CHAPTER 8 - ACCELERANDO III

  There is pandemonium not only in the Agency, but across the United States and the world. Online, and even on the Moon and Mars, people from every creed and country celebrate humanity’s hero for waking once more, and before any new Overtures at that. She seems to be healthy, if a little shaken, but Kovalenko had called a press conference to assuage any worries.

  There are those whose celebrations are just as jubilant as any other, yet beneath the noise they fear for their lives. Megan had summoned both Siena and Keisha to a dainty bar on the southern side of the city, a place the flame-wielding Magical Girl once frequented with her ex-boyfriend. They have Kovalenko’s press conference on, but the director is running a little late.

  Siena doesn’t like this bar. There’s too much noise, too many people speaking and celebrating and getting drunk. It reminds her of how her father used to get; the ashen-haired girl clenches her hand around the cold stem of her glass, a pale, sharply bitter gin martini trembling just slightly with the movement of the crowd.

  Her father drinking had never stopped her from doing the same—but only in moderation.

  Keisha seems to throw moderation out the window, given that she’s currently sipping on her third rum and coke, while Megan keeps to cool water. The southern woman twirls the ice cubes in her glass and stares intently at the television in the corner of the bar.

  “The good news is that,” Keisha whispers, slurring her words, “we’re not dead yet. I mean, we’d totally be if she knew, right?”

  “Not necessarily. And stop drinking.” Megan snatches the rum and coke out of her hand; Keisha whines, but gives in, blowing a raspberry and placing her head against the table. Twilight Ember continues, “We haven’t been discovered quite yet, but them knowing to look closer for personality changes would be the worst-case scenario.”

  “Pfft. The worst-case scenario is that we die—” Keisha tries to grab her drink back, but fails miserably when Siena now keeps it away from her. “You too, Nana…? I’ve been betrayed…”

  Siena gives her a slight smile and gets the idea of petting her on the head, but decides against it. In a way, this feels quite strange. She’s more confident than ever in herself, even if self-doubt won’t be defeated that easily. However, there is also the severe, gnawing anxiety that will obviously come from still being in the dark. Kovalenko hadn’t communicated with any of the Magical Girls in the Agency besides telling them that Golden Promise was fine.

  “It’s no betrayal if I haven’t claimed that I was gonna help you. You need to have a clear head.”

  Keisha groans. “There’s still time to run away—”

  “Absolutely not,” Megan interrupts. “What I will do very soon is use my influence to see her face to face before she leaves, since she should be back on her feet soon.”

  “Ah. True, pinning her down can be challenging,” she whines and rolls her eyes.

  Megan raises a hand to the bartender. “May we get her some water, please?” She thanks him when he nods.

  Siena smells her own drink and closes her eyes. By the end of today, she might be dead or worse: studied by the Agency, cut open like a piece of meat. She gulps, sips on her drink, and shakes her head to settle her nerves while one of Megan’s fans asks for an autograph and the bartender brings Keisha her water.

  She needs the Conductor at times like these.

  A few minutes later, the commotion in the bar dies down. Nathaniel Kovalenko walks onto the podium, hard face as always as he adjusts his military uniform. Following him is an assembly of Agency officials and—Lucienne Monroe.

  The presser erupts with hundreds of flashes of light from cameras and a standing ovation for humanity’s hope—people in the bar begin to clap as well. The girl is disheveled, with her hair all over the place, deep bags under her golden eyes and the weight of the planet she carries like Atlas on her back.

  Nevertheless, she smiles in her casual clothing: jeans and a t-shirt.

  Siena has to force herself not to close her eyes at the radiant display, and she struggles not to smile back. Her heart nearly jumps in her throat. In another world, without the Luminaries’ intervention, this could have been her. Lucienne stands behind Kovalenko with her arms neatly folded behind her. The monster might have failed, but she knows Lucienne intimately; she’d begun to experience the full breadth of her memories as she embraced and touched her brain and sank her music into her head.

  She knows the positivity is a front. That her entire personality is a facade meant to reassure humanity.

  And… yet.

  It’s quite incredible the effect it still has on her. The warmth. Siena downs her drink; here she is, commiserating with the enemy as if they wouldn’t kill her the second they’re given the chance.

  With a sigh, she listens as the Director begins to speak.

  ——

  Lucienne wants to sleep.

