Ptoo!
Splat.
Ptoo!
Plop.
Pfpfpptt.
Plip.
“Alright, that’s enough,” Kaycee chided. “This place is already a disaster, the least you could do is not contribute.”
Liberty stopped just before spitting again, wiping the premature dribble off with her sleeve. “What, really?” Liberty gestured widely. “Come on Kaycee, they’re never going to reopen,” she spun around slowly. Look at this place.
The empty atrium of the Crown Center surrounded them, dwarfing them in its silent space. The hallways were littered with husks of old boutiques and stores long picked clean of every desirable item. Restaurants that once fed thousands of eager shoppers a day lay destitute. Roaches were their patrons now, and the only sustenance left was their own droppings.
They were on the third floor, a short walkway which served only to guide people to either the Halls fashion store (Winter Sale, 40% off select brands! read a sign in front of a series of completely empty racks), a small theater that had already been withering even before the Unveiling, the top level of the parking garage, or an escalator down which did not work.
Kaycee chewed her gum, working it in her mouth. She had indulged this piece for far too long; it was tough as rubber, unpalatable. Good for gnawing and working her jaw, but the muscles in her face were getting tired.
After a few seconds thought, she turned over the third floor guardrail.
Ptoo.
Liberty laughed, watching the ballistic wad and losing sight before it struck the dust on the ground floor.
“I always kind of wanted to do that,” Kaycee admitted, trying and failing to hide her little smile. “Harder when there’s people down there.”
“Yeah, my mom would have killed me if I ever spit in front of her,” Liberty smiled back. Her face fell again after a moment’s contemplation: “Do you think they’ll ever reopen?” she asked. Younger by far, there was a light in her eyes that many of the other girls didn’t have anymore. She was the first of their crew who had contracted after the crisis was over.
Kaycee forgot the question and asked one instead. “What was it like, not being a magical girl when all that was going on?”
The younger girl took it in stride anyway, pleasantly quick on her feet. “It was weird,” she said simply. Liberty leaned on the railing, looking down and out at steel and concrete fountains. Square and rectangle reservoirs adorned the outside, bone dry if not for the mist tumbling down outside. In normal times, there would have been children and animals playing in them, relishing the chill of the water during the first days of summer.
When Kaycee did not prompt her further, she felt obligated to continue. “Everything felt like I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Even if you knew what you were doing or what was happening, it felt kinda…” she wiggled her hands limply. “Blurry. Like no matter how hard you focused, you couldn’t understand what you saw.”
She rested her head on one hand, frowning. “I think it was worse for the adults, they all seemed pretty scared the entire time. Never told us why when we bothered to ask, though.”
Kaycee nodded. “They probably didn’t understand it anymore than you did. Adults get used to knowing what’s going on, and it scares them when they suddenly don’t.”
“Well, it was scary for us too,” Liberty protested. “We didn’t have electricity for a while, and a lot of our food went bad. We had to beg for some, but no one else had any either.” The light in her eyes was fading, amber sheen slowly growing dull. It hurt to see that weight on her, even if it was something she knew they all had to shoulder.
“Well,” Kaycee interceded, “it did end eventually.”
“Yeah. Everything sucks now though,” Liberty sighed. She picked up a little stone and threw it lazily at the enormous windows in the front of the atrium. The pebble plinked off and tumbled to the tile below.
“Everything sucked before, too. You just didn’t realize it.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“It’s true, though,” Kaycee stretched, accordion pops ripping through her spine and joints. She threw a fresh piece of gum in her mouth, one of those brightly colored rectangle strips. After a few chews, sweet juices ran over her tongue and down her throat-–the one vice she permitted herself anymore. “People talk a lot about ‘before’ and, yeah, the world’s got a lot of problems now it didn’t before. Doesn’t change that things were already pretty bad.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that my family’s gone now, ” Liberty sniffed. Ptoo. Splat.
Kaycee put her arm around her charge. “I know. I’m sorry,” she said quietly. Should know better than to fight with the kid about this.
The Crown Center was silent for a few minutes. Cars occasionally passed by outside, between them and the fountains. A couple people knocked on the glass doors, deterred by the padlocks and the crumpled papers taped up saying “STAY OUT-–RENOVATIONS IN PROGRESS.”
