Adah and her team left Ketzia’s the next morning after a breakfast quieter than any other they’d had at the cabin. Everyone else may have been contemplating the strange singing Cruelty they’d encountered the day before, but Adah’s mind was still stuck on her argument with Ketzia. How could she balance what Ketzia had said with what she felt inside of her, even if she knew the woman’s words to be true?
Even after the long car ride home, Adah never found her answer. It seemed that she wouldn’t be given the time to contemplate that question any further either. As soon as she stepped into the agency office, a host of new distractions swarmed her.
First was Seb, who had connected with a proper director for the Last Light’s first real music video. He swore that this woman had a style that suited the Last Light perfectly, and together they’d create a video that no other team could replicate. That was good news, and Adah had ideas for how that video could fit into the rest of the coalition’s plans, but music wasn’t the team’s top priority right now. They needed to reorganize first, then they would know when they could spare the time to film a video like that.
Adah told Seb as much, only to immediately be pulled aside by Michel. Apparently he’d been working his connections even harder now that the Last Light had a foothold in the industry.
“No promises yet,” he had said, “but I might have struck gold. How do you feel about TV? And I mean real TV, not some boring evening news interview.”
Normally, dangling that kind of bait in front of her would have made Adah giddy with anticipation, but today she had no trouble waiting for a tangible update. She wasn’t sure what constituted “real” TV, but until Michel had a real update for her, she couldn’t give the idea any space in her brain.
His talk about interviews reminded her about Elise, though. The Secretary hadn’t reached out yet, but she’d want to know what Adah had learned about the humanoid Cruelty. She’d also be happy to know her system had produced yet another accurate prediction. Maybe she could refine the model even further.
Finally, that left the other coalition teams.
Someone would need to follow up with Seliah—most likely Ami and Adah together. That girl was still dangling out there alone. They needed to resolve whatever reservations Seliah had about joining the Last Light. Elise had been right about the girl—she had the potential to be Region 4’s strongest weapon against the Cruelties, especially the humanoids. Seliah could anticipate a normal Cruelty’s movements well, but she had an even sharper read on human opponents. Their sparring session had made Adah all too aware of that.
As for Fifty Flip, their teams were overdue for a sparring session. Adah knew the least about their spells out of everyone in the coalition, and the time had come to rectify that. She needed to know exactly how she could rely on each of her allies in the coming months.
Adah spent the rest of the day in her room, writing out notes and charting out her team’s next moves on her calendar, pausing only to eat a dinner of assorted snacks at her desk. She hadn’t thought it’d be possible for the team’s schedule to grow even busier, yet that was exactly what had happened.
By the end of it all, Adah could hear the gears in her brain grinding against each other, ungreased for a lack of glucose. There was only one cure for this kind of exhaustion—the kind that localized itself in the mind—so she put down her pen and headed across the hall for Rika’s room.
One knock later, she found herself sitting on Rika’s bed with her back against the headboard. Rika sat next to her, at the center of the bed with her legs criss-crossed. The two of them looked at each other without speaking for a while. After hanging around Ketzia so much, Adah realized what was special about Rika’s eyes. They didn’t glow like the Untethered magical girl’s. They absorbed all the light around them, pulling your attention with it, and shone like stars as a result.
Right now, those stars stared at Adah’s left cheek.
“Let me see it,” Rika said.
Adah turned her head so that her cheek, where Ketzia’s spark had burned, was closer to Rika. She’d taken a quick look at it in the mirror earlier. The burn was no larger than a thumbnail and had already healed to a pale red that hardly stood out against her skin. The mark would vanish in a couple of days at worst.
Rika grazed a couple of her fingers along Adah’s chin and sighed.
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“A shame it happened to the cuter side,” she said.
“Cuter, huh?” Adah said. “And here I thought I had a symmetrical face.”
Rika gently pushed Adah’s face away and said, “Yes, yes, it’s a perfect mirror. An old master could paint it a hundred times and still not do it justice.”
“When you say it like that, I have a hard time believing you.”
“I wonder why,” Rika said. “So, do you want to tell me what you did to deserve that?”
Adah tapped the burn with her fingers. At this point, it didn’t hurt unless she deliberately pressed against it. Still, she’d probably sleep on her right side again tonight.
“I figured out why Ketzia was upset with me,” Adah said. “Then that just made me mad, too. I ended up saying something I shouldn’t have.”
Adah recapped the rest of her late night conversation with Ketzia. Remembering what her mentor had said was making her mad all over again, but she tried to push those feelings to the side. They hadn’t done her any good last night.