  Her entire body feels hollow, as if she’s been battered and beaten and left to spend the sunset bleeding out on a beach with nothing but the sound of the waves to keep her company. Unfortunately for her, Nathan wants her with him as a show of strength. The Soviet Union has apparently begun to give the Arab Socialist Union the go ahead to put pressure on Kuwait, a staunch American ally in the middle east.

  So here she is, smiling for the cameras as if she hadn’t just woken up from a coma. Nathan would owe her big after this.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. In the last few weeks, our world has been tested in ways few could have predicted. We stand here today in triumph. Thanks to the coordination of the Magical Girl Agency, state and federal authorities, and our Canadian partners, evacuations were conducted efficiently and with zero civilian casualties.” He taps the lectern with a finger. “That is not luck; it is the product of years of preparation and sacrifice”

  He pauses, all pre-planned.

  “I’m equally happy to announce that as you can see,” he gives Lucienne a warm look, which she returns, “Golden Promise is back on her feet and once again ready to defend North America.”

  The room erupts into more applause. Of course, no words would be afforded to the thirty-three dead Magical Girl from the Battle of Seattle. This press conference is about her. Lucienne’s smile doesn’t waver, but she makes a note to ensure to address the fallen’s families when it’s her turn to speak.

  Olivia would have hated this.

  “We’ll make sure to give her some time off so she can rest up in the coming days, but the world can breathe easy for now. Essentia levels are down all across the planet, and remain down—” his gaze sweeps across the room. “—but the threat is never over. The Pale Choir will strike again eventually, and on our shores. We’re getting better at estimating where they’ll attack, when they’ll attack, and that has helped our evacuation efforts, but we still need better ways to deal with threats such as Cantors…”

  Nathaniel goes on and on about security. It is a rather dishonest assessment of the situation considering what they’ve learned recently, but the last thing they want is to create mass panic and hysteria—that, even Lucienne agrees with. Very few people are in the know. Nathan, her, the Deputy Director, the Secretary of Intelligence and a few of her trusted men, the Secretary of the R&D department and again, a few higher ups there. Outside of the Agency, there was the President and a few in his administration.

  The fact that something had tried to come out of Seattle wearing her skin and that there could be more walking among them is now a tightly held secret. Every single Magical Girl present in Seattle who survived is a suspect.

  But Lucienne keeps smiling. That’s what the world needs right now. She feels bad for them, so clueless to the catastrophe brewing underneath the Agency.

  “...before I take your questions, Lucienne had a word to say.”

  Golden Promise stands a little straighter as she reaches the lectern. Her eyes sweep the crowd of journalists working for the biggest publications both in the United States and abroad. They look at her like lost children would at their parents. She can’t hold a connection with these people; she can’t hold a connection with any human.

  They all look at her like this. She’s been stripped of her humanity to become a symbol, and with that came the death of weakness, the death of individuality, the death of hesitation. Of everything that made her Lucienne rather than this.

  “Hey everyone!” she says all bubbly. “Golden Promise is back, and stronger than ever!”

  Lights of every color sparkle behind her as journalists cheer for her. She feels like a piece of meat to be ogledand celebrated. What follows is meaningless platitude after meaningless platitude, reassurances that she would be ready to fight back when the Pale Choir returned, all wrapped up in a neat package of Golden Promise niceness and humor that made everyone in the room feel at home.

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  “I should stop talking—Nathan’s glaring at me, isn’t he?” She chuckles, and the entire room follows. “Beforehand, however, I need to get a little serious. I want to thank each and every Magical Girl who died in the line of duty in Seattle. My thoughts are with their families, and the entire Agency mourns their deaths.” She clenches her jaw. “Just know this. They didn’t die in vain. I’d like a minute of silence for them.”

  Now, they only have a bigger problem to worry about.

  The minute comes and goes, Kovalenko takes over once again and answers questions about the Agency, geopolitics and their rivalry with the Soviet Union and their allies’ Magical Girls, his address to Congress this week, et cetera. Lucienne doesn’t listen, given that she knows each answer already.

  The press conference lasts around thirty minutes, give or take. Lucienne collapses into a chair when they’re back in Nathan’s office deep in headquarters. Just making it there is a hassle given how many girls want to talk to her. Fortunately, she doesn’t have any friends to waste time on. Some people believed they were friends like Estelle, but the truth is they were, and will always remain coworkers.

