"The best things about Sydney are free: the sunshine's free, and the harbour's free, and the beach is free." - Russell Crowe
Marie woke up with a pang of excitement she seldom let course through her.
By all accounts, it was an uncomfortably hot January morning with little out of the ordinary. In fact, it was even more unbearably humid than usual, the time since she'd last spoken to Hope and Danika was making the solitude she'd had to meditate on her nightmare in the days since unbearable, and every other night, her father would have an entirely new gripe about Obama at the ready.
And yet, here she was. Up, dressed, and having eaten by 8 A.M., a small dish of cat food left out on the balcony for a certain pale rodent, her teeth brushed, her hair brushed. Was seeing Hope again really that much cause for celebration? She was somewhat uncomfortable to admit that despite never seeming to see eye to eye, Hope was one of the best friends she ever had.
No, she decided! No, that was cause for celebration: despite their differences and disagreements, they were still good friends!
Marie leaned over the balcony railing. "I'm just heading out to meet with some friends in the city!"
Her father near-spluttered on his coffee at hearing Marie mention she had friends. "Oh! Oh that's great to hear! Have fun! But don't do anything irresponsible, alright?"
"Of course I'm not going to do anything irresponsible."
"You're not hanging out with any boys, are you?"
"No, Dad..."
"Really? Are you gay?"
"I'm not gay, Dad! What kind of-"
"I mean, it's not like there's anything wrong with that."
"Well, yeah, of c-"
"But I mean, I'd like grandkids one day."
"Dad!"
He raised his free hand in surrender. "Alright, forget I said anything. I don't want you to keep your friends waiting."
Hope's eyes traced the fragile outlines of the water's surface, its serene grip in graceful but assertive embrace with the warmth of the sun, the gulls who knew the aeons of the tension between the two by heart, the sombre march of a ferry beyond the shore proceeding onward, out of sight.
"Yo. Hope."
She looked up at Marie Crawford, emerging from the crowd behind her, wearing skinny jeans and an off-white polo clearly designed by the best and brightest designers, fashion engineers, and textilemancers for optimal use by men forty years her senior.
"I know you wanna make a big deal out of this, but was the Sydney Opera House really the best place to meet up? It's not the easiest thing in the world to spot you in a crowd."
"Maybe we should have done this tomorrow, then. Then you could spot me at the gym, badum tish."
"That was terrible."
"Yeah. I'm not keen on that one either. Wait. Tomorrow's a public holiday, so the gym's gonna be shut anyway. The joke doesn't even work."
Marie blinked. "You're like the most Australian person I know. How did you forget about Australia Day?"
"Because it's not really relevant to me. I don't need to confine my being a walking stereotype to one day a year. Besides, you do know what it's the anniversary of, yeah?"
Marie waved the matter aside. "To be fair, just because you're celebra-"
"Yeah, yeah, piss off. Bloody hell, are we really getting sidetracked before we've even started?"
"Alright," Marie conceded, hurriedly scrapping the entire debate she had begun to construct in her head. "Let's forget I said anything and take this from the top. How'd the Americans go?"
"What, with Phoebe?"
"Yeah."
"Nah, they've got nothing. In fact, if not for her violent end, you wouldn't know anyone broke in at all. You'd have to be a ghost to do it as quietly as whoever offed her did."
"So we're still at square one, then."
"I'm afraid so."
A few seconds of silence hung in the air before Marie offered:
"I take it that since we're starting at the Sydney Opera House, there must be something important here. Am I right?"
"Right as rain."
Hope shifted from her position watching the harbour to her full height, and set upon an idle pace toward the building.
"You know," she began, "there's something about opera that seems to attract spooky stories. Maybe it's that meeting of Romantic art meets Romantic superstition. Maybe it's... nah. It probably is that, innit. Yeah, now that I say that aloud, it makes a lot of sense. You've heard of the Opera-Garnier, yeah?"
"The opera house in Paris?"
"Yeah. They say that's haunted. That's how good ol' what's-his-visage got the idea for that old opera. You know the one, about the opera that has a phantom or something."
Marie blinked. "Yeah, I think I can guess the one you mean."
"Of course, of course. Everyone knows that story. But what a lot of people don't know is that the construction of this place was also cursed!"
She held on that note for a second before continuing:
"Yeah, see this'd be a lot more dramatic if it weren't broad daylight, I reckon."
"No, please, go on. I'm listening."
"Righto. See, before this place was built, it sat at the end of a tram line. Up until the sixties, we had trams here. More than Melbourne, too! You ever been to Melbourne?"
"Yeah?"
"Oh. I haven't. Heard it's nice, though. But in 1957, there was this young girl... pretty much exactly where I'm standing right now, who had apparently lost a silver ring under the tram rail. You see where I'm going with this?"
"Jeez. Did she ever find it again?"
"Sadly no. Not too long after that, a railway officer dragged her kicking and screaming off the premises, and she just... died in his arms, so they say. The real kicker to this is that the very next year, when they were trying to build this place," she indicated with a tip of the head to the four-finned concert hall behind her, "there were all these freak weather patterns going on. Construction ended up more than a year behind schedule."
"You're telling me the delay to the construction of the Sydney Opera House was because of a witch?"
"Your Sydney and mine are a lot closer to one another than you might think, Marie."
"I don't believe this."
"Good, because I just made it up." Hope flashed a smirk and began away from the entrance, down the steps, towards the train station.
Marie blinked, first taken aback, but then proud to have seen through the story.
"You know," Hope continued, only glancing back to offer her fragmented commentary to her companion, "a lotta people are gonna want you to believe something or other, and you need to keep your eyes peeled for even the slightest seam of misdirection in the best-hidden porkies."
