Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation (major)
Ableism
Gore

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Grimgrave completes her translocation, the ingeniously fumbled acrobatic tumble of a true and expert clown. She lands on her feet at an unstable angle, arms wind-milling against gravity’s slapstick tyranny; she loses, topples over, long messy hair whipped across her face. But then her body bends in a perfect arch, a bowstring pulled back against the inevitable. She executes a flawless reverse handspring, the extra fabric of her white hoodie catching the air with an audible crack, granting her an extra millisecond of lift. My sports bag, still slung over her shoulder, swings wide, a counterweight, keeps her from flying off-target. She lands a second time, the true finale; balanced on one foot, high up on her tiptoes, the other leg stretched out to the side, arms raised in salutation to an imaginary circus audience. A bend from the waist, a half-sketched bow, flicks her hair from her face and twists her around, to confirm the collapse of her far less elegant accompaniment.

I land hard. Slip, stagger, stumble. Translocation is supreme disorientation; Grimgrave’s is like being knocked down by a clown car.

And why should I care to catch my fall? A familiar failure, the constant threat of fresh humiliation from another trip to the ground, the ever-present punishment of a useless cripple, unable to walk properly on her own expensive prosthetic.

Why bother anymore, now I have no dignity left to save?

Over I go. My backside hits concrete, cold, damp, hard. Jolts my hips. Jaggs pain up my spine. Thumps air from my lungs.

All the world smears sideways, blurred through a veil of tears, hot and thick and choking. Misery deep enough to drown in, if not for one singular white beacon. Grimgrave among the grey.

“Occy, hey—”

The hospital room is gone. Bad dreams banished by rotten dawn.

“—hey, we’re out, we … uh … ”

Out? Somewhere else, at least. A trickle of thin frigid wind, the scent of polluted rain on weathered concrete, distant sounds of traffic somewhere far below. We perch in a lofty aerie, surrounded by wide gulfs of sky, beneath a crushing ceiling of leaden cloud.

“Wait, what?” Grimgrave says. “Yo, yo, yo, what? What the fuck?”

Scrub tears on a sleeve, choke down the shame of my sobbing, lurch to my feet. Grimgrave twists about, mouth agape, eyes blown wide. Dumbfounded by terrestrial cloud cover, the familiar blunt fingers of tall dark towers, the little roads and hedgerows leading away from the stained asphalt lake of a car park. Thin concrete slabs seem so solid beneath our feet, dotted with shallow, stagnant, standing puddles, fringed with pale moss, encrusted with wet lichen. A low lip rises at the edge, a short barrier of concrete between us and the open void of rain-damp air. Far to the east, the iridescent glimmer of London’s corpse roils in luxurious virulence against the dead grey sky.

The nightmare isn’t over. False dawn fades.

“This was meant to be Plato Base!” Grimgrave shouts. “Straight to the moon, like! Fuck! Fuck, where the fuck—”

“We’re still in England. Still in Oxford.” Can barely force words through the thick tail-end of tears. “We’re on the hospital rooftop.”

“Shit!” Grimgrave tries to look everywhere at once, as if we’re about to be assaulted from the underside of the brooding cloud cover. “How the fuck!? I know how to translocate! Occy, I do, really! I know what I was doing, I swear—”

“Willow won’t let me go.”

“The Dreamer!” Grimgrave spins to face me. “She’s thrown us off course, slapped our shit about, something like that? Shit, I don’t know how this works!”

I do.

A single access door stands in the far corner of the roof. Dull metal, stained and dirty, doesn’t look like it’s been opened in years.

Any moment now the crust of grime on that door will crack and part and peel away. The portal will open. She will step through. And I will die. I will scream and scream and scream until my insides are my outsides and my brain turns to liquid and my heart bursts like overripe fruit.

My skin is frozen, stuck fast to my soul. My muscles lock up. My head pounds. My ribs squeeze my own organs. Any moment, that handle will move and she will burst through that door and what little is left of me will be erased. She will take me again and cram my skull full of cold slime and I will cease to be the dregs of myself, I will be a puppet, a false memory, a dream she had on a deviant whim. But who am I? Who is standing here on this rooftop, waiting to die? Who am I anymore, without those dreams of Willow? Ten years of solid memory turn to sucking mud beneath my feet. I’m nothing, I am less than nothing, I am something being rapidly forgotten even by the disparate pieces of a person who used to be called Octavia Carter and the moment she sees me I will blow away like ash on the wind and she will catch me and remake me into something misshapen and horrible and I can’t hold onto the memories but I don’t want to because I hate her more than anything I’ve ever hated before but love doesn’t forget itself so easily and it’s the only thing I have left to anchor myself and she’s going to come through that door she’s going to come through that door she’s going to come through that door and do worse than kill me—

“G-Grimgrave— p-please.” Throat closing up, teeth chattering, skin a sheet of ice water. Can’t take my eyes off that door. “Please, please, please, I need to be away from here, I need— c-can we try again? Translocate again. I-I can’t— I can’t see her again, I can’t— I can’t— I’ll go mad, please, please, I have to get away, please—”

Grimgrave grabs my wrist, my prosthetic, my right, a good solid grip. She is an angel. A grin rips her face open. “I got you, Occy! I got you! Here we—”

A jerk-stumble, halted by a mime’s invisible wall. Grimgrave snaps upright as if she touched an electric fence, blinking, bewildered.

We don’t go anywhere. The world stays sensible and upright.

“ … Grimgrave? Grimmy?”

Grimgrave’s grin turns sour. “I can’t! I can’t fuckin’ translocate, like! Dreamer-bitch has us locked down, something, I dunno!”

I yank my prosthetic arm from her grip. Pull my elbow back. Make a fist. Keening through clenched teeth, a sound I’ve never heard a human make before, but I don’t care. Dignity means nothing. I will punch the world apart to escape from Willow’s shadow. Plato Base, Luna, zoogs, my new home. New home. Home. Nerys. Concrete cell. The moon. Darkness. Oblivion. Anything, anywhere, any state of being, other than this.

Desperate strength almost overbalances me. My punch rockets forward, drags me two staggering steps.

But it’s just a punch. The world stays steadfast, whole, right here.

Translocation is blocked.

“No,” I murmur. “No no no, I can’t, I can’t—”

A shrill mechanical peal explodes from the hospital beneath our feet; I shriek, lurch, bite my tongue, taste blood. But it’s only the fire alarm.

As if in answer, sirens begin to wail in the distance, a familiar ghostly howl echoing through the streets of Oxford. Incursion. Nightmare. Dreamer. Take shelter. Run.

“I-is that because of Willow?” I stammer. “Are they sounding that because of her? I-I don’t—”

Grimgrave barks a laugh. “Shit no, that’s probably for us! They fuckin’ got us! Occy, yo, hey, you gotta run, okay?” She points at the access door. “You gotta run! I can hold ‘em here, you gotta go!”

“What? No! No, I can’t go back there, I can’t, I—”

A fire-red meteor, a flash of amber lightning, a bolt of crackling ice. All three crash to the rooftop as if loosed from a slingshot below the hospital.

The Trio of Albion, ready to finish yesterday’s job.

Scarlet Edge stands at the fore, the tip of the spear. Resplendent in her red and white dress, heat-haze shimmer rising from her shoulders, damp concrete drying in circles around her high heels. The frozen flame of her ruby sword already naked in one hand, swept low in wordless challenge. Her delicate, proud, razor-sharp face, framed by deep red hair, twisted with indignant distaste — and marred around the lips with a nasty purple bruise, the imprint of an overeager and inexpert kiss. Wounded from where I bit her? Why hasn’t it healed?

