The hospital room was silent, and there was no light in the eyes of the faces that looked down at Emi.

  She was stable for now, unconscious but her body maintained by a constant flow of her mascot’s magic. Moon would have to stay with her until he could fully undo the effects of her injury, as the affliction caused by a Cruelty wound persisted long after the initial damage. The treatment took the form of an iridescent glow that covered her shoulder like a patch of gauze. The seahorse had been by Emi’s side for a day and a half straight to keep up the magic, but the rest of the team had only been allowed to visit this morning.

  The three other magical girls and their mascots, as well as Grace and Michel, gathered in Emi’s hospital room. None of them had spoken much at all since the day of that mission, except for Ami asking any passing doctor or nurse when she could see her sister. She had spent the night after the mission camped out in the hospital lounge, as well as the night after that, until finally they were allowed to see Emi the next morning. Adah and Rika had brought Ami food from the dorm on the second day, but had no sense of if she actually ate any of it.

  Now she knelt at her sister’s bedside, her own injuries a stark contrast to Emi’s. Miraculously, her shield had withstood the entirety of the whip’s impact, leaving her with only manageable lacerations caused by flying debris. When the smoke had cleared, Ami lay unconscious in the dirt and Emi… well, to put it simply, she was unresponsive. Unable to do much of anything for them at that point, Adah had called for an emergency response. The farmhand never showed, and Adah didn’t want to stray too far from the twins to look for him.

  Given how things looked toward the end, they had all gotten lucky. The incredible outcome left Adah with some questions about what Ami had done to protect herself, but now was not the time to ask either Ami or her mascot. Besides, she had no trouble putting her curiosity aside to simply be grateful they made it out alive.

  They all had another priority before conducting a full debrief, anyway.

  Grace was the first of them after Ami to step nearer Emi’s bedside. She took a good look at the girl’s face, which twitched intermittently as if caught in an intense nightmare. Emi had been in a similar state after Adah’s attack, though she had seemed to be half-awake back then. Her state was akin to shock, at least from an onlooker like Adah’s perspective. It was difficult to fathom what exactly she was enduring.

  Although Emi’s shoulder was covered by a persisting magical field now, Adah had gotten a good look at her wound back at the farm and struggled to shake the memory from her mind. Again, it really couldn’t be called a “wound.” Where Emi’s shoulder should have been, and all the sinew and bone and blood it consisted of, existed only a swirling black abyss. The edges where that blackness met the rest of her body were in a state of dematerialization. Scraps of flesh drifted away from the rest of her body and floated freely, and would have vanished into the hole of the abyss if Moon’s magic hadn’t stalled the deterioration of Emi’s being. Without that magic, the existence known as “Emi” would have been consumed entirely.

  While Emi’s mascot could intervene in her deterioration, it would be some time before the damage was reversed and she fully recovered. As a manager of magical girls, Grace knew all of this too, and understood as well as any of them could what Emi was going through. As she looked closer at the girl, Grace’s face contorted in a way Adah had never seen, like a head-on collision of anger and pain. She dug her nails into both legs through her jeans. A moment later, she shut her eyes, turned around, and dashed out of the room. Michel went to follow her out, giving the girls a consoling smile so weak it barely moved his face.

  Adah felt her heartbeat spike after watching Grace, and her own chest was a tangle of red hot emotions that seemed to pull itself even tighter as she worked at the knot. She took several deep breaths, although no matter how slowly she exhaled, they only served to make her lightheaded and dizzy.

  Just when she felt she could topple over, Rika came close and grabbed her hand. Rika’s hand was clammy, but Adah held it tight. Surely her own hands felt the same.

  At this point, only the magical girls and their mascots remained in the room. The latter group silently vanished with their magic, sensing the girls would rather be alone, except of course for Moon, who hovered near Emi’s shoulder as he treated her. Ami remained kneeling, her eyes frozen in place as she watched her sister’s face. With the overwhelming atmosphere, and being so isolated from everyone else in the room, Adah felt she could faze out of existence any moment. If for no other reason than to bring everyone closer together physically, she walked up behind Ami, taking Rika with her.

