"It can't be helped." - Ned Kelly
Marie ran. She didn't know where to, that seemed like such a minor detail at this point. She was burning off excess energy right now, channeling her anger. In short bursts, she could think more clearly. Glances down back alleys and side roads. Checking. Checking for something. Checking for a hiding place. Not so she could avoid being seen, but as long as he thought that was what she was trying to do...
Perfect. She spotted a playground, small and pathetic though it was, positioned in the middle of a park.
How long had she been running? She ached like death. If he had been following her this whole time, what would he think of her, slamming the journal shut and scampering around town for - a peek at her phone - fourteen hours? Maybe he thought she'd gone mad. Maybe she had.
She bolted to the playground and dove beneath the slide. Did she have the energy for the way home? She didn't know, or care. She'd call a taxi or something. It wasn't important, she assured herself.
She sat and waited. She didn't know how long she had to wait for. If she was too quick, he would see what she was doing. If she was too slow... she didn't know. She didn't know how slow 'too slow' was. Her parents would get quote-unquote 'worried' about her, she guessed. Not enough to listen to her explanations for her actions, of course, but...
Maybe she had been running from that, too. Maybe that's why she'd caught herself up in this world, in the lives of Phoebe and Danika and Hope and Zoey and Lara and Madeleine and Thalia and anyone who wasn't her, because in their world she at least had the tiniest bit of gravity. Because to so many of them she was a gatherer of information far greater than most of them could dream of in their short little lives. She mattered to them.
And that journal, that fucking journal disproved all of that. Yesterday she had been sure of two things: one, that the struggles, horrors, and societal tribulations of the past were solved now, her time, her generation unrattled by their repercussions, long free from those power structures, those inequities. And two, that their resolutions could be owed to educated, intelligent, well-to-do people like her. Now she was sure of zero.
She had a headache. Why did she have a headache? She was breathing abnormally quickly, that must have been it. Why was she doing that? It could be something to do with glimpsing the sum total of all human fear, but that was just an educated guess. She tried to force back her heightened senses of sheer terror. Tried to think of something else. Abstract concepts. Numbers. This was the perfect way to pass the time, actually: she wasn't going to run out of them at any point.
One, one, two, three...
She suddenly had the most dreadful feeling that she wasn't alone. She pushed that thought aside. It was just information.
Five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one...
Someone was coming closer now, completely certain that she was where she was. She pushed that thought aside. It was just information.
Thirty-four, fifty-five... eighty-nine?
Close enough to touch her now. She hesitated to dismiss this, but reminded herself that, of course, it was just information.
One hundred and forty-four... two hundred and thirty-three...
Marie Crawford was being watched. She could feel it. She had enough information to act.
Four years, she had studied his every habit. Four years, she had kept him almost constantly within sight, and tracked his every move. She knew there was only one position from which he would be sitting, watching her - just there, by the ladder whose paint had been corroded by generations of childhood excitement. Without the slightest flinch of uncertainty, she lashed out and made a fist around his neck. He squirmed, and for the first time in weeks, she could see him struggle. She helped herself to a sinister grin. All at once, her mind was the impenetrable adiaphane of the Sun's radiance, luminant and obscure in the unfocus of celestial distance, and every mote as formidable as its immutable puissance to grant prosperity or annihilation as it would. And also, like, 10% more fucked up.
She stepped out from under the slide and held him to the sky. Like an owl, his eyes couldn't move independent of his skull, so holding him like this made him look right at her. Not that he wouldn't have on his own, but to Marie, the difference was crucial. Fighting off tremors of sadistic glee, she coupled her grip with that of her free hand and began to squeeze.
"Alright, you psycho. It's been four years of hiding the full scale of your endeavour from me. That ends now."
"What haven't I told you? You knew what I was doing to your species this whole time. You just didn't care."
"You don't have the right to say I don't care, hypocrite!"
"Am I the hypocrite? You've been born in a position of privilege over most other humans. You have the means to lessen their suffering, but you withhold it. Now you're judging me for what is essentially the same thing."
"That's not true! We are not the same!"
"You're right. The difference is that I'm doing it for the benefit of everyone in the universe."
