"I am so sorry. I am so sorry. God, I, I don't know what happened, I swear I just couldn't hear you– I thought that–"

"No no no it's fine. It's fine. What did you get on your last trig test?"

"Uh– uh– uh–" Lucia racked her brain. It was obvious. She remembered studying all night with Steph, etching every single possible triangle into her brain– but thoughts leaked out her brain like sand through her fingers. She couldn't concentrate. The fibers on the rug on swirled and grew, reaching up her legs like squirming tendrils–

"Never mind the trig test," Steph's voice said from very far away. "Don't look at anything. In fact, close your eyes. Do deep breaths. Okay? Deep, deep breaths."

Lucia squeezed her eyes shut, and realized that she was barely breathing. She sucked in gulps of air and filled up her lungs.

"Alright. What's your name?"

"Lucia," Lucia said by reflex.

"You got it. Now, your magical girl abilities. What are they?"

As soon as Steph said the words, images of glowing runes and crackling electricity flooded her mind. Lucia opened her mouth and the words slipped out. "I– I can make Pearls that teleport me where they, land– they take about two seconds to materialize fully–"

"Walk with me. Keep talking."

With her eyes closed, Lucia felt Steph move. She did her best to follow, rambling about how her shield worked. Steph sat her down on the bed.

"- I can also activate my harness telepathically, which will exert a force on my shield towards the harness, as long it's within 300 feet away– it'll move out of the way if it's on a trajectory that'll hurt me–"

Lucia realized she'd been rambling for two minutes straight and stopped. "And– yeah, that's about it," she said.

"You feel better?" Steph said.

Lucia opened her eyes. She was sitting on her bed. It was Steph, her actual body. It was funny how short she was. The right side of her Pasadena High School PE shirt, which Lucia realized she'd been leaning on, was soaked with water that dripped from Lucia's hair.

"Your shirt–"

"No worries I'll just steal yours. But you feel better?"

Lucia could still hear the blood drum next to her ears. She looked at the floor. The tiles remained rectangular.

"I feel fine," Lucia said. "I'm fine. I–"

"Here's your gem." Steph pressed her soul gem– now amber colored and clean of despair– into her hand. "Cleansed it. I grabbed a seed from your stash. You don't owe me anything."

Steph's phone rang in her pocket. She checked it, groaned, and dismissed the call.

"Also, you must be starving after, uh, that happened. I made– uh, spaghetti bolognese. If you want some."

"Bolognese? What? Why? Aren't you vegetarian?"

"Oh. Silly me. I made a casserole. Come on. "

Lucia followed Steph to the kitchen. It was a small cubicle with barely more than a stovetop and the oven underneath it. Dim light filtered through a window on the far side of the room, turning everything a light shade of gray.

Steph donned her mitts and cracked open the oven lid. From inside burst the greasy smell of cream. Inside the baking pan, an abundance of cheese glistened orange in the oven light. Off-white pasta and a motley of veggies laid on a bed of bechamel.

Steph took a big sniff. "Oh yeah that's good. I usually use cheddar but apparently you gotta use gouda, cuz gouda has a higher melting point or something?"

"Yeah. It does smell kind of different."

"It totally does. By the way, Gouda isn't even vegetarian." Steph said, scooping noodles and diced veggies into porcelain bowls. "They're made with cow stomach enzyme or whatever. I had to go to Whole Foods in the morning to get vegetarian Gouda–"

Steph suddenly paused and gave Lucia a meaningful stare. "You're okay, right?"

"I'm fine." Lucia plastered a smile on her face. "I have some things that I need to think about. That's all."

Steph set two bowls, filled to the brim with steaming hot noodles, on the kitchen counter. Lucia grabbed forks and napkins.

Steph dug in. Lucia closed her eyes. Bless this food we're about to share, she shut off her telepathy and thought. Bless Steph who prepared it. May this meal nourish us.

Lucia stabbed her fork into the mass of noodles, sloshed them around, and unearthed the multicolored diced veggies underneath. Carrots, zucchinis, bell peppers, cauliflower– they looked good, but something squirmed in her stomach like a live salamander and she couldn't eat anything. It clicked– body snatcher magi must have eaten for her. That was probably what she had done in that burger restaurant.

"So uh– whatever happened, while you were gone. Do you want to talk about it?"

Lucia spun a wheel of pasta from her fork and maneuvered her arm mechanically into her mouth. She chewed. The noodles melted in her mouth.

"Lucia?"

Lucia made a big show of muffled talking while chewing her food. She swallowed after she found a response. "I can if you want me to. But really there's nothing exciting. Only me beating up some random nobody."

"Yes. I want you to."

Lucia shrugged. "Some magi walked up and possessed me. She got stuck in a labyrinth and unpossessed me to kill the witch for her. I beat her, the witch, and escaped."