  To her surprise, Rika was the first to break the silence.

  “I’m sorry, Ami,” she said.

  Ami didn’t answer for what felt like minutes, until she finally shook her head slowly and asked, “For what?”

  Rika’s own grip tightened on Adah’s hand.

  “If I had been with you guys… I don’t know.”

  “There’s only one person to blame,” Ami said without looking back. “I’m supposed to be her shield. I’m supposed to protect her—that’s my only job, and I fucked it up.”

  Rika glanced at her free hand, then back at Ami. It was clear what she was thinking, and equally clear that she could never say it.

  “You did protect her,” Adah said as a chasm of silence grew between the other girls. “If you hadn’t told me to attack, and hadn’t kept her safe when I did, maybe none of us would have made it back.”

  If anything was to blame, it was a pair of chance occurrences beyond anyone’s control.

  Adah had replayed the battle in her mind ever since, wondering if she could have handled it differently. Would it have been better to abandon the mission entirely and escort the boy out? They would have had to call in a rapid response from another agency, and there was a chance the Cruelties would have finished with the cattle and split into multiple packs before the other team arrived. Then it would have become a challenge of tracking down several groups of Cruelties, each with the opportunity to cause further damage.

  Every option seemed bad in its own way, but the option Adah had chosen was the one she had to live with. The what-ifs of other scenarios soon faded from her mind, but she couldn’t daydream the white lights or sterile smell of this hospital room away.

  At some point while thinking, Adah had let go of Rika’s hand in order to crouch down next to Ami and wrap an arm around her shoulders. Her body was unusually warm—likely she had a fever from the stress and sleepless nights.

  Rika stayed standing, but said, “Yeah, it was the kind of story you only read about. Three true magical girls looking out for each other and saving the innocent. You guys were a real team out there.”

  Adah tried to share a smile with Ami, but she was still watching her sister with uninterrupted intent.

  “If it’s all right, though, I’m going to check on Grace real quick,” Rika said in a tone Adah hadn’t heard from her before. “I’ll… well, I’ll be right back.”

  Her odd tone of voice caught Adah a little off-guard, so she was slow to understand what Rika meant. By the time she looked behind her and called out the other girl’s name, she was already out the door. She nearly stood up to go after Rika, but stopped herself. She couldn’t very well leave Ami alone either.

  Perhaps prompted by Rika’s leaving, Ami stood up and cleared her throat. Adah followed suit, trying to catch a glimpse of Ami’s face without being too obvious. While they certainly weren’t strangers, she had a tough time understanding what the twins were feeling sometimes.

  “I’m not giving up,” Ami said out of nowhere. “Neither will she, I’m sure about that.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Adah asked her what she meant. At last Ami turned to face her; she had a stoic and resolute look on her face.

  “Our goal: taking on a C-Rank, getting our weapons, and more than that. This isn’t going to stop us. At least, it will never stop Emi, which means it can’t stop me. So if you were thinking about slowing down or taking a break—that’s not gonna happen.”

  Adah saw one more detail in Ami’s face towards the end of her words: a pleading.

  Ami’s words from a couple of days ago replayed in Adah’s mind—about how she’d begun to act like a captain for them. To be honest, she hadn’t ever considered that the twins might look to her for direction until Ami mentioned it. Maybe that was awfully self-centered of her. Maybe she had been too busy feeling sorry for herself to stop and think about what the younger girls were feeling, which only made it worse.

  She couldn’t undo what happened in the past. But what she realized now, as Ami looked to her with an unblinking gaze, was that they still wanted her to fill that role. Perhaps more importantly, they still thought she could. They hadn’t given up on themselves or Adah.