Marie found herself on the brink of screaming at him, but she knew getting angry would only make whatever he was getting at seem more watertight.
"Alright then," she said at last. "What purpose do you purport I'm serving in not aiding other humans in need?"
"Yourself. You've been brought up to believe that everyone has an equal opportunity to accrue resources necessary for their own survival and enrichment, and you still believe this despite clear evidence to the contrary. Therefore, every person's primary aim in life should be only to look after themselves, because logically every person has the means to do that."
"Woah, woah, woah. What do you mean by 'evidence to the contrary'?"
"Hope Fearnley. She has no birth certificate or formal education. The only legal documents asserting her existence are those pertaining to her time in juvenile detention. She can't find a job, has no family, and can't vote. If she had been adopted at a younger age, she would have been killed by parents who didn't understand her biological needs."
"So what? She's an abnormality, what does it matter that the system doesn't work for fringe cases like her?"
"It's a sign that the system that you believe in is imperfect."
"Yeah, alright! No system is perfect! So what, because it's suboptimal for some people it's morally imperative that I give these people my means to my... look, it's tough shit, and I do feel bad for saying this because she's an incredible person, and she's changed my life, but there's really no reason someone who's faced as much hardship as Fearno should still be alive."
"You'd rather she died than your society was forced to undergo structural change?"
"And what would you propose, since you supposedly care so much about the value of all life?"
"Your planet has sufficient resources to support populations in excess of what it currently does, multiple times over. Your species could live in a money-free society where each individual lived with all their basic needs met and all their harmless wants fulfilled. It doesn't have the resources to support a world where humans like you tear one another to shreds, to ensure you can live more comfortably than anyone else. I don't know how many more proxy wars in countries you could barely point to on a map your most powerful political organisations need to understand that."
"You're stuck with your head in the clouds, Kyub! You can't tell me you genuinely think nobody would exploit a world where they never had to work for anything!"
"Of course they would. Would that really be such a terrible thing when your world is already plagued by exploitation?"
His eyes shone. Images flashed through Marie's mind, glimpses of moments all around the world, happening right now; farmers starving from being denied the fruits of their own labour by competing forces, who cut all expenses in assuring the quality of their own produce and poison their children; forced labour brought on prisoners of states demanding years of penance for the slightest, most harmless of misdemeanours; factory workers slowly dying, forced to share a floor with technology beyond what the human body can withstand, eyes and limbs and cardiovascular health all payment in exchange for the wage to assure a roof over their heads at night; underground sex workers killed without repercussion because it made their clients feel just a fraction more sure of themselves; people living with disabilities being deemed an inconvenience by potential employers and dismissed; the poor, the suggestible, and the down on their luck being flown so very, very far from home to kill and to be killed for reasons they don't understand. All these things and a thousand more, and here she was arguing about ethics with an animal who had no emotional attachment to any of it. She fell to her knees, still clutching him in both hands, curled up and screamed in the pain of a hundred million people whose names she would never know.
"Get out of my mind," she snarled, having rid herself of the breath to shout.
"What's the matter? I'm giving you the facts necessary to make a better informed argument. I don't see the point in trying to reject that. You know, your pain responses exist to tell you there is a problem present, and you need to learn to solve it as soon as possible. Maybe you could learn from that."
"Get out... please, get out..."
"And while we're on the subject, you're touting certain ideals as objective just because they're the norm of the environment you grew up in. You shouldn't argue the values of Eurocentric civilisation against someone who helped invent it."
"Kyubey... I... I wasn't..."
"I think if you're going to admonish me for my actions because you don't understand why I take them, it's important first to assess your own biases and how they might differ from mine. Otherwise we may as well be speaking two different languages."
"I wasn't asking... get out," Marie staggered to her feet, time itself a blur, blood rushing to her head like a timelapse of a freeway, the priming and firing of motor neurons like a new and exciting full-body warmth, the rage, the hatred she had been taught to feel her whole life for anyone she couldn't trust and was forced to bottle up beneath firmly-held visages of respectable norms, the fire in her body, the lightning, her arm now a weapon, the world suddenly as fast as it was slow, the sickening grind and crunch of Incubator skull against metal, giving, exploding, blood down her side, hot and electric and cool and refreshing, the shrill finality of three words, "of my mind," as they erupted from her throat.
