“What’s up?” Adah asked Seliah. “It’s just you and me.”
Adah had taken a seat atop Grace’s desk during her meeting with the coalition members. The lobby had enough proper seating to fit all four girls, but Adah had been feeling restless ever since yesterday’s press conference. Sitting somewhere she could swing her legs or quickly hop up to pace around kept her mind busy, and that kept any other visions out.
Seliah had been sharing the couch with Dystopia earlier, but now she walked over to Adah. She took careful steps, as if calculating the exact distance away from Adah she wanted to end up. Seliah was the same way with her rapier—she only wanted to get just close enough to strike her target, not an inch closer.
What an interesting girl.
When Seliah came to a halt about a yard away from Adah, she glanced over at the stairwell leading to the agency dorms.
“The other girls aren’t home?” she asked.
“Today’s a day off for us,” Adah said. “They’re at a farmer’s market. I think they’ll bring some food back, if Ami doesn’t eat it all on the way. You’re welcome to stay until they get back.”
“I don’t…” Seliah paused with a frown, then looked around the lobby and said, “Maybe.”
Maybe? That was unexpected. Did that mean what she wanted to talk about had to do with that? If so, Adah wanted to beat her at her own game. The princess could read her opponents just as well as the witch.
“Did you think more about my offer?” Adah asked. “Did you reach a decision?”
“I did,” Seliah said. “Well, it wasn’t just me thinking about it. I talked to a close friend, too.”
Adah wasn’t aware Seliah had any close friends outside Ami. She didn’t have an impression that the girl was unlikable or anything like that, only that it didn’t add up. She had no teammates, and found no one to replace those who had left her. She spent most days training or studying Cruelties from what Adah could tell. Every time Adah had reached out to arrange a meeting about the carnival or a sparring session ahead of their A-Rank mission, Seliah’s schedule had been completely flexible.
Perhaps this was why it was best not to make assumptions about people. Except maybe Clair—that girl usually lived up to expectations.
“I see,” Adah said, crossing one leg over the other on her desktop throne. “So, what do you think?”
Seliah’s face blushed for a moment before she adjusted her gaze to the side of Adah. After clearing her throat, she started to speak again.
“I took what you said seriously,” Seliah said. “I thought about all the reasons you said I should join your team. How I shouldn’t doubt myself, and all of that. I talked to my friend about it, and she helped me realize something. I was thinking about everything as all or nothing. I kept thinking that I had to be able to do this whole magical girl job by myself because, well, what if I had to do it by myself? You know how Ami and I met, right? I thought, what if I wind up in a position like that again—by myself? What if another magical girl never showed up?”
As Adah recalled, Ami had gone into that battle against the ibex Cruelty without a plan. In Ami’s version of the story, her only thought had been to hold that Cruelty in place until either help arrived or her essence ran out, whichever came first. Ami never would have managed to kill that monster with her own spells back then. It seemed the witch didn’t realize it, but the magical girl she looked up to so much had found herself in the same position that Seliah had on that day. They were both waiting for the other to show up.
“But my friend made me realize I wasn’t thinking about the things that no one could do by themselves,” Seliah continued. “If I’m all by myself, there’s so much I won’t be able to accomplish. There’s so much that requires a team, no matter how strong you are alone.”
Adah cracked a smile and said, “Sounds like you’re finally starting to understand the point of our little coalition. Maybe I’m doing an even worse job marketing it than I thought. Even our own members don’t get it.”
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Seliah shook her head with vigor. It was easy to imagine how the point of her oversized witch hat would have flopped about if she’d been transformed.
“That’s not it!” she said, still shaking her head. “I was just being stubborn, I think. Even after talking to my friend, I don’t think I really understood what she meant.”
Seliah opened her mouth to explain, but a new voice—a disembodied voice—interrupted her.
“Friend, friend, friend,” the voice said. “You get embarrassed over the strangest things. If we’re being honest with the girl, let us be completely honest.”
A shimmer of violet-colored magic, like the reflection of starlight off polished glass, rippled above Seliah’s shoulder. A moment later, the raven mascot Shikk appeared perched on her partner. The bird folded both her sets of wings across her breast, hiding her white plumage.
“Ah, Shikk!” Seliah turned her head to yell right in her mascot’s ear. “You said you wouldn’t come out!”
