Content Warnings

Internalised ableism
Stalking
Gore
Abuse

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Winter’s directions lead me deeper into the Nightmare. Head down through curdled oil-swirl membranes of lightless radiance, smothered by soul-song resonance from the suffocating sky.

Low brick wall to my right, the park beyond choked by churning dream-stuff substrate, tainted water stirred by fingers of silent hurricane. Road widens on my left, a shore vanishing into shuddering tides of bronze-stained ultraviolet and sick-yellow infrared, punctuated by capering shadows and the memory of storm-snatched cackles. Windblown crust begins to build up in the crevices and joints of my armour once again, a sticky brown biofilm residue, dragging me backward like the grains of a sandstorm abrading the outer edge of my mind.

The zoog huddled in the crook of my left arm wheezes and quivers, little black eyes blown glassy and wide, clawed digits scraping and scrabbling at my steel forearm.

“Hold on, it’s gonna be okay,” I hiss to the zoog, unsure if he can hear. “Hold on, okay, little guy? Guy, right, that’s what Winter said? I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

A hundred meters, two hundred, three, more. Impossible to measure distance this close to the heart of a Nightmare. Each footstep stretches out leagues behind, each one in front the width of the world.

But This Machine is tireless.

Shoulder blades itch beneath armour. Eyes bore into my spine. Resist the urge to look back. Do not give Willow the satisfaction.

At last a junction flowers beneath my tread, blossoms before me like a mirage, so sudden and surprising I almost stumble. Winter didn’t lie, thin trust well-placed for once in my life.

Vast, baroque, meeting place for a dozen roads, tangled with pedestrian islands and zebra crossings, walled high with bright advertisements; coral and rock outcroppings at the bottom of a dead ocean, reduced to dim-glowing ghosts in the infinite murk. Grand statues are hung with streamers of prismatic unlight, Nightmare’s entrails strangling England’s lost heroes. Civic slogans are smeared out, bold letters blurred; what sense in ‘reporting strange dreams’ when you’re drowning in one?

A pale bulwark looms ahead, an off-white chalk-dust mountain just beyond the junction, faintly visible through the churning nebula.

Now I know where I am; pity the Nightmare doesn’t smash that place apart and scatter the stones.

Nightmare’s core — the Nightmare itself, the crown of thorns from which all this divine effluvia flows — is directly overhead, hundreds of meters up, a jagged halo of darker bronze crackling with suggestion of impossible colour, almost invisible through the layers of filth-streaked air. Falling sheets of oil-swirl unlight have a distinctive downward motion here, afterbirth descending in slow waves from a stillborn god.

I squint into the bruise-wracked sky. Do I see a mote of darting crimson? A bloom of flame? A pockmark of explosion?

Are you up there, Scarlet? Doing your duty, vanquishing England’s latest nemesis?

Perhaps not. Given the size and destructive force of this Nightmare, plenty of other magical girls will be present by now, more than just the Trio. Girls from all over the south east will have flown in, though I can’t see them through the murk. Must be a mob of them up there by now.

Maybe Scarlet Edge is safe at home, still drunk, regretting our conversation, sobbing through a hangover. How’s it feel to be grounded, Scarlet?

On my right the park finally terminates. Winter’s instructions prove true; a gaping brick-and-metal mouth yawns from the pavement, tongues of dark concrete lapping downward into the earth, walled in dirty white and banded with stainless steel. I lurch over the threshold, almost lose my footing, see myself tumbling and crashing and clattering down those stairs, landing in an undignified metal heap at the bottom, less of a magical girl than when I started, the ultimate humiliation and reduction and descent and failure.

Right hand snaps out before I can fall, grabs the railing, bends the metal. Right leg slams down, a hydraulic piston anchoring me to the concrete.

An Underground station, right where Winter promised.

Even two paces over the threshold puts me beyond the worst of the Nightmare, unlight substrate flowing past my armour in long streamers and flickering tendrils of warped glass. Another dozen paces would be a plunge into cool waters, refuge and sanctuary at the bottom.

But I can’t. I grit my teeth so hard they creak. Try to lift a foot, stopped by my own muscles. Right fist squeezes the handrail into crushed metal. I barely refuse the urge to turn my head, to look back at Willow’s inevitable gaze.

Retreat. Feels like a rout. Like shame and cowardice and indignity. If I scurry down there, Willow wins. She hounded me when I was weak, then fled from me when I was strong, and now I’m allowing her to chase me into a corner, a burrow in the dirt. How is this any different to ten years as a mundane human being, pursued and controlled and dominated by Dreamers and Nightmares and the empty slogans of the state?

What’s the point in being a magical girl if I have to cower in a shelter?

The zoog shifts in my arms, spooked by the delay.

Right. He’s the reason.

Can’t catch Willow, can’t call to Grimmy and the others. Can’t fly, can’t escape. Could probably fight, but what’s the point? Nobody to save, nobody to help, nobody who needs me. But this little guy does. If I stride back up there into the Nightmare, he will die. Enough zoogs have died today; enough zoogs die every day. This one I can save. No indignity in that, not a shred of humiliation.

Swallowing residual bitterness, I clank down the steps, metal boots echoing off the walls. Nightmare substrate thins as I descend, struggling to penetrate all this concrete and steel. A dozen steps and it’s halfway gone, two dozen and it’s mere fog—

“This is life for you, without me.”

Willow whispers from directly behind my head.

I spin, stomp on where her foot might be, grab the opposite handrail, faced by empty stairwell all the way to the surface, choked with flickering sheets of prismatic chaos. The entrance to the Underground station is a wide rectangle of churning unlight, backed by thick bands of impossible colour, headache-tempting, vomit-teasing.

A figure wavers against the murk, storm-tossed hair and wind-teased skirt, a vague outline in grey.

“Lost and alone in the endless dark of indecision,” Willow whispers as if she’s right next to my ear, just beyond the metal of my helmet, voice all slippery consonants and wet clicks. “Running from responsibility, from challenge, from conflict, from life itself. It’s so hard being you, isn’t it, my sweet little Octavia? I can’t blame you for wanting to hide. It’s what I did for you, after all, because the world will not treat you well. We both know you need me, Octavia. I’ve stopped lying to myself, after so, so long. It’s liberating, really. At least do me the decency of attempting the same. Make a good-faith effort. Show willing.”

Raise my right fist, swing it sideways, casual as a slap; black-steel knuckles smash through the white-tile wall, gouge raw concrete beneath. A shower of little fragments patters down the steps as I wrench my fist free.

“Come down here and say that to my face!” I shout up the stairwell.

Do it. Do it. Do it, Willow. Take a step, take them all. Come down here, get within arm’s reach, see if I don’t beat the living shit out of you. Insults and mind games are cheap, fists are forever. I’m vibrating with the need to bury my knuckles in your skull, you must know it, you’re a Dreamer. One step, give me that opening. I don’t want to take Winter’s advice, I don’t want a level playing field; I want your head. My fist is a wrecking ball, my heart is untouchable. My whole body bends toward the task of cracking you apart.

I break before she does, take one step back up toward the surface, metal boot clicking on concrete.

Willow’s grey ghost vanishes, sinks back into the Nightmare.

“Coward!” I roar inside my helmet. “Coward!”

