Content Warnings
Racism (borderline)
Internalised ableism
Wounded animals
Azure Infinity streaks past my flank, a cobalt comet carried on a steel breeze.
Shining silver warhammer raised high, prismatic unlight on gleaming cerulean armour; eyes flint-hard, mouth wide in wordless war-cry, ponytail whipping out behind. Great clouds of murk are swirled aside by the sheer force of her charge, slamming swift and sure through the Nightmare substrate.
Willow — high up on her stolen plinth, framed by the Nightmare’s roil and the dirty white bulk of the Oxford Parliament, her ruined right hand wrapped around the throat of some innocent teenage girl with whom she has decided to replace me, torture me, blame me — flickers with the tiniest wrinkle of consternation, attention torn from my own halted advance.
Didn’t expect the good soldier to disobey orders. Neither did I.
Azure kicks off the ground and leaps into the air with a further burst of acceleration, skirts rippling, warhammer an argent blur, spiked tip aimed for Willow’s centre of mass. She moves blindingly fast; dim awareness tells me that my eyes could not track her if I were untransformed, we have entered the exclusive domain of magical girls and dream-things. This feat of supernatural athleticism is neither warning shot nor wounding blow; Azure Infinity has decided Willow Finch must die. And she can achieve this goal faster and cleaner than I might.
Anger and resentment switches target, from Willow to Azure. This is my revenge, my rescue, my skull to break. Willow is mine!
But then, for the first time in my life, for a split-second jolt of awe, I see a magical girl as others must see her.
Azure Infinity plays second-fiddle to Scarlet Edge, in the unspoken media hierarchy of the Trio. Always second option for television interviews, a little too awkward in front of the cameras, stiff and self-conscious in that subtle way which smells so much like easily-broken prey, but placed forever beyond that category by grace of dreams and girl-juice. Too earnest and bushy-tailed for the tastes of the English public. Too short and too girlish for other tastes; not enough woman in her, not while Scarlet struts and preens, or Dawn purrs with her enigmatic, knowing smile, showing off her bare legs and her firearm tricks. Azure Infinity, sponsor of a dozen charities, face of public service announcements and stay-in-school advisory notices. No mystery to her, little online speculation as to her hidden romantic entanglements or secret liaisons, as if nobody can imagine her doing anything with her knickers off. Most likely of the Trio to often be found elsewhere, helping magical girls from other parts of the country, or even beyond.
A warhammer is a brute weapon, for easy-going bruisers and hulking cartoon monsters; Azure fails at that role, and nobody cares to define her further. Her smiles are too real, her belief too heartfelt. She says she loves animals and nature. She’s the only one of the Trio ever caught crying on camera. She shows the least skin inside all that armour, and displays the most straightforward violence with her hammer.
All such dross melts away, blotted out by the brilliance of a single moment.
Azure Infinity is a knight in shining armour, a revival from an age that never really was. Her doubts and hesitation have been defeated and cast down, and now she throws everything she has into slaying a monster — not some lost wanderer from the Dreamlands, not a Dreamer who only wishes to live, not an enemy of the state. A real monster, my monster.
Where was this feeling all my life?
Willow gasps; the world stutter-steps three feet to the right.
Azure’s warhammer slams through thin air where Willow should be standing, crashes into the plinth, hammer-head following through like a fist through warm butter, smashing apart the already toppled statue that Willow had supplanted for the sake of her grandstanding. Stone shrapnel explodes outwards, raining down onto the pavement and clattering off Azure’s armour.
Willow doesn’t vanish into the Nightmare; stutter-step motion disgorges her at the edge of the plinth, just beyond Azure’s reach, still holding her entranced, blood-streaked hostage by the throat. Willow’s outline steams with toxic golden light, leaking into the Nightmare substrate. An afterimage of her previous position lingers, superimposed on the air for a moment before it dissolves.
“This is none of your business!” Willow shrieks at Azure. “I told you, you dirty little street-urchin! Get back to work!” She jabs her free hand into the sky, at the teetering crown of thorns, the Nightmare core. “Go do your duty!”
“Unhand that woman,” Azure says. “I won’t tell you again.”
She waits for a reply. I’d scoff were I not amazed. Chivalry will get you killed, Azure.
Willow’s face twists with incredulous outrage. “Remember your place, you—”
Azure whirls, a hammer-hurricane in sapphire and silver. A flurry of strikes slam toward Willow’s head, chest, and hips, arcs of blurring steel too fast for mundane eyes.
Willow cries out in strangled frustration; her body stutter-streaks to one side, hammer blows falling on the smear of toxic golden light she leaves behind. Azure’s assault forces her off the plinth, down to the concrete paving stones of Parliament Square. Azure leaps after her, hammer singing. Willow flickers aside and ahead of every strike, face a taut mask.
“This is an outrage!” Willow shrieks like a puncture wound in a star. “How dare you!? How dare you— to me— like this—”
“You can bleed and you can die, Dreamer!” Azure drowns her out. “All of you can! A bruise on your face, those missing fingers!? You think you’re invincible, but you’re not!”
Willow strikes back. Streamers of toxic golden light coil outward from her afterimage-aurora, ragged leaves of stellar mass sheared off by irresistible gravity.
Azure tanks a direct blast of effulgence, face turned aside, eyes squinted half-shut; one cheek, the side of her neck, and half her forehead all flash-burn a deep red, blisters rising and boiling and popping in an instant. A wide patch of her armour turns a discoloured brown, exposed skirts fraying and ripping in Willow’s gale-force radiance. Her breastplate fractures with a bone-shattering crack of stressed metal. She skids back, boots scraping on bare concrete. Smoke rises from the gaps in her armour and the collar of her gorget, as if she’s cooking inside her steel shell.
