The magical girl lifestyle demands many unexpected indignities, matters not discussed on the BBC or printed in the newspapers — such as lying on one’s back, paralysed by pain, while one’s slowly regenerating flesh squeezes birdshot from within the ruptured meat of one’s heart.

  I feel every inch. Muscle tissue re-knitting, punctured lung sealing up, shards and splinters of shattered rib slipping back into proper positions.

  Little lead balls burrowing out the way they came in.

  “Unnnnghhhh!” I scream as soon as I can draw breath, then dissolve into wheezing and spluttering.

  Pain has been a constant companion for most of my life. The dull remembered pain of physical loss, the muffled pain of medical amputation, the phantom pain of missing limbs. Rehab pain, relapse pain, resentment pain. Hip pain, lower back pain, shoulder pain, all the consequential aches that come with a mismatched pair of prosthetic limbs. Skin rash pain, socket pain, foot pain from lopsided balance before I grew to my full and finally disappointing height. Eye pain, migraine pain, twinges of pain in the severed nerve endings that lie beneath my scar. I thought I’d sampled the whole buffet.

  But being shot through the heart? That’s new.

  Unlike the three bullets from the gun of ‘John Smith’, the clown-girl’s birdshot takes its sweet time crawling back out of my closing flesh. The pain is worse than anything I’d experienced before this whirlwind worst day ever, but it’s nowhere near as bad as being impaled on Scarlet’s ruby sword.

  And it’s not the birdshot that keeps me grounded. That’s just a catalyst; the pellets in my heart set off an echo of that red-hot gemstone edge, like my body remembers the shape of the blade. An aftershock, still buried inside me, still burning and cutting.

  Bone-deep exhaustion settles in as my body heals. It would be so easy to close my eyes, go to sleep right here, on the ground.

  A good way to get eaten by Moon Beasts.

  When the pain finally ebbs down to a manageable level, and I can take a breath without coughing my lungs out, I drag myself to my feet. But I have to go in slow stages. Once upright I’m far from steady. Everything feels heavy, swaying, unstable. The new bullet holes in my side have closed up, slick with blood, shirt stuck to my ribcage; a few lead pellets shake loose from inside my clothes.

  Mounting the steps to the front doors of the lunar fortress takes all the energy I have left. Lifting one foot, then the other, scuffing against the concrete, pulling myself up, step by step, drains some ineffable quality from me that I never knew I possessed until now. So tired I want to drop, put my cheek against the cold ground, close my eyes. Stop thinking. Curl up. Sleep.

  I trudge three-quarters of the way up the stairs, then I stumble.

  Land on my knees, graze my left hand, almost crack my chin. Can’t stop halfway, can’t sleep here, can’t die yet. Crawl on hands and knees. Reach, pull, drag, one step, then another. Legs snagging in my long skirt. Up. Another. Up. Left hand, left knee. Right hand. Right knee. Up. Up.

  The staircase ends in an expanse of mercifully flat concrete.

  Lie on my side. Long as I need. Ground’s cold, but I’m colder. I stare up, at the mad riot of graffiti and spray paint on the face of the fortress, grey concrete blotted out by half-remembered slogans and neon streaks of pink and big swirls of orange and purple and green. Fireworks and rainbows, defying the dark lunar sky.

  “Get up,” I growl. “Stop being a useless child. Get up, Octavia. Get up, you fucking cripple. Get up. You’re going to kill that girl. You’re going to … ” I feel sick. “Just get up.”

  Back to my feet. Steadier this time. Five more minutes on the ground has helped claw back a semblance of consciousness.

  The front doors of the lunar fortress are made from what I’m pretty sure is solid gold. The left side is wedged permanently open with a few pieces of steel pipe, the hinges melted and sagging. The right-hand door was smashed inward long ago, bent completely out of shape, partially embedded in the wall.

  A slogan crowns the doors in faded black paint. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’

  It’s been crossed out in bright pink, amended to: ‘Abandon hope all fucksticks.’

  I shuffle over the threshold, into what was once some kind of reception room or antechamber, with a big space in the rear for a tall desk. Corridors lead off to the left and the right, plugged by more big golden doors, half-battered out of shape and covered in dents. The walls and floor and ceiling are all concrete, but the graffiti here is less creative than outside, just a few perfunctory slashes to brighten up the room.

  Two open doorways straight ahead both lead into a massive open space. Light and sound flickers and burbles from within, a television nattering to itself. I drag myself through the reception room and step over a threshold, into whatever lies beyond.

  Where I promptly stumble to a halt.

  It’s a very big room.

  That’s the limit of my ability to encompass bigness right now; I am too tired, too hungry, too emotionally spent, and in too much residual pain to feel anything so straightforward as awestruck. The space is like a ballroom and an aircraft hangar had a secret baby, then dressed it like a saint, all white concrete held up by matching columns, trying to look like marble but not quite convincing enough, because where would you get marble on the moon? In a theoretical heyday this vast open space would have been the perfect place to hold unsavoury political rallies, or the kinds of upper-class parties where people with unspeakable riches make and break the lives of millions.

  But, whenever that heyday was, the room has since been ravaged and remade. My exhaustion is not so total that I can’t appreciate the meaning of that, even if the style is not to my taste.

