Adah and her teammates looked up at a black television screen in the agency lobby, then exchanged some conspiratorial looks among themselves.

  “I can’t see shit!” Ami yelled out of nowhere.

  “It’s not hooked up yet.”

  “I can’t see either,” Emi said.

  “Just give me a second.”

  “Seb,” Adah said, “The screen’s all black.”

  “I just said—”

  “Hey, can anyone else not see anything?” Rika cut in.

  Seb sighed and asked, “Are the four of you always like this?”

  “Sometimes they’re worse,” Grace answered on their behalf.

  Seb was in the middle of connecting his laptop to the television so they could all watch the results of the first round of IndieMagie voting together. The advancing teams would be announced on the competition website that afternoon, so Adah had suggested they make a little event of it. Since Seb had played such a pivotal role in helping them get to this point, she even invited him as a token of appreciation. More than that, though, she wanted to start the process of bringing him into their agency in a more official capacity.

  If recent weeks had taught her anything, it was the power of a coordinated marketing push. This Unchained Underground campaign had energized the whole region in support of DreamRise and Sunbright. Their agency needed someone who could think at that level. They didn’t have the same resources as the regional government, but they could still make a coordinated and strategic effort to promote themselves moving forward. Rather than feeding Seb tidbits of info to leak or amplify, Adah wanted to integrate him completely within their agency.

  The four girls messing with him like this was merely a rite of passage before he could officially join the team. Well, they’d also been working hard for three weeks straight; it helped to have a way to blow off some steam.

  “Usually it’s best to just ignore them,” Grace advised the boy. “If you try to keep up with them, you’ll just fall into their trap.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Adah said. “We’re just four pure-hearted magical girls.”

  “Yeah, just look at us,” Ami said.

  She was right—they probably looked particularly nonthreatening right now. The four of them all sat together on the lobby’s one couch. Actually, only three of them were sitting while Ami lay across all their laps. Seating in the lobby was limited even on the quietest of days, so with Seb and Michel also in attendance, Ami had gotten creative in making extra space.

  Grace shook her head. “No, this is a perfect demonstration of what’s so dangerous about you four. As soon as one of you gets an idea, the other three follow along no matter how stupid it is.”

  “It’s called teamwork,” Adah said.

  “Something like that,” Grace mused.

  This diversion provided enough time for Seb to finish connecting his laptop display to the television. The announcement page on the IndieMagie website showed a countdown until results were posted, and they still had another twenty minutes to wait. Seeing that, Adah suddenly became very aware of the growing numbness in her legs brought on by Ami’s weight.

  She made a quick excuse about wanting some fresh air and got up to stretch her legs while she still had time. Ami snatched the empty seat right away. Adah decided ahead of time to accept a spot on the floor when she returned.

  Outside, the heat of a late summer’s day clung to the asphalt, trying desperately to resist being swept away by the afternoon breezes. The sun was growing weaker every day, and it seemed as though the whole world had taken a deep breath in preparation for autumn. Soon, nature would sigh and slump its shoulders, settling into a seasonal nap.

  As soon as summer ended, time seemed to move so very fast. Or maybe it was just that summer seemed to go on forever, until it didn’t.

  “Hey.”

  Adah had been standing there with her eyes closed, enjoying the serenity of one of the last warm days of the year, when a low voice startled her.

  Ekki waved to her from down the road, his bracelet twinkling in the sun. He walked over unhurried. A white t-shirt maybe a size too large for him hung from his shoulders, the loose neckline exposing a bit of his collarbone. Adah probably wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact she remembered seeing Iris pick it out for him back when she was stalking the DreamRise members’ social media. That would explain why they seemed to share a fashion sense.

  “Saved me the trouble of knocking,” Ekki said as he stopped in front of Adah.

  “Yeah,” Adah said. “You just brought trouble instead.”

  “It’s not like that. I just want to talk.”

  “I don’t know if I want to,” she said. “The last time one of you showed up unannounced, I didn’t enjoy the conversation very much.”

  Ekki scrunched his forehead and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Nevermind,” Adah said. “Does Iris know you came here?”

  Ekki frowned. “She’s not my mom.”

  “I guess not. You’re just her arm candy.”

  Ekki’s cheeks puffed out as he released a heavy exhale through pursed lips. His skin was a lot easier to get under than Iris’s, thankfully.

  “So this is your personality even out of character, huh?” he said.

  “I borrow it when I need it,” she said with a shrug. “It’s very popular, so I thought you might like it.”

  “Let’s just say it’s familiar.”

