Adrift on a suffering sea.

  Flat on my back.

  Breathing.

  Quiet.

  But not total silence, which means that I am yet among the awake and the alive. Distant winds hum and sigh, occasionally rising high in strange fluting notes, as if piping through channels in porous stone. My own whimpering drowns out anything closer, in slow, relentless, pounding waves, a standard-bearer for the agony in my gut and chest and back.

  Consciousness is torture, but I’ve been out cold for too long, so the soft machine of my body has decreed it’s time to wake up and assess the damage. Can’t remember how I got here, lying on this cold and rocky ground. Can’t think through the pain; pain is all I can think. Whatever’s left of me is reduced to a thin and ragged membrane around a throbbing core of misery.

  I whine. I moan. I cry out once or twice or maybe more. I try to stay very still, one hand on my stomach, grasping the locus of my torment.

  The pain pulses and flows for a very long time. Then, slowly.

  So slowly that I dare not hope it’s real.

  The pain ebbs.

  And ebbs.

  Away.

  That process is a little too familiar; the sheer level of pain is new, but I’ve trodden the contours of recovery before.

  Stillness is an old servant and serves me well. It lets me pretend I’m not really here, not present inside my own flesh. But there’s no morphine drips to soften the blow. Reminds me of being unwell when I was a little girl, lying in bed, my body a prison awash in the storm of my own immune system. I ride the ebbing pain back down, into the still waters of a safe harbour. The tide creeps out inch by inch, until I am left shaking and raw upon the cold shore of my own biology. But I stay still for another stretch of eternity, because the pain was so total and lasted for so long. My muscles recall it even after departure. My body is afraid the pain will return if I move too soon or too sudden.

  My mouth is dry, tastes of blood.

  “Get up,” I whisper.

  Time passes. Sleep steals over me for a few seconds, then flees again.

  “Get up, Octavia,” I croak. “Get up. Get up. Get up now or you’re a useless whining child. Get up. Up.”

  Sitting up is easy in theory, difficult in practice. My coat is crusted to the ground with a layer of partially dried blood, and my clothes are glued to my back with the same; the sensation as it peels away makes my skin crawl. My head swims and my pulse races as if I’ve leapt to my feet too quickly, when all I’m doing is trying to pull my torso upright. Worst of all is my gut, my insides, and a portion of my spine and upper back. A faint burning lingers in all of them, a diagonal line carved through my core, an echo of the wound from Scarlet’s ruby sword.

  Halfway upright, memory comes rushing back with a gasping splutter. Scarlet, the Trio, the whirling portal of deathly purple, a fall through an infinite space, and then …

  Nerys said something about a ‘translocation portal’? I must have fallen unconscious halfway here.

  My jumper and shirt are shredded, caked in blood, ruined by three bullet holes and a massive gash low in the belly. But the gut wound itself is gone, closed up, not even a scar. I still possess my right leg and my right arm, prosthetics still attached. Still whole.

  Finish sitting up. Swaying, blinking, clearing my eyes.

  I have become the centrepiece of a pool of dried blood. The inner part of the pool is still sticky, tacky with the runoff from my wound, but the outside is dry, flaked like rust, soaked into dusty grey rock.

  “Nerys?” I rasp, then cough, then swallow a throatful of crusty blood and dried out mucus. “Ugh.”

  Grey rocky ground stretches away on all sides, rising into sinuous formations topped by glowing fractal fungi and claw-like bushes of coal and umber. The edge of an unearthly forest lies a little way to my right, all black and silver. To my left the crags and cracks of a canyon system crawl away beyond sight. Before me, perhaps thirty meters away, a shimmer of water stretches off, glossy-slick and faintly-grey.

  Black sky above, starless void to the horizon — except for a wide blue marble, resplendent in the eternal darkness.

  And there’s England, the British Isles. A smudge of green, wreathed in cloud, sinking into the shadow of night.

  “ … I’m … I’m on the moon?”