  That was the other side of the coin when it came to their dreams. The conversation about starting over she had with Rika and the conversation about trying to save the agency she had with the twins—those weren’t the words of someone well on the way to their dreams, of someone who had never considered quitting. Only someone who had gotten tired of walking down a long road, who had more than once looked back over their shoulder and thought about turning around, could understand those conversations.

  I’d like to see at least one of us succeed.

  Emi at least has a brighter future.

  “At least” was the last thread every weary dreamer held onto. “At least” was what kept them taking that next step forward. It was the last hope of those who had failed too many times to count, and the one thing all the girls at the agency had in common. That’s why Adah understood what that look on Ami’s face really meant. She was determined to believe in something, someone, that could make at least one dream come true.

  “Why did you want to become a magical girl, Ami?” Adah asked her.

  Ami had to pause and think. After furrowing her brow and biting her cheek a while, she eventually answered, “Well, Emi is the one who actually wanted to be one. I just followed her, thinking it’d be fun to fight together. And I was right, she’s the coolest magical girl in the world when we’re fighting. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Adah said. “I’m curious, though, if that’s really all there is to it.”

  Ami’s face brightened and her expression lifted, though she didn’t quite smile yet.

  “That’s more than enough,” she said. “One day, the whole world’s gonna understand. Raindrop will put every other girl to shame—no offense. But what about you?”

  “Me?” Adah parroted.

  “Yeah, why did you become a magical girl?”

  For some reason, Adah’s face started heating up like a steel pan on a gas burner.

  “Ah, you know, I think it’s more of a feeling than something I can put into words. Like it’s the kind of feeling that doesn’t have a name or something?” she delayed as best she could but ultimately found no viable escape route. She said the rest in a small voice she hoped might get lost on its way out of her mouth, “I guess I wanted to be someone people could look up to.”

  To Adah’s surprise, that answer finally cracked a smile onto Ami’s face. She crossed her arms and said matter-of-factly, “That makes sense.”

  Red-faced and frantic, Adah demanded to know what an aloof statement like that was supposed to mean. After all, the answer she gave was the kind of answer she was looking for from Ami. It wasn’t fair to give such a detached answer and then make her say something so embarrassing. Not to mention emotions were running a bit high anyway, so they were supposed to open up to each other. Really, what did she mean by that?

  As she fought to dig out more of a response than that, she couldn’t help but notice Ami wasn’t looking at her but rather over her shoulder. Whatever she saw there made her eyes go wide.

  “Is that him?” Ami nearly yelled in Adah’s ear.

  Adah turned to see what Ami was looking at. Peeking into the thin vertical window of the hospital room door was the head of a boy wearing a blue baseball cap. Although she’d never gotten close enough to make out all the details of his face, Adah was sure this was the same boy they had seen at the farm.

  When he realized they had spotted him, his cheeks went white and he began to look queasy. In a shaking hand, he held up a small bouquet of daffodils to the window.

  Ami looked at Adah and asked, “Should we let him in?”

  Given it was her sister in that hospital bed, the decision ultimately rested with Ami, but Adah saw no reason to shoo the boy away. He’d clearly come to wish Emi well, so why not give him the chance to do so? She said as much to Ami, who then gestured for the boy to enter.

  Seeing him up close, Adah confirmed her suspicion that he was no older than a high schooler. He struggled to look Adah or Ami in the eye, instead periodically glancing toward where Emi lay resting. Adah had pulled across the curtain partition to hide Emi’s bed from view, but the boy kept looking anyway. A shadow of guilt clouded his face.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. “By the time I got back, everyone was gone, and I… I didn’t know what to do.”

  That confirmed Adah’s other suspicion. That was the danger of those more remote parts of the region. When a Cruelty showed up in a city, the number of potential casualties was higher, but it was easier to spread the word about evacuation. In the countryside, there was a greater risk of stragglers being caught unaware.

  “You’re fine,” Ami said. “It was bad luck, and I should’ve been faster.”

  Now it was Ami who was having trouble looking at the boy.

