Neil excused himself in a rush after his brief hello, apparently needing to use the restroom. Knowing how Lina tended to operate, he was wise to relieve himself now. Once the shooting started, the designer probably wouldn’t let anyone have a break until she was satisfied.

  “You look fired up all of a sudden,” Rika said to Adah after the photographer left.

  “Of course I am,” Adah said. “I feel like we’re back at the IndieMagie. We can’t get a do-over on the competition, but this is like a second chance at the photoshoot we had back then. DreamRise isn’t with us this time, but that almost makes it better. If we’re going to show off for the camera, we couldn’t pick a better photographer than this guy. We’ll get to show him how far we’ve come, and how lucky he was to meet us when we were just a bunch of nobodies.”

  “Just like proving we can destroy a B-Rank alone,” Emi said, her eyes full of the same flame as Adah’s.

  “Exactly,” Adah said. “If we can stun Neil during this shoot, then we’ll know the photos are going to blow away our fans, too.”

  There was no better way to track their progress than a direct point of comparison like this. Maybe Adah had only practiced her modeling a little with Seb, but she was sure that she’d improved at projecting Heartbreak’s character. If she could go back and watch herself at the IndieMagie shoot, she’d probably cringe and draft up a whole list of criticisms for herself. Today was a chance to prove what she’d learned.

  Now Adah was the one in a rush, hurrying ahead of her team into the studio.

  The interior of this studio was arranged differently than the meeting hall had been for the IndieMagie photoshoot. Instead of separated sets spread throughout an empty room, the whole studio seemed designed to be a backdrop for photos. The whole room—from the wallpaper that was made to resemble clean white bricks, to the decor of Victorian-style desks, bookshelves, vanities, chairs, and more—was coordinated around a central theme. The space was like the parlor of some duke’s manor, arranged so that, depending on what direction you pointed the camera, you could capture what appeared to be a bedroom, a dining room, a lounge, or a throne room.

  That last option didn’t quite fit in with the others, but Adah saw no other way to describe it. The most prominent piece of furniture of all—the centerpiece of the whole set—was a pitch black throne positioned against the back wall. The throne was more rugged than regal, like a chunk of meteorite that had crash-landed at this very spot and been roughly carved into a shape that was barely safe to sit on.

  “What do you think of that?” Lina said as she approached Adah with her catlike grin. “A little addition Neil and I put together—something to spice up this set a bit. Consider it a present.”

  “I’m not sure what to do with a present like that,” Adah said.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Lina said with a wink. “But we have no time to waste on chitchat today. It takes one second to snap a photo, so every second we save is another chance at capturing the perfect shot. I’m going to monopolize your time today but, by the end of this all, you will thank me for it. Come on now, let’s get you changed.”

  Lina was serious about saving every second possible; she hurried off toward a door at the right end of the rectangular studio, not bothering to look behind herself to see if the girls were following. With a shrug and one more look at the obsidian throne, Adah led her team to catch up with Lina.

  Upon passing through the doorway, Adah understood why this venue needed all of the space that this warehouse provided. She and her teammates entered into another room about the size of a high school classroom that looked almost like a hair salon. The left and right walls were lined with mirrors, salon chairs, and plenty of fixed and adjustable lights. The far end of the room housed two changing closets like those you’d find at a department store, with space between them to hang enough clothes to fill such a store. The girls’ final outfits awaited them there.

  If every studio space here was as large as the one Neil and Lina had rented, and featured a dressing room of this size on top of that, then it was no wonder the venue itself was massive.

  Inside the dressing room, two fashionable looking women were waiting. They had been in the middle of laying out a plethora of beauty products—makeup, flat irons and curlers for hair, face jewels, and so on. When Adah and her teammates arrived, they both turned to face the girls with a friendly look.

  “Colette and Kritika, say hello to the guests of honor,” Lina said as frantically as she’d been walking, “and say goodbye to the guests of honor. Captain, you come with me. Lover, you go in the other room and undress. I will be with you shortly. My good friends, you can prep the twins’ nails and lashes but please leave the rest for now.”

  The two makeup artists must have been used to Lina’s manic attitude. They greeted Ami and Emi without missing a beat and got them set up in two of the salon chairs before Adah or Rika even made it to the changing closets. After a solemn salute, Rika disappeared into one closet while Adah opened the door to the other. Lina followed close behind, carrying the different pieces of Adah’s outfit by their hangers. Once Lina shut the door behind herself, the soundproofing of the room surprised Adah.

  “Should I transform?” she asked Lina. “Get my horns out?”

  “No, no,” Lina said. “Today, you are not a magical girl. You are a debutante, and the whole world is going to want to ask you for a dance.”

  “Then I’m going to have to turn the whole world down. I’m taken, you know.”

  “That’s what makes you so beautiful, Heartbreak,” Lina said as she inspected Adah’s outfit once more. “You’re out of reach. Just a little too tragic to touch. Too sharp an edge for most. But, if I’ve done my job well, today you may convince your fans to hold out their hands anyway. It’s up to you what you do after that.”

  ☆☆☆

  After what felt like half the day but, according to Grace, was only two hours, all four members of the Last Light were dressed in Lina’s outfits and made up to the designer’s exact specifications. Throughout the whole dressing and makeup process, Lina had hovered over the girls, making sure that every detail matched her vision. Every lock of hair had to curl only as much as Lina wanted; each girl’s eyeliner had to extend only as far as the precise nanometer Lina wanted; and if Lina deemed even a single speck of glitter to be too much, it had to be removed.

