Decent people shouldn’t speak to things that come from dreams.

  Any young woman sober, shrewd, and sensible, would know to keep her lips firmly shut, and not to talk with an ink-blot illusion shaped like a zoog, squatting on the interrogation room table. A proper and trusting lass would follow instructions from her betters, and keep her faith in the government man who has offered her mercy and sanctuary. A straight-laced girl, fearful and confused, would run to the door, cry out for authority, and close her ears against whispers from across the shattered walls of the waking world.

  I shouldn’t even acknowledge it’s there.

  But in my heart of hearts I’ve never been what they wanted me to be.

  “Kill me?” I echo, then swallow a hundred pointless questions. Too late, I’ve already replied, now I’m a lost cause. “You mean ‘John Smith’, the man who just left the room? Why would he kill me?”

  The zoog on the table pulls a convincingly zoog-like expression of surprise, eyes widening, little flappy ears standing up, tail stretching out straight.

  Every inch of the zoog’s body is dripping black. Globs of tarry ectoplasm slide from fur and flesh, sloughing off in sticky thick ropes. But not a single droplet lands; the tarry ooze vanishes as it falls, dissolving into thin air. The table stays clean, even where the zoog’s sharp-clawed paw-pads splay against the surface.

  “What, no screaming?” she says, still speaking with that double-voice, a human woman behind the zoog’s raspy chatter. Obsidian lips peel back, showing coal-sharp teeth in her sooty snout. “Well done! From the looks of you I thought you’d be a real screamer, you know? You’ve got the face for it, but I should never judge a book by the cover. A good sign, we’re off to a great start! If you’d screamed then we’d be done already. Men with guns would burst in and shoot both of us. Not that it matters to me, but that would be the end of you. Well done, Octavia. You’ve already cleared the first hurdle.”

  A dry swallow, cold and hard, matches the sweat drying on my skin. I lower my hands, uncurl my prosthetic fingers. A real zoog would cower before a raised fist, prosthetic or not, at least when alone. But my meagre weapons serve no purpose at the fore. This foe is beyond fists. I shan’t debase myself with fear.

  Straighten my spine, compose a frown, think fast. She’s already claimed the initiative, I have to snatch it back.

  “I should scream, shouldn’t I?” I say; the zoog shakes her head, snout swinging side to side, dripping phantasmal oil. “You’re not a zoog. You’re not even attempting a credible zoog.” She starts to nod, lips peeling back in that zipper-faced smile. “You’re a Dreamer.”

  “Oh, pwauh!” the zoog snorts, little black eyes squinting tight. “Puh-lease. Don’t go mistaking the sea for a fish.”

  “What else would you be? You appeared from nowhere. You’re clearly not earthly. You’re the Dreamer I saw earlier today, aren’t you? The girl in the white dress.” I shake my head, try to laugh, can’t quite make it. “Two Dreamers suddenly loose in Oxford? No, that would be a national emergency.”

  The zoog puffs through her little zoog nose. “Then maybe it is.”

  “You’re the girl in the white dress. You must be.” Because the alternative is too terrifying, and I’m already running on fumes.

  The zoog rolls her eyes, almost imperceptible in black-on-black, obsidian spheres rolling without iris or sclerae. “She’s one of mine, but she’s not got the temperament for something so subtle as ‘rescue’. Besides, that’s the wrong question to ask. You’ve bought yourself fifteen minutes of grace, and you started off so well, stayed on target, didn’t scream, didn’t panic, all that good stuff. But now you’re drifting. Focus, girl! You ain’t got long ‘till that raggedy old thing comes back in here. That man is going to kill you, Octavia.”

  “ … rescue? You’re here to rescue me?”

  The zoog shows off her twin rows of razor teeth again. “Catching on quick! The more you speak, the more I like.”

  She’s running way ahead of me, and I’m in no state for measured consideration. After six hours in this cell I am emotionally spent; everything I had left was drained away by the devotion and determination of self-sacrifice averted. A few minutes ago I had placed all my faith in the hands of mister John Smith, government agent of unknown provenance, and before that I was about to commit suicide to ensure Willow’s safety.

  But now I’m talking to a Dreamer. She’s not killing me, not turning me into something unnatural, not melting the surrounding half-mile of Oxford into molten sludge. Which is not meant to happen, because that’s what Dreamers do. Instead, she’s telling me that John Smith is just another kind of death.