“So, yeah,” she said as she finished filling Rika in. “I probably did deserve this.”
“It sounds like you two made up, though,” Rika said. “She probably let you off easy. What if she’d burned all your hair off?”
Adah laughed; it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. The very first time they met, Ketzia had greeted Ami by burning the sleeves off her shirt. The woman was a certified pyromaniac. Maybe she’d lost all sense of how frightening fire was to the average person, considering that even the hottest flames left her unscathed.
Although it was true that she and Ketzia had ended the evening on good terms, Adah didn’t want to think about their conversation for any longer tonight. Deep down, she’d left too many feelings unresolved and, as much as she understood her mentor’s perspective, it seemed insufficient to her. That way of thinking wouldn’t end this war. If it could, humanity wouldn’t be in the position it was today. Therefore, Adah would rather focus on the path forward. She had gone to Ketzia’s to learn more about the humanoid Cruelties, not to debate what was worth sacrificing to kill them.
“What do you make of it all?” Adah asked Rika. “The singing? The fear—or whatever it was—that Clair saw?”
Before responding, Rika waddled on her knees a bit farther down her bed. That gave her enough space to lie down and rest her head in Adah’s lap. The presence of Rika’s head there made Adah realize her thighs had been tensed, so she relaxed her muscles to give Rika as soft a pillow as possible. Rika had settled herself such that her head had shifted the fabric of Adah’s pajama shorts up slightly, revealing enough leg for her whole face to rest against Adah’s bare skin. With the way Rika’s face squished against her thigh, Adah could feel every contour of the girl’s chin and cheekbones.
“It’s hard to say,” Rika said once she was comfortable. “We know one thing for sure: the humanoids have been copying us as closely as they can. We saw one that could talk and now one that can sing, if that’s what it was trying to do. But what’s the point of copying something like singing if they already know how to use our spells? They’ve already got humanity’s best weapon. So it made me wonder, why do we sing? Our spells don’t require it, but it helps us gain fans, and fans make us stronger.”
As Rika spoke, her head rubbed against Adah’s skin, and her breath tickled the leg her head wasn’t resting on.
“Then maybe they want to sing to do the opposite,” Adah said. “Rather than turning people into fans…”
“They want them to be afraid,” Rika finished.
“It could be worse than that,” Adah said. “Remember why we went on that patrol during the S-Rank? The humanoids aren’t just deadly—they could make people lose faith in magic as a whole. Usually when magical girls struggle on the battlefield, they can try to make up for it on the stage. But if those monsters are beating us in combat with our own spells and making a mockery out of everything else that we do, that’s only going to accelerate the problem.”
“Who wants to watch a magical girl act like an idol when her city’s burning?” Rika mused.
Adah chewed on the knuckle of her thumb until it hurt.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” she said, “but this could be their way of attacking the whole system behind magic. Those early magical girls like Aino and Pureheart built a world where acting like stars was our greatest strength. Maybe the Cruelties are trying to take that strength away from us.”
“Let’s hope you’re wrong, then,” Rika said, then pressed her face into Adah’s thigh. Perhaps she needed to recharge as well.
The two of them waited in silence for a while. Adah looked down at Rika, who had closed her eyes and breathed softly into Adah’s leg. Maybe in another world, they could have had more moments like this. Why it had been that, just as they found their footing as magical girls, just as Rika began to grab hold of her dreams, all of this had to happen? Those years they’d wasted at the start of their careers had been the height of peace for humanity, and now that peace felt like it was crumbling away.
As if she’d heard Adah’s thoughts, Rika sighed again.
“I’ll never be able to fall asleep after thinking about those Cruelties,” she said. “You need to distract me.”
“And how should I distract you?” Adah asked.
Rika rolled her head slightly to look up at Adah.
“How does one lover distract the other?” she asked.
“When I asked you that same question, you told me there was a time and place for things like that,” Adah said.
Rika turned her head so that her face was pressed against Adah’s leg once more. She bit into the meat of Adah’s thigh, sinking her teeth in just enough to hurt. It was a tiny pain, one that served only to draw all of Adah’s attention to that spot high on her leg. That spot where Rika’s lips had just been.
“We’re in the right place now, aren’t we?” Rika whispered. “What do you think about the time?”
“When you put it like that,” Adah said, “it’s hard to wait another second.”
Rika looked up at her again. Those eyes of hers made all the light in the room seem dim.
“So don’t,” she said.