“You will always need me, Octavia,” Willow whispers again, like wind trickling down from the surface. “That will never change, no matter what lies you tell about yourself, no matter the costume you wear. You will always be my Octavia. You will always come crawling back to this circle of safety I offer you. And I will always still love—”

“Find a new pick-up line,” I spit. “And choke on it.”

Turn away. No more looking back. I clank down the remaining steps, onto the main floor of the Underground station. Bile rushes up my throat, the taste of retreat and surrender. Shouldn’t be down here; I should be up there, pounding Willow’s skull through a wall, breaking her, breaking the world. Drums, drums, drums in my head, pistons slamming and valves closing and pressure mounting.

Willow whispers again, weaker than before. “Octavia. You know this is denial, you know—”

Deep breaths drown her out; she’s trying to bait me. I’m a magical girl, but I’m not invincible. And this zoog certainly isn’t.

The Underground station stretches out beneath a low ceiling, concrete and whitewash broken up by rows of automatic ticket machines, escalators easing downward into the tangle of tracks in tunnels beneath, side-passages jutting off toward other exits or connecting stations or staff areas or mechanical access. Sticky floor, dirty walls, worn metal, peeling posters. CCTV cameras peer from every corner, temporarily blinded for the safety of whoever might review the footage. Nightmare substrate thins to a mist of flickering prismatic colour, a sheen of oil in the air, thickest close to the foot of the stairwell. Still more than enough to unlace an unprotected human being, but far less lethal to a magical girl.

An Oxford Underground sign on the wall confirms my suspicion: Parliament Road Station.

That tangle of streets up there, the massive junction dotted with statues, presided over by a pale leviathan, that’s one edge of Parliament Square. The squat mountain of dirty white I spotted through the murk is none other than the Oxford Parliament, the seat of English — arguably British — government, ever since the fall of London.

I’m deep in the west end of the city, the part of Oxford that matters to the people who matter.

A strange shiver goes up my spine. Who exactly was Winter fighting out there, with her cloak-and-dagger ghouls?

Across the floor of the underground station, past ticket gates locked open and a few bags lost in the panic, stands the entrance to a public shelter. Every underground station in Oxford contains half a dozen or more, budding off from passageways and tube tunnels like bloated steel diverticula. May as well, if you’ve already got a network of buried infrastructure; one of the few things the government does right, as even I am forced to grudging acknowledgement. Take one of those escalators or sprint down a connecting tunnel, I’d doubtless find another shelter door within minutes.

The outer door is an eight-foot slab of dull-painted steel, balanced on well-oiled hinges, usually operated by motors, with a big lever on one side to disengage the lock and serve as a back-up manual handle. Same design I’ve seen a hundred times before, nicer than most have. But here in the west end core, so close to Parliament, the shelters are protected by more than just big doors.

A pair of robotic gun turrets hang from the ceiling, flanking the shelter. Six-barrel rotary monsters wired with belt-feeds, back ends bristling with cameras and sensors.

The floor is marked by concentric red lines, scuffed warning cross-hatches in yellow-and-white.

DO NOT CROSS IF SHELTER IS SEALED

TURN BACK AND WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE

DO NOT CROSS

AUTOMATIC WEAPONRY

DO NOT CROSS

WARNING

Ridiculous overkill. Nightmare debris might steal away an exposed human being, but there’s no record of anything ever breaking into a shelter. Are those guns hooked into some dumb machine-brain somewhere, trying to pattern-match visual feeds against anything that doesn’t look human enough? How different to every shelter I’ve ever been inside, huddled behind thin steel doors, protected by nothing but the weight of material reality.

Still. Big guns. They look as if they could put out a lot of bullets; half-wish I could take one of them down, Grimmy might like it.

I’m not invincible. Don’t fancy getting shot.

But I can’t wait out here. Nightmare substrate is thinner below ground, but that brown residue is still building up on the outside of my armour, the Nightmare’s song of skulls and wreaths and crowns of blood and bone still resonates inside my mind. I’m still being sapped by dream.

I fold my arms carefully over the zoog and hug him to my chest, to make an armoured cocoon. Head down, right shoulder forward. One step, then another, daring the guns to fire.

“Magical girl,” I mutter, more angry than afraid. “Magical girl here. Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t you dare … ”

The guns don’t even twitch. I walk right beneath them, up to the door.

“Security theatre,” I scoff, take a deep breath. “Should have known.” The zoog noses back out from between my arms, unharmed, unconcerned.

I grab the rubberised handle and pull downward, disengaging the internal latch, dragging on the door. It opens with almost no effort, hinges well-oiled and well-balanced. Inside is a long, narrow chamber, walls plastered with slogans and posters, pride of place given to a series of pictograms and instructions which handily explain this is not the airlock, this is just the antechamber. The airlock is beyond the next door, an identical slab of steel accessed via an identical lever mechanism. Beyond that a third and final door leads into the belly of the public shelter.

Please proceed in an orderly fashion into the airlock. Follow all instructions from public officials and Transport For Oxford staff members. Keep your belongings with you at all times. Keep all pets on leashes or inside carriers. Report any suspicious activity. Report Strange Dreams.

“Tch,” I tut at the pictogram, which clearly shows all three doors open at once to allow people into the shelter when the sirens sound. Every public shelter I’ve ever been inside had one door, usually at the end of a flight of stairs and around a corner, but never anything like this.

Airlock? Inaccurate. Borderline incoherent.

The outer door shuts with a solid thump of rubber-cushioned metal. I ram the locking lever back into place, seal myself inside. Step back. Deep breaths. Deep enough?

The antechamber is still soaked in a thin layer of Nightmare, a haze of unlight hanging in the air like dust particles dipped in oil, enough to provoke nausea if examined too closely. Brown blood-like gunk still lies heavy in the grooves and joints of my armour. Energy trickles out through some hidden puncture wound in my soul. Eyelids itch. Lungs full of sand. Head filled with distant song.

“Maybe not deep enough yet?” I say to the zoog in my arms. “Maybe we have to go further—”

“But where are you going, Octavia?”

Willow’s voice, a whisper from the cracks, barely audible over my own breath.

“Shut up,” I grind out through clenched teeth.

“This isn’t what magical girls are supposed to do, is it?” she whispers, behind my helmet, to one side, right in front of me. “Running away from their duty, hiding away in the dark. Octavia, you were never meant to be this. You can’t see it yet, but you will, given enough time. This role was never for you. There’s only pain and—”

“Fuck off, Willow!” I spit. “Fuck off, or come in here and fight me! Come on! You coward!”

“Octavia … ” Voice thin as the wind. “I’m so sorry. You’ll have to learn … first hand, I suppose.”

“Fuck you.”

I stride over to the first of the inner doors and yank on the lever, expect it to be locked; it clacks downward, almost overbalances me. One step through the gap and I pass into the so-called ‘airlock’. A square room, slightly larger than the antechamber; one wall is faded patriotic posters and slogans, John Bull rousting a cartoon Nightmare, Keep Calm And Carry On, remember you’re British. Magical girls of the previous generation are all washed out by time, colours muted by age. The Trio of Albion smile back from on high, nothing like the reality up close.

The other wall is all mirrors, perhaps to reduce the effects of claustrophobia.

A black wraith almost stops me dead.

My own reflection.

The airlock door closes with a rubbery thump, lock slams home with a crunch. Nightmare trickles away to nothing, silence, gone. Air clears, almost normal. Brownish crust on my armour starts to crumble and flake away, though not as rapidly as in Winter’s little pocket of calm. I cross to the inner door, the one that leads into the shelter proper. A gentle tug on the lever proves my assumption — locked. Sensible design.