  “You are a dream-thing,” I say. “And you are trying to trick me.”

  “Tch!” the zoog tuts. Her tail lashes side-to-side, scattering droplets of black mud into the air. “And we were doing so well—”

  “But!” I hiss. “But. Maybe you’re not lying, not exactly. But you are a Dreamer. You know my name, you know what I’ve been saying in this room, you clearly walked right through the walls to get in here. Who are you? And what are you? Give me the most simple version, as quickly as you can, even if I won’t understand it. Because I agree with you that I don’t have much time.”

  The zoog’s mouth curves into a skull-splitting grin, black lips sliding back over black teeth like oil on volcanic sand, too wide for any real zoog.

  “Remember not to scream,” she rasps.

  And then the zoog is gone.

  A woman towers over me.

  She is eight feet tall, twelve feet tall, twenty feet tall — she is an oak tree, then a skyscraper, then a mountain. Her head and shoulders crash into the ceiling, break through the roof, soaring in dark clouds of cloying smog. She is hunchbacked and hook-clawed, an emaciated wreck beneath a ragged patchwork dress of pale leather, crowned by a tangle-fall of black hair, oil-slick face ruptured by a smirk, with scraps of bloody meat in her teeth. Her cheeks have been cut open and healed shut in a grin too wide for her skull. Ears cropped, nose clipped, ankles fettered but chain long broken, rat-like zoog-tail swaying from her rear. She stands on a plain of carrion, swarming with ten thousand zoogs, bare feet squelched deep in rotten meat and putrid rubbish. She cranes and coils toward me, twisting like a tentacle; she is extruded from a black ocean that flows and throbs beneath the mat of corpses.

  A hand cups my right cheek, clammy and slick, callused and rough, a thumb tracing the line of my scar. My own left hand is already clamped over my mouth to muffle a scream.

  “I’ve had plenty of names,” she rasps, the voice of a zoog grown god-like. “Nerys, that’s my current, and one of my faves. As for the ‘what’? Well, here I am. Need more?”

  I shake my head. Nerys winks, lets go of my face, straightens up.

  And she’s gone.

  The carrion-plain, the oily black ocean, the giant woman, the clouds of smog, all of it is gone, replaced by a damp-looking zoog sitting on the interrogation room table. Nerys licks a paw and drags it over her snout, like a real zoog washing its face; the gesture achieves nothing, the black ooze is omnipresent.

  I wipe at my cheek, at my scar, where Nerys touched me. My hand comes away clean and cold, but shaking. I make a fist, hard and tight, hold the shake inside.

  “Nice try,” I say.

  Nerys pulls a tiny zoog frown, as if baffled by a particularly agile mosquito. “Eh?”

  “You may be very intimidating, but you also failed to actually answer my question. Do not take me for a fool, ma’am. What are you?”

  Nerys grins again. “Three for three! Unrattled and confident, even before divine truth. Rare, rare, rare. I’m so good at scouting for you girls, I really am. Somebody should give me an award for this.”

  “What. Are. You? Now, or I scream.”

  “And get yourself shot?” Nerys straightens up, little zoog-spine pulled straight. Tail rigid, snout up, eyes relaxed. “You humans keep calling us ‘Dream-Gods’. That’s a stupid term, but I do so love the sound of it. Feels good to be divine, am I right? You can call me ‘my goddess’ if you like.”

  I’m struck speechless. My insides freeze solid. The little hairs on the back of my neck all stand up.

  I am trapped in a police interrogation room with a zoog Dream-Goddess, a mutilated deity of carrion and black tar and broken fetters. I have never heard of her before, and I doubt very much that she is one of the Dream-Gods who count themselves on ‘our side’.

  If John Smith walks back in right now, will he simply shoot me? I think he will, and he would have good reason. Dream Control would burn this whole building to the ground to suppress what’s happening here. They would kill everyone involved. They would salt the earth. And maybe they would be in the right, for once.

  But Nerys hasn’t hurt me. Yet.

