“Adah!”
The voice that yelled her name belonged to Iris, but the woman that stood before Adah looked nothing like her. Instead, she was tall and slender with big, round eyes that twinkled from deep within. Her hair, as black as Adah’s own, fell in one unmarred sheet down to the small of her back. She wore what could only be a magical girl’s transformation outfit. Her dress had a longer layer in the back, which opened wide like a blossoming flower, while the main layer was cut short and close to her body. She had on long gloves plated with pieces of metal and tall boots with double laces. The whole ensemble was dyed a green spectral hue.
All of this made her look like a princess who had prepared for a morning coronation followed by an afternoon hunting trip. She had a beauty about her that unveiled itself without any effort, as if it couldn’t be contained, and a strength in her posture that made her appear twice her size.
Adah recognized the woman as soon as she set eyes on her. There was no way she couldn’t. Before her stood the symbol of everything that magical girls had become: Auroral Aino.
Aino said nothing to Adah, and Adah was too confused to say anything herself. Aino was dead and, had she been alive, she wouldn’t have appeared to Adah so casually. This then had to be yet another vision.
As if that realization had snuffed the life from this fake Aino, the twinkling lights faded from her eyes and their irises turned dull. Her skin lost all its blush, turning a pale gray. She became like a statue all at once.
And then that statue broke apart.
Aino’s limbs fell from her body and, with nothing left to support it, her torso came crashing to the ground. The impact of that crash dislodged her head from her neck, and it rolled away, eventually vanishing within some shadows in the distance.
With Aino dismantled, Adah’s vision transitioned from a illusory movie to an erratic slideshow.
The images came one after another, flashing point blank in front of Adah’s face and lasting only a second each. The first batch were all of a similar nature: strange chimeras made up of Aino’s body parts and various other earthly creatures. Her head in the place of a rhino’s horn; her arms serving as an elephant’s tusks; eight octopus arms sprouting from her torso. So many of these abominations flickered in Adah’s eyes that she lost count of them. In the end, none of them lasted. They were soon replaced with an even more unsettling figure.
Aino appeared before Adah once more, though this was but an uncanny resemblance of her. Her limbs were misplaced—the right leg was attached to her body on the left side, and the same mistake had been made with her arms. Even worse was Aino’s head, which was attached to her body like an ear is to a head. Her neck was practically nonexistent, and only a short film of skin connected her jaw to her torso.
She had been put back together like a child’s drawing of what a human was.
And she stared at Adah with those same dead eyes.
“Adah!”
The voice came through Aino but not from her.
It was Iris again, Adah knew.
“Adah!”
Adah squeezed her eyes shut until tears welled in their corners. When she opened them again, she saw the faces of Clair and Ekki where Aino had once been. Her arm was slung over someone’s shoulder; a quick glance to her right revealed that person to be Iris. The girl stared into Adah’s eyes. She almost looked worried.
With her mind back in reality, Adah slipped away from Iris, who must have been helping to keep her upright during her vision. The present moment returned to her slowly. She was at a mission with DreamRise. She had just collected the essence from a Cruelty’s core—in fact, her left hand still clutched her scythe. After she had felt the heartbeat of the consumed essence echo inside her weapon, she had found herself staring at Aino.
And now she was back here.
“Are you okay?” Ekki asked her.
Adah released Beleth’s Bloodletter and took a deep breath. The air this time of air was still cold, but she could sense the first signs of spring. The snow had melted away, and it wouldn’t be long before life sprouted from the once frozen dirt.
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“Yeah, sorry to worry you,” Adah said. “They usually aren’t this bad.”
Now that she was siphoning essence from Cruelties on an almost daily basis, Adah had discovered some patterns when it came to her visions.
The most common kind were those that flashed through her mind without forewarning. These were the “echo thoughts,” like those she had experienced while filming the dance practice with her team or sitting on Ketzia’s shed with Ekki. She had almost considered these premonitions, on account of how they had predicted the arrival of the S-Rank Cruelty and the singing humanoid, but they were inconsistent in what they showed her. Oftentimes, she saw nothing—and learned of nothing—in the days that followed such echo thoughts that had anything to do with the vision. Their contents seemed to be as random as when they appeared to her.
Her other visions were more routine. When she harvested the essence from a Cruelty’s core, she would experience a longer vision more often than not. While the echo thoughts tended to be concrete, singular images, these longer visions were more abstract. Some of them seemed to tell a story, while others were more like disjointed kaleidoscope views of landscapes and creatures that Adah couldn’t recognize. Others, like today’s, fell somewhere in the middle.