"Porkies?"
"Porky pies. Lies. C'mon, that was an easy one! Point is, though - magic and monsters and illusions are realer than most people know. You're kind of an odd one out in knowing as much as you do, so that's why you should know better than anyone that you can't take anything for granted. Yeah?"
"Right, right, I get it. This is all stuff I know already."
Hope shrugged. "If you say so, that's fair enough."
"Then why did you pick the Sydney Opera House, of all places?"
Hope stuttered a defensive shake of the head. "Oh, I dunno. You seem like the kinda girl who's impressed by a bit of grandeur. That, and there's something about this place that's always made me a little giddy. Looking at those steps, I reckon with or without the ol' Opera House at the end of them it'd be a spot-on place to have a triumphant final act kiss between the downtrodden hero and their lover. I reckon you could have a medium shot from about here, their shoulders framing the sunlight reflecting on the water, and then if this was a Warwick Thornton film you'd have a subtle little bit of shaky camera juxtaposed against the stillness of their bodies to underline how uncertain their situation is at that point, then you'd have a bittersweet guitar ballad fade in-"
"Who's Warwick Thornton?"
"Oh, he's a cinematographer."
"Yeah, I could have guessed that."
"Then why'd you bloody ask? Ah, don't worry about- Oh! Just remembered!"
Marie fell unresponsive for a second while her brain played catchup with everything Hope was saying. It was not winning.
"You ever been to the Museum of Contemporary Art?"
"Can't say I have," Marie admitted.
"It's just across the quay here. There's an exhibition starting up next month. Yayoi Kusama, the artist's name is. I'm no art buff, but my flatmates were saying if you like Atwood you might like her stuff too. Very surreal feminist art, or so I'm told."
"Oh! Uh, thanks," she managed, with no intention of actually checking it out.
"Just next to it, though. That's a real point of our histories overlapping. Cadman's Cottage, it's called. Used to be an old naval barracks. Then, in eighteen... I wanna say forty-four? A man named Jean Videll was caught trespassing on it, trying to hide a gruesomely dismembered body by chucking it in the harbour."
"There's a creepy young girl who fits into this story somehow, isn't there?"
Hope smirked. "Not quite, but I do like the way you think. Nah, the corpse was actually his employer. Former employer by that point, if you'd pardon a bit of dark 'umour. Apparently the two of them had gotten into an argument a few hours prior, and Jean left all dejected and miserable. Then, without any warning, he underwent a total change of heart, headed back in there, and killed the guy. A complete mystery to the 'uman authorities, but to us? To us what'd happened was as clear as black and white."
Hope stared across the water, focused but without purpose. Driven but without meaning. Whenever she decided was the time to stop doing that was when she stopped doing it, and no sooner.
"Come on, Marie, let's go."
A high-end hotel playing jazz piano music in its lounge was a bit overdone, but not something Marie minded all that much.
"So this is the Russell, huh? It's a nice place."
"It's pretty swish, no doubt. Ain't it kind of funny that I've been here before and you haven't?"
"Ha! Yeah, I guess that is pretty funny. So what's the deal here, then? Is this a place where magical girls regularly meet? Or is it where some magical battle happened, or what?"
"It's cursed."
Marie nodded. She got about halfway through her first nod before double-taking. "Come again?"
"This place, Marie. It's cursed. That park outside is called First Fleet Park for a reason, y'know. The early settlers rocked up right there and of course, the European way of looking at the natural world is totally different to the ideas of custodianship the Eora people've been practicing since the dawn of time. Where the Brits come from all they've ever known is the existence of land as a resource to exploit. So when they got here and started forcing Eora culture to the side, the balance in everything was thrown way off. The way things worked here was made to fit to systems they'd brought from their homeland, and not vice versa. The water line got reshaped by the quay just out there, the animal habitats got pushed back to make way for farmland, all these aspects of this place... changed. Warped."
She laid her arms crossed on the table and stared at an ibis on the grass outside.
Marie tried to spurn the matter on. "So this place... punished the settlers with a curse?"
"Nah, not exactly. If you wanna believe that a place can be alive, and that it can think and act... who knows. You might have a point. But it certainly doesn't think in ways we do. It doesn't have an idea of justice and deserving like we do, all it has is some physical laws which dictate the way matter and energy act. Yeah?"
"Well, of course."
"Right. What nobody knew at the time - Brit or Eora, unless they happened to be living inside a small, glowing gemstone they carried around - is that this new mentality damaged more than anyone really knew. In fact, it tore a great big hole in the fabric of time itself."
"You're making this up now."
"This is the most haunted place in Sydney, Marie, or so they say. There're witches whose presence reverberate back and forth throughout its history. And you hear all sorts of stories that reinforce that idea. People suddenly appearing and disappearing. Lights flickering, temperatures shifting, floorboards creaking. All that lovely stuff. And you know, it used to be all sorts of things in its past too. Back when it was a brothel, one client in room 8 just down the hall there got killed. The witch that did it still shows up now and again, wearing his image. It's a problem with every age of this building, too. Originally, it was a hospital. In fact, one day, in this very room, there was a nurse who-"
Someone grabbed both Marie and Hope's shoulders. They almost screamed.
"Wow! Loosen up, you two! You're so tense nobody could tell I'm the one on duty here."
Leaning over the table was a girl, about thirteen or fourteen, with a green visor and short ponytail. Marie had never seen her before in her life.
"Melanie! Good to see ya! Marie, this is Melanie. Melanie, Marie."
"Is she a new girl?" Melanie leaned an elbow on the table behind Hope.