Steph pursed her lips. "You're really fine? Nothing is amiss at all? You ready to start your day over like nothing's happened?"

Lucia was swiftly losing patience. "Yes. I said. Health and vigor radiates from every cell in my body. I just have a lot of things to think about, things that maybe we both need to think about, that are a little more important–"

"You're lying," Steph said.

"Excuse me?"

"You come back home, say you've been kidnapped, then you go into a shower and have a panic attack. And you say you're fine. That seems contradictory."

"Panic attack? Oh come on, that wasn't a panic attack–"

"Don't kid yourself. It was."

Steph's eyes, infinitely jaded and knowing, pierced right through Lucia's soul. The scathing retort Lucia formulated died in her throat.

"I've gone through what you have, and it almost killed me." Steph said. "This isn't a funny joke. Go browse ObitBot. It all started when so-and-so did a routine witch hunt and came back missing half her limbs. When so-and-so realized Kyubey was a bitch and stopped answering my calls. You think anyone there hadn't told their eulogists that they were fine too, exactly the way you had?"

Lucia looked away and nodded. What had Steph called it? A panic attack? That was a stupid name. Panic wasn't even a millionth of the way to what Lucia had felt. Reality unraveled around her, revealing an infinite labyrinth of fear. She felt defeated. Alone.

If Lucia was supposed to save Pasadena, stop the corruption, then she can't be doing this. She can't be having panic attacks.

"Yes," Lucia whispered. "I understand."

"Tell me then. Tell me what's wrong."

But Steph should know what was wrong. What's wrong has always been here in Pasadena this entire time.

"Witches," Lucia said.

Witches. The spawns of hell, congregated from pus that oozed out the pores of Tartarus. They climbed out from great, infernal fissures into the mortal plane, latched onto dying magical girls like malignant growths. They buried their tendrils into their brains, realized their worst impulses, and trapped them inside the mortal realm, hidden from God, forced them to torture and kill the people they onced saved–

So was the witch's true identity. But when faced with people like Steph, you used facts.

Witches extruded a hypnotic allure that drew humans to them. It worked not based not on distance– you could hear the siren song from the other side of the city, and a curious tattoo would etch itself upon your neck, and it was too late. A normal sized witch could draw a crowd of ten or fifteen people. Pasadena witches, naturally more powerful, could draw thirty people each.

After sucking their victims dry of something that could not be empirically observed, the witches relinquished their grasps and the victims ripped their throats out or smashed their skulls open. Invariably, they died.

A city like Pasadena, where the aggregated despair of Los Angeles county accumulated, produced ten to twenty witches per day. Properly harvested, the city could support thirty to forty girls. But Pasadena had a population of eight.

Of course, a portion of the excess witches stumbled into each other's labyrinths and killed themselves. Even with that, and everyone doing triple duty, they couldn't possibly kill everything. The corruption built and built. Witches and familiars multiplied and festered until Pasadena itself became a labyrinth. If you were a magi out at night, you saw giggling familiars parading in the streets. And if you weren't? You saw the world plunged in perpetual darkness, walked yourself into a labyrinth, and got eaten. There would be no corpse for your family to find.

This was the city she lived in. The supposed genesis of Lucia's utopia, transformed instead to hell on earth. Pasadena had been a force of good, a hallowed city that saved Lucia in her darkest time. Now it was suffocating everyone from the inside. It was attracting the basest evils, like body snatcher magi.

But it wasn't over. She was still here. Pasadena began with Lucia, and it would end with Lucia, too. As long as she lived, there would be hope still.

Pasadena was simply filthy. They were waist-deep in food no one could eat. But Lucia could cleanse it. She could kill the corruption. She could save the city.

"We need to convince Maia to increase the quota," Lucia said. "Double our efforts to harvest the city."

"The hell's that gotta to do with anything?"

"It's got to do with everything! The witches are trouble. This kind of thing never used to happen when we were handling the city, back when there weren't as many witches–"

"You're telling me that you were attacked because of the witches?"

Lucia recollected herself.

Facts.

"I can't spell this out more obviously for you," Lucia said. "This place is chaos. The civs are holed up in their homes and disappear all the time. Witches fight each other on the streets and leave grief seeds everywhere. It's a buffet! Any psychopath magi can walk in here and have all they need to survive. Body snatcher magi is just the beginning. They'll be more. This place will be overrun!"

Steph shook her head, exasperated. "I ain't talking about the city. This is about you–"

"You're curious about why I had that panic attack before. Let me enlighten you. I don't feel safe. I'm frightened out of my mind that another body snatcher magi could show up at any second, take over the city, and it'd be our fault. Do you understand?"

Slowly, Steph nodded. Her hands clenched around her fork, her knuckles going white. "What do you suggest we do?"

Lucia shrugged. "Find an excuse to call a meeting. We make a play. I don't know what kind of play, but we make one."

"You're always making plays."