“I miss some stuff about before,” Kaycee admitted after a while. “Every Christmas they used to hang a wreath up right there,“ she pointed at the window wall in front of them. “It was huge , large enough that I wanted to dive through it.”
“I know.” Some of the light was back in Liberty’s eyes. “We came down to see it every year. It was always so crowded .”
“Yeah, well…” Kaycee squeezed the gum in her mouth, caressing it, “They keep saying they’ll reopen. Has to happen eventually.”
“I hope so,” the younger girl popped, brimming with energy out of nowhere. Kaycee had no idea where she got it from, wished she could bottle it and sell it. “Let’s get going, I’m tired of sitting here!”
“Fine, you’re right. We’ve got some work to do,” Kaycee grinned for a second. “You’ve been doing really well. Today, I’m going to let you hunt on your own.”
“FINALLY,” Liberty yelled, her voice echoing wildly like phantom girls shrieking at each other. “You’ve been saying that for months, I thought you’d never let me do it.”
“We did try once.”
“That doesn’t count!” Liberty yelled again, bouncing on her feet. “You didn’t let me finish it off, I was almost there.”
“You’d have lost some toes if I hadn’t stepped in,” Kaycee said softly. “Part of the reason I’ve waited so long to let you try again is because you don’t take this seriously enough sometimes.”
“Yeah, I know.” The shorter girl said a bit more quietly, clearly fuming. “I’m trying, I just get excited.”
Kaycee examined her charge closely for a few seconds. “Well, you’ve gotten a lot better anyway. You lead, I’ll follow. I won’t help you this time, unless you ask.”
“YES!” Liberty got up and ran into the Halls outlet, bedecked with naked mannequins and empty shelves. God damn this kid, she was insane. But her energy was infectious, and Kaycee huffed as she jogged to catch up.
Thus began the probing of the shopping mall. Liberty was well used to the idea at this point, she had something of a knack for it. Her canary yellow dress was an unfortunate stylistic choice but it was more than matched by the preteen’s bubbling attitude. Kaycee had viciously hated hunting when she was being trained like this… but she was older now, and the world was different.
There were several minor wraiths that littered the darker corners of the shuttered clothing store: underneath display tables, hiding in the back where the late afternoon light did not reach, or in the service hallways. It was odd to find wraiths where so few people tread now, far away from the seedy neighborhoods that demanded so much of their efforts at night.
Kaycee supposed they were left behind by the homeless and indigent after stopping to sleep for the night, or the odd group of wildling teens looking for a good place away from prying eyes. Didn’t matter much anyway, Liberty would need fatter prey soon.
These were certainly small fry at this point: within milliseconds of spotting one, her winged spear would appear in a flash and skewer it, reducing each to a single cube. Wordlessly she scooped each one up into a little plastic baggie. Dutifully, every so often she would take one out and hold it up to the amber soul gem pinned on her bright felt hat. The spent cube went into another, differently colored baggie. Both of these went into a survival pouch, a little backpack at her waist. It had been a bitch to find it all, but the pouch also held other basics like an LED flashlight, a multi-tool knife, water, and so on.
Methodical and clean. Preparation and habit-forming like this was not what most mentors focused on, but it was how Kaycee had been taught. It had served her and her girls well during the DuPage administration.
She had decided to make it mandatory for any new girls she took in. Everyone who had already refused to learn discipline like this wound up dead.
They continued in this manner across the Halls store, then down the unmoving escalator to the second level. The most noteworthy shops were a Chocolate Factory and the Crayola store (the colorful stands, displays, and historical equipment inside torn to fucking shreds somehow). The rest of the shops here were smaller, and there were less places afforded to wraiths to hide.
Moving down again, the ground floor was the slowest going: the restaurants were all spacious, kitchens being the hardest to search through so far away from natural light. They simply avoided the link to Union Station, the skyway usually held nothing and sweeping it took forever.
By the end of it all Liberty had put up a bit of a sweat, and her baggie of unspent cubes was looking decently bulky.
