Chapter Forty-Four

My eyes sprung open. The alarm hadn’t woken me up. My stomach had, though. The energy bars I’d eaten on the helicopter out of Sooke weren’t doing it for me.

I wasn’t sure which class the team and I were supposed to be in. I didn’t even know if we had classes anymore. I didn’t feel like I’d graduated, but I also didn’t feel like I belonged in a class. Not after the fights I’d been in.

I changed into shorts and a T-shirt in case someone was around. Not that anyone should be around. Li Mei and Overclock were the only two left who had access to the room. “Morning, Bentley,” I said.

“Hello, Luciole. It’s been two days. The other Operators and I were starting to get worried.”

“Two days?”

“I was going to trigger your alarm, but James insisted you needed time.” Bentley sounded apologetic, but whether it was about wanting to wake me up or not waking me up, I couldn’t tell. “Li Mei checked out of the infirmary this morning. She should be in the common room unless she also wanted to sleep more.”

“Thanks for leaving me alone,” I said, creaking my door open.

Li Mei sat on the couch, still in her hospital gown. She turned her head toward me, then back at the black TV screen. “Hi, Luciole.” Her voice sounded dead and emotionless.

“Hey, how are you holding up?” I asked.

“Alright. I think. The nurse said there’d be solo counseling for me starting on Monday with Kyle. I guess he’s very good. They say it’s standard practice after the loss of a teammate. But I don’t know what I’ll talk about.”

“You have that as well, Luciole,” Bentley said. “Your session is right after Li Mei’s, at ten o’clock.”

“I don’t know what I’ll say either,” I said. “We weren’t that close.”

“You know, I don’t think it matters how close you were. We had her back, and she had ours.” Li Mei shrugged. “I don’t know. I just finished a partial stomach muscle rebuild, so that whole process is what’s been on my mind. That and pain. Lots of pain.”

I laughed. It sounded empty, but she’d made a joke. Sort of.

“Sam’s memorial is in a couple of hours in the briefing room. Charlie’s been telling me about them. She wasn’t the only Girl we lost last weekend. I don’t think many Girls will even show up for it, but we probably should,” Li Mei said.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to. I wanted breakfast, and then I wanted to go back to bed. But I nodded anyways. It felt like Li Mei needed this, and maybe I did too.

Li Mei changed into her long sleeves, and we grabbed breakfast up in the food court. We talked about school, games, or idols growing up; anything but Sam, Sooke, or Magical Girl stuff. She told me about the online VR fighting games she’d played and how they’d replaced a lot of the boxing she’d done back in Hong Kong Walled City. For a few minutes, things almost felt normal.

Then Bentley reminded us about the memorial in the briefing room.

And that Overclock was meeting us there.

The briefing room was shockingly empty. A few other Girls sat scattered around—I recognized Pixie Punch and a couple of members of Res-Cute—and Palace Athene stood alone in the room’s center. I found my seat from the briefing and sat down quietly in it. Li Mei sat a few chairs down.

Palace Athene cleared her throat. “Today, we honor a White Magical Girl, Samantha Brandt, from Sooke District. She and her team deployed into her hometown for what was supposed to be a routine security patrol—evacuate people to the shelters, defend them against a few low-tier Emergences, and earn some battlefield experience. But B.S.O.D. and I made a mistake, and that mistake put Training Team Z-4 in far more danger than they were ready for.”

I tuned Palace Athene out. I knew what’d happened in Sooke. We’d gotten thrown right into something new and paid the price for it. The whole time she recapped our fight, I ignored her right until the end.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Z-4 was the first team to encounter a new type of Mack, and the only team to successfully defeat one without compromising its processing core,” Palace Athene said. I snorted. That’d been pure luck; I’d fully intended to beat the hell out of every part of that android until I heard the helicopter. “But that effort cost Sam her life and caused serious injuries to the rest of the team.

“Thanks to Samantha Brandt’s efforts, SHOCKS gained valuable intelligence about Type Forty-Two Macks, and the lab boys are working on extracting more from the Mack, or its processing core. If successful, Sam’s sacrifice may give humanity the tools we need to turn the fight against the Macks around forever.”

