Content Warnings

Discussion of incest

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Scarlet tries her best to believe. Trust and circumstance and subconscious evidence work in harmony upon the mundane substrate of waking scepticism and motivated doubt. Lit from below by the dull glow of the car’s instrument panel, framed by the glass of the driver-side window, and by the deep, dark, dank shadows of the woodland beyond, by the moss-draped trees and briar-thick undergrowth of England untouched. All artifice falls from her face, sloughing away like dead skin, clean truth beneath. Eyes widen as the sky after a storm. Mouth drops open, colour drains, realisation dawns.

Burning Bright is your sister, behind the guise of transformation. Your soul knew it the moment you saw her, no matter the arm’s length at which it lurks, kept at bay by the tangled metaphysics of our condition. But you trust me now, you know I won’t lie. Not to you, Scarlet. Not to you.

But then those clearing eyes unfocus for a fleeting heartbeat. A wall of cloud covers her gaze, a stone lid on the sky.

The wall of sleep. That final barrier between any waking human and their own soul, even that of a magical girl.

Scarlet’s stare curdles, face gone ghostly pale, a tremor in her chest. Speechless, stunned, silent.

“Scarlet?” I rasp. “Scarlet?” Why even speak? I’ve already lost, nothing I can do against the metaphysical weight of the waking world. “Scarlet, I need you to trust me, even if you can’t believe this. Burning Bright is Bethany Fairfax. That was your sister—”

“Stop,” Scarlet murmurs.

“Burning Bright is your sister. Scarlet? Burning Bright is Bethany—”

Scarlet’s right hand strikes like a snake from the gloom; I brace for a slap, try not to flinch, hold my resolve. But she grabs the front of my borrowed hoodie instead, yanks me halfway out of the passenger seat. Her face glowers inches from my own, gritted teeth and cold anger. The zoog in my lap lets out a chorus of wild hissing and high-pitched rasping, scrabbling for a better grip on my clothes, twisting around to threaten Scarlet with snapping teeth. She ignores him.

“Stop!” she says, shaking all over. “Stop.”

“No,” I grunt.

Scarlet swallows hard, lump in her throat she can’t shift. Her voice is a rush of half-whispered rage. “It’s not just— not just the lie that offends me, Octavia. It’s that you would say this now, this— this absurd lie, after everything— after what we’ve just been through? After we shared— and you would assume that I’ll just believe it? That I would believe this, this lie, about my own sister? My sister!” A strangled shout fills the cramped interior of the car. “She is off-limits, Octavia! Beth is off-limits! How many times do I have to repeat this!? Off limits! Not yours! I might be now, I might be, but she is not! Don’t go there, just don’t! And why, why lie to me like this now, why—”

“I will never lie to you!” I bellow in her face.

Perhaps it’s the lack of guilt in my eyes. Or how I hold her gaze. The sheer determination in my voice, the way I croak out the last of my fading strength, sagging from her hand bunched at my throat. Scarlet lets go, recoils from me, stares with stunned incomprehension.

“You’re … no, you’re lying,” she says. “This has to be a lie. You’re lying to me.”

“This Machine will never feed you falsehood.” Throat raw from the shout, ears still ringing. I ease back into my own seat, internal aches bruised afresh. Skull against the headrest, both arms around the zoog. I stroke his back, try to get him to stop hissing at Scarlet. “After last night? After what I said? You’re right about that part. If you think that was all a lie, you may as well kill me right here. Either you’re my good hound and you trust me to hold your leash, or you don’t trust me at all. Go on. If you think I’m lying, take your sword out and cut my head off. There’s no point in this otherwise.”

Highest stakes wager I’ve ever made.

Scarlet’s eyes look small, confused, frightened. “But, why say this? Why—”

I sigh, exhausted. Have to take her through this step by step. Not her fault. “Think about it. What possible benefit would I get from lying about this now? Stopping the car in the middle of nowhere, with you and me alone, to tell you something that you can’t believe. And I do mean can’t believe. You haven’t seen her transform, so you can’t believe me, metaphysically. That’s how it works, we both know that. So, Scarlet, why am I telling you this?”

Scarlet shakes her head, pretending she’s lost. But she knows, her eyes give her away.

“Because if I don’t tell you now, that’s as good as lying,” I say. “Lying by omission, keeping secrets to manipulate you. And This Machine will never lie to you, even if you cut my head off for telling you things you don’t want to hear. The alternative would make me no different to Willow.”

Scarlet’s stunned outrage hardens to an impossible frown. Her eyes wander to the woods beyond the windows. She shakes her head again, slowly. “Then why haven’t you told me this before now?” she asks. “If this is true — though I’m not conceding it is — why not before now?”

“Why do you think?” I almost laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Because it was Bright’s business, not mine. But then she saw us and tried to get herself killed, fighting you. Kinda changed things, don’t you think? Bright forced my hand. Now I’ve broken her trust completely, it’s all my fault, and I have to fix it. This is the only way.”

Scarlet’s frown deepens, eyes like those of a reluctant messiah at the moment of revelation.

“Scarlet,” I press, because she won’t move without being dragged. “Why do you think I tried so hard to stop you from killing her back there?”

Scarlet shrugs. “She’s your ‘comrade’?”

“Uh huh, maybe. But she was also trying to kill me out of jealousy. If I let you kill her, that’d be safer for me. But you don’t want to kill Bethany. At least I’m pretty sure you don’t.”

“No, of course not! I’d sooner cut off my own arms … she’s … I … oh … ” Scarlet clutches at her own chest, just over her heart, horror curdled on her face.

“Right. So, come on, why do you think I was telling her to un-transform in front of you?”

Scarlet’s eyes finally whip back to me, madness behind her face; with me she has a target for her denial, an evil voice speaking lies. “No. Just no. It can’t be true, it can’t be! If she had un-transformed in front me, then we would have both seen that you’re wrong! No, absolutely not, no!”

“Why else would I have been asking her to do that?”

“I don’t know!” Scarlet explodes; sets off the zoog again, hissing and rasping. I fold my arms around him to keep him from scrambling down the side of the car seat and hiding in a crevice. “Some prearranged plan between the two of you!? You and this ‘Burning Bright’? To plant seeds of doubt in my mind about my own sister, to play fucking mind-games with me!? She’s my sister, Octavia, she’s the one person in the world I will not permit anything to happen to, the one person who ever— the only— you can’t understand— nobody—”

“Scarlet,” I say, as slow and careful as I can. “You picked me up from a battlefield and brought me home, the last thing anybody would ever expect. I’ve not been able to communicate with my friends for days. How could I have made a plan?”

Scarlet takes several deep breaths, stares into my eyes, working herself up toward violence.

“If you really think that,” I add, “you should just kill me now.”

Scarlet puts a hand to her forehead. Screws her eyes shut. Keens through her teeth.

“It’s not your fault that you don’t believe,” I say. “It’s just metaphysics. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.”

Scarlet draws herself up, eyes grasping this slender handhold. “Yes, yes, that part is correct! Magical girl identities cannot be verified by anybody except other magical girls. And Dream-Gods, I suppose, but that almost never happens. But you do have to see each other transform, for that to work. Myself, Azure, and Dawn, we’ve all transformed in front of each other. It’s one of the first things we did when we first met. And I’ve seen various other magical girls do so as well, I know how it feels, I know that.” Scarlet folds her arms, unfolds them again, touches the steering wheel, doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “My sister is not a magical girl.”

“Apparently other Dreamland creatures can do it as well,” I add.

Scarlet rolls her eyes, gestures at the zoog. “What, him?”

“Hiiiiimuh!” the zoog rasps at her. I increase the firmness of my petting. He half-hides, snuggles against the front of my hoodie.

“Maybe zoogs can,” I say. “I’m not actually sure about that. Mostly I mean other things. Maybe.”

Scarlet huffs, turns to stare out of the windscreen. “What does it matter?”

“Do you believe me? About Bright.”

Scarlet stays very still for a very long moment, long enough that I start to think she might not answer. Even her eyes don’t move, fixed on something up ahead that only she can see. Eventually she takes a great shuddering breath. “I believe … that you believe. You believe what you are saying.” A swallow, a wet sniff, a hint of glistening moisture in her eyes. “You’re not … you’re not lying to me.” Her voice comes close to breaking, but she holds that off with a deep breath. “You’re not lying to me. Damn you, Octavia. You’re not lying. I … I think I trust you. I want to trust you. You’re the enemy, and I trust you. What am I even doing? Oh, Gods, what am I doing … ”

Reach out with my prosthetic hand, touch her shoulder. Scarlet’s hand goes to my own, clenches too hard. She bites down on what might be a sob, might be nothing.

“Good girl,” I mutter. “I won’t lie to you. I promise.”

Scarlet tries to roll her eyes again, but she’s too near to tears. She shakes her head, clears her throat, straightens her spine. Takes a moment to compose herself, which I give her freely.

“So you must be mistaken,” she says.

“Ahhh, shit.”

Scarlet looks me right in the eyes, and she’s not grasping for straws. She believes every word she says, embers of confidence taking flame behind her face.

“It’s the only possible explanation,” she says. “Your comrade, this ‘Burning Bright’, she’s misled you somehow. Or somebody else is playing a trick on you, perhaps to get at me. My sister isn’t a magical girl, or … or if she is, which I can scarcely bear to imagine, then she’s not that girl, I would know. I would just know. She’s not, Octavia, she’s not.” Scarlet nods. “Somebody is carrying out a psyop on you, to get at me. But we won’t let that happen.”

Can’t help a sigh. “Have you ever dealt with this before?”

“Dealt with what? A targeted psychological operation?”

“Magical girl identity issues. Somebody who refuses to transform in front of you, like this.”

“Well, no, I … ” Scarlet’s turn to sigh. “Octavia, I trust your words, but I don’t trust your judgement, not in this matter. That was not my sister back there. Burning Bright is not my sister, I would stake my life on that.”

“Would you stake hers on it?”

“ … Burning Bright?”

“No,” I say. “Your sister’s life. Bethany. Would you stake your sister’s life on this?”

Scarlet hesitates, a mote of fresh horror in her face. But then it’s gone, she almost laughs. Her confidence ebbs back, flames climbing higher. “There is some clever trick at work here, that’s all. You’ll see, Octavia, but first we have to uncover it. Perhaps your comrade is not even the one at fault. Burning Bright was clearly obsessed with me, and however disgusting that is, I’m willing to concede that perhaps she didn’t plan this herself. Perhaps some third party is using this against all of us.”

“Scarlet—”

“No, I’m serious!” she snaps. “There’s a plot behind this. Burning Bright, she really made some kind of deal with you, to let her have first go at me?”

“Sort of.” I sigh. “It’s complicated. Look, Scarlet—”

“And how did she achieve that? What did she say to you? Did she threaten you? No, threats alone wouldn’t hold you forever, would they? What can she possibly have told you? Octavia, I need to know this, I need answers. I need to protect my sister. Please!”

“Scarlet, stop—”

“What did she say about me!? What did she claim? What possible prior claim could she have … told … ”

Scarlet trails off, flames dying out. Blood drains anew from her face. Suddenly she looks very afraid, in a way Scarlet Edge never does.

A shared secret known only to the Fairfax sisters, so taboo it was never to be told.

And here’s me, with a promise not to lie.

Can’t hold back now.

“Bethany Fairfax — Burning Bright,” I say, as gentle as I can with a throat like sandpaper. “She told me that you and her, when you were younger, you were … ‘closer than sisters are meant to be’. Those are the exact words she used. That was her prior claim on you, if you want to call it that.”

Scarlet just stares, a wax statue beneath a thin sheen of sweat.

“Scarlet? You … okay?”

She reanimates slowly, a woman waking from death by drowning. She swallows hard, forces herself to breathe, can’t seem to fill her lungs. She turns away from me, stares out into the woods through the driver’s side window.

Long silence settles between us. A secret too far, a side of her even I wasn’t meant to know about.

“And what,” she says eventually, in a tiny, distant voice, “do you think about that?”

A shrug, though she can’t see it. “I’ve never had a sister, I wouldn’t know. Not my place to judge.”

“Not your place to judge?” Scarlet rasps, still not looking at me. “Incest, and not your place to judge? You are talking about incest. It is one of the most shameful things I’ve ever done. My second greatest regret.”

“Was it rape?”

Too tired to be delicate about this, could have phrased that better. Scarlet’s head whips back around, eyes blazing like Armageddon, tension tight in every muscle. She’s finally going to kill me, and this time maybe I deserve it. But she doesn’t answer, because this question is so far beneath her that words would be an indignity.

This Machine must have clarity. “Glaring at me isn’t an answer.”

“No,” Scarlet grinds out. “It wasn’t even … there was nothing filthy about it. Don’t you ever dare suggest that again. It was pure. Pure and … and wrong.”

Another shrug. “Alright, so what’s to judge? I’m not going to berate you for something you did as a child.”

“And what if I want to do it again now?” Scarlet asks, voice shaking in her throat. “Will you condemn me then — as you should do!” she snaps before I can answer. “It was unhealthy, pure but unhealthy. Like … like breathing pure oxygen. What we did was the height of unhealthy behaviour, and that is an extreme understatement. We never should have done it. I love my sister, but … ” Scarlet shakes her head, hard enough to hurt her neck. “It was not right. It was not.”

She subsides, sags forward, head bowed, hands gripping the steering wheel. When she speaks again, her voice is low, sad, broken.

“Well,” she says. “Now you know everything.”

“I already knew.” Reach over, stroke her hair. “Good girl.”

Scarlet stays like that for a long time, allowing me to pet her hair. Eventually she tuts and gently shakes me off, straightens back up. She takes a deep breath and wipes her eyes on the back of one hand. Sniffs hard. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected otherwise, not from a wanted terrorist who hides on the moon. I don’t understand how you can approve of this, this … this … me. But you do, and I don’t understand it. Fine, I accept your insane approval. But you never breathe a word of this to anybody else, you understand? Never.”

I wince. “Bit late for that.”

Scarlet goes wide-eyed and frozen. “What? Octavia, what do you mean!?”

“We all know. My new comrades, I mean. The girls from the moon. Me and Bright, obviously, but Signal and Grimgrave too.” I leave Tissy out, too much to explain. “Grimmy makes jokes about it, she uses it to insult Bright sometimes, but I think she means well, sort of. Bright’s pretty violent, she kinda deserves it. Nerys must know too. And the zoogs.”

Scarlet boggles at me. “The— the zoogs? What!?”

“They pick up everything they hear, they’re like little sponges.” I pat the zoog in my lap. “Aren’t you, little guy?”

“Spongeeee,” he rasps, leaning into my petting.

Scarlet looks baffled beyond her ability to process, horror held at bay by confusion. “I … but … she would never have told, she would never … ”

Clear my throat. Need to be a touch more delicate about this. “I assume Nerys found out from Bethany herself, but I doubt it was her fault. Dream-Gods have a way of learning things about us, you know?”

“I … I suppose.”

“Grimmy probably heard it from Nerys, they’re really close. Then, well, the secret was out.” I shrug. “We won’t tell the world or anything. I mean, Grimmy might, but I’ll tell her not to.”

“And she’ll listen to you? She’ll do as you say?”

“Mmhmm.”

Probably, but it’s not a good time to bring that up.

“She’s the one who threw a bomb-tipped javelin at me, isn’t she?” Scarlet says. “Are you certain? She won’t make it public, just to hurt me?”

“I’ll make her understand. Grimmy can be … difficult, but she means well. She’s my good girl too, don’t forget that.”

Scarlet takes a deep breath, shakes her head, stares off into the woods, shocked beyond words.

“You know,” I say, “you and her — you and Bright, I mean, not you and Grimmy — you’re really similar. I didn’t see it before, but you’ve basically asked me to do the same thing. She demanded I stay away from you, she was all jealous after you and I met, because you ran me through on your sword. Thought you were maybe kinda into me or something. Which I guess you were. And now here you are, screaming in my face that Bethany is off-limits.”

Scarlet huffs a humourless puff of laughter. Pulls a grimace, as if she’s eaten something distasteful. “I should say thank you, but it all seems so pointless. Why should I care anymore what the public thinks of me? After this stunt I’ve pulled, I … I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” She wraps her hands around the steering wheel again, knuckles turning white. “But perhaps you were right, perhaps your little rodent god really did kill that cat. Maybe we can still keep this quiet.”

“What, so you can go back to living a lie?”

Scarlet darts me a sharp look. “Never mind that right now, I can’t think about it. We have to focus. Your knowledge of my personal history doesn’t prove anything. This ‘Burning Bright’, she must have gotten this out of my sister somehow. Blackmail. Magical means, perhaps. Or it could have been some third party, as I suggested earlier.”

Can’t help a sigh. “Scarlet. I need you to—”

“I cannot believe this!” she snaps. “I simply cannot, Octavia!”

“Do as I say.”

Scarlet stares, stunned into silence.

“You can’t believe that Bright is Bethany, fine, whatever,” I grunt. “But I need you to act like it anyway. Do this for me, do it because I need you to be a good girl. Because you need to trust this, or you’ll die. You’ll kill your own sister. She’ll throw herself at you again until you’ve got no choice, and then it’ll be too late for proof or evidence or anything else.”

Scarlet swallows with difficulty. “Why would she … why would she want that? Why would she possibly want that?”

A shrug. “‘Cos she’s fucked up. Like all of us. Doesn’t matter right now, okay? Just don’t kill her. That’s all I’m asking. Don’t kill her.”

Scarlet hesitates, eyes darting away, down to the zoog in my lap, back to me, elsewhere. But then she nods. First a tiny motion, then harder.

“Alright,” she murmurs. “Alright. I cannot promise I won’t defend myself against her, but … ”

“Just don’t kill her.”

Another nod.

“Promise me.”

“I promise not to kill Burning Bright, or let anybody else put her down,” she says. “Until I witness her transformation for myself, and confirm that she is not my sister, and that you are mistaken.”

“But not before then,” I grind the words out.

“But not before then. How’s that?”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

A massive breath goes out of Scarlet, like something she’s been holding for far too long. Muscles relax, her eyelids seem heavier. She turns her eyes forward, to the road ahead, leading off through the shadow-choked undergrowth of the woods on either side. Have any magical girls ever pushed the metaphysical knot of this problem this far before? Has anybody ever come close? What has this done to Scarlet Edge? She doesn’t seem like she’s about to have a seizure, or stroke out, or go insane.

“This is absurd,” she mutters, reaching for the key in the ignition. “We need to get moving.”

“One more thing.” Have to take this risk, have to try, can’t let it drop. “Scarlet, if you can’t keep all this covered up, or even if you can, maybe you should come to Luna. Maybe you should run. I know I said it would be dangerous, but maybe if you … I don’t know, maybe there’s a way to … Scarlet?”

She’s giving me a very unimpressed look. “It’s all well and good for you, with a Dream-God you can cart around like a pet.”

“What?”

“Octavia, if I turn on England, my parents and my sister will never see the light of day again. And despite my parents, I do not want that for them. They don’t deserve that. And I would never let it happen to my sister.”

“What if you’re left with no choice? What if—”

“Stop!” she hisses. “I can think about this once you are out of here, not a moment sooner. Don’t forget, Octavia, you and I are still enemies. I am not on your side. I am not about to join your side.”

“Enemies, huh?” I grunt. “Didn’t know enemies had shower sex.”

That earns me a great big huff. “It’s complicated! We are complicated, alright?”

“Alright. But, hey, Scarlet?”

“Yes, what?”

“I’m not suggesting anything for the sake of ‘my side’. I’m suggesting it for you.”

Scarlet can’t meet my eyes after that. She sniffs hard, blinks away what might only be my imagination, then reaches down and turns the key in the ignition. The car purrs itself awake, engine smooth as warm butter. Scarlet doesn’t bother with a turn signal for the empty road, pulls away from the treeline and out of the lay-by, cruising off between the trees.

A sensible route keeps us off the main roads, away from the endless cameras that might read the car’s license plate or record our faces through the tinted windscreen. These days even the little places of England bristle with outcroppings of the surveillance leviathan; Scarlet has me pull my hood up and turn my face away whenever we skirt a village, hoping to confuse the cyclops for long enough to slip past. She sticks to the woods whenever she can, surfacing from the great green seas to thread our way through a patchwork of countryside fields and rolling meadows. She seems to know the route well, a meandering southward curve, taking the westward way around Swindon; no map on her phone, no GPS, no double-checking at crossroads, she simply drives onward. We see plenty of other cars close to civilisation, but almost nobody out in the woods, nobody in the desolate fields between the trees, or at occasional lonely houses just off the road, few of them inhabited.

Dangerous to live so far from a shelter, unless you can afford one in your own cellar.

Each time we plunge into a fresh patch of forest it takes longer and longer for us to emerge again, the woods either side of the road thicker and darker. Eventually we don’t emerge at all, ten long unbroken minutes of winding roads climbing steadily uphill.

“Burning Bright,” Scarlet says unprompted, eyes fixed on the road. “Will she try to kill you again, if you return to your hideout?”

“Yeah, probably,” I mutter, lulled toward sleep by the motion of the car. “Until I’m fixed up, I guess. Then I can knock her on the head. This Machine can fight a dragon, I think.”

“And your other comrades can protect you in the meantime?”

“Grimmy and Signal? Yeah. Especially Signal.”

“Good. No need to change our plans then.”

I shift in my seat, eye her sidelong. “What would you do if I couldn’t go back?”

Scarlet stays silent for a moment, focused on driving. Then says, “I don’t know. Think of something, I suppose. Hide you somewhere.”

“Where?”

A shrug. Scarlet’s not keeping any secrets on that front, no hidden magical-girl safe-houses that we might need to know about.

“Weren’t you gonna call in that fire?” I ask. “Before it burns down your family home?”

“Tch,” Scarlet tuts. “I don’t want to risk turning my cellphone on again. Not until we get where we’re going, then it should be safe. Look, somebody will have sensed the fight, they’ll know, somebody will have gone there, probably another magical girl. The house will be fine.”

“Mm,” I grunt. “You know we left that chunk of my armour behind in your bedroom?”

A sharp sigh. “And your bloody clothes in my bathroom. If somebody checks … ” Scarlet shakes her head, chews on her bottom lip. “I’ll have to hide it as soon as I get the chance.”

“Not get rid of it?”

She glances at me, as if this is an absurd proposition. Then she realises I’m teasing, cheeks flushing a delicious light pink. “It— it’s part of— I’m not keeping a piece of you— I mean, I don’t—”

“You could’ve just borrowed my unwashed t-shirt or something. I hear that’s what most people do.”

“Tch!” Scarlet tuts again. “Shut up.”

We lapse into a long silence, the road unravelling beneath the car’s tyres.

“Nice car, by the way,” I croak. “Engine sounds good. Better than I expected from some Vauxhall.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t drive?”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the machine. Seriously, the engine sounds lovely. Like there’s more power under there.”

“It’s a Q-car,” Scarlet says.

“A what?”

“Q-car. You know, like the police use. A high-performance engine hidden inside a regular body.” She lets out a humourless laugh. “Sort of like us, I suppose.”

“Uhhh, okay? Why are you driving a sleeper car with a souped-up engine?”

Scarlet glances at me, a little flicker of a smile on her lips. “Because I wanted it. Who doesn’t want a fancy car? Magical girls can get pretty much anything they want, you know?” But then a sigh. “Not that I get much chance to drive, not much point. I’ve had it five years and I’ve never really put my foot down.”

“Prove it.”

“What? Excuse me?”

“Prove it. Open her up.”

Scarlet frowns. “Open ‘her’ up?”

I make a pedal-pressing motion. “Vroom, vroom.”

“Oh! Oh. Well. I have been trying not to attract undue attention. Isn’t that the first rule of trying to get away with a crime? Don’t commit traffic violations with a boot full of drugs?”

“Does that make me a kilo of heroin? Worried you’ll get addicted?”

Scarlet sighs. “Yes, very clever.”

“Nobody’s around to see. We haven’t passed another car in ten minutes. Open her up, Scarlet. Come on. You know you want to.”

Stone-faced silence answers that suggestion. Eyes on the road, hands at ten-and-two, head back against the headrest, Scarlet drives like an instructional safety video. I sigh with residual disappointment, sink lower into my seat, stroke the zoog’s head. Not really the right time for a bit of fun, fleeing from the forces of the state, straight-laced magical girls, Dream-Gods in the wild, and who knows what else.

But then we round a corner, emerge into a long section of open road, and the Vauxhall suddenly leaps forward. Engine purring like a caged tiger, trees whipping past on either side.

Scarlet smiles, giddy, off-balance. She squeezes the accelerator toward the floor. Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, and we’re flying. The zoog in my lap clings to my hoodie, eyes wide, tail curled around my right wrist.

“Woo!” I cheer, throat still a little ragged. “There you go, Scarlet! Holy shit, this thing really is fast.”

“That’s enough for now,” Scarlet pants as if she’s been sprinting, easing off the accelerator and onto the brakes as we approach the next corner. The engine cycles down, a beautiful sound; I’d love to get my head in there and take a look at it up close. “Just a little taste, I think that’s enough.”

“We’ll make a bad girl out of you yet,” I say. “What’s the point of being magical if you can’t break the rules now and again?”

A longing sigh. Scarlet shakes her head. “If somebody else had been coming the other way … ”

“Yeah, yeah. But they weren’t. And it was fun, right?”

“Yes. It was.”

We lapse into a more comfortable silence, the woods creeping by beyond the car windows, green leaves and brown trunks and the deeper shadows beyond. A dull headache throbs just behind my eyes, but not a migraine. Exhaustion and weariness, deeper than mere muscles, down in the core engine-components of This Machine. Not quite as exhausted as I was when I first woke in Scarlet’s bedroom, but still not well. Spent most of what I’d regained dealing with Burning Bright. Now I feel hollow and slow, a bag of loose parts held together by a thin metal shell. Need to get myself put in for repairs.

Home. Is Plato Base home now? Suppose it must be.

“Scarlet,” I mutter, drifting deeper. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“That’s classified information,” she says. “Until we get there.”

“Seriously?”

“I don’t want to tell you in advance, you might … freak out. But it’s our only option. And you look too run-down for freaking out right now.”

“Mm. Feel it. This Machine is thirsty. Got any water in here?”

“Check the glove box, maybe?”

The car’s glove box turns out to be full of loose junk. I dig for a moment to unearth a half-empty plastic bottle of water. I hold it up to the light, shake it, wrinkle my nose. “How long has this been in here?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Scarlet says. “Just drink it.”

“I’ve got nothing against an indirect kiss, but I don’t want your six-month old mouth germs.”

“Oh for crying out loud!” Scarlet tuts. “You can’t get ill! Magical girls cannot get sick, not in the traditional sense. Just drink it. I don’t want you dehydrated.”

I spin the cap off the bottle and drink up. Tastes like stale plastic. “Ugh. Mmhmm, a mundane human would probably hit their yearly limit on carcinogens drinking this.”

Scarlet tuts, ignores my whining. I settle back into the seat again. Trees blur beyond the windows, all the same.

“Your driving is putting me to sleep,” I mutter.

“Good!” Scarlet barks. “Take a nap if you have to. We could be another ten to fifteen minutes. Maybe a little longer.”

“Through all this unbroken woodland? Where the hell are we going, Stonehenge?” Scarlet doesn’t laugh. Bad joke, or close to the mark? “Fuck me, we’re not actually going to Stonehenge, are we?”

Scarlet tuts. “Of course not. I can hardly sneak you into a closed government site. And what would be the point? It’s just rocks.”

“Really? Aren’t there a bunch of occultists down there, doing … something? They talk about it on telly sometimes.”

Scarlet shrugs. “That’s mostly to keep terrorists away from it.”

“The Opposition?” Scarlet shoots me a sceptical look. “Hey, I have to ask. Are they trying to blow it up, or do something else with it?”

“Are your people working with the Opposition?”

“Classified information.”

“Tch!” Scarlet shakes her head. “Take a nap. You might need it.”

File that one away for later, for Signal to pass to her Opposition contacts if I ever make it back to Luna; are they really trying to access Stonehenge, and if yes, why? I don’t particularly like the idea of the Opposition trying to destroy the finest surviving example of prehistoric megalithic engineering, but perhaps they have a good reason. Or maybe Scarlet’s just full of shit.

Her advice is good though. Sleep takes me slow and rough, a short and drifting nap, head against the seat’s backrest, then lolling onto the hard plastic pillar next to the window. Snippets of road and forest flicker past through slitted eyelids.

Not quite sleep. Best I can do.

The waking world dribbles back as Scarlet finally brings the car to a stop, applies the handbrake, kills the engine, retrieves her keys. She shakes me gently by one shoulder, but I’m already smacking my lips and blinking myself fully awake.

“Weather’s changed fast,” I croak. “Dark out there?”

“It’s always like that here,” she says. “Come on, we need to get moving. From here we’re on foot.”

Scarlet steps out of the car, shuts the door, crosses around to the passenger side.

“Come on, little guy,” I croak at the zoog. “Back in the pouch, come on.”

He nuzzles my hands, then burrows back into the hoodie’s front pocket. Scarlet opens the passenger side door, offers her arm to help me up and out.

Tarmac crumbles beneath my feet. Wet vegetable rot invades my nose. Chill air brushes my face, fingers my collar, takes my exposed left hand in ghostly fingers. We’re still in the woods. Parked on a tiny square patch of asphalt at the termination of a road that looks as if it hasn’t been resurfaced in eighty years, no markings, edges worn away by water and mud, no signposts or junctions in sight. A road into the forest, leading nowhere.

And what a forest.

Never seen anything like it, not even in pictures on the internet. So dense it could be from the dawn of time, before human feet found these isles. Gnarled trees tower in an endless canopy of darkly hanging green, forest floor a tangled mass of ferns and thorns, deadfall and shadow, sheets of shelf fungus, mats of crawling moss, and a thickly cloying carpet of rotten leaves mashed into black mud.

Slivers of visible sky have gone iron-grey with a threat of rain. Mist creeps high between the tree trunks, tendrils of chill extending out across the road. Crows call in the distance, harsh voices on still and silent air.

Shivers cover me with goosebumps, thankful for the enclosing safety of the borrowed hoodie. The zoog peeks out from the pocket, then quickly retreats back inside.

“Scarlet,” I murmur, not sure why I can’t raise my voice. “Where the hell are you taking me?”

“It’s not actually that much further, not too much of a walk.” Scarlet gestures at a pair of upright metal posts set into the ground at the edge of the wood, where rough tarmac meets untouched earth. The posts are slick with moss and lichen. A narrow pathway climbs into the woods, solid concrete steps crumbling to sand, barely visible through the mud and leaf-litter. “Those crocs … ” Scarlet looks at my feet with a tut. “I wish I’d thought of that when we left the house, but they should be okay, you should get to the other side alright. I’ll carry you if I have to.”

“The other side of what? Scarlet, what is this place? Where are we? These woods are impossible.”

Scarlet hesitates. “East of Bath, south of Swindon. About equidistant between Swindon and the New Forest, I think, but you won’t find this on maps, or in satellite imagery. No roads get any closer than this. The only ways in and out are either on foot, by flight, or translocation. And … ” She gives the woods a long and searching look. “I wouldn’t recommend the journey on foot to anybody but another magical girl. If you see any crows or ravens, don’t pay them any attention, and don’t respond if they talk. Especially ravens, whatever they say. Understand?”

I squint. “Is this safe?”

“As long as we stick to the path. It’s maintained by government occultists, don’t ask me how. I’ve only ever used it three times before, usually I just translocate or fly here, when I have to.”

“Scarlet. You need to tell me more. Where the fuck are we going?”

Scarlet draws herself up, tightens her support on my prosthetic arm. “The closest thing the Trio of Albion have to a headquarters. Us and all other magical girls in England. You’ll see. Octavia, do you trust me? I’m not trying to lead you into a trap, I swear.”

I do trust her, don’t I? I must be mad. A sadistic fascist who gutted me with her sword, and my life is still in her hands. Hard not to trust, after the last couple of days.

“Alright,” I grunt. “Let’s go, then.”

Scarlet leads me into the woods, onto the mud and the leaves and the narrow pathway of sunken concrete blocks. The crocs handle the ground better than I expect, sure-footed enough on the steps, not slipping too badly in the mud. Scarlet holds me by the arm for the first stretch, then settles for holding only my hand.

The pathway leads uphill, a stuttering switchback progress up muddy banks and along narrow passages of cleared ground. Within a minute the road behind us is invisible, Scarlet’s gleaming red car swallowed up behind the undergrowth. Water drips onto dead leaves, the occasional ticking of a vast irregular clock in this gigantic cathedral of trunk and branch. Thick undergrowth presses in from both sides, brambles like barbed wire, ivy like curtains, ferns so large they seem a throwback to when dinosaurs walked this land. The undersides of fallen trees gape like the mouths of mud-choked dragons, their roots rotting away in the damp air. Crows call and reply overhead, distant signals we cannot interpret.

More upright metal posts are placed at regular intervals alongside the path, dark poles of iron alternating from left to right. The woodland seems to shy from them. Occultist stuff, I assume.

Scarlet pays them no attention, concentrates on where she’s putting her feet, the pathway ahead, the woods to either side.

Darkness presses in from the distance, silent shadows thick beneath the trees; peer into the woods and night lurks at the edge of sight. More than once I catch a glimpse in the corner of my eye, something moving between the trunks, sliding away as soon as I look; shapes lurk in the boughs, silent slippery motion from tree trunk to tree trunk. Eyes vanish as you turn to look. Claws and teeth hide behind trees, merely a trick of patterns in the bark. Heavy breathing is just far-off wind. Nobody’s there. Stop looking.

Scarlet senses it too. She pauses as the pathway curves away to the left, glares off into the trees with defiant anger. Shadow-draped forms respond, a slippery motion seen peripheral, nothing more than a trick of the mind.

“Scarlet,” I hiss. “Scarlet—”

Scarlet flicks her right hand, plucks her ruby-red sword from thin air. She merely holds it by her side, dares the next hint of motion.

All is quiet and still. Just trees and undergrowth. Nothing was ever there. Move on.

“Alright,” she mutters, leading me forward once again. “We best hurry.”

“What was that?” I hiss. “How did you—”

“The things in the woods? Search me. If you ever find out, feel free to let everybody else know. Don’t worry though, they don’t breach the pathway, and they’re not stupid enough to attack a magical girl.”

“No,” I say. “I mean summoning your sword without being transformed.”

“Oh.” Scarlet glances down at her naked blade. “Can’t you?”

I give her a grumpy look. “Swords are your thing. And I’ve not exactly had time to experiment, have I?”

Scarlet shrugs as she leads me along the path. “Perhaps you can learn how, with your … um … fists? Oh, whatever. Just focus. It’s not too far now.”

We creep onward through the forest, to the occasional chorus of distant crows. The ground seems to level out, no longer climbing a hillside. Nothing approaches the path again, not with Scarlet’s sword on display, though my shoulder-blades and the back of my head crawl with hidden attention. Once I look up and spot an owl watching us from a branch, great round eyes tracking us around the next bend.

“Scarlet,” I mutter after a while. “How big are these woods?”

“Nobody knows,” she says, voice distracted, her focus on the path ahead. “Exploring on foot is too risky, people get turned around, reappear in odd places. From the air it’s … well, it’s odd. Best not to think about it.”

A few moments of close silence. Can’t keep my peace.

“This is a Dreamland overlap,” I say. “Scarlet, this is a Dreamland overlap, right in the middle of the English countryside, and your ‘headquarters’ is here? Bit hypocritical, isn’t it?”

A shrug. “Maybe so.”

“Do you even know what that means?” I hiss. “A Dreamland overlap!”

“Do you?” Scarlet shoots over her shoulder. “It’s not an overlap. Not in the way you think.”

“Then what is it?”

Scarlet pauses and turns to me, dismisses her sword with a flick of her hand. “You think this is all so simple, don’t you? Your merry band of freedom fighters against the evil empire.”