Then there was the lucid dream. Thankfully, Adah had yet to experience another one of those since the one involving Pureheart. As unsettling as this vision of Aino had been, it wouldn’t haunt her the way that dream did. Even now, Adah sometimes saw mirages of bodies impaled against trees as she walked about.
“You had another vision, right?” Iris said, knocking Adah out of her thoughts. “What was it of this time?”
“I’m not sure,” Adah said. “They’re not exactly easy to follow. If I had to guess, maybe it had something to do with how the Cruelties learned to create the humanoids.”
She tried to describe what she had seen based on what she could remember, but the details slipped away from her like those of a dream. Only the core images remained—the grotesque chimeras and the uncanny reconstruction of Aino’s body. Once she’d recounted the vision to the best of her ability, Iris and her team agreed that her guess was as good as any, but none of them could truly know.
“If the visions are getting worse,” Ekki said, “maybe you should stop using your weapon. At least for a while.”
Adah was standing on her own by now, but Ekki still watched her intently. His stare brought her back to their conversation atop Ketzia’s shed.
“That would defeat the whole point of our plan,” she said. “The scythe’s the only reason I’m here today, remember? Not to mention, if I stop using it, I’d be sacrificing my greatest strength in combat. The scythe’s too important to give up.”
“Maybe your visions aren’t a problem anyway,” Clair said. “They let you see inside their minds. Sometimes you can even predict what they’re going to do next. We should take advantage of that.”
“First I’d have to start understanding what I’m seeing,” Adah said. “Elise mentioned that the Cruelties think in a way that’s unlike either humans or mascots. If I could learn to think like them, maybe I could make more sense out of the visions.”
After seeing those images of Aino, Adah might have taken a step in that direction. That flickering slideshow was reminiscent of how Elise had explained her library theory. It was as if the Cruelties were rifling through a catalog of spare parts, mixing and matching items and evaluating the results in a sequence. Almost like a rudimentary computer.
“I’d rather find a way for you to avoid those visions altogether,” Ekki said.
“Ekki is right,” Iris agreed, to Adah’s surprise. “You’re no good to us when you’re possessed like that. I won’t always be around to catch you. Even if I was, I’d rather not. You’re quite heavy for someone small enough to live in a doll house.”
“After all that talk about wanting to shove my face in the dirt, now you want to protect me,” Adah said, flashing a smile at Iris.
“I can feel my tongue trying to crawl down my throat to keep me from saying it, but you are the current face of our region,” Iris said. “We’ve allowed you to lead us, so I won’t accept anything less than your best. I couldn’t survive being associated with a magical girl who falls asleep on the job.”
Adah was struck by the same unfamiliar feeling that had confounded her when Iris had defended her after the coalition teams gathered to discuss the S-Rank Cruelty. None of Iris’s insults had any bite to them any longer. She had always possessed a talent for needling Adah with criticisms that would hook into her skin and slowly drive her mad—that had been an essential part of DreamRise’s IndieMagie strategy. But lately, Iris seemed to only attack Adah with comments that would bounce off her like cottonballs.
Was it possible Iris was growing a heart?
“Speaking of,” Iris interrupted before Adah could dive any deeper into that implausible theory, “when will we make our debut? After subjecting me to that satin-laced addict of a designer, I’m expecting a promotion more impressive than that amateur campaign we did before the IndieMagie. Have you prepared anything?”
“Don’t you worry that lightweight head of yours,” Adah told her. “I’ve got a lot more in mind that a photoshoot and press release.”
Empty gestures and self-indulgent theatrics were the last thing the people of their region needed—or wanted—right now. The whole point of Elise’s original plan had been to respond to the “will of the region,” to present them with a new generation of magic users who were committed to defending the region before any other ambitions. The uniforms that her assistant Margot had imagined were symbolic, but they had to amount to more than empty promises and a superficial aesthetic. The coalition teams needed to embody the meaning that those outfits suggested.
They needed to demonstrate the difference between themselves and the teams of other regions. They needed to prove that, united under a singular banner, they were capable of doing something for the region that they couldn’t before.
“We’re going to debut by doing what we promised to do,” Adah explained to Iris and her teammates. “We took on our first B-Rank together. How do you feel about defeating our first A-Rank together?”