had stepped into the belly of something alive and breathing.

"This is the Exterior Inscription Array. It reads you down to a single line of skin."

Nina tapped a pillar with her palm, then said it as if it were nothing at all.

"Clothes all the way off, and stand in the center of the circle."

"...What?"

"All of them. Underwear too."

Rita touched the nib of her pen to the tip of her tongue and opened the ledger. Her hands moved without hesitation, as if she already knew what she would be writing.

I turned to look at Carmilla. She lowered her brows as if she were sorry. Only the corner of her mouth never quite came down.

"I told you, Commander. It has to match down to a single mole."

"And if the clothes tear at the festival? Surely that's better than having the nobles realize she's a fake."

No rebuttal came to me. While my head was still choosing words, my fingers went first to the cloak's ties. When I undid them, the cloak slid from my shoulders and fell to the floor. I unbuckled the sword belt. With every button of my shirt I loosened, I felt the three pairs of eyes follow my fingertips down, one notch at a time, against my bare skin.

"Taking your time, aren't you. Commander, it's like unwrapping a present."

Nina snickered from behind the crystal plate. Rita bit her lip, and her shoulders shook. I couldn't tell whether she was holding a laugh in or trying to be caught at it.

I had been drenched in blood dozens of times on the battlefield. I had bared my chest before army surgeons to have wounds stitched more times than I could count. And yet now my hands shook over a single button.

This wasn't treatment. This was being watched.

When the shirt came off, the workshop's heat licked my bare back. When I unwound the bandages binding my chest, the breasts that had been pressed flat spilled free, swaying.

"Whoa, you walk around bound up that tight? If the knights knew this size, you think any training would get done?"

At Nina's words Rita finally burst out laughing. She clapped the ledger over her mouth in a hurry, but her shoulders kept jumping. Her pen hesitated once, then scratched along again. I didn't need to ask what she had written.

I dragged my trousers and underwear down together. Better to be done with it quickly than to endure those eyes while I peeled them off one piece at a time.

"Just plain white. I figured the Sword Princess would be wearing something flashier."

"And it's worn through in places. No man in the picture, huh? Ha."

Nina nudged the underwear at my feet aside with the toe of her shoe. That single gesture made what I had been wearing feel like nothing more than a scrap of rag.

Once I was naked, the workshop's heat pressed down on me from above and the cold of the stone floor from below. The skin caught between them prickled and rose. The sensation of my nipples drawing tight and hard was so sharp that I couldn't bear knowing even that was fully visible to their eyes. I covered my breasts with one arm and my groin with the other hand.

"Commander, you'll have to lower your hands. Covered spots don't get inscribed."

Nina said it without taking her eyes off the crystal plate. The tone was less that of someone addressing a naked woman than of someone handling a part on the bench.

"...All right."

"Then put them down. Even the Sword Princess gets shy. Kind of cute."

Cute was no compliment. At those words, laughter soaked through them, my face burned hotter still.

I slowly lowered my arms and walked into the center of the circle. The moment my bare feet crossed the silver line, the crystal pillars lit all at once. A low hum rose, and a thread of blue light came down from the crown of my head—forehead, nose, lips. It passed my collarbones and stopped, slow, above my breasts. It was as if invisible fingers were picking their way across my skin, stitch by stitch.

"Rita, write this down. Height, five foot eight. Shoulder width... broad, the way a knight's ought to be. Bust..."

Rita copied the numbers Nina called, just as they came. The scratch of the pen drove into my ear like a needle.

"Areola about this wide—record the nipples while they're standing. Measure the usual size separately."

"Yes."

"You can see them standing, can't you? Nobody's even touched her and she's already like this. Commander, is it because you're cold? Or..."

Nina let the end of the sentence trail away, and Carmilla added a word with a small laugh.

"Commander, I think that's what happens when you get nervous."

I wanted to answer. But if I opened my mouth I knew my voice would crack, so I clenched my teeth and stared only at the ceiling. My face was on fire.

On the battlefield, this body had made its name. On a ledger, it was being taken apart into a handful of figures. And those figures would pass, whole and unaltered, from the tips of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that woman's fingers into the body of a doll.