So, if you'd told me I was going to be here twenty years ago, I would have laughed at you, but I don't think anyone expected this. That's kind of why I chose it.

And so I was considering: tile grout. And specifically, what a bunch of college students had managed to get on it (the exact contents of which I did not want to know).

Over the years I'd gotten a solid knowledge of which cleaners to use for maximum effectiveness and minimum fuss, so it wasn't really a problem, per se. Just not really a thing I was looking forward to putting in the elbow grease for.

Not least, because I knew if I reached for it—if I wished for it, it wouldn't be any trouble at all. Right at my fingertips, the feeling of a sparkling, bright power—

...but no. There were all kinds of reasons I wasn't going to do that. Not today, and probably not ever.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Well, maybe I could stand to take a little break before I dealt with this. No reason not to.

Stripping off my cleaning gloves and leaving them on the sink, I unfolded to my full height and rolled my shoulders back, stretching. No aches, no pains—one of the few perks left to me that I could quietly take advantage of. And then, fiddling with my hair so that it was neatly behind my ears again, I wandered out into the hall.

You'd think the engineering building of a university wouldn't be party central, but there'd been some club or fraternity event—whatever. I'd half-expected to go here, years ago, but now the details kind of escaped me, apart from which grad students tended to get crumbs on the floor near their desks and which ones could use an extra blanket for when they slept there overnight. I found the next bathroom down the hall, and rapped my knuckles on the door.

"Hey, Ana—you in here?"

The faint disgruntled noise in response was all I really needed. The other woman who shared my shift was glowering at something on the floor in one of the stalls, pushing some of her thick dark brown hair back with the clean part of her arm. "Unfortunately, I'll be in here for a while, I think. And here I told Sofia that I'd be home when she got there, today."

"I swear, I've got to talk to the building office about their events policy—" I said, coming down to look at what she'd got in here, and—

...stopped.

"You know what," I said, after a moment, taking it all in. "I think I have some ideas about how to deal with this. Why don't you head home? I can deal with the rest."

Ana frowned. "That's going to keep you here for hours, unless you're already done with the other bathroom."

"Oh, yeah, I just finished," I lied. "So it's no big deal, and anyway, you've got a kid. It's easier for me, you know? I can just pick up a couple slices of pizza on the way home."

She elbowed me. "You've got to eat properly too, you know," she said, clucking her tongue, in the way she tended to forget we were about the same age, since I didn't really look it. "But—" She shook her head. "Really, thank you. You're too kind. I'll have to find a way to pay you back for it."

Nice of her, I thought, as I shooed her on toward getting ready to go, but I was pretty sure she wouldn't get the chance. After all—

...after all, tonight had to be my last night at this job.

I gave the bathroom stall a long, hard look, and then went to go back to finishing up my own designated area. I'd have to wait until she was out of the building, anyway, and no reason not to tidy up on my way out of this one.

The gloves stayed in the sink. My kit stayed on the floor. I reached out a hand, and felt something bright and familiar reach back, like warm fingers entwined with mine, like a perfectly-fitting glove slipping onto my hand.

There were ways I'd learned to wield it, in the years I'd borne this mantle, that were a little more elegant or subtle than I'd been originally taught. This time, though—

"Miracle Bright Sparkling—!"

I held the feeling tight to my heart, and closed my fist—and then the world became bright.

When it faded, the bathroom was spotlessly clean. Honestly, Mari would have scolded me for doing something so vulgar with the power, but she wasn't here, so she couldn't tell me what to do, anyway. And anyway, I thought, as I legged it back to the other bathroom to do the same there, I was technically on the job, anyway.

I'd recognized it immediately, because some things you never forget. Identifying the mess left behind by monsters hatching into the world was old hat at this point.

Still. "Eurgh. Gross," I muttered, even as it melted away under my fingertips. "Honestly, it's really inconsiderate."

I sighed, and glanced back at the hallway. Like it or not, it was time to go hunting.