"Nah, she's one hundred percent flesh and bone. She knows pretty much everything, though. She was a mate of Phoebe's, actually."
"Oh! Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss."
Marie wasn't sure what the appropriate way to take that would be, so she tried to nod and shrug at the same time, before immediately opting to commit to neither and mumbling "yeah," instead.
"Mel's given a bit of pocket money by some staff member in the know to try to stop the tear in time from getting worse. To keep the ghosts out, if you'd like."
"I'm not doing that good a job of it if a relic like you is still around, haunting this place."
"Ha! Fair go, fair go. You mind if we have a look around, show Marie what goes on here?"
"Sure! I run a tight ship, though, so you probably won't see anything weird."
They didn't.
This was it.
Danika didn't completely understand what 'it' was, but whatever it might be, this was definitely that. It had taken her days to find patterns in the habits of that mysterious newcomer with the one eye. Now she could anticipate her. Now she could tail her, and finally...
"You there!" she shouted into the back alley the girl seemed to have started inhabiting. She knew she was in there.
Suddenly, the sound of bits of plastic and metal shuffling reverberated along the parallel brick walls. A tall figure stood up. It was light enough for Danika to recognise the face of the girl who killed her sister.
She swallowed her pride. Lauren wasn't there for her anymore. She had to be Lauren for herself now.
"Come on, Dani," she whispered. "You can do this! You're stronger than you know! All you need is to be more confident."
Yeah. Yeah! She could do that! She shunted into her black and purple... combattire, she thought, if the portmanteau was worth pardoning, and prepared a battle axe. Its soft aubergine glow illuminated the lane before her. She steeled herself. The time to begin her approach was now.
The stranger was already in her own magical garb. With just a flick of the wrist, a much more violently glowing padparadscha blade extended down the outside of her frighteningly long forearm.
This girl hadn't spoken yet, but Danika decided that was a pretty universal message. Self-concern far behind her now, she lunged, both hands bringing the axe down overhead. Her opponent batted the axe aside with her blade and prepared a second along her free arm.
She went for the midsection this time, but her opponent parried her axe forcefully enough to knock it from her grasp. As soon as it left Danika's hands, she readied two more, and swung left with one, right with the other. Before she could follow through with the attack, though, her adversary took a step back to avoid her blades, grabbed her wrist with both hands, broke it, and shoved her three steps back.
Danika distanced herself from her own body just enough to keep from screaming. She couldn't let the pain cloud her mind. She needed to think.
She'd tried to fight rashly, tried to appear undisciplined, but this bastard wasn't underestimating her for it. That was making finishing up with an unexpected attack pretty much impossible. The element of surprise must have been one of those actinides, where it breaks apart and disappears in a few seconds.
She needed to try something else, then. Something harder, certainly, but if she had to play her own hand to force her enemy's, she could live with that.
With tremendous concentration, she forced the bones in her right hand back into place, realigned the damaged tissue, and repaired the injury. It burned like a bitch. She winced, but it felt so much better when it was all back in place.
The stranger put up her dukes for another round, and Danika readied two more axes. She raised one...
...and then a circular sawblade sailed in from seemingly nowhere and sliced the weapon in two. Half a dozen more sped along the walls and knocked the two girls around until both were too taken aback to continue fighting. By the time both had regained their composure, the space between them was filled by Lara Macquarie, a sawblade in each hand and one more caught between her teeth.
She tossed one into the air, and with the hand it freed, snapped her fingers. All at once, the blades were gone, and she was back in her black leather jacket, half opened to reveal a black shirt with the mural from the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, Adam and the word of God's hands each edited so that they were pointing a pistol at one another.
"I've been looking for the two of you for some time."
A silence descended upon the alleyway.
"Nothing to say for yourselves? Awesome. Let's get down to business, then. First off... whatever your name is." She turned and pointed to the taller girl, who willed away her arms' blades.
Another silence.
"That's a cue to give your name, dickhead."
"Um..."
"Hey, do you even speak English?"
"I'm Thalia," she blurted.
"Thalia who?"
"Yes!" Thalia grinned and nodded enthusiastically. "That's my name."
Lara winced, pinched the bridge of her nose. "You know what, that's good enough. I'm Lara. It's a pleasure to meet you! You're under arrest on suspect of the murders of Lauren Woodward and Phoebe Deckard. And you, Woodward."
"Y- yes?"
"I'm arresting you on the grounds of the Deckard investigation too."
Danika's whole body tensed. "Me? Why the hell would I kill her? She was my best fr-"
"I don't care why anyone would kill her!" Lara snapped, perhaps a bit too loud for a conversation she wanted to keep subtle. "Look. The fact of the mat-"
"Lara..."
"-ter is... well, first off, don't interrupt me when I'm talking. Especially not when I'm arresting you. Second off, you don't have an alibi. Plus, you were the last person to ever see her alive. And even if y-"
"Lara!"
"-ou were- What did I just say? What? What's the big fuss about?"
Thalia wasn't there.
"Are you kidding me right now? Which way did she go? This is a dead damn end! Which is exactly what she's gonna get if I see her again. An end. That involves... dead...ness."
"She just sort of... vanished."
"No way. Actually, you know what? Of course she did. You're a terrible liar. In fact, I'm letting you off the hook. There's no way you could tell me you never killed anyone without being a pathetic, blubbering mess unless you actually didn't kill anyone."
"Jeez..." Danika groaned. "Now I'm kind of insulted that you're not arresting me."
Hope checked her wristwatch. It was a quaint timepiece, its thin leather strap worn and clearly having suffered replacement in parts.