  “Okay, okay then,” I say, very slowly. “So … why would John Smith kill me? How do you know that—”

  “Oh, he won’t do it right here,” Nerys says. “Smart enough not to shit where he eats. Which is a miracle among his kind. Filthy things.” She stands up and starts pacing around on the table, little zoog paws padding over the file and the photographs that John left behind. Her long prehensile tail drags in her wake, whapping at the tabletop. “He’ll make sure the police and Dream Control have got everything proper and official like, all the papers filed and the proper procedures followed, photocopied, stored in triplicate, scanned in, scanned out, shredded, un-shredded, rebuilt, and signed off by some big pig in charge. Then he’ll get you in the back of an official car, and he’ll let other people know where he’s taking you, people who matter, people who are supposed to make sure he does what he says. But you’ll never get where you’re meant to go, because he’ll stop in the middle of nowhere, out in a field or something, march you away from the car, and shoot you in the back of the head. Or maybe he strangles, but he doesn’t look like the strangling type to me. Gotta have passion for a good strangle, you know? So I think it’s bullets. All distant, hands off. Then he’ll dig a grave, and put you in it, and fill it back up. I don’t know where he does it, but I know he’s got a favourite spot, somewhere out there, somewhere everybody has agreed not to look. And the people who were supposed to know where you were going? They’ll pretend nothing happened, because they all know that people like you gotta go bye-bye and be forgotten.”

  Nerys pauses over one of the photo printouts, the one that shows the girl in the white dress and her manic grin. She grabs the paper in one zoog paw and stuffs a corner into her mouth, then rips and bites and chews, chomping up and down, smacking her lips. The rest of it she scrunches up and kicks off the table.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

  “These mangy fuckers never do,” Nerys says through a mouthful of paper.

  “Dream Control is right there, out there in the corridor.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “If he wanted to bury me, metaphorically or literally, he could hand me over to them. They’d put me in an I&O cell and dismantle me, take me apart. I’d be dead by the end, or as good as dead. Your story isn’t adding up, ‘Dream-God’. Why go to the trouble of shooting me?”

  Nerys spits out a lump of masticated paper, shredded by zoog teeth, drenched in saliva. “Because he thinks you’re one of mine. Thinks I’m gonna come for you, get my claws in you, whisk you away.”

  “And that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? So technically he’s right?”

  Nerys nods. “Uh huh!”

  “Then … go away?” I make a shooing motion with both hands. “Shoo? Before he comes back? Go on, shoo, shoo!”

  Nerys opens her snout so wide I can see down her throat, then lets out a raspy gurgle, a zoog guffaw. “Don’t be stupid, he’ll kill you anyway! He’s taken a risk leaving you alone like this, but he thinks it’s safe, because there’s a giant Harding cage built into the walls of this place. Drool-face out there thinks I can’t get in. And hey, you know what? Now I’ve met you, I really do want you. You keep passing all my little tests. You’re a real candidate, Octavia.”

  Lump in my throat, sweat down my back, a fist in my guts. “Candidate? For what?”

  Nerys makes her little zoog-mask face do something zoogs generally cannot — a sardonic, unimpressed, amused little pout. Hard to pout with a snout. “You know what I’m offering.”

  “Candidate. To become a magical girl.”

  “Ding ding ding!” Her tail slaps against the table three times. “She gets it in one!”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No, I don’t want that, I’ve never … never asked for that, never even dreamed of it. I just want to … I want to go home, I want my life back. If you’re really a god, you can get me out of here. I’m not going to make some kind of devil’s bargain with you, I’m not. My life has already been ruined—”

  “And it’s about to end.” Nerys drops the amusement. “Trust me on that, if nothing else. I’ve already lost a dozen candidates this way. I’m always one step behind, one move too slow, and he keeps putting bullets in them. I have to go through all this convincing, all this talking, blah blah blah! All she has to do is use what you people already do to yourselves. Fucking humans, making all these rules that let you murder each other. I can’t get a word in edgeways!”

  “She?”

  Nerys waves a tiny paw. “His boss. See what I mean? You’re a smart one, you could be great, if only I had time enough to convince you. But I don’t, so you’re gonna end up buried in an unmarked grave before tomorrow morning.” She does a little zoog sigh. “Oh well. Can’t say I didn’t try.”

  Nerys turns away and stomps in a little circle, dipping her head to worry at a corner of the folder which contains all the notes on my life.

  Can I be so certain this Dream-God thing is lying?

