If I had a choice between nearly being shot in the head and going for drinks at the hideout, I would’ve chosen to be shot every time. But Sid wanted to debrief the group, and it seemed like tradition. I’d missed it the first time, I couldn’t reasonably miss it again.

“Okay red, purple or black?” Dotty had taken to this like an over-eager mum, and her wardrobe had exploded out, and onto me. She held up three jumpers, before dropping one of them, the black one “black is too goth, and I’m pretty sure it’s too small for you.” She went back into the wardrobe, “you fucking beanstalk.”

She meant that affectionately, and I conceded to trying on the red one while she searched. It was woolly, but the neckline was wide and it fell down on one shoulder, presumably by design.

“What do we think?” It was a bit cold, but I liked it. Dotty turned around and paused for a second, examining me.

“You look amazing, put this on.” She threw me a black skater skirt. I threw it back,

“No skirts, they feel weird. Too much fabric.”

“Really?” she held the skirt to my waist, it barely hit the middle of my thigh, “this is too much?”

“I can wear jeans, it’s not too fancy.” Skirts felt strange, their weight was unfamiliar. I liked my jeans.

“The fact you’re here and not wearing that godawful hoodie says otherwise.” She sat herself down on the bed. “Unless you’re trying to impress someone?”

Why was Dotty always so perceptive? I went red.

Dotty’s face changed “Oh fuck you are? Please tell me it’s not the scary blonde lady. Oh wait it’s not the cop is it?” My face flushed hot and hugged my hoodie.

“No?” I managed to squeak out, but Dotty was bent on getting me with someone, this was like christmas for her.

“Tell me who he is right now. Or she. Or they! Or-”

“She’s from the…” I didn’t know what to call them, “The group.”

“The Weirds, you mean?”

“The Weirds?”

“Yeah like the Weird Sisters, in Macbeth.”

I balked slightly at the idea of giving the group an actual name, but that was as good as any

“Fine, The Weirds. There’s this girl, I think she’s a year or two younger than me and she just…” I cared more about her than I did anyone else, the thought of her in pain made my intestines scrunch into a ball, seeing her cry was more traumatic an experience than washing a man’s brains out of my hair.

“She just seems nice.”

Two hours, more tops than I could count and multiple attempts from Dotty to learn more about my romantic life later, I got to the shop. I was wearing another red jumper which seemed identical to the first, but Dotty assured me that it was entirely different. When I got down into the hideout, Jodie and Sid were locked into an arm wrestle. Addie and Katrine were watching intently, cheering them on, and there was a vein popping out of Jodie’s forehead.

For a moment it seemed like Jodie was losing, but Sid must have faltered because eventually she managed to get the upper hand again and slam Sid’s wrist into the table.

“Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds” Katrine announced, “Who wants an ice pack?”

“Me, fucking ouch” Sid shook her arm out. Jodie just grinned and picked her drink up with the same arm. “Who’s up next?”

If I was looking at the same Jodie who had been crying in my arms not 48 hours ago, she was hiding it well.

“Fuck it, why not.” I sat myself down at the table across from her. “If I win, no more kicks training for a week?” I offered.

“Deal. If I win I get five minutes of sparring, to use how I like.” She drained her bottle and put it on the floor. We linked arms, and on Addie’s cue, went for it.

I started pushing hard, expecting Jodie to relent, or at least try to beat me, but It felt like going against a brick wall. For maybe 30 seconds I strained, staring Jodie down as a trickle of sweat ran down her temple. I studied her face. She was trying her hardest to seem nonchalant but there was effort in her movements. I was getting somewhere. Her breathing barely hitched, her arm shivering so gently I could only feel it, her grin thinning out, giving way to strain, It was almost as if she was trying to impress.

“One minute!” Katrine counted, “Come on Chloe, fuck her up!” Addie added. I kept pushing, my arm started to feel like it was on fire, but Jodie’s shiver was more noticeable now. She wasn’t trying to push yet, only to hold, to not give way. Though she must have started to worry, because eventually she did start to push, and my entire body weight couldn’t have stopped her. Five more minutes of sparring it was.

I slumped back in my chair, my right arm was about to fall off. Katrine slid a can of cider into my left hand,

“Thanks.”

“You really need it.”

She looked better, The Component had done its job. There wasn’t any scarring, physically she was probably perfect, but she looked thinner somehow, shaken.

Jodie and I pushed ourselves out of the chairs and the group went over to the sofas. The cot and the Component had both been shoved against the wall, Sid, Addie and Katrine followed suit.

“So, business first.” Sid gestured to the desk, “I have no idea how to decipher that shit, Kat and Chloe can take a look at it in the morning, but there’s at least two different components in that thing. Well done everyone, that was a good run.”

Addie took a long drink at that, “Only one near miss, we’re living the life.”

“Near miss,” Sid responded, emphasising the word near, “We’re all safe and the mission is done, that’s what matters.”

While the two of them kept exchanging jabs, Katrine leaned over to me “Sid told me about your computer, what have you been doing with it?” My surprisingly magic computer, always far better than the specs should have allowed for. I should’ve been suspicious when I realised it was nearly always overheating, or when playing games on it had always left me exhausted, but magic PC towers hadn’t been my priority. “If you focus on the individual effects of a Component, you can get a feeling for what’s going on with it.” I’d practised on the Component, which I needed to find a new name for now. “I dismantled it to look around, it’s hard to decipher but I think it’s using my brain to get more computing power. I don’t know how though, it doesn’t make sense.”

“How so?”

