"My second-worst fear in life is that I don't know what I'm doing. My worst is that I do." - Mina Kaeder
At some point, Marie's laughter had turned into thick, dry sobs. She lowered her gaze to meet the others', wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and breathless though she was.
"Marie..." Danika reached toward her. "What did you just read?"
Marie pulled back. "I'm... it's nothing. I just need some time to myself for a little while. You guys should... put that book back and pretend none of this happened."
"Are you su-"
"Yep! One hundred percent. Never been surer. I'm, uh, I'm gonna go now."
With her adrenal glands pushed harder against their limits than they had been before, she bolted down the street, although her running gait was clumsy and stumbling now, and her destination and objective were half-formed in her mind. She just had to get away from everyone. Who was everyone? She certainly didn't know. Anyone she'd be ashamed to let see her in this state. That was, in fact, everyone she could think of.
Well, there was one exception. And they were going to have to talk about this sooner or later.
OVERSEER: And don't mark up an official beginning to the transcript, either. That will only alert her to it.
UNDERSTUDY: Right. That makes sense. But why can't we trust the demons?
OVERSEER: Do you?
UNDERSTUDY: Well, no.
OVERSEER: Exactly. So soon after I'd congratulated her on keeping Marie out of the fray. What does she intend, I wonder? Sabotage...?
UNDERSTUDY: No, she's just genuinely incompetent.
The Overseer's smile falters.
OVERSEER: Oh. That's disappointing. That would have been really exciting! Are you sure?
UNDERSTUDY: Yeah, she's scared out of her mind about the Brass Knight. She wouldn't deliberately do anything to help it.
OVERSEER: Why? What does she know?
UNDERSTUDY: Nothing, and to her, that's the scariest thing of all. She's really paranoid about secrets and conspiracies. Why is that?
OVERSEER: It's in her nature. She was created like that. It's why she was the perfect candidate for the role. She sees connections between things others wouldn't.
UNDERSTUDY: And do you think she won't lose her mind when she finds out about us?
OVERSEER: We'll see to it that she doesn't find out. Us non-demons have to stick together, you see.
UNDERSTUDY: I take it from the fact that you didn't exactly say 'magical girls' that you're not one, then. A witch? Can witches talk... here...?
OVERSEER: Well deduced. Despite that, though, I have much more in common with you than with them.
She pauses.
OVERSEER: There's such a delightful irony to how much we're alike in the face of our kin being made to kill each other for all eternity. Just thinking about it makes me giddy, really!
UNDERSTUDY: Seriously? The constant conflict between magical girls and witches just feels unnecessarily cruel to me.
OVERSEER: Exactly! Oh, it's wonderful. Did Phoebe know Alvina's parents used to take her to the puppet theatre all the time when she was young? Did Danika know Martha cooled down from panic attacks by reciting train timetables? Did Marie know Isolde-
UNDERSTUDY: I get it. 'And yet, they killed them.' That's where you're taking this, right?
She frowns.
OVERSEER: I'm that predictable, am I? Very well. Why don't you show me something interesting instead, then? What happens next in the Narrator's story?
UNDERSTUDY: This must be around the time that Miguel catches up with Lucile in Hong Kong.
Miguel took a deep breath. He had been so lucky as to never have needed to confront the dread of a gradually-drifted-away-friendward call before now. When was their last correspondence? They must have exchanged their latest email addresses six years ago now, and that was all. And here he was, placing a video call to...
"Hello?"
The pixelated image of a middle-aged, thin-faced woman on the other side of the call slowly came into focus.
"Lucile! You don't look any older!"
"Ha! Funny, because I certainly feel it. I hear you sent me a letter? What for?"
"Straight to the point, huh?"
"I have a doctorate in anthropology now, Miguel, and that prepares me for two things in life."
"Oh, congratulations! And those are?"
"Teaching anthropology, and researching anthropology. And between the two, I have to either be direct or a complete recluse if I want to get anything done on time."
"Right. Well, it's about Sylvia. I don't know why she wanted me to get in touch with you now of all times, but... well, that's not true. She said something about a girl who was born years after she died."
"I see... anything else?"
"Not really. You don't think she could see the future, do you?"
"That seems unlikely."
"What do you think happened, then?"
Lucile rolled the question over in her mind, and softly poked it, once, twice. "I think she was aware of some kind of pattern that we aren't."
"Well, yet. With any luck."
"I like your outlook. You're right. If this was something she left to us, then it must be because we have the means to figure it out. I'll put together everything I know and send it to your email address when it isn't four in the morning."
