"You'd better look at that note." - D.B. Cooper

As one might expect, the age range of its patrons meant Miguel's was not an all-hours establishment. It was in the small hours of the morn, as the diner began to drift to sleep after a long day's work, that its owner had two uninvited guests waltz in.

Margaret McManus and Alice Cage's disappearance a month prior had taken the city by storm. The duo were notorious disruptors to anyone with a modicum of power. There was, supposedly, no vault in the Bay Area they couldn't crack, and nothing worth stealing that they hadn't at least thrice, each time at the behest of a new client. That they had ceased to be was as much a relief as it was a tragedy.

So when the two of them stumbled into Miguel's, arm around each other's shoulder, Alice beaming and giggling, Margaret singing loudly in a drawled stupor, Miguel wasn't exactly sure how he was supposed to feel.

"Miguel, my man!" Margaret interrupted her song long enough to shout. "Gimme two glasses of the most expensive thing on the menu! Make that three, actually! On me! Treat yourself!"

"Alice! Margaret! Where have you been? Everyone thought you were dead!"

"I told you I could convince them," Alice mumbled.

"Have you two been drinking?! You're far too young!"

"Not at all, dude! We're high on life!" boasted Margaret, with her feline ears standing on end.

"And we did accidentally leave our soul gems near a magnet this afternoon," her companion pointed out.

"Hahahaaa, hell yeah we did! That shit gets you on another plane of existence, I tell ya."

"That doesn't answer the question! Where have you been?"

If Margaret's grin had possessed this sinister intensity all the while, it was only presently that Miguel noticed. "C'mon, Alice. Show him."

Alice dropped her bag on the floor and procured a golden shield, about the size of a dinner plate, polished to impossible luster, and marred with hundreds of scratches. Miguel's jaw hung slack.

"Where... did you get that...?"

Margaret said nothing for a while, just grinned and laughed to herself. She cast a glance in pride at her colleague and in contempt at her host. "We did it, man."

"No..."

"We cracked the Aston vault. They said it couldn't be done!"

"No...!"

"No, really! We did!"

"But... but how?"

"Pull up a chair, old man. You're gonna be telling your grandkids about this."

"I'M THE PAIN YOU TASTED! FELL INTOXICATED!"

Margaret winced. "Can you turn that off?"

Alice pounced on the stereo's volume dial. "On it."

"I'M THE FIRESTARTER! TWISTED FIR-"

Margaret huffed to fill the newfound silence. "Thanks. I can't stand this modern-day kind of stuff, you know? Where's the talent?"

"I think that song's more than ten years old."

"Yeah, well... it's no Stairway to Heaven, that's for sure."

Alice didn't say anything to that. Margaret took that as an invitation to sing the first few bars to herself.

By now the car was a way out of San Francisco, out into what trust fund kids pretended was rural and homely.

"You gettin' chills?" Margaret grinned. She was leaning forward slightly, oddly pronounced in her reading of each address as it went by. "I am."

"Maybe?"

"Come on, dude! Where's your sense of adventure? We're not just hitting up some run-of-the-mill hotshot with a hardon for magical guns or some crap. This is the real deal! The big one! The... final boss, I don't know."

"Sounds either underwhelming or like a death wish."

"Really? Come on! We laugh in the face of fear, don't we?"

"Can I get a raise for that?"

"Don't push it, kid."

Leonard Aston was a multimillionaire, and like all multimillionaires, he was an eccentric megalomaniac with an expensive hobby. He fancied himself a purveyor of fine arts the world over, although most of his colleagues found no pattern to his collection and those who did considered him a half-mad old coot. The commonality that underlined his collection, he would insist in exceedingly private company, was that every last artifact originated from the history of magical girls. Of course, as was the case with practically all humans, he had no means by which to truly validate his claims, but he believed he was very close to proving something.

As charming as his oddball eccentricities tended, there was something more alarming about him. Many magical girls throughout the last quarter century had tried to reclaim his collection, but in all that time, none had succeeded. In fact, only about three in five ever made it back. If you were to ask Margaret, that would all change tonight. If you were to ask Alice, she was fine being one of the three and calling it a day.

"So here's where we're at," Margaret announced, pulling over into a deciduous grove a short way off the road. "Aston Estate's just up ahead. The location of his collection is unknown, but there are talks of "the uncrackable Aston vault". Our client is a showgirl in Vegas by day - or rather, I'd assume that's more of a night job - and one of those weirdos who keeps track of auctions for rich people by night. Day. Whatever the other one is."

"Who's her employer?"