"I'd better make a play that works, don't you think? Either way, did you kill a witch today?"

"Before you got back. Yeah."

"We go find another one."

"I– are you serious?"

That was a stupid question. Lucia let the air linger until Steph realized that, too.

"That's not a great idea," Steph continued. "You are in no fucking state to do combat with a taser. Look, of everyone here we can most afford to take a break. We have more than enough seeds, and–"

"So what am I supposed to do then? Wait until my imaginary trauma that we both know nothing about magically gets better? Do you think we have that kind of time? And–" Lucia had an idea. "What about the people inside the labyrinths, Steph? They're going through something thousands of times worse than any panic attacks you and I could possibly have, don't you think? Don't you think we should try to take a chance, for them?"

That hit right in the heart. Steph looked down at her noodles, unable to meet Lucia's eyes. "I– fine. We fight a witch. One, and that's it. And only a small one. Okay?"

"Okay," Lucia said solemnly.

The easy step was done. Now came the time to put her money where her mouth was.

Afternoon in Pasadena. The sun hung high on the sky, showering the city with dizzying heat. It would probably stay that way for the next six hours.

And so Steph and Lucia walked through the deserted neighborhood. Even in the afternoon, it reminded Lucia of a witch's labyrinth. The silence, where Lucia's footsteps could echo. The absence of cars and men. The windows and doors of the gray suburban houses were bolted from the inside– the civilian population of Pasadena were trying to keep themselves in.

Steph stopped by a house. The door was wide open. Broken boards and woodchips were scattered atop the doorstep, along with empty shotgun shells.

"We'll find them," Lucia said.

Steph nodded.

They walked in silence until Steph's green gem flashed.

"This place again," Lucia said.

They had been led to a dilapidated convenience store, sandwiched between a road and Route 110. The parking lot was littered with crushed plastic bottles and cigarette butts. The faded yellow walls next to the entrance, as well as the broken vending machines, were all covered with graffiti.

They creaked open the barred iron gates next to the store and walked to the backyard.

Grotesque odors wafted from open dumpsters, the decomposing garbage within has probably sat there for days. Puddles of stale water pooled on the ground. The sunlight streaked into the ground, withered the grass, and drove buzzing flies and mosquitoes to breed in a frenzy.

"This takes thirty minutes at most," Lucia grinned. "Then we go back home, and we rest."

"Study for finals," Steph said. "They start next Monday."

"Yeah! Isn't it great?"

"Heh. Yeah." Steph scratched her hair. "You know, it's honestly kind of incredible how positive you are."

"What isn't there to be positive about? Things are only going to get better and better."

"That would be nice," Steph hummed. "But still, it's very refreshing. I never see girls older than three or four months with life behind their eyes. Actually, let me guess when you contracted."

"Are you particularly good at… uh… 'guess the magi contract time'?"

"Not really. But once, this girl from Phoenix guessed when I contracted, down to the exact week. It was crazy stuff. Apparently you can tell from the… the general disposition? Maybe it comes with experience. Maybe I'll know now, from instinct."

"A girl from Phoenix? You sure they were guessing? I think they would have your Magicord data–"

"Oh. Not Phoenix, Arizona. I mean Phoenix, Oregon. Suburb in Medford. Home of the, uh, fucking hazelnut toffee."

"They made Hazel into a nut?"

"Uh… yeah. I guess they did."

Lucia nodded. "What's your opinion on Lucianuts?"

"Stephnuts are way better. Anyway, you were obviously in Pasa before all this karmic shit started going down, so more than three months."

"Fair."

"Three months. That's my guess."

Lucia snorted. "No."

"Four."

"No."

"Five."

"Yeah."

"That's not a common thing," Steph said. "I know people who've contracted for five months. I know myself when I've contracted for five months. They don't care about anything really, finding witches, staying alive. It's nice to see someone who still has their soul."

"Meditating helps," Lucia said. "God does, too. You should really come to a sermon with me tomorrow, if only to see what it's like."

"Maybe. You know how many Christian girls I know?"

"Let me guess. Just me?"

"Six," Steph said. "Including you. Some girls started a church in Medford after I stepped down as leader."

"Were they the nicest girls you've ever met?"

Steph shrugged. "They were just… magical girls, you know? Some were really nice. Some were batshit insane. Oh yeah, this girl. One of the batshit insane ones. She collects incubator bodies. She kills them without messing up the corpse, fluffs them up with cotton and stitches them together into four-head six-legged abominations. She has display cases and everything."

Pause.

"Speaking of the incubator. Isn't it really fucking weird that he didn't show up yesterday, to warn us of you going missing."

"Why would he care about that kind of thing? He probably didn't even follow Pasadena anymore."

"Incubator doesn't follow Pasadena? The highest witch per capita city in the entire world? You sure you've been a magi for five months?"

That was a good point.