  Of all the new unknowns in the decades since the wall of sleep came crashing down, the moon has proven herself the most impenetrable. The London Exclusion Zone is the most extensive and active Dreamland overlap on Earth, but the moon has become a mystery, dangerous to the touch. Since the first days after Harding’s ritual forty one years ago, anybody with a telescope and more courage than sense could look up at night sky and see the changes rippling across the moon’s face — the spreading forests of alien vegetation, the lakes and seas of oily fluid, the furtive scuttlings in the shadows, the strange ruins and crumbling temples and gargantuan structures, all revealed as the dream peeled back a false veil from Gaia’s silent satellite.

  Not so silent anymore, mischievous Luna.

  The Americans have attempted two manned Moon landings in the post-Harding age, one in 1990 and another in 2004. The first was a small team of three. The Americans have never released audio or video of their demise. On the second attempt they sent a dozen men. They didn’t come back either, but there was no way to hide what happened from space-based telescopes. Everybody with a strong stomach and a secure internet connection has seen the orbital footage of the Luna Bestia — the ‘Moon Beasts’ — overwhelm the NASA team, pull them apart with tentacled maws, and drag the remains of the lander back to the so-called ‘dark side of the moon’.

  Moon Beasts don’t bother robotic probes, but robots don’t last long in a Dreamland overlap. They get funny ideas.

  The Chinese landed on the moon in 2020. They went heavily armed, lost only five people out of a much larger team, then scurried back to Earth with rock and vegetation samples, a lot of photographs, and two dead Moon Beasts for study. One of the Moon Beasts rather famously came back to life in an Earth-side laboratory. Of the fifteen taikonauts who stood on the surface of Luna’s Dream and made it back to the waking world, seven have since killed themselves, five are in full-time psychiatric care, two are missing, presumed Dreamers, and the final one became a short-lived religious leader, currently residing in a Chinese prison, convicted of a particularly grisly ritualistic murder.

  Magical girls cannot go to the moon. The Dream-Gods of Earth are of Earth; their powers weaken beyond our sphere. The less said about the spheres further out than the moon, the better. Some don’t dream at all, but Saturn does, and Saturn’s Nightmares are too alien. Those ones don’t get broadcast on television when they intrude on Earth, no matter how total and rousing the victory.

  Luna dreams her own dreams, so close to our own, but not quite close enough.

  And now I’m here.

  Am I going mad yet? I don’t think so. Magical girls are immune to Nightmares, immune to the effects of a Dreamland overlap. In theory, I’m safe. On the moon.

  At least I’m still breathing. The air doesn’t taste of hard vacuum, just dusty and dry, a little cold, but no worse than a bad autumn day on English soil. This must be the Mare Imbrium, what used to be the Imbrium basin, toward the north of the visible side of the moon. The wide shores of the Mare Imbrium lake are one of the few places that still retain the ‘magnificent desolation’ of pre-Harding Luna.

  I must have been lying here for hours, marinating in a pool of my own drying blood. A tempting meal. But I haven’t been eaten by Moon Beasts, and I don’t see any tentacled shadows lurking at the edge of the silvery black forest, or crouched among the smooth rock formations and fungal stalks.

  Perhaps they know better than to mess with a magical girl. Maybe my meat is poisonous to them now.

  Still, I should be terrified, shouldn’t I? But I’m too numb.

  My prosthetic arm is a mess, white plastic fingers coated with dry blood, gore caked into the joints. White and red and white and red, held out against the dusty grey ground of Luna. I flex each finger one by one, then make and unmake a fist several times, listening to the motors inside. Blood falls away in rusty flakes. The joints feel a little stiff, a little slower than normal. My thumb and my middle finger are misaligned slightly, but there’s no other damage to my hand. A minor miracle, considering what I punched.

  I make a fist again and stare at my knuckles. They aren’t glowing, or turned into tungsten; the arm doesn’t feel any different, the same weight and heft as always, the same old foam and carbon fibre. A WestEuro Bionics XMR Model 4, no different than it was this morning. My right arm.

  But somehow I punched two men to death, then went toe-to-toe with a magical girl.

  Magic, right.