"That's none of our business until someone else pays us to rob them. But I'm not surprised that someone who can use magic would make a killing in L.V.. Whoever she is, she had her eye on some enchanted bronze shield, and Aston outbid her for it. Little does he know, the only thing worth bidding for is our loyalty. First order of business is gonna be charting out the perimeter. Once we've got a look into the building from all angles, and the fastest way around, you're gonna go in."

Alice crossed her arms. "Dammit, I always go in first."

"Brilliant observation. Anyway, I'll keep my eye on you until the place is clear and you've found the vault. Then we crack it, and we're in and out in two, tops."

"Time limit on the contract?"

"Until we or the client pass away, I guess."

Holly watched the compensatingly large black SUV pull up through the blinds, and hastily turned the sign on the door from "Sorry, we're CLOSED", to "Kiss my ass, we're CLOSED".

She retreated to the counter; the sign was in no way a deterrent, merely an outlet for excess snark. By the time she had reached her station, two young women in leather jackets invited themselves in.

"Well, if it isn't the second-least charismatic pair of self-righteous... no, wait, your friend's new. Scratch that, maybe she's cool."

"With all due respect, Madam Harrison," the new girl began, "we represent-"

"No? Alright, guess I had it the first time. How can I help?"

The new girl looked to be on the brink of anger. The old girl didn't look to be much of anywhere.

"We're not here as patrons, Harrison," she simpered, "although we do have business, for which you will be fairly compensated."

"What do we mean by compensated?"

"How much would cover the next four months' rent?"

Holly gave them the cost of the next six.

"Done. Up front, even."

"Don't get ahead of yourself. What's the business?"

The old girl forced a professional composure. "McManus and Cage are intent on cracking the Aston vault tonight. The Marquess has heard the rumors of your victory against the former, and decided we need you to make sure they don't come back alive."

"From the Aston vault?"

"Is there a problem?" snarled the junior.

No! Not at all! In fact, I don't even need to leave this desk. While we're at it, why don't I put your laundry out in the desert for a few weeks, and then check up on it to make sure it's not 'still a little damp'."

"This isn't a joke, Madam Harrison-"

"Good, because it's not funny."

The senior put a hand on Holly's shoulder. "If the job really is so easy..."

She shrugged it off.

"Why not take it?"

Holly sighed. "Alright. But if you're so eager for my help, you're going to lift the restrictions on my sales."

"If you arm the commoners as freely as you do the Attendants," the junior frowned, "you would disrupt the peace we've spent so long building."

Holly stared at the girl over the top of her glasses and nodded with spurious disbelief. "Are you serious? Are you serious right now? Ha! Alright, that one was funny."

"Do you mock us, Madam?"

"You know what the difference between me and an Attendant is? I give the community what it needs. You give the girls out there what you want them to have. Before you sank your claws into this city, do you know how so many of us got by in poverty? Do you know how we settled disputes? How we protected one another?"

"How's that?" spat the new girl.

"Without a need for violence. Get the hell outta here."

In a flash, the child had a giserne at Holly's throat. "Contempt for your superiors! I could kill you!"

"But she won't," covered her elder, and batted the weapon away. She continued to her subordinate, "Don't even think about it. Take everything from her, and she'll fight back with nothing to lose."

The giserne evaporated.

"I'm sorry, Harrison. Your restrictions are there for a reason, the most I can lift them is by 20%."

"100%."

"50%."

"...Done."

Mere hours after Margaret told her tale, a similar one enacted itself across the Pacific.

Cutting through the heart of the night was Lara Macquarie, deep in the core of the city but having spent enough time scanning these streets for the path of greatest obscurity at this hour. She laid low in the shadow of the Australian Museum, house of the object of her desire. House of what belonged to her as Marquess by right.
Her phone beeped. She would have to turn it off, and just as well. She couldn't imagine who would be texting her at this time of-

- NEW MESSAGE(S) from SINEAD -

Hey, are you going to be home soon

I got into an argument with Mum earlier so I didn't want to call

I'm worried she might hear

So sorry if I make some spelling mistakes this numpad sucks dick

I mean I don't think I said anything to her she just kind of exploded at me

I think she hates me

I was just wondering if you were getting off work anytime soon

Lara scrolled up and down the conversation, again and again and again. Her jaw hung slightly open. It was hard to breathe all of a sudden. What was she doing out there? She needed to be at home, holding her family together. What point was there in trying to change the world if she couldn't change the people right in front of her? And couldn't she put this off for another night? A four-millennia old bit of bronze wasn't exactly going to go anywhere.

Had she made that excuse before? Look where it landed her. If she pulled back tonight, what was to stop this from happening the next chance she had, and the next, and the next? Would she rather turn her back on her own species indefinitely, or her own sister just once?

She was shocked to discover that even when she put it like that, it was still a difficult choice to make.