Azure Infinity stands on the left, determined yet distraught; long blonde ponytail sways in rooftop wind, armoured dress the cobalt and cerulean of deep-space nebula, massive warhammer held ready in burnished steel gauntlets. Dawn’s First Gloaming straightens up on the right, detached and ironic; cream-gold frills and butter-yellow ribbons like a slice of clean summer, dark skin glistening in phantom sunlight, long boots revealing a wide slice of thigh, antique arquebus slung over one shoulder.

“Octavia.” Scarlet Edge says. Low, hoarse. Levels her blade. Points the tip at my face. “Octavia Carter.”

She seems lost for more, my name all she could manage, breath frozen in her chest, eyes creased with some strange counterpart to incomprehension.

Dawn rolls her arquebus off her shoulder, fingering the golden filigree of the firing mechanism. “Take it easy, Edge. Play it cool,” she drawls. “By the book, yeah? No messing. No mistakes.” She nods to me, an upward tilt of her chin. “Hey there, Carter. It’s over. You get that, right? You gave us a good run, but it’s over now. Let’s make this clean. For all of us.”

Azure takes a step forward, drags the triangle of the trio out of alignment, half-lowers her silver warhammer. “Octavia, give yourself up, please! This doesn’t have to end in more violence. You don’t have to die here, I swear it.”

Scarlet turns a slow gaze on Azure, eyes filled with loathing disbelief. Azure stands her ground, hefts her hammer, stares right back at Scarlet.

“And what, pray tell,” Scarlet says with quiet acid, “is that supposed to mean, my dear sister-in-arms?”

“It’s a promise, to her,” Azure says. “Don’t be like this, Scar. Don’t, okay?” She returns her attention to me. “Octavia, I mean it! If you give yourself up here, I’ll protect you. This can all be over—”

Scarlet Edge lowers her sword, turns it diagonal, toward Azure. “I wasn’t finished with her!” she shouts. “She and I, our— our duel— we— and look at what she did to me! Just look! You have no right, Azure. We discussed this, you—”

Azure steps around her. “Octavia, ignore her, just … ” She takes one hand off her hammer, offers it across the gulf of the rooftop. “Come here, take my hand. I promise. I’ll protect you.”

“Just whose side do you think you’re on?” Scarlet hisses.

“Justice,” Azure snaps over her shoulder. “What else?”

Dawn’s First Gloaming rolls her eyes toward the sky, gun sagging in her arms. “This is so not the time. Edge, if Azzy can make it work, let her cook. You gotta drop this, it’s driving you crazy.”

But I’m already shaking my head. This offer is a fate worse than death. “No”, I say. “No, no— you’ll— you’ll feed me to her, to Willow. I can’t— no—”

“See!?” Scarlet Edge shouts, gesturing at me with one lace-gloved hand. “She understands. Octavia understands exactly what is at stake here. Azure, stand aside. Right now.”

Azure Infinity ignores the shouting, but she still hesitates. Tries to meet my eyes. Looks away. Ashamed.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I say, voice hollow. “You’re planning to hand me over to her.”

“We—” Azure can’t get the words out. “We just—”

“No. No. No, no, no, no no no no no!” Anger’s cold dross spills from my lips, muffled, waterlogged, drained of real power. Blind desperation and weak indignation. I’m terrified, not furious. Capture, confinement, worse things in this world than torture. But I can still scream and spit with the best of them. “No! You’ll hand me over to her! You’ll feed me to her! She’s in league with you, with magical girls, Dream Control, the government, everything! You’ve been working with Dreamers all along! All of you! You! You.”

Scarlet Edge, the only one who meets my gaze.

“You worked with her all along,” I hiss. “You knew.”

Scarlet Edge pauses. Swallows. Bites her lower lip. Her free hand rises, cups her bruised mouth with a white lace glove. Azure can’t look at either of us, shame in forlorn eyes. Dawn just sighs, rolling her rifle from hand to hand, focused on Grimgrave.

“She’s got a point,” Azure says softly. “We shouldn’t. This is wrong, it’s all wrong … ”

Dawn shrugs. “We didn’t even know who you were before yesterday, girl. You ain’t that special. Don’t kid yourself.”

“I … ” Scarlet Edge says. Draws herself up. “I would give you a clean death, Octavia. I would make it clean. Beautiful, even. Despite everything I said before. Do you understand?”

Scarlet Edge is telling the truth. It’s in her eyes, like rubies in a fire. No place to hide inside a naked flame.

“Would?” I spit. “Or will?”

She nods. “Will.”

My lips open again, almost take the offer. Clean death would be infinitely preferable to a forced return to dreams, to falsehood, to Willow. How can I go on after all my life has been a lie? What is there to live for anymore? Without Willow, what is there?

Red-black clarity. The bleeding hell-light of revenge. Me; Octavia Carter. That is left, when all else is taken away. And I am inextinguishable.

So slim a notion, but it halts me at the last second.

I close my lips, shake my head.

“Let me go,” I plead.

Scarlet’s face hardens with disgust.

Dawn clucks her tongue. “You gotta drop this thing, Edge. You know we can’t do that.” She nods to me again, another upward lift of her chin. “Sorry, girl. I really am, you know? We gotta take you in. Change of orders, comes right from the top. We’re taking you alive, and that’s that. Come on, it’s gotta be better than bleeding to death on this rooftop.”

Words fail me; let me go, that’s the sum total of what I have left. Let me go. I shake my head.

Dawn shrugs. “You gonna make us do this the hard way? Tch. Your choice, I guess.”

“The hard way,” Scarlet echoes, eyes hard as coals. “Yes. I think I will enjoy it.”

Azure steps aside, gets back in position, half-restores the triangle symmetry of the Trio. Scarlet snorts with dry satisfaction, raises her sword again, points it at my face.

“Now, Octavia, you and I will have our—”

Grimgrave bounces between us. She dumps my bag, well clear of a fight. Then she grins, a wide-spreading slit of unconditional madness, her maniac smirk at a hundred percent power, blazing like a runaway nuclear meltdown.

“Heyyyyyy, bitches!” she cackles. “What, you forgot about me?!”

Scarlet regards Grimgrave with total revulsion. “How dare you?” she hisses. “How dare you get in my way, you smear of human waste?”

Dawn clears her throat. “That’s the girl from the bombing footage. Technically you’re two-nil with her already, Edge.”

Scarlet narrows her eyes. “You.”

“Yeah!” Grimgrave barks. “Me!”

“Dreamers and degenerates,” Scarlet Edge says, eyes flickering back to me. “You don’t need this, Octavia. We both know you don’t need such degrading company, let alone ‘protection’. Octavia, do you understand? Send her away. Send this thing away. Clear a path between us. Octavia.” Her voice quivers, a strange tremor in her words. “Send her away. Send her away!”

The clarity and power of clean anger feels as distant as the moon. I can’t fight Scarlet Edge, no fire in my belly, no pounding pistons in my arm. My furnace is drowned by grief and loss for things that never were. My prosthetic arm is just carbon fibre and foam, hand still stained by the residue of a dream-parasite. I’m spent, I’m nothing. I’m not even here.

Without Grimgrave, I’m dead. And part of me — a foolish masochist — still wants to live, at least a little longer.

I shake my head.

Scarlet’s face falls, first to distraught confusion, then blinded by fury.