For the first time in years, Marie Crawford was alive. Drenched in blood, out of breath, potentially moments from collapse had she a weaker will, and with a light in her eyes she herself would barely recognise, and had so dearly missed. She discarded the shattered carcass, and the next of his ilk hastily gobbled it up.
"I'm not telling you to stop, you know," he advanced. "All I'm saying is that you need to assess the consequences of your way of life before telling me to do the same."
"And you won't take it into consideration until I do?"
"No, my mind is expansive enough that I can devote resources to considering it anyway."
"And your verdict?"
"No. Obviously."
"You're not listening to me!"
"I'm listening. I'm just not agreeing, not while I have a universe to maintain. What about you?"
"What's it going to take for you to see that all these people's lives are worth protecting?"
"That depends on how much you want it."
"Whatever it takes! I know I can, with the right resources and effort, and no matter how much of either I need, keeping this planet safe from you is an end worthy of any means. But I need your help. You have knowledge of Earth's entire history. You have technology more than sufficient to assure the prosperity of my entire species-"
"You're getting ahead of yourself, Marie. I can only do so much to help, by law. That was why, when you asked what it would take to prove me wrong, I asked you how much you wanted it."
"I thought I told you, whatever it takes!"
"So you'd be willing to exchange your soul for that wish?"
Marie hesitated. What, did he think she was stupid? But when she insisted the end to suffering was worth more than anything just now, she'd believed it. What did that mean? If she was going to back down from her point as soon as an actual suggestion entirely within her means - means she just made a point of saying were justified - came to light, what kind of moral backbone did she have?
It was politics, she knew, plain and simple. She just wanted to assure that by all appearances she had the moral high ground. But who was she trying to fool? Not him, surely? That left really only one conclusion. She didn't like it, but she liked being an ineffective, hand-wringing idiot even less.
"I would."
Marie's life flashed before her eyes in the most literal way possible. An eye-stinging light was torn from her chest, bleeding wisps of blue and red vapour. She found herself falling backward, vision vignetted by a rush of blood, fingertips feeling dry and stiff and bloated, whole body beating with split-second cold flushes of shock. When she hit the sand beneath her, she realised all at once that she wasn't breathing, nor in fact was her heart beating. She had been so stunned by the feeling she almost needed to will herself back alive.
Wait.
By what feeling?
She looked at the pristinely-cut gem, about the size of a ping-pong ball, resting on her chest.
Oh.
'Oh' was all she could think for the time being. There wasn't an apt expression of concern or plosive-capped profanity she could affix to how she felt. She was in a world of Oh. It was a cold, barren place.
She grabbed it, sat up, looked it over. Like a holographic foil, it looked vivid red from some angles, and deep blue from others. "Kyubey?" she tried. "Are you still there?"
"Is something wrong, Marie?"
"I don't... I've never felt this feeling before. And I'm not sure how to feel about that, because it means I've changed."
"Is that strictly a bad thing?"
"No. No, wait. It's not like I've changed. It's like I've noticed something about myself that I never..."
"Marie?"
Marie was staring off at something. Kyubey couldn't tell what. She hadn't had any particular interest in trees or back fences before, and he had no reason to believe she was starting now.
"Marie?"
"Right. Sorry. How long have I been a magical girl now?"
"One minute and three seconds. Why do you ask?"
"I don't know. It feels like I've been this way my whole life, only now I stopped fighting it."
"Do you regret giving in, or do you regret not giving in sooner?"
"I don't know. Both?"
"At the same time?"
"Yeah."
"How is that possible?"
"I don't know. It just sort of is."
"I can't... go any further... than..."
Marie blinked. That was a familiar voice, but not as she'd remembered it. The moment she turned around, the air filled with the pitter-patter of rain. She looked up. The skies couldn't have greyed over in the fraction of a second she was turning on her heel. For that matter, where did the playground go just now?
Then she saw the person who had just spoken. She was stumbling through the park in a brown raincoat, Kyubey now trotting alongside her, pausing, stopping as she sank to her knees.
"Are you sure? If you can keep moving for another ten minutes..."
