When Adah woke up around midday after the final all-nighter, it was not a fully edited music video that greeted her, but rather the rapid knocking of Grace’s knuckles on her bedroom door. Her manager barged inside a moment later, just as Adah forced herself into an upright position. She didn’t bother swiping away the locks of hair that had gotten stuck to her face after hours of rolling around in her sleep.

  Adah looked at Grace through eyes half-shut. The woman’s face and figure was a blur to her.

  “You look like shit,” Grace said.

  “What the hell?” Adah mumbled. “Then let me keep sleeping.”

  “No can do,” her manager said. “I need your help with either a mission or a problem. Take your pick.”

  Adah felt like a kid being handed a list of chores first thing on a Saturday morning. She was supposed to get to sleep in today. Didn’t the world know how hard she had worked these past few days?

  “What about the twins?” Adah said, closing her eyes to enjoy the last minute of comfort she had before Grace forced her out of bed. “They’re supposed to be covering today.”

  “That’s the problem,” Grace said. “They refuse to go on this mission together, and now they’re arguing about who should get to go alone. Even if I was okay with sending one of them out on their own, I’m not interested in picking favorites. I’ve never seen them argue like this.”

  If Grace was saying that, then this probably wasn’t their usual playfighting. Something must have really gotten between them this time. What was it Rika had said on that mission with the rabbit Cruelty? The twins seemed out of sync? Whether Rika’s omen was correct or not, if her teammates were refusing to work, then it was Adah’s job as captain to figure out why.

  “Wake up Rika and send her out with Ami,” Adah said to Grace. “I’ll talk to Emi about what’s going on.”

  She threw her blanket off herself and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. Adah wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but today could be an exception.

  “Is Rika going to be in a better condition than you?” Grace asked.

  “Believe it or not, she went to bed first.”

  ☆☆☆

  Although Rika had in fact gone to sleep before Adah, she didn’t look any less exhausted as she flew off with Ami to handle the day’s mission. At least she could take it easy once they arrived at the interception point. Based on what Grace had explained, Ami would most likely ask Rika to fill up her shield with projectiles so that she could handle all the fighting by herself.

  The mission was probably the easier of the two tasks to resolve anyway.

  Whatever was going on between the twins, Adah needed to address it immediately. Their team needed the flexibility of working in whichever pairings the circumstances demanded. They were too small and taking on too much work to be picky about who did what. On top of that, the twins could coordinate and synergize in a way that no other combination on their team could match. They offered a speed and versatility in close combat that was amplified by their ability to instantly intuit each other’s next move. Whether they were fighting as a pair or as part of the full squad, their spear-and-shield style was indispensable to their team’s success.

  Most importantly, they were sisters, and seemed to be each other’s best friend. While that certainly had value to the team from the perspectives of combat and marketing, it mattered most from the human perspective. There would come a time when Ami and Emi were no longer magical girls, so why sour a lifelong connection over a workplace quarrel?

  Adah had decided to start learning what was going on by talking to Emi. She had been the one to first speak her mind to Adah, and after their handling of the lynx Cruelty, Adah felt like they had begun to grow closer. Adah would hear Emi out as a captain, like she had back then. Once she knew more about how Emi felt, she could start thinking about how to address the issue.

  However, like Rika’s self-doubt, it could very well turn out to be a problem the twins had to resolve by themselves.

  Before Adah could make any progress on the issue, she needed to jolt herself awake. Therefore, she had grabbed Emi by the hand and led her outside and down the street to a nearby café. The chill of this late autumn day helped to jump start Adah’s brain, but the job wasn’t finished. She would indeed need coffee—preferably some drink full of sugar.

  Adah had led Emi out of the agency office at the same time as Rika and Ami departed for their mission, which she figured was the best way to avoid any kind of protest from either twin. Emi silently followed Adah the whole way to the tiny café—about a half-mile trip when taking advantage of some side yard shortcuts through their neighborhood.

  This café was one of the businesses that had popped up in the neighborhood after it had been repurposed from an industrial park to a residential area. That influx of small, family owned shops had turned the area into a sort of village, where the residents could get most of what they needed from one another without ever leaving the same network of a half dozen streets.

  As such, everyone in this neighborhood recognized Adah and her teammates and had known them for years. Everyone here knew they were magical girls, though that wasn’t what anyone here saw them as. After all, Adah usually saw her neighbors when she was grabbing a snack from the convenience store or getting her hair cut at the salon, not when she was fighting a Cruelty. Since Adah had first moved out here, she’d only ever encountered one Cruelty in the area: an F-Rank so boring she couldn’t even remember which variant it was.