“Oi oi oi!” Grimgrave shouts, spreading her arms out to both sides, sleeves of her white hoodie flapping in the wind. “You ain’t dealing with Occy! You’re dealing with me, rancid shit-cunt! Or what, you got testicles for eyeballs and foreskins for ears? Can’t see me or hear me, huh? Shit-breath cum-guzzler! Suck my arsehole!”

Dawn chuckles. “Real poet, aren’t you?”

“The best!”

Scarlet Edge wrinkles her nose. “Of you, runt, I will make quick work. You are not even worth the effort to punish for the cowardly terrorist attack. A little Dreamer should know better than to show her face before us. We’ve slain hundreds of your kind. Run. Run away now, or I will not even give you a good death. I will cut your belly open and watch you squirm in your own boiling intestines—”

Grimgrave bursts out laughing. High, rich, rolling like it’ll never end.

“You don’t fuckin’ get it, like!” she howls. “You still don’t get it! World’s a fuckin’ mystery to you cunts, ain’t it?! Alright then, I guess we’re doing this early. Bite the pillow, cos’ I’m going in dry!”

Grimgrave transforms.

A click of her fingers, an explosion of paint-blob chaos, snapping tight to her petite physique. No less incredible than when I witnessed the process up on Luna; against the backdrop of dreary English skies and Oxford concrete, it is a revelation of colour and motion, blood in the water, the first flowers of spring. My dying heart stirs, though still trapped behind thick glass.

And then there she stands, the jester of mad violence from the dark side of the moon. Her wild little dress and pink-lilac twin-tails, her candy-cane tights and rollerblades on her feet, the white makeup mask with hearts like dark bruises around glittering green eyes.

Grimgrave shoves a hand up her skirt before anybody can react, draws her pump-action shotgun, the same one she used on me. Her other hand flowers with a spread of neon-pink shotgun shells, tossing them into the air, a shower of lead confetti. She twirls the gun, catches each shell in the loading port with a blur of super-speed motion, slotting rounds into the magazine tube, shick-shick-shick.

She ends the whirl fully loaded. Racks the gun with a grin and flashes a wink. Clack-clack.

Grimgrave bows.

The Trio freeze. Scarlet frowns, incredulous, amazed. Azure goes wide-eyed, backs up a step, shifts her hammer into a defensive stance.

“Riiiiiight,” Dawn says, slow and careful. “That answers one theory, I guess. Not the answer I wanted. Goddamn. You’re real.”

“I don’t understand,” Scarlet hisses. “What are we looking at? Who is this? Who are you?! What is this?!”

“She’s a magical girl,” Dawn says. “Do keep up, Scarl’. We need to think fast.”

Scarlet Edge stutters with rage. “You— you— you have no— We are the Trio of Albion! We are the rightful authority in this part of the country. In all of England! You must know that, you—”

“Hahahahaaaa!” Grimgrave howls with laughter, spins her shotgun in one hand. “You can take your authority and shove it all the way up your arse! ‘Til you can taste the shit and stomach acid, bitch!”

Azure shouts. “Who do you serve? You’re one of us, so who do you serve?”

Grimgrave grabs her own crotch through her skirt. “Serve this!”

“She’s with the pretender god,” Dawn says. “The zoog. We always knew we were too late to stop them all.”

Scarlet’s confusion rekindles into doubled disgust. “Vermin,” she hisses. “Stinking, foul, pestilent vermin, all of you! You—”

“Proud to be it!” Grimgrave cackles, points the shotgun at Scarlet one handed. “You ain’t getting Occy, you sad-sack pity-fuck! I’ll pinch your head off with my own arsehole first!”

“You are nothing,” Scarlet Edge says, gone cold. “I can see it from here. You’re young and untested. I would cut you down in seconds. And I shall do exactly that—”

Azure steps forward again, eyes wide and darting. “I said this doesn’t have to end in bloodshed. Octavia, and … whoever you are, we don’t have to—”

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. “No. Grimgrave, don’t let them, please.”

“You heard her!” Grimgrave shouts. “You can all fuck right off! Or I’mma make you eat your own shit! Gonna get you dead!”

“One against three,” Scarlet muses, cold as frozen flame. “No contest at all.” She shifts her sword and her footing, prepares to launch herself forward; I’ve seen this before, been on the business end of that charge, and this time I don’t have the fires of anger hot in my belly. This time my arm is a dead weight, like it’s not even part of me, like I’ve lost everything that makes me myself.

“I’ll take all three of you!” Grimgrave screeches. “Bring it!”

“Octavia Carter!” Scarlet Edge shouts, ignoring Grimgrave. “We end this here, you and I! Tell your pet to stand aside!”

“Occy, when it starts, you fuckin’ run!” Grimgrave shouts. “Just run!”

“Azure, Dawn,” says Scarlet. “You handle the clown. Octavia is mine.”

Dawn puts the stock of her rifle to her shoulder, rolls her neck to either side. “Edge, hey, remember,” she says. “Bring her in alive this time. No playing.”

Azure steps forward, hefts her hammer, eyes Scarlet. “Don’t kill her,” she hisses. “Scar, don’t you do it. I’ve got your back, but don’t you kill her.”

Scarlet smiles. Just for me. As if her and I are the only two present, alone in the sultry stifling heat of some shuttered private room. As if I’m the love of her life and she’s about to strangle me to death. She opens her mouth to announce the start of a murder.

And gets interrupted.

By a burst of static and a molten fissure.

A twelve-foot vertical rift rips through the air, a roiling inferno from the heart of a volcano, a wound torn in the ever-thinning hide of the waking world. In the same split-second, the whole city pulses with a deep throb of static, as if every phone line and electric pylon all twitched as one; a sphere of ultra-dense white noise blossoms from nothing, hovering a few feet above the rooftop.

Burning Bright explodes from the rift, clad in steely skirts of iron-hard crimson scale. She slams onto the concrete tiles of the roof, streamers of dark smoke pouring from between gigantic razored teeth.

The Locus of Lost Signals snaps into sharp focus from within the throbbing ball of static. Her silver-circuit dress shimmers in the weak daylight, huge guitar slung over her shoulders, the LCD-eyeslit of her helmet strobing with argent pulses. She floats six feet off the roof, surrounded by the hulking forms of a full dozen armoured skeletons, arrayed like a semi-circle aura of fanned-out limbs.

The rift closes with a fiery hiss. The static winks out. Whole process took less than a split-second, dream logic overlaid on temporal perception.

Scarlet’s lips peel back in bewildered frustration. Azure stares with horror, backing away. Dawn pulls a rueful grin, slowly shakes her head.

“Good afternoon to you all, ladies,” says Signal, via the speakers in her skeletons, her voice the same rich bubble she used on me, Scottish accent rolling and bouncing with open amusement. “Looks like we got here just in time, yes? Don’t anybody get hasty now. Take a breath, take a moment, think it over. Consider with care before you do anything you might regret. You’ll thank me later, sweethearts.”

The flat screen of her LCD-eyeslit flickers with an emote.

(๑˘ᵕ˘)

Bright straightens up into her habitual hunch-shouldered slouch, exhaling thin streamers of superheated red smoke, carmine talons curled by her sides. She stares at Scarlet Edge, ignores all else.

“Guys!” Grimgrave lights up with incandescent delight. “Bright, Siggy, you actually fuckin’ came! You came! Ah shit, guys, I fuckin’ love you!”

“You’re welcome, Geegee,” says Signal. “And you have my apologies for the delay.”