  When I press the battery level indicator set into my forearm, the little white bar reads 100%, which also shouldn’t be possible. I huff with frustration, because I don’t trust ‘magic’ not to cook off the battery, and the last thing I need right now is to be set on fire by my own limb. My arm needs maintenance — real maintenance, with real tools, by somebody who knows what she’s doing, which means me. But all my tools are back home, in my bedroom, along with the charging cable for the internal battery, and I don’t know if I can ever go home again.

  Dislocation swims at the back of my head, like vertigo and nausea and cold sweat all at once. My life is over, isn’t it?

  I’m a murderer now. Scarlet Edge was right about that.

  So clear in the heat of the moment, with guns pointed at my face, no choice but to push on forward, no way out but through other peoples’ meat and bone. Anger was like a drug in my veins, kept me going, kept me sharp. But now? What came over me back there? My anger didn’t solve anything. Killing those two men didn’t solve anything, even if it did get me out of the building. Surely I could have just knocked them out or disabled them somehow? I didn’t know my strength for the first one, that’s true, I didn’t mean for that to happen; but the second man, if only he hadn’t shot at me, if only I hadn’t been blinded and deafened, if only, if only I could rewind time.

  Killing didn’t feel good. It feels sick and wrong. The memory of bone breaking and brains bursting under my fingers, those corpses slithering off my grip—

  My stomach clenches hard, pushes a fist up my throat. I double up, lean forward, retch and heave. My stomach is empty all except a few strings of bile, but I bring that up anyway.

  I stay doubled up for a minute or two, until the feeling passes.

  “I’m sorry … ”

  It was me or them. I’m sorry, I genuinely am. But I want to live, and nobody is going to take that from me.

  A gust of wind sneaks cold fingers through the gaping sword-hole in the back of my coat. The forest away to my right shivers and rustles. The rocks whistle with a discordant chorus of fluting notes. I straighten back up, looking around for Moon Beasts. But I am still alone, so I return to self-examination.

  There’s a long cut in the white carbon fibre over my prosthetic forearm, where Scarlet Edge deflected my second punch.

  I run my left hand over it, probe the edges. Deep, the sides turned up from the edge of the blade, but it didn’t split the innards, didn’t do any functional damage.

  An echo of anger brings a tut to my mouth. Those men did not deserve to die, but Scarlet Edge deserved a lot more than my fist in her gut. She deserves a dose of her own medicine. By now she’ll be all healed up and changed into a new dress, the bloodstains washed out, or the fabric itself regenerated by magic. Her face, flushed and quivering with pleasure, stokes my anger; she was getting off on that, aroused by running me through.

  England’s favourite rose, a dirty little sadist.

  But the moment I punched her felt so good, the thought makes me shiver and smile. A laugh creeps up my throat.

  “Ha! Haha … ”

  The moment I hear myself, the laugh dies, because I kill it. My anger goes with it, washed away by cold.

  Was that the way I laughed at Scarlet Edge after I punched her?

  “I sound deranged,” I mutter.

  What would Willow think of me now? Am I a monster, Willow? Would you blame me for what I did? Would you blame me for wanting to live? You might blame me for kissing Scarlet Edge, though it wasn’t a real kiss, and you took my first, so that’s okay. But I scrub my lips on the back of my sleeve anyway, spit to clear any of her blood from my mouth. You wouldn’t blame me for self-defence, would you, Willow?

  Of course you wouldn’t. Willow would understand. Willow would forgive.

  Suddenly I need to talk to her, hear her voice, tell her that I’m alive. That I’m on the moon? Maybe not that part. I dig out my mobile phone, discover it has survived my brush with Scarlet Edge, and wipe a crust of half-dried blood off the screen. The clock says 21:37, but that’s BST, not moon time.

  Then I almost laugh again. There won’t be any signal on the moon. It’s the moon.

  “Uh … huh?”