“I mean it’s not like the processes are happening in my brain, there’s not enough going on in there to make the calculations. And it’s not like I’m adding extra pins to each bit of circuit, so how is it working?”

“Dream logic, Chloe. I wouldn’t think too hard about it. Do you think you could recreate it?”

I’d completely forgotten about my trip to the fae realm. That was probably intentional, it was a challenge to even think about it for too long. “Maybe, it’d be hard to get the exact brain patterns, but maybe if I transferred some of the magic without altering it. Speaking of dream logic though-”

“Listening to Addie and Sid annoy each other is boring, what are you two talking about?” Jodie squeezed in next to me. The two of them had been locked into some conversation for a while, listening didn’t seem like a good time, so I avoided it. Some snatches got through, though. They were whispering about the mission. About Sid, about Katrine.

“She would have died without the Component. She might have anyway”

“But she didn’t”

“You had us looking for the book before we found her”

“There was nothing we could have done, we would’ve just wasted more time.”

“We don’t leave our own behind, Sid.”

“We didn’t.”

That theme repeated itself, over and over in different words. I couldn’t fault any of Sid’s logic. Without the Component, we couldn’t have done anything for Katrine, and going back into the warehouse would have added to the time. It worried me though, how easily Sid made the call. What if we didn’t get so lucky some day?

Katrine shifted in her seat, she’d also been listening.

“I’m gonna go for a smoke, anyone want something from upstairs?”

“Some of the bread, the fresh-baked stuff,” said Sid. Katrine nodded and left. Jodie shifted over so she was sitting closer to me.

“So, more sparring then?” I asked.

“First thing in the morning,” she grinned. “Can’t wait. Drink?” She produced another cider and pressed it into my hands. The physical closeness was nothing new, We’d grappled, fought, she’d used me as a pillow more than once, but it felt different now. The closeness felt deliberate. It was uncomfortable, but I didn’t want her to move away.

“I don’t know anything about you,” I said between sips, “Who are you, Jodie?”

“How much time have you got?” She joked, and swivelled, so her legs were over the side of the sofa and she was leaning against me.

“I’m nineteen, I joined Sid about six or seven years ago, been running with her ever since. I like old music, sleeping and sparring- you’re welcome. I’m half french, half punjabi, half gay and half straight. Right now I’m half asleep too, so that’s me.”

“You sleep a lot, don’t you?”

“I get tired easy. Lots of magic. Your turn.”

My mind went blank. What was my name again?

“Uh, well, I was born in August of 2000, my mum was a bit shit but my dad was alright, I guess. I think they’re still together, I don’t talk to them much anymore. I like DT, and building stuff. I made a dinosaur out of LEGO once, that was fun.”

“Well then,” Jodie put out a hand and nearly poked me in the face, “Nice to meet you, Chloe Nash.” I took it, at the awkward angle it was offered at and shook it.

“Likewise, Jodie whatever-your-last-name-is.”

We stayed like that for a few moments, Sid and Addie had given up arguing and were discussing movies. It had been a while since Katrine left, I was worried about her.

“Hey, I’m gonna go check on Katrine.” I gently pushed Jodie off me. She was half asleep already and made a face of light annoyance when I took my shoulder from her.

I found Katrine sitting on the roof of the shop, her face lit up by a MacBook, three smouldering cigarettes stubbed out on the ledge next to her. She was distracted, she looked sullen.

“Oh, hi. Shit, Sid’s bread, uh, it’s here somewhere.”

“No, don't worry about it, they’re busy anyway. What’s up?”

She turned the screen over to face me. It was a set of schematics.

“It’s too early to start doing proper work on it, we don’t have enough circuits to learn from, but I’ve been designing a couple of things.”

It was a suit of a Knight’s armour, with scribbles in all sorts of colours on the overlay. Notes clamoured for space, ‘squares- creation? Recreation?’ was one, in a mess of interlocking shapes. She was planning something big.

“This is… A lot, wow.” I didn’t take my eyes off the screen, trying to take in as much as I could.

“There’s a lot of ideas in it, but the main one is just an unbreakable suit of armour. Or rather, a suit of armour that keeps healing itself.”

“Like the component, but applied to inanimate objects.”

“Exactly. And then if we can rework some of the stuff in Lucille’s, it could grant the wearer strength, and movement, and so much more”

It was too much to take in, almost. “I mean, I can do it, but this would take…”

“Months. Even the theory isn’t solid yet.” She took the laptop back and closed it. “But if I can make something like that-”

“You could join us in the field. Safely, that is.”

She hesitated, then reached for the ground next to her. “Cigarette?”

“No thanks. Thanks, though.”

She nodded and took one. “There are other ideas, of course. Weapons, mostly. Simple things.”

“Send them to me, I can work on them.”

She nodded again.

“I went to the fae realm.” I wanted to tell her while I remembered, “like, actually. I talked to them, one of them gave me this.” I showed her the ring. “She said I could use it to get back in, but we shouldn’t stay too long, otherwise we’d be trapped. We’d become ghosts. The ring should keep us safe, insulated.”

She looked at the ring like it was a lit stick of dynamite. It was golden, and the light refracted strangely off it in a way I couldn’t quite place. The band knotted into a large, carved lump of gold, ordained with shapes, it wasn’t as heavy as I always expected it to be.

“This is from the other world?” She whispered, taking it gingerly. “Fuck.”

I could see her mind working behind her eyes. Questions, answers, new questions, all faster than I or even she could probably comprehend. She weighed it in her hand, and passed it back to me.

“Tell Jodie to cancel training for a while, and go get some sleep. We’re gonna start planning this in the morning.”