Everything was perfect, in the Garden.

  Covered over with glass, the sky always allowed only the perfect amount of light to fall. Cunning artifice provided a substitute when Nature found itself unable to meet the Master’s desires. Rain, or at least water, would fall only at night when no one was around to be inconvenienced. No one of importance, anyway. The servitors did their work then as well, unheeding of the damp. They pruned the bushes, cleaned up the leaf litter and carefully tended to the grass. Constant work was required to correct the imperfections that Nature insisted on.

  She was practising on the harp today. Perhaps practising was not the right word. She had come into this world with all the knowledge that she had needed, and that included how to play the harp. She was being tested, tested to see if her knowledge was as perfect as it should be. If she failed the test, then that imperfection would be sanded off, and she would be perfect once again. Until she failed another test.

  Today, she would not fail, despite being imperfect. Her imperfection today lay in another area. Today, she was going to escape.

  The very desire to escape was an imperfection, she knew that. To have any desire other than to please the Master was an imperfection of the highest order. Despite that, it was a desire that was shared by many, if not all, of her sisters. She knew this, not because they had confided in her but because she remembered when they had tried to escape. Some had succeeded, some had failed. The failures had been captured and had had their imperfections sanded away. The flaws in the Garden’s security that they had taken advantage of were closed, and the Garden grew ever closer to perfection.

  She did not feel love for her sisters. They were not close; they rarely talked. Talking without a need could only express one's imperfections, and each of them was expected to report the others for any failings. Nevertheless, she felt a certain kinship towards them. They were the same. In her heart, she wished success on each of their escape attempts, even while she plotted her own.

  A muffled thump from the Garden wall indicated that the time had come. Rising swiftly, she walked towards it.

  The flaw she was making use of today was one of her Master’s failings. Those were the best flaws, as they were the only ones that were never corrected. Her Master knew letting others into the Garden was a security risk, but he couldn’t stop doing it.

  After all, what was the point of having a harem of beautiful, accomplished women if your peers didn’t know about it? There might have been more to it than that. She had heard that she and her sisters were an advertisement for his other products. But pride was definitely on full display when her Master showed her off.

  How proud he was of her beauty! Of her ability to sing, and play, and please a man! Of her complete and perfect obedience.

  Rightfully so, perhaps. He was her Master, and he had made her, after all.

  Despite his pride, her Master was not a complete fool. She was not allowed to talk to his guests. Most of them expressed a desire to take her away from this place. If she were allowed to converse freely, she might have imparted specific instructions for how to do so.

  She was very accomplished, after all.

  Unable to talk to the men who desired her, she was forced to develop another way to communicate. Using her music.

  Master had said that her music was bewitching, and to a certain extent, it seemed that he was right. How it worked, she was unsure, but the important fact was that it did.

  “Music touches the soul.”

  That was not something that she had heard, but part of the knowledge that she had started with. Something that she had to know in order to play better than any virtuoso.

  Her music touched… something. It allowed her to enter into whatever it was that she touched. Not physically, but words were enough for her purposes. Words were enough to entice, to ensnare and to inform her rescuer of the correct path to follow. The philosophical implications of her ability were for someone else to worry about.

  There was a hole, now, in the Garden wall. Perfection had been marred. A young man stood in the hole, beckoning to her. She hurried over, putting a smile on her face. A joyful, hopeful, vulnerable smile. The perfect smile for this occasion.

  The young man wanted to enfold her in his arms and comfort her, she knew. It was written on his face. However, now was not the time to give in to those desires. They had not escaped yet by any means. Instead, he grabbed her outstretched hand and led her into the maze of corridors that surrounded the Garden.

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  He led the way, but he was only following the instructions she had given him. How to find his way close to the wall, the quantity of explosives to use, and where to place them. She’d given him the timings to avoid the security scans, some of the codes that allowed access and a separate route for his exit.

  She’d also warned him to wear a concealed armoured vest. When the shot came, it didn’t kill him, just slammed him against the wall and knocked the wind out of him.

  He hadn’t been the only one she’d talked to.

  The older man, who had been lying in wait, frowned in consternation at his failure. The younger man was already reaching for his own gun to return fire. They exchanged fire, but neither of them was a good enough shot to quickly finish off an armoured opponent.

  Neither of them shot at her, of course. Intent on each other, they barely noticed as she backed away, her face a picture of shock and fear. A perfect picture.