- I'm really sorry. I'm on night shift tonight. I'll make it up to you and take tomorrow off though, okay?

She turned her phone off before the matter could go any further, and thus did the night begin. Her investigation of the building itself had been rudimentary - it could be that the walls were rigged with the government's top security measures this side of Pine Gap for all she knew, but that only kept humans out. After securing the counterfeit relic fastened to her belt, she leapt deftly onto the roof from a standing start. Now that the building itself was her only cover, she rolled from her landing onto her front and crawled across to the wall to her right. A loud thunk struck the roof to her left.

Right where the impact had beckoned she check was the shape of her second, upright, and in white with her cape to the night and the cold as it draped from her shoulders, her gaunt on her fist.

Lara whispered, "Damn, bitch! You look haunting this eve! Can I ask the occasion? Or should I believe your persuasion-"

Madeleine willed away her outfit. "I'm not going to just stop saying 'I'm not gay' someday, you know."

"Hey. You never know until you try."

"I bet even if I was gay, I'd very specifically not get with you. Besides, you said you'd cut that out."

"Yeah, because Crawford was around. Now she's left our world for good, so I'm having to settle for second-best."

"That's a shame. She had so much potential."

"I don't give a shit. There's more than one path to power. I'm here to make good on another. A better one, in fact. Can you imagine being Crawford right now, knowing that a tacky old knife from an ancient civilisation that barely had plumbing is more useful than you?"

"So why'd you focus on her so much?"

Lara wasn't even looking at her anymore. She was pacing around the roof, deliberating over the optimal entrance.

"I figured her contract time must nearly have been up, so if I was going to win her over, it was now or never."

"And it came up 'never'."

"Such is life."

"So should I get rid of the blackmail?"

"What? Oh, nah. I'm sure we can extort something out of someone with that. Okay, I think this door is our best bet getting in."

Gears began to turn. They operated faster and sharper than the mind from which they sprung forth like the blunt, burning strike of Hephaestus sparking divine inspiration into the birth of Athena, resplendent in armour for battle. The blades snagged and tore the falsehood of Lara Macquarie, but there was no blood - only the purple nova of the truth awakening, the igniting of a beacon, the clean, untouchable dawn of her heightened state, the reality it obscured in purple, veiled sleeves, the unreality it fended off with their dark silver spiked garters, The coronation of a Marquess in a tiara of similar fashion, with her very soul nestled at the peak.

"Hold out your hands."

Madeleine did as she was told, knowing full well that inquiring or arguing the reason for the instruction would be both pointless and insane. In that time, Lara grabbed ahold of the lower hinge, and then the upper hinge, each in turn appearing in her reluctant compatriot's palms. The door fell forward. Lara caught it and lined its axis up with where it had been a moment ago.

"Now pass them here."

Again, Madeleine complied, but not silently this time.

"You didn't give me this position just because I look like her, did you?"

Lara paid her little mind, her attention on repairing the hinges. "What? No. You don't look like her anyway. Not really."

"I'm sure that of everyone in Sydney of her age, race, and gender, I've got to be in the 20% with the strongest resemblance to her."

"That's sexist. And racist. And... whatever the other one was. Probably. I don't know. I'm not paying attention, honestly. If you're making a point that's cool and good and I agree with it, awesome. You're so right, and really clever. If you're not, pretend I didn't say that."

"Macquarie!"

"What!" Lara's eyes bulged, now meeting Madeleine's own with the door back in place.

"I feel like you aren't taking me seriously!"

"Of course not! I genuinely don't think there's all that much in life worth taking seriously! You do, and that's why I appointed you. I need someone to keep me level-headed."

"Oh... wow. Really? Huh."

"Maybe I'm not the world's greatest boss to you sometimes, but do you know what?"

"Uh...?"

A sincere smile crossed Lara's face. "I can't think of anyone I'd rather steal an ancient Egyptian hunting knife from a national museum with."

Alice stared back down the edge of the football field Leonard Aston must have called a front lawn. It was too far and too dark to make out Margaret's silhouette, but they were still within telepathic range.

"I'm coming up on the side door now, but I'll need you to help pick it. Can you move into position while I ready the qualia bridge?"

"Sure thing." Margaret smirked. "All the lights in the house are off, so let's make this quick and quiet. Think we can be in and out in fifteen?"

"Too soon to tell. But I'm bringing up the bridge now."

Alice Cage's entire life had been marked by the fact that she was always the token, archetypal, quiet and lonely kid in every context - school, sports, birthday parties, and so forth. A large part of her identity had been shaped and tempered into the snide, cynical base that still made it up today by the realization that nobody ever seemed to understand her, and therefore either she was much smarter than everyone else, or much dumber. One was much more comfortable to believe than the other. It wasn't until fifth grade that she was formally diagnosed with autism, but a part of her had realized a long time prior.