“All that shit you said, hey, you didn’t mean it then? You didn’t?”

A pause. “Later, Geegee.”

“Didn’t come for you, chuckles,” Bright rasps, her voice like a house fire, eyes still locked on Scarlet Edge. “Or the Dream-bait. I’m here for one thing, one thing alone.”

Grimgrave cackles. “Fuckin’ tsundere! Love you too, bitch!”

“Regardless of the exact reasons why,” Signal says, “we’re here now. Bad decision or no, let’s make the most of it.” One of her skeletons turns half-toward me; even through the solid black armour plates, I know it’s looking my way. “Octavia, lass, it’s good to see you in once piece. You doing alright? Holding up okay?”

I will never be okay again; all good has been drained from the world by a sucking stomach wound, voided from my bowels with the fraying ropes of my frozen entrails. I am not even here; I am gone, turned to ash and smoke, all that was once me burned up and ruined and rendered inert. Why would you even ask that question, Signal? Why ask a question to which the answer is obvious? Can you not see by looking at me? Am I not a charred and empty husk? Is the light of a human soul not gone from behind my eyes? Perhaps you’re in on it, torturing me further, grinding whatever is left of me into paste beneath your foot. Or maybe you’re just a fool who has lived too comfortable a life to ever understand that I am no longer present.

But you’re here to save what’s left. So I will not insult you.

“ … no,” I croak. “I’m pretty far from okay.”

“We’ll get you out of here, lass,” Signal says. “Sit tight. Not how I wanted to do this, but oh well, can’t win them all, as they say. Go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.”

“Hey, Siggy, Siggy, we can’t translocate!” Grimgrave tells her. “There was a Dreamer! We’re blocked in or some shit!”

“I know,” Signal replies. “Like I said, sit tight.”

“You got a plan?!”

“Always, Geegee. Count on that.”

Scarlet Edge shouts over us, voice shrill with anger. “Who are these two!? More vermin-followers?!”

Dawn lets the muzzle of her rifle sag toward the floor. She smirks, shakes her head. “In theory. Scarl’, this changes everything. We missed three of them. Three. Damn. We got got, I guess.”

Signal chuckles, low and bubbly, then gently plucks a single string on her massive guitar; the sound washes over the rooftop. All three of the Trio stiffen. “Oh, don’t be so modest,” Signal says. “I’m sure there’s a nice big juicy gap in your intelligence, just the right size to fit the three of us. After all, it’s we who’ve been hitting you non-stop for the last six months. I’ll give you that for free, ladies. You would’a worked it out shortly anyway.”

“What?” Azure frowns. “What are you talking about?”

Dawn whistles low. “All that stuff with DC, I’m guessing. The girls who got hit? Maybe more?”

“Yeah!” Grimgrave shouts. “We’ve been fucking with you for ages now! Every little incident for the last year, that was us! Pearlescent, Bliss, Dragonscale, that was all us, and you know it! We’ve been hitting you too, but you’ve been too slow to see it, you dozy cunts!”

Azure’s eyes tighten. “You killed two Dream Control personnel? That was you?”

“Guessing so,” Dawn murmurs. “Who else?”

“Fuck yeah!” Grimgrave roars.

Bright just growls, breathing heavily, trailing smoke.

“And now,” Signal says, “we’re here, to take Octavia home. I hope you three don’t have a problem with that. If you do, you can file a complaint online.”

Scarlet Edge snorts with derision. “This changes nothing. Nothing. You vermin cannot stand against us, you know that. You claim her? You dare try to claim her?! You’re not worthy of this! None of you are! I will cut you down myself and see you bleed to death at my feet—”

Azure raises her voice. “Just give us Octavia! We’re not going to hurt her!”

“They want to feed me to a Dreamer,” I say. “Signal. Signal, please, they want to give me to a Dreamer, I can’t— I won’t— I’ll kill myself first”

“I know,” Signal says. “I know, lass. Breathe. Take a breath.”

How can you possibly know, Signal? Oh, I’m certain you have raw information, ripped from a clutch of CCTV cameras and half a dozen satellites and perhaps even a telescope on the moon, from which you got to watch my tears. But you can’t know. Can’t understand. I am inside this, and I have been all but digested.

A glance at the roof access door. But I cannot run. Willow is waiting for me to run. She is just behind that door. Scarlet’s sword would be preferable to that maw.

Dawn sighs. Raises her rifle again. “Just give us the Carter girl. You know we can beat you.”

Signal’s emote changes.

¯\_(シ)_/¯

“That would be a no, ladies.”

Bright laughs, just once, a low grunt, like fire burbling in her throat. “How about you give up instead?” she growls. “Surrender. Get down on your knees. But then you never do know when to stop. You’re convinced you’ve got no limits. Isn’t that right, Francesca?”

Scarlet Edge freezes, eyes like saucers, staring at Bright. Her sword sags. “ … what?” she murmurs. “How do you … who—”

“Scarlet!” Dawn snaps. “Don’t answer! Don’t engage at all!”

Azure points her hammer at Bright, one handed, like it’s made of foam. “Stop. Whatever you know, stop right there.”

“Both of you whores can shut the fuck up,” Bright growls. One clawed foot scrapes deep grooves in the concrete. “I’m speaking to Francesca.”

Signal plays another single note on her guitar, rooftop quivering with feedback. “Bright. Focus.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bright growls, but doesn’t take her eyes off her sister. “‘Scarlet Edge’? Franny. Frannyyyyy. You’re mine. Don’t you ever forget it. Mine. Always. Forever.”

Scarlet stares in wide-eyed horror. “Who … who are you?”

Bright licks her lips, forked tongue flickering between razored teeth. “You never could recognise me. Never could.”

Dawn takes a decisive step — back. “We can’t do this out in the open. Scarlet, get your head back on straight. We can’t do this.”

“We’re not leaving this now!” Scarlet Edge hisses. “I am not letting this chance pass by me! Octavia!”

Grimgrave bursts out laughing. “And you won’t be covering up shit this time, either! Look at all that, look at that out there!” She gestures wide, at the grey skies and open air of Oxford, still ringing with the hospital’s fire alarm and the distant howling of emergency sirens. “England sees you, bitches!”

We have an audience.

They’re everywhere. Filling the roads, crammed into side-streets, leaning from the windows of adjacent tower-blocks, standing in shop-front doorways. Hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps one third or more raising their mobile phones in salute. Filming us, streaming us, taking pictures, videos, posting us all over. Traffic stands halted, snarled in mile-long jams as drivers gape upward. Pedestrians jostle for a better view, shoulder-to-shoulder, spilling from the pavements. Police nip at the edges, trying to control the crowd, but it’s hopeless. People still pouring out of the hospital turn to stare even as they stumble away from the fire alarm. We’re on a thousand phone cameras, ten times the number of naked eyeballs, and who knows how many CCTV feeds. By now we’re likely live, real-time, online.

On the worst day of my life, I am on a million screens. My pain and my dissolution is being immortalised. I will be replayed and rewatched on monitors and televisions all across the world.

I want to shout, scream, hurl abuse. The crowd is ripping me apart, tearing into me, and there is nothing I can do.

Signal laughs, a low bubble. “I’m recording this too, make no mistake on that account. Local storage and real-time sat-link upload, in case the government pulls an internet black-out. Smile, ladies. You’re on camera. By this evening, the whole world’s gonna be watching what you say here. So choose your words with care.”

Scarlet Edge stiffens. Her right eye twitches.