  A humanoid robot hands her an iced coffee from one of the vending machines, and then leaves only her and Nathan in his office.

  “Thanks for putting up with all of that,” Nathan says as he adjusts his collar. “I know it’s not easy for you to sit through these.”

  “Whatever. Just promise me no more for a month.”

  He nods tightly, though she can tell he’d come to regret that. Lucienne stretches in the uncomfortable chair and groans. “So. Back to work?” She feels the coolness of the coffee can in her hands. She wasn’t a fan of the bitterness, but it’d help her wake up. “We were talking about suspects.”

  There was a high probability that this new critter created by the Choir—now designated Recital—had escaped from her and taken over someone else. Lucienne and Nathan are pessimists; they like to think of the worst-case scenario first and be pleasantly surprised if that does not come to pass. As a precaution, they’d decided to assume that there were multiple of these ‘Recitals’.

  “Back to work,” he says with a nod. “Though this is a highly irregular meeting and we should do this in more of an official fashion soon with the others.” He clears his throat. “You wanted to keep a closer eye on Keisha Boucher?”

  Silver Mercy had died that day, but both girls had gone silent for an extended period of time. Shadow Lily was the closest to her on the beach, and although Estelle knew nothing of what was going on, she’d noted her behavior as odd.

  “Yup.”

  ——

  There is unfortunately no cause for celebration according to Megan, although the lack of a manhunt would buy them some time. Now out of the bar and in Keisha’s car, the three girls sit in silence and gather their thoughts. Siena finds a bitter kind of humor in it, given that even their best-case outcome has come barbed, blooming like a poisonous flower that cannot help but wound those who touch it.

  They might be hiding it, Megan had said, to prevent a panic.

  There’s no point in beating herself up for it, but Siena balks at the fact that she had missed this. In her desperation for salvation, she had missed the threats right in front of her because she’d been preoccupied looking at the far horizon which promised a peaceful life—as peaceful as she could get.

  They’re going in circles. Barely outrunning their doom. The floor is collapsing behind them.

  “We should do this more often,” Keisha says, collapsing against the backseat. Of course, she’s not the one driving, Megan is. “Hanging out was f-u-n.” She spells out the word.

  Megan’s eyes are glued to the road; she hasn’t driven in years, but Keisha told her it’s like riding a bike. “If things aren’t too busy, I’m open to it. Makes it easier for me to keep an eye on you two.”

  Siena tries to distract herself from the uncertainty. “It was fun. You’re a menace when drunk, Keisha.”

  “Yayyyyy!!!”

  “Stop being so loud,” Megan complains.

  This is a strange moment. It’s the kind of situation where all people present are trying to go on as normal when they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. Siena has lived through enough of these to recognize the shape of it. Her mother complaining about bills that couldn’t be paid yet. Waiting for test results for exams. Watching her phone face-down on the table after sending a message to Maya, pretending not to care.

  This feels the same.

  A guillotine over their necks.

  “Do you girls think we’ll make it?” Keisha asks quietly. It’s a rare moment of weakness, the darkness in her eyes clear as the void between the stars in the night sky. She chuckles, a small thing that barely escapes her throat. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a downer.”

  “I think I’ll make it,” Megan says coldly. “You might not.”

  Siena nearly glares at her.

  “...sorry. But she’s still possibly the main suspect. Do you think the Agency would give her due process? They could have her in Essentia-nullifying handcuffs this evening and dissected the next morning—not that they’d find anything. The Conductor made sure of that.”

  The ashen-haired girl gulps, hands wrung together. “Anything new from… him?”

  “Stand by. Stand by. Stand by.” Keisha angrily kicks the front seat. “Fucking hell, it’s—ugh, just, fuck. He could at least send small Overtures to help us out—”

  “Watch it.”

  These moments, the sword at their throats, the gun to their heads; they make the tension bubble up and up until it has nowhere to go but out. Siena sees it in their eyes, the burning flame never extinguished facing the absence of light. Something needs to give.

  Or someone needs to intervene. This is a technique she’s seen Gabriel employ with his friends he’d learned from a young age: direct the attention to something he needed because people pitied him. Pity is grating—Siena’s the last person who needs to understand this—but it can also be a weapon or a cure for the malignant disease that is anxiety.