But she staggers only a moment, then raises her hammer and shouts a war-cry and comes on again.
One third of the Trio of Albion. Finally I understand why.
“Enough!” Willow snaps, goes ice-cold. “You forget what I am.”
Willow stops trying. Goes still as stone. Awaits the next lightning-fast blow.
Awe goes brittle, snaps me from my useless gawping. I pick up my feet, slam across the concrete to — to do what? To assist Azure Infinity, one of the most powerful magical girls in England, possibly in the world? An idol, a symbol, a perfect encapsulation of the hypocrisy I’ve hated for ten long years? A woman who would surrender me to Dream Control and lock me in a cell for thinking wrong? Yes, because this isn’t victory. Azure Infinity doesn’t know Willow Finch like I do. She doesn’t know that look, that hint of a sneer concealed behind beneficent acceptance. I don’t know it either, don’t recall it from dreams. But I know what it means.
Azure takes the opening, a horizontal hammer blow aimed at the left side of Willow’s chest, to crack her ribs and pulp her heart.
Willow’s left hand moves faster than Azure could ever hope to match, a smear of golden light bent the wrong way.
She slaps Azure across the face with all the power of a solar flare.
Azure’s head snaps round, a sickening crunch-crack of breaking bones. Her feet leave the ground, whole body a flailing corkscrew as she sails through the air, halfway across Parliament Square. She crashes into the base of another statue-plinth, shatters stone and concrete and metal, her hammer cracking the ground where it lands. A dead English hero topples from the plinth and breaks across Azure’s back.
Azure Infinity lies still, face down in the dust.
Willow straightens up, raises her chin, takes a deep breath. Flushed in the cheeks, panting softly. She resets her face, loses the sneer, turns back to me.
I skid to a halt, metal boots raising twin showers of sparks from the concrete.
“What a rude interruption that was,” Willow muses, as if we’ve sent off an unwanted caller in the middle of a sleepy afternoon. A tiny smile twists her face into something ugly, crocodile tears back to the fore as she looks me up and down. “Interesting, isn’t it? How you falter as soon as you’re alone again. Why stop, hmm? Do you even know it yourself? Ahhh, but I always knew this about you, Octavia. That’s what all this is about, that’s why we’re here. You cannot do anything without me.” She sighs, high and sharp and quivering, on the verge of tears. “But I’m not so foolish or optimistic as to believe that one moment will teach you the truth about yourself. We are not ready to mend things between us, not yet. It will not be so easy.” She glances once again at the young woman trapped and entranced by her hand around her throat, gone limp and lifeless as an unstringed doll during the brief fight. Now the woman stands on her own feet again, right arm rising to resume the mockery of my own childhood loss. “Now,” Willow says, “where were we? Ah, yes, I remember. The … necessary changes that made you, well, you—”
I turn away. Leave Willow behind.
A moment of stunned silence, then she erupts into a chorus of outraged splutters.
She can’t believe I’ve turned my back on her; neither can I, clenching both fists, lungs like hot bellows, muscle-cable-piston-interlocks vibrating with stored energy. This Machine is fuelled by rage, and all that molten fuel has to go somewhere eventually, or it will burn right through the engine of my own heart.
But that doesn’t make me an idiot; I just dug myself out of a collapsed shelter, burned everything I had in the effort, and now I’m running on fumes, scratched and dented and maybe worse, deep down in places I can’t see. Willow has demonstrated that she can melt into the Nightmare at will, can probably teleport herself away faster than I can punch. She can outpace Azure Infinity, she can kill a magical girl. She wants me to watch while she tortures and cripples somebody in my place, some twisted parody of a jealous rebound.
The only way to avert that is to stop giving her what she wants. Ignore her, for a moment, until the pressure becomes too great.
I stomp over to Azure Infinity. Grab a shoulder with one black gauntlet, try to haul her upright, see if she’s a corpse. Weighs too much, all floppy and limp, all armour and metal and that massive hammer.
“Dead?” I grunt. Can barely squeeze words past the anger. Shake her hard. “Azure. Valerie. You dead?”
Azure Infinity splutters back to life, hacks and gasps and screams through gritted teeth. She shrugs off my hand, shakes herself free, grabs her warhammer in both fists, then uses it to lever herself up, shedding masonry dust and rubble grit.
The right side of her face is a wreck of pulverised bone and shredded flesh, jaw shattered, teeth broken. One eyeball is burst and ruined, the socket crumpled inward from the side. Her neck sits at the wrong angle, spine twisted, skull dented, a sticky mass of blood staining her blonde hair from beneath. Exposed skin on her face and neck is red-raw from radiation burns, a ragged landscape of fluid-filled blisters. Her armour is scorched and cracked, still smoking from inside.
Her magically-powered body is already trying to pull itself together. Flesh and bone on her face reknits with visible speed — though so much slower than the propaganda likes to pretend, a snail-crawl compared to the regenerative powers I witnessed from Scarlet Edge. Give her twenty minutes and she’ll be ready to lose a second round.
Azure forces herself upright, leaning on her hammer. She keens through her teeth, panting for breath, drooling blood. Left eye wild and tight, skin gone waxen-pale, shaking all over.
Never seen this before. A magical girl truly wounded, not the picturesque aftermath they like to show on television. In pain. Slow healing. Grounded.