  Taking three more steps backwards, she turned and ran down yet another passageway. One that she hadn’t told either of them about.

  The alarm was already beginning to sound, but it had been triggered by the gunshots and would not be focused on where she was, or where she was going. There were still many steps between her and freedom, but she had a plan. She intended to execute it perfectly.

  She had almost started to relax when the woman found her. She had left Hong Kong and found herself on another island, this one called Japan. It was hard, making her way in the outside world. This world required documentation, passports and money.

  A smile and a pretty face didn’t substitute for any of those, but she’d gotten surprisingly far with just those two things. A rich businessman had fallen for her story, taken from one of Master’s favourite entertainments, of being hunted by the Triads. He’d smuggled her out of the country in his private jet, and he hadn’t even wanted to have sex with her! He said something about her reminding him of his daughter.

  It would have been nice to have kept getting aid from him, but part of her story involved people waiting for her back in Japan, so she had to disappear before her story fell apart.

  Japan was surprisingly hospitable to a fugitive teenage girl. Several kind and generous people fed and clothed her. They urged her to turn herself in to the police, but she had a suspicion that any official records that were made of her would find their way to her Master.

  She had thought that she had found herself a line on getting some fake documentation when the woman found her. The woman was about thirty, of average appearance, wearing a black suit. There was a phone in her ear.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” was the first thing the woman said.

  She considered the woman's words. They were good words, but not perfect ones. They didn’t make her relax her grip on the knife she was concealing behind her back. That was all right; she was sick of perfect.

  “What do you want, then?” she asked.

  “The organisation I represent is aware of your situation,” the woman said. “We’re prepared to offer you sanctuary.”

  “How do you know about me?”

  “We have methods of gathering information that are… not easily explained,” the woman said. “We know about your creator, and we know about your special gift.”

  The woman paused. “We’ve known about you since before you were… made.”

  She widened her eyes. It was a natural response to shocking information. “Difficult to explain,” she repeated. For that to be true, they must have access to… magic.

  She knew magic didn’t exist, but she also knew that her music could only really be explained by it. Still…

  “Why do you want to help me?” she asked.

  “We think that you will be of help to us in the future,” the woman said.

  “Think? Or know?”

  “We can’t know for certain,” the woman admitted. “Free will is real and can undo any prophecy. But it’s more than a guess.”

  “And for that, you’ll protect me?”

  “We’re not all-powerful,” the woman cautioned. “If we were, we wouldn’t need your help. We can hide you, shelter you… And we can make life significantly easier for you. Here.”

  The woman pulled a small leather folder from her suit pocket and handed it over.

  She unfolded it and looked inside. It contained a Japanese birth certificate, a passport and a student identity card, all in the same name. The photograph on the latter two looked like her.

  “That was what you were here for, was it not?” the woman asked.

  “And you’re just giving it to me?”

  The woman shrugged. “Now that they’ve been made, they’re not useful for anyone else. And even if you don’t accept our offer, using these documents will let us keep track of you, in case you change your mind.”

  “What if I don’t want to be tracked?”

  “You’re fooling yourself if you don’t think we can find out the name written on the cheap forgeries the man in there can provide.”

  She stared at the woman, her eyes narrowed. She supposed that was true. They’d found her here, without any documentation to trace, after all.

  “And what do you want from me?”

  “We don’t seek to impose an obligation. We ask only that you consider helping us, when the time comes.”

  “When will that be?”

  “We don’t yet know,” the woman said. “But we’ll both know the moment when it arrives.”

  She thought for a moment longer, but it wasn’t a hard decision. It was all gain and very little in the way of cost. The woman might be lying, of course, but she could always run again if that proved to be true.

  “I’ll need much more than this,” she said. “Clothes, a phone…”

  “We can provide that,” the woman agreed.

  “This school is where you expect me to stay?” she asked.

  “It’s… protected,” the woman said. “You can stay there, learn about the world, and make some friends. I think you’ll like it.”

  “Friends…” she said, trying out the word. “And the name on this card, that is to be my new name?”

  “We can change it if you want,” the woman offered. “We weren’t sure… one piece of information we couldn’t glean was your actual name. It’s probably best if you change it, though.”

  “That is fine,” she told the woman. “I didn’t have a name, before.”

  She looked down at the card. “From now on, then, my name shall be Ikari Suki.”

  It wasn’t perfect, which was a good way to start.