Nora left the girls to search the mission board for a suitable D-Rank—something slightly out of the way. Despite Sheffa’s nonchalant attitude about the whole thing, taking a mission in the middle of the city would attract more attention than Adah was comfortable with. She wasn’t doing anything illegal by helping out with the mission, but the optics of it would be more complex than she wanted to deal with right now. Her team was supposed to be putting their focus on defending Region 4. With the way other regions were hovering over her team’s missions like vultures, the timing wasn’t right to make a spectacle out of collaborating with Apex Vox.

  Besides, Adah and Sheffa could more easily talk if they were fighting without a crowd.

  While Nora looked through the mission board, Sheffa gave Adah a quick tour of the agency office. The rest of the building had as much in common with the Last Light office as the lobby had. The upstairs dorms were more spacious, with a couple of extra rooms that Sheffa and her teammates used as common areas instead of the lobby. The walls of Sheffa’s bedroom weren’t covered entirely by Pureheart posters like Adah’s had once been, but Adah deemed the number of posters she did have to be a respectable quantity.

  Sheffa’s desk was home to a collection of framed photographs of her team and Nora, either in different combinations or as a full group, some in their transformations and some in casual wear. Despite her own team being together over twice as long, Adah realized she had only a fraction of the photos of them together that Sheffa had. She made a mental note to rectify that.

  Around the time Sheffa was starting to say there wasn’t much else to show off, Nora returned to the girls holding a digital tablet. She passed the tablet over to Sheffa, who tilted the screen so Adah could view it as well.

  “What do you think?” Sheffa asked.

  The tablet screen displayed a mission brief for a D-Rank job in some area of Region 2 Adah was unfamiliar with. The Cruelty itself was on the simpler side: a snapping turtle variant that boasted impressive defenses for a D-Rank but posed little danger if you avoided floating in front of it. If they were looking for a mission they could handle while maintaining a conversation, this was a good pick.

  “If you lead the way, I’m in,” Adah said.

  “Follow me, princess,” Sheffa said, swinging her arm like a traffic conductor. “Thanks for finding one, Nora.”

  “Have fun,” Nora said. She took the tablet back from Sheffa and tucked it under her arm.

  Sheffa led Adah downstairs and to the front doors, where she grabbed her shoes from a recessed shelf in the wall.

  “That’s bad luck, you know,” Adah said. “Transforming with shoes on.”

  “Huh?” Sheffa said. It was the first time Adah had seen her look confused. “Why is it bad luck?”

  “It’s something our mentor told us. She’s Untethered, so she must know what she’s talking about.”

  Adah didn’t bother to mention the countless other random oddities Ketzia thought were bad luck, or how most of them made even less sense than the thing with the shoes.

  “Go figure,” Sheffa said, and put her shoes back on the shelf. “Are socks okay?”

  “I think so.”

  The two shoeless girls stepped outside and called upon their mascots to begin their transformations. In front of Sheffa materialized a small deer, only slightly larger than a fawn but with fully grown antlers that glowed a pale yellow like the moon. Izzy popped into existence at the same time, floating in place between Adah and Sheffa.

  “This is Feena,” Sheffa introduced her mascot, who bowed her head in greeting. “Do you two know each other already?”

  The girl pointed between her own mascot and Izzy. The mascots looked each other over, then both shook their heads.

  “Never seen this guy before,” the deer said.

  Adah felt her eyebrows raise before she could stop them. She’d never heard a mascot, even Izzy, speak so casually before.

  “Seriously?” Sheffa said to her mascot. “Is there anybody you do know?”

  “Give me a break,” Feena said. “If I picked a random human out of a crowd, you wouldn’t know them either. So, what’s your name?”

  The deer looked up at Izzy, prompting him to float down to her eye level.

  “Izrashell,” he said. “Though in this world, most humans call me ‘Izzy.’”

  “Izrashell, huh,” Feena said. “Guess that means you’re one of them.”

  “Once, but no longer.”

  Feena and Izzy stared at each other, while Adah and Sheffa exchanged confused glances over their heads. It was possible the mascots were communicating via a magic channel, like humans could while transformed. Though, that begged the question: what were they talking about? Eventually, the deer broke the silence by shaking her head like she was trying to get snow off her antlers.

  “This guy’s okay, Shef,” she said. “You don’t have to keep that goofy form to make your point, all right? I got no problem with you.”

  “What’s goofy about my form?” Izzy asked.

  Feena laughed, though it sounded more like neighing.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’re wasting time with ancient history and bad jokes. These girls got somewhere to be. Let’s lend them a little magic first. You and I can chat later.”

  “So be it,” Izzy said.

  He floated up to shoulder-height with Adah, but before she reached out to initiate her transformation, she whispered to him.

  “What was that about?”

  “A misunderstanding about an old mistake that plagues our kind,” he whispered back. “It’s a thing of the past.”

  With that, he pressed his head against Adah’s palm. At the same time, Sheffa reached down and pet the top of Feena’s snout.