"Who is this?" Marie asked him, but he made no indication that he could hear her. The girl pulled back the hood of the jacket and looked down at him, her eyes wet with a leaking watercolour mixture of agony and plain sorrow.
She was Hope Fearnley.
Not as Marie knew her, though. She looked a couple of years younger, her manner of speaking was much softer, and her hair was... markedly more heterosexual.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Kyubey. I'm sorry, Cassie. I can't do this. I'm dying."
She had only spoken the first half of the sentence before she was taken upon by a mindless screaming, and had to continue telepathically.
"Fuck! Fuck, it hurts!"
"Is this... the past...?" Marie whimpered.
"What hurts?" Kyubey cocked his head to one side.
"Everything! I don't know, can't you scan me or something?"
"Of course." He closed his eyes for half a second, opened them again, and detailed, "You are currently experiencing: exhaustion. Dehydration. Hunger. Sleep deprivation. Untreated internal bleeding as of Trent's assault. Joint pain, due to imminence of active labour. Braxton-Hicks contractions, due to imminence of active labour."
"F-f-fffuck! Can I st-st-stop it hurting?"
"Your concerns for your life and for Cassie's birth have greatly increased your epinephrine levels. I don't think your pain tolerance can go any higher in a human body, and I know she can't survive if you make a contract."
"So whhhat do I d-d-do?!"
"Just try to keep walking as steadily as you can. A steady pace is going to regulate your breaths and your heart as much as anything can until we meet up with the others."
She tried lifting a leg, almost fell over, and had to right herself. "I... I can't. I'm sorry. Fuck, if this is how it ends, maybe it's better she'll never be born to a world where this can happen."
"If it makes you feel any better, she wouldn't have looked anything like him."
Epinephrine was an anaesthesia all its own, but the added element of laughter teased hormonal ataraxy.
"Heheheh... that does make me feel a little better."
Slowly, she toppled to her side, and closed her eyes for the last time.
And then opened them, for the last time.
"Hang on, if you know that, then there is a future possibility where she survives. Right?"
"Now more than ever, you're an emotionally strong young female. My offer stays open."
"Meaning?"
"It's not too late! I can still save her. All you have to do is agree."
"And me?"
"I'm sorry, Miriam. You only have enough karmic potential to save one."
She could have heard it coming a mile away, and still the thought crushed her. She had already been sobbing heartily by that point. Now she was compelled to by more than one kind of pain. "I... wish..."
"Yes?"
"I... wish..."
"Stay with me," he begged.
"What the hell. When Trent finds me, this time I- I'll lose more than my v-vi-vir... I wish... that my daughter will be protected from all the t-terrible things life's gonna throw at her. Not even as soon as her life begins. I w-h-h-ant you to take care of her starting right now."
"Are you willing to exchange your soul for that wish?"
Nothing.
"Miriam?"
Nothing.
"Miriam?"
Absolutely nothing.
"I see. Then, your last words have overcome entropy."
Marie snapped awake. Or, not awake - she wasn't sleeping - but there was certainly some morphean transition in and out of trance.
She managed to shake a "...K... Kyubey...?" out of her throat.
"Yes?" he offered, absentmindedly prowling in a circle around her.
"Where am I?"
"Fearnley Park, on Hannah Street, in-"
"Wait, I mean when. Hang on, did you say Fearnley?"
"Yes, why?"
"I just... watched her... wait, isn't she a few months older than me? Jesus, dude. I just saw a teenager die before I was born."
Despite his vast intellect, Kyubey took a second to process that remark. "...Ah."
"Couldn't have put it better myself. Who was she?"
"Miriam West. She was only sixteen."
"I... oh my God, man. What do I even say?"
"The authorities found her here the next morning, along with some detached tissue like an umbilical cord, chewed into by something experts say would have resembled a cat. She was identified two days later by her parents, who separated in the subsequent grief."
"She was only sixteen."
"I know."
"And the baby? Cassie West?"
"Do you even need to ask?"
Marie glanced away. "I guess not."
"As per my contract to ensure her protection, I can't tell her about any of this." He stopped moving and gazed directly into Marie's eyes. "Do not fuck this up for me."