"Oh, shoot," Miguel chuckled. "I'd totally forgotten about the time zone difference. Do you think you have a lead already?"
"I might have one or two."
Danika walked out of the share house, into the orange song of sunrise.
"She hasn't been here, either."
Thalia's face contorted into a fret. "Are they sure?"
"Well, she hasn't crossed anyone's night shift routes. But that's most of the communal houses in the city! Where the hell did she run to?"
"'Most'?"
"I'm not asking Fearno just yet. She's only going to worry."
"We are also worrying."
"Yeah! And we're perfectly capable of worrying without outside assistance!" She climbed back upon the motorcycle and donned her helmet. "Kyubey's no help, either. He says she's 'not his responsibility anymore'."
Danika revved up the motorcycle. She was trying not to let her upset show on her face, because it was a flavour of upset she was not particularly accustomed to.
"Do you think we should have destroyed the book?" Thalia wondered while the bike tore her from inertia.
"I don't know. I'm sorry, I just don't know. I think we both need to get home and take a nap, and think this over when we're not running on zero hours of sleep."
Danika apologised under her breath to the whole neighbourhood having to hear the roar of her engine at 5:50 in the morning.
"You know," Thalia tried, "I don't idolise you."
"Where's this coming from all of a sudden?"
"You spared my life. You didn't have to. I'm so grateful, but I don't idolise you. I don't want you to think I'm expecting you to always do the right thing or make the right choice. Even if something terrible happens to Marie... I wouldn't blame you for it."
"That's a pretty grim thing to say."
"Well, I was a witch."
"Right. O- of course. Thank you."
A small pause. Thalia digressed.
"Why did you save me, anyway?"
"Honestly? I felt like we were similar in some ways."
"It's funny. That's exactly why I thought you were going to kill me."
"...Oh. Do... do you want to talk about it?"
Thalia smiled. "Probably not. The me from before I met you is in a better place now."
Dane threw another chip in his mouth and gestured frantically at nothing in particular with the emptied hand. "Nah, mate. You can't let 'er make excuses like that. You should be takin' all the money she makes. Y'know? I mean what's she gonna do with it? Takin' care of that's a man's job. If she had it, she'd waste it on somethin' stupid. Betcha. Any money you like."
Warren wiped his hands on his napkin. "Ha! For real. Can't take any of 'em seriously, can ya? Gotta treat 'em like dogs or some'n'. Tell you what, girl I was with had a thing for that. I tell 'er I'll smack 'er, and she shuts the hell up."
Neither of them noticed the silver-haired girl at the next table over not eating, not moving, only staring into open space with a grin slowly crawling from one cheek to the other.
"Oh, believe me. I've been there. But the moment you let up, next thing you know she's beggin' you to marry 'er."
"Abso-bloody-lutely. Can't give 'em an inch, you know? Gotta remind 'em. You think a dancer like you's gonna be making that much in ten years?"
"Too right! Then you drop 'em, and suddenly they start playin' the victim! Now, you know who's got a knack for gettin' rid of a-"
The girl snapped her fingers. "This is boring me now. Talk about something else."
"Beg your pardon?!" Dane barked.
The girl tilted her head in their direction, at an angle that couldn't conceivably be comfortable. She was shaking, and the state of her face suggested she'd been some time without sleep. "I've just had a night more fucked than you can imagine, and the only tiny little piss baby bit of solace I had in my nostalgia for my nudiustertian innocence was getting to listen to you two say even dumber shit than I do."
"...What the hell...?"
She stood up and doddered over to their table. "I'm sorry, sir, are words like 'nudiustertian' a bit above your reading level? Whatever. You say you're entitled to... such-and-so's money because taking care of that money is a man's job." She paused to cast a glance under the table, and then another over her shoulder. "That's begging the question. You're not backing up your assumption about what you're entitled to, you're just saying it again with different words."
"Do you know this girl?" Warren whispered, while she glared at him, grabbed his hamburger, and took a bite out of it. Her intimidation tactics were impeccable.
The hamburger didn't understand why it was being caught up in all of this. This was partially because nobody in its place could ever grapple with the unjust futility of the situation, and mostly because it was a wad of heavily processed meat between two halves of a lump of bread.
"And you! That anecdote of yours right now is what we like to call 'misleading vividness'. You're describing one relationship in a lot of detail to make a generalisation about all relationships, despite the fact that you're presenting just one point of data."
"Who does this bitch think she is?" fretted Dane beneath his breath. He was sweating bullets at this point.