“That was before I knew I’d have to,” Shikk replied. “You need not choose your words so carefully. I am your loyal partner. Your friend stands before you. Speak to her as such.”
So the friend Seliah had consulted with had been her mascot all along? That made more sense. Not that Seliah couldn’t make friends. It just… didn’t seem high in the girl’s list of priorities.
Adah didn’t know too much about Shikk other than the fact that she wasn’t part of the Keteriel. Izzy had said that he knew of the raven, but they hadn’t had much reason to interact in the past. Come to think of it, Izzy didn’t seem to have any friends either, excluding the ones Adah had helped him make. He must have found himself isolated after separating himself from the Keteriel. How long ago had that been? A hundred years? A thousand? If mascots could get lonely, Izzy didn’t let it show.
In any case, the fact that Shikk had no connections to the Keteriel made it even easier to extend Seliah an invitation to the Last Light. Though it made Adah wonder, if Shikk had been one of them, would she want to keep Seliah at arm’s length instead? The idea of Iris joining the team was so absurd that Adah had never considered how she’d feel about letting that two-tailed cat Iosk get close to her. A healthy distance was built into that relationship from the start.
“Okay, okay,” Seliah said, stroking Shikk’s back with her opposite arm. “I get it. Just… don’t say anything embarrassing about what we talked about.”
“It would be unthinkable,” the raven replied.
With her mascot perched on her shoulder, Seliah’s demeanor shifted. She straightened her back and looked Adah in the eyes—not as a matter of course, but to insist that Adah pay attention to every word she had to say.
“During that battle against the cerberus, you saw that I wasn’t going to catch up to that third dog,” Seliah said. “I didn’t say anything, but I was panicking so much. I wished I could have been just a little bit faster. You gave me this one job, and I was screwing it up. I was coming up short. That was all I could think about until you called my name. When I saw what you were trying to do, it washed all the panic out of me.”
“You don’t have to worry so much when your teammates have your back,” Adah said.
She had thought she was agreeing with Seliah, but the witch shook her head yet again.
“I don’t think that’s what this was,” she said. “It was more like you put me back on track. I was too worried to think of a backup plan, but you gave me a new job to do. Once I understood what you were trying to do with your stars, it was so easy to focus again. I was able to execute it without even trying. Even when I’m fighting at my best, I’ve never felt as free from my worries before. I’ve never felt like I didn’t have to try. There was a hand guiding me right where I needed to be, and all I had to do was finish the job. Like I was your sword, I only had to be sharp. I want to feel that again.”
Ah, so that’s how it was. Adah had misunderstood her from the beginning.
Sometimes Seliah was a hawk watching its prey with dagger eyes, but sometimes she was a dragonfly tossed about by every passing breeze. Adah understood now why Lina had hesitated to touch Seliah before. She hadn’t been afraid of getting hooked by the hawk’s talons, but of damaging the dragonfly’s wings.
“If you join us,” Adah said, “you’ll become a sword sharp enough to cut through any Cruelty.”
Seliah didn’t respond right away. All her words until now had given Adah the sense that she’d already made up her mind, that she already planned to accept Adah’s offer. Still, there was one last question on her mind.
“Is that everything for you?” Seliah asked. “Destroying the Cruelties? You became a magical girl almost five years ago, didn’t you? Back then, nothing bad had happened in so long. That couldn’t have been the reason you started. What happened to your original reason?”
It was the same question Dystopia had asked before the carnival’s concert. Why did Adah become a magical girl? Only Seliah was asking for a different reason.
And Adah had come to understand her own answer a bit better.
“My reason never changed,” Adah said. “From the very beginning, I thought I’d make a good magical girl. The only thing that’s changed is what it means to be good.”
Seliah stared into Adah’s eyes, and Adah stared right back. There was the hawk again, coming out to cast her gaze across the world before making a final decision. If this was what Seliah wanted—for Adah to enable her to be this sharp in every second of every battle—then Adah would happily hone her.
“If your offer is still open,” Seliah said, “I’d like to become a member of the Last Light.”
Adah smiled.
“If it’s what you want,” she said, “then it’s what you are. There’s just one problem with it.”
Adah stopped to look around the agency office, unchanged since the first day she had arrived here.
“We’ve got to do something about this place.”