"(There) was the power of gods in the hands of children, we know: but were they mad children, all of them quite mad?" - John Wyndham

In Sydney's inner suburbs was a downmarket steakhouse called Human Face Pareidolia, more or less as intriguing a name for a steakhouse can be without having attached to it a legal requirement to meet the customers' expectations. Not that it needed to. Critics generally remarked that it grilled a mean steak. Mean here of course being a term used in its mathematical sense.
The entire place was defined by replication, abstraction, reflection. Though it was not the most financially stable of steakhouses, it did riff on the stylisations of its bigger-business, inner-city-real-estate competitors, but they in turn were mimicking the homeliness of a lower-class establishment. So close to the university, it was once entered by a philosophy student who had just read the Derridean essay Plato's Pharmacy. Bystanders were relieved to report that the ambulance made it just in time.

Marie cracked her menu open. "Thank you so much for inviting me out, guys. I really just need to leave the house for reasons that aren't witch-hunt- or politics-related."

"Hey, anytime." Danika leaned her head on Thalia's arm as she spoke. Marie feigned ignorance. So too did Florian, currently slaughtering a series of napkin animals Marie had constructed for him.

"Any particular occasion?"

"We just felt like we hadn't seen you that much recently, you know? Actually, how often have we had the chance to talk from your contract onward?"

"Not enough, man! Not enough!" Marie shook her head and laughed. "What's been going on in that time?"

Thalia and Danika pulled apart and each tried to reconstruct the past month in their minds.

"Well, for a start, I've set up a place for Thalia to hang out and sleep and stuff without Dad seeing."

"Ah! That's nice. Because... what are you two, like together or something?"

"Oh!" Danika looked almost frightened by the question. "Oh, no! No, it's not like that."

"Are we not?" Thalia looked around, mouth ajar.

"Not in the way she means."

"What way does she- oh! Oh. No. Very no."

"Wow. Thanks."

"What does your Dad say? 'Out of the question'."

"You really know how to flatter me, don't you?"

"No. Flatter is a new word."

"I'll... I'll explain it later. Remind me."

Marie raised her hands. "Alright, my bad. I just thought you two were... well, it doesn't matter. Anything interesting happen while me and Fearno were out in the country?"

"Which country?"

Danika and Marie stared at one another in incredulous silence.

"Oh! Yeah. I met Madeleine Whitman, actually."

"Is that right?"

"I don't like her."

"I figured as much."

"How did you know?"

"You'd met her."

"Oh."

They both went back to idly thumbing through their menus. Thalia, incapable of reading and therefore without one, filled the silence. "Now you answer."

"What? Oh, anything interesting while I was away? I mean sure, I guess."

She did have a fatal seizure while looking into the eyes of God. But given that her girlfriend was a ten-million-year-old anthropomorphic alien with whom she'd accidentally wagered her soul for the moral value of the livelihoods of everyone on the planet, her life was one where that which was interesting wasn't always clear.

"Such as?"

"You know. Learned some history. Shared some history. Got obliquely worded death threats from some history. The whole gamut."

"Is that all?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"You seem..." She propped her chin on her palm. "Different, I think."

"What, because I'm a magical girl?"

"Could be it."

"I mean other than that I feel the same as ever."

"Hasn't it like... affected your relationships with everyone?"

Marie hurried in.

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry I'm late! I read the clock wrong earlier. Turns out I was looking at a vision of the past."

Mækiu giggled. "It's nothing. I mean I don't really have anywhere to be, do I?"

"I don't know. I figured you must have had other girlfriends to hang out with."

"No, no. You called this night first. Glad you always pick early evening ones, though, because it's going to be night soon in a lot of East and Central Asian timezones. And with population densities like that? Whoof! You don't want to be vying for my free time."

While nodding along, Marie helped herself to the chair opposite. "How many girlfriends do you have, anyway?"

"Oh, uh... two hundred and sixteen."

"Two hundred?!"

"You do have to understand you weren't the only person who was nice to me before I had the emotional capacity to be nice back. I mean it does mean a lot, it's just... it does mean a lot some two hundred times over."

"And the thing with the bees?"

"That was just me being an idiot. Don't tell me that me almost being killed by a swarm of bees is making you jealous."

"I'm not jealous!"

"I mean I'm not presuming you are-"

"And I have no problem with you having two hundred girlfriends. If anything, some of them sound really lovely, and I'd like to meet them someday. Not to mention I'm impressed you can keep up with two hundred relationships."

"I'm sure some of them would really like to meet you, too. Oh! Speaking of people who want to talk to you." She nodded.

"Hmm?" Marie hmmed, but a tense grip took to her shoulder.

"Crawford! Fancy seeing you here!"

Marie's mood downturned. With each passing second it pressed ever onward, its back to the quiet enjoyment it stood in firmly but a moment before, like two upper-middle mothers who'd not met since high school, conversing across the sole two-wide supermarket aisle one finds they must traverse.

"Macquarie," she snarled.

"Ah-ah-ah!" Lara grabbed Marie's chin and twisted her head to look at her. "Macquaries, plural."

Sinead stood uneasily to her sister's side and coughed up a reluctant nod.

"And to what do I owe the torture?"

"What did I ever do?"

"Not you, Sinead. You're fine."

Lara scoffed. "You really think you're worth me and Sinead going out of our way to follow you? No, me and my family are just eating out here tonight." She pointed over at her parents. As they came into Marie's sight, the presumed Mrs. Macquarie waved. She didn't wave back.

"And what about you, Crawford? Am I crashing some kind of 'hot date'?"

"Go away."

"Wow!" Lara pulled back, lifted her hands in surrender. "Okay. Have a crap time with your giiirrrrrr...? B...oooyy...yy... this thing. Who the hell are you, anyway?"

Mækiu cackled. "Like I'd know. there is no self."

"Oh, I know you!" She glanced at Marie. "This is the something-or-other that answered your phone that one time, right?"

She didn't respond.

"You know, that time I gave you a heads-up about the office fire."

