To Prevent Chic Costumes

by Emily Martha Sorensen

  Everything.

  Including the bannister of the stairs.

  How long has this lair sat vacant? Kendra wondered.

  “So here we have a sweeping staircase, leading down to a vast entrance . . .” the realtor said, skipping down the stairs and waving around at the cavernous room beneath them. “Fully-furnished plotting room . . . picturesque bedrooms . . . state-of-the-art bathrooms . . .”

  The “fully-furnished” plotting room had one long table, twelve chairs, and a chalkboard that was three times larger than anything Kendra had seen at school.

  The “picturesque” bedrooms on the top floor had a superb view through the giant windows of absolutely nothing but empty, scrubby hills.

  The plumbing barely worked in one of the “state-of-the-art” bathrooms, and another one had rusted fixtures. On the other hand, all three had an enormous flat-screen TV attached to the wall next to the bathtub.

  Somebody had strange priorities, Kendra thought, shaking her head.

  Still . . . the walls were intact, there were no corpses anywhere, and overall it seemed head and shoulders better than anything else they’d see today.

  “So what do you think?” the realtor asked breathlessly, beaming as she led them back into the cavernous open space that the stairs led down to.

  “Actually . . . this place isn’t half-bad,” Kendra admitted. She glanced over at Chronos. “I wonder what the catch it?”

  “Probably cost,” Chronos said, glancing upward. “Did you notice there’s a chandelier in this room?”

  Kendra snorted. “Somehow, I’m sure price won’t be the only problem.”

  “And finally, the dungeons!” the realtor’s voice called from behind them. There was a sound of a door opening, then quickly slamming.

  Kendra and Chronos spun to look in that direction.

  “The door to which . . . uh . . . seems to be stuck . . .” the realtor said nervously.

  “Catch?” Kendra asked Chronos.

  “Catch,” Chronos confirmed.

  “No! Wait!” the realtor cried.

  “Good villains need good dungeons,” Kendra said darkly. “Aren’t those one of the key features of a lair?”

  “Why won’t this door open?!” the realtor wailed, placing her foot on the door and pulling on it.

  So that’s why this place has sat empty for so long, Kendra thought with a smirk. What villain would buy a place with dungeons they can’t reach?

  “Actually . . . this place seems adequate,” Chronos spoke up. “If lack of dungeons are the only problem, we’ll take it.”

  The realtor was by her side in a flash. “Terrific! Here’s a contract! Don’t bother to read it before you sign!”

  “Soothsayer!” Kendra shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  Chronos took the contract, carelessly signed two copies without reading them, wrote down her account number, and handed over one of the copies. The realtor was brimming with joy.

  Kendra watched in indignant disbelief.

  “Are we done here?” Chronos asked, capping the pen.

  “I have some lovely extra perks that you can —!”

  “No,” Chronos said flatly. “I’m done shopping. You can go now.”

  “So pleased to make your acquaintance!” the realtor sang, skipping up the stairs in sheer ebullience.

  Bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD MOVE! Kendra thought furiously.

  The realtor exploded from the lair, giddy with her success. She’d known as soon as she’d seen those two that they’d be the perfect marks. Their costumes had been brand new, their faces unfamiliar, and they’d had no affiliation with the Deathwaves.

  She’d been banking on the hope that they might not have heard the rumors about that particular property, and she’d been right. She still couldn’t believe how perfectly it had gone, even though she’d nearly messed up. In all the heat of her excitement, she’d completely lost her head and nearly shown them the dungeons.

  But the older one had been a sucker, through and through. She hadn’t even looked at the contract. All that effort to carefully obfuscate the meaning of the third page hadn’t even been necessary!

  She grinned so brightly that it hurt her cheeks, and yanked a bricklike object from her pocket as she raced down the hill. It was a cellular phone, an incredibly expensive luxury, but one the agency provided for all of their top sellers as a way to make sure that they had a way to call for help in case one of their satisfied customers attempted to kill them.