“That’s a bluff!” Azure snaps.

“I wouldn’t take that risk, Azzy,” Dawn says. “Best believe it. Can we risk the alternative?”

Scarlet Edge straightens her spine, resets the position of her sword, lifts her chin. “I don’t care.”

Dawn shoots her a sidelong frown. Azure openly stares. Scarlet Edge doesn’t look at either of them, only me.

Signal carries on, voice bouncing from her skeleton-speakers. “I also happen to know you have mundane air support on the way. A flight of attack helicopters out of Brize Norton. There’s half a dozen Harriers scrambling too, with enough bombs to level this hospital. Which is exactly what they’re planning to do, because we’re just that scary, we three. Or we four, now? Yes, I think so. And make no mistake, ladies, there’s people in this hospital who can’t be moved. Old people. Children. Intensive care. That kind of thing. I’ve even got a list of their names. I can read them out right now, get it all on video. Maybe they’ll play it on the evening news, show it alongside you three letting it all happen.”

“Lies!” Azure shouts. “You don’t know that! How could you possibly know that? And why, why would anybody bomb the hospital?!”

Signal’s helmet-emote changes again: (=_=;)

“Because the government is panicking,” she says. “Call them off.”

A heartbeat passes. Scarlet Edge answers. “We don’t control what the military does.”

“I think you can make a very convincing phone call,” says Signal. “I think you have a lot of influence. Call them off. Or at least try. For the sake of all our viewers at home.”

Azure looks at Scarlet, her brow furrowed in a new way. Dawn shakes her head slowly. Scarlet grits her teeth.

“Do you want to know what will happen otherwise?” Signal carries on. “No? I’m telling you anyway, of course. If you don’t call off the air support, then my esteemed comrade here, Burning Bright,” she gestures at Bright with the arm of one armoured skeleton, “is going to wait until just before they drop their payloads, and then knock them out of the air, because we’re not going to let you bomb people on British soil. That’s what terrorists and tyrants do. We’re neither, in case you haven’t been paying attention.”

Another emote change.

(⩺_⩹)

Azure’s face twists with open anger. “Those are British soldiers in those helicopters and planes! You wouldn’t—”

“Try me.” Bright growls. She holds out a fist of claws. “Try me.”

Grimgrave laughs. “She can totally do it! Shit, she could take out a whole fucking army of planes!”

“Don’t need your glazing, chuckles,” Bright says. “And it’s an air force. Not an army.”

“Whatevs!”

“Besides,” Signal adds, “you’re trying to kill our friend. Or hand her off to a Dreamer, same thing. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Now, call off the air support. I know you don’t have long. About forty seconds, give or take. Best do it quick.”

“Too scared, Francesca?” Bright asks. “Too scared to fight me? I know you are. Admit it.”

Scarlet Edge ignores Bright. One hand produces a slender mobile phone from somewhere inside her red and white dress. She holds it to her ear, staring down each of us in turn. Her eyes veer away from Bright, glare with disgust at Grimgrave and Signal, settle on me with unreadable need.

“It’s me,” she says into the phone. “Are you watching this? Yes. Yes! Call them off. Do it or we walk. Yes. Fine!”

Scarlet ends the call with a snarl, slips the phone back into her dress, glares across the damp concrete of the rooftop. Nobody moves.

“Well!?” she demands.

“I’m waiting for independent confirmation,” Signal says. “Because if that was a bluff, then you and I, lassie, we’re gonna have words. And you’ll know when you’ve been spoken to.”

Scarlet looks like she wants to spit. “I could destroy you with a single blow, you glitter-draped moron. You think a handful of jumped-up robots can stop me?”

That provokes another emote shift: ( ͝° ͜ʖ͡°)=o==[]::::::::::>

Signal fingers the strings of her guitar, not quite drawing out a note. “Ah. Yes, there we go. They’re turning around. Thank you kindly, Miss Scarlet Edge. Always better without the armed forces breathing down one’s neck, am I right?”

Scarlet’s bruised lips contort with hatred.

Dawn nods to Signal, that same upward lift of her chin. “Alright, so, what now? Three on three, a straight fight, is that what you want?”

Grimgrave brandishes her shotgun. “We want you bitches to all fuck right off! Right now! Get the fuck out!”

“Grimgrave is correct, if a little inelegant with her choice of language,” Signal purrs, voice crackling from her skeletons. “But I would like to echo the sentiment. You should all fuck right off. I’m willing to bet that all six of us here are more than capable of massive collateral damage. If we fight — and I mean, really fight — that won’t be much better than letting those jets bomb the hospital. Here’s what’s going to happen, ladies. You’re going to leave. Get out of our sight. Cancel your transformations. Tell your boss to leave well off. Then we’re going to leave too. We’re gonna get beyond range of whatever you’ve done to interfere with translocation, and we’re taking Octavia with us. You’re not going to try to stop us.”

“Unacceptable!” Scarlet Edge hisses. “This is where it ends, between her and I! Octavia! Octavia, you want this too, I know you do!”

Scarlet meets my eyes. Whatever else she is, she’s not lying.

Azure Infinity chews her lip, shaking her head, ponytail swaying against the clouds. “This is crazy. Scarlet, Dawn, this is crazy.”

“Letting Octavia go was already a non-starter,” Dawn drawls, shrugging as if this is all nothing. “Even more now that we know you three exist. And also you’re filming all this? Naaaaah. Surely you can see that … ‘Signal’, right? Funny name.”

“The Locus of Lost Signals to you,” Signal says, bright and bouncy. “You’ve never heard my name, or seen my face. But you’ve seen the result of my work plenty of times.”

“Huh,” Dawn almost laughs. “Megalomania, really?”

“Let Octavia go,” Signal repeats.

“Too late for that,” Bright growls. “They wanna fight. And so I do. Scarleeeet. Francescaaaaa. Look at me. Look at me!” Bright roars. “Look at me!”

Scarlet hazards a glance at Bright. “You are of no interest.”

Bright clenches her teeth, red smoke trailing from the corners of her mouth, muscles quivering.

“Yeah, yeah!” Grimgrave breaks into a fresh grin. “This is it, Siggy! They won’t let us go, they don’t want to, and this is all on camera. There’s a Dreamer too, this is all about a Dreamer! If they let us go, they’re letting that cat out the bag!” Grimgrave turns toward the crowds, down in the streets, the people hanging from their tower block windows, the stopped traffic, the phone cameras. “You hear that, England?! They’re working with a Dreamer! The Trio are working with a Dreamer, everything you’ve been told is—”

“Lies!” Scarlet Edge explodes. “Lies! It’s all lies! You don’t understand a thing you’re saying, you filthy vermin! You think it’s so easy!? Well, I refute all of it! I will give Octavia a clean death. I will, I will!”

“Ooooooh!” Grimgrave cheers back, flashing her teeth from ear to ear, spinning her shotgun, aiming at Scarlet’s face. “Getting personal, hey? You up to find out just how bad I can be, huh? Huh!? Want me to shove my boomstick up your cunt and paint your baby-baker with lead, huhhhhh!?”

My voice creeps back, a tickle of stagnant cold up my throat. “Signal. Signal, I have to get out. Willow, she— I can’t stay here, t-there’s no time for a fight, please, please.”

Signal changes the emote on her helmet: （´＿｀）

“Sorry, lass,” she says. “I think the only way out is through. Pains me to say it, but Bright and Grimmy have the right of it for once. We’re gonna have to fight.”