  “Were you two the ones there that day?” he asked. “I wanted to thank you. And her. I brought these, but I don’t know…”

  His voice trailed off as he held out the daffodils again. They were tied together with some twine, and their yellow bulbs popped against their white petals. Ami took the flowers from him, and the two of them finally made eye contact.

  “We’ll make sure she knows they’re from you,” Adah said. “Though she’d probably find them sweeter if she knew your name.”

  “It’s Lucas,” the boy rushed to say. “And flowers were just something I thought of! I thought, you know, you bring flowers to someone in the hospital. But I feel like I owe her more than that. She saved my life. I just don’t know what I could do besides this.”

  “This is enough,” Ami said, looking at the flowers in her hand. “They’ll make her happy when she wakes up.”

  Lucas smiled at that, but only for a second. His face grew a little anxious again and he looked around the room, perhaps unsure if he should stick around now that he’d done what he came here to do.

  Ami was right in a sense—he didn’t really owe them anything. Fighting Cruelties and protecting people like him was their job. What happened that day was a stroke of awful luck. Him bringing flowers was a kind enough gesture already.

  Yet, they didn’t have to leave it at that.

  “There might be a way you can help her more directly,” Adah said.

  Even though it was her own idea, it surprised her. She probably never would have thought of it before she’d taken on this Twilight Heartbreak identity. A tragedy like a teammate getting injured would have seemed like another weight on the scale in favor of giving up on her dreams. She would have let what happened block her view of a way forward. However, Twilight Heartbreak refused to be set back. Adah may not have been the one in that hospital bed, but Emi had gotten hurt while fighting for a dream that they shared. They all had the same goal written on that whiteboard back at the agency, and they were all part of the same story.

  Ups and downs were a given along any journey worth taking. As long as they were moving forward, that was the only direction that mattered.

  “What you said about Emi is something everyone should hear,” Adah continued. “If we were more popular, maybe the news or somebody else would have already covered this story. But right now, nobody but us knows what happened. That means no one but us is rooting for Emi to recover.”

  Ami watched Adah intently, like she was trying to follow the thread of every sentence to its conclusion before the words left Adah’s mouth.

  “If you could share what happened that day with the world—tell everyone about the danger you found yourself in and the magical girl who risked her life to save you—then a lot more people would start supporting Emi. That extra support would mean more magic and a faster recovery.”

  Adah had taken this mindset ever since her fight against the whale Cruelty. Working harder and getting stronger wouldn’t necessarily lead to success in this industry. All of a magical girl’s effort could float away, accomplishing nothing, if she didn’t stick in the minds of fans. The only way to guarantee you were recognized for what you’d done was to shout it from the rooftops.

  What happened to Emi was awful, but it could also come to represent her virtue as a magical girl. Rather than taking advantage of the situation, this was making the best of it. At least, that’s how Adah viewed it. She wasn’t as sure of what Ami would think.

  “That’s the will of humanity, isn’t it?” Ami said. “If people know about what she did and want her to get better, then she will?”

  “That’s the plan, anyway,” Adah said. “And hopefully it doesn’t end with her recovery. If people come to care about her, that FP will make her stronger after, too. It’ll make both of you stronger.”

  “Why both of us?”

  “You’re a pair: shield and spear,” Adah explained. “We can’t tell this story without talking about how you protected her until the end. Anyone who roots for Emi will want to root for her sister as well.”

  Ami turned toward her sister’s hospital bed. Under the stark white lights of this room, the bags under her eyes and the paleness of her skin stood out in contrast to Adah’s memory of how she normally looked. Her typically beaming face was drained of all that energy.

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “I told you that Emi and I won’t give up. If this plan can push us forward, then let’s show the whole world how cool Raindrop is. I want her to have some new power to wake up to.”

  “I’ll tell the whole story to anyone,” Lucas chimed in, “but I don’t really know how. I mean, I already told my friends what happened.”

  “If you’re willing to help, you can leave the rest to me,” Adah said. “I know someone who I think will be interested in spreading the word.”