“From one group of psychopaths to another,” Ami said as she climbed into the back seat of Grace’s beat-up sedan.

  “At least there’s only one person to watch out for this time,” Rika said, sliding into the middle spot.

  “She’s a three-in-one,” Emi said, the last of them to take a seat.

  There was a moment of silence, presumably for Adah to add a fourth and final remark, but she was too tired to contribute. Her plan for the whole drive was to catch a nap. If she could sneak in even ten minutes, she’d call that a victory.

  They were headed to a rentable venue in Region 3 where the photoshoot for Lina’s new costumes was going to be held. The venue wasn’t far from Lina’s studio, which would make it easier for the designer to transport the precious cargo of the team’s finished outfits. This was a midday shoot, yet Adah still felt yesterday’s fatigue even after sleeping in.

  Truthfully, this exhaustion had probably built up in bits and pieces over the last month. Her brief respites from work—her coffee date with Emi, playing games with Apex Vox, and spare moments here and there—were not enough to fully refresh her. She wasn’t stubborn enough to ignore what her body was telling her: she needed a proper break soon. The question was when would she find the time?

  So, while Adah tried to slip into sleep, Grace added her own thoughts instead.

  “If you think everyone you meet is crazy, maybe that’s a reflection on you and not them,” she said. “You’re the common denominator, after all.”

  That statement triggered a patented Last Light “chorus of complaints.” The magical girls all shouted out their grievances, with the notable exception of Adah.

  “Once you meet those girls, you’ll understand,” Rika said. “There’s something wrong with them.”

  “And yet, you still recruited them,” Grace said as she started the car.

  They had indeed.

  Once Adah had pitched her plan to the Fifty Flip members, none of them had taken much convincing to join on. To them, allying themselves with the Last Light probably looked as appealing as teaming up with DreamRise during the IndieMagie had to Adah and her teammates. As appealing as it had looked at first, anyway. Fifty Flip stood to gain a lot from participating: the advice of a more successful team, exposure to all their fans, and—most importantly—a powerful ally should Adah succeed in influencing the region’s politics.

  Of course, the members each had their own reasons to wanting to get involved as well.

  Hyperia was the quickest to agree, more or less pledging her allegiance to whatever Rika wanted her to do. Getting to work alongside her idol in any manner was enough of a benefit for her. If there was something in particular that caught her interest, though, it was the possibility of performing together with Lyrika in concert.

  Elegia followed in her former student’s footsteps soon after. She wanted to support Hyperia, of course, but she also held a twisted sense of duty when it came to fighting Cruelties.

  “Humans are meant to be the ones inflicting pain on Cruelties,” she had explained, “not the other way around. That’s not cute at all. If the Secretary allowed for such a thing to happen, he deserves as much torture as the Cruelties do.”

  While torture wasn’t exactly what Adah had in mind—maybe some emotional torment and public humiliation—Elegia’s intentions were close enough to the right idea.

  With her two teammates already on board, Dystopia would have been put in an odd position to decline, but she seemed as eager as either of them to agree. Although she didn’t explain her reasoning, Adah already had a sense of what motivated the girl.

  Adah had been considering this earlier—the most likely explanation for Dystopia’s attitude toward being a magical girl was that she wanted revenge. The darker sides of Hyperia and Elegia’s personalities didn’t bother her at all, but it wasn’t because she took the same pleasure in hurting Cruelties as they did. She lacked their inherent sadism, yet she could understand it. Maybe she was even comforted by it.

  The fact she kept her own motivations close to her chest made Adah think Dystopia had lost someone or something to Cruelties in the past. Someone or something that couldn’t be replaced. Adah didn’t want to assume too much of the girl, but that would explain a lot about how she wound up on this team.

  Thinking about the three magical girls in this way also made Adah wonder how much their manager knew about their irregularities. Had the three of them been recruited for who they were beneath their outer layers? There was that tagline, after all—Exist in Extremes.

  Whatever the truth was, Adah would find out before long. Now that the members of Fifty Flip were on board, she’d be meeting their manager and anyone else who worked at the agency soon. Those involved in the business side of things would want to know what exactly their talent was getting themselves into.

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  For now, though, Grace was right. The Last Light had recruited their very first allies—excluding their existing friendship with Apex Vox.

  “Their peculiarities would make it hard to be friends with them,” Adah said with her eyes still closed, “but that doesn’t mean they won’t make good allies. I think Hyperia will be loyal to Rika, and Elegia is loyal to Hyperia. As for Dystopia—to be honest, she probably joined us for all the right reasons. How passionate they are might actually make it easier to trust them.”

  The fact of the matter was that Adah couldn’t be picky about her allies. This was the other side of the coin, something else that Ketzia had prompted her to think about.