“Good work,” Kaycee said truthfully. She felt that this sort of routine, while not particularly flashy, was more effective than the crap some magical girls liked to get into. Clearing public places methodically was practical and if everything went right it wasn’t too dangerous either.
… If everything went right.
“You feel that too?” Liberty looked up at her, the golden spear flashing back into existence without conscious effort. There was an unusual tension in the bridge of her button nose and cheeks.
Kaycee didn’t respond immediately. There was a small pressure in her back, a negging force that demanded attention. She looked around aimlessly, and eventually both girls settled their gaze towards the back of the mall. There was an unspoken agreement, a formless synergy that told them both they needed to go towards the parking garage.
“C’mon,” Kaycee said simply. Both of them trudged up the broken escalator back to the second floor, milling towards a garish pink door set in the wall between shops that had an enormous orange “2” painted on it.
Kaycee took her cape off, putting it neatly in an abandoned trash can. “I don’t know what we’re walking into,” she told her follower. Liberty’s usual vivaciousness had been replaced by laser focus, her eyes melting a hole in the door. “Remember: bigger wraiths are more complicated to approach. They create labyrinths and pathways meant to confuse you and make you vulnerable. Take in what your eyes and ears are saying, but don’t believe what they show you. Not completely.”
Liberty nodded, gripping her winged spear in both hands like she was going to crush it. Kaycee felt a flicker of appreciation for insisting on these lessons.
She opened the door to a small foyer with stairs on their right going up and down to the other levels, another door to the garage proper right in front of them. The small window embedded in the portal produced a fuzzy semi-blackness, like a child plastered it over with multiple layers of construction paper.
“We don’t have to do this today,” she whispered.
“We should,” her student whispered back.
A good answer, if not the one she had hoped for. Her heart flip-flopped in her chest as she reached out, but before her hand touched the handle, the door opened of its own accord and trapped them in its maw, swallowing them whole.
Panic reared its head and threatened to overwhelm, blood rushing through her body like a frenzying horse trying to trample her. Every instinct of her body and mind told her that she needed to GET OUT, whatever OUT meant now, but she forced herself to continue breathing smoothly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In and out.
Her heart gradually began to slow as she worked her lungs. The air was damp and smelled heavily of mold, like the exhaust of an air conditioner left trickling over concrete. She realized she was squeezing her eyes shut and they flew open.
Liberty was nowhere to be found, setting her heart racing again. She was in the parking garage, and though it had always been a pretty sizeable walk from one end to the other, she could no longer see the boundaries of the structure around her. No door behind her either. All around were blocky cement support pillars and stairs leading up and down, interspersed at regular intervals, but she could see no walls anywhere.
Parking spaces delineated in oranges and pinks and purple lines spread out and away from her, regular rectangles that warped and shifted the farther away she looked. They simply kept going, straight to the horizon. It was an entire dimension made of cracked asphalt and paint. Silence pressed in on her, uncomfortable and heavy.
She ran over to the nearest stairwell. Peering her head in, she looked up and down: the angling was bad and she couldn’t see as far, but what little she gleaned did not inspire confidence. The parking garage for the Crown Center was, to her memory, three or four stories tall. She stopped counting at fifteen. A maleficent odor drifted over her, its source indeterminable.
This was fucking bad. She didn’t spy any lesser wraiths in the structure, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
That part didn’t bother her so much, she was used to these encounters enough that she had confidence in herself to get out alive. Liberty getting lost here was what really made her sweat. The idea of losing another girl was stressing her out so bad it made her sick to her stomach. A familiar pain lanced through her intestines, a neediness coming with it that made her grimace.
Kaycee was pretty sure there were no bathrooms in here, so she opted to hold it in. Instead, she called out for her student.
Hailey? Are you there?
Waiting a couple seconds yielded nothing, so she vaulted the steps and went one floor up, pounding the stairs to take some of the feeling out of her belly. It only made the urge worse, her head beginning to pulsate with the echoing of her footsteps. She realized she had spit her gum out at some point, but the thought of replacing it just made her want to empty her guts even more.
On the next story she looked around: the smell of rot and decay was slightly stronger, the air thicker. The parking spaces continued their steady march out and around, but the snarling of their painted lines she had seen before was stronger. Colors were wilder, the neat boxes actually falling apart into random shapes and blotches the further away from the stairwell she looked.