"Oh, we're doing really well for time, looks like. You mind if we take a quick little detour through Hyde Park here? I wanna introduce you to a frie- well, not a friend. A pers- no, not a person either. A goddess. The Keeper of the Path, we call her."
"A goddess?" Marie stammered. "I mean, I've heard magical girls swear to goddesses before. What, is this a title you give to extraordinarily powerful magical girls?"
"Nah, it's a title we give to goddesses."
"Goddesses. Like deities."
"What other kind of goddesses are there?"
Marie didn't have a good answer to that. Hope continued, then:
"The Keeper's a death god. Her whole deal is that she can see to it that you have a peaceful time kicking the bucket. Even retroactively, too. Me and the others've been making a few offerings on Phoebe's behalf. You must've heard me and Auntie Zoey talking about her last week, yeah?"
"I think I remember that..." Marie furrowed her brow, slowed a pace. Thought for a second.
Hope's tone grew sombre all at once. "Mind you, we've all given our dues for her. I'm visiting today to honour... an old friend."
"...So why do you call her 'Auntie', anyway?"
"'Scuse me?"
"Zoey. Why do you call her 'Auntie'? You said she wasn't your actual aunt."
"Ah, don't you know? In Aboriginal Australian cultures it's a way of showing respect to your elders."
"Oh. Wait, you're Aboriginal? I had no id-"
Hope pivoted to face Marie and threw her arms out in a shrug almost as broad as her accent. "Marie, use your brain for two seconds. How would I know what my heritage is if I've never met either of my parents?"
"Oh. Right, no, sorry. That was a stupid question. Forget I said anything."
"No worries," Hope smirked, and continued walking. "She ain't, though, and that's not even why I call her that. Really, I just needed a similar kind of overlap between family and community. Something a few of the girls who raised me taught me. I tell you, when you're brought up by a revolving-door group of girls from every walk of life, you pick up on all sorts. You've caught me using New Zealand slang, too. Remember chur?"
"Yeah. I remember chur."
"Chur's how Kiwis say cheers. Sometimes I dip into Pommie or South African or Vietnamese slang too. Most of the time I don't even notice it, actually."
"Seriously?"
"You could say the city's the closest thing I've had to a Mum, and I've picked up on her habits something big. Speaking of, here comes the closest thing I've had to a Dad."
Hope nodded in the direction of a small white-and-red mammalian figure scurrying across the park to meet them.
"Kyubey? You're Hope's father?"
"No. What are you two talking about?"
"Don't worry about it," Hope shrugged, fully aware that he wasn't capable of worrying in the first place. "We're just on our way to meet the Keeper of the Path is all."
"You're mourning for Sonia, aren't you?" he smirked.
"Golly, Kyub! Bit of a sore subject, you know!"
"I apologise. Well, it's good that you've finally overcome any reservations you had about paying your respects to her. Depression leads to inaction and apathy, and what's more, a slowed output of emotional energy. All immense problems we never seemed to be able to breed out of your neurology without causing even worse damage elsewhere."
"Oh, you tried to eradicate depression? Good on ya, mate. Sounds pretty bloody unethical, but I can't fault you for trying."
A few seconds of walking in silence before Hope seemed to remember what she was going to say.
"I never went to school. Actually, the Kyubster taught me everything. History, maths, chemistry, physical fitness, biology, rational choice theory, existential psychotherapy, astrophysics, posthumanism... they teach all those in schools, right? Jane tells me they don't but I can't tell if she's screwing with me or not."
"Well, uh," Marie started, mind racing for how best to let her down gently.
The three came to the south end of the promenade, where there rested a long, rectangular pool of water, its opposite end framed by the immense monument to lives taken by the First World War.
"What now?" Marie asked through a sigh of relief at not having to elaborate on 'well, uh'.
"That end's in memory of 'uman deaths. This end... well, get a squiz at this."
Hope pulled a two dollar coin out of her pocket and dropped it over the pool. As it fell, gradually, impossibly, its descent slowed to a crawl. No, Marie realised, looking around the park, time itself was slowing. And when the coin struck the water's surface, everything stopped.
The sun dimmed. The water in the pool turned to blood. A figure emerged from it - a woman of unquantifiable age, a broadsword in hand, a blood-soaked tunic draped over her body, and her face, visibly very beautiful but largely obscured by a sheep skull worn as a helmet.
"Heya," she said. "You guys need a job done? Ooh! Who's the new girl? I don't think I've seen her before."
Marie was too dumbfounded to introduce herself. Hope spoke in her stead: "Oh, Marie? She's just a good mate. Marie? This is the Keeper."
"Hi!" The goddess beamed, and extended a hand dripping with blood for Marie to shake. Silently, but politely, Marie declined. "Ah, right," the Keeper continued. "I'd wipe it on something, but I'm not exactly corporeal. That all aside... what can I do for you today?"
Hope raised a hand. "I just figured it's time enough I stopped moping about and did a little something for Sonia, now that she's gone. If that's alright with you."
"Yeah. Yeah, no problem. That's the whole thing with divinity, isn't it? You mortals don't even need to sweat it. I've got it under control. Anything else?"
"Nah. That's it, thanks."
"Alright! No problem! See ya!"
The goddess vanished. And just like that, the world returned to normal.
"What was that all about?" Marie demanded, but Hope had already started off in another direction.
"I told you. She can retroactively give people a painless death."
"So, what? You just give her two dollars and she can do that?"
"Well, when you put it like that, you make it sound like I'm paying her. The gods hate that. Makes it sound like what they're doing is work. I'm just asking for her to put her divine power to a particular use, and because it means a lot to me, what she does, she can have some money as a gift. It might seem the same to you, but a little difference goes a long way for them."