  “Guess what, Marnie?” she shouted into the phone. “It’s Valancy! They bought it!”

  From the scream of fury, she knew that her coworker was slightly discontented that Valancy had successfully sold the property that none of the rest of them had succeeded in getting rid of.

  I wonder how long they’ll still be alive, the realtor thought, grinning broadly. How long will it be before I can sell it again?

  She’d had to sell it six times over the past three years, which was twice as often as any other lair their agency took hold of, and after it had sat empty for the past half a year, she’d started to think she’d never find another buyer clueless enough to purchase it. But she just had.

  The only thing that would make this perfect is if the buyer doesn’t have the money in cash, and so has to go with a mortgage, Valancy thought gleefully. Which they can only do through our bank. If that’s the case, the agency will be able to confiscate every penny they owned when they die.

  One of the things her agency always slipped into their contracts was an extremely high variable interest rate, plus the fact that it was only possible to finance through their affiliated bank, and of course realtors got paid on commission for that.

  Valancy Darkwater loved her job. She didn’t have to have magic to be a villain.

  Chapter 4: The Catch

  “You bought it,” Kendra moaned, smacking her face into her hands. “You actually bought it.”

  “I was tired of shopping,” Chronos said. “You liked it fine, didn’t you?”

  “Before I found out that the dungeons don’t work!” Kendra shot back. “Not to mention whatever else is wrong with it that the realtor was hiding!”

  Chronos shrugged. “There’ll be something wrong with every lair. You’ll never find an honest villain realtor. At least this time, we knew exactly what the problem was, and it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Not a big deal?” Kendra asked incredulously. “A complete lack of dungeons, not a big deal?”

  “I’m not planning to use dungeons for anything,” Chronos said. “Are you?”

  Kendra sputtered, seeming to be caught by the obvious logic.

  “Well, of course not, but don’t you know the first thing about bargaining?” the former magical girl burst out at last. “You could have used that obvious problem to ask for a better price! How much did you pay?”

  “Good question,” Chronos said, shuffling through the papers. “I didn’t look.”

  “You DIDN’T LOOK?!”

  “It wasn’t like I was going to prolong the conversation by arguing over it,” Chronos said. She was starting to feel pretty annoyed over the pest’s ingratitude. “Whatever it was, I could pay it. Ah, here it is.”

  She found the relevant paper in the stack. The purchase price had been buried in the middle of an exceptionally boring paragraph, written in very small print. Chronos gave the number a cursory glance to make sure she had enough money in her account to cover it without a mortgage — she did — and held the paper out for Kendra to see.

  Kendra snatched the paper, her voice rising in a shrill scream. “How could you afford a number with EIGHT ZEROES?!”

  Chronos shrugged. “I day-traded stocks for a few weeks, several years ago.”

  It had been quite unpleasant. She’d had to talk to people over the phone, sign papers in person, and interact with extremely intense individuals over and over again. Still, it had been worth it, given that the easy-to-earn money had bought her a ticket to successfully ignoring the world f
or the next seven years.

  Come to think of it, Chronos thought, perhaps I shouldn’t have given my account number to someone who’d feel no guilt whatsoever about clearing it out?

  Whatever. She still had her backup account. It’d be a minor nuisance if her main account had been compromised irreparably, but not enough to necessitate bothering to do anything about it.

  Kendra stared at her with narrowed eyes. “Someone uses her magic for personal gain . . .”

  “I’ve never seen a problem with that,” Chronos said.

  Kendra’s jaw twitched. “Magic is supposed to be used for higher purposes. For saving the world.”

  “And yet, somehow, the world survived,” Chronos said flatly.

  Kendra seemed to be struggling with her temper. She tossed the paper back to Chronos, who made no attempt to catch it, so it flipped through the air, spun the wrong direction, and landed on top of one of Kendra’s feet.

  Chronos’s lips curved upwards in amusement.