“Uh huh. And I’m right.”

Scarlet laughs without humour. “This isn’t a Dreamland overlap, not like London. Magical girls and their Dream-Gods are not the only power at play in England.”

“Yeah, I know. There’s also a cabal of Lucid Dreamers.”

Scarlet sighs. “I didn’t mean that. Look, I don’t understand everything, okay? I just need to get you out of here. We can talk about the complexities of this war some other time.”

“What war? Us against England?”

Scarlet sighs. “I wish it were so simple. Now come on, we’re almost there.”

Another hundred paces proves the accuracy of Scarlet’s estimate; the forest ahead thins against iron grey skies, drowning the world in leaden cloud-cover. Scarlet slows as we approach the end of the path, gesturing me to silence, peering ahead before we venture to the edge of the woods.

The forest ends in a sharp line at the apex of a lofty hill, the crown peak of the incline we’ve been climbing all this time. A narrow valley lies below us, ringed by tall dark trees on all sides, an impenetrable thicket of branch and leaf and briar and thorn, cupping the valley in a woodland fist.

The path turns into clear concrete slabs as it descends into the valley, crossing the whole length and climbing the far side, where it becomes raw stone and vanishes into distant woods. A wide barrier of naked metal has been placed across the far end of the path, as if blocking the narrow road would somehow stop any foot traffic when one can just step around it, into the open fields. Scraggly long grass, tall hardy thistles, the occasional withered tree, leafless and gnarled, punctuated by half-fallen dry stone walls. I spot pale horses wandering the ruined fields, strange scarecrow figures collapsed over some of the walls, dark blotches on the overgrown grass, the remains of great pyres, a greasy scent in the air.

All this is eclipsed. In the middle of the valley squats a lunatic’s memory of a castle.

A massive structure built to block the road, by an architect who could not decide on style or era. A Norman keep grown gigantic has been stitched to a half-finished wing of some 19th century gothic revival, all peaks and sharp angles and high narrow windows. A curtain wall with blocky crenellations and square guard towers gives way to the straight lines of a star fortress. Many windows — some modern, others like arrow slits — show lights inside, weak and watery as candles in the sea. The near side of the castle is mostly stone, but the far side is more modern, all concrete and searchlights and lines of barbed wire, watched over by empty gun emplacements and deserted guard towers. The gate on this side of the road is straight out of the medieval era, a drawbridge and a portcullis. Inside the walls is a modern helipad. Rooftops bristle with antennae. A telescope dome is pointed toward the cloud-choked sky.

A Union Jack flies from the highest tower, limp and still. The Cross of St. George has been painted on many of the exterior walls, bright white and bleeding red, faded and struggling in the cold, damp air. Great rookeries of black birds — ravens or crows, can’t tell at this distance — have smeared vast streaks of the towers and walls with bird shit, despite rolls of razorwire and other bird deterrent; they seem to have pulled sections of the wire away and colonised the resulting clear spaces.

At least there’s nobody manning the walls. No, maybe there is. Faint wisp-like outlines stand at attention, suggestions barely visible against the ground fog and grey skies.

Scarlet gives me a moment. “I know,” she says, a sigh in her voice. “Same reaction when I first saw it.”

“What is this?” I find my voice, find it weak. “Scarlet? What is this?”

Scarlet sighs, half-shrugs. “It has two official names. Castle March, as in the Welsh Marches, though it’s not Wales we border out here. The other official name is the Queen Elizabeth the Second Memorial Castle, but nobody ever calls it that. Sometimes it’s just the border, or the dump. We think it used to be Ludgershall Castle. Well, the occultists do, but I don’t see how that makes any sense. Ludgershall Castle was just a few nubs of stone, there’s none of it left now. These woods overran Ludgershall village and Tidworth back in 1985, apparently. Adjusted the landscape and so on. The castle itself came a little later, a ‘joint venture’. Before my time though. Don’t let the outside fool you, the inside can actually be quite pleasant. It’s not all damp and dripping like it looks. There’s rooms, and training facilities. Stuff like that.”

“That doesn’t answer my actual question.”

Scarlet gives me a rueful smile, as if she’s just unveiled some horrible family secret to which I am now party, whether I like it or not.

“This is England’s embassy to the Dream,” she says. “Or their embassy to us, I’ve never quite figured out which way it goes.” She gestures at the far end of the valley. “But don’t go that way, whatever happens. There’s a good reason it’s blocked. It doesn’t lead back to the waking world.”

“I wasn’t planning on it, thank you.” I swallow, can’t help it. “Isn’t this a huge risk, me being here?”

“Not really,” she says. “It’s usually good as deserted, relative to the size of the place. Only a few girls live here these days, and there’s so much space that nobody has to see each other if they don’t want to. And the Dream-Gods, well … never mind about that now. We’re exceedingly unlikely to run into anything that cares. And besides, we shouldn’t have to go much further. Hold on.” Scarlet lets go of my hand at last and takes her mobile phone out of her pocket. She turns it back on, makes a call, holds it to her ear.

I brace, trust we’re not about to be located and tracked down by the phone signal. Scarlet must know something I don’t.

Silence lies thick across the narrow valley, broken by distant bird calls. Crows wheel over the castle. Dark shapes move in the treeline far away. Something makes the leaves behind us crinkle and crackle, but when I turn to look there’s only empty path.

“It’s me,” Scarlet snaps into the phone, almost makes me jump. “You’re still there? Good, okay. Yes, I know, I had to take a longer route, forget it. Now, I need you to come outside, up to the head of the trail, just- what? No, I can’t come in, I’m … no. No! I can’t come inside. You come out here.” A long pause. Scarlet closes her eyes and clenches her teeth. “Fine. Fine. Who else is around? Alright, okay. Where? No, where are they, exactly? Alright, good. Make sure you’re ready. I’ll have this phone on, call me if anything changes. Yes, fine, I know, just do your best! Now stay there.”

Scarlet kills the call, lets out an exasperated sigh, stares at her phone.

“Shouldn’t have to go much further, huh?” I echo.

“Oh, shut up!” Scarlet snaps. “Fucking hell! I didn’t think of this.” She glances down the valley at the castle, chewing on her lower lip.

“Think it’s a trap? How much can you trust this mysterious person on the other end of your phone call? And why aren’t you telling me who it is?”

Scarlet shoots me a tight glare. “It’s not a trap. We’re going to see somebody who can get you home without suffering explosive decompression, or whatever it is that’ll happen to me if I set foot up there.”

“Another magical girl?”

Scarlet hesitates.

“A Dream-God?” I ask.

“Neither,” she huffs. “It’s complicated. Look, this isn’t a trap, it’s just … I don’t want to take you in there, but there’s no other way. Too much risk of being seen. It’ll probably be fine, nobody will care, but … ”

“Cameras?”

“No, there’s no security cameras here. The chances of running into anybody are low, but not zero.”

“What if I transform? Nobody except you, Azure, Dawn, and Willow have seen me transformed, right? Bright too, I guess. You can pass me off as some newbie or something.”

Scarlet’s eyes widen in relief, but then the frown crashes down again. “No, no, absolutely not! Everybody will know who you are soon enough, and if I’m spotted leading you into Castle March, they’ll know I’m a … ”

“A traitor to England?”

A dark laugh. Scarlet sighs. “Too late for that. They’ll all know.” Scarlet draws herself up, takes my prosthetic hand in hers again, faces toward the castle. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You pull that hood up, hide your face as best you can, especially your right eye and your scar. Don’t say a word, don’t speak to anybody. With any luck we won’t bump into a soul, and the few we might meet should be easy to overawe, or just ignore.”

“Who lives here anyway? Why would anybody?”

Scarlet dismisses the question with a toss of her head. “Rejects and defects, don’t concern yourself with them. Just stay silent, move in my shadow, and don’t let go of my hand.”

“Right. And what if this doesn’t work?”

Scarlet raises her chin. Takes a deep breath. “If we are discovered, with no chance of recovery or believable excuses, then that is why you must hold my hand.”

“Ah.”

“If we’re caught, I shall translocate us both. I’ll have to charge out of the castle first, so I may have to carry you. But I’ll take you home myself, consequences be damned, I’ll accept them all. Now pull up that hood, Octavia.”

I hesitate, don’t feel like hiding my scar anymore. Guess there’s no other way. “What am I?”

“What?”

“If we run into anybody in there. What am I supposed to be?”

Scarlet hesitates. “A … civilian occultist? No, that won’t work, that won’t make any sense … ah. Hm. I … I suppose … ”

“Your new squeeze?” I purr. “Not a lie, is it? Though I’m hardly dressed for a hook-up.”

“Tch!” Scarlet tuts. “Fine, yes! That would be easy enough. If we run into anybody, you’re my … new … plaything. Stick close to my side. Don’t speak to anybody else. Pretend we’re going to my quarters.”

“You have ‘quarters’ here?”

“I never visit them. It’s just an empty room with a bed.”

“Ever take a girl back there?”

Scarlet shoots me a sidelong glare, sharp enough to reopen my facial scar. “What do you think, Octavia?”

“First time for everything.” Can’t help a smirk.

Scarlet takes a step forward, yanks on my hand. “That’s not where we’re going. Now come on, and hide your face, don’t let anybody see. Everybody would recognise you, everyone knows who you are. Stick to my side, don’t say a word. And don’t you dare let go, Octavia. Don’t you dare let go.”

“Sure thing, good girl,” I murmur. “My big scary guard dog. As long as you remember who gives the orders.”

Scarlet swallows a whimper. “Shush.”

Downward we tread, passing into the penumbral vale, on the old road to an English castle at the edge of the waking world.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

That went about as well as it could have done. Well done, Octavia, you’ve successfully found a workaround for metaphysical thought-blocks. Now it’s time to go explore a spooky castle. Magical girls don’t tend to get on so well in spooky castles, do they? Look out for ghosts, or scary dominatrix ladies. That sort of thing.

Also I do have to say, it was a lot of fun writing about Octavia and Scarlet getting some time together in the car which wasn’t taken up by yet another crisis. These two are quite amusing when they’re not trying to kill each other or dealing with the pressures of being magical girls. Perhaps, maybe, in some ever-distant future …

Behind the scenes, arc 6 has finally concluded at 9 chapters. So you’ve got another three after this before the start of arc 7. Hooray!

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

Right now 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.

Thank you for being here, dear readers! Thank you so much for enjoying my story, being here and reading along. Without all of you, there would be no Maidens, falling or otherwise. Nobody to watch Octavia carrying on extremely unhealthy relationships with other magical girls. Thank you all!

Next chapter, spooky ooky castle time. Just in time for the spookiest month of the year. (I swear I did not plan this to line up with October! Pure coincidence!)

Content Warnings

Ableism
Gore

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

No point in excuses now, no matter how eloquent. No truth could possibly satisfy the green-eyed monster of Burning Bright.

I’ve been missing for days, and I turn up in her home, dressed in her sister’s clothes. My hair is damp, Scarlet’s t-shirt still spotted with water. We have frozen like thieves, metaphorical hands in the jar; our actual hands are joined together, my prosthetic right held in Scarlet’s left. Mutual afterglow smoulders down in my gut and aches between my legs, a sensation like none other, perhaps plain on both our faces. Can Bright smell the evidence on us? When she looks into her sister’s eyes, does she see that I’ve made her bark like a dog? Am I metaphysically different now, transformed in some way so obvious to all but myself? Feels like it, on the far side of an invisible boundary, my body transmuted by orgasm.

Explanations bubble up my throat, tasteless by the time they reach my tongue. Back on Luna with plenty of legroom for run-up and hindsight, I could have spun this any way I wanted, told half the truth and left out the details, found a way to frame this to Bright’s advantage. Hid inside a lie. Fed her false hope.

She won’t believe a word now. It would be an insult to try.

Bright stares in stunned silence, dirty topaz eyes dull as a bonfire through twenty feet of smoke on a moonless night. Perhaps she’s praying this is all a bad dream.

“Bethany? Bethany?” Scarlet makes it worse, crooning Bright’s mundane name in a voice so soft and gentle, doesn’t sound like her at all. She drops my hand and takes a step toward her sister. “Bethany, are you feeling okay? Please, I’ll— I’ll see you later, okay? This is, um— this is just a friend of mine, uh … O-Olivia! A friend from my schooldays. You probably don’t remember her, that’s all. She just dropped in, but I need to … to get her home, she’s uh, she’s got to go now. Bethany? Can you hear me?”

Bright’s eyes crawl from my face to Scarlet’s, slow as spreading rot.

“Beth?” Scarlet reaches for Bright’s shoulder, face creased with care. “Are you alright? Did something happen?” A tiny, loving smile graces her lips. “Do you need me to put you to bed?”

Bright flinches from Scarlet’s touch, stumbles back so bad I think she’s about to topple, but she gets one hand against the wall.

“Careful, careful!” Scarlet says, moving forward to lend support. “You’ll take a tumble, you—”

“Don’t!” Bright hisses. “Don’t touch me.”

Scarlet comes up short, open-mouthed, speechless.

Lips peel back from Bright’s hard-clenched teeth. She sucks a deep breath down into her lungs as if through a clogged drainpipe. Then another, and another, each breath inflating her, pulling her upright, flushing her exhausted frame with furious strength.

“Why?” she murmurs, voice wet with mucus. “Why do you always lie?”

Scarlet smiles, more false than any television appearance she’s ever made, like a doll trying to keep its face attached.

Bright takes another deep breath, rolls her shoulders with a snap-crackle-pop. “You always lie, you—”

Raise my right hand, index finger extended, and point at the ceiling.

Scarlet can’t see the gesture, but it’s not for her. Bright’s attention flickers back to me. I jab upward, eyes manic with silent meaning. Bright might be violent and unstable, but then again most magical girls do seem to occupy various points on that particular spectrum; I can hardly blame her for that, it would be deeply hypocritical of me. She is not, however, a total idiot. It should not take a mind-reader to interpret my gesture.

‘Moon!’ I mouth as hard as I can, gurning like a clown. ‘Translocate! Me!’

Bright hesitates, suddenly so much like her sister, family resemblance shining through the layers of exhaustion and illness and outrage. Didn’t expect me to request extraction, did you? Didn’t think I’d still be on your side? Come on, think logically, you big stupid dragon; we can share your sister, or perhaps I did nothing, but if you lose your shit here we both lose control. Get me out of here, get me back to Luna.

Her eyes travel down my body, rest on the big round lump in the front of my hoodie.

‘Zoog!’ I mouth. No, Bright, your sister has not gotten me pregnant with a litter of puppies. Bright blinks, one horror dismissed.

But Scarlet starts babbling through her plastic smile. “Lying? Beth, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’d never lie to you. Look, I just have to take Olivia home, that’s all. But I’ll be back later, okay? I’ll be back later, I’ll see you later. I can tuck you in, or read to you, or … or anything else you like, okay? I promise. Do you need … Beth? Is everything alright? You look worse than … than usual, like something happened. Bethany? Speak to me, say something.”

Bright’s eyes slide back to Scarlet in a hollow-eyed glare, my increasingly absurd gestures forgotten. Can’t stand the lies, can’t deal with Scarlet’s mask, can you Bright? I don’t blame you. I can scarcely imagine.

“Beth, whatever it is, it’s okay,” Scarlet is saying. “Look, why don’t we get you back to your room, so you can lie down? I’ll come see you later, if you want? But, well, right now I really have to get Olivia home, I need to … uh … drive her, yes—”

I stomp past Scarlet and stick my hand out toward Bright.

“O-Octa—” Scarlet tries to take my arm, but I shake her off. “I mean, Olivia! What are you— what—”

“Well!?” I grunt at Bright. “Yeah!?”

Burning Bright regards my hand like a missive from the devil; her eyes ascend to my own, ringed with pressurised hatred. She stumbles back another step, recoils from me. Then another, trying to shake her head. Then she stiffly turns and walks away, goes back the way she came, lurching around the corner.

“Bright!”

I give chase as best I can, steadier on my feet than I was an hour earlier, but still stiff and awkward with internal damage and deep bruises. A few lumbering steps carry me around the corner just in time to see a door slammed shut, followed by the thunk of a heavy bolt. The handle rattles in my grip.

“Bright!” I hiss through the door. “Bright! Just get me out, take me back to—”

A dull flicker passes behind my facial scar, the ghost of a migraine. The stump of my right thigh and my right arm both tingle with phantom sensation. I stagger back in shock. Is that a crackle of flame at the edge of my hearing? Gone the moment I focus, it could be my imagination, though I know it’s not.

Scarlet catches me by the shoulders and sets me right, then steps up to Bright’s bedroom door. “Bethany! Bethany!” She knocks, puts one ear to the wood. “Bethany! Just … just lie down and rest, okay? Lie down and have a nap. You’ll feel better soon. I’ll— I’ll be back, okay? Okay? Bethany!”

“I don’t think she’s in there right now,” I croak. Translocation. Bright went somewhere. Luna?

“What?” Scarlet squints at me. “What are you saying? And why did you call her that? Octavia, why did you call my sister that name? ‘Bright’? I … don’t … ” Scarlet’s eyes unfocus for no longer than a blink, skies clouding with the threat of rain; her mind tries to reconcile two known identities with each other, Burning Bright and Bethany Fairfax. But it won’t stick, not unless she sees Bright transform. She snaps back, doesn’t wait for an answer. “My sister,” she snarls in my face, “is none of your business.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Whatever has happened between us, my sister is not part of it. You understand? She is off-limits, she is not yours to interfere with. Protecting her is my right, my responsibility. Octavia, tell me you understand. Tell me. Say it!”

Breaking this is beyond me. “Okay. Yeah.”

Scarlet shakes her head, not reassured enough. She lowers her voice further, a hiss barely above hearing. “I think she might be able to tell that we … what we did.”

“That’s impossible,” I grunt. Not sure I believe it myself.

Scarlet shoots me a look filled with daggers, then forces herself to take a deep breath, fumbles her hand back into my prosthetic. “Never mind that now. She’s my problem, not yours. Come on, and quickly now. We’ve already delayed too much, we need to get you out of here, right now … Octavia?” She tugs me toward a set of stairs visible at the end of the plush corridor, but I stay planted, right leg solid as steel. “Octavia, what now!?”

“Wait,” I grunt. “Just wait.”

“Tch! You—”

“Wait!” I hiss.

Did you head back to Luna, Bright? Could you not bear to break your act in front of your beloved sister? And now you’ve told Grimgrave or Signal or maybe just Tissy exactly where I am, handed off responsibility. You’re not a fool, you’re one of us, we magical girls from the moon; you’re on my side and I’m on yours, and I’m praying to Nerys you haven’t forgotten that. Any moment now Grimmy is going to explode from the air in a shower of confetti and custard pies and haul my sorry backside back to the moon. Do that one sensible thing for me, Bright, and you can have a free potshot at This Machine anytime you like.

Just do it, Bright. We’re on the same side.

Seconds crawl by. Sweat collects down my back. The corridor does not fill with moon-skeletons led by a jester.

“Fuck,” I murmur under my breath. “Fuck, Bright, what are you doing? Come on!”

“Octavia!” Scarlet snaps. “Octavia! We have to go!”

“Alright, alright, lead on!”

Scarlet herds me to the stairs, lined with pale wood and wide enough for three people abreast, overlooked by yet more dull watercolour landscapes, England as pastoral idyll. Jolly-faced farmers and docile cows watch us descend around two full turns in the sweeping stairwell, me with one arm supporting the poor zoog huddled in the front pocket of my borrowed hoodie. We land in a long central corridor with pale carpet and white plaster walls, more mediocre art everywhere, poorly lit and overlarge, like architecture with gigantism, high arches leading off into other parts of the building. Both ends of the corridor vanish into tangles of blind angle. Scarlet wasn’t exaggerating when she called this place a manor house. Alone, I’d get lost in seconds.

We don’t pause to appreciate the place, a minor blessing, it looks insufferable. Scarlet leads us out, my hand in hers as we pass half a dozen doorways, some open on a dizzying array of rooms, all pale soft wood and small windows, others closed and kept shut with faux-antique handles made to look like cast iron. A pair of carpeted steps leads up to a set of glass doors, open into a cavernous space beyond — brick fireplace, oak panels, green-tinted sunlight falling through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, massive television playing a football game to itself toward the back. The rear of a blonde head is just visible over the cushions of a leather sofa; it half-turns as Scarlet marches us past the open doors.

“Francesca dear, is that you?” A woman’s voice pursues us, rapidly left behind. “Francesca? I need you to come look at these figures. Francesca! Come here!”

“My mother,” Scarlet hisses. “Ignore her.”

The corridor turns into an awkward tangle of three doorways, sunlight flashing down on one side, trapped in a tiny brick courtyard. Scarlet goes unerringly forward, slips around a massive wooden door, pulls me through into a ‘rustic’ kitchen larger than my grandmother’s entire flat. All exposed wooden beams and gleaming dark stone counter-tops. She hurries me past a table that looks as if it’s never been used and over to a jumble of shoes that spills from a low wooden chest. She stamps her feet into a pair of battered tan trainers, grabs a bundle of keys from a hook, unlatches a little side-door, and ejects us together from the dim and shadowy interior, out beneath blazing sunshine.

Eyes squinted against the swan song of an English summer, I can’t get my bearings. Scarlet drags me forward like she’s trying to tear off my prosthetic arm, down a pathway of pale flagstones, house wall towering on one side, dense green hedge on the other.

A few paces brings us into the open. Scarlet fiddles with the keys. A car unlocks with a clear click-clunk, lights flashing once.

“That’s mine, the Vauxhall,” she says. “Get in quick, the sooner we’re on the road the less chance of us being stopped.”

Seen from the outside, Scarlet’s home is an obscenity; I was right to judge it from the bathroom. A massive rambling pile of sallow stone and red brick, topped by a trio of peaked roofs, with two wings sweeping back from the sides of the structure. Almost certainly it has its own shelter somewhere, buried in a wine cellar or cut from the rock. Windows are set with metal lattice, ‘artful’ ivy climbs the exterior, perfectly manicured hedges stand to attention, outdoor pathways scoured clean. A garden rambles off out of sight behind the house; the front is paved with grey tarmac, host to three expensive-looking cars and an old Land Rover. The tarmac falls to crumbly gravel where the grounds meet a road, behind a boundary of low stone walls.

Beyond lies the countryside, a narrow band of fallow fields spread out before the house, dense woods in every other direction. A canopy of verdant green sways in a slow breeze beneath cloudless blue, a lake of trees thicker and older and more tangled with growth than any forest in England should be.

Scarlet’s family home is situated inside a true rarity — one of those places where the old wilds of the British Isles have come creeping back, an exhausted landscape made fecund and dank by dream-borne memory, the vast open-air factory of the countryside swallowed by an inexorable wave of woodland. Such things are possible in the decades since Harding’s ritual, ancient trees rediscovered, plant life growing at an accelerated rate when out of sight for too long. Not a Dreamland overlap, that would be impossible, just somewhere the rules of the waking world have grown thin, eroded by the slow steep of years.

Officially this phenomenon does not exist; the government denies it, and there are no attempts to study it, at least not here in England. But everybody knows, everybody’s seen the pictures of impossibly ancient trees passed around on the internet, the satellite photos of tangled woodland creeping across the south and the northeast. And no denial will explain Wales, the mist-shrouded Celtic rainforests sprouting oaks like mushrooms whenever waking minds have their attention elsewhere.

It’s not technically illegal to build within one of these areas, but permission is never given, certainly not up in the Welsh wilds where so much hides from mundane eyes, no matter how hard the government tries to scour the hills. Scarlet’s family home was probably here before the woods; the trees regrew around the house. Forests from long before Angles and Saxons, before Romans, perhaps before even the Britons, biding their time till this brief waking lapses back into dream.

The zoog shifts inside my borrowed hoodie; a long grey snout pokes out from the pocket, sniffing the scent of grass and trees beneath the sun.

“Holy shit,” I croak. “Look at this place. And you grew up here? That explains a lot.”

“Tch! Not here!” Scarlet hisses, dragging me toward the car. “We didn’t move here until after I’d become a magical girl. You think we had money, when I was growing up? Now here, get in, quickly!”

Scarlet’s car is a beefy dark red compact SUV, clean enough to eat off. She opens the passenger side door and gestures me inside, one hand on my arm for support. Hot car-scent almost makes me recoil, a reek of plastic rolling up into the air. I hesitate only a second, not looking forward to the process of folding myself up to get into the seat. Deep breath, grit teeth against pain.

A meteor falls from the empty sky.

Wreathed in flame and trailing black smoke, a blood-red javelin crashes into the tarmac not thirty feet from the car, broken gravel raining down in its wake. Slabs of corded muscle ripple and flex beneath flowing layers of wine-dark scale. Horns and claws like bloody diamond glint and flicker in the fire. Carmine talons crack the tarmac. A bone-tipped tail lashes the air. A mouth of razored knives opens wide, smoke pouring from the throat behind, a glowing cinder lurking in the dark. Eyes glow red-hot, hard with hate. Heat-haze turns the air to an oven.

Burning Bright didn’t go far.

“Octavia!” she roars, voice like an avalanche of molten rock. A cloud of birds explode from the edge of the woods, spiralling up into the sky.

The engine of my heart stutters toward a cold start, pistons sticky with congealed oil, dregs of fuel not enough to take spark. Even if I could transform in my current state, I would not be well enough to outfight this dragon.

Bright advances, footsteps melting the tarmac; her fire is no phantasmal effect this time. A wave of heat washes over us, whipping Scarlet’s hair back from her face and tightens my skin against my skull, a wall of searing air that makes my eyes water and my lungs burn. She points at me with a fistful of ruby-red claws.

“You traitor!” Bright rumbles. “Liar! You promised, you swore!”

Scarlet Edge steps to the fore, plants herself in Bright’s path, one arm out to shield me. Her face is creased with confusion. She speaks to me over her shoulder. “Octavia, I thought this was one of your comrades?”

“Not right now she isn’t.”

Bright halts, massive knife-like teeth clenched hard, black smoke trailing from the corners of her mouth. “This isn’t about you, Francesca,” she says. “Get out of the way.”

Scarlet’s eyes tighten. “You do not give me orders.”

“Out of the fucking way!” Bright roars.

Scarlet’s attitude shifts, transforming her without transformation. Body language, the angle of her head, the set of her face. Gone are the soft inner layers that I’ve come to know over the last day. Scarlet Edge stands tall and unbowed, eyes hard as granite.

“I remember you,” she says to Bright, voice dripping with contempt. “From the fight on the hospital rooftop. You knew my name then, when I was transformed, rubbing it in my face. Who are you? How do you know me?”

Bright rumbles with strangled fury. Red drool runs from between her teeth, staining her chin.

“No answer for that?” Scarlet almost laughs, words twisting with mockery. “You were quite obsessed with me, weren’t you? But Azure kept you pinned. If you cannot overcome even Azure Infinity, then you are beneath me, friend of Octavia’s or not. And I gather that currently you are not her friend.”

Bright makes a sound like the start of an earthquake, a great terror rising from underground.

“Bright!” I snap. Step away from the open passenger-side door. There’s a clear way out of this, though I doubt it’ll work. “Bright, you fucking idiot, I didn’t have a choice in this. She picked me up after the fight, she saved me, brought me here. I didn’t even know where I was, I was unconscious for three days. Bright! For fuck’s sake, Bright, listen to me.”

Bright’s glare could melt solid steel. She doesn’t care if I’ve kept my promise or not.

“Worth a try,” I mutter.

Scarlet shakes her head, gestures at me. “Your friend is no traitor!” she says to Bright. “She’s telling the truth, I brought her here. And she hasn’t given up any of your secrets! She hasn’t betrayed—”

“Shut up!” Bright roars. “Shut your fucking mouth!”

Bright’s roar is so loud it shakes the air and hurts my ears, rustles the tops of the nearest trees like a pulse of wind. The zoog in my front pocket hisses and rasps, clinging to the fabric in frantic fear. Bright’s half-flame hair blazes hard, darkening from clean fire toward blood-red with the rising of her own internal heat.

“That’s not why she’s angry, Scarlet,” I mutter.

“Then why!?” Scarlet shouts at Bright. “You’re here to do what, to kill your own companion, to kill Octavia?”

“Yup,” I say. “She’s absolutely gonna kill me.”

Not that I haven’t earned it; did break my promise, didn’t I? Extenuating circumstances or not, I have betrayed Bright’s trust. Perhaps that’s why I feel so calm, despite a dragon that wants to rip my head off. Or maybe I just know that Scarlet Edge will protect me.

As long as she doesn’t know that’s her sister.

Scarlet glances back at me. “Octavia, what is this? What is this about?”

Promised to tell the truth, didn’t I? “She and I had a … an agreement. Which I’ve broken. Never really respected it, I guess.”

Scarlet’s eyes narrow. “An agreement about me? She was to have first go at me, was she?” Scarlet’s lips flicker with a grim smile. “Then I’m glad you broke it, Octavia.”

Bright resumes her advance, tarmac melting and buckling, tar running away in little black beads. “Get out of the fucking way, Francesca! You have no fucking right to stop me! Move!”

“Because of me,” Scarlet says, turns back to Bright, disgust plain on her face. “Because of me. You are obsessed with me, aren’t you? You cannot bear that Octavia — This Machine! — beat you to the punch. Treating me as a prize. Huh! This does not impress me, you animal.”

Bright seethes with humiliated fury. Her body shudders, heat-haze turning the air to liquid, each breath the pounding of a train down a tunnel of flame. Black tears leak from the corners of her eyes, like running mascara. Stringy red drool hangs from between her teeth. Her taloned feet grip great furrows in the tarmac.

“This is beneath me,” Scarlet says. “Leave.”

Burning Bright howls with a lifetime of frustration, then surges forward in a wave of fire.

A pillar of flame with a core of molten ruby scales, rippling sheets of muscle wrapped in heat-haze and the stench of burning rock, slams toward us with the inexorable force of pyroclastic flow. Bright is more force of nature than magical girl, a dragon from an ancient time where human feet should never tread. I will be dead on impact, insensible ashes, won’t even feel the moment she tears my guts from my belly with those claws. Though I saw Azure go toe-to-toe and trade equal blows with her, an instinctive part of my mind cannot believe that anything is capable of stopping her. Bright could tear through a nuclear fallout shelter, a meter of solid lead, raw bedrock. This Machine isn’t remotely ready to turn aside those claws; I gather up everything I have, every scrap of magical energy Scarlet Edge has transferred to me, but it’s not anywhere near enough to turn aside this pyrophilic climax.

Scarlet gets there first. She bites her lower lip and explodes into her blood-soaked transformation in fast-forward, drowned in crimson fluid, the blossoms of her red-and-white dress blooming from within the gore, red hair flowing free, clean flame clearing a space amid Bright’s dark smoke, like fresh air pumped from a pinhole in reality. Her own heat-haze pounds against Bright’s, clashing auras pulsing in the air between them.

Her ruby sword sings a crystal note as she draws it from the scabbard. Bright bears down on her, one arm wide to swat her aside, tail lashing for a follow up. Bright’s red-hot eyes are fixed on me, not even paying attention to Scarlet.

Her mistake.

Scarlet parries Bright’s claws one-handed with her ruby-red sword, sparks and flame spraying into the air, heat-haze deforming around the blade’s edge. Bright stumbles, force turned aside, as if she didn’t expect Scarlet to fight back. Scarlet’s free hand snaps forward like a snake, closes on one of Bright’s great curling horns. She yanks Bright off-balance, drops her sword low to take Bright through the gut.

To run her own sister through, the way she did with me.

“Scarlet, no!” I shout. This isn’t what she wants, but she doesn’t know it.

A screech of metal on metal drowns out my voice. Scarlet’s blade glances off Bright’s scales, scores a deep scratch in her armour, slides wide, out to the side. Scarlet draws back her arm and tries again, hacking for the underside of Bright’s ribs; but Bright gets her feet under herself again, hands clutching to block the sword.

Wide-eyed with unfamiliar panic, she tangles Scarlet’s blade in her claws. “Out of the way, Fran—”

Scarlet roars in Bright’s face and powers forward, the pair of them locked together by claw and sword. Her charge carries Bright away from the parked cars, across the width of the tarmac. They crash into a hedge, naked flame igniting the leaves, scorching slender branches to ash, setting fire to either side as they fall through the gap. They smash through the low wall on the far side and out into one of the fallow fields before the house. Scarlet and Bright tumble together down a shallow slope, grass on fire in their wake, streaks of black ash on the ground, red flame licking the soil.

I hurry to the gap burned in the hedge, ignoring the terrible heat.

Scarlet and Bright disentangle as they roll to a halt at the base of the shallow slope. Scarlet springs free and up to her feet, sword at arm’s length, point at Bright’s throat. Her red-and-white dress is no longer in the tatters to which she tore it last night, repaired and returned by whatever magical processes keep her anchored, but now the edges are singed and scorched.

Bright swats the blade away with her claws, struggles to one knee; the grass around her blackens and burns, little green blades wilting and dying, a ring of fire spreading outward.

Scarlet declines to press the attack, takes a step back. She glances up at the sky, wide with panic. Then back at me.

“Octavia!” Scarlet says. “Run!”

“How!?”

“Take my keys, get in the car, drive!” She starts to pat her dress, feeling for her car keys. “Every magical girl in a hundred miles will know about this fight soon. You can’t be here, you can’t—”

“Look at me,” Bright rasps. “Look at me!”

Scarlet whips round. “You! Leave! You want to kill Octavia, perhaps that is between you and her. But I will not suffer her to be captured by Dream Control, I will not have her placed back in the hands of a Dreamer. Surely you can’t wish for that!?”

Bright’s eyes slide to me, smouldering with hatred.

“Don’t think she cares how I die,” I say. “Just that I’m out of the way.”

Scarlet’s lips curl with utter disgust. “All over an obsession with me? You sick thing, you—”

“You’re finally looking at me, Francesca,” Bright hisses. She pulls herself to her taloned feet. Black tears roll down her cheeks. Habitual exhaustion creeps back into her magical girl form, shoulders rounded, eyelids heavy, breathing too hard. “It had to go this far, huh? For you to just give me what I wanted, after all this time. I had to lose you, just to get you to look at me?”

“I don’t even know you,” Scarlet spits. “You have no prior claim on me.”

“Yes I do!” Bright screeches, breaking down into terrible wet sobs. She stamps, one taloned foot driving hard into the soil. “I do, I do, I do!”

Scarlet’s face twists with frustration. “I don’t have time for your games, whatever this is.” She glances back at me. “Octavia, go—”

“Don’t look at her!” Bright howls, drooling red mess, her face a mask of dark tears. “Look at me!”

Scarlet whips back to her. “You want DC to capture her? You want—”

“I don’t give a fuck about DC!” Bright screams. “I don’t give a fuck about any of it! You and me, Scarlet. You and me! You look at me now, only me! Fight me, fight me, fight me! You want to leave, you have to kill me first! You run and I’ll burn both of you! You translocate and I’ll hunt you!”

“Scarlet!” I shout. “Scarlet, she’s trying to bait you! You don’t want this!”

But Scarlet doesn’t reply. She raises her sword again, hilt held in both hands, face dyed with loathing. She turns her body side-on, as if preparing to face an opposing blade.

“I’ll slay you quick, dragon,” she says. “If that is your wish.”

Burning Bright breaks into a beaming smile, weeping with ecstatic pleasure. “Yes, yes!”

Scarlet doesn’t give Bright time to reassume a fighting stance. She lunges with a two-handed hacking motion, her blade arcing overhead and falling with a hiss of superheated air. Bright takes the blows on her forearms, scales denting and screeching, trying to grab the blade with her claws. But Scarlet strikes with blinding speed, her sword a semi-visible blur, staining the air with ruby-red light. Bright is so strong, a wall of muscle and scale and crimson claw, but she’s forced backward by the sheer strength and speed of Scarlet’s sword, her taloned feet digging trenches in the dirt.

Scarlet’s lips peel back in a wild grin. The very same battle-lust she showed when fighting Grimgrave on the hospital rooftop.