“But, Willow … ” I glance back at the roof access door again. Still shut. Is she right behind it, ear to the metal, waiting to snatch me up? She is. I know it.

“We’re doing this, then?” Dawn drawls. “Azzy, you with us?”

Azure Infinity swallows hard, then raises her head and nods, gauntlets tightening on the haft of her hammer. “All together, or not at all. All together.”

Bright growls, steam and smoke pouring from her mouth, totally focused on Scarlet. “We’re doing this. You and me.”

“Azure, Dawn!” Scarlet snaps. “One of you handle the dragon. Keep it off me.”

Bright snorts a plume of dark smoke. “I’m right here. I’m right here, and you still won’t see me. Look at me. Look!”

Signal strums another single note on her guitar, prelude to an avalanche. “Well then, if we’re all agreed? How very civilised this all is. Anyway, if it’s unavoidable, we may as well make this count. Our debut. A coming out party. Isn’t that right, Octavia?”

So numb, I can barely think. My suggestion, wasn’t it?

“Right,” I murmur. “Our debut … ”

Grimgrave cheers. “Coming out of the closet to fuck you all dead!”

Azure Infinity raises her hammer, eyes set and hard. Burning Bright steps forward, hissing great gouts of red smoke, claws scraping against the concrete, tail lashing behind her. Dawn’s First Gloaming passes her rifle from hand to hand, and suddenly has two identical guns, levels them akimbo.

“Going to war, huh?” Dawn drawls. “There’s no way back after this, you know? You three were just a theory until today. Step back now, maybe we can all pretend … ” Then she chuckles softly, dark smile on her lips. “Nah. Guess we can’t. War it is.”

Signal switches her emote: (⌐▨_▨)

“As a great philosopher of war once said,” Signal’s voice loses all bounce, all accent, all humanity. Pure machine, a static crackle. “Once you in it, you in it.”

Scarlet Edge points her sword at me, eyes ablaze, lips peeled back.

“Octavia!”

She charges. A bolt of bleeding flame. Breaks me from the glassy depths of dissociation. I stumble back, catch a scream, caught between death and worse, the door at my back.

The rooftop explodes into a whirling melee.

Half the fight is too fast for me to follow, the other half beyond my comprehension. This is far from the first time I’ve seen magical girls in battle; anybody who lives in England and doesn’t reside under a rock has seen magical girls on the evening news, on the approved parts of the internet, in comic books and cartoons and a hundred thousand slapdash memes. Even in person, from street-level, witnessed with one’s own eyes. But they’re always dashing and precise. The clash of elegant sword against curved nightmare claws. The parting of Dreamland flesh beneath magical pike and shot. Glamorous angles, picturesque slashes, artful splashes of otherworldly blood. Every now and then one might see a magical girl display evidence of her true superhuman limits — unpowered flight, strength beyond her slender muscles, bare fists ripping through monsters from beyond the wall of sleep.

But the hard stuff, the stuff they only use against real nightmares, they try not to show that on the telly.

And magical girls do not fight each other; they fight nightmares and monsters and Dreamland incursions. This battle is a historical first. A broken taboo, a watershed in history. An interesting place, at an interesting time, though one I would rather not be present for in person.

Scarlet Edge charges like a backdraft from a burning building, moving too fast to follow with the naked eye, a corona of heat scorching the air before her, sword raised for an overhead blow.

Burning Bright roars so loud it shakes the rooftop, launches herself to catch Scarlet in a bull-rush tackle.

Azure Infinity kicks off the concrete tiles and shoots through the air like a comet, swinging her hammer for Bright’s centre of mass. Her weapon connects with the front of Bright’s ribcage, a sickening crunch of breaking bones and pulping flesh, deflected by the rippling scales of Bright’s living armour. Bright goes flying, spitting blood, lashing her tail, tossed up and over the side of the roof.

She catches the air as if gravity means nothing.

Wings of fire unfurl from her back. Pure affectation; all magical girls can fly, wings or not. She lifts into the air, wings beating with the roar of open flame, swoops for Scarlet Edge a second time. Azure jumps off the roof and darts up into the air, blocking Bright’s path, the deep blue slash of her armoured dress flashing dark against the grey storm clouds.

Dawn’s First Gloaming discharges both her rifles at Signal, twin gunshots like the disc of the sun struck by a stellar mallet. Paired bullets rip a double-furrow through the air, a streak of irregular jagged sunlight-yellow, zig-zagging toward their target. The Locus of Lost Signals strums one hand across the strings of her guitar, blasting out a deafening power chord; she opens her mouth wide and howls a deep, guttural, death-metal growl. Sound-waves snap Dawn’s bullets back onto a linear trajectory, slowing them as if plunged into cold tar, sunlight gleam drowned in black ink. One of Signal’s armoured skeletons jerks forward to block the rounds. The bullets thump into the iron-hard metal shell over the skeleton’s chest, leaving behind a pair of nasty dents. Antiquated lead shot falls to the concrete tiles with a dull clicker-clatter.

Scarlet Edge charges straight across the open rooftop, blade raised to take off my head. Her eyes blaze, no time for her comrades, as if I am the end of her world.

Stumble back, grit my teeth, try to raise my fist; she’ll kill me if I don’t fight back, but I’m so thin, like mist, almost gone.

I don’t even know who I am anymore.

A dark rainbow blur leaps to my defence. Grimgrave the clown, the psycho jester from the dark side of the moon. Patience Graves, the third and first magical girl of Nerys’ anti-trio. Grimmy, who has saved me more than once, more than twice, more than she can know.

She spins into Scarlet’s path, rollerblades gliding across the concrete rooftop, mouth wide in a maniac gibber. She ducks and weaves and twists, faster than I can follow, suddenly well inside Scarlet’s guard. The black metal tube of her shotgun bounces upward, muzzle jammed into Scarlet’s ribs, denting the white lace and red ruffles of her dress, right against the hidden flutter of her heart.

“Boo!” Grimgrave shouts.

She pulls the trigger.

Scarlet’s ribs crumple, viscera and bone fragments and an arc of bright red blood exploding from an exit wound on the opposite side. Momentum slams her sideways, knocks her from her feet, sends her bouncing and rolling across the rooftop, ruby sword clanging on concrete.

The other two thirds of the fight have already gone airborne.

Burning Bright vomits great gouts of dark red flame, spears of fire lancing the underside of grey storm clouds; ruby-red claws rake the air, dragging twenty-foot rents in the atmosphere that close with snapping thunderclaps. Azure Infinity dodges half the hits, tanks the other half on her armour; the deep sapphire nebula of her dress expands like an optical illusion, swallowing the blows, dousing flame in the vacuum of space. But the edges grow ragged with rapid damage, Bright’s claw-strikes ripping it to shreds, blood raining from a hundred wounds in Azure’s flanks. Azure replies with rapid-fire hammer-blows, landing bone-breaking impacts on Bright’s arms and ribs, each one shuddering across the sky, spilling broken scales to the streets below. She darts away from Bright’s roaring counter-attacks — but then catches a side-swipe from Bright’s spiked tail, careening through the air before righting herself, raising her hammer, shouting a war cry as she returns to the fray.

In mere seconds both of them are bruised and bleeding all over, spitting blood from burst lips, scorched and blackened by fire. Azure’s ponytail comes loose, tips of her blonde hair aflame. Bright roars with frustration, ribs cracked and re-knitting with magical girl healing powers; again and again she tries to break through Azure’s defences, darting for the rooftop, to stake her claim on her sister, Scarlet Edge.