  Kendra’s jaw twitched again.

  “Whatever,” she said. “When do we move in? Can you pack everything by today?”

  Chronos stared at the former magical girl.

  “What?” Kendra asked.

  Chronos just kept staring at her.

  “What?” Kendra demanded.

  “We do not move in,” Chronos said, turning her back and heading towards the stairs. “This lair is yours. Enjoy.”

  “Are you seriously planning to go back to that lame apartment after buying this place?” the former magical girl burst out from behind her.

  “It isn’t like I’m short on money,” Chronos said, putting her hand on the bannister of the stairs. “I just wanted my privacy back.”

  Her fingers left a trail across the bannister, which was shiny underneath all that blanket of grey fuzz.

  Huh, Chronos thought. I didn’t even notice there was dust.

  She rarely noticed such things. She hadn’t even been aware that the top of the stove in her apartment’s kitchen had been covered with dust until Kendra had made a really big deal about it. “Do you never cook?! How long has it been since you touched that thing?!”

  Which was silly, since of course Chronos cooked. She cooked premade meals. She had a microwave.

  “That’s completely ridiculous,” Kendra sputtered. “I don’t need a gigantic building all to myself. Besides, what am I supposed to do? Teleport to your place every day?”

  Chronos felt a stab of annoyance. “No. You’re supposed to not teleport to my apartment every day.”

  Kendra snorted. “Well, it’ll be pretty hard to coordinate our plans of attack if I don’t. You don’t own a phone.”

  Chronos stared at her incredulously. Was the pest really so blindly stubborn that she’d missed the obvious point that Chronos had been trying to make? That Chronos had, in fact, outright stated over and over again?

  “We’re not going to coordinate any plans of attack,” Chronos said. “We are not teammates.”

  “You don’t get a choice in that matter, soothsayer,” Kendra said.

  Chronos exploded. “Don’t you understand why I bought this lair? I want you to stay here, while I go there. I want you to leave me alone!”

  “Not gonna happen,” Kendra said.

  “Yes, it is!” Chronos shouted. “I’m not going to give you any information! I’m not going to tell you anything! You’ll never get a word out of me!”

  Kendra sighed. “Are you saying that I’ll have to eavesdrop on you while you sleep? That seems really roundabout and inconvenient to me. Plus pretty boring.”

  Chronos stared at the stubborn pest in absolute disbelief. Was this the personality of a person who had been destined to found the Magical Girl Union at age seventeen, start several wars at eighteen, and destroy the world before she was nineteen?

  No wonder no one in the future had been able to talk reason into this girl. It was impossible.

  “Now,” Kendra said reasonably, “if you willingly give me the information I want whenever I want it, that’s a whole lot less time you’ll have to deal with me. I don’t expect you to fight magical girls, and I don’t expect us to be friends. I only ask that you help me save the world.”

  “You’re not asking,” Chronos muttered. “Asking means you’re willing to accept ‘no.’”

  “True,” Kendra said.

  Chronos clenched her teeth. There was only one thing she was certain about right now, and that was that giving this girl the teleporting watch had been a major mistake. If she could have only seen her own futures, she would have known that.

  “Of course, it will make much more sense for you to move in here,” Kendra said briskly. “I’m sure there will be people looking for us both eventually, and anti-tracking magic barriers will be useful to keep them out.”

  Chronos stared at the former magical girl in horror. It had never occurred to her that there might be other people tracking her, too. Other people besides Kendra. Other people who might be converging on Chronos’s home already.

  She would definitely have to move. Perhaps to another city.

  Probably one with Deathwave teleporter tubes, so that she could escape easily. That meant Paris, Athens, Nairobi, Moscow, Hong Kong, Melbourne, New York, Rio de Janeiro, or Mexico City.

  Of course, those were all cities known for major villain activity. Which meant those were the first places anyone would look for her.

  Blast it, Chronos thought furiously. I should never have given up that watch.