Hailey, I need you to tell me where you are.
She went back down; the original level was unchanged, a baseline of eeriness. Numbers were usually painted on the support pillars of the garage, but looking revealed that they were the same glitch rot which lingered around the heads of wraiths. Could have been on level seventy million for all it told her.
The next level down was changed as above, so at least she would have a vague way to gauge where she was.
Hailey, please.
Lacking any further directions than this, she decided to continue down to the next level. The intensity of the place increased with distance from the “main level” she had started on, each parking space’s painted box becoming a confused tangle of vomit colors closer and closer to the stair.
Six levels down, it was no longer recognizable as a parking garage at any point. The haze in the air was a hellish sauna, condensation gathered on her face and got in her eyes so she couldn’t see properly without blinking every few seconds.
The sense of panic and pressure in her midriff was growing by the second. After another couple levels down she could no longer help it and relieved herself away from the stairwell. She sucked in breath that made her feel like she was drowning as she hobbled back to the stairwell, her insides squirming with discomfort.
Her head spinning like she was on a carnival tilt-a-whirl, she was forced to crawl back up the stairs to the main level. Three flights up she heard something, a glimmer:
-–help me! Kaycee–-
and a physical shout, far off into the structure that had no end. It bounced strangely, robbed of its substance by the labyrinth’s infinite floor and ceiling.
Kaycee’s guts were still heaving and tossing angrily: they demanded her attention and she couldn’t afford to give them any. Pushing aside her discomfort she stood up on wobbly knees and looked around, trying to gauge the source of the shout.
No dice, of course. Everything around was a nothing space, a half light that lent no perspective or visual purchase.
Hailey! Where are you?
Another shout met her in response and her spine flushed with cold. The profound upset in her belly was pushed to the side as frightful purpose entered instead.
-–up the stairs, it got me–-
She started sprinting up the stairwell, working her lungs like bellows to prolong the oncoming stitch as long as possible. Floor after concrete floor passed her by as she rocketed upwards, pumping her legs as fast as she could.
Five, ten, fifteen flights. The periphery of Kaycee’s vision told her the structure was becoming progressively disentangled from reality. There was nothing resembling parking spaces anymore, the neat purple and orange boxes had become a bilious splatter of red and yellow. The air itself glowed with nauseating energy, the endless black giving way to an odious brown that made her stomach roil again.
I’m almost there.
Twenty-two flights up, there was another shout, much closer. Within reach now, surely. In its wake she realized she could hear the sounds of fighting. Her body was heaving, thrumming with the effort and rhythm of upward movement. Her diaphragm ached, the muscles in her thighs and calves felt like they would explode.
At the twenty-sixth level, she felt more than perceived that she was right underneath her student and the wraith. Her legs also gave out, so that she stumbled hard on the cement. Almost cracked her skull on the guardrail going down.
Kaycee checked the sapphire on her hand: not blue anymore, but a bruised magenta. Awful. She hadn’t been careful enough with keeping pace, but then she hadn’t really had a choice. The aching in her intestines had gone away at least, thank goodness. She reached to unzip the pouch with her grief cubes on her right leg and shoved her hand into it.
A few spilled out and tumbled down the stairway. Fuck ‘em, not enough time. From the rest still in the pouch she felt relief pour into her. Exhaustion was lifted away as easily as a feather, the muscles in her legs went from feeling like murder to resting for a day, to a week, to brand new.
All far, far too slow. Above her the structure quivered with a low groan, an earthy sound that filled her bones like the Earth itself was reaching into her body to shake her.
Liberty shrieked. That at least was very loud now. Kaycee wasn’t sure if that liquid in her eyes was the moisture in the air or sweat, and she wasn’t sure if that sweat was from exertion or fear.
A brief glance around showed her that the section of the labyrinth she could identify as a parking garage was now limited to the stairwell itself. Within inches, the world around it had been transformed into something firmly alien.
There was no paint or recognizable geometry anymore. The insides of her own body had been ripped open and laid down against the floor. Rivulets of blood and something that looked (and smelled) suspiciously like piss filtered through veiny protrusions, flowing nowhere in particular. A small part of her wondered if she touched it, whether it would feel warm.