  The walls and columns have been graffitied like the outside of the structure — coated in bright colours, slashes of neon coral and glowing rose, sunbursts in apricot and tangerine, great sweeps of verdant olive and emerald, fields of deep violet and waves of turquoise. A massive fifty foot mural of a fanciful lunar sunset dominates a wide section of one wall. One column is coated with thick-lined illustrations of various cartoon animal-girls, gnawing on bones or taking pratfalls or just posing all cute and poised; some are even embracing each other, in ways that would make me blush if I wasn’t so wiped out. Another column has been turned into a rainbow swirl from floor to ceiling, the colours swapping position as they rise, as if somehow sliding through each other without mixing. Half-finished artwork is dotted all over the walls — monkeys playing, cloudscapes in motion, unearthly cities, a raised fist, another fist smashing a helmet, ‘HOME IS DEAD TO ME AND I AM DEAD TO HOME’ in big red letters.

  One section of wall sports a collection of national flags. Real ones, not just paint on concrete. The American Stars and Stripes, upside down, the stars coloured in pink, half the stripes torn away. The Chinese Five-Star, red field splashed with white and green, stars given party hats and crossed out. The Indian tricolour and the Japanese hinomaru, both printed on stiff metal and nailed to the wall, as if they’ve been ripped from machines, the metal scored and marked, flags covered with black scribbles. The Soviet Red Banner stands to one side, also ripped from a metal hide, slashed in half down the middle.

  In the lowest place among the flags lies one so defeated and defaced that the original design is impossible to make out, covered in paint and graffiti and years of cartoon nonsense, save a few scraps of red at the margin.

  Opposite the flags, across the width of the massive room, half a dozen dresses hang from the wall, all of them at once extravagant and yet oddly practical. One of them is very skimpy, two of them are armoured. They’re all ruined, all in different ways; some burned, some cut and torn, some reduced to shreds.

  Unlike the flags, the dresses have not been defaced by paint.

  Approximately one corner of the huge room — mercifully close to the entrance, so I don’t have to stumble far — has been domesticated.

  Thick bright rugs cover the floor, half-ringed by a trio of battered old sofas and a collection of equally ancient armchairs, all gathered around a massive quad-screen television setup, trailing wires into a botched-together entertainment centre, packed with video game consoles and DVD players and other layers of obsolete technology. Beanbag chairs, a trio of coffee tables piled with junk, and various other odds and ends lie all over the place, scattered wherever they were last used. One side of the space is taken up by the innards of a kitchen, frankensteined from different sources — a massive chrome fridge, several bits of mismatched countertop and sink, cupboards ripped from at least three separate places, and an entire kitchen island deposited right on the concrete floor.

  The rear of the dubiously domesticated space gives way to a computer setup for a deranged genius, enough to make even my numbed-out mind twinge with envy. A dozen screens flicker through terminal readouts, multiple towers humming away to themselves, linked together by a jungle of cables, planted on a haphazard assemblage of desks and tables; more devices squat on the floor nearby — 3D printers, CNC machines, a server rack off to one side. Wires trail off into other parts of the structure, vanishing down corridors, climbing a set of distant stairs, hanging from brackets in the ceiling. A high-backed, plush-seated, adjustable swivel-chair stands before the setup, currently empty.

  The only clear thing in the whole place is a huge metal table, standing slightly apart from the chaos.

  And that’s just the stuff I comprehend. There’s more that I don’t: a globe of Earth as wide as I am tall, but all the continents are different; a bookcase with a transparent door on the front, locked and bolted and chained and shoved against one wall, empty of actual books; a big glass tank full of murky green water, with a massively muscled corpse floating inside, skin a rubbery dull grey, face full of tentacles. I’m pretty sure that’s a dead Moon Beast.

  Several zoogs nose through the mess. Real zoogs, with grey fur, long pointy snouts, and pinkish rat-like tails, the larger and meaner Dreamland cousin to the opossum, too easy to mistake for the harmless variety. All of them freeze as I enter; most of them scurry off.

  A big fluffy animal bed occupies pride of place in the wide stretch between the seating and the screens. A pile of zoogs lie asleep inside, tangled up in each other, tails draped over fur and fluff, little claws and flappy ears twitching as they dream.

  Nerys is snuggled down atop the pile, curled on her side, fast asleep.

  The girl in the white dress is sprawled out on one of the sofas, bare feet up on a beanbag, television remote in one hand. She presses a button as I stagger to a stop. The television shuts up, picture frozen on a blurry frame.

  She shoots me a grin, nods to an empty armchair. “Sit down before you fall down, newbie. Anywhere you like.”

  Too numb for questions, too exhausted to care; I had dreams of punching her, but the effort seems impossible now. I shuffle over to the armchair she indicated, pause to check there isn’t a zoog curled up on the seat, then ease myself down into the cushions.

  And.

  I sit.

  Very still.

  For rather a long time.

  The girl watches, a smirk playing behind her mouth.

  I watch her back, but my lips are slack. My whole body wants to give up, go to sleep, fast forward to tomorrow, wake up from this unbroken nightmare. Pain and exhaustion fill my flesh with static, rob me of focus.