Sinead blinked. "Your office was on fire?"

"Nah. Sorted it. Just didn't want to freak Marie out when she'd come in to work that afternoon wondering where the firefighters had come from."

"One would presume the fire station."

Lara chortled. "Yes, one would presume!"

Marie massaged a temple. "Would you mind-"

"I'm Mækiu, at any rate," said the one person equipped to make such a claim, standing and extending a hand to shake. "Ms. and Ms. Macquarie, yes?"

"Yeah; I'm Sinead, this is my sister Lara."

Mækiu grinned to each of them in turn, but her expression lost definition to meet Marie's own. She, for her part, bolted upward and marched for the door. The Macquaries made no attempt to follow, or so much as acknowledge save for the younger reprimanding the elder on the return to their table. Mækiu scrambled past the table and blinked out the door to face her lover.

"Hey. Hey, where are you going?"

"I just remembered I needed to run past the chemist on the way home."

"I... I see! It's just, I would have expected you to do that after the date, is all."

Marie stopped dead in her tracks. "Don't you get it? Don't you get what you've done?"

"I didn't do anything, did I?"

She jabbed Mækiu dead in the gut.

"Ah! Gah! What was that for?"

A curt huff escaped Marie's sinuses. "You don't even get it, do you? You're still just Kyubey."

"That's... that's not..."

"Now if it's all the same to you, I repeat: I need to run past the chemist on the way home."

A sound statement, in a vacuum. The way home was apparent. So too was the chemist. So too was the mechanism by which one would run past it.

"Yeah, I know all that, smartarse." Denise waved her hand in a manner one certainly couldn't call 'noncommittally', but what she was committing to was anyone's guess. "I'm just wondering why you bring it up now."

"I'm not going to remember if I don't say something about it. This is me we're talking about," said Jane, even though that was oversimplifying the topic of conversation. Her forgetfulness was owed to her attention deficit disorder, and for that reason, two minutes ago the topic of conversation had been about Denise's aunt; three minutes ago, the history of Belgian colonialism; five minutes ago, Gyarados. You had to be there, the narrative sighed, but sadly you just got in from an awful date. It's sorry to hear that, by the way.

"What are you getting?" Marie's disembodied voice from within the changing room asked in her stead.

"Oh, you know. I'm actually a late contractee, the same as you. Well... early bloomer, rather."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"Fearno told you about what happens to your hormones if you contract late in puberty, yeah?"

"Yeah. That's why I've, like, gone grey and stuff."

"You got the cramps too?"

Marie's head presented itself from behind the curtain. "That's related?"

"You're going through menopause. Hadn't you figured that out?"

"What?" She retreated behind the curtain and stared her reflection down. "What?"

"Hey! Me too, though. There's this grey-market apothecarist - a majjo too - who I get estrogen supplements from. I could grab you some if you wanted."

Marie stepped out. Shrugged, smirked. "Hey. Pretty good, right?"

Ankle-height boots. Black jeggings, God have mercy. A sand-beige jacket with millimetre-thin stripes of fuzz running vertically.

Jane and Denise winced. The latter offered: "I mean sure, it's... um, effective! If you're trying to get into urban camouflage. At a landfill site."

"I think if you walk around in that, you should feel obliged to have sick bags prepared for everyone you meet," concurred her counterpart.

"Yeah, screw you guys too." She returned to her laboratory for the next experiment.

"So what were we talking about before you decided to rag on me?"

"I'm pretty sure you put those rags on."

"Come on!"

"Estrogen supplements," Denise said.

"Like the things trans women take?"

"I mean I don't."

"Oh! Any reason for that?"

"It's covered by contract."

"What!?"

"Gender affirmation therapy. It's covered by contract. You know, adolescent girls and young women have the right-"

"Yeah, yeah. The ideal epiphenomenal experiences for manipulating emotional energy, et cetera, et cetera. I've known all that for years."

"Well of course. So K-dogg figures he can get along just fine with any teen who wants female hormones put into their body, and leave well alone anyone who wants them taken out."

"Sorry, did you just call him 'K-dogg'?"

"You wonder why so many Ancient Sumerian priests gradually took to becoming priestesses and started talking and dressing like women?"

"No. No, I've actually never wondered that in my life."

"It's not a magical girl thing," Jane said. "Denise is just messing with you because she thinks you're gullible. And I also think you're gullible. And messing with you is honestly hilarious. Sorry."

"Wow, I'm flattered."

A pause, punctuated by sounds of a struggle.

"Dammit, hold on. I'll be out in one second."

Take two. "Is this... tolerable?"

Loafers. Real, actual jeans this time. A navy polo.

"Depends," Jane nodded. "How likely are you to become a balding, fifty-year-old man any time soon?"

"Oh, come on. It's ironic! Get it?"

"Not at all."

"How come when Fearno dresses up like someone's dad, it's cool, but when I do it, it's dumb?"

Denise grimaced. "Woah, no. That's totally different. Fearno's butch. Butch is trashy, and trashy has to come from the heart. You can't be ironic about it."

"Okay, then maybe this is... like that is."

"Darling, if you say you're dressing like that sincerely, I think I'm going to need a little cry."

Marie took to the implicit curtain call without offering the satisfaction of a retort.

"I wasn't messing with you, by the way," Denise elaborated, borderline apologetically.

"She was."

"I honest-to-anything was not."

"Are you serious?"

"Just this once, yes."

Marie called out. "So the concordance has had access to the technology behind sex changes for, what, a few millennia?"

"Well, nobody calls it that anymore, but that's more or less right."

"Huh. How different do you think humanity would have progressed if we just had total access to that this whole time?"

"Oh, multistellar civilisation. Easy."

"Really?" Marie smiled to herself. "I mean the multistellar part I can accept, but the idea that humans might one day be civilised is a shocker. Oh, hey."

"Hey what?"

"I'd say tell me what you think of this, but at this point, if you're still not impressed, I wouldn't mind if you guys killed me instead. That would be easier to take."