"He also takes magi crimes very seriously," Steph said. "There were two girls from Riverside or some other shitty UC city that got kidnapped. Incubator made a whole hoopla. This was pre-Magicord, right after the Disaster in Los Angeles, so he had to go up to every magical girl and physically tell them. I was in Medford and I heard about it."

"Huh. That's pretty cool."

Steph shrugged. "It's super fucking annoying to be honest. Really think a random California psycho would come to Medford, Oregon? It's a waste of time."

"Either way, the incubator collects seeds on Fridays," Lucia said. "So he was here. And he didn't say anything about me going missing?"

"Well, at least we found you. All that matters." Steph shrugged.

On the edge of the yard was a disk. It was black void space, an image of a snowflake on it, spinning slowly about its center. The portal was suspended midair by clouds of opaque black mist orbiting around the edge hypnotically.

On cue, a presence manifested behind her, blowing icy breaths on the back of her neck that made her hair stand up. She heard whispers of sharp, chilly nonsense that drilled into her ear canals like an icicle, freezing her cranial fluid solid.

"So." Steph's teeth clattered. "That wasn't just me, right?"

Lucia stared at the sky, hoping to catch some of the sun's warmth. But the scalding summer sunshine became icy daggers that stabbed through her body. A layer of frost deposited on her skin. It was becoming cold.

They really weren't dressed for this. Lucia wearing summer clothes. Steph had not changed out of her wet PE shirt.

Witch coldness was nothing that magical girl body discipline could do anything about, so Lucia transformed instead. Her steampunk suit was usually decent insulation— but now she might as well have been naked. The cold sneaked through the crevices and seeped into her core.

"Lucia. Remember that, before we got here, we agreed on a witch that was on the weak side? As opposed to, uh, one that's recreationally fucking with the space outside it's labyrinth?"

Steph was right. On closer inspection, the portal bubbled like a vat of boiling water, spewing out streams of white mist into the air. A thin pile of snow was building up around it. The border between this labyrinth and the real world was steadily collapsing.

This witch was powerful.

Lucia heard of powerful witches from niche Magicord stories. From the real veterans, the girls who had survived the Disaster in Los Angeles. It was inevitable that such a witch would come to Pasadena. But, it couldn't have shown up at a more convenient time.

"Well, we wanted an excuse to call a meeting? Now we have one."

Steph nodded.

"We'd need to find another witch for now." Lucia said. "I doubt we can take this one."

"Smaller witches usually gather around these huge labyrinths, to pick off leftover humans from the big ones." Steph said. "There has to be one or two around here. We can clear those off. Then, we do a rescue mission. Try to get all the civs out that we can."

"I don't see any other portals around, though."

"The smaller witches usually hide so the bigger witches don't notice them. For example, you see those puddles?"

"Uh, puddles?"

"It hadn't rained for months." Steph said. "Where could a puddle have come from? Plus, does that look like a normal puddle to you?" There was a half-eaten corn cob sticking out of it. A colony of ants, arranged in a single-file line, was crawling inside.

Steph's arm elongated. The yellow rubber gloves she wore lengthened to contain her arm, the silver patterns continuously morphing into different geometric patterns like a kaleidoscope. Her hand plunged into the puddle.

"Yep, it's a labyrinth. And it's warm. We can fight this one." Steph's face dawned in disgusted realization. "Oh fuck. I just threw up in my mouth a little. This is gross."

"What is it?"

"I can't even– wow. I don't even know how to describe this. Let's fight the witch making everything cold."

"What are you talking about? It can't be that bad." Pause. "Uh, can it?"

"I mean. No. It can't." Steph's arm retracted from the puddle and flailed back into place. There were ants crawling on her hand. She scowled and shook them off. "God. Why did I think it's a good idea to get my hands wet."

"It can't be that bad if we're not being frozen to death."

Steph shrugged. "Guess we'll find out."

Steph sped forward, leaped off the ground, and cannonballed herself into the puddle. There was no splash, nor any other indication that the puddle had been disturbed. But Steph disappeared.

Lucia was alone.

A wave of unease gripped around her chest. Adrenaline pumped in her bloodstream, and the dirty convenience store came into focus around her.

No, Lucia scolded herself. She couldn't be feeling like this. She had a job to do.

Lucia half-ran-half-crawled her way towards the puddle and jumped in.

Hazel expected Maia to mess up. For her act to slip and her mangled thirteen-year-old brain to overwrite all rational thought with whatever thirteen-year-olds thought about– Justin Bieber? Instagram filters? Fashion magazines? But when Maia went ahead and actually messed up, it still felt like someone spitting on her plan, the saliva permeating through the neatly organized printer paper and rendering the neat, handwritten cursive illegible. Fuck! Maia! Fuck!