  ‘John Smith’ didn’t give me a real name or a government department or any form of identification; Nerys has shown me a vision of her real face, which may or may not be true. But did John show me anything more authentic, anything even the slightest bit convincing? The dripping zoog currently chewing on my notes has just as much credibility as the government man who put the folder there. And if Nerys wanted me dead, or turned into a frog, or whisked off to the Dreamlands, then I would be powerless to stop her. Just like John Smith could shoot me in the head, and it would all be made legal.

  They’ve always wanted me dead, tidied away, easier to forget. They! All except Willow. ‘They’ — everyone, everything, every system and institution and cultural standard. The girl is damaged goods, don’t you know? She’ll never walk unaided, she’ll never truly recover, and what is ‘recovery’ anyway? She can’t regrow her arm or her leg, and her brain will always be broken. Besides, who would want that half-a-face? Forget about her, there’s a million more without her scars and her pains. People with small and sensible dreams could never imagine this cripple as a person. ‘John Smith’ is one of them, another normal who would leave me in a ditch if he could.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  But Nerys didn’t stare at my scar, or my drooping eyelid, or comment on the missing pieces of my body.

  The vision of her true face had been cut and shackled.

  Nerys is like me.

  “Why do you care?” I whisper.

  Nerys looks up and smirks again, but this time it’s touched with melancholy. Subtle, for a zoog. “Bast, Nodens, Hypnos, all the rest, all the Dream-Gods you’ve heard of, they sniff out their prey just the same—”

  “Prey?”

  “Their candidates. They sniff out their candidates the same way I do, and I can smell you from the far reaches of the Dream, Octavia.”

  “My— my personal hygiene is impeccable, thank you very much.” I’m trying to joke, but my voice shakes too much.

  “Don’t you just want to go totally apeshit?” Nerys grins wider, lowers her scritchy-scratchy zoog voice to a rasping burble. The woman’s voice behind the zoog is purring, low and soft. “You would if you could. You’d rip that door off the hinges and beat those Dream Control guys to death with the handle. You’d smash down the walls and break open John Smith’s face with a brick. You’ve got it in you, I can smell that. And you want to let it out, so bad, but these pigs have kept you down, made you think you can’t do anything at all. Made you scared, pliable, submissive. You’ve kept it bottled up for so long, it’s rotting you from inside. Just picture the looks on their faces if you walked out of this cell with a bat in your hands. Or an axe? Do you like axes? Bury one in a few skulls, find out how it feels, and they all finally get what’s coming to them. Pick your poison, Octavia. Guns? Swords? Knives? Bare fucking fists? We can do anything you want. You can do anything you want.”

  “I … I-I don’t … ”

  Of course I’ve had those dreams.

  Who hasn’t? Who hasn’t fantasied about getting revenge on all this? Spitting in the oh-so-polite face of an emotional health and hygiene nurse? Taking a crowbar to the black-and-mirror helmet of a Section Special officer? Breaking into an I&O ward to throw open the cells and tear down the walls? Crushing the cold, slow, relentless cruelty of Dream Control with red and bloody violence?

  “Don’t deny it,” says Nerys. “You can’t deny dreams to a Dream-God.”

  I swallow hard; anger’s ghost goes down fighting, makes me want to vomit. “Those are just idle thoughts. Pressure relief. Pointless. Punching an emotional health nurse wouldn’t solve anything.”

  Nerys smirks. “And you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I was thirteen. I was … she was asking things … things about … ” My throat closes up. “Sexuality. Accusing me of being a … h-homosexual a-and a—”

  “And you shut her up and made her lip bleed,” Nerys says. “With a fist! Your fist! Do you remember how that felt? How good it felt to wipe the placidity off that face? The way she yelped? The way you made that old cow bleed for you?”

  I remember the recriminations, my grandmother’s disappointment, the additional sessions, the wrist cuffs.

  “I remember it made everything worse.”

  Nerys laughs again, a raspy little zoog sound. “But it felt so fucking good, didn’t it? Don’t pretend it didn’t. You loved it. You still think about it sometimes. I know you dream of it. What if you could do it again, bigger and better?”

  I try to laugh, but I’m shaking too hard. “You’re trying to seduce me with violence?”

  “It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “Violence alone will never solve anything.” Do I believe that? Do I believe anything I’m saying?

  “It’ll get you back to Willow.”

  My blood goes cold. “Don’t. Don’t you dare use her as bait. You keep her name out of your mouth, whatever you are.”