This time Marie didn't care what she tried on, and was astonished to discover that this yielded by far the best results.

Off-brand All-stars. An autumnally-hued sundress. A denim jacket, on top of the sundress. A deep-black baker boy cap.

"That is..."

"You come up with this one on your own?"

"Yeah. Why?" Marie shifted about uneasily.

"Infinite monkey effect," Jane pondered.

Denise beamed. "It suits you. Honestly, I don't think it would work on most people. But on you it's great."

"Could lose the hat, though."

"No it couldn't."

"Seriously, It adds nothing to the look. Plus, it's... what, $20?"

"Marie. Do not let even God tell you not to wear the hat."

"It looks dumb!"

Marie sighed. "Alright! I'll lose the hat."

Denise shook her head and rested a hand on Jane's shoulder. "You're going to take the advice of someone who dresses like this?"

"What's wrong with the way I dress?" Jane pouted.

"Oh... I'm not saying anything. That's up to Marie to decide."

Marie weighed her options, took a deep breath, and slowly nodded. "The hat stays. You know, I could get used to it." And it came to pass that she did.

Audrey pointed and laughed. "So that's the hat I keep hearing so much about?"

Marie snatched it off her own scalp. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing! That's the thing. Did you, Denise, and Jane really get into an argument about a completely ordinary-looking hat?"

"You had to be there, I guess. I don't know, I'm not all that fashion-minded myself."

"Me neither. Although you don't really have to be when you're this naturally good-looking."

"Exactly! I'm so glad someone gets it. It's hard being so pretty."

"Word."

"So who's the poor, fresh-faced kid we're supposed to be mentoring?"

"Her name's May. You're not going to like her."

"You don't know that."

"Oh, believe me. I do. Here she is now, actually."

A young girl, only about thirteen, and still in her school uniform, hurried up the road to meet them. The Incubator rested on her shoulder.

"You two must be the magical girls, right?"

"Sure are. Although maybe that's not so much the kind of thing you want to be saying out loud."

"Yeah, sure. Noted."

"So what's the plan?" Marie said. "You guys feel a witch nearby?"

"Well, I'm not a magical girl." May shrugged, and demonstrated the audacity to grin superiority. Marie rather saw what Audrey meant.

"No? Alright, well I was only saying that for you. Audrey here knows I've got a knack for picking them out."

"I've heard you have. There's a difference."

The Incubator smiled. "I can validate her claims, for whatever it's worth. Marie has proven strikingly adept at hunting witches!"

"Alright," May grumbled. "If you're so good, would you mind finding one soon? My parents aren't going to want me out super late."

"What, you got a bedtime or something?"

"Har har."

"Yeah, I'll pick out a labyrinth for you. This way." Marie jerked her head aside and strolled in the implied direction.

"Hold on, don't you need to take your soul gem out and start scanning for witches or something?"

"Damn, kid. You know your stuff. How long have you known about all this?"

"Three months."

"Three months! Nice! Most people can't resist temptation for that long."

"You're not answering my question."

"Yeah? You wanna know why other magical girls have to take their gem out, but I don't? I think the answer is obvious."

"Not to me."

"I'm just better."

Audrey rolled her eyes. May didn't seem all that impressed, anyway.

"Better? Better how?"

"Hey, if you gotta ask, you don't need to know. Labyrinth... I'm guessing within two hundred metres."

"Kyubey? Confirm or deny."

"Don't." Audrey walked alongside May, close enough to scratch the Incubator's chin. "If she's right, it'll just feed her ego."

"She's right. I've got a self-image like a goddamn black hole."

"What, constantly emitting Hawking radiation at the surface?"

Marie ground her teeth. This May kid was difficult to see as anything beyond a vain smartarse, and nobody hated a vain smartarse more than a recovered alum to the practice of vain smartasshood. But it was pretty funny that that would be the sarcastic hole she would try to poke in the analogy.

"That's actually more or less correct!" Kyubey smiled. "The human soul is a complicated object. When it's condensed into something as small as a soul gem, it behaves erratically, and causes constant vacuum fluctuations."

"Oh. Really? Huh. So it must run out of energy after long enough, right? Is that what becoming a witch is all about?"

"No," he said, and nothing more.

"Tell you what, kid. We should be seeing the barrier down the alley to our left. You survive that, I'll explain how it works."

"Oh good! I brought a notebook and everything."

"Of course you did."

Audrey's warning made more sense with every passing second.

"Bit odd for it to be outside, though, even if it's in a back alley."

Marie perked up. "Sorry, what was that?"

"I was just saying. Usually a witch hides indoors. In abandoned buildings and stuff. If one's out here either it's so weak it's been kicked out of the nest or so strong as to not need it."

"Wow. You really know your stuff, huh?"

"Like I said. Notebook."

Audrey slung her arms across the two girls' shoulders. "Well, should we find out which it is?"

...disturbing...

...who is...?

...who is...?

Oh, crap. Alright. Definitely a strong one then.

...prey...so eager to kick the nest...

...so, so eager...

You go on and fight it. I've got a... let's say a technique to prepare. Just don't tell Fearno about this.

...delectable...

...the largest morsel strikes first...

...del...ect...a...ble...

...into the darkness...

So, um.

How long does it usually take you to prepare this technique of yours?

...weak, no pain...

...do i miss pain...?

Can you fight any quieter? I need to focus.

...does the inert thing joke...?

...i have enough on my plate...

!TEAR!LIMB!FROM!LIMB!

Ma-?

Shh!

She's getting pulverised over there? Shouldn't you be doing something?

Alright, May. Here's something you can do.

...grind...crush...tear...

!ALL THINGS INTO MANAGEABLE PORTIONS!

What's that?

Stand back.

...hesitate...

...i feel...

...afraid...?

-drey broke free of the witch's grasp before her head touched the jet turbine's blades, slipped away to see all her hands cut off at th-

...no...wait...

-on, but already she was engaged in her dance, as dance is art and art is representation, and the essence of the original and the repre-

!UNACCEPTABLE!