  If Adah wanted the public to support her cause, she needed to support their desires as well. The people of Region 4 loved Fifty Flip enough to help the team reach this point of popularity, and Adah would risk losing the support of those fans if she excluded them without a good reason. Her coalition needed to represent what the public loved most about Region 4’s magic users.

  The will of humanity at work yet again.

  “So that just leaves Seliah,” Rika said. “At least until we know what’s going to happen with Ekki.”

  Of course, Adah had far more reservations about working with DreamRise than she did with Fifty Flip. But Rika was right—DreamRise’s involvement was contingent on Ekki’s recovery. Seliah was the next magical girl Adah had her sights set on.

  “You don’t have to worry about Selichi,” Ami said. “She’s a good person, I could tell right away when I met her. She’ll want to be a part of this, I’m sure of it.”

  “It almost sounds like you’re praying she joins us,” Rika teased.

  “She wants to replace me,” Emi said.

  “I like her, what can I say?” Ami said. “She’s been working so hard all by herself for so long. She deserves to be part of something bigger.”

  Even as she floated halfway between waking and sleeping, Adah didn’t miss the implication in Ami’s words. She didn’t just want Seliah to be their ally, she wanted her to join their team.

  There was a better argument for the idea now than there had been in the past. Seliah was no longer a rookie. She was taking out D-Ranks as part of her regular routine and—now that she’d proved herself capable of handling a weaker C-Rank variant—was probably as strong as Ami had been when they first met. She could be an active contributor, rather than a liability, during the missions Adah and her teammates went on.

  The Last Light was also in a better position to take on new talent than the agency had been. Although the team’s workload had grown in some ways, they weren’t bound to taking every C-Rank mission that popped up anymore. They had the mental space to plan ahead now, which was how the very idea for this recruitment effort had come about. With the money they were bringing in, providing a baseline salary and other necessities for a new member was also feasible.

  But just because they could try to hire Seliah, that didn’t mean they necessarily should.

  In the first place, anyone who joined their agency in an official capacity would need to commit to the full journey. The Last Light wasn’t planning to slow down after they replaced Thibault, and they were likely to make more enemies in the future. While their allies could bow out if the going got rough, the members of the Last Light wouldn’t have the luxury of dodging whatever consequences came their way.

  Liking Seliah wasn’t enough of a reason on its own to bring her aboard. Was she the right fit in terms of the team’s goals, or was she just someone they could get along with? What did Seliah herself want out of being a magical girl?

  Those were the kinds of questions they’d have to consider when they met with her. After all, they couldn’t jump ahead to recruiting the girl to their team when they hadn’t even convinced her to join their coalition yet.

  These were the kinds of thoughts that floated idly through Adah’s mind as her teammates recounted to Grace every detail of their interactions with Fifty Flip. Adah soon found her ten minutes of sleep, and perhaps even a bit more, but was eventually woken by a nudge from her manager.

  “We’re here, kid,” Grace said. “Better get your blood flowing—you don’t want to show the camera a sleepy face.”

  “Sleepy girls are cute, too,” Adah mumbled, even as she squeezed her eyelids tight and shook out her arms and legs.

  Adah believed that for the most part, but maybe not for this kind of photoshoot. Today, she was supposed to be an incomparable princess. That was the feeling Lina’s dress was meant to capture.

  As she stepped out of Grace’s car, the midday sun helped Adah wake up further. She looked around the half-empty parking lot of the studio. The building itself looked to be a decommissioned warehouse of some kind. From the outside, she could see that some sections had the windows blocked by black boards, while others were exposed, with the left side of the building even featuring a skylight panel. Adah figured the interior must be divided into different studios, with some offering natural light and others focused strictly on artificial.

  Lina and her photographer had planned to meet Adah and her team inside the particular studio they had rented, as they would be arriving early to prepare the set. Thus, Grace led the girls into the venue, which looked more like the reception to a doctor’s office on the inside than a warehouse. A man at the front desk pointed them in the right direction after Grace told him the studio number Lina had booked, and they proceeded down a white-walled hallway until they reached a metal door with the number “4” stenciled onto it in blue paint.

  Grace went to push the door when it suddenly opened from the other side. A tall man in a black, button-up shirt emerged in a hurry, almost bumping into Grace. He had his mostly graying hair tied back in a ponytail, though it was just barely long enough to allow for such a style, making it look more like a tuft than a tail.

  All at once, Adah remembered where she had heard the name Neil.

  “Oh, long time no see!” the man said with a smile. “Sorry, I should’ve been looking where I was going!”

  This man was the same photographer as the one at the IndieMagie shoot. It shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise—surely there were only so many photographers specializing in shooting magical girls in this area. Maybe the reason his involvement stood out to Adah wasn’t the coincidence of it but the opportunity.

  “I hope you four can show me something even more exciting than last time,” Neil said, a look of pure glee on his face.

  “We most certainly will,” Adah said, smiling back.