But at least she was prepared. There were a number of PR stunts she had in reserve in case this kind of thing broke out. Which was not desirable, honestly. It meant she couldn't productively procrastinate herself from solving the bigger issue at hand, which was the plastic box in front of her, emanating an aura of chaos and despair.

The incubator didn't collect seeds yesterday.

That wasn't supposed to happen. Here was how it was normally supposed to be: girls met on Friday, turned in their quota, and the incubator subsequently collected all the seeds from Maia instead of making five trips to five different households. It was a great plan, worked perfectly for months, pioneered by Lucia, the girl who led Pasadena before she did. It was efficiency incarnated.

But the incubator didn't show up.

So here was Hazel, on Saturday, stuck with a non-insulated box full of crystallized despair, emanating an aura of evil over her study. But this went beyond the ruination of the natural order. Magicord (not subforum moderators, Magicord itself) had recently begun suppressing posts containing the keywords "incubator missing", "gone", "grief seed collection", and a variety of other synonyms. Given Magicord was the only way information propagated between magical girl municipalities, this was worrying. There was something wrong and Hazel did not have the energy to deal with this–

"Ring ring ring," rang her phone.

Hazel recognized the number as Abby's. "Hey!"

"Hey Haze. I almost fucking died. That's what's up."

"That sucks. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"I need you to cut up a person for me," Abby said.

Cut up a person. How straightforward. Who would Abby want to cut up, though? Oh wait, she could just ask. "Who?"

"The girl who kidnapped Lucia."

"Important customer huh? Alright I'm coming." She hung up.

Hazel estimated that she was fifth or sixth on the hierarchy of People Who Lucia Called When She Got Kidnapped. It was a rather sad reflection of the progress Hazel made on her Pasadena resolution– that is, to make some friends– especially since on the tier list, she was probably below Chase the Ice Queen, who did nothing except look pretty with her lithe figure, high cheekbones, and heart-shaped face every single meeting. But it seems that she'd chosen her one friend well.

Abby. Lucia's "bestie". Met her before Steph, they're on good terms. Second on the aforementioned hierarchy of People Who Lucia Called When She Got Kidnapped. And if Abby needed help, the first person she'd call was Hazel.

The girl who kidnapped Lucia.

So Lucia was kidnapped. Hazel wasn't surprised– it was a more logical explanation than whatever Steph blubbered the day before. The incubator was a careful king. His simultaneous micromanagement and macromanagement kept magical girl crime rates nonexistent. The odds of Lucia getting kidnapped and the incubator disappearing all at once? Statistically insignificant. Somehow, these events were related.

Given the timeline Steph offered, Lucia was kidnapped at noon yesterday. A cursory search revealed that Magicord began censoring posts after 4pm yesterday. That meant Lucia's kidnapper could not have known the incubator was missing beforehand. No, the incubator put her up to this somehow.

This girl knew something. And now, Hazel was going to be the second person in Pasadena to hear her story (Chase didn't count).

Hazel left the comfy chair in her study, placed her plastic box of crystallized despair in a desk drawer. She wore her nice shoes and took the stairs to the third floor.

Abby and Chase's apartment was enormous. Well, it wasn't, but Abby and Chase seemed to think so, because they made the executive decision to leave a perfectly good bedroom completely unfurnished. Did they not even have any spare junk to dump there? The rest of their apartment was spotless, too. No unwashed dishes in the kitchenette, no dust or crumbs on the tabletops, each cushion perfectly oriented on their assigned segment of the couch. That was why Chase was going to be Hazel's first choice for an assistant if this Pasadena thing ever took off. Unless Abby did all the cleaning. Hazel didn't actually know.

But unfortunately, that perfect immaculacy was unceremoniously interrupted by a supine body sprawling unconscious across Abby and Chase's spare bedroom, secreting body fluids all over the mahogany hardwood floor.

First thought: It was a guy. Weird– magical girls tended not to be guys.

Second thought: Abby did a number on him. The glasses he wore were bent in the middle in an M shape. The supports had been lodged so deep inside his nose it drew blood which bubbled as he breathed. The left lens was a spider web of shattered glass.

"Where's Chase," Hazel said.

"She went to get ice cream. You want some? I could hook you up bestie. They got the good mint chip. Ones without food coloring so it ain't bright radioactive green."

"Sure." Hazel gestured towards the unconscious person. "That's the person you wanted me to cut up?"

"Yeah. Their name was uh– Sofia Robinson. Have you heard of them?"

Hazel had to think. She could remember every Magicord account registered in California with details proportional to their distance from Los Angeles (it was a more productive pastime than reading fashion magazines like Maia), amongst which were a few Sofia and Sophias, no Robinsons, and definitely no Sofia Robinsons. Which made sense– Abby must have looked them up on Magicord already.

Abby spoke. "Under severe mental pressure, Sofia told me they didn't have a Magicord account. But they have a high pain tolerance, so who knows?"