"Why do they care about whether or not they're working, though? Aren't they powerful enough for it not to matter?"
"I mean, sure. But they just like the idea of a gift economy. They don't need for anything. They certainly don't need for wages and salaries. Besides, a lot of the older ones - including the Keeper herself - really predate the idea of capitalism by a fair few centuries. They don't take too kindly to mortals assuming our own rules apply to them, just because it's been 'the way things are' for our comparatively minute lifespans."
"I still don't feel like I understand anything."
"You don't have to. Nothing wrong with that."
"I thought you wanted to teach me things today."
"And I thought you wanted to learn."
Marie balled her fists and stewed in the simmer of condescension for about as long as she cared to, which wasn't very long at all.
"So how many goddesses are there?"
Hope scratched her shaven hemisphere. "Oh, I dunno. A few thousand, for sure. They're not all relevant to everyone's lives, of course. You just worship the ones that are and leave the others to go about their day. I mean, you would be kind of worshiping them all. They're sort of a package deal. But if you go everywhere by plane you wouldn't need to pray to the goddess of safe boat journeys. Actually, I've never left the state, so I haven't either. I don't even know her title."
"I'm guessing they all go by titles, then."
"Oh, of course. Apparently the glyphs on your soul gem are your name. I don't mean they spell your name, I mean they are your name. And since they don't have physical forms, they don't have gems, either."
"So, they all used to be magical girls?"
"Strictly speaking, nah. They're more like... well, imagine if a majjo put her wish toward the whole universe instead of any one target. If they've got a strong enough will to take that on, you've got yourself a goddess. Then they start going by whatever title makes 'em sound tough. Like we've all had a jolly good laugh at the Dark Rift. She's a bit of an edgelord, dare I say, but she's saved my arse a time too many. So I s'pose she gets the last laugh in there."
"Yeah? What does she do?"
"You ever seen a soul gem go pitch black?"
"Once or twice, yeah."
"Real harrowing sight, honestly. And explosive to boot, as you well know. What she does is protects majjos from the shockwave of that. Seriously, you hardly feel a thing. Which is good, too, because otherwise if your gem's fully exposed when one of those goes off in your face, that'd be it."
"...Yeesh."
"Yeesh is right."
Marie mulled the rectitude of yeesh over in her head so deeply that she didn't immediately realise where she was heading.
"Are we just going back the way we came now?"
"Nah, just for a block. Then we're gonna carry on South a bit. It's the long way around, but Lara's office is a couple blocks that way. The deeplighters get a bit pissy if I get too close for too long. It's a bit of a bugger, having to go back down this stree-"
Rounding the corner, Hope bumped into a middle aged man with a greying beard and a wine-swollen face.
"Watch where you're facking going, bitch!" he snapped. "Fack!"
"Oh, Jesus. Calm your farm, man, I'm sorry," she protested, and quietly ushered Marie past him.
He looked as if he wanted to yell something else at her, but he decided instead to roll his eyes and carry on his way.
The man's name was Trent Hughes, and unbeknownst to... well, anyone, really - he had just cussed out his own biological daughter. This event would come to be of no consequence, as he would spend the next twenty minutes lost in the thought that the girl he had run into looked terribly familiar. This concern occupied the portion of the brain dedicated to recognising the motion of dull green 2002 Toyota Corollas, which was, unfortunately, precisely the survival mechanism he had needed at that very moment. His passing came as a shock to everyone who knew him, and his parents described the event as "a bit of a shame".
"What is it with you and the Attendants anyway? I thought your job was to uphold a sense of unity or something."
Hope shot a sly grin across Marie's bow. "Oh, are you defending them now?"
"I mean, they're not all Lara Macquarie."
"Do you know what being a deeplighter entails, Marie? They wanna go to war with your species to assert dominance."
"That's not... no they don't..."
"That's their most fundamental belief, I'm afraid."
"Kyubey? Is this true?"
"Actually, yes!" he confirmed, and then wondered if his chipper tone of reassurance was emotionally appropriate for this situation.
"Even Selene?"
"Who?" Hope asked.
"Selene Antonio." Marie elaborated.
"Yeah, I don't know who that is. Is she a deeplighter?"
"She was one of those girls with Lara during that investigation."
"Then yeah. That's honestly what she wants."
Marie had to slow down and take a deep breath. "This is... a lot to take in. I take it back, then. I'm glad you're against that."
"I'll be honest with you, Marie. I'm not completely against it. I reckon our mob would actually have a better shot at it than yours is having right now. What that lot don't seem to understand is that trying to take that power by force would wipe both 'umans and majjos out almost completely."
"It would be an end-of-the-universe scenario," Kyubey concurred. "With both dead, our energy reserves would never recover completely, and the cosmos would dissolve into a cold death."
"Speaking of cold death," Hope grinned, "guess where we're headed next!"
"Darlinghurt Gaol!" she finished, but by that point there had been about two or three other topics of conversation. "Well, it's an art school now, but it used to be where they chucked Sydney's most wanted."
The sunburned brick edifice loomed over Marie, continuously, unrelenting as she wandered its outer edge. Its walls looked thick enough to... well, she couldn't think of an apt analogy. But whatever it was she couldn't think of, the walls looked as if they could with ease.
"I tell ya, Marie. Old timey prisons take to ghost stories like the guy at the checkout in front of you takes to five or six things he didn't know he wanted until just now, you know, when you're just trying to get in and out with some milk and a bag of chips, and bugger all else. You think, 'yeah, we get it. There's a lot of bloody ghosts here, we know that now,' but then he decides nah, actually he'll get a pack of ciggies and a Mars bar, and then he forgets if Mars is the one with nuts in it, and gets all confused. You know, much like this simile."