  Less than twelve hours ago I was ready to pick up my A-Level results and face a bleak future, a future without Willow. Right now I should be at home, checking which of my university applications have been accepted, based on said results. I should be planning, packing, pleading with Willow. Or, no. Celebrating with Willow? Letting my grandmother know that I haven’t let her down. Thanking the memory of my parents. Crying myself to sleep, because my life was grinding toward a small and quiet end, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Twelve hours later. Neither small nor quiet. Definitely not over.

  So now I’m on the moon, in a mysterious fortress, a wanted dream-criminal, covered in my own blood, sitting beside a terrorist magical girl, who — a scant few minutes ago — shot me through the heart.

  Maybe I am going mad after all. Maybe none of this is happening. Maybe I’m bleeding out on the lunar dirt while the Moon Beasts circle closer.

  Doubt that. Too easy.

  Time passes. Perhaps only seconds, maybe a couple of minutes, maybe a lot longer; I don’t remember closing my eyes, but I do know I’ve just opened them again. The huge room is still here.

  A few zoogs snuffle back out from their hiding places, freeze when they see me, then scuttle away again. Half-glimpsed shadows peer from behind distant columns, then slide out of view when I turn my head, trailing wisps of blue ribbon behind them. The television hums to itself, image still paused on a blurry swirl; the computers hum louder, fans working hard, screens flickering in silence. The lunar wind whispers against the exterior of the structure, distant and low, an odd comfort.

  The girl is still watching me, so I make the effort, pull myself up in the chair, straighten my spine. It takes a couple of goes, but I get there eventually.

  She’s holding back a laugh. I want to reach over and slap her, but she’s too far away, and I’m afraid I’ll fall over if I try.

  “I’m … ” I croak, clear my throat, gesture at myself. “Blood. Bloody. Getting it on your chair.”

  The girl bursts into a giggle-snort. “No worries! Nobody gives a shit about blood, it’ll all get cleaned up. Damn, you’re a fussy one, aren’t you?”

  Northern accent, working class, maybe Manchester. My age, maybe a year or two either side. The big purple birthmark is much more visible now she’s back in her white dress. It stretches ragged fingers from her left cheek, thickens down her throat, spreads wide across her collarbone, then slips away beneath the neckline of her dress. Bright and angry, like a badly healing bruise. Moves when she talks.

  “ … ”

  She snickers. “Don’t look at me like that! Shit, you still mad?”

  “Door,” I grunt.

  “Eh?”

  “Your front door. Door to this. It’s broken. Stuck open.”

  She squints as I talk, then waves a hand. “Pfffft, who cares? Haven’t you noticed this is, like, on the moon? We’re on the moon, bitch! Nobody’s around! Nobody’s ever gonna be around!”

  I slide my gaze over to the big dead Moon Beast in the tank of tainted formaldehyde. “Them?”

  “What, Greg?” She thumbs at the corpse. “Greg’s fine. Greg’s our mate. Aren’t you, Greg?” She addresses the Moon Beast. “Hey, Gregory! This bitch has a problem with you!”

  “ … ”

  She collapses into giggles, squeaking and squawking. “Nah nah nah, I get it, you mean the Moonies. Nah, bugger it, I’ve never even seen one, ‘cept for Gregory here. They’re too shit scared to get close to Plato Base.”

  Plato Base? Was there a crater on the pre-Harding moon named after the philosopher, since drowned by the Dreamland overlap? Is that where I am?

  Too tired to ask.

  Besides, I’d rather not invite further conversation. The girl in the white dress is not a Dreamer, she’s another magical girl, a ‘fellow’ magical girl, whatever that means now. Unfortunately for the both of us she is also the kind of girl that I cannot endure, let alone deal with. She is the kind of girl I slide away from, minimize my responses to, hope she won’t keep going. My sense of humour has always been stiff and brittle, I can’t help but get irritated by this kind of clowning.

  Girls like her don’t last long in England. They smarten up and learn to laugh at only the right things, or they come to the attention of Dream Control.

  But for the first time in my life I’m too worn out, too beyond my comfort zone, too done to care.

  The girl in the white dress scrambles to her feet up on the sofa, breaking back into a big smirk. She puffs out her chest and throws one arm wide, at the mess and the tellies and the pile of sleeping zoogs.

  “Anyway, yeah!” she yells. “Welcome! Octavia, yeah? Cool name, eight-sided name, I like it. Welcome to Plato Base, Octavia. Make yourself at home, it’s yours too now. Unless you’ve got a home to go back to.” She pulls a big comedy wince. “But from what I’ve seen so far, you ain’t. You’re best off hanging with us for a bit. Don’t fret though, right? We’ve all been through it.”

  Shake my head, screw my eyes shut, hard as I can. Force the exhaustion down. Take a deep breath. Open my eyes again.

  Nope, she’s still there.

  “And who am I, you ask?” the girl carries on, patting her own chest with an open hand. “I’m Grimgrave. Between us girls, you can call me Grim. Grimmy if you wanna be real friendly. And hey, you can be! Maybe you’ll get my mundanes later on, if you prove you’re as cool as that scar makes you look. But Grim’s fine for now so—”

  “Nerys,” I say.