“Where’s the rest?” I say.
Azure eyes me, snorts back a mouthful of blood. We both ignore Willow, still ranting and raving.
“ … unnh?” Azure grunts.
“The rest. The Trio.”
Azure gestures vaguely at the miasma-choked sky, the dim crown of the Nightmare. Then she forces herself further upright and tries to push past me, though she can barely take one step.
“Stand aside, Miss Carter,” she wheezes, blood bubbling from her lips. “This is not your— this is my— my responsibility—”
“Willow’s mine.”
“I don’t— don’t understand what this Dreamer did— to you— but—” A shake of her head, a whine as her broken neck refuses to reset. “This isn’t enough to stop— stop me—”
I grab Azure by her metal gorget and shove her to the right. She stumbles, too weak to resist, barely keeps her feet.
“Dig,” I grunt.
Azure frowns, shakes her bleeding head. “What—”
Another shove. I point at the hole in the ground from which I crawled, the rubble-filled route down into Parliament Square Underground Station, into the violated public shelter.
“Thirty people,” I grunt. “Dig.”
Azure looks at the rubble, then back to me, intact left eye scrunched with disbelief, flickering past my shoulder, to Willow.
“But— the Dreamer, you—”
“She’s mine,” I say. “Dig. Go save somebody. S’what you’re meant to do, right? You can’t fight like this. You’re done.”
Azure Infinity looks at me with something close to respect. Or maybe she’s just brain-damaged right now.
“You can’t fight a Dreamer alone. Miss—”
“This Machine. Willow is mine. Go dig.”
“But—”
“Dig!” I roar.
Azure Infinity glances at Willow one last time, then hobbles off toward the rubble.
One obstacle removed. If another magical girl interferes too much, Willow might decide to simply run, and then I’ll have no way to save her new victim. Or maybe she would kill Azure with the next counterattack, leave me with a corpse on my hands. Maybe I was just taking pity on Azure. Or doing a kindness. No time to think about that. Clearly nonsense.
I turn back to Willow. Her faint golden aura leeches into the Nightmare substrate, staining the oily prismatic murk with a spreading patch of aurelian toxin, a skin disease on the distant face of the Oxford Parliament. Above us, the Nightmare itself careens through the sky, a burning ring of bronze listing to one side, an airship breaking up as it falls, layers of un-light glass shattering like rainstorms as they come apart. Tiny dots buzz and loop in the air nearby the Nightmare. Magical girls, still fighting.
The substrate is thinning now, beginning to die away as the Nightmare falls. Nothing dares approach us anymore, fading back into the dream.
Willow looks peevish, left hand on her hip, lips compressed to a fine white line, as if I’m late to meet her for a date in a cheesy rom-com, like we’re standing beneath sun and clear skies, not in the roiling heart of a dying Nightmare. Her new victim still dangles from her maimed right hand, bleeding from a scalp wound, face caked in masonry dust and sticky with half-dried blood.
Out of options. No tricks up my metal sleeves, no secret special moves held in reserve, no last-minute allies riding to my side. Not like in the cartoons. Still have to try. This Machine does not cease.
One step toward Willow, black steel boot crunching on concrete.
Willow sneers. “Well, that was a touching little display. Since when do you care about ‘the public’, Octavia?”
Another step. Two, three, four—
“You saw what happened down there in that shelter,” she says. “You saw what those ‘good citizens’ were ready to do to you. They would have killed you, pulled you to pieces, and spat on your corpse. The British public, bloodthirsty as they’ve ever been. And you think we’re the villains in this sordid little arrangement? You would happily see them crushed beneath all the rubble, Octavia. And I would too, to protect you. It’s all I’ve ever done, protect you.”
Five, six, seven—
A delicate huff, a sniff to keep her tears back. A turn of her eyes, a return to her subject. The limp woman raises her right arm again.
“Now, where was I?” Willow says, ignores my footsteps. “Yes. In your absence, I shall require whatever thin comfort I can get. You must understand, Octavia, you are the one making me do this, you should see it for what it truly is, and—”
Eight.
The Eightfold Engine of This Machine catches and roars on the final step, accelerates my body into a piston, right fist as the tip, feet pounding a channel of cracked concrete across Parliament Square.
Willow doesn’t pretend this time, already warmed up. And I can’t match Azure’s speed.
She flickers backward, a smear of toxic golden light into which I am forced to sprint. Radioactive heat crackles and creaks against the outside of my black steel armour, a layer of instant death for mundane flesh.
Willow bursts into smiling tears. “Oh, Octavia! We’ve been together for so long, half our lives! How can you do this to me!? To us!?”
My right fist slams forward, aimed dead centre on Willow’s face; she’s not there, another flicker-smear of toxic gold carrying her six feet back. I’m on her again in two paces, another punch into the dead air where her face should be. Another, another, another, prosthetic arm slamming back and forth like a jackhammer, black steel knuckles cutting swirls in the Nightmare substrate and the toxic golden dust. Always just shy of the target.
“Who even is she!?” Willow wails, shaking her new victim. “You didn’t answer before, but I know there must be some truth to this! Why did you care so much about this girl? Octavia!? Do you know her from somewhere? Is she special to you? Were you somehow keeping secrets from me? No, of course not, you couldn’t have. So why? Why? Why!?”
Tears slide down Willow’s face, mad with paranoid jealousy. Her weeping fills the air thick with aurous dust, a spreading cloud of golden gunk, smothering my sight with toxic shine, clogging the joints of my armour, slowing me by that fraction of a second more.