There goes an old philosophical question concerning Umwelt (the environment according to the self), of the differences between the qualia of two organisms in the same environment receiving the same stimuli. That is to say, the question of, 'is the color red you see the same as the color red I see?' Fascinated by the metaphysical ramifications of either possible answer, and staunchly believing in the fact that everything in life is learned from one's surroundings, Alice's wish was for the power to exchange sensory information. If those around her saw the world as she did, she would surely be so much easier to understand.

The girl on the other end of the bridge was now some twenty, thirty yards behind her, in a strong position to keep track of this wall of the building through the scope of her rifle. Or rather, that's what Alice could make out, but such was the imperfection of Alice's power: Margaret's feline attributes, night vision included, stemmed from magical means and were thus more aligned with her soul than her body. Therefore, connecting their visions allowed Margaret to see clearly through both of them, and Alice not quite through either. Then again, that was why she had this flashlight whose light only she could see.

She turned it on to better watch the lock. "Woah! Crazy how the light makes it even harder to see everything it leaves in darkness, even though light and darkness are impossible to define without one another. You ever think about that kind of thing?"

"Well, it makes sense. If something's already hard to see, contrasting it against something easier's gonna only make you focus on the easy thing. More on topic, here's what you're gonna wanna do."

Margaret walked Alice through the lock, but underestimated Aston's security system. A rhythmic, high-pitched beeping screamed through the house.

"Quick!" Alice panicked and dropped the bridge. "Which way's his bedroom?!"

"To your left! Up the stairs! Why?"

Alice dashed in that direction right away. At the same time, Leonard Aston shot awake to the sound of the alarm. He almost made to get up, but then it faded. Oh well, he reasoned, it must have been an audible hallucination brought on by whatever he had been dreaming about.

Alice was stationed outside his bedroom door, her distance to him precisely that of the distance between the sound waves of two consecutive beeps and the bridge linked up to his mind. Then she moved her head ever-so-slightly back, so that the sound wave he heard and the sound wave she heard fell out of phase and canceled one another out. She imagined the alarm was still going, but right now it was completely silent. She explained this to Margaret and urged her to come turn this damn thing off.

Margaret crept into the house and ran about in search of the alarm.

"You know, it's funny. I didn't even stop to think about how quiet it was until you tripped that up. Just like light, huh?"

"I mean sure, its absence and its presence make each other more obvious," - as was a core notion to the work of her namesake John - "but in this case, from where I'm standing, the sound's real opposite sounds identical, and the two cancel out to zero because they're equal in amplitude. It goes without saying but the sum of x and -x is 0, both in math and in nature. I mean look at antimatter. It's the same as matter, except it has the opposite spin. And the two combine to make energy, which has no spin. But it makes you think, doesn't it?"

"What does?"

"Newton's third law. Every force has an equal and opposite counterforce. So why would the origin of the universe not create as much matter with a negative spin as it did with a positive spin?"

"How do you know it didn't?"

"If it did, all the stars and galaxies and antistars and antigalaxies would have negated each other by now. Actually, you know, the Gnostics had some ideas about this, even though they were mainly around in the second century. They believed in the divine, abstract world of God, Pleroma, being made up of perfect symmetries. Then one day, Sophia, a part of God and therefore a part of Pleroma, decided to try creating a being without a mirror image. That entity was called Yaldabaoth, and was supposedly the first imperfect being. It made the real world, Kenoma, because its imperfect mind couldn't understand or perceive Pleroma at all. So in both situations, the universe is only made because some kind of symmetry is broken."

"Dude, that's nuts. But nerd shit aside, I found the thingie. I'm turning it off now."

There came the sickening crunch of fist against plastic downstairs.

"I think it's off."

Alice swung the bridge back around Margaret's way. "Okay, now what?"

It was no challenge at all to find the Egyptian collection. Lara came prepared where she could, and did well to peruse the lay of an institution open to the public. Her recollection served her with complete loyalty, and her almost equally agreeable subordinate had, with her guidance, made her way to the security room.

"Establishing trans-noetic contact," Lara tried.

"Copy, loud and clear."

"Really? It's... I don't know. It's like trying to make out your silhouette while staring into the sun."

"Is it the machete?"

"I really don't know. It's never felt like this when I've visited before. What's different now?"

"Maybe you are."

Lara turned to the nearest security camera. "What?"

"It's four thousand years old. I doubt it's changed all that much since whenever you were last here. But I'll bet you haven't been near it transformed, have you? Maybe that's activated something and heightened your perception. To use your sun analogy, you're staring at it wide-eyed now and might need a moment to adjust."