"Their general unconsciousness doesn't credit their– ah, pain tolerance." Hazel said.

"They maxed out their gem. But earlier, Chase did– that to them," Abby gestured at Sofia's head. "And then I possessed them and dialed up the pain the max I could go, and this fucker was still lucid enough to point their gun at Chase and shoot. If I hadn't acted quickly, this would've turned messy."

"That doesn't sound impressive." Broken bones, flesh torn by things that weren't supposed to be there– all physical trauma. Any amateur can suppress the pain, easily.

"No no. Sofia possessed people. Kind of like me. Right now, they're possessing a civvie. That means they don't have magi physiology."

Oh.

Oh.

"But you must have restrained her," Hazel said. "How did she get out of that?"

Abby must have waited this entire conversation for that question. She corrected her slouch and snarled. "Sofia apparently had another ability. I think they could vanish things that they're touching. And Lucia didn't mention it, so I tied them up with fucking zip ties from Home Depot, and she escaped easily and almost killed me."

"That's messed up." Hazel said personably.

"I know right? Steph didn't even have the decency to pick up when I called her. Sent me straight to voicemail. Don't know why I even do anything for them. But maybe it was a good thing, though. If things went any other way, I wouldn't have been able to score their gem."

Abby took out a soul gem from her jacket pocket and tossed it at Hazel.

Hazel caught it instinctively. It was one of the most corrupted that she'd seen– twenty percent of its surface area was a dark maroon color, which flickered like television static. The rest was composed of iridescent black splotches which combined and mitosed at random.

"This magi has threatened one of the residents of our great city. Therefore, interrogating them should be the responsibility of the Pasadena provisional government, including all expenditures incurred therein." Abby winked.

"Did you not secure their gem when you captured them?" Hazel said.

"Well– I couldn't find it then. I stripped them as naked as I could. They didn't have a gem, or anything else a gem could turn into, and if they shoved it up their ass I didn't fucking want it anyway."

"How did you end up finding it?"

"Can't tell you." Abby smirked. "What I found was extraordinary and could potentially revolutionize the science of magical girls. You can read about it in my autumn paper."

"The gem was in their gun, right?"

Abby's smirk disappeared. "How did you–"

"You know I know everything." Hazel deadpanned.

So Sofia knew how hammerspaces worked. Magi who understood gem mechanics well were usually the incubator's lapdogs. It was circumstantial evidence, though. nothing that would hold up in a court of law. But it seemed the prelude to something slightly more damning.

"Well. I've got no more questions. Let us commence." With a flash of light, Hazel transformed. A crown set crooked on her head. Crimson bands of silk zipped around her plain black robe. She held her magical weapon– a flail.

Hazel waved her flail in dramatic yet calculated movements, carving great arcs of silver light in the air that raced towards Sofia's body, sailing clean through it like knives through butter. Disassembled body parts flew through the air– both hands, feet, the flesh around elbows and knees. Sofia's head flew off their neck. But there was no blood, no gore. Hazel's cuts exposed a flat layer of royal purple linen, tiny icons of Hazel's flail embroidered on them with golden silk, shimmering with magic.

"The hands can still crawl," Hazel said. "Too many ligaments for me to disable in a reasonable amount of time. If Sofia doesn't have magi physiology, the hands don't have enough leverage to do anything substantial."

"They can conjure their magical weapon? With their hand?"

Hazel nodded.

"Yeah no. Fuck that. You, er, know about whatever Sofia's using to make things disappear?"

Hazel nodded. "The energy required scales inversely with the surface area in contact with the magi's body. It's difficult, almost impossible, to pocket dimension something you're barely touching."

"Oh! So I was just doing it wrong." Abby pulled out a roll from her pocket. It was massive, rubberized. The casing advertised its AIRCRAFT GRADE ADHESIVE STRENGTH.

"Duct tape is just paper with adhesives. You could store it in a box or something–"

"No, I have an idea."

Abby pried Sofia's hands open and laid them flat against each other, like a high five. Then, she wrapped it with three layers of aircraft grade adhesive strength duct tape. She kept going, peeling off another long stripe not attached to anything,

"That's plenty of surface area. This will really make it uh, not pocket dimensionable?"

Surprisingly elegant. Gah, Hazel should have thought of that herself. Guh. Ghhhk.

"You may now cleanse the gem," Abby said.

From the pockets of her robes, Hazel pulled out her backup grief seed. Hazel hated using her backup grief seed. Their current situation seemed too pedestrian to cause her to be without her backup grief seed. But Abby would owe her for it.

Hazel clinked the seed against Sofia's gem.

"AAAAAAAHHHH!"

The scream cleaved into Hazel. She could feel the pure, unadulterated agony laced within it, the muscles in Sofia's larynx tearing apart. For a second Hazel ceased to function, the blood stopped in her veins, air froze in her windpipe, electric impulses stalled in her myelin–

You tried to hurt Chase, Abby was nowhere to be seen, but her voice, dripping with hatred, echoed through Hazel's head. You smear of shit.