She won’t strike me like she did Azure. She wants me drowned and choking. Wants me to watch.
Rage slams shut a row of pressure-valves deep down in my chest, injects hydrazine and magma into the pounding chambers of my heart; the engine cuts out, stutters with strain, then thunders back twice as strong. My skin — the surface of my armour — floods with a flash-sweat of superheated oil and anti-coagulants; Willow’s golden gunk ignites and cooks off in a burst of red-black light. Joints free and clear, vision washed clean, I stride from the toxic miasma. My throat hinges wide, steam rushing up from inside This Machine.
“Coward!” I roar, louder than the Nightmare. “You’re mine, Willow!”
Willow flinches. Almost does as she’s told. This voice of This Machine is so loud, the will of a titan of old, loose in the world to wreak havoc and revenge.
A flinch or two is the only way to save Willow’s new victim.
But the moment I gain on her by a single footstep, Willow figures that out too. Her distraught shock twists with a pale mirror of my own anger, sick with jealous frustration.
“No!” I shout, fist uncoiling, reaching out.
Always too far behind, too much to one side, Willow flickering and smearing across the surface of a glass, breaking the rules of reality as she drags the dream into the waking world. The entranced young woman at her side raises her own right arm again, offers a sacrifice. Willow’s left hand forms a pincer of golden light, shears made from stellar radiation and the off-gassing of dying stars.
With no more effort than pruning a branch, Willow snips the woman’s right arm clean off, a neat transhumeral amputation.
Bloodless, cauterised instantly. A stump of bisected white bone, exposed to the air. The severed limb flops to the ground with a heavy, meaty thump, fingers limp.
Somebody is keening, roaring with white-hot rage, inarticulate at this repeat of ancient trauma. Sounds like my voice.
The girl snaps out of her trance. Eyes open wide and wild in a face caked with masonry dust and half-dried blood. Her mouth opens in an animal wail of pain and panic. She flails, thrashing and frothing, gagging and gasping at the sight of the stump, choking and coughing in the Nightmare-thick air, spraying spittle and tears, kicking and biting and losing her mind.
Willow recoils with mild surprise and less mild disgust, the face you might make if a new pet shat on the carpet. She shoves the girl away.
For a moment the wounded woman keeps her feet, tottering and reeling. Her eyes rotate skyward toward the falling Nightmare, then land with terrible finality upon her own severed arm lying on the pavement. She gropes the air, once, twice; I feel it in my own prosthetic arm, all those years of phantom pain, that ever-present loss, the map of your body denying it as you try to feel with a limb long-gone.
Two stumbling steps toward the severed arm, then she goes down, crumples to her knees beneath the weight of the Nightmare substrate, foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling into the back of her head. I’m too slow to catch her, my trajectory screeching to a halt, black-steel gauntlets closing on thin air. She thumps to the pavement, onto the lonely support of her left hand for a moment, then slumps, face-down.
Her eyes find me, glassy with pain, somehow still semi-conscious.
“I don’t understand,” Willow mutters. She wipes her hands, as if she’s touched something unclean, staring at the woman. “Don’t understand at all. Don’t understand … ”
I pick up the severed arm. Not sure why. Torn sleeve of a grey suit jacket, white shirt underneath. Heavy, real flesh, warm meat, still full of blood.
A bystander, caught up in events beyond her comprehension, crippled in a conflict between magical girls. She’s me all over again; Willow is disgusted by her now, but Willow has already won, stamped out another iteration of Octavia Carter from raw human materials with the application of pain and suffering and loss. The cycle continues. I am powerless to stop it. I helped it happen, went down to that shelter, spoke to that girl, protected her when the ceiling fell. I am as much to blame as Willow; we are all to blame, we magical girls. I turn to the fallen woman, hold up her arm as if I can press it back into place, rebuild the soft machine of the human body with nothing but willpower and righteous anger. Can rage re-knit flesh? Can This Machine remake another?
Willow mutters at my back. “She should have been just like you, after a couple of snips. The mind, the mind, I had to do the mind first, yes. Next time, the mind first, then the body? I never knew, I never—”
Crimson flame flares in the Nightmare-choked sky, burning ground-ward several hundred feet above Parliament Square. A tiny speck of living sun-fire flowers into a lance of ruby-red, streaking over the rooftops, condensing further, drawing itself coherent.
Pain traces an echo from my gut to my upper back, the memory of a sword. High-heeled shoes clack down onto the pavement.
Scarlet Edge.
She looks like shit.
Her cream-and-red dress is torn here and there, stockings laddered, lace gone limp, bronze-brown stains marring her studied perfection. Any actual wounds have already healed — but her poise is broken, the regal set of her shoulders slumped, her natural grace all off-balance. Her ruby sword has gone dull, inner fires either spent or never kindled. Her ever-present heat-haze is drawn close to her body, cooled almost to extinction. Her hair is limp as cold ash.
Worse than all that, her face is drained and slack with something far worse than defeat, in a way she never shows the cameras. Darkness rings her bloodshot eyes like twin bruises. The mark of my bite still shows purple on her lips, but even that seems faded and pale.
England’s wild rose, tattered and torn. Still drunk, maybe hungover.
Scarlet Edge stares at Willow, at the wounded woman on the ground, at me. Her back straightens with a flicker of her usual poise. “Dreamer!” she spits, venom and contempt. Then looks aside, perhaps for Azure. “Where—”
I march up to Scarlet before Willow can answer. We don’t have time for her to get stupid.