-refore, dances of violence were perfect forms for battle. But the witch was too fast, interrupted her technique, threw her against the-

Marie...

-n't get back up. But Marie didn't react. Red and blue lightning coursed up her body, but if it hurt, she made no indication. Last time-

...what is that thing...?

!STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!

When Marie opened her eyes again, the witch stopped moving. She could see something in her, something she didn't understand. Sunlight began to shine into the labyrinth, to cast the shadow of the witch's wings upon the earth. The haunting song and dance of her familiars dropped the beat.

May prostrated herself beside Marie, begging for forgiveness. In front of her was a pistol. On the reverse side of Marie's head was a terrible quantity of blood. There was no light to its eyes. It was impossible to say the same of its teeth, though.

...mine...

...mine...

!REASSERTING CONTROL!THIS PLACE IS MINE!

-uick to see, caught only in a moment with its hammer held above its head. The blow felt like it strobed across a higher dimension. Thr-

...go away...

...please...

...i was happy here...

...i was happy here...

-standing just in time to see what Marie had become throttling the beast's neck with its stole bunched in one hand, the other clawing m-

...

-gh its skin, crackling and sparkling and gushing a fluid best left uncontemplated. It lurched, staggered, its engines struggling to ev-

...

As Marie rose from the monster's carcass, the labyrinth evaporated. She shook, at hyperventilation's door. Audrey nearly doubled over at the sight of her, blood and sinew dripping from between her teeth. This, too, faded away.

A clump of lead emerged from her temple and dropped to the ground as the last of her skull returned to its place.

"Christ... what happened?" She rubbed her eyes and shook her head.

"I thought you died!" May jabbed a finger at her. "You told me I was stopping you from concentrating, and then you pulled out this gun, and, and..."

"You thought I killed myself because you were annoying?"

"I don't know! I panicked!"

Audrey shifted about uneasily. "I don't know what you just did, but I'm going to ask you never to do it again."

"What, save your life?"

"That's not what this is about, and you know it."

"That's exactly what this is about. Maybe you disapprove of my methods-"

"Maybe I do! You're a good flatmate, and I'll admit you're an excellent hunter, but if you're ever in another fight again, you can count me out."

"Alright, alright! At least get yourself cleaned up. First dibs." She threw the grief seed to Audrey, who caught it, filled it, and tossed it back. Marie did the same.

May stepped forward. "Careful, Marie. That's... oh, you're really pouring into that thing, huh?"

Already it began to rattle in her grip. She kissed it, and whispered, "Alright. Why don't you come on out? I'd love to do all that over again."

The grief seed stopped moving.

"What's wrong with you?" Audrey stammered.

Marie made a slow point of feeding the seed to Kyubey before scoffing at the question. "I don't know. Can we talk about this when we get home?"

"Okay..."

"That doesn't sound all that okay to me."

"Should I be concerned?"

"Alright. I need to confess something."

Erica looked at Marie like she emanated a bad smell.

"I'll admit! A lot of the art here is really well done! You know? You can tell lifetimes of technical skill, or some genuinely novel ideas, or both, went into these artworks."

"Yeah?"

"But I don't get it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean none of it makes me feel anything."

Erica's eyebrows shot up. "Nothing?"

"Nothing. I don't think I like the way the gallery is put together. It's kind of... discouraging the act of letting yourself get lost in any of it. Right? You just acknowledge each thing you pass, then you move on."

"Like furniture?"

"What, you mean this is the equivalent of saying, 'nice dresser', or 'cute tablecloth', at a friend's house, only hundreds of times over and with each worth several thousand dollars?"

"I don't. I'm wondering if that's what you mean."

Marie put her hands on her hips and looked around.

"I guess I do. Hm."

"Well, if you want my opinion," and as fate would have it, Marie didn't really, "I think that's markedly pretentious of you. To call your own apathy the purpose of the gallery itself."

"What, do you think I just don't 'like art', and I'm calling that someone else's problem? You know, all these classics are the best their era had to offer. That's why they've survived so long - people have decided they're worth preserving, generation after generation. But they just weren't made with the intention of being absorbed at our current pace of life! Especially not laid out like this!"

"Damn. Alright."

"See? I'm not pretent- well, not for this reason."

"So why don't I take you to see something more modern, then?"

"Why, are you trying to impress me?"

"No. Well... a little bit. C'mon, we can take a look at this year's Archies, if you want."

"What, like the comics?"

"The Archibalds! The portrait prizes."

"Oh."

She was actually rather disappointed to hear that. Danika had described this month's Sonic the Hedgehog as 'hardcore'.

As Erica led her to the other side of the building, Marie couldn't shake the feeling that their single-minded passage through the gallery exactly proved her point.

The room hosting the Archibald exhibition was grander and more brilliantly decorated than the one they had just been in. Being an art gallery less than 150 years old, all this basically meant was that the varnished wooden floor here was real.

Erica winced. "Crap. Tickets are ten bucks each. You got a twenty?"

"What, for you to try to prove me wrong about something?" She procured the bill nonetheless.

"And I think it would be really cool if you were obnoxiously sarcastic about it, too."

"Was that a demonstration?"

She raised an eyebrow and took it. "What were you bringing twenty dollars to the gallery for, if not tickets?"

"I thought we might be grabbing lunch or something while we're here."

"Wow. This really is your first time at the gallery, if you think twenty dollars is going to get you lunch."

The exhibition fascinated Marie. Being populated by the full breadth of what national-level portraiture had to offer, rather than the particular tastes of one or two curators, the variety was overbearing. One was given no choice but to allow each work time to sink in.

"See, I bet you don't like this, either."

"Well that's where you're wrong, pal, because I bloody well love it."

"Oh! I'm actually really glad to hear that. Here, let me show you my favourite finalist."

The painting was cluttered, aimless, saturated with unclear consistency. A young man was surrounded on all sides by sharp-dressed skulls, disembodied eyes, and text from an alphabet which shared a common ancient Mediterranean alphabet as that from which the cool S was derived.