  Signal. Three bars. More than enough. Several missed calls from my grandmother earlier in the day, then nothing. No messages or calls from Willow. A few messages linger in the group chat with Willow and her wider circle of friends — Dory, Kaycee, Rose, Max, people I know only through Willow, and then barely as more than a bunch of normals, a group in which I am second only to a stranger. But nothing since this morning. Nothing from Willow.

  My last private message from Willow is a custom emote of a nodding puppy-girl. It was a response to a question I sent her. Are we going together, today?

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

  The puppy-girl looks a bit like her, I guess.

  I don’t know what to say, what to send. Are you safe? I’ve heard you’re in hospital, was that a lie? Are you safe, in pain? Are you going to be okay? Thank you for protecting me. Everything I’ve done is to get back to you. I miss you. I’m far away. Very far away. I don’t know how to get home. I think I’m dead, or I’m never coming back. I want to hear your voice. I love you.

  I love you?

  Can’t think clearly. Too much has happened and I’m technically still in a lot of danger, even if I’m not feeling it.

  I settle for simplicity, an implicit test, a heart emote, in pink. I send it, then wait for the little tick mark that shows Willow’s phone has received the data. Then I wait some more, for the second tick mark, to show that either she has picked up her phone and unlocked the screen and seen that I love her — or that Dream Control are watching and listening over her shoulder.

  While I wait, I flick over to my photos, because I need to see her face. I’m too much of a coward to set Willow as my phone’s wallpaper, too afraid of a stop and search, mortified by the potential looks as people assume things about her and I. But what teenage girl doesn’t have a few pictures of her best friend? Some are candid, photos taken when she wasn’t looking, or when she didn’t know I had my phone out, but others I took with her full knowledge.

  My favourite is one of us together, her arm around my shoulders, a big smile on her beaming face, her hair up in a ponytail like a waterfall.

  Willow is so beautiful. Scarlet Edge is nothing compared to her.

  But I notice something I’ve never realised before. In the picture, I look a little scared. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

  Ten minutes later, phone clutched in both hands, Willow still hasn’t seen my heart.

  Did ‘John Smith’ lie about her as well? Is Willow more badly injured than he told me? Is she unconscious, strapped to a hospital bed, full of drips and needles? Is she in a coma?

  My fingers mash the call button before I can stop myself, shaking so hard I have to press it three times. I put the phone to my ear and bite my lower lip. I’m calling you from the moon, Willow. Please pick up. Please be there, please be alive, please, please, please—

  Click.

  “Willow?! Willow? It’s me, it’s … hello?”

  Silence. A soft note of distant static. Nobody replies.

  Dream Control.

  Or the police. Or MI5. Or maybe them, the Trio of Albion. Whoever it is, they have Willow’s phone tapped, and they know I’m likely to call her.

  “You won’t have any luck tracing this,” I say. “Willow, if you can hear me, I … ”

  Can’t say it. Not if they’re listening.

  “I’m alright,” I say, and it hurts. “I’m going to be alright. I’ll … I’ll see you. Later. Soon.”

  I can’t say ‘goodbye’. I just hang up.

  A new kind of anger settles into my gut. Slow and cold and hard.

  I put my phone away and check my pockets, but I don’t have anything else except my purse, and I don’t expect a few pound coins or my debit card or student railcard to be of much use on the moon, unless the Moon Beasts have been busy building trains while nobody was watching. I’m also extremely hungry and more than a little thirsty, though oddly enough it does feel like my body can ignore those needs for a while longer.

  Magical girl, right.

  My strength has mostly returned. The echo of pain in my torso is further away, receding more with every second.

  I’m a magical girl now, for some unknown definition of ‘magical’ and ‘girl’. I’m also on the moon. But magical girls aren’t supposed to be able to go to the moon, because the Dream-Gods of Earth do not have power here. There’s only one logical conclusion.

  My benefactor Dream-Goddess isn’t from Earth.

  “Nerys?” I raise my voice as much as I dare. “Nerys!”

  I peer around with a bit more clarity, hoping to find the oily zoog curled up against a rock. But no, I am steadfastly alone.