"That makes about as much sense as it was aiming for."
"Bonza. You know, this is where they killed Louisa Collins. Last woman they hanged in the state. I know what you're thinking. This is another leadup to a story about witches, innit?"
"I don't say innit, but continue."
"Well, she was 42 at the time. Bit old in the tooth as majjos go, ay? And she'd had a few biological offspring by then too. So she couldn't've been one. Yeah, this place did have a fair share of witch hauntings, but not her. No, I tell you what."
"What?" Marie sighed with relief in the shade a small tree a short way from the entrance so thoughtfully provided. Its family had spent a few million years learning to thrive in the Sydney basin's summer. Hers had not.
"She'd been cheating on her husband for quite some time, you know, and when he found out... he suddenly grew very ill soon after, and died. So did the man she was cheating with."
"Is this where magic comes into the story?"
"Nah, it's where rat poison does. But there was no way anyone could have known that. She'd done it in complete secrecy."
Marie waited for Hope to continue. The smile creeping upon her lips told her she was all too keen to do just that.
"But she was turned in, you know. You know who? A daughter. Aged ten. May, her name was. She got adopted a little bit after, and the people who took care of that said they were amazed by how intelligent she was. She lived a pretty quiet life after that, married a fettler, didn't really do all that much else of note. So if you want to follow that thread - and believe me, I've damn well tried. It's an absolute bugger - you're gonna have to get it out of this little bastard."
"Hi!" Kyubey cheered.
"Do you see what I've been getting at, though? Remember what I said about your Sydney and mine being a lot closer than you think?"
"I had my doubts at first, sure. But no, I'll admit I'm starting to get what you meant."
The trio reached the front gate. It was slightly less imposing than the rest of the building, which wasn't much of a challenge, and much more green, which, unless one was in possession of several cans of green paint, was.
"That's good. I don't want you to feel like you're in a whole other- Huh."
"Huh?" Marie echoed.
"Come here. Take a squiz at this. The sign says 'open' but the board says 'do not enter'. Tricky, ay? Now if there's one thing we gays hate, it's mixed messages."
"What's mixed messages got to do with being gay?"
"We never know when someone's flirting or if they're just being nice, because at the same time if we're flirting with someone we try to keep it on the down low to maintain plausible deniability. Imagine if you're cuddling in the buff with some chick and you're stroking her hair or something, and then you have to go and say she's your best friend. You know, just in case she isn't gay. How are you supposed to- Marie. Marie? You can stop imagining that now."
Marie violently retched back to reality. "I wasn't imagining it. I was trying to figure out if there's another entrance we're supposed to go in through."
"Well, you're not gonna figure it out by staring at a brick wall. Oi Kyub! Can we go in?"
Marie hid her embarrassment in the shadow of conversation that had been cast over her.
"Of course!" he affirmed, with an exaggerated nod.
"Oh! Well that's a- are we allowed to go in, though?"
"No."
"Ah. Well there you go, we can tick this one off the list. Come on, Marie. I've got one last place to show you. And I promise, it's a lot better to look at than bricks."
Melanie kicked back and helped herself to a glass of apple juice on the rocks. Today had been another successful day of telling ghosts where they could shove their rattling chains and floating candelabra. She had earned this: an afternoon with no stress, watching the waves of Sydney Harbour lap mutely at the ankles of the quay.
She hadn't received it, though, because she had the displeasure of recognising the figure who took a seat opposite her, with purple veils of hanging sleeves, spike-studded garters fixing them in place, poise accentuated by crop-top cuirass, head anointed with bladed tiara bearing navette-cut amethyst at its apex.
"Sorry, Macquarie. I'm off-duty right now."
"Yeah, I'm pretty good. How about you? Enough pleasantries. It doesn't matter, and I don't care. Really, all I'm after is whether you know where I can find a girl named Marie Crawford."
"What makes you think I'd know?"
Lara placed a twenty dollar note on the table. "Just a hunch."
"What's that?" Melanie gestured at the red-and-grey image of Mary Reibey's face.
"It's twenty bucks, moron."
"No, dammit, what's it for?"
"That's up to you! You could answer my question, and find yourself twenty dollars richer. Or, I could ask someone else, find the same answer to my question, and make no difference to you whatsoever. What do you think?"
Melanie reached across and snatched the note up.
"This is the last stop of the tour, by the way, and maybe the most important. Thought it'd be pretty convenient for you to get back home from here."
Marie smirked. "Okay, I'll admit it: I'm impressed. You legitimately seem to be able to pull a story of your people's history out of every corner of this city. But - and I know how much I'm setting myself up here to get completely owned - I find it hard to believe that the 'most important' part of your astonishingly secret history happened at Central Station. Like, people are in and out of here around the clock."
"Of course! You're spot-on. It's completely absurd."
"But...?"
"But d'you know what it was before it was a train station?"
"What?"
Hope held up a printout of a sepia-toned photograph of a cluster of buildings which matched the very station of the... well, station. Faint but completely legible beneath the image was scrawled:
Sydney Female Refuge Society, 1878
Marie didn't have anything to say to that. She thought her gawk and whine of astonishment filled in the gaps, though.
"The place was asylum for young women who were running from abuse for the better part of a century. I feel like I don't need to tell you all that much about it, ay?"
"No, I think I can guess what a place like that would have been like. Like your place, but... more."
"So our primary source seems to think. Ain't that right, Kyub?"