Dawn’s First Gloaming has leapt into the air and turned herself into an artillery barrage; her arquebus has multiplied, splitting like bacteria undergoing mitosis, doubling and doubling and doubling again, until she is the darting core of a sphere of a hundred antique rifles, each one cracking off zig-zag bolts of yellow sunlight. Signal strums her guitar non-stop, glove ragged, fingers bleeding, pounding out a discordant wave of death-metal noise; her throat and exposed mouth distort as she growls a gut-shaking chorus. Her song slows the bullets, makes them mundane, gives her skeletons time to intercept, their black armour increasingly dented and crumpled, starting to break away in places, exposing the false bone and computer parts beneath.

Four skeletons are inside Dawn’s sphere of guns, moving with as much speed as the magical girls, breaking rifles with iron-shod fists, metal-clad feet stomping for Dawn’s exposed head. Dawn whips out her brace of black-powder pistols, cracking off close-range shots at her attackers, keeping them barely at bay as they slowly dismantle her gun-line. Her face is twisted with an agonized grimace, blood running from both ears.

Everyone sees Scarlet go down in a tangle of flailing limbs.

Azure hesitates. Bright roars with indignant rage. Dawn bares her teeth and concentrates on the fight. Signal doesn’t react. The crowd beyond the hospital rumbles like the ocean.

Grimgrave trips to a stop on her rollerblades, raises her shotgun in one fist, cackles out a peal of high-pitched hyena-laughter.

Scarlet Edge halts her headlong tumble by ramming the point of her sword into the concrete rooftop. She lies still for a second, then slowly rises to her feet, blood soaking down the side of her dress, open wound sucking shut with visible speed. She spits a crimson spray onto the ground.

“Awwwwww!” Grimgrave belts out a mocking whine. “Gonna cry!? Gonna fuckin’ blubber for me, bitch? Get down here and suck my fuckin’ toes!”

Scarlet Edge wipes her blood-stained mouth with one hand, eyes fluttering strangely as she touches the bruise on her lips. She spares me a long look, then glares at Grimgrave. “She does not belong to you, either, you absurd little clown. She belongs to nobody. Nobody. Nobody.”

“Eh?” Grimgrave pulls a comic frown. “The fuck you on about now?”

Scarlet Edge raises her sword. “You are not worthy of this. You are not.” She charges again, a blaze of fire across the rooftop.

Grimgrave cackles, zipping away on her rollerblades. “If you can catch me, you fuckin’ loose-arse cock-holster!”

The Trio of Albion, split into three, fighting the revolutionaries from Luna. And me in the middle, the eye of the storm, where none of it feels real.

Am I not still a player on a stage, led around by my lines? Willow blocked the translocation, kept me down here in England, tethered to Oxford, to false memories of her. Is this fight not what she wants? Or is this happening at the direction of some other force? Did Nerys plan all this, or a Dream-God on the other side, another hand on my strings?

My own hands don’t feel real either, no distinction between the left and the right anymore. All of me no more than a puppet, a whole-body prosthetic, but not my own. I don’t know who I am, or what I am. Make a fist with my right, but I can’t feel a thing. I never could.

Was I ever real in the first place? How much of me did Willow dream up?

I’m nothing. So why is Grimgrave fighting for me?

Grimgrave moves like a cross between a trapeze artist and a parkour expert, sliding and spinning and skipping on her rollerblades at incredible speed, punctuated by instant handsprings and zero-inertia shifts of momentum, kicking off the lip of concrete wall, using the weight of her rollerblades to carry her in near-impossible loops and spirals, tossing her shotgun into the air, making it vanish behind her back. She leads Scarlet Edge on a mad chase, her twin-tails and the ends of her big blue ribbon trailing out behind her; again and again Scarlet Edge turns to me, to break off this diversion with Grimgrave, to resume her real purpose. But always Grimgrave is there again; she darts in and out quick as a striking snake, peppering Scarlet Edge with buckshot from her pump-action. Her hands blur, racking the slide so fast it seems like the gun should break, slam-firing shell after shell. Fresh rounds blossom from her fingers whenever she stops, colour-coded in warning reds and toxic pinks and nuclear waste green; the rounds belch fire and punch out solid slugs and blast flechette airbursts at Scarlet’s face.

She laughs as she fights, grinning wide like a mad little imp.

Scarlet Edge dodges perhaps one third of Grimgrave’s fire, deflects a little with the flat of her sword, takes the rest as if she doesn’t care. Rounds ruin her red and white dress, blast chunks out of her sides and skirts, streaming with shredded white lace, crimson innards bursting free like pulped intestines.

Bleeding from a dozen open wounds, scalp torn, face lacerated, hair tangled, limbs cut and bruised and burned, but she doesn’t stop. She heals so fast one can watch it happen with the naked eye, even in the middle of a lightning-fast duel between magical girls. Buckshot pellets squeeze from closing wounds, ribs pop back into place, shredded flesh folds in on itself, smooth and pale and unblemished in seconds. Head wounds close like nothing. Broken arms whip back into place.

All except the bruise around her mouth, the one I left on her lips.

Grimgrave keeps firing, pumping round after round into Scarlet Edge, but even Luna’s grinning jester can’t stop this monster. She must be brimming over with girl-juice to heal this fast; she could endure this fight for hours, days, weeks, months.

She starts to land hits on Grimgrave. A nick here, a slice there, her ruby sword cutting scorch marks in Grimgrave’s clown outfit, marring her blue-and-black dress with lines of burnt fabric, opening shallow wounds on her blue-pink-white legs, scoring one massive slash across her collarbone and neck and cheek. Grimgrave doesn’t pause, barely acknowledges the wounds, bleeding all down her dress, mad laughter undimmed.

Somebody screams her name. “Grimmy!”

She heals so much slower than Scarlet, the massive cut on her collarbone and neck barely inching shut. Scarlet Edge glances away from her, blazing eyes landing on me, calculating if the fight is over, if she can go for the kill.

But then Grimgrave is in front of her again, spinning and kicking and weaving and ducking, pumping solid-slug rounds into her gut to knock her back, bowl her over, keep her down.

Scarlet Edge bounds to her feet in the blink of an eye. She redoubles her speed, forcing Grimgrave into retreat, toward me. Her ruby sword rises and falls like a woodcutter’s axe, slamming concrete tiles apart, opening wounds on Grimgrave’s front, heedless of the pounding discharges from her shotgun. Scarlet’s face twists with triumph, teeth gritted, eyes aflame, flushed and panting with pleasure.

Clarity hits, cleaner and clearer than anything so far in my pitiful lie of a life.

Grimgrave is about to die. Protecting me.

Absurd. Obscene. Unacceptable nonsense. I am nobody and nothing, less than a shadow. Grimgrave — Patience Graves — has known me for one single day. At best I’m another embryonic magical girl in a long line of failures and disappointments and sad, lonely, unrecorded deaths. How could she possibly care enough to give her life for me? Why would she sacrifice anything for a pathetic cripple who cannot protect herself? Grimgrave is beautiful and swift and skilled and confident and I am the sodden dregs of a Dreamer’s sordid little fantasy.

Grimgrave doesn’t deserve to die for me; I don’t deserve such selfless love.

Red-black light drowns my sight, pouring from behind me, over my shoulders, around my flanks. A monster stands at my back, a titan of black metal and the fires of unquenchable rage.

I let it inside, because there’s nothing left to stop it.