Deep breaths again, turn to face the door I entered through. Wait for Willow’s whispers.

Nothing. Perhaps a tickle. Wordless echoes.

The zoog cradled in my left arm peers past his refuge, looks up at me, curious, confused. Half a minute trickles by. A full minute. Two. Tension drains from my muscles. Disappointment settles in. Willow has given up her pursuit.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I guess this is it, for now.” I glance at the zoog. “I … hmm. Hang on a second.”

Face empty air, brace my feet, pull back a fist. Think of Luna, Plato Base, Nerys and Tissy and a hundred zoogs, too many wounded.

Translocation fizzles out before it can start, smothered by Nightmare or pinned in the shelter.

“Worth a shot,” I mutter. “We’re safe enough in here, I think. We can ride out the rest of the Nightmare, then … ” The zoog peers over the edge of my arm, little paws scrabbling for purchase. “You wanna go down, huh?”

“Dowwwwwn,” he rasps.

Returned to the floor, the zoog shelters between my black-shod ankles for a few moments, clutching at my boots for safety. Courage found, he slowly ventures out, sniffing at the edge of the room, pawing at cracks in the concrete.

“Don’t go too far,” I say. “Not that there’s anywhere to go.”

And then I can’t avoid it any longer, staring back at my own black reflection in a wall of mirrors.

Not like this is the first time I’ve seen myself transformed. In the dream I shared with ten-year-old Willow, the transformed Octavia Carter was like a goddess from a world of red-black clarity; I caught further glimpses of myself on the way through the Nightmare, reflected in shop windows and the the semi-transparent plastic of the bus shelter with Winter.

But now there’s no dream in the way, nothing to obscure.

Black armour, black helmet, black mask. Black steel smooth and matte, drinking the light. No eye-holes, no mouth grille, just a jagged glow to match my scar beneath. My helmet retracts at a thought, folding back from my face, more extensively than before. My hair falls free, so much longer than I’ve been used to for most of my life, a fluttering wave of black, dark as the armour, strands drifting across metal-clad shoulders.

A step closer to the mirror, turning my head this way and that, lost in my own red-black eyes.

I’m lit from within. Scar aglow.

Willow used to tell me I was beautiful, but somehow I sensed that was a lie, though I thought it a kindness at the time. My grandmother assured me I was a pretty girl, despite my scars and missing parts. I always knew the truth, that I am a mangled corpse on the verge of rot. The sensible thing to do was to clean me away and pretend I did not exist.

The woman in the mirror is transcendent, a kind of beauty I never knew existed outside of machines and mathematics. I touch her face with a gauntlet. Pale skin dimples beneath black metal. Both are the same.

Self-fascination fractures a little as I step back again, look myself up and down, examine my results. Quite the villain I would make, in a Saturday morning cartoon. A Dark Lady, an evil knight who threatens the green and pleasant isle from her hidden fortress on the moon. A cackling madwoman for the Trio of Albion to vanquish once per week, along with her minions and monsters. A parody, a simplification, a safe adversary.

Except I’m none of those things. I am so very real, and my fists can break the world.

Ten years of hating magical girls melts away, mist in the morning. A grin splits my face, a mad laugh behind my teeth.

“Look at me!” I hiss. “I’m … I’m … ”

Hiding in a shelter.

A sigh ruins the brief high. “I don’t want to be down here,” I say to my reflection, and she says it back to me, red-black right eye a narrow slit of old pain. “I want to be up there with the others. Even the Trio. I’m one of them now. Aren’t I?”

I want Scarlet Edge to see me like this.

Before sensible precaution can interrupt, I slap my thigh, have the armour extrude my mobile phone. Another step back frames me perfectly in the mirrored wall. I fumble with the phone camera, hands shaking with unfamiliar nerves, almost excitement; I never use the damn thing, I’ve never done anything like this before. What possible reason would I have to take a selfie?

The first photo is bad. The second and third are a little better. By the fifth I’ve raised my chin, straightened my spine, thrust out my chest. Free hand on my hip. Feet apart. In the sixth I’m wearing a look that isn’t quite a smile, but isn’t anything else. Wish I could take the gauntlet off, show my prosthetic arm, but this isn’t the place to experiment. I redeploy the helmet, take a few pictures all buttoned-up, then fold it away again and take more. Side-on. Full front. Can’t stop.

For documentation, I tell myself. For everybody, so Grimmy and Signal and Bright will know not to attack me on sight. Even as I sort through for the best one, the one I’m going to send to Scarlet Edge as soon as I’m back on Luna. Hope Willow didn’t break my laptop.

Dozens of photos and the novelty ebbs only slightly, but the other feelings sweep back in.

Magical girl, hiding from a Nightmare, taking selfies in a shelter.

“I’m so fucking pathetic.”

I lean back against the far wall and slip my phone away. Slide downward until my armoured backside thumps against the concrete floor. The zoog waddles over, coils around one black-steel ankle, stretches his little paws.

“Willow?” I say.

Nothing. Perhaps a distant howling, like high winds whipping between buildings. A murmur — perhaps a muffled scream — comes from deeper in the shelter; the people inside must have seen the lever move when I tried it, they’re probably terrified there’s some debris managed to get all the way up to the door.

“I suppose we’ve both given up on each other, haven’t we?” Still no response. “Willow?”

The zoog watches me with tiny black eyes, confused in the way only zoogs and small children can be.

“Sorry,” I say to him. “I wasn’t talking to you. When this is over, do you want to go to the moon?”

The zoog opens his jaws, hesitant, unsure.

“The moon,” I repeat. “Luna. All the dog food and oats you can eat. No predators. Actually that’s not entirely true, I think there’s some kind of birds, outdoors, but you don’t have to go there. Nice and warm all year round. Well, I haven’t been there that long myself, but I assume the moon doesn’t have seasons. Maybe it does, you’d have to ask Grimgrave. Grimmy. You’d like Grimmy, she loves zoogs. I think.”

The zoog stares, skittish and ready to bolt, like I’m trying to trick him into consenting to some terrible fate. Can hardly blame him. Zoogs do not live long, far less if they trust humans. This zoog was most likely born on Earth, in England, his entire short life so far spent rummaging in rubbish bins or fleeing from cats, or else building up the courage to venture out into the countryside and join a more stable warren of his kind, free from urban threats, but hunted by foxes, always at risk of traps and gas and ratting hounds.

Suddenly I realise this zoog is no Dreamland creature. He is English, like me.

“Why aren’t there more of you on the moon?” I mutter; the zoog looks baffled, part-frozen, pinned by a trick question. I reach out and run a gauntlet across his back, stroke his fur. “Is it a carrying capacity issue? Are moon-zoogs different somehow? Would you fly apart if I took you up there? Sorry, you have no idea either, these are all just speculation, talking to myself. Where would you like me to leave you, once this Nightmare is past?” The zoog still doesn’t answer. “That’s an actual question. If you can’t answer, don’t worry about it. I’ll find a nice dark alleyway or something, put you down there. Sound good?”

The zoog looks away, around, perhaps seeking advice.

“Nerys?” I try. “Do you know Nerys? Or know about Nerys, I suppose.”

Eyes widen. Jaw hangs open. The zoog goes stiff with something like awe. Have I just spoken the name of a god?