  The girl in the white dress — ‘Grimgrave’ — stops, mouth open on her next word.

  “Nerys!” I shout at the fake zoog; shouting makes my vision swirl. “Wake up. Wake up, or I’m going to come over there and punch you through the floor.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Nerys wakes up. Black eyelids flutter, peel back from the glossy obsidian spheres of her eyes, like skin over an ocean of oil. Her tail twitches, then straightens and swishes, scattering droplets of phantasmal goo in her wake, all vanishing before they contribute to the mess. She yawns wide, black tongue and teeth and throat on full display. She wriggles to extricate herself from within the tangle of other zoogs, then navigates her way off the pile, treading on heads and bellies and tails; some of them stir and wake up too, emitting scratchy little complaints in their chitter-chatter voices, snapping at Nerys’ paws as she passes. A few of them spot me and go very still, then scramble free from the pile and scatter, waking yet more of their companions in a sudden chain-reaction.

  One or two raise the alarm — a panting hiss from deep in their throats. The pile of sleeping zoogs explodes with writhing motion. Seconds later it’s been reduced by eighty percent, paws scrabbling across the concrete floor, furry little bodies flying for cover, pinkish tails dragging through the mess. One zoog trips on the corner of a rug and gets all tangled up, then tries to fight the fabric, kicking and biting and hissing; two of its companions skitter back and pull it clear, vanishing behind the computer setup.

  Only a brave few zoog remain in the animal bed, peering over the edge, lined up behind Nerys as she steps clear.

  Nerys stretches her whole body, stubby torso forming an arc between her front and back paws. She yawns big, smacks her coal-black lips, and raises her snout.

  “Octavia,” she rasps, that skritter-scratch zoog chitter mixed with a womanly purr. “Good to see you up and about. Welcome to my home away from home. ‘Scuse the sleeping, but you know how it is after a long day.”

  “You abandoned me,” I say. “Out there. In the open. To wake up alone. No idea where I was. No idea what had happened. You just left. You lied—”

  “And you weren’t listening!” Nerys screeches, “I tried to teach you how to make a translocation portal, but you insisted on your scratch-match with Scarlet Edge. Bitches in heat, glued to each other! If I hadn’t dragged you away, those cat-piss guzzlers would have knocked your head off and pulled out your guts! And I had to go somewhere they couldn’t follow. So!” She snaps her teeth together. “Not like it wasn’t obvious the moment you woke up. And I said no apologies for the destination. Didn’t I? Huh!?”

  Cold water drowns the embers of my anger.

  Nerys is right. She tried to get me to leave, but I just kept fighting, like I couldn’t tear myself away from Scarlet Edge, like the most important thing in the world was smacking that perfectly composed look off her face. What was I thinking? Why did I do that?

  “I … I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re right. I … I kept fighting, when I should have just … run away?”

  “Tch,” Nerys tuts softly, a wet click of her zoog tongue. “Not your fault. You’re all like this. It’s what makes you good magical girls.”

  A wave of cold spreads deep in my chest; I almost died back there, more than once. Why be angry with Nerys? She saved me from getting shot, she gave me a second chance. I was right in the belly of the beast, deep in Dream Control Oxford Headquarters, and she led me to freedom. She pulled me from a grave.

  “I’d be dead without your help,” I murmur. “Wouldn’t I?”

  “Mmhmm, mmhmm!” She puffs herself up, fur bristling, tail rising. “You would be so dead. Extra dead. No gravestone, no take-backs!”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you, Nerys. I still don’t understand, well, any of this, but thank you.”

  Nerys looks very smug. “You’re welcome.”

  Several of the zoogs behind her let out a chorus of soft hissing.

  “But,” I add, “that’s not my complaint. You brought me here, thank you for that, but then you left me out there, bleeding, unconscious, on the moon. Anything could have happened to me. A Moon Beast could have come along, or a … a … ”

  Grimgrave bursts into a fresh peal of giggles. She bounces from foot to foot up on the sofa, messy brown hair swaying, one hand shooting into the air. “She went for help, actually! Came home to check if anybody could carry you in. You think a zoog could drag you all that way? Come on, she’s teeny!”

  “Nerys isn’t really a zoog—”

  The line of zoogs behind Nerys explode into chittering and rasping, zoog outrage mixed with snippets of mangled English: “—ours ours ours—”, “—nasty downtalk magical hagfuck—”, “—is too! Is too!”

  They cut off instantly the moment I look at them, quivering and shaking, quickly retreating down into the interior of the animal bed. One zoog pops back up, hisses loudly, then retreats again.

  Nerys rasps with zoog laughter. “I take no offence, but my kind might.”

  “Yeah, like, Nerys is totally a zoog,” Grimgrave says. “At least in all the ways that really matter, right? So she came on in and found me! Which was lucky, lucky, lucky, ‘cos I’m the only one home right now. ‘Cept Tissy, but she doesn’t count.” Grimgrave breaks into that maniac grin again, at about fifty percent power. “And I insisted you get a proper initiation.”

  She mimes loading a shotgun, aiming it at my face, and pulling the trigger.