  Nerys goes silent for a moment. “Tick tock. Time’s counting down, Octavia. That mangy thing out there is going to take you away and kill you, and Willow won’t ever see you again. You’ll never get to thank her for saving you today. You’ll never get to kiss—”

  “Shut up!” I snap, almost a scream.

  We both glance at the steel door. Nerys goes very still. But nothing happens.

  Nerys curls her little zoog claws, dragging her tail back and forth across the table. Beady black eyes bore through me, digging into my secrets, no different to the emotional hygiene officers, the same as Dream Control.

  “I am not—” I try to say, but my throat is too tight, my breath too hard, my face too hot. “What Willow and I did— what we— we weren’t— there was nothing wrong with it, what we did. Nothing.”

  “Of course there wasn’t,” Nerys purrs. “It’s natural. Two girls loving each other. All that.”

  “How do you even know? How do you know all this about me? What right do you have? Get out of my head. Out of my dreams.”

  Nerys pads right to the edge of the table, claws clicking, as close to me as she can get without falling off. “Because I’ve been watching you. Watching your dreams. Poor little thing, all twisted up inside. No parents, no—”

  “My grandmother takes perfectly good care of me, thank you very much.”

  “But she doesn’t know you,” Nerys rasps. “Nobody knows you.”

  “Willow does.”

  Nerys flicks her tail into the air, arcing it forward over her body, a dark crescent moon. Ropes of sticky black tar drip from oil-slick flesh, sliding down from the sharp tail-tip in endless loops of phantasmal ooze.

  “And you’re never going to see her again,” she says. “Unless you take my deal, and become a magical girl.”

  So many young women dream of an opportunity like this, but the idea makes me sick, makes me want to pick Nerys up and hurl her at a wall.

  “You’re a Dream-God,” I hiss. “You can get me out of here yourself, if you care so much. And even if you did, what then? I’d be on the run from the police. My life would still be over.”

  “Not if you become a magical girl.”

  A lump sharpens in my throat. “You’re lying. You’re trying to trick me into something I can’t take back. And I don’t … I don’t want to be a magical girl. I don’t want to be like them. I refuse to serve this, all of this, this … this! What we’ve become, what England has turned into, under them, under Dream Control. I would … I would rather be … ”

  Rather be dead?

  No, I wouldn’t. I want so very much to live. I want to see Willow again. I want to go home, and dream private dreams. I almost sob.

  “You think I’m offering a position of service?” Nerys says. “Octavia, I’m free as free can be. And you can be, too. You want to tear all this down? Let’s do it.”

  And she’s through, she’s into my heart, past my defences, my doubts, my better judgement. I am trapped in a room with a rebellious devil, and she agrees with all my most secret thoughts.

  Nerys breaks into a new kind of grin, breathy with anticipation, as if we’re face-to-face, growing closer by the second, lips parting for a kiss. She shuffles her paws on the table, claws going tippy-tappy clicky-clacky. Her tail grows, stretching outward until it’s four times the length of her body, a slice of dark moon blotting out the interrogation room. The tail-tip rises into the air, extending toward my face.

  A droplet of glistening black oil gathers at the tip, no larger than the end of my little finger; the black oil reflects the room, the harsh light, the steel door, the zoog-god-thing crouched on the table, and my own face, eyes wide, gone pale, hair a mess. Everything else is false. Only the globule of black is real.

  “Drink,” Nerys purrs.

  “You … you want me to drink your goo?”

  This isn’t how magical girls are made.

  Or rather, it’s not how they tell us magical girls are made. It’s not the image the government presents, it’s not the myth that culture has woven. They tell us it all happens in dreams. A girl with pure dreams, of duty and service and charity and sisterhood, wakes up one day and the world suddenly seems different, because in her dreams she’s been touched by the gods. Maybe there’s a formal meeting later, perhaps a ceremony, a day of conscious and joyous revelation. But the initiation is clean, metaphysical, unproblematic.

  Maybe that was all a lie. Maybe they’ve all done something more like this. Maybe they’ve all drunk the goo.

  “Drink,” Nerys whispers. “Take the deal. Then you’ll get to see Willow again. You’ll get to be everything you wanted with her, everything you couldn’t be before. Make a contract with me, Octavia. Become a magical girl, so you can wreck shit up.”