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Ana wasn't precisely eager to go outside; the cold snap had come early this year. She added "get a new damn coat" to her mental to-do list of things she'd do if she ever won the lottery by some miracle.

So she pulled her hair out of its bun, tucking it down the back of her coat like an extra layer, shoved her scratchy knit hat on her head and her hands in her pockets, and went once more into the breach.

The time had said 9:30 sharp on the clock as she'd filled out her time card; this late in the year, it was pitch like midnight, and probably had been since five. She always thought, when she left about this time, that it was a shame for all the darkness she couldn't see the stars, with all the city light pollution—

She stopped in her tracks, and froze, transfixed, head turned up toward the sky. No, that shouldn't be possible, should it?

Because, tonight, up in the sky—there weren't just the stars she remembered from her youth, offset slightly. There were somehow more, like she could see more clearly and as far as a fancy telescope, a bright sweep across the sky like in scientific photos—

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

A few realizations trickled in. First—around her, it was pitch-dark from lack of electric lights. The power was out—at least on this block, if not farther. Second, when she fumbled with freezing fingers for her phone to try and take a picture, she realized it—and her keys—weren't there.

She stood there for a moment and strongly considered just lying down on the ground because it had been that kind of day. And then she tore her gaze away from the impossible, beautiful sky, and started trudging back toward the now-dark university building.

Just one of those days, she thought, grimacing as she turned into the wind. Hopefully it would be quick to find; hopefully the lights would come on soon enough.

It was such a relief to find the locks had shorted out and left the doors open, enough that she didn't think about the matter further as she legged it down the hall toward the staff room. She didn't notice when her steps and thoughts became sluggish, or when the shadows started to close in around her.

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In a way, it was a little surprising I'd never ended up with this situation before—plenty of college kids were probably in the throes of despair in one way or another, whether it be about grades, love, or more personal stuff. Great place to incubate those things—but then again, mostly they hadn't been working this area. Before now, anyway.

So probably I'd just gotten lucky. Or unlucky, in this case. It was one thing to try and avoid scrutiny when sneaking in to clean up messes away from where I lived and worked—another thing entirely when it landed right on top of me.

The other thing that was a nuisance about this was that, walking down the dark hallways, I stood out enough to not even need a flashlight. Honestly, poor design for stealth, being lit from within by the radiance of the stars.

Then again, whoever'd created the mantle in the first place had probably never expected someone to go rogue with it and become the city's first and only illegal magical girl. You'd think, who wouldn't want to arrive on the scene wreathed in the full glory of the stars, and then some inheritor does something like this.

I could see the trail, though, outlined in a sickly glow in the darkness—the kind that no amount of scrubbing would get out. At least it was young, and not particularly clever—

—but then again, I'd had my share of trouble with those, too, in their full flush of initial power. And especially, well...

Hard to get around the fact that I was getting older. The mantle had passed to me when I was in my teens, and it had kept me in my prime for as long as it could, but—

I was alone. I wasn't meant to be fighting like this.

But damned if that was going to stop me. I stopped just shy of the corner of the dark, silent hall to keep any light from leaking around—

There was a sort of strangled gurgling, but more of a human noise than anything other. I frowned. I'd made sure I was the last to be closing up... but I couldn't discount some grad student hanging around or just sleeping in their office.

A muffled cry, and then a thud, like a body hitting the floor, and I winced. Almost definitely not dead—probably getting dragged back to wherever this thing was nesting—but that didn't make it feel much better. This wasn't my best or proudest work, but easier to keep doing the work if no one saw me at it. The last thing I needed was a newspaper headline, even in the tabloids.

It was only after a solid minute I risked glancing around the corner and—

...oh hell. Why had Ana come back?

I scrubbed my face with both my hands and resisted the urge to slam a fist into the wall or scream. Of course. Of course. Probably that was just one of its appendages, though, so—if I wanted to root the whole thing out, I'd have to follow it back, rather than getting rid of it right here.