The Incubator curled up into a ball on the pavement and pretended to fall asleep. Again, any sufficiently feline action carries the same meaning as a shrug. "It's a reductive way of putting it, but not by so much that I'd refute your saying so."
Hope nodded. "Fair dinkum, I s'pose. Yeah, staff was a bit of a revolving door for a while before one Mrs. Martha Malbon took over as matron. She actually oversaw the place for more than three decades before she carked it. After that, the place downsized, and not too long after that, came apart completely."
Marie looked at the ground. For thirty years, magical girls had their own sort of village in the middle of the city she'd grown up in. In Phoebe's wake, she was finding it hard to trust the people around her. And now Sydney itself had been keeping secrets from her. How deep did this run?
Hope put her hands on her hips and shook her head. "To think... the things she must've seen, ay? The people she would've met..."
"Did she not keep a journal or something?"
"She did," Kyubey nodded, "But her daughter sold it to a museum of nineteenth-century curios. It's been in storage gathering dust, being eaten by silverfish, and decomposing ever since. At this point I'm a better source of information on the place than what's left in its pages."
"Proper tragedy, innit..." Hope mumbled to herself. "Shit, I didn't mean to end today on such a low note. Or for the whole thing to be so gappy. Turns out when you're only given a few years left to live, there's not so much of a younger generation you can pass your history over to. Almost nobody's preserving this kind of thing."
Marie turned to face her in silence for a second. "Almost nobody?"
"A few 'uman philanthropists here and there around the world, but... yeah, that's about it. I know one, but she lives out in the country, out in Jonquil."
"I've never heard of a town called Jonquil."
"Oh, well... It's about midway between Morley and Ingar Lake."
"See, these don't sound like real place names."
"Doesn't matter if they sound it, mate. Thing is that they are. Anyway, her name is Ruth Cahill-Madigan. I'll talk to her next time I'm out there, see what else about my history she has to say. Sound good?"
"For sure! I'd love to-"
"Marie," Kyubey interrupted, "I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but your father is starting to wonder where you are. Also, the cat food dish is empty. This issue is one I'm reporting of my own accord, to be clear."
"What? Dad knows I should be back around half past twelve-ish, right?"
"Oh!" Hope gawked. "That was the schedule you were working to, ay? If I'd known that, I would've spread this out over a few days."
"Why? What's the time now?"
"Just gone, ah, eight past two."
Marie freaked out internally, but maintained her composure expertly. She freaked in. "Wow! I should probably be going, then!"
"Time flies when you're having fun, ay?" Hope chuckled, and granted Marie a quick hug goodbye.
Having fun, Marie thought. Yes, she supposed she did have a lot of fun today. Just hanging out with Hope, listen to her talking about whatever she thought was interesting, constantly getting sidetracked in that really jumpy, owlish way that she-
"Marie?"
"Hm? Oh. Right."
"No, it's no worries. You were just hugging me a bit long there. I was getting worried."
"It's nothing," Marie asserted. "I'm straight."
"I believe you."
"Seriously, I'm so straight they use me as a reference frame to measure the curvature of space and time."
"I believe you."
"And if I spend a long time hugging you and staring at you," she continued, well on a steady ascent to the top of her lungs, "it's because you kind of look like a guy!"
Hope burst into a fit of laughter. "Nah. Nah, Marie. Don't get it twisted."
"W- w- wh...?"
"I don't look like a guy. Guys look like me."
"I-!"
"Why don't you get a wriggle on, see that you don't miss the next train?"
Marie slumped back in the corner seat at the end of the last carriage. She really had no idea that today would go by so quickly, nor that she'd be left so knackered by the end of it. But it was refreshing, in a weird way. It made the world she found herself caught up in feel that bit more real. And while she still thought Hope was a bit of a... well, she was ideologically very different to her, was the thing. Despite, and because of that, seeing the world through her eyes was genuinely the most interesting thing she'd seen since... probably since a giant dragon foretold her death, she saw a vision of two women discussing the self, and her friend died that very night. That was a tough one to beat.
I'm sort of dreading the possibility that it won't hold that title very long.
"Crawford!"
Marie looked around. She couldn't tell who had just called her name, but she knew she hadn't-
Oh, Jesus Christ.
"Crawford!" Lara repeated, brimming with enthusiasm and inviting herself to sit next to Marie.
"What's that stitched on the back of your jacket?"
"Don't worry about it. It's fine. Do you mind if I take a seat?"
"The seat you're in right now?"
"Yeah! You know what, I'm going to avoid wasting your time with things like asking for permission. I came to talk to you about something, actually. I don't know, though. It's probably rude to talk about someone who's absent."
"Yeah? Who's that?"
"God. Hey, don't give me that look. I know how it sounds, but the fact is there are powers running through this universe far, far deeper than mortal neurology can fully consider, and they are significantly less benevolent than the Christians would have you believe. Has Kyubey told you about the universe's ever-increasing dark energy surplus?"
"Well, yeah, but I don-"
Lara wrapped an arm around Marie's shoulder. "Has he told you how far back it stretches? Two million years. Around the same time his kind arrived on our planet. And it's no coincidence. Forget the goddesses you've heard about already, there's a force that stands above them as much as they stand above us. A nexus of creation that transcends time, transcends space, and you know what?"
"What?"
"I think... it just might be intelligent."
This was typical Macquarian weirdness, Marie knew, but she couldn't help the fact that altogether without warning, the hairs on her arms and neck were almost standing on end.
"Now, I don't know how many other higher beings there are. It could be an entire pantheon. But I know there's at least its opposite. A counterforce, you know? A force of destruction, said to resemble a giant golden dragon, whose hide is made of ten thousand singing scales."