"What do you think?"

Marie shook her head. "It's... it's incredible."

"Do you like it?"

"I have no idea."

"It's a self portrait. Griggs, the artist's name is. Calls it Zoloft Nation. He says he spent some time wandering around the poorer parts of Manila to sort of get a feel for the art there, but then he retreated to the comforts of his own studio. This is sort of a self-satire of the fact that he could wander around and absorb those aesthetics, but not live that life. Still leave whenever he pleased."

"What do you think that means?"

"Well, why do you think we make portraits? Why do you think that's a thing people do?"

"I don't know. All sorts of reasons."

"Look around you, Marie. Why do you think a bunch of toffs are handing out prizes for capturing the likenesses of 'some man or woman, distinguished in et cetera et cetera', or whatever it was?"

"If I had to boil it down to one reason, if we're looking at it that way, I would guess preservation."

"Of a person?"

"Well, yeah."

"Of a moment in time?"

"If you'd like!"

Erica nodded. "So look back at this portrait. It has all this sort of rough, gritty imagery, and he connects that to his time in Manila. That imagery, I think, reflects his social environment."

"But that wasn't his environment. You said he didn't live that life."

"Ah, but it was for a moment in time! Captured here, preserved, just like the image of himself."

"But that's not who he is."

"Maybe the image isn't either! Maybe he's shaved or something. Would that make the painting less authentic?"

"I don't know."

"And is your environment not as much a part of who you are as your own face, both long-term and moment to moment?"

"No. That's ridiculous."

In the months following this she would return to this wing of the gallery, long after the wrapping-up of this particular exhibition, and stroke the empty wall where once stood the sovereignty of antidepressants, now conjured only in psychometric hallucinations. She would recall her objection to Erica's musings and scream at the space where she once stood for how palpably, crushingly wrong she had been, long and hard enough to be escorted off the premises. But that would not come to pass for some time. Life would take her from one point to the other at its own pace, and, oh, she had time to run a few errands before then.

An electronic two-note intonation pronounced itself once, twice, from the supermarket doorway as Hope welcomed herself, then Marie, inside.

"So what is it you're after?"

"Ah, not much. Couple things here and then maybe swing by the bakery."

"Then why did you need me?"

"Well! I'd heard from Dazza when you and her were out the other night that you said you wanted to get out more."

Marie snagged a basket. "See, grocery shopping wasn't exactly my idea of psychological enrichment."

"Yeah, well it wouldn't be, would it? That's why you're..."

"Why I'm what?"

"Oh, you know."

"That stings, dude. Not least of all because I do know."

"That's nice, dear. Could you gi's the basket over here, d'you reckon?"

Marie mimed offence for about all of two seconds before cracking up and doing exactly as requested. Hope took it off her and began picking items from shelves with a robotic degree of purpose.

"But I do empathise with ya. Can't stand sitting still for two seconds myself, but I don't wanna be living my life tearing up a good labyrinth every hour of every day. 'S not good for ya."

"For sure."

"Which I hear you're scarily good at, by the way."

"Yeah?"

"Haven't been shooting yourself in the face again, have you?"

"Wouldn't dream of it," Marie lied pathetically. Hope gave her the benefit of the doubt, but not because she considered it well-deserved.

"I've actually been tossing up something to get out and about myself, in fact. Actually been tossing it up for years." Down one aisle.

"Oh yeah? First I'm hearing of this." Marie jogged to keep up.

Hope was very visibly struggling to withhold her excitement. "I'm gonna try getting into uni."

"No way! Oh my God, Fearno. That's great news!"

"Well! I'd say it's a bit too soon to say that."

"What are you going to try getting into?"

"Diploma of Science. You know, I've been weighing stuff up. I think it'd be good for morale if not only is one of the community representatives in this city an orphan who spent 14 years at no fixed abode and a large chunk of one more behind bars, but a woman who goes on to get a tertiary education at that! A real 'anyone can make it' kinda story. That's what I wanna be."

"Wow, that's... that's really admirable of you."

"Cheers."

"I feel a bit silly now."

"Why's that?"

"I was mostly planning to go to uni to get hammered and sleep around."

Hope cackled. "Well, just because your intentions were ignoble doesn't mean... nah, actually. That's exactly what it means."

"Actually, what's to stop me from doing that now?"

"I thought you said you didn't like getting hammered or sleeping around."

"Yeah. Still, though. What's to stop me?"

Hope hauled a carton of milk out of the freezer. $1.99. 199's digits summed twice produced ten, the number of completion. It was the 46th prime, an ordinal which shared this exact property.

Back, now, and down a different aisle.

"So why science, of all things?"

"Oh. Chips are hell cheap."

"What?"

Hope blinked. "Oh, just saying. Mid-size bag of chips on sale for a dollar. What flavour d'you like?"

"Oh, I don't know. Any."

She shrugged and nabbed a bag. Its actual price was 99 cents, bringing the total to $2.98. Another digital sum twice to ten. The 298th prime number was 1973, the year of both hip-hop's nascence and the publication of Gravity's Rainbow.

"But I was asking what got you interested in science."

"Have you forgotten? Has my hyperbolically larrikin vernacular and general urban bumpkinism made you forget who raised me?"

"Ah."

"Just because I toss around words like 'galoot', 'nongbar', and 'grogan' doesn't stop me from being the girl you go to if you've got nuclear equations you need solving."

"You make it sound like I need you on speed dial."

"You never know. Something might come up. You bring a bag?"

"Right here."

She checked the milk and chips out, and slipped 15 cents of change into the donation box, this one supplying wheelchairs to children in poverty worldwide. Why they were delivered to children in poverty rather than being delivered to those children in, say, cargo ships, was anyone's guess, but it did bring her total expenditures to $3.13, a number needing no introduction.

It began to rain.

"Reckon we just skip the bakery today?"

"I don't mind a bit of rain. But sure, if you'd like."