“Nerys is on the moon,” I say. “That’s why—”

“Moon,” he rasps. “Moon!”

Can’t help a smile. Feels like the most gentle thing I’ve done in months. “Okay, little guy. To the moon, then. You hold onto me in the meantime, okay? Do you have any … friends, others you want me to take up there too? Or … ”

The zoog doesn’t answer, too focused on clambering back up into my lap, climbing into my arms, wedging himself firmly back into place. I almost laugh.

“If I have to fight my way back out of here,” I tell him, “I probably won’t be able to carry you like this. Nerys seems to prefer riding on my shoulders. Do you know how to do that?”

The zoog responds with a confused look. I sigh.

“Not there’s much chance of fighting my way back out of anything right now … ”

The zoog nuzzles against my armoured belly, as if he’s discovered something there. In the same way that my armour extruded and reabsorbed my phone, an almost imperceptible pouch opens in the belly of my armour plate, like a wide pocket. The zoog worms his way inside, hind feet and tail slithering after him. I can’t feel anything against my flesh, so he must be contained inside the armour itself. A half-second later his head pokes back out, sniffing and snuffling.

This time I do laugh, incredulous. The zoog-pouch doesn’t seem to add any additional size to the armour. Maybe it works the same way Grimgrave keeps half a dozen guns up her skirt.

“Good solution,” I say. “You stay in there then. No safer place right now, I guess.”

“Yaaaaaah,” the zoog rasps, then vanishes again.

A glance at the airlock door brings the humiliation and frustration back down like a shutter slammed over my mind. The zoog is safe, he could have been safe like this all along. What’s the further point of me staying here, a magical girl cowering in a shelter? What’s the point of all this power if I hide from Willow, when I would rather be knocking her skull apart?

Hot pinpricks blossom behind my eyes.

“Useless,” I whisper. “Useless crippled child. Scarlet Edge isn’t hiding from a fight. Grimgrave is out there, probably. And where am I? Behind shelter doors. Afraid of … of what? Of Willow?” My voice rises. My lungs pump. Anger glows like metal in a forge. “I’m not afraid of you, Willow! I’m not! You think that’s why I’m down here, because I’m afraid!?”

Up I stand. My helmet redeploys, masks me in red-black metal. Stare at the airlock door, the one that leads out.

“I dare you, Willow. I fucking dare you. Open that door, I’ll … I’ll … ”

Knock knock knock—

I almost jump out of my armour, whirl around to the rear. The knock came from behind, from the airlock’s inner door, the final layer before the shelter’s main room.

Then, through the metal: “Hello?”

Thin, young, muffled by steel, right up against the inner door.

Another knock, more hesitant than the first. “H-hello?” the voice calls again. Female. Shaking. Afraid. “Is somebody … is somebody out there? You can come inside, you know? If the … if the outer doors are shut … I … I guess … ”

Whoever you are, you should not be calling out to something on the outside of a shelter. A voice that young, her parents should be telling her to come away from the door, close her mouth, cover her ears. If anybody else inside that shelter is coherent. What if something terrible has happened? What if there’s almost nobody in there, just one young girl and one of her parents, catatonic and foaming from the mouth? What if Willow is playing the cruellest possible trick, a shelter awash in innocent blood that I was too preoccupied to avert? What if that girl is going through exactly what I did? What if this is a trap, designed to torture me with my own past?

Dead or dying inside a collapsed shelter. What if Willow wants to replay that one pivot of cruelty, what if—

“Are you … okay?” the girl calls through the door.

Deep breath. She’s right there, speaking sense, sounds like she’s in one piece, not screaming in agony beneath a mountain of shattered concrete.

“I’m fine,” I shout back. “I’ll be fine out here. Are you okay? Is everything okay in there?”

“ … y-yeah. I think so.” A long pause. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

Something is very wrong.

No young girl should be knocking on the door of a shelter and inviting people inside. Even if her parents are unconscious or raving, she would have been taught, she would know. Everybody knows!

Do I have a duty to check on the people inside this shelter? As if; I’m a revolutionary and a rebel, an enemy of the state. But doesn’t that mean I have even more of a duty? What sense in revolution if we can’t avert the horrors which made us the way we are? Can I risk letting a handful of mundane humans be first public witness to my transformed self? Because I won’t be some messiah striding to their rescue, I’ll be a coward hiding away in a shelter. That’s what the people will see — a magical girl scuttling into safety, a failure and a cripple and a coward, hiding from what she should face. Behind this door are some of the people we need to convince of — of what? Not yet sure. But not a great propaganda coup. Not a good image, a very poor debut.

But still, that girl should not be inviting me in.

A cocktail of doubt rattles through my head, a loose bolt inside a red-lined engine. Perhaps I should check on the shelter, but perhaps not as I am.

The thought triggers a reflex action. My heart stutters, like being flicked beneath the ribs.

Magical girl transformation undoes itself.

Red-black glow gutters out beneath my surfaces, a furnace smothered by ash. Black-steel armour folds up, a machine collapsing into itself, joints disarticulating, plates sliding into nothingness, retracting back inside my body. Machine purity leaves me, a million cables and wires going slack and still, every cell sagging with release. A flush of heat leaves my face and head, skin suddenly cold and chill, vision blurred as the red-black light leaves my eyeballs. My scar gutters back to mundane flesh.

A spark remains, a pilot-light in the engine of my heart. Even as transformation unwinds, I know instinctively that I can re-summon it again with the right thought. This Machine lies dormant, coiled inside my body.

“Ahhhhhh … ow, fuck, ahhh … ”

Pain washes back, heralds the frayed ends of exhaustion. My left arm is on fire from fingertips to elbow, skin peeling all over, massive blisters weeping clear pus, flesh burned red from my earlier proximity to Willow’s toxic aura, back in Plato Base. Moving my fingers is agony now they’re no longer cushioned and cooled inside the machine. My hips feel out of joint from all the running, one staggering step enough to send a jolt up the base of my spine, jagged spears against bone. My thigh is chafed raw inside the socket of my prosthetic leg, flesh sticky with a sheen of blood, a sensation I haven’t had to endure in years. My prosthetic right arm feels loose; something grinds as I lift the limb and make a rough fist. Still works, fingers move, myoelectric pickups in place; the carbon fibre tape might be the only thing holding it together now. One punch to Willow’s face was enough to compromise all my hard work?

The zoog scrambles up onto my shoulders; quick thinking, I would have dropped him otherwise.

“Fuck,” I hiss. “Ahhhh. Maybe I should go back—”

“Hey!” the voice calls through the inner airlock door. “H-hey, are you okay? Miss? Are you okay?”

“ … yeah,” I croak through clenched teeth, sound like a zoog. “Just … ” Shoeless, in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, radiation burned and bleeding beneath my clothes, ready to sit down and not get back up for twelve hours. “Just … tired.”

“I’m letting you in now!”

Clunk goes the door mechanism. Down goes the lever. The door eases open on silent hinges, but she’s not strong enough to pull it far.

Get inside the shelter, make sure something terrible hasn’t happened, then back out here, and transform again. I can’t stay untransformed for long, not like this, not when I’m physically falling apart.

I push on the door with my prosthetic hand, swing it open easily. Still strong, even untransformed. I drag my feet over the threshold, staggering a few steps to catch myself.