This is the other aspect of Scarlet Edge the public never sees, the side of her they don’t put on television. She loves this part of what she is, the wild beast inside the woman.

Bright’s bone-tipped tail whips out from behind her and crashes into Scarlet’s left flank; the disadvantage of Scarlet’s style, leaves her open to counter-attack. The tail catches Scarlet in the ribs with a cratter-crack explosion of breaking bones, knocks her from her feet and tosses her through the air like a rag-doll. She sails in a shallow arc and rattles to the ground in a boneless heap, sword spilling from her fingers, red hair spread out on the green grass.

A mundane human would be dead. Heart and arteries shredded by bone fragments, lungs collapsed, in too much pain to stir, let alone regain her feet.

Scarlet Edge hauls herself upright, grabs her sword, spits a gobbet of dark blood into the grass, and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. The left flank of her dress is bloody with pulped flesh and spikes of exposed bone; she takes deep breaths, inflating her lungs on purpose, hissing through gritted teeth. Her body reknits at incredible speed, broken ribs sucking back inside, skin sealing shut. The dress is still torn and stained, but Scarlet stands untouched.

Bright stares as if watching the descent of an angel, awe and love and fascination and worse. She lets out a broken sob, mouths a silent prayer.

Scarlet points her sword at Bright.

“One.”

“What?” Bright asks.

“That was your limit. You shall not get another.”

Bright laughs through worshipful tears. “I don’t care, Francesca! I don’t care! This is all I’ve ever wanted! You won’t pay attention to me any other way! And now you’re mine!”

Scarlet charges, heat-haze rippling across the burning grass, sword in a two-handed grip. Bright replies with a charge of her own, claws raised, tail lashing, wings of living flame unfurling from her back to crack at the air and set the grass on fire.

They slam into each other, trading a flurry of sword-blows and claw-strikes, bone and steel and ruby and scales screeching and squealing as attacks bounce off, deflect and parry, go wide, slide past, and find their targets with bone-shattering impact. Waves of scorched air radiate out from the duel in a dome of heat-haze, blackening the verdant grass, setting little fires in dry patches, even beginning to curl and crisp the leaves on the nearest trees, the edge of the forest which overhangs the fallow field.

Scarlet fights differently now, sword in both hands, wary of Bright’s lashing tail, guard held close to her body when she’s not lunging or twisting to make an attack. She works from the sides, jabbing and spearing at Bright’s guts and belly, feinting for her face and throat, then switching targets with flicker-flash speed; her sword moves so fast that my untransformed eyes can barely track the blade, the edge cutting ripples of displaced air in the heat-haze aura. The point of her sword bounces off Bright’s scales, but she attacks again and again, begins to open cracks in Bright’s armour, sending scores of ruby-red scales broken and flaking to the earth like burning cinders. She changes tactics faster than Bright can keep up with, opening shallow gashes on Bright’s face, filling her eyes with boiling blood, forcing her to shake her head like a wet dog.

Bright gives as good as she gets, no more retreat. She barely bothers to defend herself, letting her scales do all the work. She rakes and claws at Scarlet, ripping at her red-and-white dress, opening great rents in the flesh beneath, each wound healing so fast it’s closed before the next attack lands. She rips and tears to no avail, then closes her fists and pounds at Scarlet instead, forcing Scarlet to deflect with her sword or suffer bone-breaking blows on her ribs and forearms.

Bright whips out with her tail again, bone spike aimed at Scarlet’s heart. But Scarlet is wise to the trick now. She executes a complicated twist with her sword, raising it in a curling arc, deflecting the tail with a ring of ruby on scales, a shower of sparks, a defiant shout.

I scramble down the shallow slope and into the field, following the duel as it veers toward the treeline, flames washing out the dim shadows beneath the woods.

No idea why I’m trying. Can’t intervene, not as I am.

If I was whole and flush with girl juice, This Machine could match Burning Bright blow for blow, crack her scales with a punch, or at least withstand her fury. This Machine might be able to knock some sense into her. Octavia Carter is unarmed and unarmoured and burns rather easily. In the back of my mind lurks some half-hearted notion that I need to stick close to Scarlet, whatever happens; if Dream Control or other magical girls really are about to turn up, then I need to be where Scarlet can reach me first, or I’m going to get captured and taken away, or perhaps just executed on sight.

But when I stumble to the bottom of the slope — prosthetic leg catching my balance in hard-packed, summer-baked earth, nostrils clogged with the reek of burning grass, waves of heat washing over my face, flames crackling across the field — I realise why I have to stop the fight.

Scarlet’s going to win.

Bright should be an unstoppable battering ram of armoured muscle and diamond-hard claw. Back on the hospital rooftop she fought Azure to a stalemate, both of them battered and bruised and bleeding by the end. But now she’s fighting like a fool, wailing on her sister as a child attacks another, weeping smoke-black tears and sobbing as she flails. Alternative strategies spiral outward with every strike, but she takes none of them; she could launch herself into the air on those wings of flame and swoop down on Scarlet like a bird of prey, or back away and drown her sister in fiery breath, or break her sword in diamond claws, or lunge and grapple Scarlet to the ground. But instead she throws a tantrum.

And Scarlet heals so quickly, flesh zippering back together after each passage of Bright’s claws. Bright cannot out-heal her, cannot outlast her, cannot leave any permanent mark on the perfect and untouchable mask of Scarlet Edge.

Scarlet’s playing for keeps, aiming for limbs and neck and belly. She’ll break Bright’s armour and skewer her through the heart.

I stumble forward, suffocating in the heat, no plan. Bright scores a nasty strike, an open-handed blow across Scarlet’s face, claws raking her right cheek, opening her flesh in triple gashes, bone-deep. Scarlet’s head whips aside, a spray of blood fountaining into the air, a grimace of exposed teeth across her torn cheek.

Bright hesitates. Scarlet turns back, face already sucking itself shut, teeth full of blood. Her sword whirls in both hands, a horizontal shockwave aimed at Bright’s neck.

“Scarlet!” I scream, but she can’t hear me over the flames. The intake of breath scorches my throat, chokes me on superheated air.

Bright gets her claws up in time, deflects the sword with an ear-splitting clang. Scarlet follows through, whirling her sword back for another attempt, aims the next decapitation strike at the other flank. She’s roaring now, spitting insults in Bright’s face, words lost in the blaze.

She’ll kill her own sister, and she won’t know it till Bright’s corpse hits the ground.

Does Bright really want this? To die at Scarlet’s hand?

Scarlet doesn’t.

I saw the way she looked at Bethany, back in the house. Whatever madness has unfolded between these two, Scarlet loves her sister, however cramped that love has become, however rotten it has gone. A win here would break her completely, no matter what other framework of being I’ve begun to offer her over the last day. If she wins here, there will be no future for her, as Scarlet or Francesca or anything else.

Pick up my feet, stumble toward the duel, into the furnace. Nothing to put between the combatants but myself.

Failed to save Willow, didn’t I? Am I going to fail again?

Fuel trickles through the engines of This Machine, thin and weak as stale water, still leaking from a hundred cracks and punctures. Not enough to spark transformation, let alone sustain. Anger sputters and gurgles, so little of it left, the deep wells of my fury breached and broken. I’ll burn if I throw myself in front of Bright untransformed; if I don’t, both of them will die.

But I’ve other fuel sources now. As transformation becomes do-or-die, deep tanks of strange fluid respond to hidden pumps, fuel lines flushing, engines flooding with strange new potency.

If I don’t save Scarlet here, she’ll never bark for me again. That’ll do.

Raise my prosthetic hand, even as I stumble forward. Close my fingers in a fist. Swing hard, strike the air, strike the world.

Transformation takes me.

I’ve no idea what it looks like from the outside; in a blink I’m clad head-to-toe in imperishable black steel, armoured in truth, my heart a pounding engine, my limbs a set of pistons. Fragile still beneath my shell, loose and grinding and unstable, barely enough to tank a single solid blow, but there’s no other choice; at least I’m not full of holes anymore. Heat and flame licks off my armour, untouchable inside. I don’t even break my stride, picking up my feet and hurling myself toward the duel.

Scarlet and Bright both turn in shock. Bright roars, “No!” Scarlet flourishes her sword to force Bright back, makes space for my arrival.

“Octavia!” Scarlet shouts. “What are you doing!?”

I skid to a halt, almost go down. Scarlet’s free hand catches me under one arm. Red eyes search like I’ve gone mad. Perhaps I have.

“Scarlet,” I pant from inside my helmet, voice a mechanical rasp. “You don’t want this. You don’t want to kill her, you don’t—”

Bright roars like a dragon. The skirts of Scarlet’s dress flap as if in the wind. The side of my black steel armour flares hot, glowing red.

“Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Bright screams. “This is between me and her, me and her! I told you, you filthy lying cunt cripple, she’s mine! Mine! Mine! She was supposed to forget you! How the fuck are you even still here!?”

Scarlet turns a glare on Bright, pure with contempt and disgust. She doesn’t need words.

Bright sobs, humiliated and lost and drowning in her own rage. She takes a tripping step backward, then draws herself up, filling her lungs with a great breath, wind whistling through her massive knife-like teeth. A vortex of flame and heat-haze and thick black smoke swirls toward her.

Scarlet tries to pull me aside, but there’s no escape from this. She raises her sword, as if she can deflect this attack. I shake free of Scarlet and take two steps forward, place myself before her, brace my legs. Deep down in the belly of my armour, I feel the zoog burrow deeper, protected by layer after layer of black steel.

Bright heaves forward, her whole body jackknifing, head projected out, jaws open wide.

She vomits a stream of red-hot flame, the core a spear of roiling blue. It hits me in the chest and face, a physical wave of force and heat, blinding me with red and white, turning the world beyond my shell to an inferno. Black steel armour rings like a gong, creaking and groaning under pressure. My heels dig furrows into the grass, forced down into the soil, but I cannot bend or break, or else the wave will wash over Scarlet. Cannot even twitch or else my armour will buckle and then the flame will consume me, regardless of my own internal fires, fed on richer fuel.

Three, four, five full seconds — and finally the flame sputters out. Smoke and steam rise in a thick dark cloud. Bright lets out a hacking, coughing, retching sound, like she’s trying to vomit up her own guts.

Smoke lifts. Scarlet steps around to my left, the edges of her dress charred to cinder, but otherwise intact. My whole front is red-hot, but rapidly cooling toward black.

Bright heaves for breath, rasping and spluttering. Her eyes find me, blazing with hate. She rights herself again, begins to inhale a second time.

“Coward.”

A dark mechanical crunch, my own voice. Bright hesitates, so much like her sister.

“What?” she growls. “What!?”

Not sure what I’m saying. The word came from my heart. Have to hope it’ll work.

My helmet peels back from my face, folding down into my collar as it did before. Heat washes over my exposed skin, draws sticky sweat from my face, makes my scar itch. My hair flows free, borne on the fiery updraft, black tips dancing against the flames.

“Coward,” I repeat. “Burning Bright, I pronounce you a coward.”

Bright’s teeth clench hard. “You shouldn’t even be here, you lying cripple fuck! You promised, you made a promise, and I trusted—”

“Cancel your transformation.”

Bright’s insults die in her throat. “What?”

“Cancel your transformation. Let her see.” I gesture toward Scarlet with a twist of my head. “Isn’t that what you want? That’s what all this is about, right? You want Scarlet to see you, to pay attention to you, to know you? Then cancel your transformation. It’s that easy.”

“Shut up!” Bright snaps. “Stop— stop it, shut up! How would you know anything, you’re a dead fucking bitch you—”

“Cancel your transformation!” I roar back at her. My engines throb and grind, heat in my scar and behind my eyes; down in my guts pieces of me are shutting down, giving up, pushed too far on too little rest. “Show her! Or are you all talk, Bright? Was all this just an excuse to commit suicide? You’d rather goad Scarlet into beheading you than tell her the truth? You don’t want her to see you after all, you just want to punish her with your own death! You’re a coward, Bright. You are a coward. And I will stand my ground or see you be honest. Your choice.”

Scarlet must be bewildered, but she doesn’t ask questions or gawp at my words. She moves to my left shoulder, facing Bright, sword in a double-handed grip, ready to back me up.

Flames rise higher on all sides, great swathes of the field on fire, the edge of the woods catching alight as the conflagration spreads. For a moment Bright just stares, slow tears running down her scaled face, as Scarlet and I stand side-by-side amid the blaze.

Bright’s face collapses into weeping. She screams and sobs, face a wet and incoherent mask.

She turns aside and rips a hole in reality with her claws, a volcanic fissure in midair. With an inelegant leap and a flick of her tail, she slides through, body swallowed by the space between the waking world and the dream beyond.

The rift slides shut, vanishes along with Burning Bright. Translocation complete.

She really is a coward.

“I assume,” Scarlet hisses, “she’s not on her way to inform your other comrades as to your whereabouts?”

“Doubt it.”

Scarlet takes a deep breath and lowers her sword. “Then come on, we have to get moving. Right now!”

One step almost fells me, even transformed and inside my armour. Spent everything I had just to get here and tank that fire-breath. Scarlet hooks her arm under mine and drags me stumbling across the field, through sheets of billowing black smoke and the smouldering remains of burned grass. She hauls me up the shallow slope, through the hole smashed in the wall, past the torn hedge, and back onto the semi-melted tarmac of the courtyard.

She cancels her own transformation, charred dress collapsing back into casual clothes. Mine stutters out a moment later, black steel armour folding up and away as if sucked back inside my body; still no idea what that looks like from the outside. Makes me sag and stumble, like a building with the supports kicked away. This Machine coughs and stutters, engines failing, heart juddering out of sync.

Scarlet hauls me toward her car. “Move, move! We have to leave, right now! Somebody will have picked up the transformations, not to mention all this fire!”

The field in front of the house and a long section of woodland is ablaze, pouring smoke into the sky, flames flickering against the blue.

“What—” I croak, can barely speak, barely walk, everything weak and shaking. “What about the house? Your parents? This is a full-on wildfire!”

“About which we can do nothing!” Scarlet snaps. “If we stay here much longer, we’ll be found! Get in!”

She bundles me into the passenger seat of her car and slams the door, then hurries around the front and slides into the driver’s side. A yank of the key wakes the engine with a deep mechanical purr; at least she takes good care of the car, or somebody does. Scarlet slams the handbrake down and hits the accelerator, hands on the wheel. The car leaps across the tarmac, away from the flames, gliding down the driveway. Scarlet doesn’t pause at the turning into the road, just yanks the wheel hard to the left. We speed off down the tree-lined country lane.

In moments her family home is dwindling in the rear-view mirror. Lost behind us, then swallowed by woods and smoke and the light of leaping flames.

Neither of us speak. I pant for breath, rasping and stuttering, concentrating on the awful feeling in my heart. Scarlet, wide-eyed and white-knuckled, concentrates on driving. The country road widens out as it plunges between the trees, descending beneath a thick green canopy, deep in the shadows of the woods. The wildfire can’t be more than a couple of miles away, but you’d never know. Perhaps the revived ancient woodland will swallow it like the sea.

The zoog in my front pocket noses halfway out, little paws grasping at my side. Absently I pet him on the head, still panting for breath, realising we must reek of smoke. Ruining the fancy interior of Scarlet’s expensive car. At least my hair’s dry now.

“Seatbelt,” Scarlet mutters.

“Eh?”

“Fasten your seatbelt,” she repeats, shellshocked and distant. She takes one hand off the wheel to draw her own belt across her body. “Octavia, fasten your seatbelt. I won’t have you go sailing through the windscreen. Seatbelt. Now.”

Not the time to remind her that she’s not the one who gives orders. My hands feel so weak, shaking with exertion, but I grab the seatbelt and drag it into place with a click. I wrap my right arm around the zoog, cradle him tight in my lap.

Scarlet cranks up the air conditioning, tries to clear the reek of smoke from our clothes.

“What … that girl, the dragon girl … ” She keeps her eyes on the road, but her voice is a distant quiver. “She … ”

“Burning Bright,” I croak. “Her name.”

“Burning Bright, okay. She’s obsessed with me, is she? Why? I don’t understand. I’d never seen her before that fight at the hospital. Octavia, she’s one of your comrades, isn’t she? Why … I’ve never seen anybody … her face … ”

Scarlet’s voice is all wrong, a confused quiver behind her words. Her mind fights her soul. Instinctively she must have drawn connections — the shape of her sister’s face, the sound of her voice, the hunch of her shoulders. Her waking mind refuses the truth, but the dream tries so hard to break through.

Can’t leave her with this doubt.

“Scarlet, shouldn’t you call home or something?” I ask. “The house might catch fire. Your sister could be hurt. She’s still in her bedroom, right?”

Scarlet blinks, once light, then hard. Shakes her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” she hisses. “Bethany left before us. Octavia, I don’t appreciate you talking about my sister. You have a great deal of leeway with me now, you know that. But don’t abuse it. Bethany is off-limits. Understand? Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Besides,” Scarlet adds, “there’s plenty of clear ground between the woods and the house. And those woods are wet on the inside, even in the summer. When we get a bit further, I’ll call it in. I’ll call it in, it’ll be alright.”

Bethany left before us?

Technically true. Scarlet knows it, but doesn’t know how she knows. She just knows that Bethany Fairfax is now in no danger.

The trees on either side of the road thicken and darken, sucking us deeper into the woods. Shadows grow heavy further from the road, undergrowth thick as tar. Scarlet follows sweeping curves past road signs and side-roads, far from any villages.

“Stop the car,” I say.

“What?!” Scarlet hisses. “What now? What are you talking about?”

“This is not going to be easy for either of us,” I say, swallow my own heart. “Scarlet, stop the car.”

“Why? I’m not—”

“I need you to be a good girl for me. You should not be driving when I say this. Stop the car.”

Scarlet obeys, turns us off into a crumbling lay-by, inches from the treeline. She tuts and hisses and mutters, but something in my voice keeps her from complaining too loud. She kills the engine, lets out a big huff, then turns to me, eyebrows raised.

“Well!?”

Eyes forward. Can’t look at her. My fault, I’ve fucked this up. Now I have to fix it.

“Scarlet, I told you I wouldn’t lie to you, so I need you to believe me. I need you to trust what I’m about to say, no matter what. Can you do that?”

Scarlet frowns, baffled. “Yes? Yes, fine, what is it!?”

Not my secret to reveal. But Scarlet trusts me now, in a way she has perhaps trusted nobody her whole life. I promised her I would not lie, but I am lying right now, by omission and silence. She will not believe my words, she will not accept any of this, and it won’t be her fault, it’s just the shape of the world, the weight of dreams. But if I keep this secret now and allow Bright to make things worse, then Scarlet’s trust will collapse the moment she discovers.

She’s not going to believe me. Likely she’ll hate me for this. It might ruin the fragile bridge of gossamer we have built between us.

But the alternative would be worse. She’d never forgive. I would be just another peddler of yet another falsehood.

I turn to look her in the eyes. Blue-grey as rain clouds.

“Burning Bright’s mundane identity is Bethany Fairfax,” I say. “Burning Bright is your little sister.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

That’s a bold strategy, Octavia, especially alone in a confined space with a woman who can kill you very easily. Let’s see if it pays off!

This chapter was really fun to write; I’d been looking forward to this confrontation for a long time, and I gotta say, Bright did not disappoint. She went even further than I expected. This girl is deeply unwell. I love her.

Ahem!

Anyway! I have a shoutout for you this week, a very unconventional shoutout. It’s not for a web serial; it’s for a computer game. I also want to make extra clear that the developer of this game did not ask me for this shoutout. I was not contacted at all. I’m bringing this up because I have had such an incredible time with it, and it is 1000% relevant to Maidens of the Fall.

So.

Do you like magical girls? Do you like comedic magical girl fiction that plays with all the magical girl genre tropes of the last 30+ years? Do you like little rpgmaker games? (‘Little’ is inaccurate, this took me 40 hours to finish, there is a lot of game here.) Do you like magical girls being incredibly gay with each other? (I cannot emphasize that last point enough, this is one of the most lesbian magical girl works I have ever encountered.)

Then I would like to draw your attention to Angelic Acceptor Alouette, a magical girl yuri RPG, by Large Battleship Studios.

Why am I recommending this? Three reasons. One, I am not exaggerating when I say this is the most satisfyingly lesbian magical girl story I have ever seen, (outside of web serials, possibly???). If you like Maidens, you might like this, though it’s a lot more comedy and a lot less violent. Two, LBS is a very, very, very small indie outfit; the game is made mostly from free assets, the game itself is free. And three, as it contains adult themes, it’s blocked from showing up on itch.io’s internal search. That’s right, if you search for yuri or magical girls, you don’t even see this thing! Which sucks! So I am doing my part to recommend something I deeply enjoyed. Anyway! Go take a look!

Also this week, I have some fanart to share, from over on the discord server, hooray! First up we have a little doodle titled Scarlet Acquires Vital Information, (by Cybran). Then, a much more complex doodle (which made me laugh), Anatomy of Octavia, (also by Cybran!). And finally, a piece that made my jaw drop; this one might not make sense if you’ve never seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but this piece is Octavia, interpreted as a Madoka-style witch, reduced (elevated?) to simply her heart and her prosthetic arm, (by Hydrahead Hunter). Absolutely incredible to see so much fanart, thank you all!

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

Right now 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! I know I repeat myself here every week, but I always type it out anew. Thank you so much for being here and reading my little story, it means the world to me that so many readers out there are enjoying what I’m doing here. Without you, Octavia would never have reached the page, let alone her current position. Thank you all!

Next chapter, Octavia dances through a minefield. Better hope Scarlet really does trust you, Occy …

Content Warnings

Ableism
Wounds
Animal cruelty
Wounded animals

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Scarlet must be joking. There’s no other explanation for her offer to help me shower. An odd moment to reveal her sense of humour; I had assumed she didn’t possess one, not beyond bitter laughter at her own confidential circumstances.

But now I see she’s perfectly capable of mockery. Laying a trap for the lecherous dyke. Ready with ridicule when I take the bait.

No other explanation. Surely.

A handful of heartbeats pass in sweat-stained silence. An ocean of trees crest and creak in gentle wind, half-drawn curtain swaying in the breeze, the scent of wet grass carried through the open window. Scarlet awaits an answer with perfect calm, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. She’ll break first, erupt into a nasty grin, like Grimgrave before I knew Grimgrave’s heart. Call me a homosexual, Scarlet, make this safe and simple for both of us. Stammer and apologise, or spit in my face. Laugh at my presumption. Brand me with the truth.

Scarlet’s confidence stands tall. Subtle heat-haze plays around her hair, tickling my peripheral vision. Her eyes blaze, grey skies set aflame.

Every heartbeat radiates little crackles of pain through my core. This Machine has remembered that it is flesh, and flesh has needs.

“Octavia?” Scarlet does break first, but not in the direction I presumed; I flinch in slow-motion, too tired and wounded. “Did you hear what I said? You can’t shower by yourself, you would fall over, or worse. Allow me to help—”

My prosthetic hand jerks out between us, my final shield. “What—” Croak, clear my throat. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Exactly what I’m saying.” Scarlet rolls her eyes and tuts. “I’m not insinuating that you and I should attempt to have shower sex. You’re in no state for that. The strain would probably kill you.”

“Mm,” I mumble. “Heart would probably give out.”

“Quite. And I … ” Scarlet’s confidence flickers, a gutter of flame in a hidden draught. She glances down at her own body, then lets out a humourless puff. “Oh, what does it matter? You’ve good as seen me naked after last night. Simple nudity would be far less difficult.” She gathers herself again, flame behind both eyes. “My offer is genuine. You have a need. I can assist.”

Scarlet Edge, England’s blood-stained idol, one of the most beautiful magical girls in the world. A woman beyond desire, a sex symbol for an age that all others past could not have imagined; the dirty locked-door secret of ten million silent orgasms a day, the subject of more explicit fanart than one would ever guess, the star of at least one pornographic video game — highly illegal in England. Untouchable, unattainable, unthinkable. Pure as white-hot fire. To dream of contact is to burn oneself to ash. To risk the reality would be death.

And now she’s offering to wipe me down in the shower, with the same determination she shows her Dreamland foes. A month ago I wouldn’t have dreamed this; it would have disgusted me.

Shivers take me. Can’t catch my breath. This Machine has found a new state, one it has never been in before.

Need to sit down. But take one step and I might go over.

“Do you … ” Swallow hard, dry throat, can’t speak. “Scarlet. Do you know about girl juice transfer?”

Scarlet’s confident crust cracks with a sharp frown. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Girl juice.”

“ … oh, that! Yes, magical reserves. Again, ‘girl juice’, really? Why call it that? And what does that have to do with showering? Do you recharge by submerging yourself in water or something? What am I not understanding here?”

Examine Scarlet’s expression. Brow furrowed, eyes pinched, nose wrinkled, and not the least bit embarrassed. She’s not capable of lying about this, not to me, not in this way, not after last night. She’s also not an idiot, and doesn’t think I’m one either. She simply does not know.

“Magical girls,” I say, “can transfer juice between each other by fucking.”

Scarlet stares, a total blank.

“Huh,” I grunt. “Yeah. You didn’t know that, did you? Kissing works too. And it’s just transfer, not generation, not as far as I know. Both parties have to be into it, or it doesn’t work.”

Scarlet’s mute shock flashes into wounded anger. “My offer was genuine,” she hisses. “I thought we were beyond this kind of farce, you—”

“M’not lying.” I raise my voice; hurts my chest, but it’s worth the pain. “Scarlet. I won’t lie to you.”

Scarlet frowns with great and terrible consternation, as if I’ve just upended some vital principle of physics, some constant upon which she has relied her entire life, and suddenly found a void where the ground used to be. Her eyes wander to one side, lost in thought. She takes a deep breath, then another, then a third, nodding to herself. But then she comes up short, eyes jumping back to me.

“How do you know this?” she asks.

My turn for a dark chuckle. “How do you not know it? They don’t tell you, do they? Your Dream-Gods keep secrets, other magical girls don’t tell each other—”

“No!” she snaps. “I mean how do you know it works? Have you … you must have … I assume you’ve experienced it. Is that correct?”

Walked myself into a minefield, haven’t I? Did promise her I wouldn’t lie. “Briefly.”

“With the … with the clown? With ‘Grimgrave’?”

“Uh huh. I had a heart attack, after the fight on the hospital rooftop.” Leave out the part where I masturbated myself into cardiac arrest; still technically the truth. “Grimmy … ” I gesture at my lips. “Resuscitated me.”

Scarlet swallows, not without difficulty. “And this ‘Grimgrave’, she’s also your … your … ‘good girl’? That wasn’t a joke? Truly?”

Have to cast my mind back to remember that one. The night Scarlet and I spoke over the internet, I told her Grimmy was mine.

Not sure Grimmy would agree, but keep it simple.

“That’s what I said.”

Scarlet takes another deep breath, nodding slowly, mostly to herself. No jealous rage, no explosion of flame. “I see. But how? How is that possible, how does it work? Magical energy comes from the Dreamlands, from Nightmares who bring it into the waking world, and from the Dream-Gods who uplift us. I’ve never heard of it moving from one magical girl to another. Either this isn’t known, or it’s kept from us.”

A tiny shrug is best I can do without pulling on my insides. Standing is beginning to tire me out. “S’all I know. Maybe it only works in certain conditions. Between girls attached to the same Dream-God, maybe? Or maybe only for Nerys? Maybe it only works in a Dreamland overlap, I dunno.”

Scarlet’s eyes linger elsewhere a moment too long. I’ve just given away that our ‘hideout’ is in a Dreamland overlap. Still, if DC hasn’t gotten that intel from Willow and the Lucid Dreamers already, what would they do with that knowledge? They’ll probably assume we live somewhere deep in London’s roiling corpse, and they can hardly comb the buried streets of the dead city. They’d never guess Luna.

Can I trust Scarlet? If not, then what’s the point in all this?

Scarlet’s confidence swells back. She pulls her spine erect and raises her chin, radiates confidence like naked flame.

“This changes nothing between us,” she says. “My offer is still genuine. You’ll fall down if you attempt to shower alone. Allow me to help you.”

Never before has anybody had such wide choice of good reasons to refuse, but all fall to nothing as I try to grasp them. I’ve never been naked in front of another woman, all those nights with Willow never happened; but as Scarlet said, I’ve already seen her good as naked, stripped down to nothing. I’ll be vulnerable, certainly, but I’m already vulnerable; if Scarlet wanted me dead, she could do it right now, my resistance would count less than wet tissue paper. My promise to Bright, to not get between her and Scarlet, has already been shredded.

But, so much more importantly, Scarlet has left the central problem unsaid.

Am I truly your good girl, Octavia? Or were those just empty words?

Scarlet trusted me to handle her at her most vulnerable; I cradled her face and told her she can be my loyal hound. I must do the same with my trust in her, or whatever we’re building here will collapse, though I cannot yet see the contours of the edifice. If I reject her now, I may as well knife her through the heart myself.

Or maybe I’m just a filthy pervert, presented with the best opportunity I’ll ever have.

“Alright,” I murmur. Louder. “Alright. Alright, Scarlet. You want to scrub me down, I’m game. It’ll help.”

Scarlet Edge beams, sudden and sharp and clean, a smile never before seen even in the most candid of promo shots and television interviews. The smile vanishes as soon as it peaks, a sunbeam from inside a storm.

“Right!” Scarlet says. “First step, let’s get you into the bathroom.” She draws close to me, doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, hovers without touching. “Do you need help? You can lean on my arm if you like. Which side should I take? Octavia?”

“I can walk on my own,” I grunt, “I’m just slow. Be ready to catch me if I go down, I guess.”

“Tch!” Scarlet tuts, steps in front of me, blocks my way. “Lean on my arm. Which side?”

A short staring match leads us nowhere.

This Machine being so defiant, playing the part of the cripple too proud to accept help, too sensitive to humiliation. Truth is I’m shaking to pieces inside, quivering like a leaf in a hurricane. Touch was so easy just a few minutes ago. Now it’s electric current.

Scarlet’s face contorts beneath the surface, seething with frustration. “Octavia,” she hisses. “Let me … let me be your—”

“I’m not insulting you,” I rasp. “I’m not being difficult, alright? You’re about to strip me down and hose me off. I’m a little flustered.”

“ … o-oh.” Scarlet’s anger evaporates. “I-I couldn’t tell, you didn’t—”

“Right arm,” I grunt. “Don’t touch the left, it’s still burned.”

Scarlet nods, steps to my right, and holds out her elbow. I grip her forearm with my prosthetic hand. She takes my weight like I’m stuffed with straw, strong as a god herself, even untransformed.

“Good girl,” I mutter. Scarlet makes a little sound, could mean anything.

Away from the television and out between the sofas, we trudge and totter together toward the walk-in closet. My mangled insides pull at themselves, like internal scabs have formed across my organs, hard structures amid the soft machinery of my innards, tissues tender and fragile. At the closet doorway Scarlet flicks on a light, floods the dark tunnel with warm glow. The closet interior is even bigger than I imagined, a wide space walled in off-white cream, carpeted same as the bedroom. A double-row of clothes on hangers stand as honour guard — dresses, trousers, blouses, skirts, ten times the wardrobe I’ve ever owned. A stout wooden chest of drawers stands tucked against the wall on one side, presumably full of underwear and other things that don’t go on hangers.

Nine paces to the far side an open door admits us into the gleaming haven of Scarlet’s personal bathroom. My stunned feet drag us to a halt.

The en-suite bathroom seems even bigger than Scarlet’s bedroom, walled and floored in dusky white tiles shot through with dark veins. A bank of windows, high and frosted, reflect greenish light from the woods and fields outdoors. A huge tub dominates one half of the room, a massive white boat of a thing studded with internal nozzles, surrounded by a rim of tiles wide enough to lie down on, one end clustered with soaps and shampoos and other bottles. It even has steps, one internal and one external. The sink, no less ostentatious, is a plinth to self-worship, set before a massive mirror that reflects the entire room. A fancy Japanese-style automatic toilet squats in pride of place next to it, legroom enough for an elephant. A fluffy waterfall of towels hang from a heated rail. A walk-in shower big enough for six people stands at the opposite end of the room, enclosed in opaque glass.

“Octavia? What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Is this marble?” I croak. “Your bathroom’s floored with fucking marble?”

“What? Oh, no. It’s quartz.”

A laugh spills out, no matter the pain in my core. “Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes all the difference, quartz, right, how could I be so stupid?”

Scarlet huffs. “It’s one of two bathrooms in the house. And there’s a toilet downstairs too.” Can’t help the stare I give her. Scarlet returns it, shameless. “My parents designed it, it’s not as if I had any choice in the matter. What am I supposed to say?”

“Soothing your conscience with luxury?”

Scarlet scoffs. “Conscience?”

“Soothing something, then.”

“Hardly.” She gestures at the edge of the massive bathtub, the wide lip of tiles. “Do you think you can manage sitting on that for a moment?”

“Mmhmm.”

A slow shuffle brings us to the side of the bath. Scarlet eases me down on the hard surface, lets go slowly, hovers nearby, perhaps afraid I’ll topple over. A grunt serves to reassure her that I’m not going to fall backward and crack my head open on the tub. Only then does she step away and head over to the far side of the bathroom, past the shower cubicle.

“How big is this place, anyway?” I ask. “The house, I mean. Two bathrooms this size, not to mention your bedroom? Must be huge.”

“Big enough. Too big sometimes, just for the four of us. My grandparents used to live here too, but they both passed away a few years ago. It was converted from an old manor house, done up and refurbished and whatnot.”

A latch goes clack; there’s a second door on the far side of the bathroom, tucked behind the angle of the wall. Scarlet double-checks the lock, tries the door, nods to herself.

“Where’s that lead?” I ask.

“The corridor to my sister’s bedroom.” Scarlet sighs, rejoins me by the tub. “She never uses this bathroom. She doesn’t like to enter my space, I suppose, but, well, with you here, I want to be absolutely certain of our privacy.”

Good thinking. If Bright walks in on this we’ll make the international news. Mysterious nuclear explosion levels half of Gloucestershire.

“Mm,” I grunt. “I’m your little secret.”

Scarlet ignores the bait. She draws herself up before me, radiating confidence. “Step two. Do you need help disrobing?”

A quick and decisive answer proves impossible. The eightfold engine of my heart turns rebel and tries to choke me, flooding my throat with oil. A hard swallow clears the blockage, but now I’m flushed hot and cold at the same time. Approaching this question directly feels like it’ll kill me.

“Taking my clothes off,” I mutter. “Right. Mm.” I lift both my arms, test the flex of my rib cage, swallow a nasty wince. “Dunno. Maybe a little. Maybe more than a little. Never taken my clothes off in front of another woman before. Only in dreams.”

“This isn’t about that,” Scarlet says. She believes it, too. “This is about helping you.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

Scarlet nods. “I won’t if you won’t.”

“Deal.”

My t-shirt comes off first, a supposed easy start. Fabric gone crusty with dried blood, sticky patches still glued to my back, it peels away with uncomfortable relief, exposing raw skin beneath. Scarlet does the actual work, I just raise my arms and grit my teeth. She does a decent job at not abrading the burned flesh on my left arm, pulls the t-shirt over my head, then balls it up and dumps it on the pristine floor tiles. Next comes my bra, but there’s no way I’m getting my arms behind my own back. Scarlet undoes the clasp, helps me thread my arms through the straps, tosses it after the t-shirt.

“Ahhhhh,” I wince. “Fuck.”

Open air on half-healed wounds. I feel like a cesspit in sunlight.

My exposed torso makes a busy canvas. Bruises gone classic black and blue, sickly greens and pale yellows. Blood caked in messy patches, dark brown and blackish flakes falling away. Stranger fluids have gone sticky and dark in great gritty streaks, the voided lubricants and fuel runoff of This Machine. The air reeks of stale blood and rancid oil.