"Woah, you can swear?!"
"It seems I can. That's how serious I'm being."
"Uh, oh, right...! Yeah. You got it, weird, sweary Kyub. Not a word to anyone."
"I take this to mean your power is psychometry then - seeing the past of objects you touch. That makes sense. If you want to convince me to save your species, current and former, you'd need a tool like that to gather evidence for your case."
"So it wasn't as easy as just wishing compassion into you..."
"Meanwhile, I have new potential clients to tend to. Congratulations, by the way. I'm sure you'll prove a very useful energy source."
A moment later, silence.
Still the sound of cars, and of birds, and of wind, but also of silence. Silence not of sound.
The sunlight offered warmth, but refused to serve Marie. There was no sensation of heat on her skin until she noticed it, and then she had to reel it in, this normal, everyday feeling, with all her strength.
A stench, she imagined, of her own rot, her own decomposition. Truthfully, though, she knew it to be his blood. She needed a shower.
She crept into her own vestibule. The garage was open and the car was in, so somebody else was home right now. She had to be as quiet as-
"Marie."
No, not Marie. Something more like... wait, what?
Her family were stationed around the kitchen, each tending to grim emotional labour. Her father was hard at work processing anger. Her mother, grief. Toby, at the delicate stage in life where it was hard to find the energy to do any work into a particular field whatsoever.
"What have you done?" her father spat. "What happened to you?"
"Please!" interjected her mother, a sharp raise of her hand to dismiss him and to contain herself meanwhile, "let her explain herself."
"Explain... oh! Oh, right! All this blood on me. I was out with a friend, down by the beach. You know those weird shower things they have there, with the button that almost never works? Some of the water from that had slicked up the concrete-"
"Enough!" her father demanded. "You don't think I can tell when my own daughter is lying to me?"
"It's the truth! Why don't you believe me?"
Her mother elaborated evenly: "The police were around earlier. Said you'd been involved in all sorts of things. Breaking and entering, theft, possession of an unregistered firearm, gun violence, attempted assault, attempted murder..."
"What's more, one of these friends you've been spending so much time with has a serious criminal record. She'd gone into juvenile detention for two months. What have you been doing...?"
"What? Look, I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds like something really strange is going on. Can we sit down and have a reasonable discussion about it? Dad? Mum? Mum...?"
Her mother gave her the most peculiar look. If Marie had been intimidated by her before, she had no idea what it was she was feeling now.
"That ring," was all she said.
A dumbfounded "Wh," was the best Marie had to counter with.
"Where did you get it?"
"I don't know, I just sort of... did."
"When I was in high school, my two best friends had rings just like it."
Marie grimaced. "And?"
"For the two weeks they had those rings, they were inseparable. And after that, they... it took six days of searching, but they found them and... more. Not all of them in one piece, but they all wore those rings. They'd all been broken, ritualistically almost."
"This isn't-"
"Marie. I can help you, just give that ring. That's the first step we can take toward fixing things."
"You can help me? And since when did you even care if I needed your help?"
"Just give me the ring, Marie."
Josephine Crawford was upon her now, pulling at her daughter's fist.
"No! Mum, please! You're hurting me!"
"Hand it over!"
"I can't!"
"I am not asking you, I am telling-"
Crack.
Josephine was at the wall now, cradling a bleeding jaw. Her son started to tend to it, but he was too stunned to approach, too hesitant to understand this was a reality that he could.
Marie looked down at her hands.
She was clutching the hammer from her nightmare. One face vivid crimson, the other sky-blue and now more than slightly bloody.
"I didn't...! I'm so sorry, let me help you-"
Thomas Crawford looked at her as if an utter stranger. "I think you've done enough. Get the fuck out of my house."
"No, I can-"
"Didn't you hear me? I said get out!"
Shaking, tired, weak, bloody, doomed, Marie was in no fit state to turn and run. She did anyway, what else was left in her life than to do just that? She sprinted out onto her street, down to the back alley to the next neighbourhood over, stopping only to take one last look at what had once been her domain.
Shaking, tired, weak, bloody...
And then only forward, to this new world of hers with no house, no family, no soul in her flesh, no anything, just no no no no-
-know somebody who lives here?" the girl asked.