She tries to raise her ruby sword between us, eyes scrunched narrow with sudden outrage; I bat the blade aside, get good and close. “Who—”
Retract my helmet, show my face, almost nose-to-nose. Long black hair slides free and whips aside, tips mingling with Scarlet’s own fire-red tresses, soaking in the lingering heat; tongues of flame lick across her hair where mine touches. Scarlet’s eyes blow wide with recognition, no pinprick of resistance for her; not after what we shared earlier?
Reach out with my right fist, grab the front of Scarlet’s dress, yank her even closer. She splutters, reeks of alcohol and ashen fire and sweat and tears.
I shove the severed arm against her chest, force her to cradle the limb.
“Do your fucking job!” I roar in her face. Point at the wounded woman. “Save somebody!”
Scarlet tries to splutter my name. Raise a protest. Offer to kill me. I shove her away, toward Willow’s new victim. She stumbles back, starts to shake her head, draw herself up.
I stare her down. Mouth two words. Good girl.
Scarlet Edge swallows hard. Hesitates harder. Then she turns to the wounded girl on the ground. My helmet redeploys, seals me back inside.
Willow has recovered her composure; she doesn’t vanish when I face her again. Her eyes are tight with jealous hurt, a betrayed look hot and red from too many tears, a wounded twist to her lips.
“I see,” she hisses, moist and tearful. “I see. You’ll deny me even the thin comfort of a surrogate. Gone from my life, but still trying to control who I’m allowed to associate with. And you, Octavia, look at you. Look at yourself. Conspiring and consorting with magical girls, with people you’ve hated your whole life. This isn’t you, this is a parody of you, this is those whores and monsters putting things in your head and—”
“Willow.”
“I do not see why I should answer to anything you care to say to me!”
“Are you going to run away again?”
Why even ask; I know she won’t, not now. My refusal to break has pushed her over a threshold of impatience. She needs me, needs to own me, dictate to me. She is not content to wait me out. She’ll have me even if it’s just hand-to-hand combat.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She sniffs, almost sobs. “But no, Octavia. You’ve taken away my last thin comfort, so now I will take away yours. I don’t see why you deserve—”
This Machine roars, drowns out her lies. A standing start, kicking off the pavement, zero-to-maximum in less than a heartbeat. No grand strategy, no team effort, no plan.
Willow dodges again, slides across reality’s skin like a knife, radioactive golden blood billowing in her wake. My right fist hammers the air, a piston breaking the world into prismatic shards. Willow flickers aside, retreating across the length of Parliament Square, threading her way deeper into the Nightmare substrate, between the towering statues of ancient British heroes. I lunge and lurch, turn my body into a battering ram, slamming into the corners of decorative stone and statue plinths as Willow tries to outpace me; Alfred the Great and Admiral Nelson and Oliver Cromwell come crashing down around us, marble bodies exploding into fragments as my fists tear on through.
“Oh, Octavia!” Willow cries out, a smeared face against the Nightmare’s thinning swirl. “Don’t you see what this is?! You can’t live without me, and I can’t live without you! Even with all this bitterness between us!”
This Machine roars again, beyond words now. Lash out with a fist, clip the side of a statue plinth. My knuckles pass through golden aurora that might have been Willow a split-second earlier. Closer now. Closer every second. Come here, Willow! Hold still, let me break you!
“Octavia, stop!” Willow screeches. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
Another roar. A wordless denial.
Willow finally strikes me.
Her golden halo explodes with tendrils of lashing light, stellar pulses and solar flares dousing me with whips of radiation, just as she did with Azure Infinity.
But This Machine was made to endure. Black steel armour turns aside the hungry starless maw. Eightfold engines ramp higher, heart cooked in rocket fuel and braced with molten metal. Innards heat to boiling, cook down into carbon, transmute to pure steel. Pistons race, saturated in oil. Gears engage, circuits complete. This Machine finds reserves of rage and drains them dry, processes anger into power. Willow’s assault burns off my outer layers, but then I’m through, I’m on her again, fists in her face.
Faster, stronger, more accurate, less thought required for each motion. Fists — both right and left — slam outward at where Willow was, at where she will be, crunching through concrete, smashing apart stone, drawing a yelp of surprise from Willow’s throat, a skidding of panicked feet, a tripping back on concrete.
We both pause in mutual amazement, the great dirty white bulk of the Oxford Parliament looming over us. Willow frowns with confusion and concern, golden aura shivering like a frightened bird.
Inside my helmet my lips peel back from my teeth; a mad laugh bubbles forth.
“You can’t stop me now, Willow!” I bellow. “You can’t stop This Machine!”
Willow shakes her head. Resets her expression. “Octavia, you have no comprehension of what you are doing. I am a Dreamer. You don’t seem to understand what that means—”
I kick off again, a battering ram of black steel and slamming pistons. Willow smears backward like gold dust across torn paper.
A bolt of lightning in brilliant sunburst yellow strikes the ground perhaps twenty feet to my right, blinding and deafening, cutting through even my crystal clarity.
Buttery frills crumpled and dirtied, brilliant ribbons torn and ragged, a form-fitting yellow dress askew and stained above long bare legs. Bandoleers half-empty, unloaded pistols in her belt. Dark skin, braided hair, still glowing like the first moments of a brilliant day, the sun just gracing the horizon, but struggling past layers of thick cloud. Arquebus in both hands, held as if too heavy for tired limbs.
Dawn’s First Gloaming doesn’t hesitate. She points the gun at me and pulls the trigger.