Raw ragged circles of tender flesh pockmark my front, still faintly puckered — entry wounds from Willow’s accelerated pebbles. Three on my belly, two through my lower rib cage, and two on my left breast, right through my heart.

Scarlet bends over to examine my back, hands hovering but not touching, lips moving in a silent count. “Seven exit wounds, I was right. The exterior has completely healed, at least. We can get you in the shower, under the water. It will sting, though.”

“What doesn’t?” I grunt. “Come on, can’t stop halfway.”

Removing my pajama bottoms presents a significant challenge. For a farcical minute we shuffle about on the side of the bathtub, trying to figure out how I can raise my hips without wanting to scream. Then the problem clicks together in my head.

“This is fucking stupid, fuck this,” I grunt. “Come here, help me stand.”

“What, why? Oh, oh, right, yes.”

Scarlet gives me her arm and I climb back to my feet. Hook a thumb into my waistband, pajamas and underwear both, then drag them down off my hips. Fabric pools around my ankles. Cool air chills my thighs and crotch; just as badly bloodstained, but no wounds down there. With Scarlet’s support I step out of my abandoned clothes. Scarlet adds them to the pile.

“You’re not gonna try washing all those, are you?” I croak.

Scarlet hesitates. She won’t look at me, focused on the stained clothes. My heartbeat is painfully elevated, drumming against my will on the inside of my ribs.

“I … uh,” Scarlet mutters. “I didn’t think of that. Hiding blood will be difficult, I … could take them elsewhere, or do it by hand, or … ”

“Joke,” I rasp. Can barely get the word out. “S’a joke, Scarlet. Just toss ‘em, burn ‘em, whatever. Doesn’t matter now. Forget the clothes. Fuck the clothes. I can … steal some new ones. Whatever. Forget it.”

Scarlet nods, more to herself than me, then breaks our deal and makes it weird.

When she looks at me it’s the most natural thing in the world. She doesn’t pretend she’s not looking, doesn’t politely avert her eyes or convince herself I’m too stupid to realise where her eyes are pointed. She looks me up and down, takes in the fucked up body that I’ve occupied for twenty years. She lingers on my belly, my thighs, my cunt. She looks openly at my breasts; bigger than yours, eh, Scarlet? Like what you see? She stares at the junctions between metal and flesh at my right shoulder and right thigh. She sees me, covered in three-day-old dried blood and engine oil, hunched with injury and internal pain, tits out, stark naked.

Apparently I’m worth a moment’s stunned pause. Mouth stilled, breath stuck.

Nobody has ever looked at me this way before, let alone my naked body, scarred and half-ruined and filthy. Even Willow’s dream-self never regarded me with this vulnerable curiosity, this cocktail of fascination and caution and wonder. And who would? My tits aren’t the size of my head, my hips are a little too much on the slender side; my skin is pasty, veins on my thighs, and I stand with awkward posture. I am not magical girl pinup poster material. Yet Scarlet pauses in stunned realisation, as others must pause when they see her in the flesh.

The engine of my heart wakes into a steady beat. Spine straightens, draws me up right. Deep breaths feed the furnace with an intoxicating rush.

Scarlet’s fully clothed, but I’m the one with the power. How is that possible?

She recovers with a curt nod, eyes the walk-in shower, then gestures to the massive bathtub. “I didn’t think of it at first, but there’s always the bath. It might be easier, if you can get over the side with my help. Do you want to try?”

“No,” I grunt. Power curdles into a bad taste.

“Why not? It might actually help, a soak in the hot water—”

“Scarlet. Think about it.”

She shakes her head, confused.

My turn to sigh. I tap my right thigh. “My prosthetic leg. It’s water-resistant, not water-proof. I can shower with it on, but I can’t submerge it.”

Scarlet looks baffled. “Surely you can take it off to bathe? There’s blood under that rubber socket, I can see it from here. That can’t be comfortable—”

“The leg stays on!” I snap.

Scarlet blinks. Her eyes fill with hurt, like I’ve slapped her, inches from anger.

I hiss with frustration. “It’s not a matter of trust, for fuck’s sake. It’s … look, when I take the limbs off, there’s phantom pain, a lot of phantom pain. I sleep with them on. I do everything with them on. The leg stays on for this, because it’s bad enough already that I’m going to have to remove my arm. Alright? Does that make sense now?”

Raise my right arm, broken plates of CFRN grinding beneath layer after layer of carbon fibre tape. Right now this limb isn’t resistant or proof against anything, let alone water.

“I didn’t know,” says Scarlet. “I’m sorry—”

“Not your fault.” Swallow ten years of humiliation; Scarlet Edge is not the world. “Don’t apologise.”

A long moment of silence, both of us staring at my arm.

Eventually Scarlet says, “Do you need help taking it off?”

No convenient table at which to sit for the process. No way I’m getting down on the floor and then standing up again. My arm is already so damaged that I could just let it fall, but the idea makes my stomach turn.

“ … yeah.” Clear my throat. Hold out my arm. “Come here, hold it here, and here, support the wrist and the elbow. Don’t bump the hand, that’s the most fragile part. And don’t drop it when I remove the socket, understand? Don’t drop it.”

Scarlet steps in close, our bodies almost touching. She cradles my wrecked prosthetic arm in her own, close to her chest like a crippled baby. She murmurs ‘I’ve got you.’ I roll the silicone socket down my stump, hissing at the pain it causes my burned left hand. Myoelectric pickups peel away from my flesh; my fingers go dead. The socket comes off, a little blood beneath, but the amputation site is clean. Cool air trickles across my stump. A phantom forearm begins to tingle with the beginning of old pain, tension creeping across the right side of my chest, muscles tightening against long-lost bones.

My left hand drifts upward, as if I can hide my stump with a palm.

“I’ll put it on the bed,” Scarlet says, starts to step away, carrying my arm.

“No!” I hiss. “Don’t— not— not out of my sight.”

One of the most humiliating things I’ve ever said. But Scarlet just casts around for somewhere proper to rest this piece of me. “Surely not on the floor?”

“Floor’s fine,” I grunt. “Just nowhere it can fall.”

She nudges a fresh towel off the rail with one elbow, and pillows my prosthetic arm in the crumpled fabric. Heat gathers behind my eyes, can’t stop it building. When Scarlet turns back to me, she pauses in surprise.

“Octavia?”

“It’s … ” Sniff back a bolus of mucus. “It’s nothing. Nothing. Just … ”

Can’t word this. Can’t even think it. Scarlet seems as surprised as I, but she she says nothing, doesn’t probe, just looks at my exposed stump. She waits for me to recover, looks back and forth between the stump and my prosthetic arm, putting something together in her head.

“You’re not going to get naked too, are you?” I ask when I can, cover for the tail-end of the tears. “That really would make this weird.”

For that I earn a sigh and a roll of the eyes. “No, of course not. You’re the one getting washed. Now come on, step three, into that shower.”

She does get naked though, in the one way that really matters; she rolls up her sleeves so they won’t get wet, exposes those scar-wracked forearms, offers up the sight without comment.

Scarlet begins the process with strict and awkward practicality. She herds me into the glass-walled shower stall, has me stand there while she turns on the water and waits for it to heat up, flexible hose held in one hand, testing the water with her other, feet planted in the open doorway. First contact with the water is excruciating, but we agree it’s best to get this out of the way first. Scarlet holds the shower head over me. A trickle, then a sluice, then a wave of hot water runs down over my shoulders, across my front and my back, carrying loose fragments of dried blood away to swirl into the drain.

Water’s touch draws pain from me like poison, sharp and stinging on the surface of my skin, crackling down deep in my core. Gritting my teeth can’t contain the low keening of pain, nor the gurgle in my throat. My vision throbs at the edges, pulse pounding in my head. I’m panting, drooling, almost going down. But Scarlet’s there to grab my flailing left hand, despite the superficial pain in my burned skin.

“Try not to scream,” she says. “I can’t keep this secret if you scream.”

“Easy for— for you— fuck— ow—”

Pain eventually ebbs away. Skin remembers it is skin, not exposed muscle and broken bone and the inner workings of This Machine. The world throbs back, the gentle echo of water splashing against the shower floor, Scarlet’s face in the stall doorway, my own body coming alive again beneath the hot water. Scarlet keeps the stream on me for what feels like minutes, heat soaking through me, unknotting muscles.

“Tolerable?” Scarlet asks.

“Mm,” I grunt, try to straighten up a little. “I’m— I’m good. Good.”

“Alright then.” Scarlet takes a deep breath, sets the shower head down on the floor, water arcing behind my ankles. “Step four, then. Yes. Time for … for step four.”

Scarlet takes a bar of soap, lathers up her hands. A moment of silent assessment and negotiation passes between us, not that I could speak even if there was anything to say. My burned left hand and forearm make it impossible for me to wash even my own belly. Scarlet can’t meet my eyes; our breathing matches, both going ragged as she reaches out to touch my body.

Her hands are the warmest thing I’ve ever felt, slippery-soft motion over the surface of my bruised and tender skin. She doesn’t start safe, doesn’t seem to understand safe; she soaps up my shoulders, my back, my belly, runs her divine touch over my stump, my hips, my thighs. She washes my chest, breasts lifting in her hands, so much more flesh there than I’ve ever really paid attention to. She doesn’t mean to do it, but she teases a gasp from me, a sound of wonder and pain. Slender fingers map the deep bruises beneath my surface, flinch from my sweating grunts. She touches the sites of my wounds, treats them just the same, tries not to press too hard. Traces my spine, encircles my waist. I hiss and grunt and whine as the deeper pains float to the surface.

Never been touched like this before, not even in a dream. In all Willow’s falsehoods, did she ever touch me with such intimacy? She never grabbed my tits like this.

I’m almost crying. Thank Nerys for all this water in which to hide.

Three times Scarlet soaps me up and rinses me off. Layers of dried blood and engine oil and caked sweat and old dirt slide from my skin, swirling around my feet, sucked down the drain set into the floor. Her hands ease the worst of the pain from my muscles, reveal the pale expanses beneath, the raw red entrance wounds still healing inside. We can’t wash everything, not all of me. She doesn’t touch my face, or my left arm; we keep the burns out of the water as best we can.

Scarlet turns a strange shade of pale red as she works in steaming silence. Mucus sticks in my throat, makes it hard to breathe. A shiver passes from my body to her hands. A hesitation in her is answered in me. The deep places of This Machine are flush with heat. Scarlet’s t-shirt is spotted with water, forearms wet.

Feels like hours, but it can’t have taken more than a few minutes. I’m clean now, except for all the places she doesn’t want to go.

But then she puts the shower head down one last time, takes up the soap again. She meets my eyes, lips parted, eyes wide as dinner plates, hazy with something I’ve only seen directed at me once before, pinned to my own bed in Plato Base.

Wet silence hangs between us.

Her eyes flicker downward. Back to me.

Neither of us can speak. This isn’t really happening. This can’t be real. Can’t think. I give her the smallest nod. Permission.

Scarlet slides one soap-slick hand between my thighs and grabs my cunt.

At first we both pretend she’s still washing, rubbing and squeezing with plausible deniability, soaping me up good and proper. But within a few moments she’s made me clean enough to eat off, and she’s not stopping. She kneads me harder, draws from my throat a strangled whine I never thought myself capable of. My left knee buckles, only my prosthetic keeps me upright. I stagger backward, thump into the glass wall, heaving for breath. She falls with me, braces us together with her other hand on my shoulder. Doesn’t stop.

Scarlet works my cunt like dough. She breathes hard and steady, panting in time with her hand. Volcanic heat rises up between my legs, like Scarlet Edge is pouring raw magma into the engines of This Machine; it flows through a channel she once cut through my core, the memory of her ruby sword an aching counterpoint to the rhythm of her hand. Broken pieces of my innards melt and run like molten iron, knots relaxing, structures smoothing out, scabs and scrap and pain falling away in discarded layers, dissolving into slurry inside my guts.

On the outside I’m snorting and gasping through gritted teeth, whining and keening and panting. On the inside This Machine is self-repairing. Soft mechanisms tighten like a bowstring drawn back, tension increasing every second, a piston quivering deep down in my belly.

Scarlet Edge looks me right in the eyes. Hers are dark red, skies on fire.

Sudden and sharp, orgasm rushes up me like a volcanic eruption. Kicks me between the legs, rolls into my belly like boiling honey, shoots upward through the belly-to-back scar left by Scarlet’s blade, explodes behind my eyes, whiteout and blindness.

Nothing like I ever imagined it would be, surrender and victory and ego-death all at once. Flame fills me from Scarlet’s hand.

The back of my head bounces off the glass. Eyes squeeze shut. Left toes curl against the shower floor. The noises I make are not pretty, not the kind of noises I half-remember from Willow’s dreams; I whine open-mouthed, heave through wet teeth, sound like a pig. My body wants to thrash and buck, but my wounds are still too deep.

Slowly, achingly, like a cooling tide of lava-flow beneath soft rains, it leaves me behind, leaves me smooth and clean and washed out.

I sag against the wall, head on a limp neck, eyelids heavy as lead, can barely stand. Insides engorged and sore in a way I’ve never felt before. Scarlet takes her hand from between my legs and stumbles back, fingers slick with soap and water and my own transparent juices.

Flushed, vibrating, intense, like she’s about to transform or explode or scream.

And then she opens wide.

“Rrruuurff!”

A bark, a real one. A hellhound warcry, wild and loud and beyond control.

She lights up with a beaming smile, eyes wide with shock and wonder, breathing so hard as a hurricane. Pride and confidence and power roll off her like heat-haze, a hundred times more real than any public appearance I’ve ever seen from Scarlet Edge.

But only for a moment. Euphoria ebbs even as it crests. Scarlet’s joy gutters, replaced with mortified confusion.

“Ah— I— I didn’t— I’m sorry—”

“No!” I snap, throat still a wet gurgle. Push myself up. Don’t let her go now. “No. Good girl. Good. Good.”

She hesitates, looks like she might turn and flee.

“Scarlet. Good girl.”

She catches herself. The smile creeps back, perhaps halfway to her prior peak. But she stands tall again, in pride and power.

We stay like that for a long moment, until I can stand straight again. Scarlet picks up the shower head and washes off her hand, then rinses my crotch.

“Step five,” she says, perfectly composed once again. “Stand up straight as you can, and close your eyes tight. I’m going to wash your hair. You don’t want shampoo getting in your eyes.”

Washing my hair goes by like the aftermath of a strange dream. Scarlet massages in the shampoo as best she can, but my hair is thick with grease, longer than I’m used to, and she has to go twice. Warm water and shampoo suds run down my face, over my closed eyes, cooling off a lingering subdermal heat beneath my scar.

One more rinse and we’re done. The shower goes quiet. Dripping water echoes off the glass.

Back out into the bathroom I step, wrapped in a fluffy towel big enough for a horse. Scarlet steers me toward the edge of the tub again, but I don’t need as much support anymore, my stride is more stable, pain blunted. I dry off mostly by myself, abandon my damp hair to the vulgarity of time. I even get to my feet without risking a tumble. Scarlet picks up my prosthetic arm and we return to the bedroom, through the enclosing tunnel of her closet, me trailing behind, still wrapped in the towel.

Sitting on the edge of Scarlet’s bed, I first reattach my arm, phantom pain releasing me as the myoelectric pickups find my skin again and my fingers come to life. Fresh air from the half-open window brushes residual moisture from my skin, deliciously refreshing.

“Are you sure your arm doesn’t need cleaning as well?” Scarlet asks.

“Well, yeah, it does, but it needs a full rebuild first. Never mind, I can put up with a dirty right arm.”

Scarlet’s spare clothes fit me well enough, though she’s taller and slimmer than me. Socks and knickers, both fresh, but no bra; hers wouldn’t fit me anyway. The big baggy black t-shirt is absurdly large, long sleeves to hide my prosthetic right arm and my burned left forearm. Jogging bottoms are a bit long on my legs, and a trifle difficult to get on over my prosthetic, but they’ll do; cream and red, like a cake with racing stripes. Not something I would choose to wear. The black hoodie I need a little help with, too voluminous to manoeuvre my arms through without pain. Scarlet helps me get it over my head. Like wearing a miniature tent, enclosing, warm, safe. There’s even a big pocket in the front for my hands; could fit my whole arm in there. A hood too, large enough to vanish inside. I pull my damp hair out, settle it over one shoulder.

The zoog on the desk opposite the bed peers at me through the mesh door in the animal carrier. He makes a sharp click with the side of his mouth. Scarlet starts in surprise.

“S’alright,” I tell her. “Means he wants help. Don’t worry, little guy, it’s okay. We’re going home soon.”

Scarlet peers down at me. “You do look as if you feel a lot better. Do you?”

“Mm. Not so wounded, I guess. Can stand, walk. All that good stuff. Pain’s still there.”

But not as bad, and without the pain I have fewer excuses for what I say and do, all those old inhibitions creeping back. What Scarlet and I just did in the shower, did that really happen? Was that really me? Seems half dreamlike now, something that should have happened to a simulacrum of Octavia Carter. But no, that was me, that was us.

Scarlet and I just fucked. Or she fucked me. Not sure how that works.

Raise my right hand, pull back the elbow, make a fist.

Translocation is still impossible. One glance toward the precipice sends a shiver of deep exhaustion through my guts, dull pain crackling across bruised organs. Still not enough girl juice for even one jump; my wounds have soaked up everything they can get, cannibalised my route home. But even if I could go, I can’t run from Scarlet now. If I wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am her, this house of cards between us will collapse in an instant.

Lower my hand, shake my head. “Can’t translocate, not enough juice. But yeah, I’m feeling better. Ish.”

Scarlet swallows hard, wets her lips. “It worked, then?”

“What worked?”

Deadpan comes easy; Scarlet’s composure cracks fast, sticky as warm toffee. She turns a most fascinating shade of muted crimson. “Octavia! You know exactly what I mean!”

My foolish mask peels off. Couldn’t help myself. “Yeah. Yeah, I … I do know. Is that why you did it?”

Scarlet thinks for a second, then shakes her head. “No. No, it was … it was what you needed. It felt right to do it. That’s all. Are you saying you didn’t … ”

“No. No, it was … you know.” Truth sticks in my throat. “Good.”

Scarlet lets out a big sigh. “I don’t entirely know why I did it. I just … it happened, it was … ”

“You did it because you’re my good girl.”

Scarlet bites her lower lip, lets out a tiny sound, might be a whimper, might be my imagination. But then she smiles again, the ghost of how she looked in the shower. Her eyes smoulder with the memory of fire.

But now it’s over, now I’m cleaner than I was and no longer marinating in my own dried blood, dressed in fresh clothes, pain no longer reducing me to a handspan higher than an animal, an obvious question germinates in the front of my mind.

Have I just cheated on Grimgrave?

Absurd proposition. Grimgrave and I are not in a relationship; she is not my girlfriend or my lover. There is nothing to betray, nothing with which to break faith. Or am I missing something that should be obvious? Grimmy let me pin her to my bed and shove my knee against her crotch, endured my violent outburst, came crawling back in the spirit of sisterhood. She took me as I took Scarlet’s sword, and she did it willingly. To Grimmy I owe my life, twice over. To Grimmy I owe a prior claim. She’s a loyal hound and I will not kick her away.

Am I meant to do for her what Scarlet just did for me?

“Octavia?” Scarlet’s frown falls hard; she sees the problem in my face. “What is it? What’s wrong? Did I … was it … I didn’t … ”

Tell one truth, leave the other.

“That was my first time.”

“O-oh.” Scarlet blinks. “Of— of course. You and the Dreamer, she never really—”

“No,” I interrupt gently. “Not sex. First orgasm.”

Scarlet goes very still, stares at me for one long uncomprehending moment. “Ah,” she says, eventually. “I … I see. You mean you’ve never … ”

Shake my head. “Tried a few days ago. Gave myself another heart attack.”

“You gave yourself a heart attack trying to masturbate?! Then why the hell did you just let me at you!?”

“Because I wanted it.”

Scarlet huffs, looks away, folds her arms, unfolds them again. But she can’t stay angry. Grey-blue eyes drift back to me beneath a delicate frown.

“Your first time, really?” she asks. I nod. “I hope it was … adequate.”

“Nothing to compare to,” I grunt. “Your first time, too?”

Scarlet hesitates, shakes her head. “I’ve been weak before.”

“Weak?”

She catches herself. “Not like that, that’s not what I meant. With you, it wasn’t weakness. With … ” She pulls herself straight, packs her frame with dignity. “I told you that I’ve had ‘groupies’ thrown at me. My patron and the MGNR board, they’ve thrown pretty young things at me, as much as I want, especially when I was a bit younger. In the past I’ve been weak, when I thought the world could still be a beautiful place. You’re not the first woman I’ve handled, Octavia.” Her eyes flick to me, defying me to shame her. “First magical girl, though.”

“Huh. Well. I’m honoured to be a recipient of your hard-won expertise.”

Scarlet huffs. “It’s not like that.”

“Then how is it?”

You massive dyke, Scarlet; if only England knew. We are so much like each other.

Perhaps Scarlet Edge is a mind-reader. More likely she sees the thought plain on my face. Her eyes flash with exasperation and fairly-won offence, but she has no comeback to an unspoken smirk.

Scarlet sighs, steps away from the bed. “I’m going to put those ruined clothes in a bin bag, and stash it somewhere until I can dispose of it without being seen. And I’ll fetch the hairdryer, too. You stay there, and don’t go near the open window. We still don’t know who might be watching.”

“Yeah, yeah. Opsec can be my middle name a while longer.”

Scarlet gives me a searching look, tries to figure out if I’m teasing her again. But she gives up without an answer, rolls her eyes and vanishes through the walk-in cupboard again. A moment later, the rustle of plastic, the crack of a bin bag being opened.

No peeking through the window for This Machine, but I need to test my legs. If Scarlet is going to get me out of here soon, I better be able to walk under my own power. Standing up isn’t too difficult now, just sore and tender, though my prosthetic right leg still does most of the work, anchoring me to the floor. Straightening up sends my ribs into a chorus of intercostal muscle pain. Tendons creak, gears slip, muscles shiver, engines cough. But I’m upright and taking six steps to the desk, leaning down to peer at the zoog still clinging to the mesh front of the animal carrier.

“Not much longer now, little guy,” I murmur to him. “You just look after yourself.”

“Nnnnnnn … nnnnnnn … ” His doubtful rasps hurt my heart. I’ll do right by him soon enough.

Six paces back to the bedside, twelve paces over to the sofas. Working out the kinks, warming up the pipes, getting the lubricants applied to every surface. On each left stride something taut and tender goes pop inside my hip, but the pain is no worse than a stitch, I can manage. Raise my right arm and make a fist, flex the elbow joint, spread my fingers out to the side. Full range of motion, but loose and sloppy. CFRN plates grind with every movement. One solid punch and the arm will explode. This Machine is currently — and paradoxically — disarmed.

“Full rebuild,” I mutter to myself. “Start with something stronger. Or a double layer? Mmmm. Or maybe one solid piece, maybe that’s better than joints in the material. Or if I could just have more time for it to set. Or … um … ”

Alone with my own thoughts, all my concentration must bend toward the problem of my prosthetic arm. Otherwise I will start to think about the enormity of what we’ve just done.

Grey suggestion leaps across my peripheral vision.

A whirl almost sends me sprawling, clutching at the back of the sofa to catch my balance. Heart ramps up, engines ready to roar, head pounding with rocket fuel. Right fist pulled back, knuckles creaking. A familiar grey, one I saw up close before, one I dearly wish to revenge myself upon.

A cat. Perched atop the animal carrier.

Silver-grey fur, sleek and muscled as a miniature missile, well-fed and well-kept, sharp-eyed and sharper-eared, with a plain collar around its throat. Eyes of mirrored silver gleam dark.

The dream shatters to the sound of a zoog’s hiss. Long and loud and spitting mad. The zoog inside the animal carrier hisses and rasps and thrashes like he’s trying to burrow through the plastic. The grey cat’s concentration breaks; it leans down to peer through the metal mesh, silver claws flicking free from one elegant paw, tugging at the cage. The other paw bumps against the lock, suddenly free, falling to the desk with a metallic clonk. The mesh begins to swing open. Another set of claws extend from the opposite paw, reaching through the gap.

“No!”

I lunge, but I’m not going to make it, too slow to close the gap. What can This Machine do against a quicksilver cat? I’m about to lose another zoog, see my poor little friend gutted alive by yet another silent grey assassin.

A patch of black oil bubbles from the wall just above the desk, a sudden dark stain intruding on the waking world.

Nerys — Nerys the zoog, jaws open wide, claws extended, tail lashing — bursts from the pool of oil in a blindsided pounce, falls upon the silver dream-cat from above, knocks it from the animal carrier.

They tumble through the air locked together, teeth and claws biting and tearing, a rasping and a yowling. Nerys has the ambusher’s advantage, jaw locked around the cat’s throat, back feet gouging intestines free in a shower of silver fluid, blood unspooling into the air like liquid mercury.

Nerys and the cat hit the floor — and fall right through it, into another pool of sticky phantasmal tar.

The black oil vanishes. No bloodstains on the carpet. Like it never happened.

The zoog in the carrier is still hissing like mad, and I don’t blame him. I yank the metal mesh wide and drag him free. He bites and scratches and writhes, doesn’t realise it’s me, not until his teeth close on carbon fibre. By the time I’ve pulled him out and cradled him to my chest he’s realised this is rescue. Burrows close against my chest, tiny lungs panting hard, beady black eyes wide with panic, claws clutching.

Scarlet bursts from the walk-in closet, wild-eyed. “Octavia?! What was that!?”

“A cat,” I rasp. “A cat, it— it was on the animal carrier. And Nerys— Nerys—”

“A cat?”

Scarlet goes cold with quiet panic.

“Was that your patron?” I ask.

“A cat,” she echoes again. Swallows hard, strides across the room, towers over me. “What kind of cat? Octavia, describe it, what kind of cat?”

“Grey. Silver-grey. Uh, big. It— it had collar, it—”

“Mangy or healthy? Well-fed or thin? Octavia, think! This is important!”

“Healthy. It looked strong. Scarlet? Scarlet, was that your Dream-God? I think Nerys might have just killed it, she … ”

But Scarlet’s not listening, eyes a thousand miles away. Sweat beads at her hairline.

“Scarlet!”

She snaps to, eyes on me. “We have to leave. I have to get you out of here, right now. I have to get you … ”

Scarlet Edge grabs me by the collar and mashes her lips against mine. Can’t be called a kiss. Lasts barely more than a second, then she pulls back, eyes wide and wild, free hand clutching at the bite mark on her lips.

“Well!?” she spits. “Did it work? Can you translocate now? You have to leave, now! Can you!?”

Don’t feel any different. An abortive raise of my fist does nothing. “No, no—”

“Why? Why doesn’t it work!?”

“I don’t know!” I spit back. “Probably because you just did that out of pure necessity, I assume!”

“Shit.” Scarlet steps past me, goes to the window, looks outside, then jams it shut with a thump, drags the curtain closed. “We have to leave, right now. Octavia, get your phone and that— that—” She gestures at the animal carrier, then realises the zoog is already in my arms. “That thing. Don’t drop it, don’t let it run off, because we are not going back for it!”

The zoog lets out a tiny hiss at her, then scrambles down my front and burrows into the massive front pocket of the hoodie, cradled safe against my belly; some zoogs would be too large for that, but he’s scrawny and compact enough to hitch a ride down there. I grab my phone from the desk, slip it into my right pocket. Scarlet runs into her walk-in closet and reemerges holding a pair of spotless red crocs. She tosses them down.

“Put those on, now! Or just one, if you need it, whatever!”

Scarlet produces her own mobile phone, jabs at the screen, puts it to her ear. She paces past me, turns and paces back. Waiting, waiting, waiting for somebody on the other end to answer. I jam my feet into the crocs. Get ready to move.

“Can I trust you?” Scarlet suddenly blurts into the phone, stopping dead still. “Exactly what it means. Can I trust you? With anything? Truly anything? You once said … ”

A long pause.

“Alright, where are you?” Scarlet says. “Yes, right now. I need to talk to you, in person, ASAP.” Then a tut, tight with frustration. “Is anybody else there? Okay, you stay right there, I’ll come to you. I’ll be thirty, maybe forty minutes. No, no, I can’t fly or translocate. Don’t ask that. And don’t tell Azure or Dawn. Do not breathe a word of this. Swear on your own God, whoever it is. Swear! Good.”

Scarlet terminates the call, shoves the phone back into her pocket.

“Who was that?” I ask.

Scarlet hesitates. “Somebody I might be able to trust.”

“Might?”

“It’s the best option you have right now!” she snaps. “I can’t fly or translocate, they will know exactly where I’ve taken you! You can’t translocate yourself, you—” She stops short, tentative relief on her face. “Tell me where your hideout is! I can translocate you there. And then I’ll just come right back, and—”

“No.”

“This isn’t a trick, Octavia! If your hideout is beyond their reach, who cares?! You have to leave, you have to—”

“No,” I hiss. “Scarlet. I don’t think you can safely go there. I don’t know what it’ll do to you.”

“ … what?”

“It’s somewhere you can’t go. That’s all.”

Scarlet’s eyes go wide. She puts two and two together, because she’s no fool. A Dreamland overlap where no earthly magical girl can tread. Distant Luna, beyond Earth’s reach.

But then Scarlet’s confidence comes raging in like a wildfire. A deep breath to feed the flames. She straightens up, eyes blazing.

“Scarlet. You can’t.”

“I could,” she whispers. “I could do it, Octavia. You think there’s anything to stop me anymore?”

“I thought you didn’t want to abandon England.”

Scarlet’s confidence flickers. “That’s … that’s not what I meant, I just … ”

“I’m pretty sure the only way to go there safely is to be one of Nerys’ girls. Even Willow could barely survive up there. She was burning out fast. And you’re no Dreamer.”

Scarlet seems lost; I wish I was wrong, wish she could just flee.

“And,” I say, slowly, carefully. “We don’t even know if that message got through. That’s what you’re worried about, right? That cat was a messenger of some sort, a spy, right? You weren’t listening to me earlier. Nerys appeared, she ambushed the cat, got it right in the throat, then vanished back into wherever the hell it is things like her go. The Dreamlands, I guess. She killed it, she won. The message might not even have gotten through.”

Scarlet’s brow furrows. “Your patron, the pretender, if she won, she should have informed your companions.”

“ … ah. Huh.”

“Yes, ah, indeed!” Scarlet hisses. “She should have told them. They should be here, to pick you up.” She gestures at her bedroom. “And they’re not.”

“Nerys?” I croak at the air. “Nerys?”

“Your patron has lost,” Scarlet says. “Or the cat slipped away. Or the combat is still going. We need to leave, Octavia, right now! This might be the only window we have. Please, tell me where your hideout is! Or— no, I don’t need to know. I can see the moon with my own eyes well enough.” Scarlet reaches out toward me.

“Good girls don’t get themselves killed for me,” I snap.

Scarlet’s rising fury slams to a hard stop. She stares at me, wrestling with anger.

“What was your first plan?” I prompt, get her back on track.

“I … I don’t … alright!” She hisses. “Alright, we have my plan A, fine. We get you out of here by car, and meet up with … you’ll see. If we hurry, we can outpace any observers. But we have to hurry, Octavia. Right now. If we get caught, if this goes wrong … I’m sending you home by the direct way.”

Scarlet Edge offers me her hand. Eyes ablaze, more determined than I’ve seen in her a thousand propaganda posters.

I accept, fold my prosthetic right into her grip.

Scarlet leads me across the room, glances back to double-check. I make sure the zoog is snuggled down safe in the front pocket of the borrowed hoodie, curled against my belly. Scarlet unlocks and unlatches her bedroom door, draws back the bolt, throws it wide, pulls me out into a plush, pale corridor.

Sunlight falls slanted through distant windows onto dense carpet. Exposed beams cross a high ceiling, vanishing into the white plaster of the walls, above a few ‘tasteful’ watercolours of rural landscapes. A big latticework window at one end looks out over distant treetops; two surprised doves take off from the outside sill. A few other doors punctuate the long hallway, longer than any domestic house should have right to. Scarlet’s home is truly beyond my scale.

Scarlet shuts the door behind us and pulls me around to the left, toward a corner. “My car’s parked outside. My parents might be in, but just keep walking, no matter what they say. We have to get you moving before … ”

A figure shuffles out in front of us, six paces from the corner. A dark mirror to Scarlet at my side.

Dirty topaz eyes set in a sallow, rotten, sunless face, lit from deep inside by dying fires, framed by long lank blonde hair. Slow to surprise, stunned incomprehension. Hunched and slumped, as if only just risen from exhausted and restless sleep, ready to drop into oblivion. Baggy trousers, black tank-top, no socks.

She halts like a zombie faced with a wall, a shuffle of stunned feet, a blank gaze.

“Bethany!” Scarlet says. “Oh, oh it’s just you. I thought you were still out. Are you … alright? I hope you’re … well, I have to hurry, we have to … have to get going … ”

The mirror-apparition doesn’t move. Her mouth hangs open. She stares right through me.

Bethany Fairfax, Francesca’s estranged younger sister.

Burning Bright has caught me red-handed.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Woof woof, Octavia. You’d better hope that Scarlet is as good a guard dog as she is a service dog. Eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy lmao that’s one of the worst jokes I’ve ever made.

Ahem! Anyway! This chapter is probably the most explicit thing I’ve ever published in any serial, and I was not about to pull any of my punches. Octavia and Scarlet have both learned something new about themselves. And so has Bright, oh dear. 

Behind the scenes, things are coming along nicely! Amusingly enough I’ve done it again; what is ‘it’, you ask? Why, expanding the arc beyond my original plans! Arc 6 will now be ending on chapter 6.9 (cue the funny number), so we’ve got quite a ways to go yet. Octavia better buckle in and grit her teeth and so on.

Also this week, I have a little shout-out! A friend of mine is writing a classic zombie survival story, in the vein of old-school day-by-day diary-style zombie apocalypse narratives, titled The Summer Journal of Evan Daniels: 1993. If you’re fond of that style, perhaps go give it a look! 

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

Right now 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! As always, thank you so much for being here and reading my little story about magical girls doing extremely magical girl things (violence, weird sex, biting each other, barking, etc, hooray). I couldn’t do any of this without all of you! Your support makes all this possible! Thank you so much!

Next chapter, how to tame a dragon. Step one, don’t fuck her sister.

Content Warnings

Gore
Self harm
Discussion of self harm
References to suicide
Internalised ableism

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Scarlet Edge is going to rip out my throat.

Her aversion to touch was no simple distaste, it was for my safety. Now I’ve crossed an invisible line by reaching out and making contact with her shoulder. Violated an unspoken truce I didn’t even know we had. Her fist tightens on a handful of my t-shirt, filthy fabric creaking under the pressure of her knuckles. Her eyes turn hot, molten rubies washing out the dim electric glow. Tongues of ghostly flame flicker across stray tresses of her hair, an inferno about to ignite. She looms over me, thin lips peeling back from sharp white teeth, a crimson phantom blotting out the temporary dream of this bedroom refuge.

Scarlet is an untamed hound from a hell I can scarcely imagine. How could I be so foolish? The most powerful magical girl in all England is not some pathetic sop in need of a shoulder on which to cry. She contains her own limitless reservoir of corrosive fuel.

What is it like to be Scarlet Edge?

Closer she draws, our faces inches apart. We’ve been this close once before, when she impaled me on her sword. She burns with the same ferocity now, an unaccountable need for unspeakable acts. But this time I absorb her details: the subtle scent of her skin, wood-ash and hot-iron and fresh fire; her parted lips, her shuddering breath; her wide and staring eyes like boiling wine.

Been here before, haven’t I? Just not with Scarlet. This intensity has echoed in a million false dreams, alongside a simulacrum of Willow. Intimate together in secret shadows, possibilities and potentials spiralling outward from the moment of inaction, born in the shuddering uncertainty of shared liminal darkness. An in-between place where rules break down and anything can happen, where childhood friends can join their lips and express what they’ve always been, where a broken girl and a false angel can bring each other to weeping orgasm.