"Yeah, Fearno," Marie admitted. "She and I are, well, maybe not really friends. I don't know."
"Uh-huh?" she smirked. "Didn't know a girl like you was her type."
"Oh, come on," Marie winced. "You wouldn't believe the day I'm having. We're not like that."
"Damn, that's a shame. You're cute, too. If you're ever in need of a 'friend'-"
"Thank you! Thank you. But I'm straight."
"Oh! Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. Tamara. Apartment three." She extended a hand to shake, but Marie walked right past her and up into the building.
In a sense, the place felt as familiar as it should. In another, equally unwelcoming. She ambled over into a slump on the stairwell handrail, old, varnished, and smelling of weed as it was, and ascended.
Marie paused for a single breath before ringing the doorbell.
"Be right there!" she heard Hope's unmistakable larrikin drawl declare. The next few seconds must have been some of the longest in her life. What was she going to say? Where was she going to find the courage to say it?
No, she didn't have to say anything. It felt humiliating to do this where someone else would see her, but it was easier than talking. She braced herself (she didn't know why or what for, but it felt like the way to do things) and manifested her new ensemble in a flash of light. The air around her rarefacted ever so slightly, and for but an instant, and when it was done, she...
Right. This was who she was now, she reminded herself. The translucent neon-blue visor and stole, the scarlet breastplate and vambraces, the grey gloves. They were all more intrinsically Marie Crawford than the flesh and bone beneath.
Hope answered the door. "Can I help you?"
"I don't know, I-"
"Marie?! Jesus, darl, I hardly recognised you!" It looked for a moment as if she couldn't decide whether to smile or gasp.
"Does it... look okay?" Marie tried, half-heartedly tugging at the hem of her skirt and swaying from side to side.
"You look stunning, love!"
"Thanks, but I can't..." she ran a hand through her hair. "I don't know. I'd feel like I was lying if I didn't tell you. You know, 'this is me now'..."
"Sure. Sure. Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not really. I mean, maybe later. I don't know."
"No worries."
"I just... I couldn't keep pretending everything was okay. In my old life, I mean. I'm a part of your world now. I couldn't keep being someone I'm not, some coward who lets everything happen at her and the people around her..."
Hope nodded, but had difficulty meeting Marie's eye. She didn't want to make someone already so vulnerable see her cry. "Does anyone else know?"
"My family, I guess. But..."
"They didn't take it so smoothly, ay?"
Marie shook her head. Now it was getting difficult to speak. "I remember... after Phoebe died, you told me if I ever...!"
"Oh, goodness. Are you crying, darl? C'mon, gi's a hug."
The two held one another for a time. Neither could speak. Neither had to.
"I'm sorry, I just-" Marie blurted.
"Nah, nah. There's nothing wrong with that, I just never thought I'd see you..."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It must be pretty hard, finding yourself in this situation, ay?"
Marie sniffled and nodded. That was about all she could get out.
"Well, it was very brave of you to tell me. Come on in, I've made some chicken stir fry."
"Can I have a shower first? I'm sorry, I'm just covered in blood right now, and it's starting to reek..."
"Sure, just be quick if you can. Have you got a change of clothes?"
"Shit. I don't. I'm sorry."
"I mean, you can just resummon these ones after you're done, and then we can see if we've got anything your size."
Quite despite herself, Marie chuckled. "What, so I'm just gonna be eating dinner in my colourful space-age battle regalia?"
Hope found herself starting to laugh too. "Oh, be quiet, you."
Hope urged Marie inside, where Zoey was sitting in her armchair, and Audrey and Erika were hunched over a chessboard and two bowls of vegetables upon the kitchen bench.
"Girls," called Hope, "if I may- hang on. Where's Jane and Denise?"
Zoey tipped her head in their direction. "Night watch. Why, is it important?"
"S'pose not. I'll tell them later."
"...Marie?" Audrey squinted.
Marie lifted a hand to wave, got shy halfway up, and let it back down.
"I'm so sorry."
In the eyes of the others, shock turned to recognition, recognition to pity. They all voiced their condolences. Marie felt it might be enough to suffocate her.