Marie fell dead quiet. She turned to look at Lara, who was staring at her as if expecting a response.
"And?" was all she said.
"And? Well, the thing with this... what did I call it? A nexus? Well, everyone who's in the know calls it the All-Permeating Abyss. The thing with the All-Permeating Abyss is that some people have been granted strange visions, that look and sound almost like old folk tales or something. Supposedly, these are clues of some kind."
"To what?"
Lara glanced out at the moving houses and trees out the window and scratched her cheek. "I won't say too much. Not for now, anyway. But despite the endless power the Abyss has, it can't fully manifest in our reality because the way it interacts with our physical laws is ill-defined. One of these visions - albeit not one anyone's found yet - contains the key to giving this power definition. To understanding it. To elevating your consciousness to its all-seeing, all-powerful-"
"All-permeating?" Marie tried.
"Yes, if you'd like. And the other one? They call him the Brass Knight. He has his own goals, and a big part of them involves bringing that power to mortalkind. And I think the person most capable of actually doing that is myself. I want you to join me."
In the occult tradition of tarot reading, the sixteenth Major Arcanum is ascribed the name The Tower, and is representative of change of circumstances. In more esoteric practices, it often carries a much stranger meaning.
The origin of the symbol is unclear, but often accredited to the tale of the Tower of Babel, and generally refers to the change of fortunes one reaps from meddling in the divine.
When the Macquarie clan motto proclaims that "God is my tower of strength", the implication, then, is a destiny to take divine strength equal to that of a god for oneself.
"Woah! Woah, woah, woah! Slow down! This is an insane amount to ask of one person! At the start of this month I didn't even know you had a culture! Now you're telling me you want me to join you on some... god-conquering quest?"
"Wow. Slow your roll, kung fu hustle. I just want a hand, is all. You proved yourself pretty clever in the Deckard investigation already. And I know you're smart enough to tell a good deal when you hear one. Which actually brings me to my next point pretty nicely."
"Oh, good lord."
"As of Deckard's death, I don't know who I can trust in this city. Nobody does, really, and nobody wants to spend their whole lives just not trusting anybody. That would suck shit."
Marie had to agree that it would suck a fair amount of shit.
"So I want to cut you a deal. You work out who killed your friend, I help bring them to justice, and then I let you in on this plan. Sure, you're just a human, but this is a whole new kind of magic. There's no reason to believe you'd be any less suited to wield it than I would."
"This sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?"
"Come on. We both want the same thing. All I'm suggesting is that we work together. The only catch here is me. I'm gorgeous."
Lara caught herself on the tail-end of that statement when Marie rolled her eyes and started upright.
"Oh, is your stop coming up?"
"Yeah," Marie jeered. "You know, I really really hate to cut this conversation short, but I've gotta go now."
"Okay. Oh! Just one more thing. I need you to investigate Madeleine Whitman for me. My one-off, remember? The two of you are so alike that when I didn't think I'd see you again after graduation I devoted my time to annoying her instead. She probably didn't do anything wrong, but... well, she and I have a bitter professional relationship and a strained social one. Think you can do that?"
Slowly, Marie nodded. She had come to so surely take Kyubey for granted that she knew she didn't even need to ask for an address yet.
The train came to a stop. Marie corrected her momentum and left. The first thing she did once on the platform was wander to the vending machine and fish around in her pocket for loose change for a Sprite. She was going to need a very stiff drink.
FORMER AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER ROBERT MENZIES
Robert Menzies (1894 - 1978) was, in the words of his contemporaries, a creator of a great legacy, a big man on a small stage, and a courageous national leader, which were exceedingly polite ways of saying "complete maniac".
Menzies was born in Jeparit, Victoria, to a father serving as a member of the Victoria state parliament alongside a brother, and a mother whose brother was a member of the federal parliament. From square one, he seemed destined for politics, but he would soon outshine his relatives and serve as Prime Minister, the biggest member of them all. So much so, that he became the longest serving Prime Minister in the country's history, first from 1939 to 1941, and again from 1949 to 1966. This was troubling, because most medical practitioners would advise one to consult a doctor if a member serves for more than four hours.
At the beginning of his first term, Robert Menzies found himself at the helm of a nation at war with Germany, whom he called a "magnificent" country full of people who had "devote(d) themselves to the service and well-being of the state", led by "one of the great men of the century". At the first election after that, the outspoken anti-imperialist John Curtin (1885 - 1945) was voted Prime Minister for the remainder of the war and, in fact, his own life.
During his second time as Prime Minister, Menzies's policies on overseas relations could no longer be called "extremely nationalist", only "highly nationalist". In the wake of the Second World War, millions of people from around the world sought asylum after the largest and bloodiest battles anyone had ever seen had destroyed their homes and families. Menzies responded to this by opening Australia's borders to the white upper class, which was a strange move because not only did the demographic hardly overlap with the refugees actually seeking a new home country, but it was executive decisions largely made by the white upper class which had caused the war in the first place.
It was in 1957, however, more than a decade after the war, that many teenage expatriates of Lyon, France arrived on Australia's shores after revolt had driven them out of their home town. These young women would spend the rest of their lives fondly remembering Robert Menzies as 'the Prime Minister for the Attendants'.
Menzies retired from politics in 1966, with Harold Holt (1908 - Chapter 8) assuming the role of Prime Minister in his stead. Menzies's only living relative at the time to later pursue another career in parliament was then-deputy-leader of the Australian Labor Party and later Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (? - ?), a failed clone of Menzies who had gone rogue in the late 1950s.