Another shout, longer and breathier this time, and almost unconsciously she vaulted her refreshed body up what she hoped was the last flight.
Sure enough, a quick look around revealed Liberty only a short way off in the haze, a forlorn figure cut against a wall of flesh that rose from floor to ceiling. It filled the space around them, making the flesh sack feel profoundly claustrophobic after the openness of the lower levels.
Kaycee blinked furiously to clear her eyes and got only fragments of its pustulent mass. Liberty was backing away, one arm hanging limply. The other held the spear up alone, a pike warding against protruding flesh. Her mouth was bared in a wild grimace as she struck out with her lance, flashes of sunlight pulsing forth from its tip. With every swipe and stab a gouge appeared in the wall and blood surged forth, but the wounds Liberty created were simply too shallow to slow it down. It would swallow her soon.
“I’M OUT OF CUBES, KAYCEE!” Blood stained down the front of her yellow dress.
That chilled purpose which had entered her before reared its head again, spurring her forward before she really knew it. With two leaps she planted herself between Liberty and the great mounds of flesh encircling in front of and around her. It quivered again, shaking the floor and making her legs feel like jelly. The thing undulated: follicle growths and fatty protrusions pulsated as it disgorged putrescence.
“Thank-–” Liberty choked as she was lifted by her dress and yanked, back and away from the living charnel house. She was thrown bodily at the stairs, dumped unceremoniously in a heap onto what little ground was left which was not meat.
Kaycee was brimming with newfound energy. None of this reached the cold stones of her eyes, blue fire radiating forth which sought only to scorch a malefactor. She had managed to keep her student safe, and now her usual work could begin.
Where her cleats dug into the flesh mat, she felt it actually recoil in pain. Little gouts of blood and clear fluid of indeterminate nature sprang up around her heels and ankles, squishing obscenely as it tried to digest her. She ignored all of these silly little details, summoning her bat in her right hand and a baseball in the left.
Liberty covered her ears, always hated how loud this could get. She still felt the thuds as they reverberated through her chest and limbs, could feel the pounding in her clenched teeth. After a few seconds the flesh near Liberty began to pull back, receding into itself. Cannonfire continued to pulse through her.
Within another minute it was done, and she chanced a look up.
The walls were torn to shreds, reduced to hanging flaps of skin and muscle festooning the pillars around. Piles of gore surrounded Kaycee which she was intent on beating to a pulp. She was no longer using baseballs, wielding her bat as a cudgel. Every strike pulverized the refuse a little more, her magic amplifying the force enough to rip the viscera apart, obliterating it with each stroke.
She was tireless. Liberty watched her lift the bat over and over again without purpose beyond destruction. Blood splashed on her, coating her legs and crawling up her midriff. Every blow crashed up into her hands, looked as if they should have torn her arms off at the shoulder.
The snarl never left her face. She was possessed by a predator’s grace.
It felt like it might go on forever, until suddenly it didn’t. With a strange snapping sensation like she was cracking every joint in her body at once, Liberty and Kaycee reappeared in the parking garage of the Crown Center. They were on the top floor, decorated in straight lines of purple on the floor and walls. They were right next to the stairwell leading down to the mid-level in orange.
Regular parking spaces, neat box shapes. Hard to see very far still, but the lonely emergency lights above offered enough to work by.
And then Kaycee was patting her down, hugging her feverishly, murmuring all sorts of ‘I’m sorry’s and ‘Are you okay’s. It was embarrassing, and Liberty mostly felt tired. She sat up, pushing her teacher off gently.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled indignantly, though exquisite pains in her face and left arm probably signaled otherwise. She tried her best not to show it.
Not fooled for a second, Kaycee moved to touch gingerly at the shoulder. “Arm’s broken.”
“Yeah,” Liberty said, not opening her eyes. “I got a little too close at the start.”
“There’s so much blood,” Kaycee continued her examination. “Was it the wraith’s or yours?”
“Both, I think.” Her tutor’s hands were feeling delicately all around, inspecting gently. Inexorably they drew up to Liberty’s face; there was much blood here, and now a few tears.