Parliament Road Station Public Shelter #3 — stencilled on the wall in letters seven feet high — is gigantic, designed to accommodate the height of rush-hour, stretching off across naked concrete floor beneath a low ceiling. Occasional posters on the walls urge occupants to keep calm, lead them through basic breathing exercises, or instruct focus on ‘British Values’ without elucidating what exactly British Values might be. The edge of the space is lined with cheap wooden benches, the vast middle dotted with cheaper plastic chairs. Most of the chairs are up front, closest to the door.

Almost deserted. Rush hour had not yet begun when the sirens sounded. Perhaps thirty people huddle in the chairs, sprawled on the benches, some sitting or lying on the floor.

Nobody is handling it well. Nobody ever does.

Hollow eyes, thousand-yard stares; panting and rocking, mumbling and gasping. An older gentleman in the uniform of TFO cleaning staff is curled up in a ball on the floor, spluttering and sobbing like a baby. One young woman has pulled out a clump of her own hair, hand shaking as she stares at the strands, other hand scratching at her bloodied scalp. Several people have their eyes closed tight, trying their best to breathe slowly, steadily, stately; one breaks and grits his teeth, voice rising as inarticulate wail. A middle-aged lady clutches at the air, eyes rolling and lids fluttering, mouth opening and closing, words trapped somewhere below. Somebody has vomited in a messy pile, slightly further back. One man is staring at the ceiling, spread-eagle on the ground, smart business suit ripped open down the front, so still he might be dead.

An older teenage girl cowers by the open door, a surprise; from her voice I had expected a child ten years younger. Tall and thin, lanky and awkward, short hair, dark skin, eyes like puncture wounds in a storm. She’s dressed in a suit, skirt, tights, self-conscious and ill-fitting, perhaps for the first job interview of her life. Breathing too heavily. Scratching at herself.

A few weeks ago I would have passed a woman like this in the street like a slug passes a tiger. Superficially pretty, dressed for future success, whole and hale and together. I would have hidden my prosthetic, turned my scar away, not dared look. Now I’m wounded and bleeding and on display and I don’t care.

What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing; nothing unusual for a shelter in the height of a Nightmare. And that’s what’s wrong.

Focus on the girl. “Are you okay?”

Eyes wide as coal-pits, dark and empty. She can’t answer.

“Hey. Hey!” I snap right in her face. She flinches. “Are you okay? Answer me.”

She frowns through the brain-fog; what a stupid question. Her lips struggle to part, the word stuck. “W— w— well … no? No. Um … you have a … ” She points. “You have a zoog on your shoulder.”

A sigh. “Ignore that. I mean is anything abnormal happening down here? Abnormal for in a shelter?”

She manages to shake her head. “I should … s-shut the door … ”

I raise my prosthetic arm, block her way. Don’t cut off my escape, something here is very wrong.

“You should know not to open the door to monsters.” I tell the girl. “That was very dangerous. You shouldn’t have done that. You know that, you’re not a child.”

Through all the weight of the Nightmare overhead, the girl manages to give me a look that says I am just the wrong side of adulthood not to sound like an idiot. Teenager, definitely, I decide.

“Are you a … a monster?” she squeezes out.

“No, but—”

“Then who … who are you?”

“Nobody.” This Machine, beyond your comprehension. “How were you able to get up during all this?” I glance around at the room again, at the other faces absorbed in their private struggles to stay above water; nobody has even reacted to a teenage girl getting up to break the shelter’s seal?

“I … don’t know … ”

Cold realisation settles in my chest. There’s no panel or screen anywhere, no way for the occupants of the shelter to tell if there’s anybody inside the airlock.

“Wait, wait!” I stumble to one side, block her as she reaches for the door again. Her eyes boggle at my burns. “How did you even know I was there?” A dull blink. “Think,” I hiss. “How did you know I was out there?”

A shrug, hesitant, fragile. “I really don’t know. I just … it seemed like … ” She blinks hard, eyes clouding. “Seemed like I should … shouldn’t leave somebody behind … ”

“Hey.”

A rough voice, from a man with a face like an axe-wound. Stocky, heavy, curled up around his midsection as if he’s nursing a stomach upset, seated in one of the plastic chairs.

Wide eyes stare at me in dull recognition.

“Hey. Hey,” he repeats, tremor growing in his voice. “It’s her. It’s— it’s her. On telly, I saw you on telly.” He tries to sit up, points at me, starting to pant, fear turning him waxen. “D-Dreamer! She’s a Dreamer!”

A ripple passes through the thin crowd. Those capable of coherent thought look up in consternation, faces pinched, frowning, drinking down a cocktail of fear and disgust, the edge of panic, a hint of fanatic rejection. Several people lurch to their feet or try to stand up. Somebody babbles out a high-pitched warning. Another voice blurts my name.

Octavia Carter. Uncontained Dreamer. Terrorist and murderer.

Everyone in the country knows my face; half the world has seen edited footage of me fighting Scarlet Edge, or glimpsed me at the starting line of a revolution up on that hospital rooftop. They don’t know I’m a magical girl, they know nothing about me except what the government has put in their heads. And they shouldn’t know, should they? I’ve transformed. I’ve become This Machine.

They should all have forgotten Octavia Carter.

But the Great British public have not forgotten what they’ve been conditioned to hate. Light sparks behind a few too many eyes, adrenaline and cortisol flooding for flight-or-fight. Muscles twitch, fingers reach, eyes dart.

Raise my prosthetic hand. “Wait—”

One young man picks up his plastic chair, holds it aloft. A woman dressed in a smart business suit grabs a bunch of keys from her bag, the biggest key between her knuckles as a pitiful weapon. People fall over in their haste to back away from me, leaving a few brave or cruel candidates at the fore. Fists come up; a jacket comes off, snapped between hands as if to catch a knife; a belt buckle fumbles into sweaty hands, a makeshift garrote.

“—she’s gonna kill us all, she’s gonna—”

“—get her away from the door, she’s blocking to the door—”

“—don’t touch her, don’t touch her! Whatever you do, don’t touch her!”

“Hey, hey!” the first man — axe-face — shouts again, up on his feet now, a mask of terror and courage over his eyes. “Hey, you get away from that kid. You hear me? You get away from that girl!”

Takes a heartbeat to realise he means the teenage girl who invited me in. Hardly a kid.

A worst fear, finally brought to life; a room full of people all screaming and wailing at me, the freak and the cripple, the unwanted remnant, the monster from the television. My throat seizes up, I try to mumble an apology, a bow of my head, backing out through the door. Not wanted, never wanted, even by the people I’m supposed to be — what, protecting? I’m not their magical girl. I’m here to shatter England, shatter the world. Old bitterness stirs in my chest, choked by older fear. How dare they?

The door at my back closes with a thump. The teenage girl shut it while I wasn’t looking. She stumbles past me, eyes glazed with confusion, hands a-tremor, a jumble of broken words spilling from her lips.

She lurches as if pulled on invisible strings, suddenly diverts from her course, slumps against my right side, a weight I can hardly bear.

“You get away from her!” Axe-face bellows again. Takes a step toward me. Raises his fists. Sets his shoulders.

A little courage drags the rest of them forward, eyes wild with madness which has nothing to do with the Nightmare. The other man with the chair raises it high, to dash my brains out. An older woman has grabbed a broom from somewhere, handle held like a spear to force me back. Somebody lurches upright, spilling plastic chairs behind, hands outstretched and grasping for my throat. Somebody shouts ‘kill it! kill it!’