"Bonza. Let's just hurry home, ay? Be there in two shakes anyway."

Two shakes was a slight understatement, when clearly it took at least another high-five or dap longer. The venture home was almost wordless - wasn't that odd, Marie thought, that she instinctively spoke less under the weather?

The two of them barged through the door to the stairwell side by side. Marie placed her bag to her side, adjusted her grip on it, sighed, and spluttered madly. "Great snakes, what is that smell? Has someone been smoking?"

"Smells like it..." Hope murmured.

"In the stairwell?!"

That much, she didn't answer.

"Fearno, you good?"

"Hm? Oh yeah, darl. Just thinking."

"Yeah?"

"I figure even if we do air it out, get this odour outta here, the old one's gonna be long gone."

They each proceeded to ascend.

"The what?"

"Y'know how these stairs always reeked of weed?"

"That's what weed smells like?"

"Oh, I'm surprised you never knew."

"It smelled awful."

"It was Sonia's."

"Oh."

Marie dug her nails into her palm. Was 'oh' all she had to offer?

"Yeah. She at least had the decency not to partake while in the Citadel, but she wasn't exactly gonna go outside for it. If someone saw, and word got to her parents - lovely people, by the by,"

"As I well know."

"As you well know! But still, if they saw her...! They'd not so much fancy her hanging out with us lot, let me tell you! I said, Sonia, darl. If it's so much trouble, give it up! It's no good for your lungs, either."

"What'd she say to that?"

"She said she'd stop smoking if I stopped drinking. And, you know. She did."

"Did she?"

"Technically."

"...Ah."

"So I eased myself off the grog at the start of this year. And I tell you what, I feel absolutely aces." Hope fumbled in her pocket for the keys. "Gotta say. Underage drinking is a right proper epidemic in this country."

"Heh. Don't have to tell me."

In a moment the keys were forgotten. "What? You're joking."

"Well. Not often."

"This is the first I'm hearing of this."

"I mean it's not like I'm proud of it. It was just my way of getting at my dad."

Hope returned her focus to the key, found in her opposite pocket after all. Life was one big mystery like that sometimes. "Darl, your teen years aren't for being proud of."

"What are they for, then?"

"Pupating. Like how a caterpillar up-chucks some gunk and then sits in it for some time, turning to even grosser gunk."

"I don't need some flamboyant little butterfly analogy or whatever."

"Steady on. Some moths of genus Calyptra have a proboscis tough enough to pierce and drink blood, you know. Give lepidopterans a chance."

"Sheesh, alright. That's pretty hardcore."

But once they were through the door, she stopped, reconsidered. "Hold on. You're not just telling me that because I'm something of a vampire, are you?"

"Take it as you will, by all means! But I mean no offence. Really, I'm just surprised I can relate to teen you on any level whatsoever."

"Hey, I- no. That's totally reasonable. I'd be surprised if I could, and I even was the bitch."

What was it about Hope's sentimental meditations that resonated so strongly with Marie? She didn't know. Or if she did know, all she knew was information she couldn't understand. Something was wrong. She was ushered into this world during a transitory period, and only now tasted the melancholy of its old face being washed away in the foam of time. Therefore, it became a ritual - gradually at first, she didn't know when - to loom a fraction of a second upon the complex's lowest stair, to catch one final hint of the scent Hope described so bittersweetly. She changed too, over time. Eventually no sentiment which had been at her first climb of these stairs survived.

But the universe didn't care. The laws of thermodynamics generally suggested that the cosmos did more or less whatever it pleased.

She accepted this. Everyone in the aforementioned universe did, or else they would have an absolutely terrible time there.

"Hey," someone interrupted the ritual. "You're Fearno's friend. Mary or something, right?"

She was familiar, somehow. Tall, long-faced, and butch, in an unbuttoned black pea coat over a white singlet. Her enunciation was strained by the unlit joint between her teeth.

"Definitely something."

"Gotta light?"

She turned out her pockets, as if it was at all possible that she might. "Sorry."

"Hey, don't sweat it." She spat the joint out, and it faded out before hitting the floor. "It's just illusion magic anyway. Li'l in-joke that annoys the crappers out of some of your roomies."

"Sorry, do I know you from somewhere?"

"Whether you like it or not!" She bowed not unlike a cartoon butler. "Sonia Vu, Fearno's old something-or-other."

"Oh!"

"'Oh'?"

"No, I... should have recognised you, is all. Been hard to go long without catching you in some psychometric episode or other - you know that's my...?"

"Yeah, I'm aware. And I mean fair enough I'd linger here and there. Look at me."

And so that was exactly what she did. "I can certainly tell. What's with the outfit, by the way? It's so..."

"Last year?"

"Yeah, if the current year was 1944."

"You know, I'd heard of your pre-contract reputation, everyone had. And they certainly never said you dressed well yourself."

"That's fair. But I've taken to letting Denise and Jane criticise my dress sense relentlessly, so I'm probably better now."

"Is that so? How are they, anyway?"

"Oh, you know. Alright."

"And how's Fearno?"

A question both completely innocuous and paralysingly direct. What even constituted an appropriate answer.

"Oh, you know. Been a bit of a mess going so long without having you around. Tries to cover it up, but... you can just tell with her, can't you?"

"You really can."

"Plus she's under the pressure of taking over from Zoey and trying to start uni next year."

"Wow. That's a lot, even for her."

"Is it?"

"I don't know. I think accepting a lot of responsibility is probably going to be good for her in the long term, I mean... well, I don't want to speak on the past too much - that's a series of regrets and embarrassments between me and her - but I do find the idea of Fearno taking a lot of responsibility a little funny."

"She wasn't always like this?"

"Not at all! More a follower than a leader. A chronic case of just sorta kicking around."

"Must be to do with her giving up the drink, I imagine."

"Oh my shit, she has?" Sonia's face lit up like an illusory joint. "I'm so glad to hear that. I knew she could do it."

"Yeah, it's like... wow. I've really been thinking of her as my rock but she's been changing just as much as I have." There was a sobering thought. She slumped onto the lounge and pretended not to think about it.

