To Prevent Clear Paths Read online

  “Kendra —” Chronos began.

  “Crocodile tears,” Kendra shot back. “She’s playing for sympathy, and you’re letting her. If she’s a verge at the age of ten, she has to be an awful person. The magic system’s really merciful to girls that young. If she can’t transform anymore, she has to be a much worse person than I am.”

  Chronos was so offput by Kendra referring to herself that way that she couldn’t find a response.

  “I’m not a bad person!” the little girl sobbed. “I just want to be happy! Nobody ever loved me outside! Only my machine-friends understand me!”

  Chronos winced. It reminded her way too much of her own childhood.

  “Nobody loves you more than I do, Chronos,” ten-year-old Rhea had said once, patting her hair. “I’m the only one who understands you.”

  Chronos shuddered, wishing she could exorcise the memories of her vile sister’s mind games.

  If anyone had tried to force Chronos to go back home to the parents who had done nothing about her older sister, to the stifling traditions of Olympus Estates, to Great-Uncle Nico with his stranglehold on the entire extended family, she would have screamed far more vehemently than this.

  No. Anyone, even a young child, deserved the freedom to go or leave.

  “I’m sorry, Tiffany,” Chronos said quietly. “You don’t have to go back home. You’re free to go wherever you want.”

  “Wherever I want?” the little girl asked, her face peeking up from behind her hands.

  Chronos nodded.

  “Wherever I want, to live?” the little girl asked tremulously.

  Chronos nodded again.

  In a flash, the little girl was halfway up the staircase to the top floor. “Dibs on the biggest bedroom!”

  “Crocodile tears!” Kendra snarled.

  Chronos set her jaw. She didn’t care. It didn’t really matter who the little girl was. If she didn’t want to go home to her family, she wasn’t going to force her.

  “I’m going to take this one!” a voice shouted from upstairs. A door slammed. “No, wait, this one!” Another door slammed. “No, wait, this one!”

  “Great job, soothsayer,” Kendra growled. “Now we’ll never get rid of her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chronos asked defensively. “She’s not staying! She just misunderstood that she can go anywhere. She’s been a prisoner here. Of course she won’t want to stay —”

  A head with blonde pigtails poked over the top of the wall beside the stairs. “Oh, by the way, Davie the Defense Grid only listens to me! No one can kick me out but me!”

  Chronos stopped abruptly, her thoughts screeching to a halt.

  The little girl raced off again. “Ooh, Boris the Broom! I haven’t upgraded you in ages!”

  “She could have escaped at any time,” Kendra grated. “In no way was that kid ever really a prisoner.”

  Chronos swallowed.

  She looked at Kendra. Kendra looked at her.

  “I’m going back home,” Chronos announced, heading for the stairs. It almost didn’t matter that the former magical girl would inevitably follow her. Better to have one pest constantly in her hair than two.

  “You can’t leave me alone with that girl!” Kendra said indignantly, pointing upward. “She’s crazy!”

  The little girl’s voice echoed from upstairs as she continued to race from room to room. “Hi, Stevie the Shower! Hi, Linus the Light Bulb! WHOA!! Robbie the Rocket Pack!”

  “Indeed,” Chronos said. “And you still haven’t given me a convincing reason to stay.”

  She headed determinedly up the stairs.

  For once, Kendra didn’t teleport in front of her. Instead, the former magical girl marched up the stairs behind her. “Saving the world?”

  “Couldn’t care less,” Chronos said, not turning around.

  “Responsibility towards her?” Kendra said accusingly.

  “She’s in your lair. She’s your problem.”

  “Then responsibility towards me!” Kendra shouted.

  Chronos spun around in fury. “I never asked you to turn villain! You chose your own path, despite my clearly telling you not to do something exactly like this! I will not let you choose my path for me!”

  Kendra marched up the stairs, her feet slamming into the floor with every step. “So you thought it was okay to show up, call my whole life ‘propaganda,’ then just casually leave?”

  “It wasn’t casual!” Chronos said. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve done in years! And now I’m done with it!”