Lara stood directly before the casing of the ancient blade and blinked. "You're... you're right... yeah. Sorry. I think I'm ready to start. Give me a minute to disassemble the alarm circuit."

"I can accept that you know how to put a door back together, but I'm not going to trust you with an electronic security system. There's a controller here, in case an artefact ever needs to be taken out for cleaning or get sent somewhere else. You're safe to extract the blade."

"You're putting in a lot of work over some old Attendant superstition," Lara snickered, and spared a smile into the camera.

"Correction: I'm putting in this work for my commanding officer."

It was no challenge at all to find the Aston vault - word from survivors who made it this far all agreed that he was just a weird old man who kept his hobby locked up tightly in the quietest wing of the house after having it laughed at for so long. The hard bit was getting in.

"Or it was, until we showed up. Cat ears. Ain't just for looking pretty, although according to the worst kind of boys they really exceed at that. Step aside."

Alice stepped aside. She wasn't even in front of Margaret.

Feline pinna to vault door, the thief made a show of gripping and twisting the dial with all of her focus. Going so far as to squint with one eye at nothing in particular and bite her tongue. Alice couldn't complain about Margaret all the time - this was certainly entertaining.

Click.

"It's taken twenty-plus years," she boasted, "but finally someone's cracked it. And of course, that someone is us."

"Of course. Well, maybe we're not the first. Maybe some people died past this point."

"You're such a downer, man! Here, how's this to lift the spirits?" She paused for effect, beamed, and swung the door wide open.

"Haha, come on! You're not obligated to put in all this work for me!"

"I heard about Crawford's attempted execution."

"Hang on, wh- Jesus, Maddie, can we talk about it later?"

"I heard you spared her life. Even though the law dictates you should have killed her."

"So?"

"This is my way of saying... thanks. I don't know what I would have done if she was dead because of me."

Lara paused to remember who it was that she was talking to. "Oh, anytime. You don't need to thank me. But since you're here, I guess I could spare you my favourite party trick." She held thumb and forefinger enclosed before the lock on the glass cabinet, and between the two digits manifested a comically small sawblade. "You've probably seen girls pull out oversized weapons as a big, epic coup de grace with all the energy they've got. It looks fantastic, sure, but I find the opposite end of the spectrum to be far more useful." From the saw extended another, suspended in the air and interlocking with the first, and then another, and then another, and so forth into the depths of the keyhole. "Do you know why this sword is so important?"

Madeleine sighed. "I have a profound suspicion you're about to tell me."

Immediately a slug burst forth from a shotgun set up in a rudimentary, eye-level trap in the threshold. It only missed Margaret because she was sufficiently histrionic to throw the door open from off to one side in a melodramatic display of her handiwork.

"Do you think he heard that?" Alice fretted.

"I dunno. Let's be quick about this."

Perhaps it would be less fitting beyond this point to call it a vault, and better to call it a small art gallery the château ridicule was immense enough to accommodate. True to legend, the walls were lined with all sorts of trophies of wealth plundered from every corner of the planet. A human would be completely incapable of determining why they were gathered here, but to Margaret and Alice, the room was teeming with life.

Well, there were a few inert fakes, but a man like Aston doesn't become as wealthy as he had without being scammed out of a few thousand dollars.

The duo gawked at the lineup. There were very obviously ancient Polynesian hunting spears, augmented with shimmering, chromatic machinery humans could not yet dream possible. There were traditional Siberian winter hats, into which were weaved the moving, shifting constellations identified by societies long past. There was a bleached, featureless, bony mask with a single pink elliptical diamond embedded in its forehead. And then there was...

"The shield..." Margaret gasped. And sure enough, the remnant of a more magical age hung in exactly the same state Alice would reveal it to be in more than a month later: a golden shield, about the size of a dinner plate, polished to impossible luster, and marred with hundreds of scratches. "And so the past..."

She whispered now, gently, elegantly slipping it off its wall hook and into a bag Alice held out at the nervous, impatient ready. She liked to imagine herself as a worldly person, contemptuous of grandeur that wouldn't affect her life in any meaningful way. And yet, here and now, she was reminded of the fascination her ex-girlfriend possessed for the eternity of human nature. She could almost feel it, clinging to the shield like a film.

"...wakes from its slumber."

"The great priestess Nedjem of Iwnw. Who she was depends on who you ask, but everyone can agree she was a legend. Some say she was a protector of the dead, wandering the city without ever stopping to eat or sleep. Others claim she was the greatest enchantress in history, able to write divine power into the humblest of objects. A few even believe the blood of the Deep Light herself coursed through her veins."

A click. The casing slid aside.