Abby was having an unremarkable conversation. Hazel noticed nothing amiss. But the moment Sofia woke up, some internal switch was flipped, and Abby changed.

Hazel steeled herself. Channeled herself into Abby's telepathy channel.

Enough. I didn't come here to indulge your revenge fantasy.

The screaming stopped. Hazel picked up Sofia's head. They were sobbing, blood-drenched fluids welling up from their eyes and nose and pooling on Hazel's hand. She choked and whimpered. Joints squirmed and flopped like dead fish on the ground.

Oops, Abby telepathied. Hope the neighbors didn't hear.

Amongst other concerns. What exactly were you trying to achieve?

Eh. They deserved it, probably.

"What did you do to me," Sofia's head choked out.

Alright. Hazel banished her fear into a nice brown box of abstracted coping mechanisms and switched to interrogation mode. "It didn't need to come to this," Hazel said. "I'm sure having spatially disconnected appendages is quite disorienting. Worse than being cuffed by zip ties. But you've demonstrated we needed to tighten securities a bit."

"You have my gem," Sofia said. "You have my– no no no. No. No. You can't–"

"My companion is currently suppressing the pain from your injuries so you may give an unbiased testimony. She can alternatively amplify it and make you suffer living hell. It all depends on what you do."

"I– ahhhh," Sofia whimpered, brows contorting in pain. Hazel balled up her other fist to prevent herself from flinching.

"That's what happens. Now, you answer my questions. What is your name? Your Magicord account?"

"I told you. I told you! I don't have a goddamn Magicord account, I didn't even know what the fuck Magicord was until earlier today. Please let me go– I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I attacked, attacked your friend. And I. I'll cooperate, I'll do whatever you want– Please don't– AHH! I'm sorry, I'm sorry–"

Can't hide behind your gem now, can you? Abby cackled.

"What do you actually look like? Can you revert to your original body?"

"My original– original body," Sofia sighed. "I– I don't– I can't. I can't do that. I'm just– I'm just here."

Made sense. No reason for them to inhabit a civie otherwise.

"What city do you hold?"

"Uh, uh– Malibu, I guess– ahh, no, no–" Sofia gritted their teeth as Abby activated her neurons again. "I'm– I'm not lying. You– you have to believe me–"

Malibu. An hour drive from Pasadena, definitely within the Pasadena witch excursion zone. No one could possibly live there, if they made a living killing witches like ninety-nine percent of magical girls.

Abby, stop. I tell you when to zap her, understood?

You're funny Hazel. You're funny! Abby said. Fucking Malibu? No one lives there. Unless you saying that she got to Lucia and decided to, what, set up base there–

Lies usually have some truth in them. We can verify everything they say afterwards!

Sofia shrieked in pain– it was louder than the other times. Hazel flinched– she couldn't help herself. Her hand fumbled and Sofia's head slipped from her grasp– it fell limply like a soccer ball, bounced before rolling to a stop on the hallways.

Then screaming stopped too. The room grew silent, save for Sofia's ragged breathing.

"Why did you attack Lucia," Hazel asked the disemboweled head.

"I– hkk, hkk– I feel like you know the answer, to that question–"

Sofia was interrupted by her own scream in agony. It was hoarse, raspy, and cut out like a bad radio. Her decapitated head squirmed in Hazel's grasp.

She kept screaming. She screamed and screamed until Hazel realized she was laughing.

"You fucking psychopaths," Sofia said with a demented grin. "I'm a fucking CK. The jig is up! Kyubey's had enough! It's Lucia now. Soon it'll be you! Hkkkh, hkknngh–"

The air grew stagnant and dense around Hazel, pressing into her skin like a steel mold, locking her into place.

C–

CK–

Hazel suspected the incubator was involved. She never suspected a fucking bounty.

Her brain tried its best to process this new information and failed. Lucia, a CK target? That idea was fundamentally incompatible with the universe she lived in, like a fourth-dimensional cube, or division by zero. Don't get Hazel wrong, Lucia had her demons. She smiled like she was perpetually posing for a photo. She was running Pasadena to the ground for no clear reason.

"If you're a CK," Hazel said. "Why is Lucia not dead?"

Sofia coughed. Blood bubbled from her nose. "My power. It's kind of like, digesting food, I guess– if I digest someone's c–consciousness fully, you know, I get nutrients. Their powers. If I just kill them, their, their powers fade away."

"You wanted to wait for that to happen," Hazel said. "You were trying to digest Lucia."

