Adah stood in front of another mirror. Although, this one reflected all four members of the Last Light, and Adah did not feel she looked very cute at all right now.

  She was sweaty and her hair was frazzled. The evidence of her hard work over the past few hours dripped from her chin and soaked into her shirt. Her teammates were in more or less the same condition, with even the twins clearly reaching a point of exhaustion. If anyone out of the four of them looked like they could keep going, it was probably Rika, who was leading them through this training.

  The team had rented out a dance studio for the afternoon, yet another benefit of having a surplus of cash in recent months. While they didn’t have the time to develop a full choreography for their concert, Rika had come up with a plan to cheat their way around the issue. By ending the show on a more elaborately choreographed performance, they could make their final song feel like a proper climax to the event. They could ad-lib their way through the other songs or devise simple moves that fit the theme of that particular song.

  Essentially, they’d distract the audience through the beginning of the concert, then cap the event off with a performance that they actually wanted their fans to remember.

  The surprise unveiling of several new songs would surely buy them some goodwill, even if most of their performance was amateurish. After all, the fans still didn’t know Ami and Emi were even involved with the music side of the Last Light’s business. If the girls could dazzle them during that final song, it’d be like showing off a new spell for the first time.

  Executing Rika’s plan, however, would take practice. The choreography was of Rika’s own design, but even she would need to hone her steps through repetition. Today marked their first of many practice sessions. Since the song itself wasn’t finalized, the girls focused on memorizing the moves, maintaining their formation, and figuring out which sequences each of them would need to practice the most. They had spent the first part of the session watching Rika as she walked them through steps, then moved on to practicing sequence by sequence with the song’s instrumental track playing in the background.

  At the end of three hours of piecemeal learning, they ran through the full choreography a few times, though no one but Rika managed to hit all the moves correctly just yet. Despite taking more naturally to dancing than Adah had, the twins were still worn down by the combination of memorization and motion. The whole session was a bit like studying for a test while running a long distance race.

  As Adah looked at her team in the studio’s floor-to-ceiling mirror, she could tell they’d reached their limit for the day.

  “We’ve got a little time left,” Rika said, recognizing the same, “but we should probably call it there. We look pretty beat.”

  From the way the girls were dressed, you wouldn’t have guessed how cold it was outside. Rika had on shorts and a tank top, as was so often her style. The twins had both come in capri sweats and t-shirts, though by the end of their practice Emi had rolled her pants up to her knees and Ami had ditched her shirt, opting to simply wear her sports bra in the privacy of their studio. On paper, the choreography shouldn’t have been as intense as one of Grace’s circuit workouts, but the girls had worked up a heavy sweat.

  “And we’ve got to sing during all this, too?” Ami said, wiping her face off with her discarded shirt.

  “This was only level one,” Emi lamented.

  “Is it too much?” Rika asked. “I just put together some ideas I had from watching other dances. If I overdid it, I can make some changes to it.”

  Ami shook her head and said, “I like it. If it’s our finale, it should be something intense like this. I just gotta beat it into my body.”

  “More pain, more gain,” Emi agreed.

  Though, it was obvious neither of them had any space left for more pain or practice today. Ami’s movements were rough and devoid of any grace, like she was trudging through a knee-deep snowbank. Likewise, the vacant look in Emi’s eyes revealed her mind was lost to daydreams. Adah was sure she looked much the same. The four of them were in need of some rest and a good meal.

  “They’ve got a locker room here, right?” Ami said. “I need a shower ASAP.”

  “You sure do,” Emi said.

  Ami laughed and pinched her nose while looking at her sister.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “We might look the same, but I know for a fact that you smell worse. What would your fans think of that?”

  Emi, her voice even more subdued than usual, said, “If you didn’t stink so bad, I’d tackle you.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “If I wasn’t so tired, I’d make you regret it.”

  Ami flung her shirt back over her head and onto her body, then made her way out of the studio. Emi went with her, the two of them bumping shoulders in a half-hearted imitation of their usual roughhousing.

  "What about you?” Rika asked Adah after the twins had left.

  “What about me?” Adah said. “And choose your words carefully.”

  Rika walked across the polished hardwood of the studio floor and squatted down by a collection of four gym bags at the back of the room. She reached into her own bag and grabbed a couple of individually wrapped pieces of chocolate, then picked up Adah’s water bottle from the floor. She returned to Adah and handed over the water and one of the chocolates.

  “I’m just asking if you’re going to freshen up here or wait until we get home,” Rika said. “So sensitive.”

  Adah graciously accepted the chocolate and swallowed it so fast she hardly tasted it, all the more so given how much water she chugged immediately after. Then, she plopped down cross-legged on the floor.

  “I’m going to sit here and enjoy every second of rest I can get before the twins get back,” she said. “Then I’ll let you carry me home.”