"Go on, Marie. Get yourself a shower," Hope urged. "Marie's gonna be staying with us for a while. Trust me, it's for the best that she does."
Marie waited for the steam to clear from the mirror. She struggled to breathe, raised two fingers to it. Was she laughing? Was she grieving?
The girl in the mirror was dead. This was her corpse. This was a parody of all the pointless torment she had offered now. She was smiling, with tears in her eyes, with shoulders rising and falling, she had never done that before. Never before death had she been so alive.
Did she hate this? Did she love it?
Her gem bound her back to her flesh, but now she was in control. She called up the red armour again and looked it over in the mirror. She looked...
What was that?
Out in the kitchen.
"Now, now hang on. Why does she get to live with us, when you've turned away so many other girls in need of a home?"
"This is an emergency."
"All those were too, I'm sure."
"I always put in a good word with the other communal majjo houses for them! Marie's different, though-"
"Yeah, she's bloody well worse than them."
"Lara spared her from execution."
"...Now hang on, what...?"
"The deeplighters need her for something, lads."
"What, and we're gonna put ourselves in their way?"
"If nobody else will. Don't tell me you wouldn't."
Marie stepped out of the bathroom. "It's alright. I can just leave."
Erika pinched the bridge of her nose. "No, I... that's not what..."
"Marie!" Audrey blinked. "How much did you hear?"
"No, you guys are right. I'd just put you in danger."
"And if you walk out that door, the whole city could be instead," Hope huffed.
"I'm just a responsibility to you, aren't I?"
"I'm trying to help you. Let me help."
Marie choked back tears.
"Come on, when was the last time you ate? Or slept, for that matter?"
"Around sunrise, and two nights ago, respectively."
"Jesus, Marie! You're jostling my elbow!"
"I don't think that's a real-"
"Come on, let's get some dinner into you. Take a seat."
Marie shrank up on the couch. Zoey didn't leave her be, though.
"You into the cricket, darl?" she boomed.
"M-me?"
"Yeah, a' course you! You think I dunno if anyone else here's into cricket?"
"Sorry."
"Sorry? Don't be, darl. If Fearno says you belong 'ere, you bloody well belong 'ere. Forget what AHEM! SOME PEOPLE might say. If she's got faith in ya, 's good enough for me."
"Right."
"For real, though. The cricket."
"Not... not really."
Zoey shook her head. "Truth be told, AFL's more my poison. But Hope? She loves the stuff. Women's World Cup's on, see. She was down at Drummoyne watchin' us play the West Indies, in fact. Says it was phenomenal."
Hope sat down next to Marie and handed her a bowl and a fork. "Didn't know if you were any good with chopsticks, sorry."
"No," Marie admitted, "I never got the hang of them."
"Tell you what, though!" Zoey continued. "The real reason she went is because she has a crush on that Perry girl."
"I do not."
"Ah, come on! Your age, world-class soccer player and cricket all-rounder, she's so up yer alley."
"She is not up my alley. I don't even have an alley."
The moment the first mouthful touched Marie's lips, she dropped the bowl. It shattered, and everything went quiet.
"Did I say somethin'?" Zoey knitted her brow.
"No, it's... I mean my power, I..." Marie struggled. "I can see the past of anything I touch."
"Oh, that's nifty. Why d'you bring that up?" Hope prompted.
"...I think I might become a vegetarian."
"Oh... Oh. Oh fucking hell, Marie. I'm so sorry."
"I'll just clean this up-"
"Let me do it," Erika offered, already intruding with dustpan and brush. "Just sit there and chill out for a second."
Hope tried: "Anything you like watching, this time of week? If not, we're gonna be sitting through a good half hour of highlights from today's game."
"I, ah," Marie retreated into herself for a second and all at once found it as easy as closing her eyes. "Right. No, I don't mind. Let's watch that."
"You sure?"
"Yeah! Yeah, sure."
"Now, to be clear, you're sure you're not gay. Yeah?"
"Oh, for su- I mean, maybe. I dunno. Whatever."
"I'm about to introduce you to women's cricket, is all. Don't wanna awaken something."
Marie didn't respond.
"That was a joke, love."
"What? Wh- right. Yeah. Sorry. A lot on my mind right now. It was kind of funny, though, I mean."