"All agree she made this sword. And so our history..."

Carefully, precisely, but not fearlessly, Lara drew the blade from its scabbard - worthless, it was, purely decorative and nowhere near as old as its contents - hardly even flinching when the sputcheon began to sing while pent-up energy, eager to escape, bid the metal to resonate.

"...returns to us."

And so the metaeclyptical alignment betwixt the two events diverges, no longer a clear syzygy from the throne of the speaker to call on cupid's arrow, or whatever other name one might have for the straight and true vantage point that might grant the unlikely bond between the two. Plato would call the eclipse an avatar of the almighty Monad, the one true God. For what more blatant force could she (few have ever gotten her gender correct, but Monad derives from the feminine Monas for a reason) use to demonstrate her power than the temporary alignment of two celestial bodies?

Alarm bells sounded. Attack dogs stirred. A vault's auto-lock had failed to trigger in time. An old man peered down the sights of his hunting rifle from his bedroom window. The cacophony - nay, ruckus - nay, shitshow - was only avoidable to two girls capable of moving at beyond-human speed, and only thanks to one of them having beyond-cat reaction times.

Margaret and Alice exhaled together once they were off Aston Estate, only to immediately pick the breath back up and dust it off.

"My car!" Margaret screamed.

Holly, dressed in a coal-black trench coat and witch hat, far too many belt and boot buckles, and her burning red soul gem on a necklace, stood with her back leg on its hood and her front on its roof, along with a glassy-looking broadsword glowing rose red on which she rested her elbow. The car had never been the most reliable or structurally sound in the past, sure (in fact, unbeknownst to all present, it was by all conceivable metrics the second-worst in San Francisco), but now it was beaten into a shape that would no longer so much as necessitate a license to operate.

"You know," she shrugged, "I was really hoping I'd only need to talk to you once tonight. Sorry, Vince, looks like you and Jules here weren't supposed to see what's in the briefcase."

"Wow. How long did it take you to come up with that one?" Alice put her hands on her hips.

"It's not easy to prepare a one-liner like that when most famous fictional duos are actually pretty intelligent, skillful characters."

"I can think of so many examples that aren't, though."

"That's besides the point! Forget I said anything, let's start this over."

"Which one's Samuel L. Jackson?" Margaret cut in. "He was the cooler one. I wanna be him."

Holly winced. "Oh my G- look. You two saw the inside of the Aston vault. Aston's gonna be livid that a magical girl stole his stuff, and the deeplighters are equally apop-shitting-leptic because... I don't know, they just do things arbitrarily. I think this is just an excuse to start a riot over you having stolen a ton of their crap in the past. So now my job is to kill you and have this whole thing blow over. En garde."

Holly bounded to where Margaret had positioned herself, but her reflexes were not on par with her target and she landed a quarter-second too late to connect.

Margaret had bounded back and landed just in time to catch Holly smirking, and then fail completely to catch the sword she had thrown after her. It obviously weighed less and was more aerodynamic than Holly's entire body, thus Margaret couldn't avoid this one and both sword and catgirl were thrown backward.

Against anyone else's better judgement but more or less in keeping with her own, Margaret rose upright again, now using the butt of a rifle as a crutch.

"Hand it over, Maggie. That's what thieves are meant to do when they're caught in the act, right?"

"I don't have it." Margaret clenched her teeth.

Holly turned to Alice and asserted the presence of another sword. "Is that right?"

Alice rolled her eyes. "Unbelievable. You're just gonna turn me in, huh? Of course you would."

"You do have it, though! And she was gonna kill me if I didn't say something!"

"And it's preferable she kills me, huh?"

"She's not gonna- Holly, you wouldn't attack a fifteen-year-old with Asperger's, would you?"

"Well, no..." Holly admitted.

"Dammit. This is just a leadup to the old joke of 'no, I'd attack her with my sword', isn't it?" Margaret leaned her weight off her rifle and onto her own two legs now.

"No! It's because Hans Asperger was a eugenicist, his legacy shouldn't be celebrated, and I imagine Alice would just prefer I said she had autism. Right?"

"Would be nice," Alice mumbled, and cast a bitter glance Margaret's way.

"But also, yeah, I am going to attack her with my sword."

Alice waved her arm from opposite shoulder to adjacent side. In the passage of its shadow fanned out about a dozen daggers flying outward in a wave. Holly bent over backwards to avoid taking one to the sternum, and Margaret ducked just in time for another to get caught in her hair. By the time they both stood again, Alice had drawn the shield from her bag and wore it on her arm. Only her eyes, aflame with furious passion, were visible over the top.