  This was Adah’s first time seeing Sheffa’s transformation up close and in person. She was surprised that its details were as simple as they had seemed in videos and photographs. All of the Apex Vox girls wore the same standard style of idol concert costume—frilly skirts and blouses with poofy shoulders, not a far cry from Adah’s original Sparkling Starbloom design. Sheffa’s outfit was yellow all over, accented in white for the skirt’s lace or the sheer fabric that covered her shoulders. The design was simple but cute. That simplicity helped draw your attention to the most important detail of her transformation: her tall bunny ears.

  Sheffa caught Adah staring at those ears and asked, “Want to touch them?”

  Adah nodded and slowly extended her hand toward the top of Sheffa’s head. As gently as she could, she ran her finger along the back of one of the ears.

  Sheffa immediately jolted and let out a squeak before covering her mouth with both hands. Adah yanked back her own hand as fast as she could.

  “Sorry!” she said. “I wasn’t trying to be weird or anything!”

  Sheffa stared at Adah, then slowly moved her hands away from her face to reveal a wide grin.

  “I’m just messing with you,” she said through the smile. “I can’t feel anything up there.”

  As if to prove it, she started flicking both ears with her fingers as hard as she could. Apparently Mari wasn’t the only jokester on their team.

  “Enough playing around, though,” Sheffa said. “Let’s get flying. It’s just under ten minutes if we go fast.”

  “Then let’s go fast.”

  ☆☆☆

  The girls’ flight took them to a business park beyond the city limits of Alliment. The area was made up of a circuit of several streets lined with small office buildings and storage garages, making it the kind of development that the neighborhood surrounding Adah’s own agency office was originally intended to be.

  As Sheffa had predicted, no one had stuck around to watch this battle. Anyone who had been working in these buildings had been evacuated, and they probably all decided to call it a day and head home. No news crews or fans had set up anywhere in the area. To be honest, even if this Cruelty had showed up in the capital of Region 4, it probably wouldn’t have garnered any attention there either.

  “There’s our guy,” Sheffa said as they arrived.

  A gray turtle about the size of a sedan stood at the center of a roundabout at one end of the business park. The Cruelty noticed the girls at the same time they spotted it, and began slowly walking in their direction. The glacial pace of its movement only further emphasized what little danger it posed to magical girls of their level. The only problem to solve was how they wanted to either break through or get around the monster’s shell.

  “How do you want to do this?” Sheffa asked. “You’ve got the stars, the whip, and the scythe. Anything else?”

  Adah hesitated. Her [Parietal Perception] was undetectable to anyone watching her, and the spell’s power could be a secret that worked in her advantage like Clair’s mind-based spells. It wasn’t something she needed to keep a secret from Sheffa, though.

  “My eyes,” Adah said. “It’s a little complicated, but I can track movement even if I can’t always see the thing I’m tracking.”

  “That explains how you and Raindrop handled the cat,” Sheffa said. “Saves me the trouble of asking about it. Well, I bet you could break this guy apart with just your whip, but was there anything you wanted to watch me use? You’ve probably seen the wind bursts.”

  “That’s how you fly so fast?” Adah asked.

  “That’s part of it. I’d like to think I’m speedy on my own, too! Other than that, the stomp’s in our videos and my weapon’s no good here.”

  The stomp Sheffa referred to was another of her spells. Much like the rabbit Cruelty Adah and her team had fought, Sheffa could accelerate downward as if manipulating gravity, reaching a speed that surpassed even her wind-assisted flight. From what Adah had seen in their music videos, the spell must also empower the girl’s legs with some kind of magic energy—when her feet stomped onto a Cruelty, the impact was always accompanied by a burst of yellow light. Adah had also seen Sheffa use the spell simply for additional mobility. Between the wind bursts and her stomp, Sheffa could reposition herself to almost any spot on the battlefield in the blink of an eye.

  Staying true to her theme, Sheffa’s weapon also played off her kicks and stomps. Rather than a proper weapon, it was more like an accessory. She could conjure spiked footwear that attached to the boots she wore, with long metal hooks that resembled an eagle’s talons. Adah wasn’t sure if this metal had any magical properties like the head of Emi’s polearm, but the talons already did plenty of damage in combination with Sheffa’s spells.

  “I guess that leaves the funnest of them all,” Sheffa said, failing to hold back another grin. “[Invert Instinct].”

  Adah hadn’t heard the name of that spell before in any of her research into Apex Vox, nor had she seen any magic in their music videos that seemed to fit such a name.

  “Is that new?” Adah asked. “What does it do?”

  “I’ve had it since the end of the IndieMagie,” Sheffa said, “but it’s taken me a while to get used to it. Personally, I think I’m a better match for straightforward spells—a speed boost, a stomp, stuff like that. [Invert Instinct] is much more confusing, and it makes all my other spells confusing, too.”

  Sheffa glanced at Adah, who gave her a quizzical look. The spell must have been a strange one if it was taking Sheffa this long to explain it. Nevermind her spells, it was making her manner of speaking less straightforward, too.

  “In short,” Sheffa explained, “it flips gravity on its head. Kind of. I can’t really put it into words—you just have to experience it for yourself. How do you feel about fighting upside-down?”

  Adah shrugged.

  “Only one way to find out.”