  “Initiation,” I echo.

  “Yeah, like! No hard feelings, right? I got worse back when it was me. I spared you some real shit, you know? That was just a love tap. Didn’t know you’d be so low on juice or I’d have put the shot in your leg or some—”

  “Initiation into what? Into what!?” Anger comes roaring back. Down on the floor, Nerys opens her mouth to answer, but I’m still shouting at ‘Grimgrave’ — what an absurd name. “And you! You … ”

  I grip the arms of the chair and try to stand up, get halfway there, can’t quite make it.

  Nerys rasps, “Down, girl, down! You’re running on fumes.”

  Grimgrave giggles. “You still mad? Mad I shot you? Mad I dodged your punch? What are you gonna do about it, fisto? Shove it up my arse?” She wiggles her hips sideways and slaps her own backside, white dress swaying about her calves. “‘Cos I can take both fists and swallow you whole—”

  “Your bomb,” I say. The anger goes cold, like my voice, like a bag of ice in my guts. “Your bomb burned my best friend. My … ” I swallow, mouth still tastes of blood. “She’s in hospital, because of you. And I can’t contact her. I can’t visit her. I don’t know if she’s even … ”

  “Pfffffffffft,” Grimgrave snorts. “You’ll make new friends. Look!” She spreads her arms. “You already are!”

  I ease my aching frame back down into the chair. But I keep my spine very straight, hands on the armrests, feet flat on the floor. I stare at ‘Grimgrave’, picturing my prosthetic fist crashing into her face.

  If Willow is …

  Can’t even think it. But if. If. Then I will have revenge. Willow’s revenge.

  Grimgrave tries to fuel her grin, to reignite her clowning, but she flickers and gutters. Her mirth goes out, snuffed by gritted teeth, eyes shifting sideways, furrows in her pale brow. She stops bouncing. She clutches her arms around herself.

  Suddenly she’s vulnerable, a young woman in a thin white dress, nothing more.

  “Fuck!” she spits, then hops down off the sofa and starts to pace back and forth between the seats and the televisions. “Okay, okay, look! I didn’t mean for the bomb to hurt anybody, alright? I mean, nobody but the Trio, not like, ordinary people. I didn’t mean for it to go off like that. I screwed up.”

  “You threw a bomb. In a crowd.”

  “I know!” Grimgrave spins toward me. Her face is white as a sheet and her throat keeps bobbing. “I had one fucking chance! One chance, one opening to get those cunts in front of everybody, absolutely everybody! The whole country would have seen, ‘cos everybody was out there, it was just a few polyps, and … fuck! I fucking panicked, alright?! I thought Scarlet was further out than she was, higher up, shit like that. I should have aimed for one of the other two. But another couple of seconds out there in the open and they would have spotted me, and I was doing it alone, and then … ” She looks away again, hugs herself tighter. “I screwed up, alright? Sorry about your friend or whatever. Hope she’s, like … not dead. I mean, I’m sure she’s not dead. Right.”

  Grimgrave kicks at a beanbag chair. The zoogs in the animal bed follow her with their snouts. One of them paws at the air, as if reaching for her.

  I do not have the emotional bandwidth to carry this girl’s weight.

  She gestures at the telly with one elbow. “News won’t say if there were any deaths. Were there any kids in the crowd? I didn’t, like, check first. I didn’t kill a kid, did I? Fuck … ”

  “That’s on you,” I say.

  Grimgrave looks up at me, foolery drowned in desolation.

  I thought it might feel good to rub her face in what she did, for Willow’s sake. But I just feel vaguely sick.

  Nerys smacks her lips. “Sure as sure there weren’t any kids.” She purrs the words, a zoog rasp dropping low. “You humans don’t let your kids get too close to fights, think it’ll scar them. The sirens were going off for ages. And the bomb was mostly for effect, nobody will be dead. Burns, bruises, scratches, sure. But not dead. Not Octavia’s friend, either. No dead. My guarantee.”

  Grimgrave sighs through gritted teeth. “But they won’t say! The BBC, Sky, channel 4, nobody! They won’t say shit, and that might mean anything, it might mean there were like, little kids and shit, and I didn’t mean to—”

  “Patience,” Nerys rasps. “Stop and breathe.”

  Grimgrave’s distress twists into girlish outrage, horror gone, irritation paramount. “Hey!” she yells at Nerys, but points at me. “Newbie right there! Nerys, shut up!”

  “You know her mundane name,” Nerys purrs. “Only fair she knows yours. Equality among the lost.”

  “Y-yeah, but … ”

  “Octavia Carter, meet Patience Graves.” Nerys tilts her head to indicate ‘Grimgrave’. “Patience was my most recent candidate, prior to you. Patience, you’ve met Octavia, but now it’s all polite and formal, all that junk you humans love so much. There.” Nerys settles down against the floor, tail slowly swaying back and forth. “Now you’ve been properly introduced.”

  Patience Graves crosses her arms and rolls her eyes, then looks at me for one stiff and silent second, as if I’ve done her an injury. “Grimgrave, Grim, or Grimmy,” she says. “Graves if you really fucking must. But don’t call me Patience. ‘Cos I ain’t got much of that.”