  “How nice for you,” Kendra said furiously, storming up another few stairs. “How nice that you can blithely throw a bomb into somebody else’s life and just walk away.”

  Chronos swallowed. When she put it that way . . .

  “I . . . I wasn’t trying to convince you to quit.” Chronos hesitated, knowing that that was probably a lie. Kendra’s quitting magic would have been the easiest solution. “I just hoped to end the nightmares.”

  “So what are you planning to do next time someone gives you bad dreams?” Kendra demanded.

  Chronos fell silent. She had no answer to that question.

  Nightmares, the most extreme of futures, had been her constant companion for most of her life.

  She’d dreamt about the revolution in Mágico.

  She’d dreamt about her parents’ deaths.

  She’d dreamt about two moon shuttle crashes, neither of which had happened.

  She’d dreamt about the Spikewallow gang in Melbourne.

  She’d dreamt about hundreds of battles between the tienlong and the kamikaze.

  Futures that later happened, futures that soon ceased to be possibilities . . . it didn’t matter. They all littered her dreams.

  There had never been a solution to that problem.

  Ever.

  “That’s why you should stay,” Kendra said, arriving at the top of the stairs. She leaned against the bannister and looked at Chronos. “Next time you’re afraid of someone, tell me, and I’ll fix the problem. You stay a hermit, you sleep at night, and I save the world.”

  Chronos was silent.

  There was no doubt that, if another future catastrophe arose, it would show up to haunt her dreams.

  There was also no doubt that all of Kendra’s future allies were still around. Any one of them could choose to go down the same path without her.

  Dulcina Caramelo. Namikaze Tateru. Jeanne d’Rouen. Princesa.

  There was also the fact that Chronos didn’t know for certain whether Avenging Angel was truly gone. Escaping and getting far away from Kendra would never change that fact. Because she had been so important to Kendra’s past, any extreme paths that were in her future were bound to have Chronos in them.

  If nothing else, if Kendra turned into Avenging Angel, her first course of action would be to kill Chronos.

  And she still had the watch.

  Chronos breathed in and out. It wasn’t just that Kendra had a point. Everything obvious was pointing her in one direction.

  “Well . . .” Chronos said slowly, hardly able to voice the words.

  A blur of fire roared past them. Chronos leapt back, and the crazy little girl zoomed up to the ceiling, wearing a rocket pack. Amazingly, her legs weren’t burned despite the huge tails of fire blazing out the back. She had to be protected magically.

  “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” the crazy little girl screamed.

  “Fine,” Chronos said abruptly, shoulders hunching. She jabbed her finger in the direction the small lunatic was heading. “You save the world, and you take care of that thing.”

  “I’m not a thing!” the little girl shouted, crashing into a wall. “My name’s Tiffany!”

  They spent the next few hours moving all of Chronos’s belongings out of her apartment in Athens and into a bedroom that was very small and crammed into a corner on the east side of the building. It had a cracked outer wall, and the window was filthy.

  “This is a terrible room,
” Kendra opined. “There are no shade trees, and it’s in full sun. It’ll be really hot in the morning. You should sleep on the west side, like I am.”

  Chronos smiled. That was the reason she wanted this room. It was the farthest away from Kendra’s.

  “FIX IT!” was Tiffany’s only opinion.

  The cracks in the wall mended themselves.

  The window stayed filthy.

  Kendra was extremely grumpy when she discovered there were no cleaning supplies anywhere in Chronos’s things.

  Overall, the moving went extremely quickly due to Kendra’s ability to teleport everything, even large furniture, into whatever place she wanted it. Despite the fact that Chronos had agreed to stay, she still didn’t let Chronos or Tiffany anywhere near the watch, so she did most of the work of moving herself.

  At last, the only things remaining were Tiffany’s many piles of clutter down in the dungeons.

  “Now you can help me!” Tiffany said excitedly. “I have Matty the Mattress, and Benny the Boxes, and Barry the Bars from the cages —”

  “Pass,” Kendra said. “I’ve got things to do.”