Holly started toward Alice at a brisk pace, then sprung a skip in her step right on time to build momentum for the swing of her sword. She swung it from the hip, but Alice jabbed it aside with the shield. The blade glanced off without so much as making a sound. She brought it down from overhead on Alice with a veteran's elegance, but she raised the shield to meet it. Again the same silent result. Alice followed through with the block, up, and to the side, and the movement of her arm conducted a new arc of knives. Holly jumped and rolled back to avoid their return descent, and looked up just in time to see a muzzle flash from Margaret, now some way away.

Everything moved in slow motion. Holly could sense the approach of the bullet, but she didn't even have time to focus the muscles in her eyes, much less move her body to dodge or block. But these were not the only outs she had.

Another sword burst forth from her soul, breaching into the air of reality with cetacean grace. No sooner was it present enough to obscure the shot did it swat the bullet away with its flat. Then, its work done, it flickered back into the ether.

This gave her an idea.

Holly ran to the side, over to where the most sarcastic of cynics would claim the car stood. Of course, they had known each other for so long, Margaret knew Holly's running speed fluently. Holly knew that Margaret knew that. Margaret didn't know that Holly knew that, but Holly knew that Margaret would know that alarmingly soon. Right now, the barrel was lining up to where she was about to be in the brief window of time it took for the sequence of events between the contraction of a tendon in Margaret's index finger and the propulsion of a small ballistic projectile from the weapon's less tactful end. And once that sequence was set in motion, Holly acted as if it were all the time in the world.

The bullet would fly for Holly's leg such that its thrilling sequel wouldn't miss. Of course Margaret would try that, she knew she would. Holly stopped immediately and lodged her sword in the dirt at the angle between her two enemies, too late for Margaret's eye-to-brain, brain-to-nerve, nerve-to-finger series could cancel out the finger-to-trigger-onward proceedings. The bullet struck Alice in the leg, and she toppled over in agony. Satisfied, Holly started toward Margaret, who dropped her rifle and ran, but the night had worn her down and before long her assailant was upon her, and her assailant's sword in her side, then her leg, then her deltoid. She almost immediately passed out from the pain, but clung onto what little consciousness she could.

Margaret forced herself up onto one elbow just in time to see Holly's head eclipse the moon and don it as if a halo. So this is it, she thought to herself. Ah, well. Could have been worse. But if there is another side I'm gonna lodge a complaint.

Holly didn't raise her weapon.

Margaret didn't raise her body.

"Shoot me," Holly said.

"What?"

"Once through the collar, once through the gut."

"What?!"

"Come on, you're dead. Don't ask any questions."

"What!?"

"You're dead. I killed you. But I was pretty badly injured in the fight, took two bullets, and if I had to get my ass out at the last second and missed you two slinking off to a hospital, well, I guess that's just a stupid old shopkeeper not knowing to confirm your deaths! And I could've sworn you were mortally wounded, so what gives?"

"Hang on, you...?"

"Of course I wasn't going to kill you! Seriously, since when did you think I had the heart to kill someone?"

"You said you were going to!"

"I just thought if I prompted you into a fight, you could at least give me a convincing wound or two. But I guess I'm just too good."

"I... the shield! You're not going to-!"

"Alice is fine, and she'd be glad to hear you asked, I'm sure. You can keep that weird old relic, though, and I do not mean the idiot wagon. Seriously. When my sword connected with it, I could feel in my gut that something unnatural was going on with that thing. And you don't need to know how much I'm getting paid to deal with you tonight, but it is not enough to get me to touch that thing with my bare hands."

"I started blacking out after that, but long story short, me and Alice laid low in the hospital until everyone forgot about the whole fiasco. Which... is now, actually! So yeah, we're basically the best."
Miguel didn't share in her pride. "You raided Leonard Aston's private collection."

"I know, right?"

"He's going to fucking kill me," he groaned to thin air.

"Excuse me? He's what?"

"Sylvia didn't get the money for the halfway house from nowhere. He's been building your community before you were born, in the hopes that maybe one day, he'd get to see... fuck fuck fuck, if he finds out I serve you that's it. For me and for every girl in the city."

"Chill out, dude! If I'd known it meant so much to you-"

"I think you should leave."

"What!?"

"Now! Please! Just... I don't care where, just go!"

Margaret's face hardened. "Alright. I get it. C'mon, Alice. Let's go. About time I skipped town, anyway."

"What, seriously?" Alice protested, and continued to protest even as she dragged her out the door.

Once they were gone, Miguel let out a breath of defeat as if his essence were being expelled from his body. He finished closing up for the night and retired to a small living quarters to the rear, serried with altogether unmanageable amounts of arcane (in every sense of the word) paraphernalia for a grown man's living space. Then again, Sylvia had left it in this state, so that was that.