A split-second was all it took; now they’re a pack of braying animals, hooting and howling, chimpanzees at a murder. A real Dreamer would dismiss them with a glare, turn them to glass or to frogs, melt them together into a single fleshy mass, without the slightest care. A real Dreamer would not be forced to endure this final and total indignity.

And behind them all, standing serene and smiling, caught in a snatched gap between one shoulder and the next — Willow.

She smiles, vicious in victory.

Willow has set me up. Forced me into an impossible position. She has taken control of where and when and how I get to reveal my transformed self to the world. Either I transform now, a magical girl huddling in a shelter, a punchline to a lifetime of being a joke — or these blood-maddened, Nightmare-wracked English will beat me to death with chair legs and fists, for the crime of standing too close to a girl they don’t even know. These animals, led by the nose, by the very thing they claim to hate.

Anger bubbles up like magma, erupts from my throat.

“Down!” I roar.

The mob recoils, flinching back on tripping heels, blinking and winded and uncertain why they do as I say. They obey because they’re animals.

Or perhaps because my transformation flickers at the edge of my vision, a second skin of black armour not quite made real.

Willow’s face twists with frustration. Somebody staggers past her; she’s gone.

Straighten my spine. Raise my chin. Breathing like bellows, but anger controlled. Not their fault; their responsibility, but not fault.

“You cretins,” I hiss, shaking inside, amazed by my own defiance. Since when do I speak like this? “You think a Dreamer would wander into a shelter?” A beat, too long. “I don’t hear any answers. Do you think a Dreamer would fail to defend herself, against— against chair legs and fists?” Another beat. They have not yet learned. Raise my arms, prosthetic and flesh, one wrapped in tape, the other burned to blisters. The teenage girl finally stands upright again, leaves my side with a sheen of surprise on her face, eyes me with confusion. “Do you think a Dreamer would choose to look like this? You think I walk around with half my body missing for … what, for fun?”

Throats bob. Eyes avert. Makeshift weapons sag. A chair clatters to the floor. I am not getting through to them, I am merely exercising power.

“Let—” Axe-face man says again, so much weaker than before. He gestures at the teenage girl. “Let her go, then.”

The girl shares a glance with me, then staggers away. The half-ring mob stands and stares, dumb as bovines, robbed of the only handhold they had.

“I’m not a Dreamer,” I say, slow and low. “I was never a Dreamer. The government lies to you about everything else, so why not this? You know that. You know so much of it is all lies. So why believe—”

Click-click-click-whirrrrrrr—

A sound vibrates into the shelter through three airlock doors, high-pitched and electrical, a whirring the likes of which I’ve never heard before.

Just enough time to look back over my shoulder.

BRRRRRTTTTTTTTT—

A mechanical screech, high and tight and crunchy. Half the shelter screams or gasps, stumbles back, goes for the walls.

The gun turrets outside, opening up and doing their job, bullets thudding through concrete and meat; I’d thought they were just for show.

—RRRRRRTTTTTTTT—

Then a ripping, tearing, wrenching sound. Metal and wire and concrete pulled from a loose socket, crashing to the floor, sparking and whirring and fluttering and flickering, and then finally fading away, to sudden and total silence.

No more gunfire.

The Great British Public freeze, all eyes on the inner airlock door. Feet begin a retreat, backing away from the entrance. Chairs scrape. Breath catches. Somebody takes refuge directly behind my back — the teenage girl, shivering hard.

Axe-wound mutters, “Maybe they chased off whatever was—”

The world detonates.

The airlock door crumples inward, folded easily as tissue paper, tearing a ragged ring of concrete from the surrounding wall. Ceiling and floor fissure and part, jagged ruin bucking from below and spearing from above. Masonry dust and metal shrapnel saturate the air, a choking cloud of steel slivers and pulverised brick. Rebar and wires and dirt and filth crash down in a drowning torrent as the lights go out and the screams start.

Somebody grabs me from behind, just before the world finishes imploding.

Worst day of my life in mocking replay. Ten years old, a helpless child trapped in a shelter collapse; twenty years old, a magical girl strong enough to bend steel with bare hands, and I’m back here again. Back here, always back here, a fixed point in time and space I will never escape, no matter how strong I grow or how far I run. For me the world is forever caught in the moment of collapse and the long-suffering aftermath of pain and amputation. I will always be an undead monument to a girl who never got to live.

A final split-second before the world swallows me, Willow’s face glows gold amid the collapsing ruin.

She strides in through the shattered airlock, smiling with inevitable triumph, despite the bruise on her face. Reality twists a half-step to the right and freezes in place, so she can get her words in before I’m buried.

“Enough running away for you, I think,” she says. “You’re right about that, Octavia. You will never escape this moment, not by yourself.”

She reaches out a hand, reaches through the frozen collapse, offers me her help.

“I am your only way out,” she says. “I’ve always been your only way out. Take my—”

I jerk my head forward, get my teeth around two of her fingers before she can retract — little and ring — and clamp down as hard as I can. Joints part, cartilage tears, Willow screams. I bite off two of her fingers and spit them in her face, spraying her with a mouthful of her own voided blood.

Willow recoils, wailing, bleeding, clutching her ruined hand. I grin bloody and triumphant, from the bottom of a pit, but still free. Time resumes in a furious eye-blink.