  Ekki looked past Adah, toward the windows of the agency office, where surely three (maybe even four or five) floating heads were watching their exchange.

  “Did you come here for a reason?” she called him to attention again. “You’re kind of interrupting something.”

  He laughed at that. A slight smile spread on his face, then faded like he couldn’t be bothered to maintain it. His face really was just like Iris’s—only if her expressions danced on her face, his lounged.

  “Waiting for the voting?” he said. “Not to spoil it, but you can probably celebrate early. The whole thing’s basically rigged for our teams.”

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  She didn’t say anything to that. Partly because the truth of it pissed her off and partly because he hadn’t answered her question.

  Taking the hint, he said, “I just came here to talk about Iris. I think you two are misunderstanding each other.”

  “Really?” Adah said. “She should train you not to be so presumptuous. I understand her just fine.”

  He shut his eyes and she could practically hear him mentally counting to ten. She silently begged him to explode. She had given herself a little challenge to keep prodding this dog until it barked.

  “I’m not going to apologize for her,” he continued after regaining his composure. “But I want to put it out there that our teams are only fighting in the short term. Who knows where we’ll both be a year from now, or even sooner. Iris’s goals don’t end with the IndieMagie, and I doubt yours do either. Point being: I’m not interested in burning bridges over one competition. Our teams have more in common than a stupid marketing gimmick, and I’d like to know we’ll be able to rely on each other when the time comes.”

  “So what?” Adah said, “You know our sob stories and now you want to tell us hers?”

  “If you’ll listen to it,” he said, his head tilted forward so that his eyes turned up to look at Adah.

  She sighed—he really was like Iris. Looking up at her like this, he’d shifted his whole demeanor into something much more innocent than the detached attitude he arrived with. Were the two of them always thinking about how they appeared to other people? Or was it something that came naturally to them?

  “I already know it,” she said. “She loves this region. She wants to marry a cow, live in a barn, and use the smell of fresh manure as a perfume. Something like that.”

  Once Ekki realized she’d implicitly given him permission to tell his story, he started wagging his tail. At least, that’s what she imagined to make herself feel better about giving in.

  “That’s true—that she loves it, anyway,” he said. “But she started at a Region 1 agency. A big one.”

  Adah had come across that in her research on the DreamRise members. Iris had signed to a top agency but never went on any missions or got any publicity. It wasn’t unusual. Big agencies could afford to keep talent in reserve that they would sub in if a star player got injured, for example. The name recognition and networking an agency like that provided made it worth it for the reserve talent, too.

  “Then she decided she’d rather be a big fish in a small pond,” Adah said.

  Ekki shook his head. “Not exactly. She never got put on an active team, but that wasn’t why she left. You’ve seen how she is—she’s not the type to take it easy just because nothing’s being asked of her. While she wasn’t active, she’d still push all her ideas to the agency. Any ideas. She’d write lyrics, design costumes, even scope out marketing campaigns. You’d think she was part of the management, not the talent. And they were more than happy to use her work. They just had no interest in using her.”

  Situations like that weren’t unheard of, either.

  “After a couple of years of that, she got the message. There’s only so many times you can watch some girl who arrived a week ago get pushed in the limelight ahead of you before you snap. Even Iris isn’t immune to the feeling of getting snubbed. So she called it quits. Left quietly, if you can believe it, and came back home. Like a fool, I thought she was done being a magical girl entirely. I thought maybe she’d join me at university and jump back into the industry as a proper manager.”

  “You’re definitely a fool,” Adah sighed. “I feel like I’m learning more about you than her.”

  Any fans shipping those two were signing up for one long journey. This guy wasn’t a hopeless romantic, just a clueless one.

  “Obviously I misjudged,” he admitted. “She ended up convincing me to leave school instead. Like always, she probably had a plan ready before she even took the train ride home.”

  “And that plan was to apply to DreamRise, of all places,” Adah said.

  “Yeah,” Ekki said with that same fast fading smile. “You were around back then, so I’m sure you remember that no one wanted to touch that agency a few years ago.”

  “It was cursed.”

  “Cursed by Sweetdream Soulslip,” he said. “I can’t blame people for starting rumors. The first few months after we joined did not go well. For the most part, your impression of Clair is probably correct. She’s the silent type, but she’s more than capable of getting loud when she wants to. She and Iris would get into screaming matches almost daily when we first joined—just fighting over anything, even little things like whether we should open a window in the office. At the time, I was too busy mediating to notice, but they were both so scared.”

  “Sounds like you were the one who should’ve been scared,” Adah said.