“What happened?” Kaycee asked quietly.
Liberty opened her eye, and her mentor drew in a soft breath. The amber of the left shined out at her defiant and angry. The light of the right was gone. Blood trickled from it instead, and the effort of seeing out of only one side hurt in the back of her head.
Kaycee hugged her again, tightly. Liberty allowed herself one noisy sniff and nothing else.
“That was more than I expected,” Kaycee apologized. “Probably the worst one I’ve seen since last year.”
“It was scary,” Liberty admitted. She had closed her eyes again.
“You did very well, though. I know a lot of good magical girls who wouldn’t have made it, especially as long as you did.”
“I didn’t really do anything,” Liberty protested mutely. “I just ran from it mostly. I wasn’t hurting it enough.”
“You’ll get better,” Kaycee assured her. “I wasn’t as strong when I first started out either. It comes with confidence, and you’ll get more confident with experience.”
“If you say so.” There was no energy in her little voice.
Kaycee bit her lip. “That being said, I think we’ve had enough experience for one day. We should find the cubes and get out of here. Sound good?”
Liberty nodded into Kaycee’s shirt and they stood up, tired and aching. Kaycee hid it a lot better, though she had wiped herself out in that frenzy. She could use an hour’s nap or six.
They both got their little LED flashlights out of their pouches, thankfully still working despite everything, and swept their moonbeam arcs around the parking structure. The original smell, that moldy dampness, was still rather pervasive, and unfortunately the stench of rotting flesh was stuck in their noses. It was always hard to shake the hold of the miasma.
Turning the corner, though, it became obvious why the smell was persisting: a corpse was curled in the corner, bloated beyond any hope of facial recognition. The flesh was mottled black and purple, with foul liquid seeping out from under it. Vibrating flies covered its surface in multitudes, and rats had clearly had their way with what they could reach.
Stifling her urge to vomit, Kaycee led Liberty quickly away. No argument from the young one.
After a few minutes more of searching in echoing silence, the light glittered on a couple of cubes littering the far corner of the garage, then a few more, then a trail leading to a modest pile.
It abutted the wall, hard to say but Kaycee guessed a few hundred. A good enough haul, but the cost was greater than she could stomach. Wordlessly, they scooped up entire handfuls and held them up to their gems, Kaycee cradling her hand in her left arm while Liberty poured a bunch into her beret.
Kaycee had seen her girls recover from all sorts of injuries that would have outright killed a regular human being, but she was much less sure about the loss of complex organs. Obviously if you had enough cubes it usually turned out fine, but her nervousness grew as the eye stubbornly refused to regrow itself.
Part of it was that Kansas City very rarely had access to any healers. They were in high enough demand they could go practically anywhere they wanted, and the Midwest was small potatoes.
Whatever the case, it was clear the grief cubes were not going to cut it. Liberty had been hoping too, but when she opened her right eye nothing appeared but the optical nerve and some raggedy muscle.
Kaycee pulled a crumpled bag out of her pouch and unfolded it, started scooping the unused cubes into it. “Here, we’ll take these to Perry,” she said. “There’s a couple new girls with her and one of them can heal, sorta. She isn’t very strong, but having extra cubes should give her a boost.” Tipton’s powers were dogshit for anything but casual use, frankly, but it was worth a shot.
There was some light back in Liberty’s remaining eye. Very good to see, though the ample helping of grief cubes helped. “Will do.”
Having gathered everything they could find, they turned to take the downward ramps leading out. There were three levels to descend and they took it slow, reaching the ground floor opposite to the entrance. Kaycee purposefully avoided a dark corner where she briefly smelled something foul.
Their surroundings were slowly etched with light, reflected from the outside. There was the exit sign, and the ticket booth with its arms down on either side. Damp warmth and fresh air spilled over them, crawling up their legs and into their chest.
And then they were out.
Kaycee sniffed to clear her nose, pleased with the relative freshness. Towers of slickened metal and glass surrounded them. They were ensconced by manmade pillars which cast water down their sides and sent it cascading around their dirty shoes. She savored their robustness.
“I’ll let Perry know we’re coming,” she told Liberty as she dug her phone out of her pouch. She loved the summer: the clock read past seven, but it was still light out. The mist had turned to a full rain, and she tucked under the concrete of the garage as she looked at her messages.