Clinging tight to the wall, I waited around the corner until it had a good lead on me, and then dashed to hide in the shadow of a doorframe. Bit by bit, following along.

And here I'd sent her home to her kid, who was probably wondering where she was by now... I shook my head. No time for thoughts like that.

Years ago, I didn't have to do all this skulking. I'd been part of a team; there'd been five of us, able to split up to cover ground and stay together to cover each others' backs. Back then I could just charge in, and know that the city was behind me—that the other girls were behind me. That the universe was good, and that I was its finest instrument.

That was a long time ago, though. Now it was just me.

I stepped in something that made a squelching noise and lifted my boot—more of the black sludge. Squinting into the dark, I could see more of it now, splattered along the walls and baseboards.

Really rude, I couldn't help but think. No one ever thinks of the janitors when making evil designs, do they?

But on the other hand, maybe it was for the best that no one thought of the janitors. It was dragging her down a shabby, disused maintenance stairwell that even we didn't use, its passage narrowed by half-solidified sludge. My boots would have been mired to the floor if I didn't have the rare benefit of magic immunity.

And I felt a smile grow on my face. First of all, I could hang back long enough to be sure I was out of sight, and then—

...well, and then slide down a segment of the railing, leaving it sparkling clean in my wake. I was allowed to have some fun with it, after all.

And then, second of all: the upside of knowing this building inside and out was being a lot more confident in where I'd find the nest once I had a direction. These things tended to incubate in the sewers, so it made sense it would have holed up near the plumbing and the entrance to the steam tunnels.

Every time—more and more, these days, I felt a creeping nervousness when I put on the mantle. Like I'd have lost my touch or something. Probably, there'd been a little of that in why I'd erred toward caution earlier; now, though, I was warmed up. And now, I knew it had cornered itself for me.

Like, sure, it could still escape into the water system.

But I hadn't been doing this for nearly thirty years for nothing, and now it was solidly on my home turf.

I swung my right hand back, and the warm heft of my staff dropped into it as I aimed a hard kick at the curtain of gunk blocking off the doorway—which exploded inwards, in a shower of stars.

"Hey! Hey, asshole!" I yelled, in a move that would have gotten me a scolding from Mari back in the day. Behavior not befitting of the office— Well, that was well and good, but behaving hadn't done me a whole lot of favors. "Paying attention yet?"

And it sure was, now. These things hated light, and here I was, burning with the light of a star in what should have been its safe space. It growled, and it gathered itself up, and it surged—

I was ready, staff already aimed and left hook at the ready for the one-two. "Shooting Star—Impact!"

In the suddenly bright light, I could glance—just barely, between defending and striking, a mass of faces, comatose, cemented into a web of murky gunk in the corner. And—there, Ana had been left to the side, since this thing had barely enough time to get her down here.

Yeah. Okay. She was going to be all right.

It surged, and I leapt; it lashed out, and I met it with starlight in my fists—shielding, and then pushing back until it flattened against the wall.

Easy stuff. Thank god I got one of these every now and again. It didn’t even have the strength to drain back into the sewer.

I readied my staff, and held it aloft. When I closed my eyes—it wasn’t so different from being sixteen, full of hopes and dreams and an undimmed, untarnished light.

Like riding a bicycle. Like an earworm I could never quite get out of my head.

“Shining Light! Miracle Shooting Star!”

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Ana drifted in and out of consciousness; she had been so exhausted, and then the world had just… slowed, with the overbearing weight of all there was for her to do.

But she must have made it somehow, because she could feel warmth, and support under her back like she was being carried. A soothing darkness, above, so she must have made it home and into bed and turned off the light.

So, for just this moment, she let herself relax. She had to get rest while she could, anyway.

There was just one moment where she looked up, as her position shifted strangely, and heard a rapping noise like someone knocking on a door. It was then that she looked up and a face swam into view, through her half-closed eyes.

Grace?

What a strange dream, she thought, and nodded off again.