  “You better not have lied to me as well,” I mutter, then slowly clamber to my feet. “Or I’ll … punch your head off too. See if I don’t.”

  Gravity feels no different to Earth, another trick of the Dreamland overlap, but my internal gravity is another matter. As I stand and straighten up, an aftershock of pain shoots from my gut to my spine, along the path taken by Scarlet’s blade. I gasp and double up, tears springing to my eyes, breathing slowly, clutching at my guts. Terrified the pain is going to come back in full.

  Eventually I straighten up again, the pain ebbing as fast as it struck. Running a hand over my belly shows nothing, no reopening wound.

  The Mare Imbrium stretches away ahead of me, the horizon of glossy grey-slick water closer than it would be on Earth; I’m not stupid enough to try wading through that. To my left is mostly rock, fungus, and a few low pools of silver-dark oily liquid, and then a dense landscape of canyons. Not navigable without good boots and a climbing rope. To my right lies the forest all silver and black and full of fern-like fronds, thick as wild jungle. The fronds sway in the wind, but sometimes without any wind, so I’m definitely not going over there.

  Over my shoulder, looming close, stands a line of mountains, curving away around the massive lake of the Mare Imbrium. These must be the Montes Alpes, transformed from the pre-Harding grey sentinels to forest-dusted heights of black and silver.

  They are quite beautiful against the dark and starless sky, but I’m not built for mountain climbing.

  Between the shore and the foothills stand the memory of buildings, stretching off toward lunar north. Low walls of dirty white stone, crumbled colonnades colonised by creeping ivy, the gutted remains of temples and shrines, their fallen grandeur worn down by time, their carven displays mere outlines in rock.

  Beyond the ruins, built into a mountainside, squats something distinctly more modern, and much larger.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re not meant to be here, whatever you are,” I say, then sigh. “Just like me.”

  I start walking toward it, because there’s nowhere else to go.

  A sturdy, slope-sided, sharp-edged block, large as a football stadium, surrounded by low outbuildings, with dark horizontal slits at regular intervals. Concrete perhaps, the underlying grey painted in a dizzying riot of colour. Splashes of void-dark purple, streaks of fresh green, sunbursts of deep orange, scars and pockmarks filled in with neon pink, glowing in the lunar sunlight. Banners hang from several of the dark slits, ragged and tattered, slogans and symbols sanded down to sentence fragments. Spray-paint tags have faded, but some are still legible — the circled anarchist ‘A’, a cartoon monkey chewing his own tail, the words ‘vampire sex dungeon’, a fist smashing a wall — and ‘REPORT STRANGE FUCK YOU’, in letters ten feet tall. The mantra of Dream Control, mocked in a way impossible back on English soil.

  The roof is studded with rusted gun barrels, sagging and broken, still pointing at the lunar sky. The front of the roof bristles with a little cluster of modern antenna and satellite pickup dishes. Several long poles sport the ragged remains of flags, most of them too faded and weathered to recognise. Only one flag is still mostly intact, the colours muted, caked with dirt.

  It’s the Union Jack, but with the Welsh Dragon added on top, breaking the Cross of Saint George in its jaws.

  I’ve never seen anything like that before, but I’m pretty sure it would be illegal back home.

  The entrance is multifaceted. To one side a pair of massive metal doors stand wide, rusted open, designed for vehicle access, shielded by concrete buttresses and overlooked by empty battlements. A courtyard lurks inside, mostly grey concrete, with dark tunnels burrowing beneath the bulk of the mountain overhead. Another pair of doors, human-scale, stand at the apex of a wide staircase, flanked by ridged columns, crowned by a massive lintel of masonry; something’s been torn off that lintel, a long stretch of concrete or stone cast to the ground long ago, the wound filled with graffiti, bright colours, neon paint, and ‘GOD **** THE KING’.

  “Where have you brought me to, Nerys?” I mutter. “This isn’t visible from Earth. Nobody knows this is here.”

  Passing the outbuildings, little squat blocks of concrete, I realise what they are — bunkers, their guns long gone or rusted away to dirty red streaks in the grey. Standing piles of rock have been placed by intelligent hands, cairns marking out some pattern I’m not Dreamer enough to read.