  “Or what?” I can’t help myself. She blew up Willow. I want to hurt her.

  “Or … or I guess we can’t be friends?”

  My lips start to form a ‘p’.

  But Miss Graves here didn’t stare at my partial facial paralysis, either at first, or when she had me at her mercy, down on the lunar soil in a pool of my own blood. Nor did she comment on my prosthetic limbs. She did first shoot me in the heart, but maybe that means something different for a magical girl, seeing as I’m still alive.

  She looked at my scar and said I look cool.

  I don’t want to be her friend. The only friend I’ve ever had is Willow, and Patience almost blew her up. But she has shown me respect.

  “Graves,” I say.

  Patience looks away, swallows hard, seems hurt. She can’t be serious? She shot me through the heart, and now she wants to be friends?

  She kicks at the beanbag chair. “What do I call you, then? Occy?”

  “No,” I grunt.

  “Fine, fine. What’s your true name, then?”

  “True name?”

  “Your magical girl name?” Patience blinks at me. “Shit. You haven’t even, like, got that?”

  Nerys hisses between her obsidian teeth. “Octavia has no true name, no transformation, nothing but the fist. Yet.”

  Patience boggles at Nerys, then throws her arms out wide. “What!? She’s not even awake? Nerys, whaaaaat? What are you doing, hey?”

  Nerys makes a very authentic zoog gurgle, wet and throaty; I think she’s offended. “It was this or let her die, Grimmy. No time to let her ripen on her own, no time to let her dream. No time, no time, that’s what the human world is like these days, never any fucking time! And I’m not some piss-stinking cat. I save my own.”

  The zoogs in the animal bed agree, soft hisses and raspy noises floating up from within.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” says Patience. “But like, she’s got nothing? Nothing at all? ‘Cept the fist?”

  Nerys hisses a tiny sigh. “I showed her myself, that’s all. Give her a night or two of decent sleep up here, that’ll start the process. Speaking of! Grimmy. You feed her yet?”

  “Oh!” Patience perks up with a burst of giggles. “Shit, haha! I’m a shitty host, yeah! Sec sec sec!”

  She scurries off across the mess, to the jumble of kitchen fittings haphazardly plugged into one wall. She grabs a glass and fills it from the sink, then hops back over to me and holds it out.

  Faced with fluid, I suddenly realise my own deathly thirst.

  I grab the glass left handed, not feeling too confident about those bent fingers on my prosthetic. The water tastes like it’s full of minerals, but it is water, clear and cool, not Dreamlands moon-gunk, not gritty with pre-Harding lunar regolith. Drained in seconds, I thrust it back at her.

  “More,” I grunt.

  Patience takes the glass and bounces back off, messy mane swaying as she goes. We repeat this absurd ritual three more times, until I feel a little nauseated from all the liquid sloshing in my stomach. On the final trip Patience throws open the fridge and extracts a greasy paper bag. She returns, balances the bag on the arm of my chair, and folds it open. A pair of chicken strips lie alongside some soggy, sad-looking chips.

  “My leftovers!” she says. “Tissy’ll whip up some proper food for you later, but she’s shy, probably playing with herself right now.” She turns her head and yells into the vast space of the massive room. “Tistis!”

  Echoes.

  “Later, later,” Nerys rasps. “She doesn’t like new faces.”

  I put a few cold chips into my mouth, chew slowly, swallow, feel even more nauseous. Patience steps back to watch, like this is one of the greatest things she’s ever seen.

  “Shit, girl,” she says, grinning wide. “You went a round with Scarlet, no transformation, with nothing but your metal fist there?”

  “Carbon fibre.”

  “Eh?” Patience tilts her head back and forth, a puppy with excess energy.

  “Carbon fibre. My prosthetic.” I lift my arm. “Carbon fibre, foam, motors. It’s not metal. Mostly.”

  Patience gapes at me, eyes wide and twinkling inside. “You get that’s even cooler, yeah? Ohhh shit yeah. We’ve got a robot girl! We fucking own, haha!”

  “I’m not a robot. Don’t call me that.”

  “Yeah, cool!”

  Nerys purrs, “Octavia has much potential.”

  I screw my eyes shut for a long moment, squeeze hard as I can, sinking into the darkness behind my own lids, the swirling hallucinatory chaos of false colours as I increase interocular pressure.

  When I open them again, the massive room is still there, along with Patience and Nerys, a dead Moon Beast in a tank, and half a dozen zoogs cowering in a dog bed.

  “Who are you?” I say, then hold up my prosthetic hand. “Not your name. Not that you’re a magical girl. You know what I mean. Who are you people, what is this? What is all of this? You throw bombs at magical girls, you live in a fortress on the moon, and—”

  “And now you’re one of us!” Patience cheers.

  I cut her off with a swipe of my hand. “A simple answer. Please.”

  Patience shrugs. “Didn’t Nerys tell you?”

  “No time,” Nerys rasps. “Had to run.”

  Patience lights up slowly, mouth moving in silence, suddenly too excited to get a single word up her own throat. I sigh and resist the urge to put my face in one hand.