Collapse crashes down, buries me in darkness and concrete and steel, an old friend’s familiar embrace.

~~~~~~~

Think I’m transformed. Did it on reflex. Self-preservation.

Rough concrete scrapes across raw metal. Breath stutters and snorts, close and contained; helmet, maybe.

Darkness occludes in stuttering waves, throbs with red-dyed pain, shows glimpses of a jagged world, infinite crags, lethal confusion.

Somebody is weeping, whimpering, wounded. Not me, for once. Tiny vulnerability is cradled close to my belly, inside my armour, breathing rapidly. A zoog. The world stutters back in false colour, lit red-black from the lanterns of my own eyes. A girl lies twisted and bleeding beneath me — the teenage girl, she trickles back into my memory, lanky and dark and skittish, the one who let me into the shelter. She’s still conscious, eyes narrowed to blood-pained slits, face stained white with masonry dust. Protected by the black-metal arch of my back.

Consciousness betrays its mistress, fades and falters when I most need to stay here, stay alert, stay vigilant. The engine is eternal, This Machine cannot die; I gutter, go out, return in stuttering fits, but the armour stays locked in place, holds up this tiny pocket of the collapsed world, protecting some scrap of flesh still struggling to live.

Somebody is digging through the rubble, boring through concrete and steel like butter. Somebody who doesn’t need hands to dig.

“Will— Willow—” A gurgle, all I can manage, broken and flooded. “Keep— away—”

Metal scrapes as concrete shifts; my back, heaving to break free. But my eyes gutter out again, red-dyed world flickering to black. Hands slide into the gap my strength has held open, drags a heavy weight from beneath me.

“What interesting priorities you have,” Willow hisses, simmering with disgust.

“No—”

Sight returns in a crimson stutter. I’m alone in the crush of shattered concrete. The girl from the shelter is gone.

The world dims out for a long time. Flickers dead in red and black. Throbs back in red-black clarity, furnaces self-stoking.

Consciousness cools itself, grows firm enough to grip. A grunt through my teeth.

“Uhhhh … ”

I’m buried in rubble and rebar, pinned by a mass of broken concrete and twisted metal, crumpled on my front, encased inside the protection of my armour. Somehow I can still see; the world is dyed a deep red, light pouring from inside my own eyes. Everything aches, head ringing, meat tenderised, but the parts of me that matter seem to be intact.

I have a passenger, the zoog I rescued, curled up and panting in terror inside the metal pouch over my gut. Can’t see any other survivors.

Willow engineered this to punish me, throw me back into the deepest pit of my childhood, the moment Octavia Carter ended, trapped and dying beneath a collapsed shelter. Physical confrontation terrifies her, so she attacks my fears, plunges me into the terror of my own memories. Darkness, blood, pain. Down here at the end of my world, all over again.

Old fears shrivel and shrink before the forge-fire behind my eyes.

I fill my lungs with dust-choked air, inhale against the weight of rubble, and roar.

Force my back against broken concrete, get my hands and knees beneath me. You think this was enough to stop me, Willow? You think I’m still a ten-year-old girl, broken and limbless, huddled in a wheelchair, waiting for you to come rescue me? I am This Machine. I am armoured with slices of the void. My heart is an engine fuelled by substances of which you cannot conceive, which would melt your flesh from your bones. And I am going to tear your head off your shoulders. I am going to peel you open and extract truth.

Broken concrete and shattered steel shift with stubborn reluctance, scraping off my armour, snagging my hips, trying to puncture my ribs. But my steel shell is inviolate. I push and yank and crawl and squirm. Rubble turns to slurry, thick as magma, but I am unstoppable.

I died here once. I came back as nothing, lived as a memory, then made this machine from my own corpse. You cannot kill what is already dead.

Step by step I haul myself through the ruin, sometimes full-body wading as if underwater, more often crawling and writhing, kicking and tearing, a metal worm in stony guts. Concrete parts beneath my hands. Steel twists aside under my arms. I dig like a mole through rubble and ruin, ranting and screaming all the while, shouting Willow’s name, promising punishments I forget the moment they leave my lips. Gibbering, screeching, hissing like a zoog. Spittle-froth mad, sentence fragments stumbling and slamming onward.

If my rage falters, if I let those fires burn low, terror will overwhelm me. I will drown if I don’t rage.

My hands hit solid matter, anchored in the ground — stairs, steps. Up I go, toward points of prismatic unlight shining darkly through the rubble, the swirl of the Nightmare. I roar at that as well; let the Nightmare know I am going to pulverise it and rip its guts out and stamp on the remains, that I am going to sink my fists into a soft underbelly of dream and tear out glistening entrails and crush them in my fists and— and—

Close to the surface I’m almost spent, spitting single words between rasping for breath. Within reach of freedom, my fingers falter and fail, pushing against the last few slabs of fallen concrete.

A wordless whine rises in my throat, ten-year-old me overwhelmed by fear.

Even magical girls have limits.

“—somebody in there? Hey! Hey, I can see you! Hold on, hold on!”

Saintly strength parts the rubble, hauls away chunks of concrete. Slender steel gauntlets reach down into my tomb and pull me free, deliver me from this second womb, out into the Nightmare.

I stagger to catch my balance, prosthetic leg slamming down, wobbly as true flesh for once. Raise my helmeted face to the sky, suck down great gasps of tainted air.

Back on the surface. A titan of black metal, free once again.

Parliament Square, the same tangled road junction from which I descended into the station, dotted with statues slathered in Nightmare-gunk. To my rear is a collapsed maw of rubble where the entrance to the station once lay; a sinkhole has swallowed half of the neighbouring building, glass and steel collapsed into a tangle of shards and spears, sagging into a gaping wound in the earth, all still wrapped in Nightmare’s swirling substrate. The Oxford Parliament looms through the prismatic murk ahead, clearer and bolder now, a dirty white beacon in the sheets of impossible light.

The local substrate seems thinner somehow, holes and gaps sagging amid the maelstrom. Up in the sky, the core of the Nightmare grows more visible by the second, a bright band of impossible colours listing to one side, pockmarked with craters, blighted with crimson flames, lashing out with semi-visible loops and lashes of translucent force. A crown of thorns, divinity sagging into gravity’s mud.

“Hey, hey!” A silvered gauntlet waves in front of my face. “Hey, were there other people down there? Other people? Hey?”

My rescuer is a fairytale knight dressed in blue steel and long skirts, her armour gleaming like polished cobalt, dented and stained here and there by recent damage, brown-bronze burns streaking the metal. Long blonde ponytail, eyes the colour of tropical seas, an aura of perfect clear skies at her back, hanging like a cape. Shorter and younger than me, a serious frown on a delicate face. A gigantic silver warhammer waits at her side like a loyal hound on its haunches, head smeared with pulped purple viscera.

Azure Infinity.

I have been rescued by one third of the Trio of Albion.

She waves her gauntlet in front of my face again. “Sister, are you concussed? Can you hear me? I need to know, were there other people down there?”

Deep breaths. Straighten my spine. Flex my fists. Should I sucker punch her before she knows who I am? Tempting, but I can’t; I’d want her to know who’s breaking her jaw.

“Sister?” she presses. “I’ve never met you before. What’s your name?” She repeats, slowly, loudly: “Your name?”

Shake my head. Not ready for that yet. “Other people,” I mutter, throat raw, voice hoarse from screaming and shouting. Speaking feels difficult, words hard to grasp. “Down there. Yeah. Thirty or so. Maybe.”

Azure nods, brow tight and determined. She glances down into the hole from which I crawled. “This Nightmare’s on the way down, but it’ll be two hours at least before a rescue crew can get out here. I don’t know how you crawled out of there, it’s beyond me, but … but thirty people.” She swallows, glances up at the Nightmare, chewing her lip. “I thought I felt something odd. We can’t just … ”

The zoog in my belly-pouch emerges, scrambles up my armour to one shoulder, curls into place.

Azure does a slow double take at the zoog, then at me; the nature of her frown shifts. “I still don’t recognise you,” she says slowly. “You didn’t give your name. Who are you with, sister?”

I don’t answer right away. Azure’s silver warhammer leaps into her hand. Her face hardens. The zoog on my shoulder hisses at her, good boy.

“You’re with them, aren’t you?” Azure says. “The terrorists.”

My helmet retracts, folds down into my armour. Black hair falls free, whips out to one side, caught on Nightmare’s intangible breeze.