Except none of that ever really happened. Willow’s lying dreams have run together in my memory like diluted paint gone grey.

But this is real. Scarlet’s lips are inches from my own, peeling back to show a mouthful of canine teeth — an illusion in the dark — with which to bite clean through my windpipe.

Speak or die, Octavia. Take control or This Machine ends here.

“Heel,” I snap.

Francesca flinches as if struck. She blinks rapidly, extinguishes the fire in her eyes. Glances down at her hand bunched in my t-shirt, then lets go and recoils, hand flung high into the air, stained with flakes of my dried blood.

“I— I— I don’t— I didn’t—”

“Francesca—”

She lurches to her feet, hand held far out in front, framed by the frozen glow of the anime girls on the television. She lunges for the bathroom, almost trips on the corner of the other sofa, plunges into the darkness of her walk-in closet.

Bathroom light flickers on, banishes grey haze with warm glow. Water splashes. A soap bar clunks into a sink, dropped from frantic hands. Francesca hisses as if stung.

I’m not certain what just happened. Doesn’t feel quite real, here in the cave of the night.

Scarlet would have killed me, strangled me to death, or torn out my throat with her teeth, or perhaps even transformed right there and finished the job she started when we first met, stain her plush bedroom carpet with my intestines. Of that I am certain; if I had not spoken up, or if I’d failed to put enough steel in my voice, she would have continued her obsessive trajectory.

Bizarrely enough, I’m not afraid. Heart’s going a little fast, fluttering and catching. Thin cold sweat has broken out on my skin. Head feels hot and light. But I don’t want to run away, can’t even think of attempting translocation. A sensible young woman would try to minimise the fallout now, smooth over the ruffled feathers, plead a headache and go back to sleep.

Don’t want that; never claimed to be sensible. I want more — not of Scarlet’s aggression, but of whatever lies beneath.

Submission and surrender?

Raise my prosthetic hand again, examine the offending fingers. A moment’s touch unfolded Scarlet like a lethal blossom. What if I’d cupped her chin, would I have provoked an even more powerful reaction?

Will she kill me if I do that? Not if I keep my head.

Couldn’t dream of this with any other girl; couldn’t even reach out and touch Grimmy without pinning her to the bed and forcing my knee between her legs. But with Scarlet it’s different. She’s already tried to kill me; we’re past that now. She barked for me on command, and I made her cum. She saved my life when she should have ended me, took me home and hid me. I’ve slept in her bed. We watched her favourite — and illegal — anime together.

I’m supposed to try to get Scarlet Edge to flip sides; that’s what Signal’s plan called for. If I do that here, it would eclipse everything else. Everything will change. England wouldn’t believe it. Scarlet Edge gone rogue would be the greatest propaganda and material coup we could ever hope for.

My lips curl with brief disgust. That’s not why I want this.

Scarlet returns from the en-suite, moving stiff as old wire, hands and face scoured with soap and water, hair raked back. She leaves the bathroom light on, keeps the grey shadows at bay. Folds her arms, won’t look at me.

“We can pause the show there,” she says, nods at the television, then lets out a single bark of bitter laughter. “Not that I expect we’ll ever get a chance to continue. I suggest you watch the rest under your own power, if you really do care. You need more sleep. And so do I, it’s gotten late. Tomorrow you might be well enough to stand in the shower, I don’t know. And then perhaps we can get you out of—”

“Francesca.”

Scarlet stops. Stares at the telly.

“M’not leaving it there,” I croak. “Can’t do that.”

Scarlet tuts. “We can hardly watch the whole thing in one sitting. It’ll be far past sunrise by the time we finish. And I keep saying, I keep trying to tell you, you need more rest. You’re not actually immortal, no matter how you feel now. You can die just the same as any of us magical girls, you need to—”

“Not talking about the anime. Don’t play dumb.”

Scarlet takes a sharp breath. She can’t inflate her lungs all the way, arms folded too tight around her rib cage. “I’m … I only meant … I … ”

“What’s it like,” I echo, “being Scarlet Edge?”

A long frozen moment makes me doubt my strategy; Scarlet stands in utter stillness. I dare not even breathe. Have I pushed too hard, too fast, on the wrong track? Will she grow violent again, close off this narrow wound before I can clean it out? No, passivity would lead to my defeat here. I am like a zoog trapped with a hound; I must show that I have teeth of my own, I am an equal, not her prey.

Eventually Scarlet unfolds her arms, fills her lungs with a deep breath, straightens her back. She steps past the sofas and stands in front of the television, skinny torso bracketed by the electric glow and the bright cartoon. She casts one way then the other, breath coming harder and faster, a doubtful pugilist working herself up for a back alley brawl.

She locks eyes with me again, calm and steady, rimmed with red, hollow all the way down.

“I wouldn’t know,” Scarlet says, hard and bitter.

“No?”

“I thought I did. Once, I thought I knew exactly who I was and what I was about. I thought I had all the answers, all the purpose in the world.” She takes another deep breath, cannot quite conceal the shudder. “The day I was chosen, the night I was made into a magical girl, the morning after I was visited in a dream, can you guess what it felt like, for me?”

Shake my head. Stay quiet. Let her run.

“Joy,” she says. “Joy beyond anything I thought possible. When I realised what had happened, I woke up crying. Tears of absolute joy. You have no idea what it’s like, you simply can’t. Not you, not any of the other girls, at least nobody I’ve spoken to. Nobody felt like I did. Nobody got what I got out of that change. Before that night, I was … ” A hard swallow, choking down bad memory. Scarlet glances away, tightens her control. “I had a difficult childhood. And then, one day, in the space of a single night, everything changed. I was Scarlet Edge, and nobody, nothing, not a single thing could question that, not ever. Do you understand?”

“Maybe,” I murmur.

A ghost of a smile flickers across her lips, fragile as a long-dead leaf. “I knew it in my heart, or my soul, or whatever word you want to use. I knew my true name — Scarlet Edge — that very morning, before I’d even gotten out of bed! My first transformation happened later that same day. I went outside, I ran into the countryside, and I just— just— willed it to happen!” The smile grows, a genuine look I’ve not seen on her before. “I outpaced the professionals, the public relations people, even the other magical girls they sent to pick up the new-hatched chick. They expected the usual, a confused young girl. But oh no. They had to physically pull me out of the air to stop me flying around. They don’t tell that story for the public, do they?”

“They certainly don’t.”

Scarlet grows more animated. “And then I took to the media like a fish to water, as soon as the MGNRB and my patron and all the rest decided it was time. They made me into an idol. At thirteen years old, can you imagine how that felt? A dream come true, because it was! I loved my patron, my Dream-God patron, I thought she had given me the world. I loved the other magical girls, the public, the television cameras, the attention, the … ”

Her smile falters and fades as quickly as it bloomed. Scarlet’s face collapses back into hollow loss.

“All of it,” she says. “I loved all of it. Because back then I was naive enough to believe it was beautiful, and true.”

“Back then,” I echo. “What about now?”

Scarlet’s face hardens. Her eyes find me in focus. “Now? Now I think I never really knew anything. I don’t understand who I am, because I’m … I’m nothing. I’m nothing, again, the same way I was before. There’s nothing beneath the surface. Becoming a magical girl doesn’t change you, it simply reveals you. And I’m … nothing.” She clutches at her own sternum. “What have you done to me, Octavia?”

This runs deeper than I knew; I didn’t do this, I was just a catalyst.

“I haven’t done this to you, Scarlet. Not me.”

“But you have,” she says, a quiet quiver in her voice. “Until you, I was … holding myself together, holding to the lie. I had resigned myself to an utter lack of truth and beauty. Nothing was real because nothing could be real. So I could endure, if I told myself there was no alternative. But then … then you … ” Scarlet’s voice collapses into a breathy rush. “You’re everything I told myself did not exist, could not exist. You’re a paradox, a contradiction. You didn’t come in the form I expected.” She gestures helplessly at the television, at the magical girl cartoon, at Pastel and Neon. “So at first I didn’t recognise, I didn’t see what I was looking at, I didn’t understand. And how could I? How? How can you be so … so imperfect, such a … a … with missing limbs, and scars, and … and your face? When I stabbed you, your face, the way you looked at me, and you … you … ”

“We’re getting off topic,” I say. Reel her in. She’s fragmenting again, spiralling off into some fixation on me that I can only respond to in the same way I did via text, and neither of us are prepared for that. “What’s it like,” I echo again, “being Scarlet Edge?”

Francesca blinks several times, like snapping out of a trance. She takes a deep breath, stows her obsession.

She goes over to her desk and picks up one of the figurines of herself, then brings it back to the sofas and places it on the low table, facing me. Scarlet Edge in miniature, sculpted from high-quality plastic, her red-and-white dress flaring outward as she strikes a particularly elegant pose with her ruby sword. The blade is quite realistic. Her proportions less so; the sculpt has enhanced her curves.

“Ask her,” Francesca says. “That’s Scarlet Edge. A plastic toy.”

Can’t help a sigh. “Right. I think I get the point.”

A bark of laughter, low and bitter. “No. No, you don’t. You don’t understand. Nobody does, not even you.” She walks back to the desk and the vanity, surrounded by images of her transformed self pinned to the walls, a shrine to her image. She jabs one of the posters. “This is Scarlet Edge, she’s right here. And here. And here. And here. This is her. And this, too.” Promo shots and magazine illustrations and printouts of fanart; she tugs on them, as if threatening to rip them down, but never quite does. Her fingers curl as if they want to rip the paper off the wall, ball it up, hurl it around the room. But she merely taps, gestures, steps back again, casts her eyes across her own face reflected a hundred times. “All these, these are Scarlet Edge. I’m not a person, I’m a media franchise. A merchandising empire.”

“A propaganda figurehead,” I add.

Francesca whirls back to me, eyes wide with recognition. “Yes! Yes, you see? Maybe you do—”

“A propaganda figurehead,” I repeat. “For something you believe in.”

Scarlet goes still, stares at me like I’ve just slapped her, faint anger behind her eyes. Slowly she stalks back to the television, looks down at me. “Something I believe in?” she hisses. “You think I believe in … what?”

“England.” Can’t keep the scorn from my voice. “Justice.”

“Ha!” Scarlet barks in surprise. “Did you get that from Azure? It sounds just like her.”

“So, you don’t?”

“England,” Francesca echoes, packs that word with a hundred times the scorn I could. “England. Living a lie makes it easier to spot other lies. And, England? Can you imagine if they were exposed to the truth?”

“The truth of … ?”

“Me!” she hisses, jabs at her chest. “They had me on television for the first time when I was thirteen years old. Transformed and shining and perfect. I was perfect! And it felt so good, better than anything else in the world. I didn’t have to fake a smile. I didn’t have to pretend for the cameras. England loved me! The world loved me! Being Scarlet Edge, back then, it felt like being God! Unstoppable, unbreakable, beautiful! The best in the world and nobody dares deny it! Everything before then was washed away, forgotten, blotted out! The whole world looks at me and sees … ”

She trails off, takes a deep breath, swallows her esoteric anger.

“A lie,” I finish.

A shrug. “They saw what they wanted to see. They saw something which was theirs. And the more they made it theirs, the less it was mine. Whatever was real, it eroded away. And what now, if they saw beneath? What if they see the sheer contempt in which I hold them? What if they see … this?” She gestures at the television screen, at Majohiko, at the perfect cartoon world where magical girls fight back-to-back and fall into each other’s beds. “What if they see a reality which does not match their expectations?”

“They won’t like you very much. The image of Scarlet Edge dies.”

Francesca nods slowly. “Yes. Because Scarlet Edge is made up, and if she once belonged to me, she doesn’t anymore.”

I shift in my seat, try to sit up a little, despite the deep dull pain still tight in my core. Scarlet’s sob-story is real, I don’t doubt that; but if I don’t show my teeth we’ll never get further.

“This all sounds like a lot of justification for mass murder,” I say. “Your sword felt pretty real, when you stuck it through me. You do real things, out there. Kill real people. You’re not entirely a media invention.”

Francesca stares, eyes hardening. “Is that what you think this is? That’s what you think I’m doing?” Her voice lowers with quiet outrage. “You think this is me … justifying myself?”

“Subconsciously, maybe.”

Francesca laughs without humour, a slow, sad chuckle. “Why am I even telling you this? Why do I even care? I’ve nothing to prove to you, nothing! And yet you … you sit there, and you … you … fine!” she spits. “You want justifications? At least the killing is real.”

“Uh huh. That’s what I said.”

“No, you’re not listening,” she says. “But you do understand, you do. You, out of everybody, you understand, because I’ve seen you understand. Killing, fighting, face-to-face, that’s the only real thing in all this, the only real thing I have. The parts of it they don’t put on the telly, the things they turn off the cameras for, or they censor them out. I need no justification for that. Do you know why?”

“Because you’re … ” A psychopathic fascist butcher. But I hold my tongue; that won’t bend Scarlet in the right direction. “Because you’re good at it.”

“Yes!” Scarlet breaks into a lighting-flash smile, gone again the next instant. “Yes. Violence. It’s what magical girls are made for, it’s what we’re all for, it’s the one thing the mundanes all look away from. And I’m good at it! I’m really, really good at it. When the cameras are off and it’s me and all the parts they don’t want to show, it’s real. And I don’t have to justify myself to you, or anybody else, not for that. It’s what we’re for. It’s the only thing that makes sense! Nothing else is real, there’s no other beauty in the world. Everything else is just lies, and it all belongs to them. But the violence, that’s mine.”

“Them?”

Francesca casts an arm wide. “My Dream-God patron. The BBC, the newspapers, the internet, the whole fucking world! Them!” she spits. “England!”

A suggestion pushes to the tip of my tongue, an obvious offer, a way out: why not leave, Scarlet? Why not abandon all this and join us?. But she’s not ready yet. Francesca is creeping toward a cliff-edge, but pushing her now would meet only resistance. Hold my tongue. Let her run.

“But now … ” She simmers down, going cold. “Over enough time even the violence … even that has ceased to mean … to mean as much … ”

She turns to the television, choked by a sudden threat of tears, touches the screen with one hand. Trying to press through the barrier of glass, to join Pastel and Neon in their perfect world.

“All I wanted was just one real thing,” she says. “One beautiful thing. Just one … one tiny promise that it was real, that something was real.” She turns away from the telly, but won’t look at me, face twisted with bitterness. “Because none of it is. The Trio of Albion, Azure and Dawn, I was so happy when I met them for the first time. We were going to be the best of friends. Closer than sisters. But … but even them. Azure with her secrets and her fake fucking smile. Dawn and her closet psychopathy, her backroom plots, her smug face like she knows everything already. I tried, I tried so hard with them, but they weren’t real either. There’s no true friendship, no real companions. It’s all lies.” She takes a great shuddering breath, can’t keep her tears back anymore. “Because it’s not— like this— never like that. I can have— I can have a dozen fake lovers if I wanted, did you know that?”

“You mentioned it.”

“They’ll give me anything I want. A harem of my own. A dozen girls, any shape and size I ask for. They’ll all be perfect and— and fake, fake, fake, fake! Did you know the Trio is just interchangeable too? When one of us dies, they’ll shuffle in another. And I’m past my expiry date, but I’m still here, and I just keep getting stronger, and nothing— nothing happens, nothing changes! Would you even remember me, if I died here, if you— if you transformed and killed me and— and nobody would remember? Even my parents, my sister! It’s cost me everything, and what have I got in return? Nothing. My sister doesn’t remember me properly— I— I broke her— just wanted her to see me—” Francesca begins to cry, breathing too hard. “My parents— mundanes, they don’t even know, so confused about it, can’t keep it straight in their heads.” She rakes her own scalp with her nails, pulls at her hair, trying desperately not to sob. “It’s fake, fake, it’s always been fake, and I just wanted— just wanted— just—”

A helpless gesture at the television, at what she’s always wanted.

One gentle push? She’s not all the way to the bottom yet, but she’s falling fast. “Scarlet,” I croak. “Scarlet. Breathe.”

She closes her eyes, takes several deep breaths, tries not to choke or hiccup, not to shame herself.

“Scarlet,” I repeat. “Would you rather I called you Francesca?”

Tears flash-boil into rage. Scarlet’s eyes fly open.

“Francesca?! Francesca was a weakling!” She scrabbles with the cuffs of her long-sleeved t-shirt, and suddenly I know what’s coming. “Look! Look what she did to herself!”

Francesca bares her arms, shows me what I’ve seen once before but didn’t fully register, in that full-body selfie she sent me on the night we made contact. Now I know why Scarlet Edge’s outfit design has such long sleeves, cuffed right to her wrists.

Her inner forearms are covered in old scars, little parallel lines; across the road, not down the street. Worse on the left, because she’s right handed.

“You think I want to go back to that!?” she snarls. “You think I want to just give it up, go back to being nothing!?”

“I know what it feels like to be a corpse.”

Scarlet comes up short, shivering like a sapling in a storm. About to break one way — but then she goes the other. Straightens up, sucks down a single clean breath, raises her chin.

She tucks a corner of her lower lip between her teeth. Bites down hard, draws a bead of blood from pale flesh.

Francesca Fairfax transforms.

The bead of blood welling from her bottom lip expands like a flash-flood across her skin, swallows her mouth, her face, her hair. It engulfs her whole body, clothes drowned beneath a second skin of shimmering crimson. She is an eyeless pillar of living blood, narrow hips and slender chest and thin limbs clad in ripples of gore.

Flames erupt from the lake of blood — the deep red of her hair, licking forth in tongues of fire that settle about her shoulders. A pair of rubies kindle within her wine-dark grave; her eyes, blinking out from a mask of blood. Posture curls and coils her upright as her skin pulses through, shoulders back, chest out, chin high, regal and proud. Her dress blooms from the bed of claret, absorbing it and remaking it into smooth red fabric and chalk-white lace, flowing skirts of ivory about her hips, cream-soft satin climbing her throat and unfurling down her arms. High heels lift her another few inches. Her dress cracks open like bone cooked in fire, reveals bloody inner layers in crimson silk, the long elegance of her legs, the swell of her ruffle-framed breast.

She casts bloodstained light across the walls and floor of her bedroom, drowns out the electric glow from the television and the weak imitation from the bathroom. This space cannot contain her, too small and mean and mundane for such divine presence. A touch from her hair might ignite the walls, burn this house to ash.

Her ruby-red sword grows like a crystal, held in a scabbard of pale metal, belted at her waist with white leather.

Transformation completes. She stands tall, looks down with a sneer.

“I am still Scarlet Edge,” she says, in the crackle of a forest fire. “Whatever you are doing to me, it will avail you nothing.”

Through lingering pain and would-be mortal wounds and exhaustion that threatens more than another heart attack, transformation suggests itself to me. This Machine presses toward my surface, aching to match Scarlet’s energy. If only I could transform and stride up to her and look her in the eyes. If only I could make her see that she is not the lie.

But I can’t. Transformation would probably use up whatever dregs are keeping me alive and intact.

Instead, I let it show on my face. Maybe Scarlet sees that truth. Or perhaps she’s so fragile that she doesn’t need a final push. Maybe I’ve got nothing to do with it. Maybe it’s all her, all internal. Maybe I was never even a catalyst.

Scarlet’s face crumples into a mask of ugly tears. Her blood-light glow gutters, dies dim, goes out. She keens through clenched teeth, loses the final battle of her internal war. She starts to cry, wet and hard, full-body sobs that wrack her like a storm.

She rips her sword-belt off, tosses it to the floor with a frustrated cry.

“It doesn’t mean anything!” she wails. “It’s fake, it’s all fake, I know, I know, okay!? I know! But I can’t— I can’t do it anymore! I can’t— I can’t do this, I can’t— I can’t— can’t— can’t—”

Scarlet tears at her flawless white-and-red outfit. She rips the fabric across her chest and shoulders, ruining the lace, shredding the satin. She froths and rages, yanks at her sleeves until they burst and come apart, exposing her scarred forearms again. She tugs at ruffles, ripping her skirts, ruining her outline. She almost falls over as she kicks off her shoes, picks one up and hurls it across the room, where it thumps into the wall. She sobs harder and harder, broken and falling, until her outfit is ragged and trailing, laddered and torn.

Scarlet Edge is a butcher of my would-be sisters-in-arms. She has tried to kill me twice, and she would have killed Grimgrave if not for my intervention. I laughed in her face with delight when I punched her in the gut; I would see her ground into the dirt with my boot on the back of her head, grovelling and bloody and defeated.

But this isn’t that. This isn’t a foe defeated. This is a broken hound tearing at her own flesh.

My responsibility. Should I have held off, backed down, played the wrong part, kept all this under wraps for another six months, six years, the rest of Scarlet’s life? I could have gotten out of here with another day’s quiet, but that would have meant—

Abandoning her?

I want to ruin Scarlet, for those who have used her, those who would use her again. Ruin her as their tool. I want to corrupt her utterly. She’s ready.

On my feet, not easy. I lever myself upright with the arm of the sofa, grit my teeth to ignore the pain. Straighten my spine, though it burns inside my core. Raise my chin. Harden my voice.

No idea what I’m doing. Doesn’t matter anymore, because it has to be done, and I’m the only one to do it.

“Scarlet.”

Scarlet Edge stops tearing at herself. Slowly she looks up, tears running down pale cheeks, eyes wide with faint surprise. Like I’m the rising sun after an imperishable night. She straightens up, careless of her torn clothes, red-and-white rags hanging from her in ruined glory. Shallow scratches on her skin are already closing, magical girl physiology denying any further self-harm.

“This isn’t the only way to be,” I say.

She reaches toward me, frames my face from a distance.

“You,” she says through a veil of tears. “I still don’t understand you. Don’t understand how you survived … me. Scarlet Edge. Twice. You didn’t even try to run, you … you threw yourself at me. Fighting you … no, no, even just seeing you fight, or just … you! You! You’re the most real thing I’ve ever seen. It’s … beautiful. And you shouldn’t be. By all rights you should be … weak, and dependent, and … and dead. But you’re not. How?”

“Not very good at dying,” I croak. “Had too much practice.”

She half-sobs, half-laughs, shakes her head. “When we first met, when you were escaping Dream Control, the way you faced me down … at first I thought you were going to grovel, and you did, but that wasn’t you. And then you … you didn’t. The way you laughed, Octavia! Free. Completely free. You laughed at me, you laughed when you hit me, nobody has ever done that before. Nobody would dare! I couldn’t even conceive of it. I … I hated you for it, and then you were so beautiful.”

Scarlet’s words tug at the desire to transform again. This Machine is beautiful, she’s right.

“You took my sword,” she says, “all the way to the hilt. I had you, I owned you, I’d reduced you to nothing … and I was wrong. You bit back.” One hand rises, clutches at the bite mark on her lips, the one thing beside her scars that transformation cannot hide. “You bit me! You marked me. You marked me with your teeth and it’s … I-I never want it to go away. I want this imperfection for ever, and I … I can’t appear in public now, not with this, not anymore.”

“Yes you can.”

“Even now, how are you still alive? How can you be conscious and upright with those wounds? You fought a Dreamer, Octavia! A Dreamer, one on one! I don’t even … ” A helpless shrug. “When you did that, you confirmed everything, everything I thought about you, beyond my wildest dreams. Do you know why I drew art of you?”

Shake my head. Can guess, but I won’t.

“Because you were shining. You were defiant. You were … you. Everything I cannot be, cannot touch, cannot have. And then you … ” Her hand squeezes her own chin, cupping the imprint of my teeth on her lips. “You bit back. You bit me.”

“Scarlet.”

I take one step, away from the sofa, toward her. A shuffle is the best I can manage.

“And nobody’s forgotten you!” she says. “The news media, me, Azure, all the others. Nobody can forget you! How have you done that!?”

A shrug, all I can manage, pulling at loose innards. “No idea. Was hoping you could tell me.”

Scarlet tries to laugh, can’t get there through tears. “I … I wish … I could be like you?” Then gritted teeth, a welling of frustration. “No, no, that’s not what I want, I don’t want to be like you, I want … I don’t even know! I don’t know! Octavia, I don’t know! What have you done to me?!”

“Nothing.”

Scarlet backs up a step as I take another, though she doesn’t seem aware of it. Her face twists with bitter self-hatred.

“What does it feel like, for you?” she asks in a broken voice. “Being This Machine?”

I stop my advance. She needs to hear truth.

“It feels right.” Raise my prosthetic arm, damaged plates grinding against each other beneath the carbon fibre tape. “Like there was a me waiting to get out from inside, my whole life. Like this is how I’ve always been, but I didn’t know it before. I’ve been a corpse for ten years, Scarlet. I know what it feels like to be nothing. Now I get to live again.”

Scarlet bites back a wet sob. She stares at my prosthetic arm. “I thought … I assumed they were a weakness, when we first met. I was wrong.”

“They’re me. This Machine is anything but weak. My own anger blinded me a little, during the fight. But it also felt good. It felt good to just … be me.”

Scarlet nods, tries to choke back another sob. “It felt … felt like that for me too, at first. Back … back then.”

“What did I look like? In the armour, I mean.”

Scarlet can’t find words. She just nods, incoherent but so very eloquent.

“Scarlet.” I shuffle another step closer. Scarlet takes another step back, trailing the ragged shreds of her red-and-white dress, but there’s nowhere else to run. Her back bumps against the television.

“N-no—”

“Scarlet. Listen to me.”

“I … I … ”

Another step. Then another, around the little table. A third and I’m almost on her. Less than an arm’s length between us. She’s taller, doesn’t matter. Plant my feet, can’t fall over now, no matter the pain.

“Scarlet. You’ve been a bad dog.”

Her eyes go wide, glistening with tears. Instantly she stops sobbing.

“But,” I add, “it’s not your fault.”

She grits her teeth, tries to shake her head, can’t make words, just a high, faint, keening.

“You don’t need to die, and you don’t need to go back to being nothing,” I tell her. “You don’t need to give up on what you want. You don’t need to surrender to an image that you never asked for.” I almost laugh. “Can’t believe I’m telling you this, you. You tried to kill me twice. You tried to kill my new … ‘friends’. You tried to convince me to die, willingly. But I’m saying it anyway, because I think you know what you need. I think you know exactly what I’m going to say.”

Scarlet goes absolutely still. Stares at me in devastated awe.

I reach up. Both hands, prosthetic right and burned left. Cup her cheeks, frame her face, gentle but firm. I run my right thumb, my prosthetic thumb, over the bruise on her lips.

“All you need is a better hand holding your leash.”

Scarlet whimpers, but she doesn’t push me away. I’m so weak right now that she could shrug me off and knock me to the floor with her little finger.

“You don’t know who you are,” I carry on, “but I do. You’re Scarlet Edge. And Scarlet Edge is my good girl.”

“You don’t … ” she whimpers. “Don’t really mean that.”

“Don’t I?”

“You can’t— can’t offer me that, you can’t—”

“It’s not an offer.” I let her process that for a moment. “Good girl.”

“Nnnnnnn!” Scarlet keens. “You can’t! We can’t! I can’t just abandon— I can’t abandon England! You have no idea what we’re protecting England from, you don’t understand, you don’t— and it does need protecting, it does, it does, from you, from all of them. My— my sister needs protecting, it’s all—”

“Shhhhhh,” I hush her. Must keep control. If I waver now, I’ll lose her forever. “That’s not what this is about. S’about you and me. Mostly you. Everything else, leave it for the morning.”

Scarlet stares, framed by my hands, by burned flesh and damaged prosthetics. Her tears stop. An awestruck focus floats into her eyes.

“You have my permission,” I whisper. “Do it.”

Scarlet’s lips peel back, showing her teeth, the threat of a bite and the promise of more. She hesitates, the sound stuck deep in her throat, choking on a lifetime of expectations and restrictions and unfulfilled desire and an ocean of yearning.

“Bark for me,” I whisper.

“ … rrrr … rrruuurr!”

A shaky growl, a damp vibration in her throat. Hardly a bark worthy of this hell-hound. But it’ll do.

“Well done,” I say. “Good girl.”

Scarlet sobs once more, wet and choked and yet somehow complete. She pulls her face from my hands and surprises me, puts her arms around my shoulders, clinging on tight, clawing at my back, panting and heaving and struggling for breath, but no more sobbing. The pain makes me grunt, compressed wounds screaming in my core, but this is the price of victory. I put my hands on her sides, cold flesh through the rips in her dress. My prosthetic leg locks solid, the only thing keeping me upright.

Scarlet’s head goes over my right shoulder. She lets out a low growl. Teeth meet my flesh, through my bloody t-shirt.

She bites down, a touch too hard.

Scarlet Edge and This Machine stay locked together until time runs thin; if it were not for our bodies, we could stay like this all night. But pain and consciousness start to blend the wrong way, I begin to fade even as my insides are twisted with dull agony. Scarlet hears me grunt, or perhaps feels the tremor in my bones. Her teeth leave my shoulder, she leans away from me, ruby-red eyes stained with darker crimson, hazy and flushed.

“ … Octavia?”

Clear my throat with a rasp, speak through clenched teeth. “Gotta sit down, or I’m gonna fall down.”

Scarlet blinks several times, floats back to the surface of her self. “You’re … still injured. Yes, yes, you’re still deeply wounded, you … yes … right … okay.”

She half-drags me back to the sofa, half-stumbles in my wake. Lowers me down onto the towels, though I’m not sure we need those anymore. My joints and organs and bones and tendons creak as I slump into the sofa cushions.

Scarlet hovers for a moment, a wraith in loose bandages, side-lit by the electric glow of the television and the distant illumination of the bathroom light. Her own inner flame has guttered to a dark ember, as if the fires have been tainted by some esoteric chemical.

“May I sit with you?” she asks.

“S’your bedroom.”

Still transformed, she lowers herself to the sofa, awkwardly parallel to my side. Our thighs touch; she’s warm as a stone left in a campfire, sharp-edged and hard and awkward. Has no idea how to orient her body against another person. But then again, neither do I. Never done this before. I reach over with my prosthetic hand. She takes it in one of her own.

Eventually she grows still, head next to mine, legs touching.

Long minutes tick by, together in the darkness, staring at the anime on the television screen, still paused right where we left it. This Machine begins to shut down, crisis averted, state changed, uncertain horizon coming into view. But now is time for more rest, because tomorrow will be worse.

Scarlet murmurs. “What … what now? Octavia? What do we do … ”

“Shhhhhhh. Don’t think.”

“Don’t think?”