  The lunar soil changes aspect beneath my shoes, growing thicker and meatier, spotted with dark sprouts of strange vegetation, pale ivy crawling up the sides of the old bunkers.

  Earth recedes behind me, toward the lunar horizon. Whatever this place is, it’s right on the edge of the dark side of the moon. Now the pain has mostly passed and I’ve got my wits back, I’m worried about Moon Beasts again. They’ve ignored me so far, or perhaps magical girl meat is not to their tastes, but this vast ruined building could be crawling with them. I slow my pace, gazing up at the gargantuan structure as the shadows beckon me inward.

  “Nerys … Nerys, damn you. Where are you, you little—”

  A figure slides through the human-scale front doors of the lunar fortress. A slip of white and brown, fluttering on the moon-wind.

  She stops and stands, still as a painting, waiting at the top of the steps, staring down at my stalled approach.

  The girl in the white dress. The terrorist bomber. The Dreamer.

  She takes the stairs down two at a time, hopping and skipping, white sandals slapping on concrete. She sways from side to side as she draws to a halt, perhaps thirty feet away. She looks exactly as she did earlier today, hair like a thicket, all curls and mess, pale forearms and face too clean in the lunar sunlight. Big green eyes too innocent to be true, folding her hands behind her backside, framed by the ruined fortress. A hint of maniac grin plays across her lips — curious, uncertain, amused.

  She raises her eyebrows at me, as if expecting a response.

  Straighten my spine, smooth out my clothes, try not to look like a bloodstained madwoman. This girl is a criminal and a fugitive, yes. But so am I.

  “Hello?” I call out. “Nerys brought me here. Are you … are you … ”

  The girl in the white dress grins wider, struggling not to break, as if this is all a joke at my expense.

  Clarity comes sudden and sharp, right up against my heart. This is the girl who threw the bomb at Scarlet Edge, and that makes us allies right now. But this is also the girl who threw the bomb that ended my life.

  More importantly, this is the girl who threw the bomb that burned Willow. This girl is the reason Willow is in hospital. Or worse.

  Maybe the anger flashes onto my face. Maybe she can see it in my dreams, or smell it on my skin, or read an invisible aura. Or maybe she’s been watching all along, waiting for this moment. Whichever it is, she gives up any attempt to control her face. The girl in the white dress breaks into a grin from ear to ear, teeth together, eyes wide. A slasher smile.

  And then she transforms.

  Nobody has ever seen a magical girl transformation. That is not merely the official policy of the British government, and of every other nation state with magical girls who operate within their borders. It is a rule of reality, of the waking world and the Dreamlands both, one that has not broken down with the falling of the walls. Or perhaps the rule was created by the consequences of Harding’s ritual; who can say for certain? The most powerful divine intervention stands as an unbreakable injunction between any magical girl and her ‘real’ identity. Trying to witness the transformation will do subtle damage to the memory and mind of any mortal, rendering it impossible to link the magical girl with the young woman who stood there a moment earlier. Trying to capture it on camera is both illegal and lethal. A few occultists have made the attempt. None survived sane.

  The only exception is other magical girls.

  One moment the girl in the white dress is standing there, hips swaying from side to side, grinning at me. She raises a hand, clicks her fingers, and she is enveloped in blinding chaos, a riot of dark pink and searing white, bubbling toxic blue and streaks of oily black, like splatters of paint hurled at a canvas.

  The colours bulge outward as if trying to contain a sudden increase in pressure — then snap inward, slapping tight to the petite figure at their core, wrapping her in headache hues and a clashing cacophony of colours.

  For a split-second I have no idea who I’m looking at. My mind reels with mental dislocation.

  And then, with a little pop, my tainted soul pushes past the mental block placed on mortal humans, and I recognise her again.

  The girl — the magical girl, because she’s obviously not a Dreamer at all — has the same face and physique as she did a moment earlier. But everything else is different.