"Everything good, Marie?"

"No." She sighed. "No, I'm not really sure I'll ever be 'good' again."

"Hey. That's how mourning goes. But it does get better, yeah? It doesn't hurt as much forever."

Nothing.

"Marie?"

"I'm... fine."

"Is there something else you're worried about?"

Hope sat next to her. Close enough to see her eyes. That wasn't the shock of loss within them as she had suspected, rather, that was the rawest, most primordial look of terror she had seen in her life.

"Something freaked you out?"

She nodded. Plucked the ring from her finger and forced it into its gemstone form. "I shouldn't be so scared, should I? Ha..."

"Of what, darl?"

"Her name. I know her name. I know! Her name!"

"Whose name?!"

"The witch! I don't know, me! And the just-sort-of-knowing is terrifying! It feels like a thought too big to hold in my own skull!"

From the kitchen, Thalia wandered over. "I know that. I remember mine, too."

"You... you do?"

"Yes! Theoris."

"How do you live with knowing that?"

"I don't know. I just don't think about it."

"Oh."

She returned the ring to her finger, and slumped back on the lounge.

"I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do that."

"I know mine too, if that's worth anything," Hope added.

"Alright. I understand Thalia knowing, but how do you know yours?"

"Dunno! Known it as long as I can remember, been another fact of life more than anything. Informed some of the sigils on my back, actually, made 'em stronger. So I can't call it all bad."

"Is this another consequence of your... circumstance?"

"What ain't, really?"

"Yeah. That's fair."

"I... have a vague idea of what mine might be?" Danika interrupted. "Nothing specific, though. From the sounds of things it's better I don't, eh, Marie?"

"I dunno," she mumbled. "I dunno, man, I just don't know."

"Must've really rattled ya, ay?" A grin of bittersweet compassion flitted across Hope's mouth. "Like a frog in a sock."

"Yeah, that's... what?"

"You know. Intense. Wild. Much as in a frog in a sock."

"Sure. What's yours called, anyway?"

"Dorothy. You?"

It suddenly felt hard to speak. She had to force the words out. "My name is..."

"No! No," muttered her half-lotus present state of being. "I'm straying from the important stuff. That all comes later."

She had been muttering to herself for some time now. It was concerning for Hope to watch. Over the phone, it was concerning for Zoey to hear. And to whoever might burst in through the door, perhaps profusely apologising for past transgressions with little self-awareness (should that, in all its unlikelihood, occur), it would be concerning too.

"I don't know. I guess everything's a little different now, and I mean everything. But it's still the same old me, really. And you guys are still the same old-"

"Not me." Thalia raised her hand. "I'm different."

"Okay. Not Thalia, then."

Danika smiled and rested her chin on her fists. "I don't know. You say that, but I'm not convinced."

"What do you mean?"

"The Marie sitting across from me now wouldn't have gotten off on the wrong foot with the Citadel, wouldn't have gotten on my bike and rode away from Lara, wouldn't have freaked out at that old journal. You're more personable, and braver, and less susceptible to being pushed around than you used to be. I think, anyway."

"Well thanks! I-"

"You...?"

Marie didn't say anything.

"Everything okay?"

"The journal. The journal! Ruth told me all about Anneliese Holzknecht. Died in 1871, in battle. Hope said it was during the breach of Mombasa, where magical girls from all over the world were congregating at the time. And that journal entry I read described one girl being collected by some friends to travel across the world - get this - in 1871. You don't possibly think there could be a connection?"

Danika's face found the shape of confusion, then intrigue, then awe. "You don't mean...?"

"Dani. Thalia. Would you care to join me on stealing the journal a second time?"

"I'm in."

"I am also inside."

The night ran on into a culmination of life's most valuable pleasures: good friends, good food, all manner of irreverent and crude banter. As in all good things, it was ephemeral - but this was not to be mourned, the delight was only reinforced by having a particular time and place where it could be defined.

It happened that Marie needed an early night. Her work with Lara began soon, and the following few weeks, she knew, would be immensely stressful. The prospect of her stress possibly culminating in arson would come as a surprise, though, but she had enough to look forward to already.

"Well, chaps. That was a fantastic dinner, really. We should get out more, you know. Just the three of us."

"For sure! Why don't we... you know what? We can sort out other stuff in the morning."

"Sounds good to me. Catch you 'round."

Marie stood, stretched her legs, and stepped off. "Seeya."

Thalia pointed across the table. Her arm had enough elbows to it to reach across the table's complete diameter.

"Oh, crap! Thanks!" Marie picked her soul gem off the table and put it on her finger.

"Did you nearly forget?"

"No, it's like the first thing I check for, even before my wallet and keys. Shi-" she patted herself down. "No? Okay, I've got those. Seeya, then. For real, this time."

"Bye!" Thalia grinned. Florian even looked up from the glass of water he was equal parts drinking from and bleeding into to wave.

"Later, dude!" Danika saluted.

But even with Marie off home, her companions had only just begun to wind their dinner down.

"Marie's so cool now," Thalia thought, half-aloud.

"Well, more than she used to be. I don't know what it is."

"Think she's happier?"

"I think she's... more capable of happiness."

"Whats the difference?"

"I think if she was happier, nothing would be weighing on her mind, right? But you've seen her! She's, like, 40% angst by body mass. She's got us knuckleheads beat on that front. But I think even if she's troubled, she can still be happy."

Though one deeply touched by the tinge of romance might itch to describe such a night as particularly still, or warm, or frigid, this was late April. It was the most nothing-in-particular night of the year.
But in the face of this, and even with the capacity to find herself on her own doorstep in a fraction of the time, Marie decided to walk.

There was a time where she would have considered it nothing short of self-evident that what she was now was a poison in the veins of this city. That she was born of a horror beyond the stars, a thing which should not be. Now she walked these streets woven through its heart among a small crowd. A rather tall university student in a brown coat. An exhausted-looking middle-aged couple relating anecdotes of mutual friends. An old woman with an intense look in her eye, pacing across the bus stop. She was part of the same system as all of them.