“Not yet,” I mutter. Can barely make words. “Not till morning. Good girls don’t think. Until the morning.”

~~~~~~~

Morning comes late and slow, a dripping accumulation of consciousness buoying me upward from the warm deeps of dreamless sleep. Cool air brushes the faint sweat on my face. Birdsong plays far away, blurred by the sound of wind through trees. A scent of leaves and grass and growing things trickles by, damp soil new-wetted by brief rain.

“Unnnh?”

Blink and squint against the daylight trying to peek around the edges of the curtains. Shift my hands beneath a thin cocoon, limbs heavy and slow; somebody has draped a blanket over me, tucked it around my ragged edges. I’m still sat on the sofa, facing the television, sunk deep in the groove pressed by the weight of my body.

Scarlet Edge — the plastic version, twelve inches high — stares back at me from the little table, bathed in filtered sunlight.

One of the windows at the far end of the room stands wide open, the curtain inched aside to let in fresh air and morning sun and the scent of wet grass. The television is off, as is the bathroom light. The bedroom is a comfortable cave of captured midnight shade, a shelter from the last day of a briefly-resurrected summer.

“Nnh? Scarlet?”

The real Scarlet Edge is sat at her computer desk, examining something on the monitor, sipping from a steaming mug. She’s untransformed, back to thin blonde hair and muddy grey eyes, skinny and scrawny, all fires suppressed. She wears the same jogging bottoms and long-sleeved red t-shirt as when she transformed, significantly more intact than her magical girl outfit.

She turns at the sound of my voice, meets my eyes, freezes. Slowly, she puts down her cup of tea.

“Octavia,” she says. “Good … good morning.”

“Time is it?” I croak.

“Almost midday. Quarter to twelve. Actually eleven forty eight, so closer to ten to twelve.”

“Mm.”

I push back the blanket and do something more foolish than baiting miss hell-hound last night — I try to sit up without testing first. A hard wince stops me cold, a sensation deep in my core like peeling the biggest scab in biological history. My insides are tender and raw, fragile as new flesh. My body has remembered it is not all steel and fire; it is also meat, and meat has nerves.

Slump back. Wheeze for breath. “Fuck. Ow. Ahhhhhhh.”

“Better? Worse?”

“Both!” I probe my front with my prosthetic hand. Sore and stiff, but not like touching an open wound. “Different. I think the holes might have closed up. Water. Scarlet? Water?”

Scarlet interprets my grunts correctly. She gets up and fetches a glass of water from the bathroom, hands it to me and watches me drink.

“Thanks.” I pluck at the blanket, still draped over my knees; lilac and purple, now with accents of dried blood. “Yours?”

Scarlet clears her throat, accepts the empty glass. “Bloodstains hardly matter now, I thought.”

“Mm. Yeah.”

I have another go at sitting up straight, slowly and carefully. This time I make it all the way, breaking into cold sweat and gasping at the sharper pain deep in my gut and belly, behind my rib cage. Scarlet takes an awkward half-step back, but stays silent as I hunch and pant, lets me get my breath. Pain is worse, but strength has improved; I test my legs against the floor, think about standing up. Cool morning air trickles beneath my t-shirt, laps the sweat from my skin.

“Octavia?”

“Mm.”

“What … I mean, I need to ask … I … ” Scarlet pauses, then lets out a sharp sigh. “Oh, I don’t even know what I’m being hesitant about. What now? What happens now?”

I deliver her a squint. “Breakfast?”

That earns me a beautifully exasperated huff. “That’s not what I meant! You know that’s not what I meant, you—”

“I know. Just wanted to wind you up.”

“This isn’t the time for that.” Scarlet gives me a very unimpressed look. “What happens now, Octavia? What are we, you and I? After last night, what are we now?”

Good question. I could — maybe should — say the sensible thing, the thing that Octavia Carter would have said for years when faced by such a question. ‘That’s up to you, isn’t it?’ Autonomy, independence, the weight of decisions and the status of a moral actor, this is my gift to you, Francesca Fairfax. Enjoy it. But that’s not what Scarlet wants or needs, even if she can’t say it in words.

Almost don’t think I can say it myself; but when I open my mouth it comes so naturally. Whatever strange alchemy we shared in the night, not all of it has vanished in the morning light.

“You’re my good girl,” I say.

Scarlet averts her eyes, an awkward twist on her lips. “It feels very different by daylight.”

“Still here though, aren’t I?”

Scarlet sighs, starts to fold her arms, then stops, leaves her cage open. “The question stands. What happens now?”

My turn to sigh. “Mmm. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yes, I figured that.” Scarlet lets out what might be a laugh, shakes her head. “You and I, we’re still … we’re still enemies, Octavia. I don’t see how it can be any other way. England still needs protecting, that wasn’t some reflexive denial. I meant what I said, and now it’s the morning, so I’ve been thinking. And I’m not … I can’t betray … ”

“You gonna offer to take me in, protect me?” Can’t keep the scorn from my voice.

Scarlet does laugh at that one, a single bitter huff. “That sounds like something Azure would say.”

“She did make me that offer.”

Scarlet freezes, stares flint-hard. “Really.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Don’t take the offer. Azure is … well, her judgement is untrustworthy. She keeps a lot of secrets, that one. She wouldn’t be able to protect you, if you came from the cold.”

My turn to laugh, a dark little chuckle. “Scarlet, I’m not the one out in the cold.”

A pinched look. “Is that what all this was about? Trying to flip me to your side?”

“No.” Don’t even have to lie. “You know it’s not.”

Scarlet looks away, shamed. She murmurs, very softly, “Sorry.” A long pause, a deep intake of breath. “But it doesn’t change anything. One night doesn’t change everything, Octavia. I can’t just abandon England. Or my sister. Or … ”

Bright. There’s a wrinkle. Should I tell her? Not my place, is it?

Maybe if I tell her, she can stop Bright from murdering me.

“One night?” I echo instead. “Makes it sound like we fucked.”

Scarlet gives me another pinched look. “Perhaps we should.” But then she turns away and starts to pace. “What am I supposed to do now? I’ve never … I’ve never spoken to anybody about any of that before, and now you … you … what do I do now, hm? What do I do?”

“Come with me.”

“Stop being absurd!” Scarlet snaps. “I can’t! And that’s not what I want! Give me something—” She halts, sudden and sharp, staring at me. A swallow. “Give me something I can do.”

“You could stop killing your own kind.”

“My own … kind?”

“Magical girls. Or embryonic Dreamers just trying to escape. Any of those girls you’ve killed could have turned out like me.”

I brace for an argument, but Scarlet doesn’t erupt. She folds her arms and stares at a point on the floor, brow furrowed hard. “It all made so much sense in the night. Now it feels so … muddy.”

“Need me to fight you into submission?”

Up snaps Scarlet’s head, eyes burning with pinpricks of dark fire. Her lips part. A red tongue flickers out. Breath catches in her throat.

“Huh,” I grunt. “Well. Can’t do that right now. Not in any state for it.”

“I … y-yes, yes, that’s true.” Scarlet unfolds her arms and takes a deep breath. “Nothing material has changed. You’re still wounded and drained, you still need to be returned to your … ‘hideout’, as soon as you’re well. Do you need breakfast? Lunch? What am I saying?” she almost laughs. “Of course you do. Wait. Wait there. Try to stand if you can. But don’t go near the window. Stay out of sight. Octavia? Stay out of sight, understand?”

“I’m your little secret, Scarlet. Night time fun only.”

“Tch!”

Scarlet’s idea of a hefty brunch for a badly wounded semi-invalid is a pair of ham and cheese sandwiches with a wartime ration worth of mustard, accompanied by a big cup of tea. She grunts a bewildered negative when I ask about coffee again. This time I manage to balance the plate quite comfortably on my lap while I eat, since I don’t feel like getting off the sofa; my insides are still deathly raw. As I chew and swallow like a steady machine, Scarlet bustles about her bedroom, tidying up the bloody towels I’ve left everywhere, then feeding and watering the zoog.

He catches my eye through the mesh of his cage; I shoot him a wink. We’ll be out of here soon, little guy. Hold on.

Scarlet vanishes into her walk-in closet for a few minutes, then emerges again with an armful of clothes. She lays them out on the bed one by one, glancing at me between each item. Plain socks, functional white knickers, a big baggy black t-shirt, a shapeless matching hoodie, a pair of cream-and-red jogging bottoms.

“What are those for?” I ask around a mouthful of bland sandwich.

Scarlet frowns, like I’m being a bit slow. “You, of course!”

“Oh. Why?”

“Because I am thinking of other ways to get you out of here! If we have to leave via mundane transportation, I can’t be dragging around some bloodstained woman. You need to look clean. This is the best I can do, I think. The underwear is new. And you wouldn’t fit one of my bras, so … sorry. About that. I mean.”

“Hate to break it to you. But I don’t think I should go near public transport.”

“Oh for— I don’t mean that. I mean driving. Or if I have to fly you, or something. I haven’t finished making a plan yet. It’s just … in case.”

“You can drive?”

“Of course I can drive! You can’t? I thought you were, what, twenty?” I rap my prosthetic knuckles on my prosthetic knee. Scarlet’s eyes go wide. “O-oh. I didn’t mean … I meant … you … ”

Can’t keep a smirk off my face. Scarlet throws her hands up. Could drive if I cared to learn.

With the last bite of my sandwich travelling to my stomach, I sit forward again, tensed against the pain. I raise my prosthetic arm, rotate my wrist, work the fingers of my hand. Broken plates of CFRN grind beneath the carbon fibre tape. Sounds loose.

“If I’m gonna be down here much longer,” I say, “then I need something to hold this together. Got any duct tape?”

Scarlet wrinkles her nose. “Duct tape? On your own arm?”

“Better than having it fall apart.”

“Yes, but … ” Scarlet pauses, then straightens up and bobs her head, as if bowing to me. “I would like to formally apologise for damaging your prosthetic arm.”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

“But, still. I’m glad you repaired it. It looks … much more … um … ”

“Like shit.” I snort. “It looks like shit, Scarlet. You can be honest.”

Scarlet throws up her hands again. “I am trying to be polite!”

“Doesn’t suit you. And hey, you’ll apologise for the arm, but not for trying to gut me?”

Scarlet bristles, as if rubbed the wrong way. “That was entirely different!” she hisses. “I thought you understood, after last night. I thought I’d made that clear, I … ” She trails off at the look on my face, a look I hadn’t know I was capable of making. “You’re winding me up again. Aren’t you?”

“Mmhmm. Can’t help myself. Hey, at least you’re learning.”

Scarlet glowers, makes me want to pinch her cheeks. I ignore her and shuffle toward the edge of the sofa, preparing to stand up, testing my legs. Prosthetic feels as strong as ever, new foot still in good condition, and my left isn’t too bad either. Up I go, one hand on the arm of the sofa. My insides grind like broken glass, the engine of This Machine fluttering and catching, but chugging onward with slow, steady beats. Deep breath makes me wince, inflates my ribs around the slow-healing wounds from Willow’s last stand. But I’m up.

“Alright,” I mutter. “I can stand. That’s a start. If I’m gonna put those clothes on, I … ”

Scarlet is staring at me in a new way, distant discomfort in her eyes, turned inward.

“Yes?” I prompt, since she’ll take all day to get there on her own.

“Your ‘hideout’,” she says. “You and your companions. What’s your … are you planning … is it at all like … ” Her eyes flicker to the dark screen of the television.

“We’re not like your anime show, no,” I say. “But I’d wager we’re closer to it than you are.”

Scarlet eyes me. “You would accept anybody? Any magical girl?”

A shrug pulls at my insides, provokes a wince. “Not up to me. Not like I’m the leader.”

Scarlet huffs one of her short, bitter laughs. “Ah yes, of course. There’s your Dream-God to consider. The pretender in charge.”

“Nerys?” I almost scoff. “Please, she’s not in charge either. Nobody is.”

Scarlet frowns. “How would that even work? You take votes? Sit in a circle and discuss everything?”

“Not quite. Not been at it long, myself.”

Scarlet shrugs, trying to throw off a mantle she can’t quite shift. “And you … you and … what’s your relationship with the clown girl?”

“Grimgrave. Grimmy. That’s her name.”

“Yes, alright,” Scarlet sighs. “What’s your relationship with ‘Grimgrave’?”

Study Scarlet with great care, the way her eyes flick to mine and then away again, the way she compresses her lips, turns her head aside. What is she really asking? How much can I risk here? How much does she need to be brought to heel?

“Scarlet, I need you to be a good girl.”

She blinks at me, blushing, caught doing something she shouldn’t. “I-I don’t—”

“Grimgrave is mine too. Hurt her and I will be very displeased with you. Understand?”

Scarlet goes wide-eyed with shock. Then she tuts and turns her face away. Folds her arms tighter. “I’m still your enemy, Octavia,” she mutters. “You can’t expect to give me orders. You can’t … ”

That’ll have to do for now. I offer a silent prayer to Nerys, and any other Dream-Gods listening, that Scarlet’s propensity for jealousy is less than that of her sister. If she goes after Grimgrave again …

I’d save Grimmy first, no question.

Right?

A deep breath to clear my mind, pain crackling down my insides. I raise my arm again, examine the carbon fibre tape. “How about that duct tape, then?”

“Yes, yes,” Scarlet says with a huff. “There’s probably some, somewhere in the house. I can go look.”

“If I’m gonna put those clothes on, and wrap my arm up, I need to shower before, not after.” I glance at the walk-in closet and the bathroom beyond. Take a step, wobble and reset. Still very unsteady on my feet. Pain fizzles and sparks up my ribs and my spine, the remains of holes in my back. “Fuck. I don’t … don’t even know if the wounds are closed yet. Gotta … gotta check … ”

Another step. Another wobble. My hand steadies me, on the back of the sofa. It’s a long way to that bathroom. Long way down.

Humiliation rises up my throat like a bolus of stomach acid.

Even if I make it twenty paces or so to Scarlet’s no-doubt swanky en-suite bathroom without falling flat on my face, how am I ever going to climb over the edge of a tub to take a shower, let alone wash myself? The thought of trying to bend down or twist around makes me break out in a fresh wave of cold sweat; even the smallest such motions will aggravate the ragged tissues and pulped organs inside me, no matter how indefatigable magical girl healing will be in the end. Right now, This Machine is still broken, no matter what victory I’ve had here.

I’m an invalid again. A useless cripple who can’t even keep herself clean. I probably reek of rotten blood and stale sweat by now. It’s a wonder Scarlet didn’t recoil from me last night.

“Scarlet,” I croak. “What kind of shower do you have in there? If it’s walk-in then maybe … ”

Scarlet has gone very still. She had been moving toward the door, but now she’s frozen, examining me with an intense look, little points of fire dancing inside the grey of her eyes.

“Walk-in,” she murmurs. “But there’s no way you could … ”

“Scarlet?”

Scarlet Edge takes a deep breath, straightens up, raises her chin. She blinks and her eyes clear like coals under fresh air, a solid glow as she looks down at me. She braces her feet, chest thrust forward, a blaze behind her face. Sudden confidence radiates like heat-haze, the same absolute self-certainty she possessed when we first met, when she ran me through with her sword.

“Octavia Carter,” she says. “This Machine. You cannot shower on your own, you would fall down and injure yourself. So. Let me do it for you.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

One suspects there are dozens of magical girls (and millions of the mundane) who would kill to hear an offer like this from Scarlet Edge. But none of them have done for her what Octavia just has. But … what exactly is it that Octavia has achieved? Uh oh, Occy. You may be in deeper than you intended to dig.

Ahahahaha. Um. This was actually one of the most difficult chapters I’ve ever written, on a technical level. This and the next one, anyway. These girls are wildly out of control and I am swept up in their shenanigans every damn chapter. Which, you know, I’m not complaining about, wouldn’t have it any other way. But oh gosh, these two are toxic and weird and difficult in a way that even I did not fully plan for. Delicious.

Anyway! Behind the scenes the arc is shaping up to end around chapter 8. Which I think I mentioned last week? I’m not sure, all other thoughts in my head have been crowded out by magical girls. No thoughts, head frilly. (Though Octavia’s a magical girl, and I would hardly describe her transformed outfit as ‘frilly’.)

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

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! Thank you all so very much for being here and reading my little story about hyperviolent magical girls and dystopian Britain and dream magic and zoogs and all the rest! I am still having the time of my life writing Maidens, there is nothing I would rather be doing, and I owe it all to you, the readers and audience. Thank you all so much! Maidens of the Fall is for you!

Next chapter, we’re skipping the beach episode and getting right to the shower. If Octavia doesn’t chicken out. Oh dear.

Content Warnings

Gore

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Behind enemy lines, communications cut, resources depleted, wounds untended. My only ally, a single badly injured zoog, is confined to an animal carrier by a cheap padlock. Scarlet Edge — the most powerful magical girl in the country, who has twice tried to kill me — is the only person who knows where I am.

Not the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Better than a Dream Control interrogation room, or alone with Willow at the hospital.

Scarlet takes a while to return, long enough for me to realise there’s no clock lost in the clutter of her bedroom. My list of options remains thin, and does not improve with thinking. Option one, grab my mobile phone from the desk and turn it on, hoping that Signal is faster than the bureaucratic tag-team of Dream Control and GCHQ. Option two, drag myself out of this room and start shouting, in hopes that Bright is closer than Scarlet knows, and will decide against summarily ripping off my head for sullying her sister. A third option refuses to present itself. Hide a weapon somewhere about my person? A pen or a knife stuck in my waistband? I would laugh if I weren’t awash with ambient pain.

Don’t do anything stupid, that’s what Scarlet suggested. So, I won’t, but not because I’m a good girl; I am, in fact, the opposite. I just don’t think I’d get much further than six paces. I’m not going to have Scarlet find me face-down on her carpet.

And Scarlet was sincere, when she said I’m not her prisoner. She’s not capable of lying, not about that.

My confined zoog and I share a long look through the metal mesh of his prison, one beady black eye pressed tight to the bars. He pulls at the thin mesh with his front claws again, then peels his lips back on one side and lets out a distinct wet click. A pre-linguistic zoog sound, ‘come here’, ‘pay attention’, ‘please help’.

“S’alright,” I croak. “We’re gonna get outta here, just have to … wait. I promise, okay? Promise I won’t leave you behind.”

“Out, outttttt,” he rasps, scrabbling at the mesh again.

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. Scarlet, she … ”

“Scary. Scary scary.”

“Scarlet?” I almost smirk. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of, little guy. She put that bandage on your leg, right? She did that because you’re with me. As long as you’re with me, she’s not scary. Not one bit. Got it?”

The zoog eyes me, deathly uncertain. He rasps again, scrabbles at the mesh, wants out. I’ve no more energy to spend on reassurances. I sit very still, concentrate on my breathing, keeping my eyes open.

Scarlet returns a few minutes later, carrying a tray of food, several fresh white towels draped over one shoulder. She pauses in the doorway again and stares at me like a recurring ghost. Expected me to get up and climb out the window, did you? Regretting your decision to hide a wanted terrorist in your bed? She locks and bolts the door behind her, then carries the tray over and sets it down on the computer desk. There’s a low table in front of the sofas before the massive television at the far end of the room, but that’s very far away and looks awkward to sit at, even without a series of holes bored through my torso. Scarlet hesitates, looks between me and the desk chair and the bed and the tray.

“I’m not going to successfully balance a tray on my lap,” I croak.

Scarlet tuts. “You’d better sit here then. Can you … make it?”

“Mmhmm. Gimme a minute.”

Scarlet prepares the desk chair by draping more towels over the back and seat; it does look pretty expensive, high-backed mesh with fancy supports and plush armrests. Can’t blame her for not wanting my blood all over her gamer chair. She takes the opportunity to feed the zoog, unlocks the padlock with a little key from her pocket, tops up his water, refills his dish from a little bag of dry dog food. He makes no attempt at escape, quite the opposite; he bites the air near her hand a couple of times, then presses himself against the back wall of the animal carrier, hissing and rasping until she closes it up again.

“Huh,” I grunt. “What’d you do to piss him off?”

Scarlet huffs, rolls her eyes. “Nothing! I don’t understand it! Ungrateful little rodent.” She grabs the empty water jug and marches off toward the walk-in closet, then vanishes inside. A moment later I hear the sound of running water. She returns with the jug refilled.

“Bathroom in there?” I mutter.

“Yes? Yes. It’s my bathroom.” Scarlet frowns at me, shakes her head. “Look, if you’re not going to lie down, then you need to eat. Can you make it to the desk, or … or … ”

Don’t worry, Scarlet. You don’t have to touch me.

Standing up is no easier a second time, but at least I know what to expect now, gritting and hissing through the pain that stabs deep into my torso, burned left hand on the wall for support. My prosthetic leg does most of the work, gets me to the desk. I lower myself down into the chair with only minimal risk of a trip to the floor. Scarlet ventures close enough to help me rotate the chair toward the desk, then retreats again.

Spaghetti on toast, with little meatballs. Heinz, by the smell. Microwaved, by the flecks of dried tomato sauce. Dumped onto a plate so the toast is drowning and the sauce is in danger of spilling over the edge. With a glass of water. Fork and spoon.

The scent of food unlocks hard-clenched components of this soft, wet, damaged machine, rekindles the need for material fuel, reminds the processes of eating and digesting that they still exist. All very abstract; my body feels distinctly non-biological, still stuck halfway from transformation, little difference between flesh and metal.

I fumble the fork into my prosthetic hand, pieces of broken forearm scraping beneath carbon fibre tape. Spear a meatball, put it in my mouth. Taste. Chew. Swallow.

“No coffee?” I croak.

Scarlet hesitates, wide-eyed with uncertainty. “Was that … a joke?”

Yes. But also. “No?”

Scarlet shrugs. “I wouldn’t know how to make coffee. Nobody in my family drinks coffee. We drink tea.”

“Figures.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Octavia? What does that mean?”

Heinz spaghetti on toast works like a catalyst; things deep down inside my torso gurgle and rumble and glug and chug back to semblance of biological life. Taste. Chew. Swallow. Can’t eat quickly. Can’t grip anything in my left hand without the skin screaming as if it’s on fire, all that radiation damage still not healed by magical girl physiology. I switch to the spoon, cut up the sauce-soaked bread, shovel mouthfuls of pasta and soggy toast into my face. Taste. Chew. Swallow. The zoog eventually creeps back to the front of his cage, sniffs at the dog food in his bowl, joins the meal. Scarlet busies herself straightening up the bed, laying down fresh towels for me to ruin, then potters about the room, trying to tidy things up, getting nowhere. Eventually she gives up the pretence of cleaning, perches on the edge of the bed.

Strangest meal I’ve ever eaten, surrounded by a magical girl’s shrine to herself. The pair of figurines on the desk watch me with little plastic eyes, while the real thing watches me from behind. The computer desk and the vanity and the mirrors are surrounded by hundreds of images of Scarlet Edge, magical girl, captured in all her most dashing poses, wearing her most imposing looks, recorded and depicted and interpreted in her moments of highest heroism. A promo shot of her looms up from behind the monitor, facing forward, legs planted, both hands on the hilt of her sword with the tip touching the earth at her feet, eyes blazing like sullen coals in a face cut from marble. Low down on the right there’s a piece of fanart — not by Francesca herself, I don’t think — of Scarlet with her eyes closed in prayer or deep thought, body surrounded by a whirlwind of flame, sword like a conductor’s wand, held in a hand as delicate as spring lily.

Scarlet Edge is beautiful; can’t deny that. Guess Scarlet agrees.

Once half the food is inside me, I can’t help staring up at those ruby-red eyes. A glance back at the real thing for comparison reveals the wrinkle; when untransformed, Francesca Fairfax has eyes the colour of a dirty sky, more grey than blue. A hint of deep red lurks in the depths, a dying fire beyond the firmament.

The real thing doesn’t match the grace and elegance of the image either; half of England would lose their minds if they saw Scarlet Edge in jogging bottoms and a baggy long-sleeved t-shirt.

Also, she’s not watching me eat. Scarlet is staring at the posters on the wall, but not the ones of herself. She blinks when I glance at her, caught in the middle of some shameful act. Stares back for a long moment, then looks away, anywhere but me. I return to the food. Chew. Swallow.

“This isn’t like Pastel and Neon,” says Scarlet, soft and distracted.

“Eh? What?”

She fixes me with a peevish look. “I said,” she speaks louder and clearer, “this isn’t like Pastel and Neon.”

“ … like what and what?”

“Like Pastel. And. Neon.”

No point repeating myself, Scarlet gets the gist from my long, slow, exhausted look. She huffs, rolls her eyes, does her best impression of a grouchy teenager, then gets up and stomps away from the bed, over to the opposite wall. She taps one of the posters, large and glossy; a sextet of brightly coloured cartoon magical girls are arrayed as if bursting out from the bottom of the panel, leaping into the air as a group. Stylised text proclaims a title in Japanese, which I can’t read. Scarlet jabs a finger at two of the girls in particular, one dressed in pale pink frills, the other in a garish neon-rainbow half-hoodie-half-dress thing; they’re holding hands, down low.

“Pastel and Neon,” Scarlet repeats, then slips into Japanese. “Mahou Shoujo no Himitsu Kokoro.”

Raise my eyebrows, shake my head.

A great huff peels away Francesca’s composure. “Mahou Shoujo no Himitsu Kokoro! Uh … Magical Girl’s Secret Heart. You’re telling me you’ve never seen Majohiko? You’ve never even seen one episode of it?! You can’t be serious! This is … ” Scarlet closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, folds her arms protectively across her chest. “You’re winding me up, you’re winding me up on purpose. You are doing this on purpose. You—”

“Never heard of it before. Not winding you up.”

Scarlet frowns sharp, caught between disbelief and outrage. She creeps back to the edge of the bed like a deer emerging from the treeline, watches me with a doubtful look.

“You’ve never even heard of Majohiko?” She gestures at the poster again. “Just— just— just look at it, maybe you’re mistaken.”

Humour her. Give the poster a good stare. Magical girls, colour-coded and shiny sweet, cute enough to eat; Japanese anime, probably not based on anybody real, the group is too picture perfect for that. They’ve got the pink one, the wild one, the one with big boobs, the small nervous one, the mysterious dark-themed one, and the smart one who wears glasses. Some kind of ridiculous floppy mascot-animal is perched on the pink one’s shoulder; a few other characters lurk and loom in the background, a stereotypical white-haired professor, another girl who might be a rival, a couple of generic monsters.

“I mean, fine, yes,” Scarlet is saying. “It’s not legal to broadcast on terrestrial television here in England. The BBC wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. But it’s so famous, or infamous, everyone has heard of it. Or, or at least every one of us. I’ve never met a magical girl who hasn’t at least tried the first few episodes, it’s such a … such a big deal. I know it gets a little strange, and it’s very long, but you don’t need to insult me by pretending you haven’t—”

“I’ve never heard of this show before.”

Scarlet hisses through clenched teeth, folds her arms tighter, trying to hold herself together. “I said you don’t need to insult … ”

Raise my prosthetic arm, show off the fractured CFRN plates wrapped in carbon fibre tape. Scarlet goes quiet.

“Do you know why I use two prosthetic limbs?”

Scarlet squints, like I’ve asked a trick question. Unfolds her arms, suddenly aware of her own limbs. “Because … you … lost an arm, and a leg?”

“How did I lose them?”

Scarlet opens her mouth. Wets her lips. “I … I assumed … ”

“Extensive and regrettable collateral damage.” The words grind out from the battered engine of my heart, hotter and more difficult than ever before, wet with something I cannot name. “Shelter collapse. Killed my parents. I was ten years old. The previous Trio of Albion.”

My prosthetic hand slumps back into my lap.

Scarlet Edge is lost between dull amazement and slow realisation. You really had no idea, did you, Scarlet? You had no idea who or what I am, not a guess at the forces which made me; you assumed, like all the rest. And here I thought you were—

Different?

She hasn’t openly stared at my prosthetics; then again, she’s had three days of me lying in her bed, to get her fill of the freak.

Scarlet’s eyes wander sideways, casting back into memory. “The … the Dreamer, Beatrix Ayton,” she says slowly. “Ten years ago, that would have been the Ayton breach, yes. I … I wasn’t a magical girl yet, not back then. I was not graced that young.”

“Mm. Previous Trio.”

“Crimson Herald, Spring-in-Bloom, and Emerald Gaze.” Scarlet nods. “Were you ever informed who exactly was responsible?”

“No.”

Scarlet takes a deep breath; a settled peace comes over her, eyes distant. “A lot of people died in the Ayton breach. Civilians mostly, but several magical girls. Switchback Hexagram, Seventeen Ophelia, World-Wand, and Truth In Light.”

“You know them all by heart?”

Scarlet shoots me a sudden searching look. “And I assume you don’t. You were lucky, Octavia. A lot of people died that day.” She straightens her back, raises her chin. “You probably would have died too, if not for their sacrifice. You owe them—”

“Owe them?” I hiss.

Scarlet doesn’t back down. Her eyes flicker and spark with righteous certainty, dancing motes of blood-red deep behind the grey. Her face masks over with sharp and precise control. Here is the magical girl, England’s severe sweetheart.

“The weak owe the strong a debt of gratitude,” she says. “The mundanes are lucky that we exist, or they would all be swept away—”

“There’s a graveyard,” I say. Not loudly, but something in my voice makes Scarlet shut up. “At our hideout. It’s all magical girls. A lot of the gravestones don’t even have names. One of them is for a twelve year old girl.”

Scarlet blinks several times, like there’s something in her eyes.

“You,” I grind onward. “Or people like you, put them there, in that ground. Me and my ‘companions’, there should be dozens of us. A hundred. More. But you. You and England. You keep fucking killing them. Killing us. You’ve tried to kill me, twice.”

Scarlet is left speechless for a long and gratifying moment. Chew on that, you murdering bitch; how does it taste? My lips twitch; one push and I could have her kneel, bark on command, roll over and play dead. But then she swallows hard, eyes narrowing in swift recovery.

“Those girls were nothing like you,” she says.

“What?”

“They were weak,” Scarlet says. “They were nothing like you, or like me. That’s why they died, they weren’t—”

Strength enough flows from the engine of my heart to make a fist and slam it down against the desk. Scarlet flinches. Cutlery rattles. Water glass jumps. The zoog scurries deeper into his animal carrier. I make a mental note, must apologise to him later. Pain jars through my shoulder and down into my chest and belly, needling the open wounds hidden beneath my t-shirt. I grit my teeth and snort like an animal, keening with pain, hissing for breath, slumping forward.

Scarlet Edge swallows with considerable difficulty. One hand has flown to her mouth, to cup the mark of my teeth on her lips. She glares at me from above her fingers, resentful of the surprise.

We don’t speak for what feels like minutes. Scarlet takes a deep breath, soothes her ruffled feathers, straightens her posture. My pain ebbs down to background. Pull myself up as best I can.

“You bring out a side of me I don’t understand,” Scarlet says.

“Same.”

Eventually she lowers her eyes, looks at my prosthetic arm. “I assumed your limbs were the result of something the Dreamer did to you.”

“Willow,” I croak, still recovering from my self-inflicted pain. “Her name is Willow Finch. But you already knew that.”

Scarlet frowns, not quite caught up. “Excuse me?”

“You were ordered to guard her hospital room. Ordered to feed me to her. That’s why you were there, in the hospital.”

Scarlet’s face hardens with disgust. She refuses to meet my eyes. “I … I didn’t want any part of that. I thought I made that clear, when we spoke before, before that … that clown got in my way—”

“Grimgrave. Saved my life. From you.”

Scarlet huffs. “I broke with my orders! I was trying to give you a clean death!”

“You did.” Even I can’t deny that. “Who gave the orders?”

Scarlet shoots me a dark frown. “That’s classified information. I’m not going to unfold to you the entire internal structure of Dream Control and the MGNR board and—”

“The what board?”

Scarlet hesitates, then relents. “The Magical Girl National Relations Board. MGNRB. Knowing the name won’t help you, it’s not any kind of secret.”

“What is all this, if it’s not you helping me?”

Scarlet stares. I stare her right back down. But she won’t bend on this, apparently.

Another soggy spoonful, slow and careful. Chew. Swallow. Gone cold, doesn’t matter. I let the spoon click against the plate. “You’ll patch me up and feed me lunch, let me sleep in your bed. But you won’t tell me who gave the orders to feed me to a Dreamer.”

Scarlet looks away, like this is beyond debate.

“Scarlet. I said—”

“There are names I can’t speak here,” she hisses. “I’m surprised you spoke yours earlier.”

“My … you mean Dream-God names? You mean Nerys?”

“Yes!” Scarlet hisses, gone stiff. “Are you trying to summon her attention on purpose!?”

“Wouldn’t say no. She’d get me out of here, at least.”

Scarlet sneers. “But she isn’t responding, is she? She’s a filthy little pretender, throwing you away like this. You can’t trust Dream-Gods, any of them. Don’t tell me you lot, you and your … so-called friends, don’t tell me you actually trust her?”

“You don’t trust whatever Dream-God made you a magical girl?”

Scarlet shrugs, folds her arms. “Not to keep your presence a secret. They don’t think like we do, Octavia. They have agendas of their own, they see further than us, and they have no compunctions against the grandest of lies. My … mine would have no sympathy for this … lapse in my judgement.” Scarlet huffs, looks away, swallows hard. “As she shouldn’t, I suppose.”

Having doubts about letting me live? Don’t voice that one. Don’t give her ideas. I’m still near-helpless. If Scarlet decides she would like me better gasping through bubbles of my own blood, with her hands buried in my entrails, then she could have me that exact way, and I wouldn’t be able to stop her.

We’re probably already compromised anyway; likely the room is bugged or watched or there’s a team of occultists keeping tabs on Francesca Fairfax, or perhaps a Dreamer knows all about my presence here. Willow knew about our little late-night cyber-session. DC probably knows where I am. We’re having a lovely little play-date, Scarlet and I, but who are we kidding here?

But then, why aren’t I dead?

“Pretender,” I echo.

“What? Yes?”

“Pretender. One of you called Nerys that once before. Maybe more than once, I don’t remember right now. What does it mean?”

“That’s also classified information, but I’ll tell you anyway.” Scarlet sighs, shrugs, doesn’t seem to care. “You deserve to know what your patron god is up to. She’s trying to overthrow Britain.” Scarlet lets that statement stand, like I’m supposed to react somehow; when I don’t, she carries on. “We think it’s only her, but she might have other god or god-like accomplices. She’s the core of a network of conspiracy, a complex web of plots to overthrow the proper order. She’s trying to usurp the natural Dream-Gods of the British Isles, and place herself on the throne, or perhaps abolish it all together.” Another pause. “Octavia?”

“Who told you that? Your god?”

“You think I’m lying.” Scarlet huffs.

“No. I think you’re right. Because it’s what I want to do as well.”

Scarlet freezes, stares at me with a new kind of surprise, wondering what manner of creature she has allowed into her home and her bed. But then she recovers, her surprise shifts, as if turning inward. She shrugs. “I suppose that makes … sense, from you. I suppose.”

I shovel a few more spoonfuls of spaghetti and wet toast into my mouth, concentrate on chewing and swallowing, blotting out the taste of three-day old dried blood. Drain the glass of water, cool fluid sluicing over the tired engine of my heart. Eating still doesn’t feel right, like my body hasn’t quite remembered how to be meat.

Scarlet clears her throat, speaks with stiff formality. “What is your relationship to the Dreamer?”

“Willow?” I croak.

“Yes.”

“Classified information.”

Scarlet huffs so hard I half expect her to choke; how satisfying to see her flustered. “Oh for— you don’t have— you—”

“You seriously don’t know?”

Scarlet looks pinched with anger. “We were given only the most basic explanation. I can make educated guesses, but seeing as you’re right here, I figured I might as well ask! But if you’re going to be like that, don’t bother. Why do I even bother asking? You’re so … so … ”

Consider Scarlet, trailing off with her haughty little huff, failing to conceal the depth of her curiosity. She’s desperate to know me. What kind of person is offering to take in hand the other end of her invisible leash?

She would gain no advantage by knowing about Willow and I, no leverage that I can see. She is perhaps one of the few people in the world who has nothing to gain over me. She is a butcher of my would-be sisters and an enforcer for the British state, a blood-soaked butcher who has taken visible pleasure in running me through on her sword. But she has no power over me, and that is both baffling and intoxicating.

“Alright,” I croak. “You wanna know about me and Willow. Here’s me and Willow.”

I start at the beginning — the real beginning, the one I don’t remember, when Willow and I met in the hospital at ten years old, both of us disfigured and desperate. Then onto the decade of dreams and the perfect friendship that never really was, the things I believed that Willow shared with me in the private darkness of our hearts, and the true darkness in which I was kept, the false Willow who loved me as more than a friend and less than anything else.

I do my best not to editorialise or censor or soften; truth comes easily when This Machine lies in such tenuous wreckage. Scarlet listens in silence as I tell her about the sex that never really happened, the endless times Willow and I knew each other in quiet places, and how it’s all faded into a mass of rot now that she is gone from the inside of my head. I tell her about Willow Finch, the reality and the dream, the little girl and the Dreamer. My voice is like a puffing steam engine, chugging along with the boiler down low. Pause a few times, to shovel in the last few bites of food. Refill my water glass from the jug, chuck that down onto the ashes.

Willow Finch, the reality and the dream, the little girl I could not save, the Dreamer who kept me as her pet.

Who I have now failed.

“And there’s a whole cabal of them,” I finish. “Dreamers, Lucid Dreamers, whatever you call them. They have her now. Suppose they always did, if she’s one of them. You saw them, yeah? On the Parliament building steps?”

Scarlet has gone very still and a little pale. She takes a breath, doesn’t sound quite awake. “I didn’t … see them myself, no, but … ”

“But you already know they exist.”

Scarlet swallows. “That’s classified information. I’m … I’m sorry.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Scarlet can’t meet my eyes. I press the attack. “Who sent the cats?”

Scarlet’s eyes snap up, confused, alarmed. “Cats? What cats? Where did you see a cat?”

“The big cats. Big grey ones.”

Scarlet sits up, sits forward. “What cats, where?!”

Weigh my options; she’s telling the truth, she has no idea, but she would know those cats if she saw them. “Willow came after me. A pair of massive grey cats came with her, tried to kill me. She claimed she didn’t bring them. Wasn’t her.”

Scarlet goes very still, brows knitting tight, eyes elsewhere. Her lips move through silent words.

“Scarlet. Who sent the cats?”

She holds up a hand, palm out, face hard. A stop.

“Scarlet—”

“Not your Dreamer!” she hisses. “Okay? I can’t talk about this with you. I … I will deal with this.” She puts a hand to her forehead, agitated in a way I haven’t seen yet, as if she’s just realised something that’s been staring her in the face all this time. Her Dream-God?

Hard to care. I turn back to my food, scrape up the last few fragments of toast, let the spoon clatter on the plate. Scarlet can have her crisis of faith by herself, I have to get back to Plato Base; the longer I’m down here the greater my chance of being found by somebody I do not wish to be found by. And there’s so much fallout, the zoogs and Tissy, Willow and the Lucid Dreamers, so much to tell the others. And I want to see Grimgrave, I need a dose of her relentless energy. I want Grimmy. What an idea. Deal with that later.

Isn’t there something I’m forgetting?

“The girl!” I splutter. Scarlet flinches, jerks round, boggles at me. I almost claw my way out of the chair; I would launch myself across the intervening six paces and grab Scarlet by the collar if I could. “Where is she?! Where’s the girl!?”

“Shhhh, shhh!” Scarlet hushes me. “Nobody else is in right now, but—”

“The girl!” I hiss.

“ … who?”

“From the fight, the girl! The young woman. The girl who got her arm cut off. Willow’s new victim.”

Scarlet shrugs. “I— I don’t know where she is now—”

“Then what did you do with her?!” I grab the edge of the desk, feel my engines catching, trying to start, longing to hurl myself at Scarlet. If she didn’t help that girl, I’ll strangle her to death, wounds or no. “I gave her to you, Scarlet! What did you do, what did you—”

“I handed her off, alright!?” Scarlet hisses back at me. “It was the middle of a Nightmare, and you needed assistance against the Dreamer!”

“Handed her off? What?”

“To other magical girls. To … uh … Highwind and Blossom’s Passing. They took her, I don’t know where. She would have been picked up during the cleanup afterwards. She’s probably in some hospital now, or—”

“She’ll be in an I&O cell. Fuck!”

Scarlet squint-frowns, doesn’t get it. “What? Why would she be in custody?”

“Or worse,” I spit. “You really don’t get it, do you? How can you not know this, Scarlet? You’re Scarlet fucking Edge! She was caught in the middle of a Nightmare. She saw a Lucid Dreamer up close. Willow wanted her as a surrogate replacement for me! They’ll probably put a bullet in her, let alone stuff her in an I&O cell. Or maybe just hand her off to those Dreamers. Fuck. Fuck! You really don’t understand? Fuck you, Scarlet. You don’t understand anything. I was starting to think you were … fuck, I don’t know. Better. Better than this.”

Scarlet surges to her feet and towers over me, shoulders back and eyes blazing. I brace, ready for a slap across the face.

But then she turns and marches off across the room, pulling her mobile phone from the pocket of her jogging bottoms. She unbolts the door, throws it wide, and steps out into the corridor. It closes behind her with a soft click.

“Huh.” I share a glance with the zoog, through the bars of his animal carrier. “Think I touched a nerve?”

He replies with a little rasp, goes back to munching on his dry food.

Scarlet’s gone for what feels like twenty minutes, though I don’t have any way of telling, not unless I want to risk my phone. I toy with that briefly, weigh it in my right hand, hope it’s not damaged beyond repair; all those photos I took of my transformed self down in the shelter better not be lost. With a sigh I give up the idea, not worth it. My right hand moves over to the chunk of black steel, so obviously taken from my armour. How can this still exist now I’m untransformed? Scarlet’s made no effort to hide it, perhaps she didn’t mean to take it. I tap it for a moment, but nothing happens, it doesn’t flow like ferrofluid to rejoin my body. Better not leave it here though.

Up to my feet again, I hobble halfway back to the bed, hissing at the pain in my stump, but then I get curious. What’s the view like from Scarlet’s bedroom windows? The skylight still shows a clear blue day. Carefully I inch over to the nearest window, avoiding the mess on the floor, and peek around the edge of a curtain.

A sliver of lawn and flowerbed, a hint of stone wall, thick green woods beyond. Sunlight so bright it hurts my eyes. Could be anywhere.

Back to the bed, careful as possible. The chair is comfortable enough, but Scarlet’s not wrong, I need to lie down and rest and recover, I’m not going anywhere like this, not yet. The food has restarted dozens of suspended processes and cleared out the dried blood in my throat; I can actually smell the room now, thick with unwashed flesh. Ah, that would be mine.

Scarlet returns, still standing tall, locks us in again. She strides across the room, phone in hand. Stares at me with pinched eyes, fire behind her face.

“You were right,” she says, sharp and clear. “I was wrong.”

“About?”

“The young woman. She was taken to hospital at first, but yesterday she was moved to Dream Control Oxford Headquarters.”

“Huh. Well. There you go.”

Scarlet shakes her head, brows drawn in tight. “It’s not that I can’t believe it,” she says. “I’m not a fool, whatever you think of me. But I handed that girl off, personally. I, me. Scarlet Edge.” She taps her chest with a finger. “Highwind and Blossom aren’t half the magical girls I am, yes, but they’re still us. They still deserve respect. And those snivelling little … they just … ” Another shake of her head. She stares at her phone, as if she can make it give up answers. “They can’t do this.”

“Changed your tune,” I grunt.

“What? Pardon?”

“First time we met, you told me to accept my death. Remember? And for what? Because I was exposed? Because I might be a Dreamer? Because I was a rival magical girl? Now you’re angry about one innocent bystander?”

Scarlet straightens up. Fire flashes red behind her eyes. “Entirely different circumstances. If that young woman is now a risk, I would take the necessary steps myself. I will do it gladly. There’s no need for this … this … this sordid grubbing!”

“ … you’d kill her, you mean, for being a weakling?”

Scarlet starts to answer. She must see the look in my eyes, because she stops herself, words unsaid. Corrects herself. “For being a threat. Something that must be removed. I wasn’t lying to you when I said I would make it quick and painless.”

“Ahhhh,” I say. “But you’d love it if she resisted, right? ‘Cos then you’d get to stick her, like you did with me.”

“Argh!” Scarlet grunts through clenched teeth. “You’re— you— it was different with you! You’re unique, Octavia! I couldn’t— you—”

“What’s her name?” I ask.

“What?”

“Her name. The girl. Her name?”

“I don’t— Summer-something, I didn’t pay attention to that part.”

“Summer-something?” I almost scoff, but the motion makes my torso ache. “Call back. Whoever you were talking to, call them back, find out her name.”

Scarlet rolls her eyes. “I can’t do that now, it’s already suspicious that I asked in the first place.”

“Call back. Find out.”

“Later. Later!”

We stare. She tries not to give up. But This Machine is immovable in repose, and she is only Francesca Fairfax. Eventually she swallows and dips her head to her phone.

“I’ll send a text message, alright?” she mutters. “That’s the best I can do right now.”

“Good girl,” I mutter.

Her head snaps up, not quite sure she heard right. She slowly returns to her phone, thumbs tapping away.

Rest. Recover. Sleep. The question is not ‘can I risk lying down and closing my eyes’; with Scarlet Edge guarding me, there is no place I wouldn’t be safe to sleep. The question is will it do any good? This isn’t a Dreamland overlap, no matter how unreal it seems. My body doesn’t feel truly alive, no fullness to my belly, no pressure in my bladder, no need to move my bowels even after three days on my back. Everything is off-line, This Machine running minimal station-keeping, all the food just tossed into the hungry furnace of my heart.

But I can’t afford that now.

“Nerys,” I rasp out loud. “Nerys?”

Scarlet finishes her text message and puts her phone on the desk, next to mine. “Your patron obviously isn’t coming.”

“I’m not talking to you, Scarlet,” I grunt. “Nerys. Nerys, if you can hear me, I need you to go save that girl. Nerys? She’s exactly where I was. Nerys. Nerys! Uh, my throat, fucking … Nerys. I can’t … I can’t let Willow … can’t let them do that to somebody else. Nerys. Please.”

“Lie down,” says Scarlet.

No Nerys, no help, no way out. No way to save my replacement.

Ah, but there is one way to give me a quick jolt of juice. Enough to power translocation, get me back to Luna? Could tell the others about the girl from the fight. Grimmy would understand; Grimmy would fight for her.

“Octavia,” Scarlet hisses. “Lie down. If you don’t sleep, you won’t recover, not with those wounds.”

Scarlet’s lips are thin and pale — still so beautifully marred by the imprint of my teeth, a bruise she can’t forget. I try to imagine the logical next step, but my mind judders to an uncomfortable halt.

“Alright, fine! Sit there if you like. Octavia? Octavia? Are you … you’re not breathing. Octavia!”

Can’t say the words, can’t even think it. Food has inched me up toward coherency just far enough to rob me of carefree courage.

Kiss Scarlet Edge for the sake of girl juice? I’d be as bad as Willow. No, I want something else from her, something sharper and rougher, that I cannot achieve while I’m full of holes and wobbly on my feet. Besides, girl juice transfer apparently won’t work unless we’re both enjoying the process.

Deep breath. Hurts my ribs and half my flesh. “Breathing fine,” I mutter. “Calm down.”

A sharp huff. “Lie down. For—”

“Been lying here for three days already. What did you do all that time, huh? Watch me sleep? What would you have done if I was in a coma, if I never woke up? What then? Kiss me, like sleeping beauty?”

Can’t say it straightforward.

Scarlet steps back and folds her arms over her chest. “You’re a magical girl, that’s not how it works. Lie down.”

Limp and loose, I raise my prosthetic arm, then my burned and fleshy left. “I want to get cleaned up. Need to … take my limbs off, clean out the … the gunk. Wrap up my right to keep it together. Got any duct tape?”

Scarlet scoffs. “You can’t walk to the shower, let alone stand up in it. And your wounds are still open, how many times do I have to repeat that? You think you’re in pain right now? Put those under running water and you’ll wish I’d tied you down. No, you cannot take a shower, Octavia. Lie down.”

“Not even gonna let me brush my teeth?”

A huff so sharp I’m surprised she doesn’t cut her tongue on it, coupled with an abortive little stamp of frustration; one point to me. “It doesn’t matter!” she snaps. “Hasn’t anybody explained these things to you? You’re a magical girl. Infections mean nothing to you now, as long as you still have energy. Tooth decay is impossible.”

“Bad breath isn’t?” I open wide and breathe at her, though she’s too far away for even the most determined halitosis beam attack. That earns me another eye-roll. “Bring me a toothbrush. And a mug with water. Something to spit into.”

Scarlet wrinkles her nose. “You’re serious?”

“Bring me a toothbrush.”

“ … ”

“You want me to lie down and rest. Bring me a toothbrush.” A nasty smirk creeps onto my face, a foreign expression. Feels good. “Your’s will do, if you’ve not got any spares.”

Scarlet Edge regards me with naked disgust. A few weeks ago, a look like that from a woman like her would have had me crawling on my belly in supplication, pleading for mercy, mewling like a kitten, thankful for the touch of her shoe on the back of my head. Now it just provokes mirth, hardens my resolve. If I was well and whole, I would reach out and grab her by the chin. If I could stand, I would knock her down, and she would enjoy it.

I win. Scarlet throws up her hands and stomps off to the walk-in closet again, vanishes into the bathroom beyond. A moment later she re-emerges with a spare toothbrush still in the packaging, a half-used tube of toothpaste, and a perfect white mug like something from a showroom shower. She eviscerates the toothbrush packaging and tosses the rubbish on the floor.

“If you ask me to brush them for you,” she hisses, “I will not forgive you.”

“Later,” I grunt.

She waits with such delicious impatience while I brush my teeth, but she obeys when I hold out the mug for more water to swish around my mouth, and takes the result from me once I’m done, leaving the toothbrush and the mug on her desk.

“Mmmm. Better. Mouth doesn’t feel like rotten leather anymore,” I mutter, running my tongue over my teeth. “See? Wasn’t so hard. Thank you.”

“Lie down.”

The bed of fresh towels is very tempting. Belly still doesn’t feel full, and I’m not sleepy, not like normal exhaustion. This Machine is creaking and grinding, needs repairs.

“Check my wounds?” I ask.

Scarlet goes very still. “There’s … no point. I told you, you’re not at risk of infection, your body doesn’t work like that anymore. I cannot believe your patron or your companions have failed to explain this to you. Your wounds don’t need treating, they need rest.”

“I want to know how long until I’m healed enough to get clean. Just lift my … ”

Lift my t-shirt, look at my back. But you don’t want to touch me, do you, Scarlet? At least not while I’m awake.

I trail off, give up, shake my head. Scarlet straightens up, spared confrontation with her own discomfort.

Instead, I nod at the animal carrier and the zoog inside. “How about you let him out?”

Scarlet wrinkles her nose. “What? No!”

“It’s cruel, keeping zoogs caged,” I say. “They’re sapient, no different to you or me. How would you feel, if somebody put you in a cage?”

Francesca’s right hand flutters upward; at first I assume she’s going for the bruise around her lips again, but her hand goes to her throat. She stares at me, distant, absent.

“ … Francesca?”

An intake of breath, like waking up. “No. No, of course I won’t let that thing out. I can’t have it messing and pissing all over my bedroom floor, don’t be ridiculous. And I expect you to take it with you when you leave! I’m not finding a home for it.”

But you treated his wound and saved his life, didn’t you? Because he’s mine?

Not enough strength left for that argument. Before Scarlet can recover her composure and repeat her entreaty, I slowly draw my legs up onto the bed; if she tells me to ‘lie down’ again, then I won’t, I know I won’t, so I move before she can say anything. Pain draws a sharp hiss from between clenched teeth, deep structures inside my torso displeased by the motion. But then I lower myself downward, prosthetic arm doing most of the work, towels catching and cushioning the aching wreckage of my back. A sigh goes out of me.

Lying down’s not so bad after all.

Scarlet’s face wavers into my peripheral vision, frowning sharply.

“Not as if I’ll be able to sleep again,” I mutter, staring at the ceiling. “Had enough of sleep.”

Scarlet sighs, rolls her eyes. “It’s not as if you have anything else to do.”

“I dunno. Could stay awake. Irritate you, to entertain myself.”

A sharper sigh. “Are you always like this?”

“Only for you, Scarlet.”

“Just sleep.”

“No.”