  The makeup artists Colette and Kritika seemed accustomed to this degree of micromanagement, as well. Patience was surely a prerequisite for being one of her friends.

  The whole process made Adah feel like a show dog being groomed before an event. Or, with all of Lina’s constant inspections, perhaps a paratrooper having their equipment checked before a jump. In some sense, maybe a magical girl was a cross between the two anyway.

  As stressful as she’d found all this preparation, she had to admire the results. When the four magical girls lined up for a final check-over, Adah hardly recognized any of her teammates.

  Rika’s outfit and her own were the same as they had been the week prior, but now that they had the makeup and hair styling to match, the beauty of each was elevated to a fantastical realm.

  The simple twintails of Heartbreak were left behind, with a portion of Adah’s hair beyond her bangs tied into two sleek braids that looped up and over the ends of a white, crystalline tiara. From there, her hair fell down her back and the sides of her head in clean sheets of black. At a quick glance, this style appeared simple as well, but Adah knew how long Colette had spent arranging the braids just right. In any case, it had the intended effect of transforming Adah into something more princess-like.

  Much of the focus for Rika had been spent on her makeup and the tiny jewels that covered her cheeks. If Rika’s outfit was intended to portray passion, Lina had certainly made sure her makeup matched. Thanks to some intense scarlet shadow and gloss, her eyes seemed to scream all on their own. And while Adah had a few small, white gemstones glued just to the side of her eyes, Rika’s face featured a collection of red jewels, even including a large heart stuck to one of her cheeks. On their own, the gems may have looked ridiculous but, when worn alongside these outfits, they seemed almost as though they belonged on Rika’s face.

  She was, after all, a fairy of a magical girl.

  However, it was the changes to the twins’ outfits that everyone had been most interested in seeing. The core elements all remained—the corset and robe combination up top and the loose, fluttering skirts below—but Lina had taken the designs in completely opposite directions beyond that.

  Emi’s skirt had lost about half its length, now falling just in line with her knees. The new hem was now lined with the same thin, silver chain that accented her veil. Speaking of the veil, Emi had lost that as well. Her hair was now adorned on the right side with a large bow in her accent green. As with all of Lina’s accessories, the bow was decorated to the extreme by countless white rhinestones, as well as several ribbons of black lace that streamed down as far as Emi’s cheek. In the theme of losing fabric, much of the robe cloth that covered her chest and shoulders had been cut away, exposing her collarbones and upper arms in a similar way to Adah and Rika.

  “I had it all backward,” Lina had said upon ushering Emi out of the dressing room. “I had thought you were a secret to be kept, for everyone to carefully sneak a peek of. But no, no, no, that’s not it at all. You can’t hide behind a veil. That was a mistake. I was treating you like a forbidden fruit, a Gorgon—once someone lays eyes upon you, you’ll rip their heart out of their chest. But that’s exactly what you want, isn’t it? You may not think it’s the right fit for you, but you’re longing to be the center of attention. So, we’ll draw them to you. Entrance them. By the time they realize, you’ve already taken what you wanted.”

  Emi had given no hint that she understood what Lina really meant, but the look on her face as she saw herself in the mirror proved that the designer had gotten something right. It was the same unflinching motivation Adah had seen from her that day they fought the lynx Cruelty.

  “As for you,” Lina had said, rolling her hand in Ami’s direction, “there was no need to show everyone what you so clearly are. You don’t need my help with that. What you need is distance. Not a tragic distance, not a lonely distance, but a distance that reinforces love. Far enough apart that those who love you can’t help but long after you so intensely that you can feel it. It’s a distance that breeds faith—a certainty that those who love you will remain with you. For a girl who is always screaming, ‘Here I am,’ we must create an outfit that whispers, ‘Please, come find me.’”

  If anything, Ami had seemed to understand Lina’s meaning even less than her sister, but she looked no less satisfied with the end result.

  Emi’s headdress-veil combo found its way to Ami’s head instead, its sheer curtain draped over the left side of her head. Where Emi’s makeup had been light in volume and vibrant in color, Ami’s was dramatic and dark. Her eyes were lined with a black wing that flowed beyond the outer corners, and the bottom lid shadowed by a purplish red that gave an impression that she had been crying recently. Her lips were a darker hue of red than anyone else on the team as well, adding further gravitas to her face.

  With the amount of cover her outfit provided, and the abundance of black color in the headdress and her lace gloves, Adah’s attention was drawn directly to Ami’s face. The girl’s height made her body into the perfect canvas for this fabric-rich version of Lina’s outfit, but even that had the odd effect of leading an observer’s eye toward Ami herself. As beautiful as the outfit was, your eye chased after the girl wearing it.

  Ami’s bolder makeup had the added effect of intensifying any expression she made—an effect that would only be amplified by a camera lens. Ami appeared to take notice of this as she contorted her face in all sorts of ways in front of the mirror.

  “This may be a challenge for you,” Lina said, “but it will force you beyond your comfort zone. Reveal your heart gently, and be amazed by how far a subtle look can take you.”

  This much, Ami did understand. She began to form shallower expressions, gauging how they looked on her bold new visage.

  “Well,” Lina continued with a clap of her hands, “the hard work is over. The time for fun has begun. Ladies, Neil, I have shown you what is inside my heart, now please return the favor. Enjoy yourselves, hold nothing back, and indulge in the opportunity—for I promise you I will.”