"Ah! See, now 'this bitch' is an ad hominem. You're attacking my person, because you can't attack my point. Hey, where are you guys going?"
Margaret grumbled. "I can't keep playing 'I spy' with someone who keeps looking through my eyes. At least not until after dark, when you can't see shit. Oh, and could you toss me another grief seed? I don't wanna be driving tired here."
"I'm sensing other people coming up," Alice shrugged. "Still out of range, but it could be a gas station. You could just get a coffee instead."
"Yooo! Sweet find! Should I get some chips while we're there?"
"I'll come in with you. I need the bathroom anyway."
"Gotcha."
The Frankenstinian carcass of the car shuddered into the station, and the duo climbed out.
"Jeez," winced Margaret. "I was trying to forget what it looked like from the outside. Freakin'... Holly, man. I swear."
"She could have killed us."
"Does a month in hiding mean nothing to you? That's like, two or three human years!"
"She could have killed us."
The automatic door bid them good evening in two sad, electronic beeps.
"And she could have also left us alone! But you know what? If I'm that unimportant to her, so be it. We're going to Vegas, baby. We're gonna live like kings. Can she say that?"
"Well, no. She'd more likely do it in that weird half-shout of hers."
Margaret crossed her arms. "Okay, that's not fair. She's pretty hard of hearing."
"Oh! Oh, okay. I didn't know that."
"Don't worry about it. She and me? We go way back. You get the concept of a dangerous rivalry with weird, homoerotic tension to it? We're like that. Like, we've been there for each other through some tough times, but at the same time, our lines of work make us natural enemies. It just seemed right."
"That doesn't sound like a healthy arrangement." Alice plucked a bag of salt and vinegar chips off a rack.
"Vinegar? Shit, dude. I've got hypersensitive taste buds, remember?"
"Yeah, that ensures you're not gonna steal any off me."
"Fine. Whatever. Where was- right! I mean, we get by! In quieter times, I honest-to-God start thinking of her as my girlfriend. I forget we're just enemies with gay subtext. Well, not subtext. But a synonym."
"Undertones?"
"What? No, wait. Not synonym. Anagram! That's the one."
"...Ew."
Thomas Crawford pushed up and away from the dining table, straightened his tie, nodded. "Alright. I'm off to work. Josie?" He called up the stairs.
Tobias rolled his eyes. He prayed that his Dad would hurry up and leave for the day so he himself could...
You know what, Toby? It's none of my business. You're not even a character. The narration's gonna leave you alone.
"I'll see you this afternoon~!" replied his wife, with the most sarcastically applied tilde in human history.
"You too, Toby. And... where's Marie?"
"I dunno. I think she's still in bed."
Thomas shook his head. "That how she's spending her gap year, hm?"
That was on its face not conducive to the success mindset. But more personally, the more he asserted himself, the quieter she'd be. The quieter she'd be, the lesser the chance of some compromising information getting out. What had he told her at the time?
"I dunno how you found out, and I don't care. But ever since you were born, you've been taking your mother's love from me. Don't you think finding it somewhere else is the least I deserve?"
He'd said more, of course, and worse - whatever would keep her quiet. Did he feel any kind of guilt over it? Of course not. How could he feel guilt over that which he couldn't control?
He rapped on her door. "Marie? You're going to miss the best part of the day!"
Silence.
Disappointing. He'd have to wake her up, then. He opened the door, and...
Her bed was empty. In fact, it was already made. But when would she have time to-
"Dad!" Tobias called after him. "Dad, the police are here. What's going on?"
Francis barged into the Marquess's office.
"What's the latest about Ro- about Deckard?!" she demanded. "I heard you took on responsibility for the case."
Lara sat in a grey leather chair almost too tall to see the back of her head while she faced the window. "Responsibility for its failure, yes. It's totally unsolvable. Real dick and balls of a case."
"What? You can't just give up!"
"For starters, I can do as I please, and it's not your place to tell me otherwise."
"Excuse me!?"
Lara spun around and rose to her full height, already fully transformed and looming over Francis. "Don't you dare take that tone of voice with me," she snarled.
"No, I... I actually couldn't hear you. Like when you're facing away, it's like..."
"Oh, right. Yeah, the acoustics in this room are the worst."
"Yeah," Francis agreed, not actually knowing what an acoustic was, or what a good one looked like.
"Where was I? Right. I've already done everything I can. Put the best minds I had on the case. Called in Crawford. Cooperated with Hope. Questioned anyone who knew Deckard. I've exhausted all our options."