She talked on and on about what a tragedy Sam’s loss was, how desperate the situation was, and how SHOCKS hadn’t had to put Whites Magical Girls on the front lines since Zero Suit and the Battle of Vancouver. By the end of it, I just wanted it to be over.

So, of course, when it ended, it wasn’t really over.

Pixie Punch—Patricia—joined Li Mei and me in the hall. Her eyes looked bloodshot and baggy, like she hadn’t been sleeping. She smiled thinly and looked down at the floor. “Hey, I keep thinking about last weekend, girls.”

I nodded. Li Mei just stood there.

“If we’d known something was weird in Sooke, we could have pitched in. Omega Lily had orders to deal with the Class Fours on the southeast shore, but we could have knocked out that new Mack for you. It looked like you had it under control, and we had another mission to fly.”

I didn’t want to listen to Patricia try to explain her guilty feelings away. “You were just doing your job, Pixie.”

“Yeah, but we could have done better, and it would’ve saved her life.”

I started saying something, but then I froze up. Patricia was looking for something I couldn’t give her. Not when I was looking for the same thing. I’d been the second most powerful Magical Girl there, so I felt responsible too. However, I had to deal with my own stuff, not with Patricia’s.

“I need to go,” I said.

Even though her face screamed disappointment, Patricia nodded, and I fled for the elevator. As the door closed, though, Li Mei shoved a hand into it. It popped back open, and she stepped on.

We rode in silence until the elevator dinged. Then we walked to our suite in silence. By the time she opened the door, the silence had gone past stifling and all the way to oppressive.

Then, as I was about to slip back into my room, Li Mei dashed toward me. She threw one arm around me in a super-awkward side-hug, then let go before I could return it. “Sorry. Thanks. For, um, sticking around. And not running away. That meant a lot.”

Her face flushed bright red, and she started to run away herself. I reached out to stop her, but she ducked my hand out of habit and shut her door behind her.

I could have stopped her. Or I could have knocked on her door. But I didn’t really have the energy. “Bentley, sound only.”

“You got it, Luciole.”

I shut my own door behind me and changed into the sensory suit. I needed to check out from reality. The water in the sensory tank felt cold even against the suit, but I laid into it and drifted off.

When I woke up, I was back in my poetry nook. I just sat, letting the coffee house jazz music and fire calm me. Bentley’s avatar, Tags, lay curled up in the corner, obviously not asleep but also not watching.

I grabbed a poetry book off the shelf and watched the simulated rain pound against the window for a while before I opened it. The first page was Fog. Because of course it was. It’d only been a handful of days, and it was the same poem that’d been stuck in my head during the bus ride, and through the whole day.

I wanted to be done.

Being a Magical Girl wasn’t anything like the movies and shows. Every once in a while, you got a chance to pose and do ‘Magical Girl’ stuff, but there hadn’t been a relaxed mission yet, and the learning we’d had hadn’t prepared Sam for Sooke at all. I hadn’t been prepared for Sooke, even though I’d already been through West End. And even Overclock seemed to be outgunned most of the time. The little advice she’d given had only lasted until the fighting started.

And if Z-4 had lost a teammate on its first mission, how many more losses would we need to deal with?

I didn’t think I could handle a rotating cast. I’d started becoming friends with Li Mei—she’d even hugged me, even if it was bad—but if she was just going to die in a few weeks or months, that wouldn’t work for me.

[Tags, how many Magical Girls die every year?]

[This year’s already passed the average, Luciole. Usually, less than a dozen, but the last two Emergences have killed eleven, bringing the death toll up to fourteen. Losing a White rarely happens, though. Usually, the worst-hit levels are the mid-twenties, because they’re strong enough to run without backup nearby for the big Macks, but weak enough that backup would still be helpful.]

I nodded, thinking. If Z-4, or whatever we became, could stick together long enough, we’d be okay. We wouldn’t have to deal with a loss like this.

And there was something else.

Li Mei had willingly touched me. That only just now sank in. I hadn’t thought about me fighting the android having some sort of special meaning, but for her, it must’ve.

If I could make an impression on her, what impressions could Sam have had on people? It wouldn’t be right for me to leave SHOCKS, even if retirement after a week of service was possible.

I opened up the book again.

[Fog comes on little cat feet.]