For a moment Azure shows no recognition, just a frown of denial and disgust. Then she blinks hard, the outward sign of some inner struggle, the pinprick pop of a dreamlike membrane.

Her eyes widen, her mouth hangs open.

“You!” she says.

“Me. And you know me. How the hell do you know me? You all should have forgotten.”

Eyes travel up and down my armour. “But you’re … ”

“Better armoured than you, Azure.”

Azure Infinity shakes her head. “They told us you were … they told us … ”

“Lies.”

Azure’s eyes flick to mine, sudden and solid and still. “We were told you’re a murderer, and I know that part is true.”

No comeback to that, mostly because she’s right. Octavia Carter, magical murderer, terrorist from the moon, England’s most wanted. Suits me well; a smile cracks my lips, can’t help it. Madness cackles behind my face.

Azure finally lifts her hammer, doubled-handed, light as air. Like I might rush her. I might.

I raise my chin, flex my right hand, make a fist. No idea what I’m doing, heart crunching into gear, head flush with fire, still battered and bruised from the shelter collapse. Pain is everywhere but pain doesn’t matter. This Machine operates regardless.

“Are you alone?” Azure asks.

“Are you?”

Hesitation. “Listen. Octavia, Miss Carter. This doesn’t have to happen, we don’t have to do this. My … my offer to you still stands. Come in quietly, and I’ll protect you.”

I almost laugh, a single snort. The zoog on my shoulders joins in, a rattling rasp.

“Bit late for that.”

Azure shakes her head. Stands up straight, puffs out her chest. A child in stolen armour, a play-acting knight. “It’s never too late for justice. You would understand, if you hadn’t been lied to so much. I’m sorry, on behalf of everything that put you here. I’m sorry this happened to you, but you have to stop. I’m offering you a way to stop.”

“You sound like a cartoon. A bad one. About yourself.”

She scowls. “You make it sound sordid, like it’s not true! But it is. Octavia—”

“You don’t get to use that name,” I spit. “None of you do. To you, I am This Machine. Unless you want to do me the respect of giving me your real—”

“Valerie.”

A pinprick of bizarre pressure pops inside my head.

“Valerie Talbot.” Azure Infinity swallows hard. “Not that you can make the connection without more, I know how it works. But there, you have it, you have me. Same as I have you, though I don’t understand how that’s happened.”

“Why … ”

Azure — Valerie? — speaks through gritted teeth and tortured eyes. “Because I know there’s been a terrible injustice against you. Because I know this is all wrong. Because I have to fix this. Because—”

“Because you’ve discovered you’re working for a cabal of Dreamer supremacists?”

Azure’s scowl turns dark as thunder. “That is not true! That’s not how it works! You sound like … you’re as bad as … ”

“No point me ‘coming quietly’,” I hiss. “The only reason you were ordered to do that is for Willow Finch, and I’m beyond her reach now.”

“I do not take orders from any Dreamer,” Azure hisses. Lying to herself.

“Are we going to fight, Azure? Or are you going to follow whatever conscience you’re pretending to have?”

A flex of her gauntlets around her hammer. “It’s not pretend. It’s not, damn you! But … but … if you won’t come quietly, I will do my duty. I will—”

“You will do no such thing.”

A familiar voice interrupts, rings out across Parliament Square, tight and hot with humiliated dignity.

Willow stands atop one of the nearby statue plinths, some toppled monster of the British Empire shattered at her feet, backlit by the churning Nightmare. She is not alone; a bloody, dust-caked figure stands at her side, Willow’s mangled right hand around her throat, eyes rolled back, head lolling. The girl from the shelter, the one I protected in the rubble, her smart, poorly-fitting suit torn and ripped and bloody.

Azure whirls toward Willow, points her hammer one-handed.

“You again!” Azure shouts. “You—” A hesitation, a fight behind Azure’s eyes. “You unhand that woman, right now! There are limits to this, Miss Finch!”

Willow regards Azure Infinity with dull contempt. “You will do as you’re told, toy soldier. You’ve played your part, now you’re overstepping your mark. Go on, run along, get back to the main show, before the curtain call.”

Azure seethes behind clenched teeth. “I don’t care what authority you claim, we’re in the middle of a Nightmare. You will unhand that woman, and then I am taking Octavia Carter into custody. If you resist, I’ll … I’ll … ”

Willow ignores her, looks to me; her face is still marred by the bruise I gave her, a crust of blood around her left eye-socket.

“Octavia,” she sighs, unimpressed, sorrowful. “Why this girl? Why this one girl? Is it her looks? Was it something I failed to understand you needed? Why her?”

That girl is up there because I protected her. An opportunistic target for Willow’s jealousy.

Can’t find words, wasted on Willow now. She waits, expecting a serious response, another argument, more debate.

Willow sighs, doing a very good impression of deep melancholy. “I’m afraid I’m very disappointed in you, Octavia. I didn’t even think that was possible.” She sniffs, wipes one finger beneath her eyes, as if she’s crying. “You and I have so many differences to reconcile, but I can see now it’s going to take much longer than a few days, maybe longer even than weeks, or months. You will come back to me, I know you will. But you have been lied to by evil people—”

I roar, inarticulate, wordless, a machine-sound pounding up from my deeps. Splutter and catch, cough and rattle, and then my engines fire again, so loud it shakes the Nightmare substrate. Trail off, panting, steaming with rage.

Willow really does look disappointed. Azure Infinity glances between us, eyes scrunched with disbelief.

The injured young woman at Willow’s side takes a step forward, as if propelled by Willow’s hand on her neck.

“In your absence,” Willow says, eyes glossy with tears, “I need some comfort of my own. I am considering the most pitiful of all contingencies, and I want you to know that this isn’t an attempt to stir you to natural jealousy, whatever it may look like. I could do this behind your back, but … no, I want you to see what you’re doing to me, Octavia. I want you to understand why I must rely on a temporary replacement, and why she must be so similar to you. Because it’s only you I want, you see? I want nobody else, no replacement will do, it will be a pale, hollow, useless mimicry. But I’ll have to make do.”

The young woman raises her own right arm, as if in a trance. Willow traces a line around her upper arm with the tip of one finger.

“Here, I think,” Willow says, voice a-quiver. “This was the exact site of your amputation. I can make it quick for her, easy and painless, but for you it wasn’t. So, yes. For her it must be similar.”

Her eyes flick to me, searching for — what? Jealousy? Does she think I’m jealous? Willow comprehends nothing.

I take one step toward the plinth, metal boot cracking the concrete; the zoog scurries down my front and slips into the pouch again.

Azure raises her hammer to halt me. Her face says control is crumbling. “You—” She stammers, shakes her head. “You can’t—”

“Whose side are you on?” I hiss. No answer, just wide eyes and a hard swallow. “What do you fight for, Azure?”

“For England! For justice. What else?”

“Not enough.”

I push past her hammer; she lets me go. My right fist comes together, knuckles locked into place. Willow turns to me with a face full of tears, looking down from her stolen plinth, face breaking into a quivering smile.

“It’s too early for forgiveness right now, Octavia,” she says. “I think we need some time apart. I think we both need some space.”

My helmet rises over my face and head, sealing This Machine against Nightmare and Dream.

“Willow.”

Her face brightens. “Octavia—”

“Hold still,” I growl. “While I break you.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

This Machine is locked and loaded and ready to rumble; Azure seems a little surprised. Then again, so is Octavia.

And the next chapter is the final chapter of arc 5! This arc actually turned out a lot shorter than I originally expected, sharp and snappy and pretty much to-the-point, though the girls did manage to surprise me quite a bit on the way there. Arc 6 is coming up soon, and I am very excited for it indeed.

Anyway! Before she can there, Octavia’s got her first real test drive, as it were. A live combat situation. That is, if Willow is willing to fight back, and fight fair …

Meanwhile, if you want more Maidens right away, you can always:

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Right now my patrons have access to three chapters ahead! For the moment I’m going to try to keep it as three; in the future I hope to push this out to more.

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you so much for being here and reading my little story. It really does mean so much to me that so many readers are out there enjoying what I’m putting together with Maidens. We’re still very much in the early movements of the story, and I am having a great time with it. I hope you are too! Thank you!

Next chapter, magical girls throw down the gauntlet. Time to fight for real.