Later that night, Rika didn’t sit on Adah’s bed so much as fall back onto it.

  For everyone on their team, the past month had gone by in a blur, culminating in the whirlwind that had been their fight against the hydra and its fallout. Everyone was tired and pushed to their emotional limit, and tonight represented the first potential respite from that stress. And the first major reward from their efforts.

  Just as all their exhaustion was reaching its peak, so too would their reputation—or so Adah hoped.

  The Department of Magic was expected to at last issue a statement on the outcome of the hydra mission and Heartbreak’s accusations. Based on the notes Elise had forwarded to Grace after their meeting, their office planned to sweep the news out of the public eye in a time-proven manner: conducting an internal investigation. Their statement would cut at Heartbreak in a small way by denying any knowledge of such orders to DreamRise or the Last Light, but ultimately sing both teams’ praises for defeating the Cruelty and preventing any worse tragedy.

  Of course, their investigation would return no useful findings—a fact that would be quietly announced as soon as the next big story dominated the news cycle. It wasn’t a severe enough comeuppance for Thibault—not by a long shot—but Adah was far from finished with him. In fact, him trying to avoid immediate consequence would work in her favor in the long run.

  For tonight, she would shine the spotlight on her team even brighter by turning everyone’s attention to her and Rika’s music video. Her interview had given her a chance to draw even more eyes to the release, and therefore more eyes to her team. Once those eyes were watching them, she could even mobilize their new fans to help Ekki. At this point, he was a comrade of the Last Light, and even fans who viewed their teams as rivals could be impassioned to root for his recovery so that they could stand on equal footing once more.

  Although she hoped the video would boost the popularity of her whole team, Adah had brought Rika to her room alone to watch the release and respond to their fans. This first night of a new era belonged to the two of them. Adah wanted to hold the moment close. There would be plenty more occasions to celebrate as a team in the near future—she was certain of that.

  “Before you get comfortable,” she said to Rika, “we should transform. It’ll set a nice mood.”

  “I already am comfortable,” Rika said, her body visibly sinking deeper into Adah’s mattress.

  “Come on,” Adah spurred her on. “It’ll be cute. A sweet memory. We can even take a picture of us watching together—the fans will eat that up.”

  “This is the downside with having a captain who cares,” Rika groaned. “She’s always making me work.”

  “Well, you’re about to see the upside.”

  Despite her complaints, Rika did sit up and call upon Lumi, her huge dog of a mascot. At times, he looked much more like a bear than a canine and, due to his size, he often couldn’t hang around indoors. He always could have chosen to take a different form, but like Izzy, he had grown far too fond of this one to switch. After Rika transformed into Lyrika, Lumi returned to his interdimensional slumber.

  Once they were both transformed, the girls sat shoulder to shoulder on Adah’s bed, with their backs against the wall for support. For the privacy of the room, they had to watch the video on Adah’s phone—probably a smaller screen than it deserved. Yet, Adah figured that’s how most other people would be watching it, so perhaps that made this an authentic experience.

  The video was set to go live in just a couple of minutes, but already the live chat beside the video was scrolling by at a decent rate. Over three thousand viewers were already waiting for the release, if the app’s viewer count could be trusted.

  “How many views do your covers usually get?” Adah asked.

  “The good ones might get to ten thousand after a week or two,” Rika said. “But I’ve never seen more than a couple hundred people active on the pre-release. You didn’t bot this, did you?”

  “Obviously not! By those numbers, do you think this will do well?”

  “I don’t know what to think right now,” Rika said. “But it definitely doesn’t look like it’s going to flop.”

  Adah couldn’t help but smile at that. Releasing this song had made her more nervous than any interview or photoshoot ever had. Something about the creative aspect of music curtailed her usual confidence. Or maybe she had been scared of how cruel criticism for something like a song could get. If anyone made fun of her photos, it was easy to brush off their comments and think: “Let’s see what you look like then!” With music, Adah knew she was out of her depth. Any criticism the internet levied against her could very well be justified, as far as she knew.

  Of course, all this viewership wasn’t solely a positive thing. The occasional hate message still drifted through chat, saying something like: let’s hope they sing better than they fight or we’ll all go deaf lol. Even if their first B-Rank mission had gone perfectly, their team was reaching a level of fame that would attract people who followed them only to hate on them. That, in its own way, was a sign of success.

  “You know,” Rika said as they waited, “whatever you said to Thibault has got Grace and Michel both drinking tonight. I couldn’t tell if they were celebrating or commiserating.”

  “Honestly, it could be both,” Adah said.

  Rika stretched her arms in front of her and sighed. “We got a temporary win, but he’s going to look for revenge like he did last time. I wish we had gotten him off our backs forever.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “One step at a time,” Adah said. “With Iris against him, he’s running out of allies. We just need to grow to a level where he can’t do anything to slow us down. Supposedly, we answer to the will of humanity. But if we get enough fans to want our will to be done, then who is it who actually has the power?”

  “And what do we want that power for?”

  “The same thing as always: to destroy the Cruelties.”

  Rika watched Adah’s eyes for a moment before saying, “Is that all?”

  “I wouldn’t mind having some fun and making some money along the way,” Adah answered with a laugh. “But that all comes with the job.”

  “As long as you don’t fall off the deep end, that’s fine, I guess,” Rika said. “Someone as short as you would probably drown.”

  Adah prepared to jab her finger into Rika’s exposed stomach in retaliation, but was interrupted by a sound from her phone. Their video had started to play.