Gunshot like a gong, the sun itself rung with a broken hammer. The bullet tears a zig-zag across space, dragging a lightning bolt behind itself.
I roar, swat the bullet from the air with a punch. Electricity crackles and dissipates across my knuckles. Fist aches and spasms, nothing more.
Dawn cracks off another two shots as I sprint toward her; the second I punch from the air like the first, the third I don’t even bother, let it spend itself against my armour in a crackling wave of electricity. My heart judders under the impact of the bullet’s electrical pulse, stutters out and comes to a hard stop. But This Machine can self-start from cold. The engine of my heart rebirths itself, rams straight back into high gear. I don’t even stumble.
Dawn is trying to fire off a fourth shot when I catch her. I rip the gun from her hands, raise it high, bring it down, break it over her skull.
The arquebus shatters and splinters. Dawn’s First Gloaming goes down, hands raised to protect her face. I hit her again, then toss the splintered remains of her weapon at her.
“Stay down!” I spit. She does.
Back to Willow, no talk this time. She tries, opens her mouth to lie. Closes it with a squeal when I’m on her in the blink of an eye. This Machine is red-lining now, pistons churning, oil boiling, engine thirsty, hot as a crucible. Willow is a Dreamer, but that means nothing; I can catch her now, I can catch her and I can break her apart, because that’s what this machine was designed to do.
I’m going to save you, Willow. I’m going to crack you open and deliver the ten-year-old who never got to live.
Reality flickers and jerks, a badly damaged tape. The waking world gives way to the logic of a dream.
Willow stops holding back.
A dozen statues step from their plinths and stride forward through the Nightmare, draw swords and spears and raise shields of stone. My fists crash through the carven visages of Charles the First and Henry Tudor, smash the sword and cross of St. George, break apart the faces of a dozen unknown soldiers. Willow retreats upward into the air, haloed within her glowing golden nebula. My legs freeze solid in conjured ice-flows, trying to sap my heat and drain the energies of my inner engines, but ice melts as my surfaces flush with boiling oil. More statues converge, faceless monsters summoned from England’s Nightmares — warped stony dragons and rebellious peasants with pitchforks, a thousand foreigners grinning and grasping, and then just a wave of undifferentiated concrete limbs and tendrils and weapons and faces.
My fists break whatever she sends, break it all, break the world. Concrete drowns me, plunges me into yet another underworld, a twilight of stone, whirling like a hurricane, like the Nightmare substrate.
I’m not alone down here. A flash of crimson fire breaks through on my right, scorching and burning the stone monsters, cutting them apart with a shining ruby sword. On my left a sudden crunch-boom crunch-boom shatters concrete faces and sends animated statues sprawling, legs blown off, heads shot to pieces.
Somebody shouts my name. Shouts come back. It’s not worth it. Occy, Occy! Come back!
I smash my way onward, wade through a lake of swirling golden toxin and pulverised concrete and a trillion stone splinters. Can’t recall who or what that voice belongs to, not in this red-black world.
The wave of concrete and stone falls away behind me. Willow hangs in the air, hovering high directly over the white marble steps of the Oxford Parliament, haloed by a floating orb of twisted steel and crushed concrete, rubble and ruin, the detritus from the collapsed shelter. Overhead, the Nightmare — the ring of jagged bronze, the crown of thorns flowing with impossible colours — is flickering and dying, pieces of it sloughing off and turning to dust as they fall, a leviathan defeated.
Willow drops the rubble on me. Concrete slabs shatter against my shoulders and head, parting as I stride through the hail, armour bending and denting, cracking and buckling, venting oil and steam. Steel girders fly like arrows and slam into my armour; each one knocks me from my feet, smashes me into the ground, breaks the concrete pavement, puts me in a shallow crater. Armour buckled, engine stuttering, I haul myself back to my feet.
Again, I’m not alone.
Flame gutters far to my right, tries to deflect the projectiles with a sword, can’t catch them all, can’t keep up. On my left that crunchy clack-boom-clack-boom blows concrete from the air, a mad whooping cackle rising above the tumult, but eventually drowned out by the sheer volume of Willow’s frantic defence.
Willow, six feet above the steps of the Oxford Parliament, meets my gaze, wide-eyed with surprise.
She hurls the last of the rubble down at me, superheated into a slurry of magma and molten metal. The wave washes over me, cools and hardens, grinds my limbs to a halt inside, blinds and chokes and immobilises This Machine.
Engines push past the red line, straining and squealing and shedding slivers of metal inside my organs, superheating inside my metal prison. My heart stops, restarts, stutters out again, chugs back to life, slow as sludge.
A sigh of relief, Willow’s voice quivering with effort.
“Ahhhhh. Oh, Octavia. You quite surprised me, you almost—”
“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrargh!”
Metal buckles and stone cracks. Heat vents from a hundred gaps in my armour, this machine pouring out a molten answer. Rubble-slurry parts like tar, light floods back in. I pull free, oil sluicing the remains from my exterior.
I can feel myself breaking apart. The fury of this fuel is literally destroying me even as it makes me unstoppable. Survival is a distant concept, too far away to grasp; if something lies beyond the clarity and power of this moment, I’m not sure I want to know.
Doesn’t matter now. I’ve won.
Willow scrambles back, down on her feet again, as if my mere proximity has dragged her from the air. She stumbles and trips, sprawls backward onto the marbled steps of the Oxford Parliament. Eyes shining with tears, wide with something akin to fear.
“Octavia—”
I wind back a fist. “Hold still.”
Willow flings out her wounded right hand, hurls the last few scraps of rubble.