Sitting on a humorously ornate bedside table were a single - albeit very large and very thick - envelope, and a small penknife dulled by decades. He checked the clock, an immense wooden timepiece with a no-longer-functional pendulum which, over time, had been repaired around instead of maintaining its mechanical utility. It was 12:09 now, which meant...

Stephen had become like a brother to Miguel. For years, both their lives had found themselves revolving around Sylvia in one way or another. Despite living in a different neighborhood, in fact, there was never reason to expect anything untoward about appearing in his house without invitation. To Miguel, though, this was palpably different before Stephen so much as opened his mouth.

"Oh my God, you look terrible! What's happened?"

Stephen never seemed to show any emotion outright. Of course, he had been born and raised sworn to secrecy. Nobody expected anything else from him (bar Sylvia, on which front he had indulged her), as this was just the kind of person he was, and his nearest and dearest could accommodate it. So it was that Miguel could not point out any particular reason to question Stephen's emotional wellbeing, but there was without a doubt something in the air.

"I wanted to tell you that I couldn't keep living in a city where everything reminds me of her. Sorry, man. I'm done."

"I..." Miguel needed a moment to process the fact that so soon yet another of his closest friends would be gone from his life. "I get it. I was thinking of moving back to Texas myself, but I guess at some point, this turned into home."

Stephen nodded. "I thought the same thing myself, but I don't think San Francisco's home anymore. I think she was."

"Where to, then?"

"I've got family over in New York. Ha, it's gonna mess me up to meet my nephew, though, I tell you. My little sister has a son now, man. Can you imagine?"

"No," Miguel admitted, because he was the youngest child anyway. "It must be a lot to deal with."

"Yeah, it's gonna be like starting my life over. Or at least, that's what I'm planning for. Which is why I wanted to give you this, actually."

From his jacket pocket, Stephen produced a large envelope.

"Something she left behind. A responsibility she said she wanted to take upon herself, but she wanted to prepare for the possibility that she wasn't gonna be around to see it through. She gave it to me, but I think it's better kept in the family."

Miguel took it. "Any idea what it is?"

"None."

Scrawled upon its face in a ballpoint's trails were the words, "Don't open for the next twenty years".

"Why doesn't it have an exact date?" he wondered aloud.

On the backside, in the same hand, was written: "It's twenty years from now. Why does it matter what date?"

That was February 27, 1989. As of nine minutes ago, it was twenty years to the very day. She'd said it hadn't mattered, but if he hadn't set himself an exact time, he would have found himself wondering what was wrong with nineteen and a half years instead, or nineteen, or eighteen? But Sylvia was Sylvia, and if she said twenty then by the goddesses he would stick to that.

Cautiously, he brought both envelope and knife before him and applied one to the other.
Inside was a letter, and another, smaller envelope. The former read:

To whomever I saw last before I disappeared,

I want to say first that if you're reading this, it means at the time of me giving it to you I found it unlikely that I would live long enough to do all the work myself. From your perspective, this has been true for twenty years now. This must mean I'm dead, which I'm sure mustn't come so much as a shock anymore, but I expect it must feel like a weight off your shoulders to have me confirm it. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you need time to grieve, I understand, and if there is another side you should know I'm missing you just as much. Still, though, you're alive, and that's a beautiful thing.

And it means there's something I need you to do so badly, I've prepared for it twenty years in advance. Inside the envelope I've given you is another envelope with both another letter and yet another envelope. This is not for you to open, but it's addressed to Lucile, in Hong Kong. Remember her? The next step in this sequence is something only she can do. I'm instructing her to keep in touch, and the two of you must work together to figure out who the third and final recipient should be.

I wish I could help you at all with this step, but I don't know her name, address, or nationality, because she won't be born for another nine years. I'm sorry to burden the two of you with a fool's errand as what must be my very last correspondence, but I hope you'll come to understand in the fullness of time.

Yours in life and in death,

Sylvia Carlos

Miguel felt like crying. He held the letter to his chest, and could but for a moment once more feel the presence of his cousin, but the feeling didn't last.

He would not mourn, though, not yet. He had a will to execute.

THE MYSTERY OF D.B. COOPER

'D.B. Cooper' was the pseudonym of an American airplane hijacker who, in 1971, vanished from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 United States dollars in tow. Both the specifics of where he vanished to and his true identity have been the subject of many conspiracy theories in the decades since. None of these theories have ever captured the true nature of either mystery, which are both far more obvious than most presume, and much funnier.

During the winter of 1929, the

Hang on. My understudy has just reminded me about the interview with the Overseer she scheduled, back in chapter 6. You'll have to excuse the interruption, I need to go change into my Sunday best, and my true form.