  The beginning of the video cycled through still, lingering shots of local scenery—the largely untouched woods, marshes, and hills of Region 4. They couldn’t have chosen a better time of year to film. The gray skies and barren trees of late autumn gave all the footage a unified feeling. It was cold and unsettling, but with a hint that some secret magic of nature was hidden just out of sight.

  Rika led the vocals through this section with a cracking—almost whining—string of syllables that had no real meaning. She had just made up the sounds as she went along, searching for whatever felt right. This introduction was only meant to establish an atmosphere, to hint at the feelings of the lonesome fairy Lyrika.

  Her singing built up in volume and intensity, reaching a crescendo at the moment the track’s drumbeat and a plucking guitar arrived. The beat thumped like the footsteps of a thief in an old cartoon, while the notes from the guitar bounced up and down in pitch to accentuate that sneaking feeling.

  The track played in isolation for a time before Adah’s voice made its debut. She sang the first real lyrics of the song, keeping to a lower pitch than Rika was capable of and focusing on what the vocal coach Michel hired had called her “full timbre.” That woman had made her stand there for hours just making nonsense noises until she could reproduce the sound on command, so Adah was glad to have a chance to put that practice to use.

  Walking, falling at the limit of my reason

  Waiting, praying for an answer to my pleading

  A voice to kindle the embers in my chest

  A hand to hold and quiet my unrest

  As Adah sang, Heartbreak and Lyrika’s “first meeting” played out in the video. Seb must have filmed a dozen different angles of Adah chasing Rika through the woods, all of which were spliced together in this section. Those shots were separated by intermittent close ups of the skirt tails (or short tails, in her case) on Lyrika’s costume, showing her heart pulsing in time with the drumbeat. The bright red magic that flashed on the fabric would catch anyone’s attention after the long stretch of images of washed-out scenery.

  In Adah’s room, those same tails were pulsing again.

  “Cute,” Adah whispered.

  “Don’t make fun,” Rika said. “If I could see yours, I bet it’d look the same.”

  “Wasn’t making fun at all.”

  Their song reached its first chorus now. The girls alternated their lines, each singing a section of lyrics that grew distorted through an audio effect as they reached the end of their part. Their singing was almost like chanting, their most stressed words hitting on the beat with the pounding of the drums and a struck note from the guitar.

  Scenes of the girls battling Cruelties made up the bulk of the video throughout the chorus. In battle, they were never shown together—that was an idea Adah had been particular about. Until the end of the video, she only wanted Heartbreak and Lyrika to share a frame during the verses.

  I want to

  Break through

  This coldness

  Endless

  I want to

  Break through

  Hollow chest

  Sickness

  I want

  The chorus faded away in another mess of distortion, just before its final words were realized. This distortion led back in the quieter, calmer verse. Rika carried the lyrics this time, her voice sweet and strong like a proper idol’s.

  The pattern repeated, a simple but effective song, until the third and final chorus. The words proceeded in the same chant as the first two choruses, though the intensity of Adah and Rika’s voices and the instrumentation built higher than ever before. The distortion layered over it all amplified as well, until it threatened to drown out all their words.

  At the same time, the footage of Adah's first scythe usage and Rika's maximum power railgun alternated flashing on the screen. Either Seb had managed to capture them from opposite angles or the footage was flipped in editing, and the two attacks looked to collide as the video swapped between them.

  That’s when, without any refinement and only the thumping of the drumbeat to accompany it, Adah and Rika sang the final realization of the chorus.

  I want you.

  The pulsing red light from Rika’s outfit caught Adah’s eye. The rhythm wasn’t that of a resting heart rate, nor that of the song’s beat, but a rapid and flustered racing. Even though the video had ended and the screen had turned black, Rika continued to stare down at Adah’s phone.

  “Your wings are fluttering,” Adah said. “I forgot—what does that mean again?”

  This brought Rika’s eyes to Adah’s own. Flustered as she was, Rika could still give a stare with enough intensity behind it to make Adah feel like she was being pushed down onto the bed.

  “Shut up,” Rika said. “Do you think I can’t tell how you’re feeling just by looking at you, too?”

  “I don’t mind you knowing how I feel at all,” Adah returned. “Exactly how I feel.”

  With those words, Adah saw the smallest of sign of retreat in Rika’s eyes. The pressure she’d been forcing onto Adah broke for only a moment, but that weakness was unmistakable.

  The heat Rika could conjure in Adah’s chest with her stares, Adah could return with her words.

  “Why’d I get involved with such a troublesome girl?” Rika muttered.

  “Involved how?” Adah asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” Adah said. “So tell me. Or show me. Whichever you prefer.”

  That had done it.

  It was the last note of their song, an epilogue reserved for just the two of them.

  The distance wasn’t so far to close—not when they were sitting with their hips and the side of their thighs already pressed together. Blame it on the sinking foam of the mattress or some careful movement neither of them remembered making, but their bodies had been touching since the start of the song.

  When you were staring into another’s eyes and your heart was beating so loud it echoed in your ears, it was easy to fall prey to the illusion. Were they getting closer, or had Rika’s face always been all that Adah could see?

  Was she the one leaning forward, or was Rika?

  It had already happened. Their lips were apart, but this close there was no denying it. Falling into each other like this was the kiss.

  This moment, when they each knew what the other intended to do, was the kiss.

  They clung to this moment for as long as they could. They could only have it once. No reality could ever be as sweet as a craving on the edge of satisfaction. To want something, and to know you were about to have it in its entirety, was the greatest pleasure.

  They held on as long as they could, savoring every second. But in the end, they were only human. They were fated to give in.

  They fell wholeheartedly into each other, and kissed.