Pick up my feet, sprint for the duel. Right leg, my prosthetic foot, cracks the concrete with each step, a pneumatic piston powered by molten blood. Scarlet Edge is raising her sword, an upwards sideways sweep; this blow will take off Grimgrave’s head, and Grimmy won’t dodge because then there would be nothing between Scarlet and me. Scarlet’s lips peel back in victory, her face a horrid hateful mask. What foolishness that I ever thought her beautiful. Time to correct the mistake.

I slam past Grimgrave. Pull back my right elbow. Make a fist.

My blood is fire, my breathing a bellows, my arm a piston, my fist a wrecking ball.

Scarlet’s eyes go wide, shock then delight, then screaming pleasure. “Octavia! You understand—”

The first punch breaks her nose, shatters her jaw, blood spraying in a fan. My elbow slams back like a jack-hammer, the next punch loaded and ready. Scarlet Edge splutters through ruined meat, flailing with her sword. My second punch smashes the blade aside — deflected from black armour over my forearm, a ghostly halo around my limbs, a shell of iron and anger growing more solid with every moment. My fist crashes into her face again. Bursts her right eye. Teeth go flying. Her sword glances off my chest — my chest-plate, a half-real sheet of black iron armour shot through with veins of dark red. My fist rockets back again. Third punch crumples the front of her skull.

My elbow shoots back, loads another punch. I am a living piston, my fist the extension of my will.

Scarlet Edge heals so fast her face is already re-forming, her sword swinging upward for a proper counter-attack.

Transformation has me, at long last. Teetering on the edge, armoured in resentment, plated with black steel, heart and guts a furnace of revenge. All the world will burn. I will punch it apart. England cracks beneath my knuckles. Scarlet Edge will be first.

It seems so obvious, now it’s happening. So easy, now I know who I am.

Scarlet’s sword sweeps down; I loose another punch, to smash right through it, snap the blade in two. When it breaks, my transformation will be complete, I will be complete, I will be—

An ordinary young woman throws herself between Scarlet and me.

Long brown hair, loose yellow pajamas, bare feet.

Willow.

Arms out wide, face toward Scarlet, back turned to me, as if protecting me from Scarlet Edge’s killing blow. A lifetime of false love and lies come rushing back, the dregs of the dream like wet mucus in my throat, dousing my anger, drowning who I should be.

Transformation gutters out.

My right arm is nothing but bare prosthetic limb. The rest of me, unprotected human flesh.

But the punch is already underway; Scarlet Edge’s sword is already falling. Scarlet’s face twists with horror, jealousy, disgust. But she can’t pull the blow. Neither can I.

My punch sails past Willow’s shoulder. As if protecting her from Scarlet. Putting my arm between her and the blade. A final and total humiliation.

Scarlet Edge’s ruby sword hits the middle of my prosthetic forearm at a perfect ninety-degree angle, cutting through carbon fibre and foam like a hot knife through soft butter.

The front half of my forearm clatters to the broken concrete tiles, along with the dead weight of my prosthetic hand.

Deep in my chest, something important seizes up.

I reel, lurch, try to gasp, a weight on my ribs, staring at the stump of my prosthetic. Can’t breathe. Can’t work my lungs. Scarlet Edge staggers back, eyes wide with horror, sword limp in her hand.

Legs give out. All I am crumples. Concrete meets my face. Can’t move. Strings cut.

Willow turns, toward me. An ordinary girl, a human being, soft brown eyes filled with care and sorrow for her fallen lover. But then she smiles, a cruel little slash. She opens her mouth to speak the words that will unwind whatever is left of my soul.

“Get the fuck off!” Grimgrave roars — and shoots Willow in the side of the chest.

She slam-fires round after round into Willow, suddenly inside her reach, pumping the action of her shotgun point-blank, clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack. Golden light explodes from the wounds, inhuman screeching tearing at the sky. Willow is tossed away like a rag-doll under impact after impact, topples from the side of the roof, trailing streamers of toxic light. An ocean joins her scream, a mass crowd surging with blind panic.

My sight goes red-black, then just black, then flickers back on.

Grimgrave’s face fills the world, bright red hearts like bruises around her eyes.

“Occy! Occy!” She looks up and away. I grope for her with my left hand. Can’t make a fist. “Bright, Signal!” she shouts. “We’re fuckin’ leaving, right fucking now! Now!”

Somebody shouts, a mechanical voice. “You’re clear, Geegee! Go!”

Grimgrave jerks around, over her shoulder. “And don’t you fuckin’ dare, you dolled-up cunt, I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth! You think one shotgun’s all I got?!”

Scarlet’s voice floats from the bottom of a well. “I didn’t … didn’t … ”

“Arm,” I croak, pawing at Grimgrave’s shoulder. “Arm. My arm.”

She holds it up. My severed prosthetic forearm, hand gone stiff. A clown with her grotesque prop. “Got all your parts, Occy! Now hold on tight, yo, cos’ we’re outta here!”

Grimgrave grabs me, hauls me to my feet, grey skies whirling. We go over, falling together, as Grimgrave pushes reality aside with the absurdity of her tumble.

The waking world goes one way.

And we — we magical girls — go the other.

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You didn’t think you were free just like that, did you, Octavia? After all, we can’t conclude the long opening of this magical girl tale without a grand battle, can we? Willow agrees; you see, it gave her one more chance to disarm you. Ahem. Pun intended.

But now, it’s over. The end of the beginning! The beginning of the vast middle. Octavia is all the way down now, she can feel the bottom of the pit against her cheek. But she’s not alone. Grimgrave to the rescue.

Phew! Well! There we go. As I said, the end of the beginning, the first three arcs of Maidens of the Fall, a sort of ‘first book’? The players stand astride the stage, and the story is ready to deepen. Though I doubt we’ve met everybody yet, not by a longshot. There’s so much more to come. Not least the matter of Octavia’s arm, and the pain of an unrealised transformation. Onto arc 4 we go, dear readers! And I very much hope you’ve been enjoying all this just as much as I’ve been enjoying writing it. Thank you all so much!

 

And this week, I actually have a shout-out! Well, sort of.

I imagine most(?) readers here have at least heard of The Wandering Inn. It’s very famous, probably the most famous web-serial out there, and hardly needs a shout-out from anybody these days. However, in quite a surprise to some of us, TWI is about to be published as a series of physical books, actual print! If you want to read pirateaba’s announcement about it, you can find that over here. This is … well, okay, it’s not the first time a web serial has gotten a traditional publishing deal, but I think it’s the first time something on the sheer scale of TWI has achieved that (though, please, correct me if I’m wrong!) So, this is kind of a big deal in the web serial world, especially for somebody like me, who happens to write very, very, very long stories. If TWI’s publishing deal is successful, then hey, who knows what might happen in the future!

Please, if you’re the least bit interested, go take a look. I really respect pirateaba as a writer and a person, so if that carries any weight, and you haven’t read TWI, you might enjoy it!

If you want to read TWI right away, here’s the landing page! If you want to preorder the physical books, you can do that here (UK), here (HarperCollins), here (B&N), or here (Canada)!

 

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

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! As always, thank you so very much for being here and enjoying my little story about hyperviolent magical girls and their struggle to shatter the chains on England’s heart. Octavia’s got so very far to go, and we’ll be with her, every step of the way. Thank you all!

Next chapter, it’s back to the moon, we can assume, for some much needed repairs. Oh dear oh dear. Octavia’s not going to take any of this well.