  “Maybe I was a little,” Ekki said. “Just not in the same way they were. Clair might put me to sleep if I say too much about her, but I can tell you Iris is still scared.”

  “Of what?”

  Ekki looked back over at the peeping eyes of the three girls still inside the agency office.

  “Of failing,” he said. “She’s been different since she came home. She’s always worked nonstop, but the energy behind it is different now. It used to be that she just couldn’t help herself. Now, sometimes it seems like she’s got a gun to her head. I said it’s true that she loves this place, but I think that feeling is getting mixed up with another one. She has a grudge against the bigger agencies in other regions. Hates them, even. I don’t think she’s lying when she says she wants to make Region 4 proud, but I think she wants to crush the other regions even more than that.

  “This business with the Department of Magic is feeding into that pressure. They’ve got her conflating her own vendetta with the safety of an entire region. It’s all become a single, grafted abomination of expectations in her mind. The people here just want to see us put on a show—if we do well, then that’s a bonus. You saw it yesterday: they love Iris. It’s got nothing to do with expectations, except in her mind it does. She hears all their cheers as a rallying cry to dominate the other teams. They just want to lift her up, but to her—I don’t know—it’s like she’s going to war.”

  War felt like an apt comparison. Maybe it wasn’t entirely Iris’s fault either. Being the Secretary’s favorite came with advantages, but it probably brought plenty of additional pressure as well.

  “I’m not trying to make excuses for her,” Ekki said. “Her personality is still… what it is. But I think you two would get along at least a little better under different circumstances. When this is all over, I hope you can get to know each other as something other than rivals.”

  “‘This’ might not be over for a long time,” Adah said.

  He nodded. “I can understand that. Like I said, I’m not here to apologize for her either. But I’m still going to support her the best I can until she realizes her dream.”

  “Is that what it’s all about for you then?” Adah asked. “Did you really quit school and join this team just because the girl you have a crush on asked you to?”

  Ekki laughed, though Adah got the sense it wasn’t because of her question but because of some memory it had resurfaced. He looked down at his feet and kicked a loose pebble.

  “There’s no way to win Iris’s heart,” he said, looking back up at Adah. “There won’t be for a long time, I bet. I followed her because I love her, but not because I thought it’d make her love me. I did it because of the reason I love her.”

  For the first time, he smiled as brightly as Iris herself. “Everything is just so much more fun when I’m around her. By comparison, my life before joining DreamRise was pretty boring. I’m having even more fun than I imagined, so I don’t intend on returning to that boring life any time soon. Besides, I do have my own ambitions in this industry.”

  “Like what?” Adah asked.

  “What did you think of Secretary Thibault?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “He’s got some good ideas,” Ekki went on without waiting for a real answer, “but I’m not sure if a guy like that should be in charge of something so important. He’s never done what we do—using magic, fighting Cruelties. Did you know that?”

  “I kind of got a sense,” she said.

  “If you ask me, whoever is calling the shots should have some firsthand experience. They should be someone who doesn’t just see a vision of what the world could be like, but what it would take to get there. Someone who understands the burden they’re putting on other people’s shoulders as a result of their aspirations. I think maybe someday a knight could become a king, if you know what I mean.”

  Wait—maybe there was actually something kind of cool about him?

  “Anyway,” he said, “you’d better get back to your friends. Even if it’s only temporary, in a few minutes we’ll officially become opponents.”

  He turned around and started walking away, but stopped after a couple of steps.

  “Fair warning,” he said after clearing his throat. “I won’t be holding anything back during our duel. It’s nothing personal, but I feel like I should say sorry in advance.”

  Ekki left with a wave, and Adah returned inside.

  As expected, DreamRise and Spotlight Sunbright were confirmed to advance to Round 2 of regional voting. Fans would vote again in a week’s time to select which of the two should move on to the Interregional Round, during which the representatives from each of the nation’s four regions would compete for points in a series of challenges.

  Each region had their own system for showcasing teams during Round 2. Surely Region 4 originally had its own plan in mind before Adah threw a wrench into things. Instead, Sunbright and DreamRise would go head-to-head in a duel the day before Round 2 voting. There was no rule that whoever won the duel would automatically earn the fans’ votes, but coming out on top was Sunbright’s best chance at swaying public opinion in their favor. People had started to like their team, but that fan meet had proved DreamRise was more popular.

  With how far DreamRise had pulled ahead in popularity, it wouldn’t be enough just to win the duel. They had to knock Iris and her teammates down a peg.

  Even if none of them said it aloud, Adah knew all of her own teammates were thinking the same thing.

  The time had come to vent some frustration.