Sofia rolled her pupils up to meet Hazel's eyes. "I– I was," Sofia said. "Because Lucia Mount is a fucking psycho bitch and she deserves to burn in hell. Just as you. It's GOOD that you, you found me, fuck–" Sofia's complexion twisted in pain. "My power is painless. My friends will, hkkgh, they'll rip your intestines out and feed your shit back to you, they'll make your bones grow branches and skewer your arm like a sea urchin. You know how your bum is connected to your mouth, I know someone who can do that do the holes on your face, you stick your hand through your ears and your fingers come out through your nostrils like a glove, hahahaha–"

Incubator, Abby said. I know this conversation has got enough keywords to show up in your watchlist forty times over now. Where the fuck are you.

"Kyubey's gone," Sofia said. "He'll be back though. He'll be back, and you'll all pay–"

Abby switched to Hazel's private telepathy channel. This bitch is chipped in the head. They're not a fucking CK and I've had enough. I'm crushing their gem–

Don't, Hazel said.

You can't be telling me that you believe them. Incubator missing? Come the fuck on, you're not this stupid–

The incubator is missing. Hazel said.. He didn't collect grief seeds yesterday, and doesn't respond to summoning. Even if Sofia isn't a CK, the incubator would still have shown up to clarify matters. And look at their powers. Possessing people. That doesn't scream CK to you?

Bounties are reserved for terrible people, Abby said. Serial killers, omnicidal maniacs. Lucia's not that kind of person.

No. Not even remotely. So why was everything adding up?

I know someone who could help, Hazel said.

Someone who could help, you say. Who could possibly help in this situation? What, do you know another CK or something?

Ex-CK, Hazel said. But she'll do.

From her hammerspace, Hazel reclaimed her phone. She scrolled through her endless list of acquaintances and clicked on the name marked Ellen Kaufman. She turned the volume down so Abby and Sofia couldn't hear.

Beep.

Beep.

The line clicked.

"Hey— Hazel! Wasn't expecting you to call."

Ellen sounded relaxed, happy, content, as if there was nothing to worry about. She spoke slowly and steadily, because she wasn't in a hurry. It was something that Hazel wasn't used to hearing.

"Hello," she said. "So, I have someone in my custody. They uh, kidnapped Lucia. You know Lucia, right? They claim they're a CK and that Lucia was a bounty."

"They're lying," Ellen said easily. "If you need to ask if someone's a CK, they're not. If someone in your city got marked for termination, the incubator would tell you."

"I have reasons to credit their claims," Hazel said. "Is there anything that you can do, anything that will make sure–"

"What's their name," Ellen said.

"Sofia."

"Sofia Robin something?"

"Robinson."

Pause.

"There used to be a CK called that." Ellen said. "She stopped taking bounties ages ago. We figured she died."

Ellen's voice did not waver. Hazel's intrusion into her perfect world was of no consequence to her infinite reservoir of peace and tranquility. She radiated carefree indifference that bounced off of Hazel's skin like a mirror. Hazel could live like Ellen. She should leave Pasadena behind and leave it to collapse into the landscape of insanity and death that it was always meant to be. This place was already a lost cause– the incubator disappeared, Lucia apparently had a bounty on her– no one else gave a shit about the city. The writing's on the wall. It's over.

"I'm trying to remember contracts Sofia took," Ellen said. "Remember the Bay Area McBride cult? The incubator initially sent her. Then he sent us when she got captured."

"You've worked together? You know her ability?"

"Naw. We helped her escape and incapacitated Bethie. She went into the arena and the incubator came out, telling us to go home."

"Everyone knows that though," Hazel said. "Everyone who's been around for more than two or three months, anyway."

"Most news coverage on Magicord is fake. Oh yeah, ask her about the room. I know she's been there."

"Room?"

"She'll know which room I'm talking about."

Hazel set the phone down to her sides. She picked up Sofia's disembodied head, trying hard to process as little of their ruined facial features as possible.

"Does the name Bethany McBride mean anything to you?"

"Yeah," Sofia shrugged. "I killed her."

"Tell me about the room," Hazel said.

"The– room?" Sofia's voice faltered. "How do you know about that–"

"Tell me about it."

Turn the pain enchantment back up if you don't want the incubator to disintegrate you. Hazel said to Abby. She's a CK.

Sofia's voice was hoarse and raspy. Liquid bubbled in her throat. "Well, uh, Bethany– she could bend space and time– I think. You could go in a straight line and end up in the same place you were, or you could end up somewhere different– and I fell into the room. One moment I was there, the other I was somewhere else. Like I slipped out from the universe."

Hazel stared at her phone. Willing Ellen to laugh in Sofia's face. But she said nothing.

"It was so restrictive, but there was nothing around me. It was like I was being choked by space– being crushed into, like, a sheet of paper. A singularity. The universe was so small– I could move, but I couldn't jump. I can't describe it."

The story seemed to be finished. Sofia closed her working eye. Hazel brought her phone to her ear.

"Yeah," Ellen said, her voice cheerful as usual. "That's pretty much it. You caught a live one."