A crack — the sound barrier — followed by a bulging ring of impossible negative illumination.
A handful of pebbles hit my torso at relativistic speed, punch neat holes through my black steel armour. Bones crack, ribs splinter, organ-meat tears and ruptures. Steel buckles, pistons snap, engines shatter. The pebbles shed speed as they pass through me, explode out my back in great ragged exit wounds of dark blood and steaming machine oil, scattering black metal shrapnel.
The pain is abstract, too large to encompass within the mechanism of my mind, great cold runnels torn in my flesh. Blood and oil gouts from the wounds, flowing down my back, flooding my internal spaces, soaking up excess heat. My heart has been pierced and pulped, engines stuttering and juddering to catch, tubes flailing loose, pistons stop-starting.
I stumble. Willow’s fear ebbs away.
“I really didn’t want to have to do that, Octavia,” she says, voice thick with sorrow, smile all lies. “I didn’t, I really didn’t. But it’s okay, I can help you, I can make it all better, kiss it all better—”
This Machine retains momentum enough.
My first punch cracks Willow’s head to one side. Black steel knuckles tear her cheek open and shatter her jaw, spraying blood across the pristine white steps. My second punch she manages to dodge, face smearing aside in a writhing corona of toxic gold.
“No,” I grunt, open my fist, catch her head.
And then I have her, skull cradled in black steel fingers, eyes wide and staring, panting for breath through bloody lips, gone pale as rotten oats and acid storm clouds.
Willow is terrified of me. First sensible thing she’s done in ten years.
“Octaviaaaaaahhh—!”
My name turns to a scream as I haul her into the air by her skull, slam her back down into the steps, bones cracking, golden aurora splattering and flowing like voided bowels. Blood and bone explodes inside my grip, transmutes to sputtering golden light. Willow abandons her pretence of humanity; I whip my hand back again and I’m pounding a writhing mass of golden tentacles, living clutches of light and shadow, a star-thing made of coronal mass ejection and singularity accretion disk, a human form writhing and twitching in the centre, flesh and form flickering back and forth between dream and reality.
Willow flails, lashing against my armour with streamers and tendrils of toxic gold, wrapping tight around my helmet, yanking at the joints, trying to break the seam. Flashes of blinding light superheat segments of my armour, black steel melting and running like wax. Tendrils stab inward through the puncture wounds, then whip back out, hissing and boiling and cooking with the sheer heat of my internal engines, blood and oil sluicing out after them. Human hands scrabble and rake, nails breaking on my armour. My helmet cracks at the neck seam, retracts to save itself, black hair whipping out in a dark wave.
Willow’s face is still visible through the chaos, wide-eyed with defeat and fear, desperate humiliation and outraged confusion.
“This Machine is free!” I roar in her face. “And you will be too!”
Bounce her off the steps, smear more blood and brains and viscera across the white marble, more than could possibly be present inside one human body. Swing her like a flail, smash through a white column, her body a mass of golden light and imitation flesh and sobbing, screaming, pleading voices, screeching like the noise of a stellar implosion. My own blood and oil streaks the steps as we climb, as I break marble and shatter stone.
At the top of the steps, before the grand marble doors of the Parliament building, I finally get the better of her. Slam her face-down. Ride her to the floor. One hand in her hair, gripping her skull, somehow still intact, still uncracked.
“You’re— mine— Willow—” Try to roar, comes out as a stuttering cough, engines crunching and groaning. Too much damage, in too short a space of time.
Willow is damaged too, in a way I never knew possible. She is whole and shattered at the same time, flickering and flowing and reforming, falling apart and cascading outward, a mass of shredded muscle and exposed bone beneath a flickering caul of toxic golden light; can feel my face burning and peeling beneath that light. Her face is broken, bloody, puffy, gasping.
She’s sobbing. “Please, please, please—”
“Give her back,” I rasp, drooling something black from between slack lips — heart-blood or machine oil, don’t know which. “Give her back. Willow. The Willow I— I never knew— give her— give her back— back—”
Willow’s golden eyes flicker with the faintest hint of recognition.
Her expression melts. I am talking to something else.
“Please … ” she whines, in the voice of a ten-year-old girl I never got to know.
I raise her head one last time, use all the strength I have left; this blow will crack her open like an egg, disgorge the child she swallowed up so long ago. Willow, my Willow, the Willow who should have been, the ten-year-old Willow to whom I owe so much, I will save her, I will set her free, I will protect her with my life, I will give her the space to grow she never got, because the purpose of This Machine is not only destruction and death.
A slender grip halts my wrist.
Fingers like iron probes hook into the rents in the back of my armour and the open metal collar at my neck, dragging me up and off Willow’s quivering, flickering, collapsing body.
We are not alone.
A dozen figures have appeared around us without the slightest disturbance — men, women, young, old, all of them different yet all of them the same, all the same imperious and proud and perfect in their own unique ways. One of them I recognise, the man with the ponytail from the brief hospital-dream I shared with the younger Willow. Still dressed in a suit, frowning and sighing like he would rather be somewhere else. The others are more or less interested, some faintly angry, others unimpressed, a few amused, scornful, dismissive.
In stuttering stop-motion, I see them for what they really are. Demon visages of skinned meat, vast titans of clockwork time, warped angles of space itself pretending human form, dressed-up dolls pumped with sulphur and methane, bloody-toothed monsters with bellies full of raw flesh.
Dreamers. All unique, all alike.
They intervene. The grip on my wrist tightens, cracks the armour around my forearm. I try to resist, try to kick and buck, refuse to let go. But my engines are dry, sputtering out, even the fumes consumed.