  “Um… do any of you want to help me sign up for classes? I’m way behind, so…”

  Both girls sigh in response, but Megan speaks first. “I can’t, I have a lot to keep track of to keep us afloat.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll help you out. This shit sobered me up a bit anyway.”

  “I’ll drop you off,” Megan says.

  “You’ll drop my car off too, part-time redhead.”

  Said girl rolls her eyes and ignores her, but Siena can tell the mood’s been uplifted some.

  She just hopes it’ll be enough to get them through the day.

  ——

  When one becomes a Magical Girl in North America after conversing with the Luminaries, she is given two choices. The first is to contact and join the Agency for at least three years to go through training on how to use their powers without causing massive collateral damage, bonding with your fellow Magical Girls, and third but not least, classes. These range from combat doctrine, ethics seminars, psychological evaluations, history, geography, politics, Luminary studies, et cetera. After three years, it’s possible to be handed over to one of the government-approved private security Magical Girl companies, but only the most money-motivated girls choose such a path.

  The second one is to be hunted and imprisoned until you agree to join. It could always be worse, however, considering some countries killed their rogue Magical Girls. Some allowed for a much bigger degree of independence and decentralization in high-trust societies like Japan or Finland.

  Some simply didn’t have the authority or institutions to enroll Magical Girls into a program, and thus you got total anarchy that led to the nearly decade-long war in the Andes when a cadre of Magical Girls took over Peru and some of Ecuador in the 90s after twenty long years of instability and sought to create America’s first Magocracy. Not that world’s first, but America’s first, something unacceptable to the United States for reasons Siena didn’t understand quite well.

  Such topics used to fascinate her at a young age, but depression got the better of her and she always put her studies down the bottom of the priority pile.

  The clerk sitting across from her looks painfully ordinary; he’s tired in a way that speaks of long days at work. His glasses are perched low on his nose as they scroll through Siena’s file. The desk between them is cluttered with pamphlets, printed schedules, and a terminal that hums softly as it loads. Everything about the room is designed to be unremarkable.

  Keisha’s intrigued as well, though she doesn’t need to enroll. She might skip a lot, but she didn’t forgo six months straight of classes.

  “All right,” the clerk says at last, voice neutral. “Since you failed all of your classes last semester, you’ll have to enroll in the same core courses again. Don’t let your time in there go to waste.”

  He slides a tablet across the desk.

  Siena stares at it for a moment longer than necessary.

  The list scrolls on longer than she expects: Controlled Force Deployment, Rules of Engagement for Magical Girls, Public Relations, Luminary Theory, Trauma Management, and Global Security in the Age of Magical Girls.

  “Six classes? Gosh, I only ever take three or four depending on what I feel like,” Keisha mutters as she stares at the screen. “These are all pretty entertaining though—except Trauma Management. What a bunch of bleeding hearts.”

  The clerk clears his throat loudly.

  “I said what I said! God!”

  He decides to ignore her and gives Siena a digital pen to sign. “You need to sign up for it regardless, given that you’ve never taken it.”

  “What. Why now? I was leaving it for last!”

  “Recent order from the top.” He pushes his glasses up. “Every girl who’s survived Seattle and who hasn’t taken the class has to.”

  “Fuck Seattle.”

  ——

  Nathan is too much of a careful man. Lucienne knows that deep in his heart, he would rather let all the pieces be in place and observe for six months than to act now. She somewhat agrees with this decision—better to not alert the Recital or Recitals that they were on to them. That’s the only reason why she hasn’t confronted Shadow Lily right now.

  She looks at her file Nathaniel has given her access to on her laptop, eyes struggling to stay open. She’s collected notes on Keisha Boucher all day and knows her inside and out. Lucienne knows that the girl dislikes authority, most likely faking her appreciation of her—which is honestly not something she cares about—but despite that, she’s started spending time with Megan Carter, a high-profile Magical Girl in the Agency.

  Lucienne’s gut isn’t always right, but if there’s a minute chance she is…

  “No choice when Nathan wants me to,” she sighs.

  And decides to sign up for the Trauma Management class she’s never taken. The Director had ordered the Secretary of Mental Health to mandate Seattle’s survivors to take the class to have an excuse to watch her.

  Lucienne closes her laptop with a sigh. Olivia would make fun of her.

  She’s not looking forward to this.

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