  Feet won’t move. Heart racing so fast the blood blurs in my ears. Left hand clammy. Right hand stiff with phantom cramp.

  “What—” I croak, then clear my throat. “What’s the catch? What do I have to do in return?”

  Nerys leans over edge of the table, straining toward me, little zoog paws tightening to keep her balance. The droplet of black oil eases closer to my face, trembling at the tip. “There isn’t one. I won’t lie, being one of my girls won’t be easy. You’ll be hated and feared. But you’ll be you. You won’t be dead in a ditch. You’ll be free!”

  My lips part. Quivering, leaning forward, ready to accept her, to accept the deal.

  But then I close my mouth.

  I stagger back, shaking my head. “No. No, this is a trick. It has to be. Nobody has ever just given me anything, nobody except my parents, and they’re both dead. You have no reason to care, no reason to do this if you don’t get something in return. Tell me right now, what’s the price? What am I signing away?”

  “Nothing they haven’t already taken from you!” Nerys hisses. Her eyes dart to the steel door. “Octavia, drink it, now!”

  “You’re holding something back.”

  “Nothing, nothing! It’s this or death!” Her little claws scrape at the edge of the table; the tail stretches out, droplet of black oil glistening dark and smooth, an exotic fruit from the lands of Dream. “Contract, Octavia! Contract, now! I’m—” A tiny zoog sob. “I’m sick of losing you girls!”

  “I need more—”

  Time’s up.

  The steel door opens with a click.

  ‘John Smith’ pauses one step over the threshold. He is carrying my mobile phone in one hand, inside a plastic evidence bag, and my good coat over his other arm. He does not look surprised; his face registers only blank acknowledgement.

  Nerys opens her sticky black maw, and hisses at him.

  Phone and coat fall to the floor. John goes for his handgun, steps to one side, calls out. “Code seven, code seven!” Loud but not shouting. “Code seven!”

  A second man dashes into the room, heavy-footed, off-balance, in the black body armour and white ID strip of a Section Special officer, Dream Control’s muscle. He’s got a multi-spectrum man-catcher strapped across his chest, a pistol fumbling into his hands.

  John raises his gun.

  And points it.

  At me.

  A heartbeat is enough. Turn my head, open my mouth, wrap my lips around the dangling tip of Nerys’ tail. The fattened globe of glistening black oil dissolves on my tongue. Ashes mixed with chocolate, a hint of blood and mucus, the chemical reek of burning petrol. I start to gag, I’m going to vomit, can’t keep it down.

  Three explosions punch me in the chest. So simple, so quick, just bang, bang, bang.

  The world wheels aside, goes somewhere else for an eyeblink.

  And then I’m down on my arse, slumped against the back wall of the interrogation room. Blood all down my front, oozing from three ragged holes in my chest and belly, punched right through my clothes, slippery under my hands as I try to press the wounds shut. Hot sharp pain growing faster than I can bear, forcing a rotten animal noise up my throat, robbing all my dignity at long last.

  They did it! The bastards finally did it, after all these years. All the bullying and the emotional hygiene bullshit and the stares and whispers of ‘look at the poor crippled girl’.

  They did it. They really did it. They shot me!

  But then the holes in my flesh start to shrink. The flow of blood trickles off. The pain eases back down. My jumper and my shirt are ruined, but the bullet wounds close up, until the blood-slick skin is smooth and unscarred. I gape down at myself, pawing at where the holes should be. I’m whole again. Holed no more. I’m laughing, maybe, but it’s not a pleasant sound.

  Magical girl.

  I lurch to my feet, heaving for breath, wheezing with residual pain. I don’t feel very fucking magical.

  Nerys is still on the table, hissing at ‘John Smith’; John is retreating into the corridor, gun still levelled, eyes darting left and right.

  “Pull back, pull back,” John calls out, loud but calm. Turns his head, raises his voice. “Dream overspill, dream overspill. Hit the alarm. You, there, alarm, now.”

  The Section Special officer isn’t listening.

  Eyes wide with fear, face pale and waxy. He thinks I’m a Dreamer. Thinks this is it, this is the real thing, this is what he’s trained for, and he’s so scared he’s shitting in his underwear. He jams his pistol into a holster on his belt and fumbles with the MSMC across his chest — the multi-spectrum man-catcher, an unholy love child of taser, pepper spray delivery system, and high-powered sonic irritant weapon. Newborn Dreamers sometimes shrug off bullets just as easily as the older ones, but a Dreamer still emerging from their cocoon might be vulnerable to electricity, chemicals, or burst eardrums, before they’ve figured out how to make the waking world dance to the dream inside.

  I lunge toward him, angrier than I’ve ever felt in my life.

  He frees the MSMC from the straps, fumbles with the safety, tries to point it at my face.

  I pull back a fist — my right hand, my prosthetic. No special reason, just the way I’m stumbling, the angle at which my body weight dictates I use my limbs. Pointless, because the prosthetic isn’t built to deliver a good punch; the angle won’t work, the kinetics are poor, and my knuckles might break on his jawbone. But I’m too angry to stop.

  My punch hits the officer’s head like a sledgehammer smashing a melon.

  His skull explodes, blood and bone and brains splattering against the wall behind him in a fountain of greasy gore. I feel his face crumple and collapse beneath my knuckles, feel him go limp, feel him die. I overbalance, almost falling after him as he goes down, decapitated by a single punch.

  The Section Special officer crashes to the floor. The air reeks of gore and shit. The white plastic casing of my prosthetic fingers are coated with blood.

  “ … ha … how … that’s not … not … ”

  A weight lands on my right shoulder, zoog paws scrabbling for balance, sharp little claws snagging in my jumper. “Magical girl!” Nerys gurgles. “And just in time, too!”

  An alarm rips through the air, a deep blare of panic.

  “Time to run, Octavia!” Nerys rasps, breath hot in my ear. “I’ll teach you how to open a translocation portal, but we can’t do it inside the building, not inside the Harding cage. You gotta get out, beyond the walls, then you’re home free.”

  “But … but he … ” I gesture at the dead man, his ruined skull, the spreading crimson puddle, my own bloody knuckles; I can’t take my eyes off the corpse. I did that. “I-I didn’t mean to— I can’t— that’s not possible—”

  “He knew what he signed up for!” Nerys chatters, slapping her tail against my shoulder. “You gotta run! You’re too new-minted for a fight! Go on, out the door!”

  “But—”

  Zoog claws dig into my skin. “I’ve finally got another one of you, I’m not letting you die now! Run!”

  I stumble for the steel door, pause to scoop up my phone and drag my coat across my shoulders, then stagger out into the whitewashed hallway.

  John Smith waits thirty feet down the corridor to my right, handgun still drawn, flanked by a pair of very shocked Dream Control agents. A scrum of police and Section Special officers is forming up behind him. Shouts ring out — “There she is!”, “Don’t engage, don’t engage, don’t even look at her!”, “Lockdown, we need lockdown. Call a team up to the surface!”

  John’s eyes meet mine. He starts to raise the gun again, then thinks better of it. Just stares.

  “You shot me,” I whisper. “You liar.”

  “Left, left, go left!” Nerys skritters in my ear, paws pulling at my shoulder. She wraps her tail tight around my upper arm, anchoring herself to my prosthetic.

  I lurch to my left, pick up my feet, and run.

  Running with a properly fitted prosthetic leg is perfectly doable, especially for a lifelong user, but it’s difficult without a running blade. A prosthetic leg has no bounce, no spring from hitting the ground; my running blade is back in my bedroom, and I never use it anyway, because I rarely have cause to run. So I careen down the corridor at a lopsided headlong lope, and I’ll feel it tomorrow in my hips and lower back.

  Or will I, now that I’m a magical girl?

  Am I? I don’t know what I am.

  I also don’t know where I am or where I’m going, and that’s a much more pressing concern than whatever Nerys’ tail-goop has done to my metaphysical condition, when there are men with guns lining up to shoot me again. Three bullets hurt bad enough; thirty bullets might do enough damage so they can contain me; I don’t even want to think about three hundred bullets.

  Whatever this building is, it’s a maze of concrete and linoleum and big dumb steel doors. Nerys guides me, riding my right shoulder, hissing “left!”, “right!”, “duck into that door and wait one … two … three … okay, go! Go go!” Booted feet rush past, shouts echo down the labyrinth, and I bounce off the corners, bruising myself as I flee.

  “Can’t I—” I pant, already out of breath, “—fly, now? Isn’t that— shouldn’t I be able— to fly?”

  “Not yet!” Nerys rasps. “You have to learn! And what would you do, fly down these corridors?”

  “Yes!” I growl.

  Nerys cackles. “That’s the spirit! You’re gonna make a great magical girl, Octavia!”

  I want to pull her off my shoulder and punt her into a wall, but I don’t, because then I would be alone.

  Nerys guides me up a stairwell. Has me pause and wait, breath held, pressed to a wall; feet rush past somewhere higher, men with guns clanking and rattling. Then we go up again, then down another corridor. The air lightens, brightens, high windows showing a rain-kissed sky. I can smell wet asphalt and hear the distant hum of traffic.

  “Almost there, almost there!” Nerys chitter-chatters in my ear. “There’ll be a proper security door, you’ll have to break it down. See that brown door there with the bar? Open it and go through! On the other side you’ll have to do some punching, but it’s just a door—”

  I slam against the bar and tumble through; it would set off an alarm, but the alarms are already maxed out. The room on the other side is a tiny corridor between the building and an external security door.

  The security door is wide open. A Section Special officer is standing on the threshold, neither in nor out, MSMC in both hands.

  He freezes. I freeze. Nerys hisses at him.

  “Don’t,” I say, hands out. “Don’t, don’t make me do it. Don’t. Just … just step aside—”

  The officer raises the MSMC, points it at my face, pulls the trigger.

  A pair of electrode-darts slice through my jumper and shirt and stick in my flesh. Pepper spray coats my face and slams down my throat, burning like liquid fire. My eardrums burst with a pulse of directed sound, a sharp stabbing in the sides of my head. The world dissolves into pain, choking and retching, muscles locking up under electric current, ears throbbing, deafened, blinded.

  But I’m a magical girl. Or at least something approximate.

  I tear the electrodes out of my skin and flail with my right fist, at the flesh-coloured blur atop the officer’s body armour. My knuckles connect with a crunch of breaking bones and a tearing of wet meat.

  Momentum carries me through the open security door, stumbling out onto crumbly asphalt. Carries him too, my fist embedded in the remains of his skull.

  I shake him off, let the corpse slither to the ground. My hand leaves the wreckage of his face, meat and gristle and brains. I nearly vomit, stomach clenching, pounding at the door to my throat, because the sound is so awful. Or maybe that’s just the pepper spray, though the effect is rapidly fading. Wiping at my face, scrubbing away my tears and my snot. Sound throbs back, eardrums healing rapidly; distant traffic, open skies, my own feet on the ground.

  “Time to go!” Nerys hisses in my ear. “We’re out, we’re out, you gotta portal! Portal time! Portal time, Octavia! Here, you gotta do it yourself. First concentrate on—”

  The building I’ve emerged from is a squat monster of pale concrete and shining metal, every external corner studded with security cameras — Dream Control Oxford Headquarters, on the eastern edge of the new metropolitan area. Their most famous slogan is emblazoned on the side of the structure, taken from a million posters and public safety broadcasts.

  REPORT STRANGE DREAMS

  A tall chain-link fence separates the grounds from a broad and empty road. There’s a wall in the middle distance, some kind of security barrier. The sky is flat and grey. The asphalt is wet with fresh rain.

  Nerys pulls at my shoulder, trying to turn me around. “You gotta go! We gotta go! Now, now, now! Octavia, concentrate! You have to—”

  A corner of the sky explodes into crimson blaze, as if a miniature sun has been born twelve feet to my right, a comet crashing to earth, burning through the atmosphere. Phantom pain pulses in my right leg and right arm. The ghost of a migraine stirs behind my right eye.

  The glow tightens, condenses, lowers itself to the ground. High-heeled shoes tap onto the asphalt. Cream-and-red skirts settle around long legs. A ruby sword glints in the rain-stained light.

  “What have you done?” hisses a voice I’ve heard before, on the news, too many times to count.

  A real magical girl.

  Scarlet Edge.

  Maidens of the Fall. I gotta admit that for some reason I wasn't expecting the massive positive response, and it kinda surprised me, in a very good way. I'm really glad so many readers have enjoyed the opening of the story, and I hope you enjoy everything I've got coming up as well!

  a full-on character illustration of Octavia, (by sporktown heroine!) being very normal, very calm, very normal woman, perfectly rational. Nothing wrong with her! I do love this illustration style, it's so very her.