  That kind of casual relationship with their neighbors continued even now. No one treated them any differently now that they had started to make a name for themselves. While it was a stretch to say the girls bore any burden of fame yet, the pressures of their aspirations were very real. Adah was glad to have a community of friendly faces that smiled at her the same way they had four years ago. It made her feel human.

  Even today, the barista behind the counter greeted Adah the same way as always: by guessing what kind of syrup-filled latte she wanted to order. To this woman, wearing the same ponytail and apron she had when Adah first visited this café, Adah was just a girl who liked sugary drinks and only ever stopped by when she had her friends with her. Being seen for such simple traits helped Adah clear her mind of worries like scythes with heartbeats or gray humanoids that screamed for her help.

  That clarity helped Adah self-reflect, and she hoped it might do the same for Emi.

  After placing their orders—Adah went with a pumpkin flavoring while Emi stuck with cold brew—the girls sat down at the window bar and watched the empty street outside. In the middle of a weekday, they weren’t likely to see any activity outside. Or inside, for that matter. This café only offered three small, round tables for seating in addition to this window bar, but even that was more than enough most days.

  While they waited, Adah decided to get started.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  Emi looked at her, then back out the window. “You asked me to come here,” she said.

  Emi could be genuinely aloof sometimes, but her tone told Adah she knew what the question really meant and chose not to answer. In that case, Adah would be more direct. That was a tactic Grace had used against her during some of her brattier moments.

  “What’s going on with you and Ami?” Adah asked. “Why wouldn’t you take today’s mission together?”

  This time, Emi looked at the bar top.

  “We can’t coordinate anymore,” she said. “It’s easier to fight with you or Rika. That’s all.”

  “You two can’t coordinate? You’re our original power pair. When did that start?”

  “The past couple of weeks,” Emi said. “We keep stepping on each other’s toes, so it’s easier to go with someone else instead.”

  As expected, Emi still wasn’t one to dive into the details when she spoke. She said what she felt she needed to say, and preferred to approach even complex problems in a straightforward manner. Adah wouldn’t try to force Emi to say anything more than what she wanted to, but she did need to get closer to the root of the problem. She may not have been Emi’s therapist, but she was the girl’s captain. She needed to understand what Emi wanted and what she didn’t.

  “Do you think there’s something stopping you two from syncing up again?” Adah asked. “Or do you not want to?”

  Emi shook her head. “That’s not it. But just because we’re sisters, that doesn’t mean we’re going to think about things the same way. This might be something… we’re just too different to make work.”

  “It’s true that you’re different,” Adah said. “That’s true for your personalities and how you fight. I’ve always felt like that’s what makes you such a strong pair. Those differences didn’t cause an issue before, even when we were pushing ourselves to our limits against the scorpion Cruelty. You’ve both got the same spells you did a week ago, so what do you think is causing you two trouble now?”

  Before Emi could answer, the barista approached the girls with their drinks and set them down on the bar top. She smiled at both Adah and Emi, then pointed at Adah’s latte.

  “You look like you need that,” she said with a wink.

  Instinctively, Adah touched her face. Was this karma for something she had done recently? Sure, she felt dead on her feet, but it shouldn’t be that apparent to everyone else!

  Emi wordlessly sipped her coffee through a straw as the barista walked away, her eyes watching Adah’s reactions play out on her face.

  “Anyway,” Adah said after downing half her own drink in one go, “Is there something that stands out to you as having changed?”

  “I don’t know,” Emi said, barely lifting her lips away from her straw. “I can’t figure out what Ami’s trying to do in these fights. And when I try to tell her what I want to do, it’s like she forgets it right away. It was never like that before.”

  Maybe the caffeine had brought some clarity to Adah’s thoughts, or maybe they were getting to the root cause of the issue now. What Emi had said seemed more definitive than the girl realized. The twins hadn’t changed much in the past few weeks, except for when it came to how they were expressing themselves. Their spells hadn’t changed, but the way they were using them had. Their personalities were the same, but how they showed themselves to the world was different.

  Ami and Emi had always seemed to have a way of adapting to each other on the fly. From an outside perspective, it looked almost like improv. Whether in conversation or in battle, one of them could throw an idea out there and the other would riff off it. They’d chain their thoughts together like that, always leaving room for the other to add something new.

  But now, they were each trying to build something unique. They wanted to find their own style of fighting and their own way to shine on the battlefield—to be something other than a shield or a spear. They were trying to stand out from each other, and that meant they had to break the chain.

  They weren’t leaving that space at the end of their thought for the other sister to pick up. Now, they were learning how to claim it for themselves.