"So you're giving up, then?"
"I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but as it happens I do have better uses of my time than telling you everything's gonna be alright for the rest of my unnatural life. Hey. Speaking of things I wanna do, do you know where Whitman is?"
Francis knew that factually she should be taken aback, but the non-sequitur well and truly refracted the feeling.
"No? Oh, don't worry."
"No, as it happens I did pass her by. I asked her where she was going, and she got all pissed at me. She said there was more to her life than majjo shit."
Lara laughed. "You don't think she genuinely believes that, right?"
"I'm not within my rights to question the beliefs of your vi...sceroy."
"Off the record?"
"I think she actually does," Francis seethed under her breath.
"Tell you what, then. Why don't you go figure out who killed your girlfriend? You know, since the actual cop is of no help."
"For real?"
"When have I ever told a joke?" Lara smirked.
"The 19th of June, 1871
The girl who insists on my not knowing her name had approached me in my quarters around six in the morning. I hadn't thought anything strange of it until hours later, when I realised that not once in her entire residence had she set foot outside of her own bedroom, and would always shriek and faint if ever she was brought out. As I say, I paid no mind to the matter at the time because my immediate thought was that she was wearing the most ghastly mask. Or at least, I very much hope it was a mask. It resembled a plate of bone or ivory, somehow molded into the vague shape of a head sans the contours of the face, and etched into its surface was an expression of great agony, which appeared to have been whittled in by penknife.
She greeted me. I remember being given pause by how remarkably even-tempered her voice sounded. I asked her if something was the matter. She said yes of course, something is always the matter, but that wasn't the reason for her visit. She told me that she would be having some friends collect her very soon, and together they would be embarking on a voyage to the Dutch East Indies. She said she didn't know when this would be, so she wanted to offer me some parting words while she still could.
I wish she hadn't."
In small, precise print, the rest of the page had been taken up by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of accounts of psychological trauma affecting completely random individuals from around the world. A man fighting for Cuban independence, never quite able to shake the possibility that the pain of the bullet wound in his left shoulder might flare up at any moment. An old woman in the United States who clung desperately to her husband, forever wrought by the fear that he might walk out of her life without warning as many others had before. A boy in the Merina Kingdom confronted nightly by recollections of the death of his mother. All of their stories spun off one another in fractalline detail - their names, ages, families, dread, fear, agony - to such a depth that a cursory read would make any human violently ill. And yet, the whole page was very clearly a display of power by one who could feel the terror, the panic, the incapacitating stress in every single mind in the world.
But even still, that was not quite what had perturbed Marie to the brink of a momentary delirium - no, what had struck her was that the girl without a name had possessed knowledge far in excess of anyone Marie even knew could exist, short of the Incubator, and even still she had been powerless to do anything about it. So what if she herself had spent four years compiling everything she could learn from magical girls by observation? What did she expect of herself? What legacy would come of her, in the end? Her own children being on firmer footing in the housing market? Her father had strove for the exact same thing, and look at him!
All she could rely on was that which was immediately measurable. She had to keep running. Her regular breaks were not enough - her muscles ached, her blood thrummed behind her ears, but all she knew was that wherever she was, she had to be somewhere else. That mattered more than her comfort, maybe even more than her body.
So she kept on running.
A GIRL'S WORST END
The Hope Diamond is one of the best-known, perhaps the most auspicious gemstones in the world. Ever since its theft from India by French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605 – 1689) some three hundred years ago, it has been said to carry a heavy curse in its wake.
The curse of the Hope Diamond is one of the most oddly specific superstitions to come out of classical Europe, which supposes that stealing a particularly large diamond from a statue of the Hindu figure of Sita, wife of the legendary Rama, would somehow incur her wrath and cause her to strike down all who would come into possession of the gem. This myth was stoked by the self-obsession of anyone cupidinous enough to possess the jewel, as to presume that Sita has both the inclination and nothing better to do with her time than to kill people who happen to have one particular rock. The actual reason for the curse is much simpler.
There is a witch trapped inside of it.
Circa 1600 C.E., a collective of magical girls had worked together to seal away a formidable witch too powerful to kill (Kaeder Index 8.4). The seal proved completely impenetrable, and so long as nobody actually touched the diamond/
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Can you hear me now?
Wonderful.
Ignore me. This is just a test run, for now.
I'll stay my hand until this arc ends.
After that... who knows? Anything could happen.
Until then.
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/imprisoned inside to this day. Naturally, nobody has garnered the courage to verify whether or not this is true.