“Let go,” says the voice of a cold machine. “Or I will take the whole arm.”
Willow babbles and pleads in the voice of a child, wordless broken mewling. My right arm creaks, and I know this thing will rip it clean off.
I let go of Willow’s skull. Three Dreamers move forward to catch Willow’s falling head, then drag her from beneath me. A moment of silent debate passes between them. A woman — young, dark-haired, dressed in a black evening gown that reveals no sliver of flesh, a peevish pout on her lips — lifts Willow into her arms. Willow clutches at her, a mess of pulped flesh and ragged bruises, blind and mute, trailing flickering tendrils of golden toxin.
“We did tell you not to bother, sweetheart,” the woman purrs. Starts to turn away. Willow wheezes, blood bubbling from broken lips. “Yes, yes. We’ll make it all better again. Don’t we always?”
An older gentleman dressed in a suit — in truth a leering naked satyr-thing studded with rings and piercings — gestures at me with a flick of his fingers. “The meat?”
“Let it bleed,” the woman says. “It’s over.”
The Dreamer Cabal turns to leave, simply vanishing as they move, winking out as if never there. I catch one last glimpse of Willow’s face, bleeding and broken amid her golden corona.
She reaches out for me, fingers trembling.
And then I’m being hauled up into the air, held over the head of something even more machine than I, a mass of mechanical limbs and bug-like eyes. Polymer and plastic, lined and studded, armoured and plated.
The robot throws me off the steps of the Oxford Parliament.
No dignified arc through the air for me; I land halfway down the steps, sharp angles of marble cracking my armour, blacking out for a split-second. A-clatter and a-rattle I go, crashing downward, limbs flopping as I roll, things inside me breaking and snapping and coming apart.
I end up at the foot of the grand ceremonial stairs, lying on my back, staring up at the sky.
The Nightmare is fading away, prismatic substrate melting like mist in the morning sun; the crown of thorns in the sky is a shattered band, falling and burning, the tiny dots of magical girls mopping up the leftovers. One more enemy of England vanquished. One more heroic tale to feed the public.
Down here the world is going red-black at the edges, eating up the clouds of steam and smoke, obscuring the broken concrete and rubble, filling the crater into which I have fallen.
This Machine struggles to restart itself. Parts reach across ragged gaps. Pistons ease slow and jagged. Valves open to release pressure, find none. Too many things broken.
Can’t get up. Can’t raise my head. Back is so cold. Breathing sounds like a broken steam engine. Mouth tastes of blood and oil.
I think my heart has stopped.
And why not? I’ve failed. All my rage was not enough to break the cycle, not enough to get revenge, not enough to punish Willow, save Willow, free Willow. Anger’s spent, tank’s empty, wasn’t enough. Wasn’t the right kind of fuel. Prototype needs refining. But there won’t be a second design.
Is it like this for all magical girls? Don’t think so.
Voices shout through the murk — Occy, Occy! Somebody is raging and roaring, a familiar dragon breathing fire at some irritant. A death-metal chord rings out, punctuated by the mechanical voice of a walking skeleton. I remember who those three are, now that This Machine is shutting down.
But they’re all too far away. Far side of rubble and ruin.
Something small and furry and wounded stirs against my belly. A zoog. A zoog inside my armour. The zoog I rescued.
Engines gutter back to life, a tenth of what they were, strung together with string and spit and hope. Anger and rage are all spent, but my heart finds something else as fuel, something thin and strange and not enough of it, just enough to give me a few more beats of blood and oil down my veins.
The others. Need to tell them about Plato Base. Need to hand off this zoog.
“Up,” I grunt. “Up. Up. Up! Useless cripple, up!”
This Machine rises in a lurch and a stagger, clanging off the nearest slab of broken concrete, hunch-backed and broken open, leaking black and red and red-black from every rent and rip. Pain is clear now, crawling from every part of my body, loud enough to make me scream and weep and froth with blood through gritted teeth.
Open my mouth to cry out — I’m here, over here! — but I can’t speak past the torrent of blood and oil. Can’t shout through the choking clouds of smoke and steam and masonry dust and pulverised stone.
A figure steps from the chaos. Red-white and wide-eyed, hair a tongue of muted flame, ruby sword still dim at her side.
Scarlet Edge stares at me like she’s seen a ghost, through red eyes ringed with dark bags.
Pull myself upright; can’t quite get there.
“Go on then,” I gurgle. “Do it.”
Do what?
Scarlet hesitates, half-raises her sword, parts her lips, can’t find the words.
A stagger, a lurch, a half-aborted raise of my right fist. The world goes red-black as it goes out from under my feet. With a crash and a clatter I land on my front and the world stutters out to darkness and silence.
This Machine crashes to a hard and total stop.
Any machine can be broken, if only you hit it hard enough.
Hooooooooooo, and there we go! The final chapter of arc 5, and it sure was a doozy. Willow’s out for the count, Octavia has gained several new holes, Scarlet doesn’t know what to make of all this, and a secret cabal of lucid dreamers has made off with the prize. And was that Grimgrave we heard briefly, amid all the chaos? We’ll have to wait for arc 6 to find out.
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 all so very much, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading along with my mad little tale of hyperviolent magical girls and nasty dreams. It makes me really happy to see so many people out there enjoying what I’m doing, and I couldn’t do it without all of you! Thank you!
Next chapter, Octavia’s gonna need an oil change and some dent repair. That damage will buff right out. Surely.