  “I’m not staying,” Chronos said. “I’m not giving you any information. I just want to get rid of you. Do you want me to pay you to go away? How much will it take?”

  “Stop trying to get rid of me!” Kendra exclaimed. “I didn’t come to you for money — I want a team I can trust!”

  “The money, I can provide,” Chronos said coldly. “That’s it.”

  There was silence as Kendra glared at her. Chronos stared frostily back.

  The silence stretched on, and on, and on.

  “Oracle . . . I can’t save the world on my own,” Kendra said quietly. “If I could, I would have been a solo magical girl. I wanted to make a difference, but it wasn’t until we started a team that I started to think we could do great things.”

  Chronos said nothing. She kept silent.

  “I need a team,” Kendra said. “Right now, there’s nobody I can trust but you. I certainly can’t go to any other villains.”

  Chronos said nothing.

  “Florence and Felicity wouldn’t have stopped me,” Kendra said, tears glinting at the edge of her eyes. “Neither would my parents. If they could have, you wouldn’t have shown me that future.”

  Chronos hesitated. Had there been futures in which Kendra’s family and friends could have stopped her? She’d never thought to check. She’d cared only about the worst case scenario, not the natural solutions that might have existed.

  She’d been determined to excise that future from existing altogether. And she had. Now that it was gone, she had no way to go back and check what might have been if she had left Cream Angel alone. She did know there had been futures without such problems.

  If she’d paid more attention, if she had been more careful, she could have found a way to divert that future until it was vanishingly unlikely, without shocking or traumatizing anybody. She could have fixed the problem more subtly.

  But Chronos didn’t understand subtlety. Chronos didn’t do subtlety. The only person who could have come up with a plan like that would have been Rhea. And Rhea would, undoubtably, have made the future much worse.

  A subtle plan from Rhea, who adored corrupting magical girls . . . Chronos shuddered at even the thought of it. She might have taken a sledgehammer to Kendra’s future, but at least she hadn’t unleashed her sister into it.

  “That’s why I had to leave,” Kendra said. One of the tears trickled down the side of her face. “That’s why I had to burn my bridges. I had to prevent my fate.”

 
Did she think it was inevitable? Chronos wondered, alarmed. I never said that — in fact, I’m sure I did say that it was only a likely future.

  “You — you didn’t have to leave,” Chronos said hesitantly. “It was only a likely future. You could have stayed —”

  Kendra brushed that objection aside with an angry wave of her hand. “With the whole world at stake? Of course I had to make that future impossible!”

  Chronos swallowed. That was how she’d felt about going to talk to Kendra in the first place. When the stakes were that high, any chance of that future happening was not okay.

  “I need a team,” Kendra repeated. “Besides, after what you showed me . . . well, I think I need someone to keep me under control.”

  Chronos felt a flash of anger. If you would just control yourself, that wouldn’t be a problem!

  But Kendra was no longer talking. She just stood there, looking vulnerable.

  You’re just trying to manipulate me, Chronos thought furiously. My sister used to use that trick on me constantly!

  Except that . . . in all of Kendra’s futures she’d seen, the girl had never done that. She had been glorious or dreadful, protected innocents or killed them, destroyed the world or saved it.

  She had never, ever looked weak.

  Which means it’s . . . real? Chronos thought.

  The thought was frightening. More frightening than the idea of strangers chasing her all over the world. More frightening than the idea of never having privacy again.

  Because if it was real, then she might have to do something about it.

  Chronos drew in a deep breath and let it out again.

  “Are you saying you want me to be your boss?” she asked slowly.

  Kendra snorted. “It’s not like I could trust myself to lead a new team.” Her voice was bitter.

  Her boss, Chronos thought, amazed. She has a bizarre way of recruiting someone to be her boss.

  She couldn’t deny that the idea had some appeal. She’d never been in charge of anybody or anything. All her life, people had been telling her what to do and how to use her power to benefit themselves. She’d grown extremely sick of it.