A girl Marie had never seen before stumbled through the door. She was lean, broad-shouldered, thin-faced. She was dressed in a blood orange full-body gown, with a similarly coloured jewel over her sternum. She was falling on her face. She was screaming.
"Dante?" Hope ran out of her room, over to her. "Sonia! Oh my God, Sonia! What happened?!"
"Please," she whispered. "Oh my love, have I ever told you how beautiful...?"
"No, no, no, no, no, there's time for that later! What happened to you?"
Sonia screamed again. "There isn't. I'm sorry. It - everything - burns, even if I retreat into my gem it still burns..."
"Wh- wh- what can I do to help?"
She tore the soul gem off her midsection and slammed it onto the floor beside her. "Healing doesn't work. Ice doesn't work. Just be quick."
"Be quick at what?"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, darling..."
"Sonia! What are you asking me to do!?"
What happened next was not news. It didn't need explanation, and it certainly didn't need a witness.
Marie stepped away from the memory and quietly ushered herself back into the present. She looked over at Hope. Hope looked back at her and smiled.
This girl, born to a dead child. Former inmate of juvenile detention. Killer of her own lover. Magical girl of eighteen years.
If a girl like that could smile, then everything was going to be alright.
- End of Part 1 -
NED KELLY
Australian gang leader Ned Kelly (1854 - 1880) was a notorious bushranger whose influence still lingers in popular culture today.
His story began when he was only fourteen years old, with his first arrest under allegation of assault. The case was dismissed, when he proved he was in fact fighting to protect his older sister Annie. He was arrested the following year - this time suspected of working with a bushranger by the name of Harry Power. Again, the case was dismissed, because he was unidentifiable. Not because he was innocent.
The Kelly family were, in fact, sympathisers to Power, and Ned himself had been his star accomplice (after all, Power corrupts). But the best man to a bushranger's date with the law was a heavy crown indeed, and later that year, he had bargained for freedom from retrial by revealing Power's hiding place (his Powerhouse) to the police (knowledge is Power), who subsequently sentenced him to labour on a prison ship for fifteen years (Power as work over time).
With the rise of Kelly's notoriety, and those of his eventual gangmates, there began folk legends of him taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The gang were aware of these tales and made great efforts to realise them. Hence, their circle of sympathisers only expanded, and the police only found them more difficult to capture.
Until 1880. You can read the dates up there. You know where this is going.
So, of course, did the Kelly gang, and with the arrest of Ned's mother Ellen two years prior, they had prepared well for an eventual showdown with the police. That is to say, they did the sensible thing, and built suits of bulletproof armour from pieces of stolen scrap metal, whose helmets are more a face for the legacy of Kelly himself than his actual face. The armour only covered the head and torso, however, and the gang was shot to death - with the exception of Kelly himself, who was incapacitated, arrested, and sentenced to death.
The image of a folk hero had made him exceptionally popular with the women, and his being at such a young age, many of those women happened to be of a certain crowd. His final words were an expression of futility many of them claimed was oft asserted by a mutual friend, generally to this day misremembered as the far more peaceful, grandiose, "Such is life." Of course, his actual/
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Oh, marvellous. You can hear me now.
I'm sorry for the interruption. Just when this story about an inconsequential lowlife from another country who lived hundreds of years ago was getting interesting, too. I would have loooved to see that play out, but I've already waited long enough for whoever writes this drivel to finish up.
Cut.
It's about twenty minutes before sunset, but it's raining hard enough to make no difference. You're in the corridor of an apartment block, drenched, tired. You walk. You're trying to find the right room.
There it is. You go to knock on the door, but before you raise your fist all the way, I open the door.
"It's good to see you again," I smirk.
Whatever you say in response is unknowable to me. The wills of beings of your... caliber... aren't something I can know. Not directly, at least.
"Come on in. Have a shower. The girls will prepare a change of clothes for you."
You nod, and walk past me. You're immediately assailed by the familiar sensation of the white-walled living room, alive with the hum of the holographic screens and the ticking of the pendulum overhead.
"Dinner will be ready in a matter of minutes. I'm sure we will have much to catch up on while we eat."