  “What a diva,” Rika said, joining Adah on the floor. “I’m more and more convinced that Heartbreak isn’t a character at all.”

  “She’s got a useful attitude sometimes,” Adah said.

  The two girls sat together for a while as the water and sugar brought some life back to Adah’s body, and the mindless act of scrolling through her phone untangled the mess of memorization in her brain.

  “Your photos are going over well,” Adah said after a bit of silence.

  After the initial collaboration post with Lina, in which the whole lineup of outfits was revealed, the girls had planned to highlight one member of the Last Light per day. Whoever was that day’s focus would share a bunch of their favorite shots of herself, and everyone else would free up their own feed to reshare those posts and leave comments. It was an effective strategy for spreading out the hype over the outfits while also giving each member her own chance to shine.

  Ami and Emi had been the first two to be given that focus, and today was Rika’s turn. She had chosen to share more photos of herself in the pairing shots and only a couple of her by herself. For her opening post—the one which the girls planned to make the main focus of each highlight—Rika had gone with a photo from the portion of the shoot when she was resting her head in Adah’s lap. Although the photo would certainly have a serious impact on any fans who saw it, and Adah was happy to be featured so prominently in her partner’s own highlight, she couldn’t help but wonder if Rika had chosen it for a different reason.

  Both twins’ natural instincts had been to use a solo photo for their first post. Maybe they were focused on distinguishing themselves, but that was also Adah’s plan. She had figured that would be everyone’s first instinct.

  In the end, it didn’t matter one way or another. The reception to the photos was what mattered, and Rika’s fans were engaging with her posts with the same level of excitement as the twins had received.

  “Yeah, I guess it worked out,” Rika said.

  “Were you worried it wouldn’t?” Adah asked. “In my unbiased opinion, you’re the cutest out of all of us.”

  Rika gave Adah a smile, but it vanished soon after.

  “It wasn’t that so much as it was… I don’t know,” she said. “Did you see it? Some of the comments are weird.”

  “Like creepy?”

  “No, that’s whatever,” Rika said. “Just stuff like… Some of them were surprised I look like this. I recognized those usernames—they’ve been following me for a while. Isn’t it weird for them to not really know what I look like?”

  Some of the comments Adah had seen had said something to that effect. They weren’t negative in nature, but she understood what Rika meant by them feeling weird.

  “I suppose if someone originally knows you from your song covers, they might not recognize you right away,” Adah said. “Even in our music video, there weren’t a lot of moments where people would get a clear look at you.”

  “Yeah, and that’s what’s weird about it,” Rika said. “What kind of magical girl keeps herself hidden like that? People only see me in photos that Seb or somebody takes during our battles. Compared to someone like you or Emi, I feel like my FP is almost fake. Do my fans really know Lyrika the way yours know you?”

  “That’s not entirely true, though,” Adah said. “That lady at the bakery recognized us.”

  “Maybe she only knew you,” Rika said. “But either way, that’s not what I mean. The problem isn’t that nobody recognizes me, it’s that there’s anybody at all who might not. It’d be inconceivable for someone to be a Heartbreak fan and not recognize you instantly if they saw you.”

  Adah wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, but since Rika seemed to be leading the conversation in that direction, she decided to give her partner an opening.

  “Well,” she said, “there’s a difference in how Emi and I present ourselves compared to you.”

  Rika sighed and stretched out her arms above her head. Although the topic clearly stressed her out, she did seem committed to talking about it.

  “I know,” Rika said. “I’ve been a fake this whole time, so it’s only natural my FP, my followers, and everything else would feel fake. Like, why does anyone want to be an idol or a magical girl in the first place? They want to show off and do what they love in front of their fans. They want to perform. That’s what all the Apex Vox girls were talking to us about. And that’s the exact thing I can’t do.”

  “Why do you think you’re a fake, though?” Adah asked. “Just because you’re scared to perform?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not ‘just’ anything,” Rika said. “What Sheffa and them were talking about—how they open up to the fans and the fans open up to them, and they make each other feel proud to do what they’re doing. That’s the same as magic, isn’t it? You become the magical girl your fans think you are. Every battle is a performance and every spell is a song. If your fans don’t know you—if you’re like a shadow to them—how real can your magic be?”

  “Those are two different things,” Adah said. “If your FP is at a certain level, then you’ve earned that. It’s real by the nature of what it is. Even Ketzia’s mascot told me—it’s a measure of the will of humanity, plain and simple.”

  Rika frowned and said, “I’m not explaining myself right. I’m not denying what my FP is right now. I’m saying I don’t know how long that’s going to last. If I can’t match up to the magical girl our fans imagine me to be, if I can’t stand in front of them and be that person… What’s going to happen?”