  Chronos frowned. “What kind of things?”

  “None of your beeswax,” the former magical girl said.

  And then she teleported away.

  Chronos let out an annoyed grunt. Why couldn’t she have done that when I wanted to get rid of her?

  “Then you can help me!” Tiffany said eagerly.

  Seeing not much else to do, Chronos shrugged and agreed.

  Without Kendra, moving Tiffany out of the dungeons took far more work. The mattress alone took nearly an hour to get up the stairs and into the biggest bedroom, which Tiffany had, in fact, claimed. And then there were dozens of heavy boxes filled with odds and ends and lots of strange machinery. And dozens more piles of toys and heaps of clothing.

  “Where did you even get all of this?” Chronos demanded incredulously as the little girl brought another armload of ruffled clothing upstairs. “You were a prisoner!”

  “Clyde the Clothing Cupboard wasn’t my idea,” Tiffany said, her expression shifty. “Or Tom the Toybox. Or Porter the Poster Tube.”

  Chronos rubbed her forehead. She was going to have to get rid of all of those things, as well as the refrigerator, just as soon as she figured out how to destroy the brainwasher.

  Chapter 4: The Bedroom

  Jumbled and confused thoughts warred through Florence’s mind as she walked home.

  Did Kendra really quit being a magical girl? she wondered. Do I want to quit being a magical girl?

  Without Kendra, there really wasn’t much point to Wings of Justice. Without their team leader, Green Fairy and Pink Dragon were just ordinary magical girls who had good powers but no ambitions.

  Which is probably a good thing, Florence reminded herself. You hated the way Kendra liked to try to plan out your future for you.

  Which was true . . . it was absolutely true . . . and yet . . .

  Kendra had always had a very clear vision of what she wanted. She had always lain out clear paths that she expected everybody else to follow. It had driven Florence crazy, but reacting to those paths had at least given her direction.

  Without Kendra to annoy her into knowing what she didn’t want to do next, Florence felt lost.

  Not to mention that she missed her best friend.

  Dissolve the team . . . she thought, walking slowly down the sidewalk as she passed by a playground. The same playground where her best friend had been seen crying the day before she’d vanished. Kendra, why would you dissolve the team?

  Florence looked around for clues, but there was nothing telling. Just a bunch of kids on teeter totters, swings, and climbing up to slide down the slide.

  Why would you quit? Florence thought. Why would you defect like that? What HAPPENED?

  If only she’d had some clue, she could at least have decided on her next step. She could have chosen to fight Kendra, or save her, or trust her to handle things herself. But given that she now knew nothing, it felt like all she could do was abandon her.

  I just don’t understand . . . Florence thought morosely.

  She reached her house, a small, one-story building, and pushed the front door open. She passed the living room, where her father had a Bible, sheets of paper, and several other books spread out in front of him. It looked like he was preparing his sermon for Sunday.

  “Hi, Dad,” Florence called, waving.

  He glanced up and smiled and waved, then tapped his pen against the table for a few seconds. His eyes brightened, and he scribbled a line on the piece of paper in front of him.

  “Flo! Flo! Flo! Flo!” Jacob called, running down the hallway. “Dad said we could shoot hoops after I finished my homework and you got home from track! Catch!”

  His hands whipped out from behind his back, and a basketball came flying at her. Florence caught it instinctively.

  “He shoots . . . he scores!” Jacob yelled.

  “Jacob, I told you, no throwing things in the house!” their mother called from the kitchen, where it sounded like she was chopping up vegetables.

  Florence swallowed a lump in her throat. Everything seemed so . . . normal around her house. Even though her world outside the family was shattering. Even though her best friend was missing, and her team was gone.

  In some ways, it was comforting to know that her family was stable while everything else seemed to be shattering around her. In other ways, it was maddening. Why weren’t they all as devastated as she currently felt?

  “Florence,” her mother said, sounding concerned. She set down the knife and came walking out into the hallway. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” Florence said shortly. She didn’t explain. She didn’t think she should have to.