  Her hair is a twin-tailed mane of dark pink and deep lilac, streaked with white and black, glittering with diamond dust, topped by a tricorn jester’s hat in electric blue and neon yellow. Her dress has puffed out at the shoulders, gained sleeves and cuffs, and slimmed down to fit tight to her slender build, all in blue-black-white motley. Her waist is encircled by a massive blue ribbon, spreading behind her like low-slung wings. Her skirt is all ruffles and layers now, dotted with hearts and diamonds in blood-red and deep-sea blue, legs clad in striped pink-white-blue tights.

  Her face is a mask of white makeup, decorated with pink hearts like bruises around her eye sockets, deep black swirls on her cheeks, a bright red nose, and pink-black lips.

  She’s got a mismatched pair of gloves on her hands, one red, one black, and a pair of matching rollerblades on her feet.

  A psycho clown from the dark side of the moon.

  And still grinning.

  Before I can react, she kicks off from a standing start, roller blades skidding and slicing across the hard-packed lunar soil, racing right for me.

  She reaches beneath her skirt and extracts a length of black metal — a pump-action shotgun. Magical girls do not use modern firearms, but this is no ordinary magical girl. Her other hand flourishes, producing a trio of shotgun shells held between her fingers. She flips the shotgun one handed, tossing it into the air, catching it again as she races forward on her skates. Her other hand blurs, loading the shells into the shotgun fast as a machine. She tosses the shotgun again, spinning it in the air, then catches it by the pump and makes it go click-clack, all without losing her balance.

  No time to think; she’s moving too fast, coming right at me. I raise my fists, prosthetic to the fore, and wind back a punch. But there’s no anger in me now, just fear and confusion.

  “Nerys!” I shout. “Nerys, what is this?! Who is this?! Nerys, where did you go?!”

  The psycho-clown doesn’t raise her shotgun; she charges me like a bull, baits out the punch, forces me to lurch aside or be run down. She thinks she’s got me off-balance, but my arm is a piston and my fist is a wrecking ball and I’m tired of being attacked. I put all my weight behind my arm, correcting for the flinch, going right for the middle of her chest, to knock her off those stupid rollerblades and face down in the lunar dirt.

  She ducks.

  Just ducks, while still gliding on those skates. My punch sails into thin air as she turns her head to grin up at me.

  Then she explodes out of the duck in a spinning somersault, lands back on her wheels without losing momentum, and shoots me in the side.

  “Bang!” she shouts.

  The shotgun blast is like a bomb going off against my ribcage. The world slams sideways and the ground slams me in the face; my second trip to the floor this day, on two different stellar bodies. That has to be some kind of record. A pathetic one.

  A radiating meteor-strike of pain pins me to the ground. No breath in my lungs, my vision all blurred, grey moon-soil against my face.

  I lie like that for far too long, heaving and coughing and choking for breath, drooling a trail of thin blood onto the dirt. The shick-shick-shick of rollerblades circles back toward me and skids to a halt. A small strong hand, none too gentle, rolls me onto my back, drawing out a crazed spike of pain from a punctured lung and half a dozen shattered ribs.

  The psycho clown girl crouches by my side, peering down at my face, her wild pink hair and jester’s hat framed by black lunar skies.

  “Huh!” Her eyes light up. “Well lookie here. One of us, for real for real!”

  I wheeze, try to speak, cough up a sticky plug of congealed blood. The pain in my side is worse than the bullets back on Earth, but nowhere near as bad as being impaled by Scarlet Edge — but it’s that pain which pins me, the echo of Scarlet’s ruby sword, throbbing anew through my core, resonating with the new pain of being shot yet again.

  I can barely breathe or move, let alone speak. She must have ruptured my heart.

  Clown girl dodges my clawing left hand, swaying back in her crouch.

  “Heyyyyy,” she giggles, “don’t look so buttblasted. I’d help you up, no hard feelings, you know? But you’re gonna wanna sit with those wounds for a sec, wait for the pellets to work themselves back out. You seem kinda low on juice, but hey, give it five minutes and you’ll be right as rain, alright on the night. Haha!” She squeaks with laughter again. “But it’s always night up here, right?”