Her thumb brushed the ring on her finger. She took a breath and bid the movement and light and sound consume her. No sooner had she reached the edge of the CBD than layer on layer of interconnection woven tight around each component. The imperceptibly weak but infinitely large gravitational fields of all things, interfering with each other at odd and insignificant angles, curvature of space on scales not even her awakened state could fathom. The commonality among all the people sharing almost every single piece of their genome, regardless of how different their phenotypes appeared through the lens of her human upbringing. The telluric currents of magic that none of them were the slightest hint privy to, but which connected the dormant potential of every emotion everyone here felt every second of every day.

And she saw she was a part of it.

Though she knew, intellectually, that her contract was the sole defining characteristic behind the elevation of her sensorium, all her training aside, there sat a feeling within her, telling her that this was so obvious, how had she not seen it before? To the point where it grew difficult to believe her own magic could be anything greater than a catalyst.

Out into the suburbs, she did not let her ego die. She simply dropped it off at after-school care for the day, so that she and her id could go run a few errands around town.

It was a nice night out, she thought, about as unhinged from the notion of self as a boa's jaw, and she decided to watch the stars a moment.

The light pollution shielded her eyes from the truth, but her stomach didn't notice the city lights and decided to tie a knot in itself anyway in remembering what was out there. She decided perhaps not to linger on it right now, or in fact ever again for as long as she lived. She believed that she would not even pay particular attention to the stars, even if, say, an all-powerful dragon deity fell from them and ravaged some small classical American town she found herself living in. Yes, even if that happened, she knew that stargazing would no longer really be her thing. Not that it ever would, of course. The thought was absurd.

As she wandered, the neighbourhood unfolded. She saw the space one hundred years ago, when none of these families lived here. Ten thousand years ago, and there were no roads either. One million years ago, no people. One hundred million, no life. What would the future hold that was unthinkably absent from the world around her?

It was strange how the Citadel had stopped feeling like a temporary solution to her predicament at some point. She wouldn't have been able to put her finger on the precise date, but if she had to guess the first moment, it would have been as soon as the street had become her own. Now, no doubt, if someone asked her address, her answer would be automatic.

She arrived at the Citadel.

She did not arrive at the Citadel.

She arrived home.

THE POWER OF GODS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN

It has for the longest time perplexed many a great thinker to ponder the mechanism by which the physical processes of magic occur. But the explanation is simple, and it is merely their problem for being great thinkers and mediocre knowers. The truth is that dark magic manipulates quantum gravitational fields.

As I said. The explanation is simple.

There comes a particular scale at which gravity becomes inextricable from the universe's other fundamental forces. Any smaller than this, and vacuum fluctuations constantly occur; even space and time, which most Terrans would consider perhaps more reliably constant than anything else in the universe (be they fixed or at most beholden to straightforward, infallible mathematical rules), become subject to the uncertainty principle. Perhaps the most interesting, and for our purposes, certainly the most useful, consequence of this is the apparent existence of virtual particles.

Virtual particles are a type of particle that isn't. They are disturbances in fields created by other particles, which then go on to behave as if another particle was there. It isn't. But virtually, it is. Put two charged leptons near each other, and they will attract or repel electromagnetically, even though no photons are flowing between them. The thing with vacuum fluctuations is that interactions like these are happening all the time, but with space and time instead of subatomic particles. The result is that all manner of virtual particles are showing up ex nihilo, mucking about for a few dozen negative orders of magnitude of a second, and then pissing right off again.

But dark magic has the peculiar property of uncoupling and manipulating the fundamental forces independently of each other (see chapter 3), and instead can render these fluctuations observable at low-uncertainty scales, granting the owner of a particularly powerful soul (or one compressed, as aforementioned, into a gem) almost complete control over the virtual particles which result. For the sake of accuracy, Marie conjuring her weapon would be better described as gravitational and electromagnetic fields being manipulated to appear and behave exactly as if they contained a hammer, but such an explanation would be considerably inelegant, because the discrepancy between these two descriptions makes no practical difference. Form comes before function.

But even that would be an oversimplification. Even the most elementary of particles interact in significantly more fields than these. A quark, for example, interacts electromagnetically, and therefore would behave the same as some virtual photon in the electromagnetic field. It also has mass, so the same is true of the Higgs field, and so on, and so forth, but having a property of... let's call it "quarkness", it would have its own field in which a virtual quark would behave exactly the same, and so on down a list of all of its physical properties. If we forget the analogy of virtual particles as literal particles, this is no different from saying that the quark interacts with all these fields, because these are all the fields it interacts with. An indisputable tautology.

As such, it could behave as the combination of its virtual particle equivalents in all these fields, were all these interactions to somehow suddenly line up without it. And in controlling virtual particles at the smallest possible scale, dark magic does exactly that: all the properties of a photon are compiled by magic in the vacuum fluctuations, and turned into real electromagnetic radiation, which is then emitted from the soul gem as Hawking radiation. To essentially all matter on Earth, this occurs at such frequencies that this process is completely undetectable even at the universe-sculpting quantities at which magic operates, but sent out into the universe all the same and collected by the Concordance.

With humankind so close to the understanding of these concepts, why is this energy source not shared with them? It had been, partially, but only very briefly. This information was uncovered by an informant of the British oil corporation Hyde (reporting as much under the presumed pseudonym Martin Davison), in 1990. The oil industry being incapable of ever competing with energy sources that were both completely renewable and capable of powering the stars in the sky, Hyde worked with London police in the massacre of 12 teenage girls in public housing in Clerkenwell. The company petitioned for the case not to be taken to court throughout the following decade, until its eventual bankruptcy, collapse, and mysterious deaths of its board of directors.

Martin Davison himself was not investigated for his involvement in these events, having resigned four days earlier. In 1993, he was appointed by the British government to CEO of Titania One Systems, his position the only record of his existence.