The usual check-ins, her girls were good at letting her know what was going on. A few were still out. Raytown had sent her a link to a private cam again, which she promptly deleted. A message from Chillicothe, not a very common occurrence, and another, actual message from Raytown shortly after.
Opening them, she scanned the messages. Stopped. Read them again. Again. Frowned. She turned to Liberty, glowering. “Couple things've come up. You go on alone, I need to call a meeting.”
“Aw, what?”
“You’ve done enough for today, I’ll fill you in later at the Shack, alright? You should eat something anyway, I could hear your stomach earlier.”
“Fine,” Liberty huffed. “You come straight after, got it?”
There was the fire. “Got it,” Kaycee smiled. Her protege turned without another word and leaped, taking her away from the abattoir.
Kaycee watched for a second, then allowed herself to sigh. She sent a mass text out, hoping it would reach everyone promptly:
“Meeting at the usual place, starts at 8. Come ASAP. ”
A couple minutes floated by with nothing but a passing car to answer her, until her phone started buzzing. Grandview was in the middle of business, so no response there, but everyone else seemed good. After thinking on it for a few seconds, she sent another copy of the text to Lenexa and Olathe. Might be good to give them a heads up, and if they were all going to start working together in the future, they needed to meet the team anyway.
Satisfied, she went to enter the Crown Center again-–from the front, not the garage, out of which she could still smell the faintest trickles of rot.
She passed by the rectangular marble fountains towards the ground level entrance to the atrium. On her left was the street and past that the walking fountains which no longer sported water of their own.
Past them was the shuttered Ice Terrace with its massive, pointy beige canopy. It was always closed this time of year obviously, but she doubted whether anyone would use the ice rink again once December came rolling around.
No awkward and uncoordinated kids falling on top of each other, no couples hanging on each others’ arms. None of the cowards laughing from the padded sides, their ice skates dangling from their hands by the laces as they watch their friends stumble and fall.
No, come winter she was sure it would be as quiet as it was now, in the heat of summer. Kaycee still could not get used to the silence. During the summer there were usually a couple dozen kids playing around in the fountains in their swimming suits. She remembered darting between the spouts and laughing when the water got her, chilling her to the core. It hadn’t been that long ago, all things considered, but it felt like someone else’s life when she thought about it too much. Had she ever really been a child or had she just dreamed that up?
But there was the door, and she ignored the “CLOSED” signs as she yanked it open, penetrating the silence. Her eyes unconsciously scanned the ground in front of her as she closed the door to the atrium. Back inside the shopping mall, she hung a right towards the Link. The only sound now was her own footsteps, and the thrum of her blood in her temple. The silence without Liberty here was sharp, and all of a sudden she felt strangely lonely.
She unwrapped more gum. It was ash in her mouth.
She passed by shops that had been closed and long-since looted, like “The Best of Kansas City” with its bright red doors busted wide open, and the Pen Place now missing all of its beautiful stationery. Her cleats clacked on the tile as she walked up to the portal of the Best, peering into the darkness.
There had been so much bric-a-brac in here, shoddy little ornaments and fridge magnets and postcards extolling their home. She had been fond of coming here whenever her family visited the mall, always wanted this little teddy bear that wore a tiny plastic Royals helmet. There had also been a few rows of colorful bottles, sauces and dry rubs, showcasing the best and most famous barbeque joints around the city. Now the shelves sold nothing but dust.
Passing on, she ambled through a corridor leading to another atrium of sorts, a large space belonging to the Hyatt Hotel which ordinarily held banquets and parties or some nonsense. Keeping to the right, she went up some stairs to an interior balcony that hugged the wall, ringing through the upper lobby. Over the opposite wall, a man-made rock waterfall now lay silent as the fountains outside. Large plastic plants meant to make it all look like a tropical getaway had been pulled down and savaged, littering the carpet and tilework, reduced to so much leafy garbage.
She had enjoyed people watching here, spending time leaning on the guardrail and looking below: shoppers from the mall taking a break to enjoy brunch, some upper crust folks rubbing elbows, or travelers to and from parts unknown trying to navigate the space. Occasionally she had taken the glass elevators up to the top floor, to get a view of the city out through the windows.