  Up close and in my face, she’s so beautiful it hurts.

  Not like Scarlet Edge, not the kind of beauty that forces you to look, grabs your optic nerve and your gut and won’t let go, the kind you can’t resist. This is a subtle beauty that draws you in with details; here is a girl you glance at once, then look away, then think twice, but when you look back she’s already moved on, like a fairy in your peripheral vision.

  Delicate doll-like cheekbones, thin lips more comfortable in a smirk than at rest, a button nose almost twitching as she talks, eyes glittering like emeralds in a sunlit glade. Mischief and trickery shaped into the form of a person. Here is a face you find peering at you from around a forest bough, a face you should not acknowledge, whose questions you should not answer.

  Through the clown makeup I can see a blemish — a massive purple birthmark that runs down the left side of her throat and vanishes beneath her collar, fingers of discoloured skin reaching up her cheek, impossible to hide. How did I not notice that before? Because I was distracted by the grin, by the way it rips across her lips and blazes in her eyes with the light of manic insanity.

  And that’s beautiful too.

  Or maybe I’m going delusional from blood loss and pain.

  How can I allow myself to think she’s beautiful? With Scarlet Edge I was given no choice; her beauty was a sledgehammer. But this girl has no such power. This is all me, betraying Willow in my heart.

  The clown-girl bursts into a peal of giggles.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” she says through the laughter. “I said no hard feelings, yeah? It was just birdshot, duh.” One hand flickers and blurs, producing a pair of shotgun shells in candy-floss pink. “But these are slugs, yeah? Juuuust in case you get any funny ideas. Put a hole through a fuckin’ elephant, one of these would, sure thing. Blow your head clean off. No coming back from that.” She waits a beat, then bursts out laughing again. “Naaaah, just kiddin’. I wouldn’t do that!”

  She makes the slugs vanish again.

  “You … ffff … fu … fuck—”

  The clown girl cackles. “Go onnnnn, say it! I can take it! Call me a cunt, call me a bitch, and I’ll keep on being worse.” She tilts her head to one side, twintails swaying, and looks into my right eye, at my slitted vision. “Huh. Cool scar.”

  “Rrrrr … ”

  She finally stands up, scooting back on her roller blades to avoid my hand again.

  “When you can walk and talk without spitting up shit, come on in.” She thumbs toward the ruined building, then breaks into another mad smirk. “And fix your clothes. Clothing damage is so twenty thirteen. Unless you like that kinda thing, in which case, hey, go wild. I ain’t your boss. Nobody is!”

  She slides off on her roller blades, back toward the concrete steps up to the front door of the lunar fortress.

  After a few meters she ends her magical girl transformation; the clown makeup, the fancy dress, the pink dye in her hair, it all slides off like wet paint sloughing from hydrophobic plastic, splashing to the ground, then vanishing as if it never existed. She is left once again with a white dress and messy brown hair and a pair of sandals.

  She hops and skips and bounces up the steps, sandals slapping on concrete.

  I lie on my back, staring at the dark lunar sky, drooling blood.

  Maidens chapters. Behind the scenes, things have shifted around a bit. Arc 2 was originally meant to be just 4 chapters long, the same as Arc 1, but the middle of the arc has rather grown in the telling, so it's now 6 chapters, and then onto Arc 3. It's also probably worth mentioning a concern that was raised by some patron advance-readers during this arc; though the moon is a very important location in the story (which you might be able to tell from all the description I've lavished on that there moon fortress), we will not be spending the whole time up here. We will be going back to England shortly, and plenty of the story is going to take place down there as well. But, for now, Octavia is on the moon. As is this crazy little moon-clown.

  Octavia herself alongside Azure Infinity, from back in chapter 1.4 (by sporktown heroine!) Then we also have a piece of fanart that I am going to print out and pin above my computer for the next six months: (by Cera!). This one made me do a little squeal. Thank you all so much, it's amazing to see!

  Maidens right away, you can: