Seb scribbled some words across the top of his notepad—probably labeling his notes for the discussion they were about to have—then looked up at Emi. She was sitting atop her bed with her legs hanging over the edge, while he had taken a seat in the rolling chair she kept by her desk. In her cramped bedroom, only a couple of feet separated them, even after Seb rolled the chair all the way against the far wall. Technically, hers was the smallest of all the rooms in the dorm, but she had chosen it for that very reason.

  Seb glanced back down at his notepad, causing his glasses to slide down his nose. He pushed them into place again and then returned his gaze to Emi.

  “It’s rare to get a request from you,” he said. “Usually Adah’s got a dozen different ideas for me to work on. So, what did you have in mind?”

  “I want to change,” Emi said. “Or I want to change the way people see me. That’s the kind of thing you help Adah with, right?”

  Seb started to write out some notes as Emi spoke, but paused partway through. He tapped the tip of his pen against the notepad and stared at the mostly blank page.

  “What’s your goal with that?” he said. “What are you looking to change?”

  “I was hoping you could help me figure it out,” Emi said. “Everyone else is changing so fast. Adah reinvented her whole identity. Rika’s going to make her own music. Now even Ami’s thinking about changing her name. I need to take a step forward, too.”

  “Ami wants to change her name?” Seb asked. “To what?”

  “I don’t know,” Emi said. “But people online were talking about it. They said ‘Dewdrop’ doesn’t fit her, and I think she agrees. I might be Raindrop all by myself soon. That’s okay, but I want Raindrop to become more than who she is right now.”

  “Maybe it’s not so much about changing as it is about showing people more of who Raindrop really is,” Seb suggested.

  Emi wasn’t sure. Her situation wasn’t like Adah’s. Twilight Heartbreak was a character who had an identity and a story built up around her. That character contained pieces of who Adah was—the Adah that Emi had gotten to know over the course of two years on this team—but she also acted in ways that Adah would never in her daily life. From Emi’s perspective, the character of Twilight Heartbreak had more of an influence over Adah’s personality than the reverse.

  By contrast, Emi mostly continued to act like herself whenever she transformed into Raindrop. Playing a character might present a challenge for her, but it would at least force her to distance herself from the way she behaved when she wasn’t transformed. If Raindrop was even a little different from Emi herself, maybe that’d be enough to stand out.

  She tried explaining all of this to Seb. He wrote out more notes as she spoke, and waited silently whenever she paused to search for the right words. He was kind of like the opposite of Ami. He sat back and let Emi control the pace of their conversation, however slow she took it.

  When she finished, he said, “Does Raindrop need to change in order to stand out? Ami attracted all this attention by being the same person she’s always been. Is there a reason you couldn’t do the same?”

  “I’m not like Ami,” Emi said. “If I just keep to myself, how can I reach anyone else? Raindrop’s name is all there is to her. She’s nothing but rain. As soon as the clouds pass over, she’ll be forgotten about.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Seb said. He slid his phone out of his pocket and tapped away on the screen. He held it out for Emi to take a look. “Right now, the Rally Force has more followers than the Spotlight Sunbright company page, and I’ve been trying my best to grow that. If all these people like Raindrop—like you—why wouldn’t you be able to gain even more fans?”

  “Will that be good enough?” she asked. “Is that enough?”

  Seb shrugged and said right back to her, “I don’t know. Is it?”

  Emi frowned. “Unfair.”

  She was supposed to tell him she wanted more fans and he was supposed to help her make it happen.

  Well, obviously it wouldn’t be that easy. If he was some kind of marketing prophet, every agency would be trying to snatch him up. And if she was destined to be the next big thing, the same would be true for her.

  “If you want to reinvent yourself, I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” Seb said. He was scribbling away again as he spoke, like his hand was chugging along a separate mental track from his mouth. “But that’s not what you said earlier. You told me you wanted to stand out. I think the current Raindrop is perfectly capable of standing out and—if I’m being honest—that’s who I’d like to see stand out.”

  “What’s that all about?” Emi said.

  Why would it matter to him whether she changed Raindrop’s identity or not? It wasn’t his character to play.

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “the first thing I ever wrote for this agency was about you saving that guy at the farm. And I didn’t bullshit it either—not too much, anyway. It really was an incredible story. I’ve got a soft spot for Raindrop after all that.”

  “Shouldn’t you be attached to Adah instead?” Emi asked. “She was the first one you met.”

  Seb stared past Emi, and his eyes slowly opened wider as he thought about something. A memory, or perhaps a trauma.

  “Adah’s more like a boss. Or… a taskmaster. I don’t know if her fans understand what they’re asking for when they beg for her attention.”

  Emi shook her head. “Degenerates.”

  “That’s a bit of a theme, isn’t it?” Seb said, snapping back to the present.

  While he was shaking away the memories of whatever interactions he had with Adah, Emi looked down at his notepad. He had filled almost the whole page with tightly packed notes. She couldn’t read any of it—not upside-down and with his scratchy handwriting—but they weren’t quick bullet points. They were thorough. He’d thought through all that in such a short time?

  “You like Raindrop?” she asked.

  “Huh?” he said. His eyes got wide again.

  “You said you have a soft spot for Raindrop.”

  “Oh, r-right,” he stopped to clear his throat. “I guess what I was trying to tell you is that I think we can make you plenty popular as Raindrop or anyone else. We keep talking about the character, but it’s always going to be you under that, even if you put on a big act. I think people will always like you.”

  If he was right, that would make everything easier.

  It would answer another question she had been facing.

  “When Clair was talking to me during the IndieMagie, she said that the world doesn’t like us,” Emi said. “Like we don’t belong, so that makes everybody else our enemies. But I don’t think she’s right.”

  Seb watched Emi’s face and set his pen down.

  “She understands something I don’t,” Emi continued, “but it’s not that. She’s wrong about that. Maybe it makes sense to her—it seems to work for her, but it won’t for me. What she understands is more like… being seen by the world. She knows how to draw people’s attention, and she doesn’t flinch once she gets it.”

  Clair didn’t change. Emi was sure that Clair was wrong in the way she thought about other people, but she was right in how she reached those people. Clair doubled down on who she was: cold, disinterested, even cruel. She didn’t have flashy spells or an elaborate transformation. She relied entirely on those core facets of her identity. There was no difference between Sweetdream Soulslip and Clair, and that left her with no doubts over who she ought to be.

  Through that boldness, she stood out. She could probably never become the most popular magical girl that way, but that wasn’t something Clair would want.

  It wasn’t what Emi wanted either. She had told Ketzia she wanted to become someone’s favorite magical girl. If that was her goal, then she only needed to reach those people who were already going to like her. She only needed to whip them into a frenzy, inflame their passion.

  “Maybe there is a way I can be loud,” she said. “I think, up until now, I’ve been a gentle rain. A drizzle. Quiet. But the rain can also come in a downpour. A torrent. The rain can drown out all the other noise.”

  That was the difference, wasn’t it? That was what Clair understood.

  The difference between the quiet and silence.

  The quiet was feeble, like a voice trying to be heard in a crowd. It was too weak or scared to reach your ears, so it faded away.

  The silence was strong. It wasn’t something you failed to hear—it was all that you could hear.

  Rather than trying to raise her voice over those who were much louder than her, she could aim to silence everyone and everything else. Not through the fiery hatred of Clair, but through a deafening downpour of style.

  That had been what attracted her to magical girls in the first place—their fighting, their flair on the battlefield, and how absolute the power of a high-level magical girl appeared when she destroyed a Cruelty in a single spell.

  Being the cutest, or the best performer, or the one who could play the algorithm the best—Emi didn’t know how to pursue those goals. She didn’t particularly care to, either. But in battle, she had something most girls didn’t. Certainly, it wasn’t something Clair possessed. It was a style—of the joy of fighting and casting spells—that Emi saw in only a few magical girls. A blend of elegance and ferocity that commanded all spectators to hold their breath until the battle ended.

  Ami. Ketzia. The girls at Apex Vox.

  Those were the girls she had something in common with, not Clair. Those girls were her competition.

  “I want to fight in a way where you can’t take your eyes off me,” Emi said. “You can’t help but hold your breath until the battle is over. Without saying a word, I want to capture your heart.”

  Seb had rushed to write down some notes based on her words again, but his hand slowed to a crawl as she spoke. Instead, he simply looked up at her, unblinking.

  “I want you to help me show Raindrop to the world, Seb. Make everyone who is destined to fall in love with her fall.”

  Emi waited for Seb to answer or write another note, but the boy continued to stare at her. She was about to press him to say something—she had just declared her dreams, after all—but was interrupted by a hurried knock at her bedroom door.

  “Oh, so you are in here,” Adah said. “I didn’t expect to find you in Emi’s room of all places.”

  She looked at Emi, and Emi returned her look blankly. Her gaze lingered what felt like a second too long, so Emi tilted her head, but soon Adah turned back to Seb.

  “Anyway, are you ready to go on a little adventure?”

  Seb coughed like he’d choked while chugging water. Once he recuperated, he said, “You found a mission that will work already?”

  “Luck’s on our side for once,” Adah said with a smile.

  “What’s going on?” Emi asked. “What adventure?”

  “Adah and Rika are—”

  “Shh!” Adah pounced behind Seb and slapped a hand over his mouth. “I want it to be a surprise for everyone. It’ll be more fun that way.”

  The boy held up his hands in surrender, and Adah let go of him.

  “You’ve got two minutes,” Adah told him. “I’ll carry the camera, so you focus on driving fast. Get the details from Grace on your way out—I’ll meet you there!”

  With that, Adah ran from Emi’s room as fast as she had entered it. Seb adjusted his glasses and took a deep breath, as if psyching himself up for a long day’s work.

  “What was that about?” Emi said.

  “I’m also helping those two with a project,” he said. “We needed to wait for the right mission, so I can’t leave Adah hanging.”

  He stood up and flipped his notebook closed, tucking it under his arm. He looked at Emi again, pausing long enough that she didn’t know what to do. She tilted her head again, hoping that’d prompt him to say whatever was on his mind.

  “I promise, though,” he said. “I’ll—I mean, we’ll make the whole world fall in love with Raindrop if we can.”

  Emi nodded and, after another awkward pause, Seb rushed downstairs.