~~~~~~~

Consciousness grudges me less on second awakening, perhaps because I surrendered to sleep without a rearguard. I don’t recall dropping off, just Scarlet’s frustrated face in the blink before oblivion.

Darkness shrouds the bedroom, surfaces sunk in soft shadow. Curtains show no hint of sun, the skylight black with night. Electric penumbra flickers from the far end of the room, cold ghost-light muttering to itself, throwing half-seen shapes into deeper shade, outlining my feet near the end of the bed.

Voices. I’ve been woken by voices. Whispers barely above hearing, high-pitched and artificial, words I can’t make out.

In … is that Japanese?

Lifting myself from the towel-wrapped pillow is a little easier than before; sleeping through the whole afternoon and early evening has mended my deepest core, transmuted spaghetti and meatballs on soggy toast into more of Octavia. I prop myself up, quivering with effort, and squint against blue-tinted witchlight.

The massive television at the far end of the room glows with brightly coloured cartoon chaos, sound turned down to a trickle. The pair of sofas are cast into stark shadow, a hunched figure outlined by flickering light.

Almost can’t figure out what I’m looking at. Anime characters move across the screen, strange without context. Then I recognise two of them: ‘Pastel’ and ‘Neon’.

Somebody sniffs, loud and wet.

“Scarlet?” I croak.

The hunched shape on the sofa explodes as if hit with an electric shock, scrabbles for a remote, pauses the anime. A dark phantom lurches upright, panting for breath, sweeping hair out of its face, caught side-on by electric glow, stares back at me with eyes glinting wet. She blinks several times, then scrubs at her face, tries to wipe away the evidence.

Scarlet Edge has been crying.

Sitting up takes a while; my insides still creak and groan, broken pieces grinding hard, flesh shivering around knots of unmended damage. But I get there without drooling or spitting blood or puffing like a broken engine. Once I’m up, I carefully manoeuvre my legs over the side of the bed, feet on the carpet. Solid ground, the only real thing in this haze of night and shadow.

Francesca waits, puffy-eyed, dyed down one side with cold blue glow. Her hair looks pale and colourless in the light. When she speaks, her voice is sharp, brittle, distant.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” she says. “I thought keeping the sound down would be enough.”

A nod at the television. “What’s it called again?”

She glances at the screen, currently paused on a pair of magical girls having some kind of battlefield heart-to-heart in the middle of a bombed-out building. Scarlet’s face is caught in profile, framed by electric glow, eyes wet, mouth uncertain. “Majohiko? I told you about it earlier, you—”

“Don’t recall the name. Kinda tired.”

Scarlet takes a deep breath. “Mahou Shoujo no Himitsu Kokoro.”

Questions are too obvious to voice. Either Scarlet will tell me, or she won’t.

“I was just rewatching … I mean, I don’t know why … I’ve never … it’s never made me … not like this, I … it’s too … ”

Can’t meet my eyes. Can’t catch herself. Tears gather in her voice, choking off her words. She seems so fragile, one arm folded across her belly, shoulders hunched. How can this woman be Scarlet Edge? England’s rose-red heartthrob, the terror with a blade of ruby fire, the beauty on a million posters in ten million teenage bedrooms. The sadistic killer who tried to negotiate my willing surrender, and then ran me through with a sword when I resisted. The berserk monster who almost overpowered Grimgrave.

Crying alone, watching magical girl shows in the dark.

A laugh now would destroy her, leave her with a mortal wound to be exploited later; she has never shown this side of herself to anybody, is not willingly showing it now. This Machine could reach through the crack in her armour and tear out her heart, and Scarlet Edge would never again pose a threat.

I can’t do it. Even if the hottest of my anger had not been spent on Willow, I would not be able to laugh here.

“Francesca,” I croak. “Want somebody to watch it with you?”

Francesca raises her head, eyes wide in the glowing dark, side-lit by the pale television. “You’re just saying that. You aren’t interested.”

“Might be. Try me.”

A long silence. “Would you … would you really like to?” A hard, wet swallow. A sniff. A quiver in her voice. “We can start from the beginning? It’s not much past ten right now. We could watch the start, or maybe more, or … as much as you like, I … I’m not tired … I … ”

“Mm. Slept enough.”

Up to my feet with a mote more strength than earlier, enough to take slow, shuffling steps without risk of falling; This Machine is still battered and bruised and barely functional, but that’s enough for me to cross to the desk, down a glass of water, then turn and plod toward the television and the sofas and Scarlet.

She stares at me, a phantom oozing through the dark. Then she realises this is really happening and jerks into action. She grabs more towels and arranges them over one end of the sofa, so I won’t smear the cushions with blood. She hovers around me, afraid I might fall, hands like nervous birds. But I lower myself down onto the sofa without assistance, a creaking mass of parts held together with scabs and spit.

Scarlet hesitates when she realises her mistake; she’s set me up on the sofa directly facing the screen, the one on which she was sitting, at the far left edge, wedged against the armrest. Awkwardly she sits down on the right, with less than an arm’s length between us.

She picks up the remote. “I can turn it up a bit. My parents are home now, but their bedroom is at the opposite end of the house. They never bother me, not this late. Or not at all, really.”

“Mm.”

“We’ll start from the beginning, then. I think that would be best, you need all the set-up to understand the payoff.” She cancels the current episode, pulls up an animated blu-ray menu, all sweeping pinks and purples, cartoon magical girls peeping from behind the buttons. “Technically there’s a prequel episode, but it’s only five minutes long and it wasn’t made until after the show, so I don’t think it should really come first. We’ll skip that.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Do you understand Japanese honorifics? The subs — subtitles, that is — they don’t translate the honorifics, because honorifics shouldn’t be translated, there’s too much nuance lost, especially when they matter so much to how characters talk to each other, and in Majohiko it really does matter. I don’t think it’s worth switching to the official English Language subs, they’re not as good, they—”

“I’ll pick it up as we go.”

“Right. Okay.” Scarlet settles her shoulders back against the sofa, tense and tight in my peripheral vision. “Let me know if you need me to … pause it, or anything.”

“Mm.”

“Do you want to use the bathroom first?”

Still don’t feel like a living thing, processes on pause. My body has taken all that water and turned it to steam. “No.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind—”

“Mm. Sure.”

“Well. Okay. Okay. Let’s … let’s begin.”

Scarlet presses play.

‘Majohiko’ — Magical Girl’s Secret Heart, or perhaps The Secret Hearts of Magical Girls, depending on the translation — is, at first, exactly what I expect. I’ve never watched any magical girl shows before, other than a few half-remembered exposures before I lost my parents and my limbs. I’ve less than no interest in the semi-realistic western style — the ones based on real people, the docu-dramas, the Saturday morning cartoons for small children and impressionable teenagers — nor in the broader Japanese tradition of the genre, most often more purely fictional.

Majohiko fits neatly into the latter, with nary a sniff of realism. Colour-coded young women are recruited by a mascot creature from outer space, to fight some vaguely defined interdimensional invasion, spiced up with side-character comedy, complete with a cackling antagonist who dresses like a dominatrix and lives in a secret castle full of trapdoors and sci-fi torture devices. Everyone speaks half an octave too high, most of the outfits show more skin than strictly necessary, and some of the sexualised ‘jokes’ between the girls would fall foul of the censors on English broadcast television. There’s a lot of bouncing; some of these girls need to invest in a decent sports bra.

Some of the jokes aren’t bad, actually. If you like women. And tits.

But the show contains a lot more magical girls than the main sextet featured on Scarlet’s poster. A confusing whirl of two dozen characters, clashing motivations, half-followed subplots, unrequited admiration, unspoken comradeship. Half the girls appear to be secretly working for the enemy, but half the time it doesn’t matter. Three plot lines run in tandem, with seemingly three protagonists; one of them is ‘Pastel’, dressed like a cream puff in pink lace.

My attention begins to slip and waver after a few episodes. The fight scenes are decently animated, I suppose. Night wears on, sofa conforming to the half-dead weight of my body. Scarlet slowly eases forward, to the edge of her seat.

Then, across episodes seven to nine, three quarters of the cast gets killed off.

A clever plan goes terribly wrong; a regretful betrayal is revealed; a minor antagonist is more than she appeared. The first death is sudden and shocking, a bloody rupture with this style of storytelling, a magical girl overwhelmed by circumstances and beheaded by a monster — though the audience is spared the worst by a neat discretion shot of her headless corpse. After that first casualty, girls fall like wheat before the reaper as their world comes down around them. It all unfolds with a terrible inevitability, set up right from the first scene of the first episode, a plot by the true antagonist that suddenly rotates into place, clear and hard and impossible to escape. Magical girls are betrayed, overrun, taken apart, devoured. Blood and guts and gore run crimson.

Scarlet starts to shake as the slow-motion massacre takes place. Swallows dry. Can’t catch her breath. At first I think she’s enjoying it too much, but then she sobs at a particularly bitter death, bites her lower lip.

By the time it’s over, she’s panting, struggling, slow tears running down her cheeks.

Over the next six episodes, as the small hours creep into the black reaches of night, the surviving six magical girl characters draw together in the wake of their losses. Their relationships grow intense, bizarre, fixated. They declare undying love, fight back to back, give in to the need for violence so-long resisted. The show somehow never loses its sweetness, transmuting it into something more genuine.

All idea of sleep has left me, almost as rapt as Scarlet now.

At the emotional centre of the long aftermath stand Pastel and Neon. Pastel is the only protagonist left; Neon began the show as her opposite, a potential rival, a minor irritant.

But their world has changed. In episode thirteen they nearly kill each other in a jealousy-fueled mutual rage, collapsing into shared tears at the end. In episode fourteen they share a bed. Strange domesticity settles in as they wake together in a new dawn, little touches and glances animated with more care than ninety percent of the fight scenes so far—

And Scarlet pauses the episode, wheezing for breath, slow tears running down her face. She remains silent for a long time, hunched forward on the sofa, hands clasped so hard I can hear her bones creaking, eyes fixed on the carpet between her feet.

“Like I said,” she whispers eventually, voice broken. “Nothing like … nothing like us.”

“It’s fiction. Anime.”

“Yes—”

“We’re real.”

“I know!” Scarlet hisses through tight-clenched teeth, wringing her hands so hard she might dislocate a finger. “It’s fiction, it’s all fiction, it’s not ever really like that, not between anybody, ever. Never been really like that, it was all just—”

“Francesca.”

“Mm.”

“Is that what you want it to be like?”

Scarlet Edge — or Francesca Fairfax, I’m not sure which — stares at the floor between her feet in shadow-draped dark, half-lit by the television-glow, drowning in the backwash of Pastel and Neon embracing close and clean in their perfect cartoon world. Her whole body shivers, as if she might fly apart at the slightest touch.

I reach out with my prosthetic hand, so slowly that she could pull away even in her sleep; I have no real strength, still drained and injured and deep in recovery. I will not be whole for days. She could brush me off with a breath.

But she doesn’t. She goes very still the moment I place my hand against her shoulder. The shaking stops. Tears too.

“Scarlet. Is that what you want it to be like, for you? For magical girls? You want life to be like it is in the show? Like—”

“How could it be?” Scarlet hisses through hard-clenched teeth. Tears have fled her voice, replaced with ice-cold fire. She addresses the floor, lips parted, eyes blown wide.

I remove my hand from her shoulder. Feels like I’ve touched a wild animal, chased it into a corner. She might turn and snap, sink her teeth into my flesh.

“How could it ever be like that?” Scarlet repeats.

“I don’t know.”

Scarlet Edge uncoils, turns to me with wide eyes aflame, reaches out and grabs the front of my bloody t-shirt, bunches it in one iron-hard fist. The bruise around her lips glints purple as an old scar.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like,” Francesca Fairfax growls, “being Scarlet Edge?”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

I can’t really tell you, one way or the other. You’ll just have to imagine you’re Scarlet Edge.

Ahem.

Ohohohoho, Octavia has gotten in deep, hasn’t she? Whoever imagined she’d end up watching anime with her, um, ‘nemesis’? Looks like Scarlet’s a little prickly about critique though. You’re committed now, Occy. Scarlet expects an answer, and yours better satisfy.

As for the rest of the arc, it’s currently rounding out behind the scenes at about 7-8 chapters, approximately. So! There’s plenty more of this left, though I don’t expect even Scarlet and Octavia know where it’s going to go, ehehehe.

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

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! Maidens of the Fall would not exist without all of you, the audience; Octavia would never have left England, let alone ended up here. You’re the ones providing the power, I’m just a conduit for these magical girls. Thank you all so much!

Next chapter, Scarlet wants to know. Can you imagine what it’s like, being her? Well? Can you?

Content Warnings

Gore
Suicidal ideation [MAJOR] (but also metaphorical)
Internalised ableism

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Dream. Dark as death and deep as forever. A ceaseless river both blood-warm and ice-cold, clogged thick with red-black clots, carrying me down and down and down.

Pressure against my back bends me double, curls me into a tight and creaking ball, cores me like a rotten apple. Ancient routines of flesh reach cruel through dreaming darkness, to remind this avatar of agony that it is not yet without material context. I still exist, submerged somewhere between the waking world and the precipice of eternity. On a bed of tar I float downriver, a shattered kernel of useless scrap cushioned by my own spilled entrails and sheets of scab. Faces congeal from the black — people I’ve known, people I haven’t, words that are not words, speech which communicates nothing from nothing to nothing.

Pain drives me deeper into dream, through quasi-memory of places known and out into pure abstract thought, where I rotate puzzle pieces in the dark for centuries on end, trying and failing to make anything fit, completing nothing, achieving less. Cautious visitors linger side-on and lurk peripheral, lost to direct sight, faces smeared under scrutiny, jealous of the focus, afraid of the attention.

Sometimes current betrays, forces me closer to the surface. Pain sharpens claws most terrible on the whetstone of my guts, rakes my back with red-hot iron, opens holes right through me. Light leaks from beyond, intrudes on darkness, threatens me with flesh.

Wet weak whimpers. Snorting and spluttering, snivelling and self-smothering. Taste of dried blood. Scent of burnt oil. Nails in my spine.

I claw back down into the dark, into red-black refuge.

Pain ebbs onward, but I am distant.

Dreaming.

~~~~~~~

A long time later — after the turning of entire stellar ages, when the stars have come round once again to wake me from death — dream clarifies and condenses, remembers itself as solid ground.

Upon which I suddenly stand.

A park, in a barren season. Leafless trees gone brittle and grey. Dead grass, frozen ground. Tarmac pathways cracked and crumbled, colonised by pale moss and slime-soaked lichen. Broken brick walls mark the boundary, topped by iron railings once melted, now set and sagging. High-rise towers in the middle distance have peeled open, glass and steel parting and flowering like blossoms in spring, discoloured and dripping with hues that cannot be dreamed in the waking world, a riot of pulsing purples and quivering yellows and the sickly orange of exotic rot. Around their roots an ocean boils, slopping and bubbling, writhing and roiling, sending the occasional questing tendril up the flanks of the towers-in-bloom. Their tips shimmer and shiver against a backdrop of blood-froth skies, a whirlpool of shed claret and liquefied ruby, speckled with diamond-flecks in glittering white.

Beyond the park, beyond the towers, beyond even the sky — in some fashion that makes no sense beyond a dream — stands a wall.

For this wall, dream is not enough; even broken rules cannot hope to contain it. Vast beyond measure, too tall for gods to cross, thick as a continent, it stretches from one end of reality to the other, buckling the surface of the dream. It is made from a single piece of material, grey and red and black and white and flesh and bone and wood and stone and more, all at once. A statement embodied: that some boundaries can never be crossed. There are gulfs in the universe which will forever remain unplumbed. Laws that are enforced simply by the fact of their own existence, akin to gravity or time.

The wall lies ruined.

Shattered dead centre, as if by a cannon-blow beyond imagination, a wide and crumbling canyon carved right through the middle. From that initial mortal wound a trillion cracks have spread, spider-webbing the wall’s perfection until great gouges and chunks have fallen away, matter flaking like a skin disease, the top edge eroded and chipped, the whole mass slumping with subsidence. The fall has not yet finished; the wall is coming down still, like a tidal wave in slow motion, collapsing inch by inch over a span longer than any dreaming mortal can envision.

From that first great breach and the billion comorbidities flows a discharge of prismatic plasma, boiling off and misting and freezing, slopping down a million miles to pool and collect on this side of the wall, feeding the liveliness that has begun to grow and spread at the broken base. Other things pass through the wounded wall too — scudding and scrabbling and skittering, parading and preening and pirouetting, a constant trickle of gods and monsters from the infinite beyond.

But what lies on the far side of that wall, even dream will not show. Eyes refuse the sight.

A single chunk of broken wall lies not far off, on the frozen ground of the dead park, twenty feet away. Shimmering like pearl crossed with bone, coated in a thick layer of oil, lit from within by pale fire. Wood and glass and living flesh all at once. Chalk and umber and gone when you blink, there when you look. A little piece of eternity, cast down in the dirt.

“The wall itself,” says a voice, smooth and deep, irritatingly familiar. “Though this is only a metaphor, the sign is not the signified. Risky to make that mistake, wouldn’t you agree? Especially here.”

Turn my head. Neck feels like rusted iron.

Winter — the occultist, whatever she calls herself — stands a few feet to my right. She looks no different to when I encountered her out in the Nightmare, still dressed in her long black habit, throat bandaged, hands gloved. She seems taller somehow; no, it’s just that I’m stooped, half-hunched with damage.

Winter meets my eyes, her own deep as coal-pits, lips creased with curious amusement.

“Octavia,” she says, greeting me with mild surprise. “Are you lucid?”

“ … this is … a dream?”

My voice is a scrape of twisted metal, moved by great effort. Speaking wakes the rest of me; suddenly my breath stutters up from my chest, the catch and flutter of a failing engine. Heart full of metal shavings, labouring to turn. Feet rooted to the spot; one step would send me sprawling, scatter me as loose components.

This Machine is badly broken.

Winter smiles wider, darkly amused at somebody’s expense. “My goodness, there you are. Lucid before the brink.”

“This is a dream,” I crunch out. “You’re in … a dream. You’re a Dreamer. You lied.”

Winter raises her eyebrows in mock-surprise. “You’re in this dream too. Does that mean you are also a Dreamer?”

“My dream. You’re just in it.”

Winter shakes her head. “Such innocence. No, I do not think you would lay claim here, if you knew where you stood. This dream belongs to nobody, certainly not either you or I. Unless you are far greater than you’ve been letting on. And I don’t think you are, not in that specific way. Are you?” Winter doesn’t wait for an answer. She gestures with one gloved hand. “We are on the outskirts of the dream. The Dreamlands. We are right at the border, before the final crossing. Do you understand?”

“ … huh. And that … that wall … ”

Winter nods slowly, casts her eyes across the vastness ahead. She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs, savouring some quality of the air I cannot taste.

“The wall of sleep,” she says. “Forever breached. Beyond even the gods to repair. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Silence lingers, gives me time to rotate my rusted neck, to look up at the wall which once bisected reality. A barrier that no human mind could hope to cross, were it not for that breach right down the middle. Surely it is too large to be contained, either here or in the waking world. It will fall, crush me flat if I dare creep closer. Except it doesn’t, because it has failed at being a wall.

Subtle pressure mounts behind my legs, a sea-current dragging at my calves, urging me to step forward.

“Though, it is only a metaphor,” Winter says. “The wall of sleep is not a literal thing. There is no physical object, no place one can visit. A magical girl could batter herself to death searching for a place she once saw in a dream. A sad fate, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Mm.”

Winter sighs, lowers her eyes, looks closer to hand. “And this isn’t what London looks like now. This is some myth your mind has woven, to make sense of where you find yourself. Instinct has guided your imagination, because your guts know where you are. After all, this is where so many of you magical girls end up.”

“Where?”

“At the edge of the dream.” Winter’s voice dances with dark amusement. Having fun at my expense. Would slap her if I could make my arms work. “At the threshold of change. As deep as a mind can go, before the final crossing.”

“ … why?”

Don’t need Winter to tell me. I know why I’m here. Just don’t want it to be true. Wish there was some other explanation.

“Why what?” Winter asks. Knows what she’s doing. Bitch.

“Why am I here?”

“Because you’ve been defeated,” Winter reads me the inside of my own head. “Because you’ve flirted with the prospect of simply giving in, giving up, giving out. Because you still want to. Because you’ve had enough of trying. Because you see no—”

“Stop dragging it out,” I grunt. “You’re enjoying this too much.”

“Far from it. Octavia, you’re here because—”

“Because I’ve failed.”

Doesn’t seem to matter. Perhaps I’m not fully lucid after all. Or maybe I’ve already given up.

Winter lapses into long silence. Dream bubbles and flows and froths and burbles from the infinite wounds in the wall. London’s corpse writhes with new life, a roiling cauldron of possible flesh. My body ticks along, winding down, pain a distant echo from somewhere beyond. Current swirls around my ankles, trying to drag me forward.

“Do you understand what this represents?” Winter says eventually.

“Don’t care.”

“Some of us had theories. In the early days, I mean, right after it happened. The wall is — or was — an impassible barrier, the metaphysical principle of sleep itself. Not the biological principle, you understand? That’s just an echo or a reflection of the greater need, a miniature communion taken by mundane minds, the closest you can get to touching the other side from where you stand. The pre-Harding models of human consciousness, the old models of cause and effect, they hold that sleep brings dreams, we dream when we sleep, and so on. But the clue is in the name. The wall of sleep. Do you know who coined that? A pre-Harding Dreamer of no consequence, some scribbler who lived in utter obscurity. The term was right under our noses all that time. Sleep is a wall, a wall that keeps us from dreams, keeps us apart from the rest of what we are, keeps the world itself neatly in two.” A sigh, deep and longing. “But why? For our safety, for our confinement? Are we prisoners in some divine game preserve? Who can say for certain, except those who have reunited with their own greater selves? And now the question is so much broader. We never predicted that fool would do it. Harding was a nobody. We thought it impossible.”

“You gave me bad advice,” I rasp.

“Hm?” Winter blinks at me, pulled from her clouds. “Ahhhhhhh, yes. I directed you to the shelter. I surmise by your presence here that the strategy was not to your advantage.”

“No.” A pause. “Well. Maybe. Sort of.”

Winter’s smile grows by another few millimetres. “Then was it really such terrible advice?”

“Didn’t win.”

“Evidently. Hence, here you are.”

Dip my head, look down at my own body. Still transformed, but in ruins. Black steel armour is punctured and bent, great rents in my metal shell. Blood and oil has dried in long streaks down my front, a trickle of both still flowing from deep wounds. Red-black light flutters from inside me, weak and wavering, aching to extinguish.

Makes me cough. Tastes sweet and sticky.

“How bad is it?” I ask. “Out in … in the waking world?”

Winter shrugs with great eloquence. “If you’re here, that means you’ve come right to the edge, but it also means you’re alive, since one must be alive to dream. And you are alive enough to be presented with the choice, which is more than I can say for any others of your kind who came all the way here. I’ve never seen one of you so lucid, so close to the end.”

“ … choice?”

Winter waves a hand at the wall. “To become a Dreamer.”

Currents swirl and pluck at my ankles. The way through the wall is a way out; over there, I will not have failed.

“Or?”

Winter waits. I turn my head and stare at her, her features side-lit by my own guttering red-black fires. She stares back, as if there’s more to the question.

“Or?” I repeat.

“Or go back the way you came.” Winter gestures to our collective rear. “Return to the struggle, if you find it pleases you.”

Can’t easily turn my head that far, but I know what waits back that way. Pain, and lots of it. With sharp claws and long knives and a perfect memory. But pain is an old foe by now, one I’ve learned to tolerate. Pain doesn’t frighten me, it only hurts, and I have developed a great capacity for hurt. Pain will not swallow me, I will swallow it.

But once the pain is passed, it will not be only me left behind.

I will be alone with failure.

Time seeps by, or at least something that pretends to be time. Currents tug at my legs and cup my ankles, urging a step forward; lift one foot, and the pressure will do the rest. Try not to sway, not to sag any further. My eyes close several times, seconds lost to blackness. The wall shimmers and shifts, a dying coral reef doused in oil.

“Willow,” I manage. “What … what happens to … Willow?”

“Mm? Ah, your Dreamer,” Winter says. “I haven’t the faintest notion what they do with failures or lapses in judgement. There’s few enough of them that they cannot afford to idly reduce their own numbers with harsh punishments. But equally they cannot afford the appearance of weakness. They must show utter solidarity, at least outwardly, or they risk far greater collapses. She will live, I suspect. They will find her a new anchor. But she may be under lock and key. She may be … politically unreliable.” Another shrug. “I do not know her. Do you?”

Can’t even grunt. This Machine is out of fuel, and so very tired, not only from the fight, but from all the years before, the whole long waking slog of life.

How could I hope to beat an entire cabal of Dreamers? More than a cabal, in fact; the power behind the throne, the face behind the mask of Dream Control, the British state, the whole interlocking system that keeps everything beneath the boot. This Machine gave everything in the attempt to save, punish, redeem, resolve Willow Finch, one person, one Dreamer, and that didn’t work.

Anger is all used up, fuel and fumes. Barely enough left to keep the lights on. Last few embers dimming to dark, going cold.

I’ve failed. This Machine is broken. Octavia Carter is done.

I’m ready to give up.

One step forward is all it will take; I will not actually have to trek across this dream landscape to reach the wall. Just fall forwards, and the currents in the air will pick me up and carry me along and suck me swirling through the breach. No more weight of flesh, no more need for a steel shell, no more sense of failure and loss and defeat. No pain, no prosthetics. No more ‘me’ to hurt. All will cease to matter, on the far side of that wall. As a Dreamer my desires will be made manifest by nothing but will; I could conjure my own Willow from clay and sunlight and memories, and she will be just as true as the ten-year-old I never got to know. More likely I won’t care about Willow anymore, real or fake. I won’t care about anything I care about now. Desire will die. Octavia Carter will cease to exist in any way that matters. Immortality comes with the price of no more self.

One step, the easiest thing I’ve ever done. No pain, no suffering, no humiliation, ever again. No loss. No yearning. No failure.

I raise my right foot. Black steel plates scrape and squeal. And I take a step—

Backward.

All I have strength for, fighting the currents. But it’s enough. Air pressure slackens, fingers of wind giving up and sliding off my broken armour. Temptation ebbs away to nothing, knows better than to try me again, because next time I’ll strangle it dead. Pain creeps back, stabbing me in the spine; a welcome old friend, sliding to my side, ugly but reliable. I cough three times, hack and splutter with the taste of blood in the back of my throat.

“Ahhhhhhh,” Winter croons. “I’ve never seen one of you step away from the brink before. Octavia? Octavia, can you hear me?”

“Never was … any good. At. At giving up.”

“A glutton for punishment, are you?” Winter asks. She’s laughing now, a cocktail of dark delight. “Or is there perhaps some—”

“A zoog. Was in my … inside my armour. When I went down. Need to … mm. Check on it.”

“But that’s not all, is it? Octavia?”

“Women.”

Winter waits, silent, expectant.

“Women I want to fuck,” I rasp. Not the slightest bit of embarrassment. Surely I’m not lucid.

“But if you became a Dreamer, you could—”

“Wouldn’t be real. Or if they were, I’d be … like her. Willow. So, no. No. Needs to be real. Need to want it. Want to want it.”

A tiny round of applause, fingertips against gloved palm. Winter approves. Pervert.

New fuel trickles into the tanks of This Machine, thin and weak and strange, harder to harness than anger, and not very much. It forms a cocktail with the dregs of old rage, soaks them in cool fluid, transmutes them to some unfamiliar compound that my damaged heart can barely process. But it’s enough for another step back, then another, and another still.

With great and terrible effort, I turn my back on the wall of sleep.

Winter and I are very suddenly not alone. A tall dark figure strides toward us from the direction of the waking world.

Nerys — Nerys the dream-goddess, abroad in her human guise, scarred and clipped and marred by old wounds. Nine, ten, eleven feet of hunchback oil-slick crowned with a tangle of black hair, dressed in a pale gown of patchwork leather. Her long-broken ankle fetters clink and drag on the frozen ground. A massive zoog-like tail swishes back and forth in wild agitation. Claws come up. Teeth come out.

She’s on us. A hook-clawed hand closes protectively around my shoulder; her tail wraps around my waist. She interposes herself between me and Winter, god-bulk bending the dream in a tiny imitation of the wall itself. Her other hand lashes out for Winter’s face, to claw at her eyes or rend her cheeks, black claws cutting rents in the dream.

Winter is suddenly too far away, beyond Nerys’ reach. Wide-eyed but no less amused, the occultist raises her gloved hands in surrender.

Nerys opens wide and hisses loud, a deep rumbling rasp as if from a zoog grown leviathan.

“Fuck off, blood-stink shit-bitch!” Nerys screeches. “Hands to yourself! Or I’ll bite them off and shit them back out and cram my dung down your throat! Off, off! Away!”

“Oh, dream-thing, you mistake me,” Winter says, though she takes another step back. “I was only here to observe.”

“Nerys,” I rasp. “Nerys, I’m okay.”

Nerys hisses at Winter again. Tightens her grip on my shoulder.

“You really should keep a closer eye on your girls,” Winter tells her. “Octavia almost went over the edge, and you do have such a habit of losing them, don’t you? If you intended to ride to the rescue, you’re rather late for that, no?”

Nerys straightens up, fifty feet, a hundred, more. A goddess from the deep, dripping black and bending close, torture dancing in her eyes and on the tips of her claws.

“And how would you know that, you reeking thing?” she says to Winter. “I do not know you. What hole did you crawl from?”

Winter smiles wider, shrugs with knowing amusement, continues her measured retreat. Nerys can’t reach her, not without letting go of me.

“Nerys,” I rasp again. She finally glances down at me. I gesture at the exit from the park with a weak nod of my head. “Nerys, just … just help me … help me out of here.”

“Wise,” Winter says. “Very wise, dream-thing.”

Nerys gives Winter one last glance, a towering goddess looking down at an ant, then turns away. Her tail lifts my waist, and her arms support my weight. With her help, I walk.

We leave the wall of sleep far behind, passing back into the red-black river of dream.