  Nor did she.

  “If you need to talk, we’re here,” her mother said. “If you don’t need to talk, we’re here, too.”

  Florence nodded, blinking back tears. She didn’t want to talk right now. She definitely didn’t want to play basketball. She just wanted to go into her room and be alone.

  “Come on, Jacob,” her mother said. “I’ll play basketball with you. Paul! Come play basketball, too!”

  Her father’s voice called, “But I’m in the middle of —”

  “That can wait!” her mother called. “We’re losing daylight!”

  There was a shuffling of papers, and then Florence’s father emerged from the living room. He rubbed his eyes, then rubbed his bald head. He hated his hair, so he kept his scalp shaved.

  “Do you want to join us?” he asked Florence.

  She shook her head.

  He nodded, and then all three of her family members headed outside. Soon, there were shouts of laughter from her brother and the sound of the basketball thumping and feet scrambling across the driveway.

  Florence breathed a sigh of relief. It was nice to be alone. She closed her eyes, turned the doorknob to her room, and stepped inside.

  “Hi, Florence,” a voice said.

  Florence’s eyes flew open. Sitting on her bed, as casually as if it were nothing, was Kendra.

  Florence’s mouth fell open. She let out an incoherent, high-pitched, “Urghha!”

  “What took you so long?” Kendra continued. “I’ve been waiting here for nearly an hour. You usually get home from track much sooner than this.”

  “KENDRA!” Florence exclaimed, dropping her backpack. It thudded to the ground.

  “Yep.”

  “You – what — why — where have you been?!” Florence sputtered.

  “Turning villain,” Kendra said, her eyes narrowed. “Just like I said I would. Did you think I was lying?”

  “You . . . but . . . WHY?”

  Kendra shrugged.

  Florence couldn’t process this. It was unreasonable. It was unthinkable. It was unbelievable.

  It was so very, very Kendra.

  “Who brainwashed you?” Florence blurted out.

  “I wasn’t
brainwashed,” Kendra said, crossing her legs. Her foot hit a stuffed duffel bag that Florence noticed, for the first time, was sitting on the floor beside her. “Sorry.”

  “Then where have you been?!” Florence exclaimed.

  “I was turning villain,” Kendra said, rolling her eyes. “Duhhh.”

  Florence leaned forward and clenched her hands into fists. Her best friend was the most annoying person on the planet. “KENDRA!! EXPLAIN!!”

  “It’s . . . complicated.” Kendra hunched her knees up to her chest. “I kind of had to do it. To save the world.”

  Florence stared at her blankly.

  “I didn’t want to quit,” Kendra said, tracing her finger in a circle around the knee of her jeans. “I really didn’t want to defect. But . . . I found out . . . it’s possible for magical girls to turn corrupt. One with sufficient charisma and arrogance could even lead the world to destruction. That would have been my future. A born mage showed me. So I . . .”

  “You listened to a born mage?” Florence exploded. “After all the things you said to me about Lute Deathwave? Are you crazy? Obviously he was lying!”

  “No, she wasn’t!” Kendra snapped. Her feet stomped back on the floor, and she planted an accusing finger forward. “I became a villain for the same reason we both became magical girls: to protect world peace!”

  Florence stared at her best friend dumbly.

  This was Kendra. This was definitely Kendra. Only Kendra could be so ridiculously certain about something that made no sense whatsoever.

  It wasn’t a brainwashed version. It wasn’t a blackmailed version. It didn’t even seem to be a crazy-in-love version. It was just . . . somehow . . . her best friend, having made a mind-bogglingly stupid decision that she seemed determined to justify.

  But if she wasn’t here to apologize, wasn’t here to come back, there was only one reason she would have returned.

  “Kendra . . .” Florence said slowly, preparing to summon her focus item, “ . . . why are you here?”

  “Because you’re my best friend,” Kendra said.

  She reached out her hand. It hung in the air for several silent seconds.

  “Will you trust me? Will you join me?” she said.