  Nerys chitters, “Signal explains best. Grimmy, wait ‘til Bright and Signal—”

  “We’re the girls who are gonna end the world,” says Patience.

  Nerys pulls her lips back from her black teeth and rasps with smirking laughter, shaking her head like this is a bad joke. The zoogs down in the animal bed join in, a hissing chorus of tiny cheers.

  I stare, waiting for more, expecting nothing but nonsense.

  Patience recovers. “Or maybe I should say like, ‘we’re the revolution’? Nah, that shit sounds so dumb. Revolutions need lots of people and stuff. We’re … we’re outlaws and pariahs and hooligan bitches. Yeah, that’s more like it.” She grins again. “We’re gonna tear it all down, ‘cos it doesn’t deserve to exist anymore. You get that too, you must do, ‘cos otherwise Nerys wouldn’ta picked you? Yeah.” She glances at Nerys; the zoog-goddess nods, warming as Patience speaks. “Yeah! We’re magical girls from the underworld, and we’re gonna smash England’s chains. The chains on the whole fucking world! Fuck the King, and fuck parliament too! Fuck all the magical girls who serve the system, them especially, right?! Fuck the police, and the courts, and all that other shit. But most of all?” She pauses, grinning wider. “Fuck Dream Control!” she roars. “Fuck ‘em dead!”

  She throws a fist in the air, then the other, showing all her teeth in a full-power maniacal grin.

  I try to keep in mind that this girl bombed Willow.

  “Fuck Dream Control,” I echo.

  I’ve never said those words out loud before. I feel light-headed.

  Patience — no, Grim, nods. “You get it, you totally get it! It’s confusing right now, yeah, but it’s gonna be cool, really. Now that we’ve got a fourth, we can really get started.”

  “None of this answers what you actually are,” I say with a sigh.

  Grim shrugs. “We don’t have a name or nothing. Not yet, I mean. Not official like. There’s old names, but that’s unlucky and shit, so … yeah.”

  Nerys says, “Bright suggested—”

  “Pffffft.” Grim blows a raspberry at Nerys. “Bright can’t name for shit because she’s a stupid bitch with her head up her arse. And Signal probably thinks we should be named some crap like ecks-ecks-four-twenty-one-winged-angel-ecks-ecks written out in leetspeak. We don’t have a name yet, Nerys. And now there’s another vote!” She gestures at me. “See?”

  Nerys peels back her lips in a zoog-faced zipper smile, grinning up at Grim. “Your choice, your choice, not mine!”

  “Bright?” I echo with another sigh. “Signal?”

  “The rest of us,” Grim says. “It’s cool, they’re not in right now, they’re down on Earth. They’ll both be around in the morning, bet.”

  “Nerys,” I say. “Give me a simple explanation. Like you did back in the interrogation room. What is all this?”

  Nerys turns her zipper-smile on me. “You want another scare, huh?”

  “I’m too tired to care.”

  Nerys raises her snout and looks distinctly satisfied. Her beady, oil-slick eyes widen. Her long tail goes straight and stiff with pride. The zoogs in the animal bed peer up over the edge behind her.

  “This,” she rasps, “is the first time in over twenty years that my girls have outnumbered the Trio of Albion. First time I’ve held onto four of you without somebody dying or wandering off into the Dream or … ” She pauses. “Forget that bit, because it’s not going to happen again. This time, we get to win.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of you before?” I ask. “Or of any other magical girls who don’t work on the side of humanity?”

  Nerys snorts, “Implying we’re not!”

  Grim frowns and pouts, big and obvious. She thumps her chest with one fist. “We’re not the bad guys here! You heard what I said, Occy. Fuck Dream Control! Free England!”

  “Very noble, but that doesn’t answer the question.”

  “You haven’t heard of me because my foothold in the waking world is very small,” says Nerys. “Because I am a small god, easily crushed beneath the weight of others. And the ones keeping you in bondage are leviathans, not little, not like me.”

  “And because nobody wants to believe we exist,” Grim says. “Scary thought, right? Magical girls who aren’t toeing the line? Imagine what people would think! What they’d ask, what they’d do!”

  “Besides.” Nerys adopts a sly smile. “I am not the only one attempting to free you great loafing apes. But I am having the most success.”

  “Success?” I croak. “Blowing up a crowd. And by the sounds of it, losing a lot of ‘your girls’. Twenty years of … what, repeated failure?”

  Grim suddenly beams wide, showing all her teeth again. “Occy, you ain’t got no idea. We’ve been everywhere these last six months. Just ‘cos they keep us off the news don’t mean it’s not happening. We’ve been helping Dreamers escape before Control can get ‘em—”

  “What?” I blink, amazed.

  “We’ve been hitting other magical girls whenever we can,” she carries right on. “Pearlescent Cloud, up in Scotland, the thing with the ‘gas explosion’ that took her out for a week? That was us! Gas explosion my fucked arse! Bliss in Norwich, Dragonscale in Birmingham, that was us too, and they can’t even talk about it, because the government is shit scared of us. We’ve hit the Trio four times, hit and run style. Those bitches are looking over their shoulders now. The breakout from I&O Manchester, those three people on the run? That was us. They won’t even report on the other ones we’ve done, pretending it didn’t happen. We’ve hit two DC Ministry guys, killed ‘em! We shifted a zoog colony in the New Forest before the pigs could gas it. We’ve been talking to Ghouls deep under London, rogue occultists in the Highlands and Wales. We’ve been talking to the fucking Opposition. They’re real, you know, and there’s plenty of them—”

  Nerys makes a sharp gurgling sound.