~~~~~~~

Pain is omnipresent, but it’s not pain that wakes me; I’ve had half a lifetime of learning to sleep through discomfort, no matter how bad. Pain ebbs and flows, drags me up toward the surface and dumps me back down just past the threshold of consciousness again, over and over in a timeless stutter-cycle. Might be minutes, could be hours, probably more like days.

But no more dreams, nothing more esoteric than my own fractured imagination projected onto the inside of my eyelids. No wall, no Winter, no Nerys.

Lying on my back. Eyes gummed shut. Limbs won’t move, too heavy.

Sometimes I’m not the only person here. Another presence comes and goes, hovers over me in the dark, wipes my face. Somebody else’s breathing keeps time with my own. Never speaks, nothing more audible than a low mutter. That doesn’t wake me either, not even when the silent presence rolls me halfway onto my side, adjusts something behind my back, and lowers me down onto fresh softness.

Smell wakes me in the end, with a side-order of taste: my own blood, clotted and dried on palate and throat, rank and rancid from hours of mouth-breathing.

Consciousness finally swells up inside and floods me full, taut as a balloon filled with entrails.

“Unnnnhhhh … uuuuuuhhhhnnnn … unnh … unnnh … ”

Grunting summons nobody, hurts my throat, and worsens the disgusting sensation of bloody dried mucus clogging my pipes. My eyelids part like old scabs, reluctant and crusty. A plain white ceiling stares back down, sullen in soft shadows.

“ … ‘lo? Ow.” Voice hurts, throat like poor-quality sandpaper soaked in a sewer.

Everything hurts, my back and my insides worst; no surprise after Willow hit me with a handful of relativistically accelerated pebbles. The surprise is that I’m alive at all, rather than a rapidly cooling collection of meat chunks and superheated metal. My back feels like every muscle has been pulled and every bone has been broken, shards of the latter peppering most of my organs, flesh minced, skin ragged.

“Up,” I grunt. “Up. Get … get up. Oct— Octavia. Get up.”

Sitting up takes a long time, berating myself doesn’t make it any faster. Ten or twenty minutes float by, during which I do little more than twitch and grunt and take wet-fluttering, clotted breaths, drifting off to sleep in fits and starts, always dredged back to the surface again by throbbing pain and the taste of blood and my own bone-dry mouth sticking to itself.

“Fuckin’ … fuck … get up. Up. Up!”

‘Up’ costs dearly. Obscure parts of me pop and crack and grind, while other parts stick and peel and threaten to collapse. Pain quivers close, a raw shivering hand at my throat that squeezes out an aborted scream, a guttural rasp, panting, drooling, snorting. A lesser fool would give up and lie back down; but I’m the biggest fool there ever was, and I’ve never been much good at giving up.

Legs are easier to move, and both of them seem to be present, so I shuffle them sideways until they go over a soft edge. Bare left foot touches plush carpet.

Standing might kill me.

So I just sit here.

Edge of a bed?

Hang forward, half-hunched. My back is on fire. I drift off again, drift back clearer, drool hanging from my lips.

“Pushed … pushed yourself … too far,” I mutter. “Too much. Paying for … for it now. Now. Focus. Useless fucking cripple. Focus.”

Open eyes. Raise head. Blink hard, clear sight.

A bedroom, larger and more cluttered than any bedroom has right to be; most of my grandmother’s flat could fit in here. Plush white carpet deep enough to swim in, off-cream walls plastered from floor to ceiling with posters — ninety percent of them magical girls, English and foreign, near and far, in every kind and style, from all around the world.

At the far end of the room a pair of sofas face a massive television set mounted on a hardwood entertainment centre. Nearer to hand stands a huge desk playing host to a very expensive pre-built computer, useless for anything real, but very flash, case in white with red highlights. A matching hardwood vanity stands next to a trio of full-length mirrors, set up so the owner of the room can parade before them. Three bookcases overflow with knickknacks and paperbacks. Mess lies on every surface, clothes draped over chair-backs, hairbrushes tossed into corners, underwear and bras balled up on the floor. Somebody seems to have been sleeping on one of the sofas, blankets and a pillow wedged at an awkward angle. Two doors, one closed, one open; the latter leads into a walk-in closet, clothes overflowing from what little I can see. Not the sort of room I have ever been welcome in; the sort of woman who lives in here would look down at me like something found on the bottom of her shoe.

Three windows, heavily curtained. A skylight in the ceiling too, tinted against the bright blue beyond.

Not on Luna, then.

“‘Lo?” I try again. Clear throat. Feels awful. “Hello? Nerys? Grimmy?”

A long squint at the magical girl posters everywhere reveals no clues as to where I am, not until my eyes wander back to the vanity and the desk. The posters around those show a clear theme in red and white.

Scarlet Edge; every poster in that close corner of the room is of Scarlet Edge. Promotional photos, glamour shots, newspaper cuttings, single-frame print outs from live footage, cartoons and public information posters and more. There’s even a few pieces of high-quality fanart, one or two in a certain familiar style. On the desk, flanking the computer monitor, stand a pair of very expensive figurines, probably of Japanese make. Both are of Scarlet Edge.

“No … no way,” I mutter. “No fucking way.”

I catch sight of myself in the trio of full-length mirrors. Almost laugh.

I’m a wreck. Still wearing the clothes in which I transformed, pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, sweat-soaked and rumpled, old bloodstains all down my flanks, spotted with crimson on my front. The bed on which I have been sleeping — a massive king-sized thing all in white and pink — is packed with bloody towels, most of which seemed to have been wedged beneath my back to absorb a truly inhuman amount of dried gore. My legs are fine, prosthetic intact, though I can feel the tell-tale tightening of skin inside the socket, the gummy residue of blood from abrading my amputation site.

Upstairs is much worse. I don’t have the energy to lift my t-shirt and examine the damage; feels like parts of me might fall out if I raise my arms too far. My left forearm and hand is a mass of dark red scabs, pockmarked and peeling, the remains of a thousand burst blisters, the aftermath of radiation burns on fast-forward. My prosthetic right arm grinds and scrapes as I lift it, plates of CFRN loose and cracked, held together only by copious amounts of carbon fibre tape. But it moves fine, and my mechanical fingers wiggle well enough, so the wiring must be undamaged. I raise it higher, use it to push my greasy hair out of my face.

My insides feel wrong, organs bruised and tender, bones brittle with fractures. Heart aches, beating too hard, too slow.

“Still alive though,” I say out loud, a painful rasp. “Not a … not a Dreamer. Huh.”

The wall of sleep came to me in a dream, and I resisted temptation.

Doesn’t feel like rebirth. Feels like I need repairs.

“Fucking hell,” I rasp, try to wet my lips, saliva like tar. “Nerys? Nerys? You were in that dream, you have to be nearby. Nerys … fuck’s sake … ”

A jug of water and a plastic cup stand on the edge of the desk, placed carefully at the far opposite end from the desktop computer itself, half a dozen paces from the bed. Thirst overrules better judgement and overpowers pain long enough to get me upright. Half a dozen paces almost defeat me, but then the nearest wall comes to my aid, shores up my left flank, even as my burned hand screams at the touch. Gets me back into the fight. Half a dozen paces feels like ten miles, but my prosthetic leg does most of the work, anchors me on the final step.

My right hand is strong enough to grab the jug. The plastic cup I abandon, tip the jug back against my lips, slurp and swallow and almost choke myself on the sweetest water that has ever been, snorting and panting and wiping my lips, water speckling my front, almost falling over again as I thump the jug down.

“Nerys!” I croak and gurgle, clear my throat, hack up a bolus of dried blood and mucus. Drink again, wash it all down, drain the whole jug. “Nerys. Fuck’s sake, Nerys, you have to be here. Nerys … ”

Myself in the mirror again, a bloodstained wraith with hollow eyes, lank greasy hair framing my face, dribbling water down my own front. The worst that Octavia Carter has ever been.

Except, for the first time ever, I’m neither ashamed nor disgusted by myself.

Because I’m still This Machine. The contours of the face I saw in the shelter’s mirror, those were mine all along, the same ones that stare back at me now, slit-eyed and pale from a fancy full-length mirror. The power I had out there, thundering through concrete and broken steel, that’s still mine. At a low ebb now, but still there, pilot lights keeping time inside. Transformation is only a thought away; inadvisable right now, but not impossible.

I reach out with my right hand, up toward the face in the mirror. Trace the line of my jagged scar, the flesh around the slit of my right eye.

“Really me. That was … was really me.”

This Machine was intoxicating.

Something moves down on the desk. I would flinch if I weren’t whole dimensions beyond sore.

What I had taken as another part of the expensive computer turns out to be an animal carrier, the kind of plastic box you might herd a cat into for a trip to the vet. A narrow grey snout presses itself against the metal mesh at the front, one beady black eye angled upward to get a good look at me.

“ … little guy.” I smile despite everything, then almost laugh, but stop because of rib pain. Would drop to my knees, but bad idea, I’ll never make it upright again. “Little guy, hey, hey you.”

It’s the zoog I rescued from the Nightmare. He greets me with a wordless rasp, then scrabbles at the mesh with his front paws, claws clicking on the metal, lopsided and awkward. I ease lower, more difficult than I expected, and peer into the carrier. He’s got a food bowl and a water dish in there. His right rear leg is dragging, wrapped in white bandages, a little ragged from where he’s been chewing at them.

“Out, out, out!” he rasps.

“Yeah, yeah, out. Let me … huh?” The animal carrier has been padlocked shut. Doesn’t budge when I tug on it. “Who the fuck padlocks an animal carrier? I can’t get this open, I’m sorry, I … ”

A chunk of familiar dark metal sits next to the animal carrier, a broken scrap twisted off some larger structure, stained with dark flakes of dried blood and a thin patina of machine oil.

My prosthetic fingers click against the material when I pick it up. Heavy, dense. Damn near imperishable.

This Machine.

“A piece of me?” I mutter, putting the chunk of black steel back on the desk. “No. No, come on, no. Can’t be. Can’t … ”

A sudden echo of pain shoots from low in my belly to high on my upper back, a channel through my core more urgent and real than the full-body aches from my fight with Willow.

At the far end of the room, the door opens. But I’m not surprised. I knew exactly who was coming.

She stands framed in the doorway, wide-eyed at me up on my feet, lips parted, left hand frozen in a flutter for her throat. She catches herself, steps inside, shuts the door quickly, fumbles for a latch, a lock, a bolt; the door has all three, but I wasn’t locked in. When she’s sealed us inside she leans back against the door, as if somebody might try to break it down. Am I her dirty little secret?

Long blonde hair, thin and wispy, frames a severe face, thin-lipped, sallow-cheeked, narrow-chinned. The kind of face naturally given to sour looks and haughty sneers, though she wears neither. Dark rings of unfamiliar stress surround sharp, pinched, difficult eyes. Taller than me, skinny and bony beneath her clothes. Dressed in white jogging bottoms with red trim, and a rumpled pale red t-shirt, with long sleeves all the way to her narrow wrists.

A purple bruise lingers on part of her lips, a hungry kiss imprinted on her mouth.

She straightens up and folds her arms over her chest, a tight cage around her body. Only then does she stalk across the room without a word, watching me like a deer with a crippled wolf. She stops way beyond arm’s reach, by the foot of the bed.

Can’t be her, but there’s no other explanation. A pinprick of pressure grows inside my head, makes my eyes water, too big for my mind to contain.

An echo of pain runs from belly to back once again, the shape of a sword my body remembers.

The pin-prick of pressure pops. The sword-wound is irrefutable.

I know who this is.

Try to raise my right fist, more instinct than volition, but I get less than halfway there. One punch would shatter my prosthetic forearm beyond recovery. And what’s the point? Whatever she wishes from me, I am at her mercy.

“Scarlet,” I rasp. “Francesca.”

Scarlet Edge — Francesca Fairfax — takes a deep breath, steels herself against the task. Wets her lips. Tries to raise her chin. When she speaks it is with her head turned slightly aside, as if she expects a sudden blow.

“How long have you been awake?” she says. Sharp, precise.

“Few minutes. How long was I down?”

Scarlet doesn’t answer right away, as if this information might give me some kind of advantage. “A few days. It’s Tuesday now. August the twenty sixth. Just past two in the afternoon.”

Days? I’ve been lying on that bed for days? How did I even get here? The others — Grimmy! — must be worried sick. No, Nerys would have told them, surely? Except that dream wasn’t literal, just a metaphor. Was Nerys even really there? How can I have been lying on that bed for days without food or water or—

“Your hair,” says Scarlet.

“What? What?”

“Your hair,” she repeats, then nods at me, as if I don’t know where my own hair is located.

“What about my fucking hair?”

“It’s … it’s longer. Much longer. Than when I first saw you. I mean.”

She stares at me like there’s any possible answer to such an inane statement. I stare back at her like there’s some kind of answer I can give. But words die on the way down from my brain. The last time Scarlet and I spoke — excepting when I screamed in her face during the fight — she sent me a selfie and I made her orgasm by making her bark for me. All that seems very distant and abstract right now, like something which happened between two other people, not us.

“You shouldn’t be up,” she says, sharpening her voice with a little tut. “You should lie down. Your wounds haven’t closed yet. They go right through you, all the way through, like … like … you just shouldn’t be up. Lie down.”

“I’ve been lying down for three days, apparently,” I croak. “I’ll rest when I—”

Try to take a step forward, not sure why; am I trying to get in her face? Doesn’t work, turns into a bad stumble, a grope for the edge of the desk. Impact runs up through my torso, twists open wounds bad enough to squeeze a strangled grunt from me, heaving and panting, eyes squinted hard.

Scarlet flinches too, jerks forward, hands out but doing nothing. She backs up just as quick, like being close to me brings her pain. She’s afraid I’ll fall down, because then she’ll have to catch me. Doesn’t want to touch.

Six slow paces back to the bed. Ease myself down onto the edge of the sheets. Sitting, not lying.

Scarlet folds her arms again. “Lie down.”

I stare. Dare her to try.

“Lie down,” she repeats. “Lie … lie … ”

That’s right. You don’t give me orders. That’s not the relationship we have, is it, Scarlet?

She sighs, looks away, shifts uncomfortably. “Your wounds are … well, not extensive, but very, very deep. I counted seven exit wounds in your back, though I haven’t … I didn’t … I didn’t strip you, to check, I mean.” A sharper sigh. She turns aside, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how you’re conscious right now. You certainly shouldn’t be able to stand. Even I wouldn’t be able to get up in that condition.”

“Used to being a cripple,” I croak. “Pain and me, we’re old friends. We have an arrangement.”

Scarlet squint-frowns in confused outrage, makes no sense of that. I raise my prosthetic arm, broken plates grinding against each other, and wiggle my fingers. A rueful smile sneaks onto my face; I am more of a wreck than I’ve ever been before, an objectively ugly thing, falling apart, unwashed for days, coated with dried blood. And yet I still feel glorious. Scarlet cannot look away.

“Fine,” she clicks. “Whatever you say. But you’re still wounded, Octavia. You’re not—”

“This Machine.”

Scarlet frowns. “Pardon?”

“This Machine,” I repeat. Could explain myself, but a perverse impulse wants her to stumble. “This. Machine.”

Scarlet nods slowly, surprises me. “Your true name?” A sharp huff, strangled at the end, disapproval averted. “Unconventional. But everything about you is unconventional. It … it fits, I see that. This Machine. You’re still wounded, This—”

“Don’t,” I grunt. “Don’t need to say the whole thing.”

“Machine, then?”

A shrug; bad idea, feels like the skin is being scraped off my back, fingers of pain worming against my spine. “Uhhnnn. No. No. Just. You can just say Octavia. M’not transformed right now.”

Scarlet purses her lips into a tight, pale line. She looks away, then up at the skylight, anywhere but me.

“This is your … ” I croak, clear my throat. “Your home?”

Scarlet blinks at me, as if alarmed by the question. “My family home, yes. Out in the countryside. West of Oxford by about twenty miles. We’re quite isolated here, but not actually that far from a main road.”

“Didn’t ask.”

She shoots me a pinched look, unimpressed. “I assumed you would want to know. You’re not my … my captive, or something, you … you’re not a prisoner. That’s not what this means.”

Silence. No traffic sounds or birdsong from outdoors. A trickle of something from deeper off in the house, maybe air conditioning or a boiler.

Scarlet hasn’t moved a step. Shoulders drawn inward. Chin tucked down. She does not look much like England’s ruby-red rose right now.

“Francesca,” I croak.

“Yes?” She says it like I’m being tiresome.

“Why am I alive?”

Scarlet Edge finally laughs, a single snort, harsh with derision. That gets her moving. She shakes her head and paces past the bed, arms still folded. She peers around the edge of one of the curtains, then paces back the other way, past me. Back and forth, back and forth, like a caged tiger.

“Luck, mostly,” she answers. “I’ve never seen a magical girl take that much punishment and live, not without a lot more magic to hand. But you got lucky. The moment you keeled over, the Nightmare was already dissolving. Do you know what that means?”

“Girl juice.”

She pauses, squints at me, baffled. “Excuse me? What-juice?”

“Girl juice.”

“Is that … that’s what you call it? You lot? The … the others? You’re serious?”

“Mmhmm. Magical energy. When the Nightmare went down.”

“ … yes, well.” She recovers, huffs, paces. “I suspect that sudden infusion is the only reason you didn’t die right there, though I don’t understand how you got that far in the first place. And then I … I didn’t have any other options. Your helmet came back up, so nobody else knew who you were. Except Azure, maybe. And I don’t know what was going on with her, what you did to her. Your … ‘companions’ were flitting about, but they couldn’t stay, there were too many of us by then, a dozen magical girls all descending to see what on earth had happened down in Parliament Square. Cleanup from Dream Control would be there within the hour, so I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t stall, I couldn’t. Your transformation might have reverted at any moment. So I picked you up.” She snorts with a single chuckle of derisive laughter again. “You weigh an absolute ton when transformed, did you know that? Like you’re made of metal on the inside, too. And there was nowhere else to take you. Nowhere you would be … unmolested.”

Silence reigns for a few awkward seconds. Scarlet swallows, then turns her face up to the skylight, stares at the patch of shaded blue sky.

“Not what I meant,” I croak.

Her attention snaps back down to me. “What? What do you mean, then? What are you talking about?”

“Why am I alive?” I repeat.

“I just told you!” she snaps. “You survived because of luck and—”

“Scarlet. Why haven’t you killed me?”

Scarlet Edge — the rose of England’s dreams, the de-facto leader of the Trio of Albion, the most powerful magical girl in the country, if not the world — stares right through me. She opens her mouth, closes it again. Wets her lips. Hesitates.

“Because … you … you and the Dreamer … she … ”

“I think I’ve proven that Willow isn’t going to give me a ‘bad death’, or enslave me again, or whatever. I’m beyond her control now. Burnt it out. Shrugged it off. Nearly won.”

“I … I didn’t … I didn’t know all the details, I—”

“You saw it happen.”

Scarlet stares at a distant spot of the floor, arms folded tight. She takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. Still can’t answer.

Because we shared something neither of us can process, over the internet, on a plain-text chat program, in the middle of the night. Because we showed each other things that we haven’t shown anybody else. Because she dressed up for me and put a leash around her throat, and she wasn’t joking, wasn’t playing around, wasn’t pretending.

I had ‘cybersex’ with this woman. I made her bark for me. Apparently I made her cum.

She spared my life. Saved me, perhaps.

I open my mouth. “Thank—”

“Because,” she says, speaks over me without knowing, my own gratitude too thin, “because you were wounded. Slaying you when you’re wounded, when you’re down, when you can’t fight back, it … it would have satisfied me, once.” Her eyes flicker back to me, haunted and distant. “But I don’t … I didn’t want to. Not when you couldn’t give your all, to match up to me. Which is what you deserve.”

“You saved me because, what? You want me recovered so we can fight to the death?”

“Don’t you?”

“Scarlet. If I win, it won’t be to the death.”

Francesca’s lips part, quivering on quickened breath. A full-body shiver takes her. “You can’t say that,” she whispers. “I would never … never … submit … ”

“Woof woof.”

Scarlet Edge freezes.

“Go on,” I say. “Woof.”

Her lips begin to form the sound, a little bark for me — but then she turns away, arms folded tight to contain her own shaking.

Stunned by my own boldness; if I was any less injured and exhausted I would not have the capacity to think these thoughts, let alone speak them out loud. Scarlet Edge saved me because I offered her a way out of this, a glimpse into another way to be; she doesn’t want me to duel her, she wants me to win, and put a leash around her throat for real. She wants to bark for me.

Or maybe we’re just vile little creatures, oversexed and confused. Maybe I’m concussed.

“Scarlet. Francesca,” I croak. “We … on the internet, you and I, we—”

Francesca unfolds like she’s received a covert electric shock. She huffs sharply and whirls into action, checking the jug of water I’ve drained, peering into the zoog’s cage to see if he needs more food, crossing to the bed, fluffing up the pillows, stripping away the worst of the bloodstained towels. She produces a rubbish bag from one pocket, unfolds it with a snap of her wrists, and shovels the soiled towels inside, then quickly ties it shut at one end.

“You’re going to need more padding,” she says, crisp and businesslike. “You’re still bleeding through that shirt. Another day on your back and maybe you’ll be strong enough to walk. You need fluid, food, and rest. I can bring the first two, but you’re responsible for the third, so lie down. Maybe in twelve hours we can get you in the shower, or, or something. So lie down. Lie down!”

“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” I say.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snaps. “You can’t even walk five paces—”

“Six paces.”

“Oh, for the love of God, are you always like this?! Are you this irritating and obstinate all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Lie down!”

“No.”

“Argh! You—” Scarlet flinches back as I raise my fist.

She’s right though, however entertaining it is to wind her up. I’m not going anywhere under my own power; raising my right arm and making a fist confirms that I am totally and utterly drained, no juice left for translocation, I wouldn’t survive the jump. Whatever infusion I received from the Nightmare has been entirely consumed by homeostasis and self-repair. I lower my hand into my lap, stymied.

“Shit,” I grunt. “Great.”

“What now!?”

“I can’t translocate.” A glance up at Scarlet. “Can you do that? Do you even call it the same thing?”

A roll of her eyes. “Of course we call it the same thing. And yes, of course I can.”

“Wow. You’re even spikier than me.”

“Excuse me?!”

“Just an observation, Francesca. Not necessarily a critique.” She snorts again, a non-laugh and a shake of her head. “Do you know where I’m trying to translocate to?”

She hesitates, then shrugs. “I assume you people have some kind of hideout. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but no. Nobody knows the location. Not us, at any rate.”

I cannot tell Scarlet Edge about Plato Base, the risk is simply too great. She is not some broken hound eating out of my hand. She may never be. She is the leader of the Trio of Albion; she has murdered countless non-Lucid Dreamers, and probably quite a few prospective magical girls, women who should have been my comrades. Very difficult to keep that in mind right now, faced with this scrawny, caustic thing, quivering on the edge of her own revelations, at which I can only guess.

Besides, Nerys said that earth-bound magical girls can’t visit the moon anyway.

I catch the eye of the zoog in the animal carrier, little claws clinging to the bars, beady eyes on me. I raise my right index finger to my lips. Keep them sealed, little guy. I told you about Luna, but don’t tell her.

Scarlet Edge clears her throat. “And of course you can’t tell me.”

“No offence.”

“None taken,” she hisses.

I pat the pockets of my pajama bottoms, feeling for my mobile phone, but there’s nothing. Scarlet Edge watches in silence, then steps over to her desk and pulls open one of the drawers. She holds up my phone, a bit battered, screen protector cracked, but intact.

“It survived,” I grunt. “Huh.”

“Do not,” she says, placing it on the desk, well beyond my reach, “turn it on. The moment you turn it on, Dream Control will know where you are. They’re very good at tracking phones. Even here, in my own house, they won’t hold back. If you want to call your companions, it won’t work. There’s no way to do it, I’ve already thought it over.”

“Mm. Well. Don’t know any numbers anyway.” Though I’m sure Signal would pick up something if I cast a line into the water, metaphorically speaking. I hold out my prosthetic hand. “Your phone?”

Scarlet frowns. “To do what?”

“Go fishing.” Scarlet doesn’t budge. “Alright, I don’t know. I don’t know how to contact anybody. Though Nerys should know already, she should know where I am, she was … ”

Scarlet says nothing, but stiffens at Nerys’ name. I try to straighten up. She swallows.

“I can’t stay here,” I croak. “I can’t. What about your sister?”

Scarlet’s face goes cold with confusion. “My sister? She’s out right now.” she murmurs, suddenly sharp. “What on earth does my sister have to do with you? She’s a mundane. How do you even know that I have a sister? What do you people know about me?”

“Ahh shit.” So worn out I forgot for just long enough to say something very stupid; Scarlet doesn’t know about Bright.

Besides, if Bright knew I’d been bleeding all over her sister’s bed for the last three days, she would probably kill me, and I’m in no state to resist.

“How do you know about my sister?!” Scarlet demands. “How—”

“Forget it,” I huff. “It’s not important.”

Scarlet quite clearly does not forget anything. She stares me down, a tiny blaze behind her eyes.

“Fuck,” I hiss. Then louder. “Fuck. I’m stuck here, then? In here?”

“I already said, you’re not a prisoner—”

“I can’t walk out by myself, and I can’t contact anybody, or DC will pick me up. I need juice, or a friend, or translocation!” I spit. “And you’re going to have to find one of them or—”

Scarlet steps forward, both hands making a shushing gesture. “Keep your voice down!” she hisses. “I can only hide you if you stay reasonably quiet! We’re not the only ones in the house. My parents might be around. My sister does live here, some of the time. So. Be quiet.”

Shut my lips. Feel vaguely nauseated.

“You’re gonna have to contact my friends,” I croak.

Scarlet shrugs, spreads her hands, exasperated. “How? How would I do that?”

Turn on my phone and hope Signal is faster than Dream Control. Talk to your sister and pray she doesn’t decide to rip my head off my shoulders. Feed me some of your own girl juice so I can translocate.

My turn to sigh. Hurts. “I don’t know. Fly to the other side of the world and turn my phone on. Wait for my friends to find you.”

“Ah, yes, so they can try to kill me? Use myself as bait? No.”

“That won’t … mm.”

Scarlet finally stands up straight, seems to shed some of her trepidation. She nods, more to herself than to me. “Another day and you might be well enough to travel. Then you can fly yourself out of here whenever you like.” She pauses, catches my look. “What? What is it now?”

“Can’t fly.”

Rapid blinks, a stunning confusion. Makes me want to laugh. “You can’t fly? But you transformed!”

“Voice down, Scarlet. Might get us overheard.”

“Tch! You can’t fly? You’re not joking?”

“That’s what I said.”

Scarlet shakes her head and looks away. “Then you can translocate, I suppose? As soon as you’re recovered. Another day, another night’s sleep. You can be off then.”

This time I do laugh. Hurts, a lot, each tiny convulsion wracking my torso with pain. But it’s too much, too funny.

“What?” Scarlet demands. “What!?”

“Aren’t I your enemy, Scarlet? I’m the enemy. A villain, in your bedroom. Public enemy number one. A wanted terrorist. I’m at your mercy, and you just … mm, nurse me better? Whose side are you even on, Scarlet? What would Azure and Dawn think?”

“They have nothing to do with this,” she hisses, gone cold.

“Sleeping a night, here in your bed, huh?” I rasp out. “Not like we haven’t done it already, though you got to have most of the fun.” Can barely believe the words coming out of my mouth; I knew it, I knew I was always like this, but it feels so good to say it out loud. Only wish I wasn’t so exhausted and bleeding all over myself.

Scarlet’s cheeks colour with a bright blush. She steps back, rubbish bag in one hand, looks down her nose at me. But her haughty superiority is only skin-deep. Her eyes shimmer with trapped tears.

“Don’t make it into a joke,” she hisses, voice quivering. “Don’t make it vulgar, don’t you dare—”

“Not making it vulgar, I’m serious—”

“—don’t you dare mock—”

“—I’m not—”

“—stop it, stop it, stop it—”

“Good girl.”

Scarlet stops, brain short-circuited. She gapes at me, wide-eyed and frozen, not even blushing, just stunlocked.

“Good girl,” I repeat.

Scarlet takes three deep breaths, slow at first, then faster, as if restarting herself. She steps back and swallows hard.

“You need a meal,” she says. “Proper food, after three days burning through your reserves. And that thing in there,” she gestures at the zoog, “needs its water dish topping up.”

“Scarlet—”

But she’s retreating now, across the ostentatious jumble of her bedroom. She almost cracks her hip on the edge of one of the sofas.

“Wait, wait here,” she says. “Don’t try to leave the room. And don’t open the windows. Don’t touch anything. Just … don’t touch anything.”

“Francesca—”

“Wait there!” she snaps, goes for the door. “Just wait. Wait.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

Scarlet pauses at the door, turns back wild-eyed, like a surprised deer caught in a clearing. “You’re not my prisoner,” she hisses. “I can’t hold you, Octavia. I don’t have the right. No more than anything could hold me. Now wait. Just wait. Don’t— don’t do anything stupid.” A pause. “Please.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The last place Octavia ever expected to awaken. And perhaps not the safest, whatever Scarlet says.

Better get out of here fast, Occy. Before Scarlet changes her mind.

Welcome to arc 6! This one is a doozy; I originally planned for this arc to be really short, maybe 3-4 chapters. Behind the scenes it’s already hit 4, and is probably gonna go to 6-7. So! Strap in, don’t ask Scarlet too many questions, and … well. We’ll see!

And there is more this week! I have fanart to share, from over on the discord sever!

First up we have ‘Birth of a Magical Girl‘ (by cubey) (Warning for gore!), capturing Octavia’s moment of mad laughter back in arc 1! Then we have a fascinating collage-based rendition of the selfies Octavia took in arc 5 (by Lettuce Puppy); see the zoog there too! And lastly, a simple piece, titled ‘Sorry I Sexted Your Sister‘ (by Arachnopuss), though I don’t think it’s going to work on Bright. Also, I have once again updated the memes page with several new additions, for those who enjoy a little nonsense now and again! Thank you to everybody who’s made fanart and memes and fun little pictures, it’s incredibly flattering to see!

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

Subscribe on Patreon!

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.

As always, thank you so much, dear readers. Maidens would not exist without all of you; Octavia would have nobody to follow her down into the dark depths of wherever the hell it is she’s going. Thank you all for being here!

Next chapter, break bread with the enemy, or try to find a way out? This Machine is in no state to move far under her own power. Uh oh.