Kaycee ignored all of it, stewing on her modern emergencies. She muscled the door to the sky walk without thinking, popping through into a glass corridor that was hoisted above the street. It diverged into two paths, one directed towards Union Station and the other towards the Hyatt Regency.
Though she took the former, the latter now lay on her mind. The one which lay claim to Missouri’s only true archon on record, back in 1981. The walkway collapsed during a party or something, left a couple hundred dead. Her mentor had once said that her mentor’s mentor’s mentor’s mentor had taken part in that. So, her great-great-great grand mentor?
Sheesh, what a shitty life expectancy. Kaycee’s own mom had been born in the fucking early 70s. From one step genetically to six generations of girls throwing away their lives for this city.
And, supposedly, Momo had been around for that archon. Kaycee wondered if any of the newer girls even knew Momo existed.
She was a strange fixture of the state’s history, by all indications a Terminatrix before that word had even been coined. No one knew how old she really was, but after a certain point for magical girls that ceased to matter.
Kaycee didn’t even know if Momo was real , when she thought about it. All the older girls she had been around whispered in hushed tones about her, like a fucking campfire ghost story. They talked a lot about “no one who ever saw her lived to tell about it.”
How the fuck did anyone know she existed then?
She ambled through the triangle corridor, steepled windows on either side of her. They offered a speckled view of the city through dripping beads of water, rain on the outside and condensation on the inside. Usually the air was conditioned, but with all the energy cuts the only things working for the skywalk were the air pushers to make sure no one suffocated if they were dumb enough to go in. In the summer it was stiflingly hot, so hot that she was pouring sweat already. She looked down and noticed that she was still covered with splatters of blood and other bodily fluids. She stank to high heaven.
Flexing her right fist, she untransformed in the overwhelming heat back to her regular clothes. Sweatpants and a torn jersey, somehow even worse. She transformed back instantly: it exhausted her a bit further but the magical clothes came out fresh and clean. Didn’t do much for her hair, but whatever. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them had shown up looking like a dumpster.
She passed by orange construction buckets with hoses leading down into them, collecting stagnant water from the ducts in the nook overhead, not that they were doing much right now. After a few more minutes she passed the halfway mark in the tunnel, marked by a placard telling her about Kansas City’s riverside history back during the early 1900s. She wondered how many generations of magical girls ago that was, if there had been any here back then. Had to be, probably.
She got a text from Liberty, “made it.” Two little words and her stomach felt remarkably lighter. Followup: “told the two newbies about the meeting, they wanted to go. i can wait, no worries.”
Well, shit. She’d have to send Tipton back pronto. No idea if taking time with injuries like that made them harder to fix, but she wasn’t going to take chances.
Finally she felt the stuffy air around her move, and then it was whooshing into the relative cool of the receptacle into Union Station. She breathed a little easier as she stepped out from the harsh jungle light of the skywalk. Taking a stone stairway down to the main lobby of the station, she looked up at the vaunted ceilings with their colorful Beaux-Arts reliefs and enormous chandeliers.
Being in here always made her feel tiny. It was magnificent, probably her favorite place in the city. Despite the day, the corners of her mouth tugged up.
Looking at her clock told her there was still twenty or so minutes before the meeting, so she supposed she could take a break. Finding a bench, she ignored stares from the few people who bothered to be here and looked up, soaking it in.
Chapter End Notes
"People who hire all these things done for them never know what they lose, for the homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them..."
The Crown Center isn't a place I go to very often anymore, I visited it earlier this year to refamiliarize myself with its physical structure and the stores in it. I probably got the colors wrong for the garage though, I didn't go in there.
Union Station really is my favorite place in the city, aside from Arthur Bryant's. Here's a picture of the inside of the Grand Hall, courtesy of Wikipedia. Don't mind the olds.
I did not make Liberty's chapter take place in the actual town of Liberty because there is basically nothing of note there. What, you wanted something interesting? Fine. I was once propositioned for a night of sexual debauchery by someone who lived there, but was unable to seal the deal. Probably for the best to be honest.