  Grim cuts herself off, then stomps one bare foot. “She’s one of us, Nerys! What, do you expect us not to say shit to her?”

  “Later, Grimmy, later. She can hear it later. She’s ready to drop, too tired for this. Aren’t you, Octavia?”

  Grim rolls her eyes. “Hear it from Signal. Yeah, yeah.”

  I hold up my prosthetic hand, one finger raised, to shut Nerys up. It’s such a rude gesture, one I would never have used before today. If I was even a fraction less exhausted, I wouldn’t do it. But it works; I’ll have to remember that.

  “No,” I say. “I want to hear more. Gra— Grim. The bombing today, what was the point of that? Why do it?”

  Grim tilts her chin up, beaming with pride. “To show that not everyone loves those bitches. Do something the censors can’t scrub out. Show ‘em we’re here. Couldn’t cover up that shit! Ha!”

  Her bark of laughter echoes off into the vast empty room. A moment of silence descends. Her grin falters.

  “Not enough.”

  “Eh?” Grim frowns. “Wassat mean?”

  I shake my head, more to myself than her. Good question; what do I mean? What am I saying? Where are these notions coming from? But the words crawl from me, slow and inexorable.

  “One bomb isn’t enough. The public have seen the Trio in all sorts of dire situations, that’s why they’re on the news so much, why there’s documentaries, cartoons, everything. For all the magical girls, not just them. A single bomb, really? Scarlet Edge was healed up within an hour or two. She even had a fresh dress. I know that, because I saw it.” I sniff hard, feeling like there’s blood stuck in my nose. I pause to eat a single cold chip, chewing slowly. Grim doesn’t interrupt, and I question once again if this is even real. I am giving strategic advice to a magical terrorist in her secret hideout on the moon. But the words keep coming. “If you want to change public perception, you need to attack the Trio head-on, even if you don’t win. You need to get yourself … yourselves, on the cameras, on the news, do something showy and flashy. Not something that kills a bunch of people and blows up a crowd. You need to attack a magical girl, in broad daylight, as a magical girl.”

  Like I did. Like I punched Scarlet Edge in the gut, and stood tall, and laughed like a fairytale witch. I don’t say that part out loud.

  As soon as I finish speaking, the words seem absurd. I sigh and shake my head, dismissing everything I just said.

  “Forget it,” I say. “Forget I said that, it’s all stupid, it won’t solve anything.”

  “Yeah!” Grim says, lighting back up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah! That’s what Bright keeps saying! Bright and Signal, you can meet them tomorrow. And hey, maybe she’s right, maybe you’re right. Now we’ve got four, we’re strong! Maybe it can happen at last. Maybe we can do something real, get ourselves out there, so the world can’t ignore us any longer!”

  “Debut,” I croak, then almost laugh at the absurdity of it. “Post yourselves on Youtube.”

  “Hurrrrk,” Nerys rasps from down on the floor. “I’m calling everyone together, here, tomorrow morning. This requires discussioning!”

  “Morning?” I croak. “Morning on the moon?”

  “Morning GMT!” says Grim. “Plato Base is free England now, all that’s left of her. Government in exile, that’s us.”

  I sigh and shake my head; none of this feels real, a provisional nightmare that will lift when I wake.

  “What is this all for?” I ask. “All of this, to achieve what?”

  “I told you!” Grim laughs. “We’re gonna break the chains on England’s heart!”

  “And what about Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland?” I ask. “Do they get to come too?”

  Grim rolls her eyes. “Duh! Yeah! That’s what I meant. I mean, like … ” She blinks a couple of times. “If they want?”

  “Octavia,” says Nerys.

  Nerys stands up.

  She’s no longer the zoog crouched on the floor. Nerys the Dream-Goddess fills the room, towering over me, framed by a landscape of carrion and smog and the lapping tides of an oil-dark sea, a million zoogs swarming around her feet. Her wasted body hunches over, draped in pale patchwork leather, her scarred face as wide as the moon itself. Her blood-flecked teeth part in a stained smile.

  “You ask what all this is for, Octavia?” she says, reaching for my face, cupping my cheek in one bony, callused hand. “To give the waking world what it deserves. Freedom to Dream.”

  I’m too exhausted for fear.

  “What’s in it for you, dream-thing?”

  Nerys laughs, a high-pitched carrion-god laugh, full of meat and bone.

  “You humans,” she purrs. “Is it really so hard to believe that I think you’re worth the trouble?”

  Maidens all it needs, as much narrative space per chapter as these girls demand. It's going well!

  Grimgrave as a marketable plushie, (by chimera-like creature!) Very amused by this! Perhaps I should try to get one made. I've also updated the with an absolute bucketload of new stuff made by readers, if you feel like a giggle yourself.

  Maidens right away, you can:

  Maidens of the Fall is for all of you! Thank you!