YOUNG GIRL RESCUED FROM HOUSE FIRE. ONE SURVIVOR IN TENEMENT EXPLOSION. UNKNOWN IF THERE WERE OTHER OCCUPANTS AT THE TIME OF THE FIRE.. ...GIRL UNHARMED IN WEST END BLAST

He didn't know why it was that time didn't follow her quite right

Madi sat upright in her bed. Monitors flashed with numbers and symbols that didn't make any sense to her. People in scrubs said she was fine. They said she was lucky. Her eyes kept moving to the window. All she could make out was blazing blue sky but not much else. Eyes drift back to the door, one of many such looks. A few wards down she'd heard panic. A death. A girl her age. Dead.

Madi looked back out the window, away from the rushing staff that fleeted past her door. Fingers pushed the blanket away and she slid from the bed. Ran. Rhy'Din Memorial Hospital left behind her.



"Delores, where's our patient?"

The nurse removed her reading glasses from her nose and stood from behind the registrar's desk. Surprise lit up her otherwise dour face. "Doctor, I didn't even see—"

Doctor Lew rubbed the heel of his hand down his forehead and sighed. The streetkids always did this. The ward had been preoccupied by the emergency in Ward C. He felt sick. He had wanted to monitor the girls breathing, for at least the night. Now she was gone again. Security came to his side. "I'll go do a search", one offered. "Don't", Lew replied, hands on hips. "Just....let her go. Just let her go..." He shook his head, resign chilling through his stomach, and he turned abruptly, and headed towards Ward C. Sometimes, you just had to let the kids go.



Clad only in her hospital shift, Madi ran like some white specter down the narrow alleys and towards the one place she did remember. The blue warehouse with a Tree of Life painted on the shuttered doors. Hope against hope, it might still be unused.

Walked through another fire. Here she was again, reborn, and not. Same name, same face. Why was it that it happened" What price hadn't she yet paid" Through the other side, palms black as sin, like the day she'd awoken in similar flames. It'd been happening for years. How could she ever tell a future child or lover of this life" Of any of them' How she was a circle that broke. That she was impossible.

Most days were average. She could get on with the life she had. No longer a widow, but a divorcee, no longer a gunslinger, and no longer a girl in a faded army jacket sleeping on the streets.



Check placed the steaming mug into her hand and sat down opposite her. Zeal's had been closed early due to a lack of foot traffic and another spate in Mako warfare. First O'Malley's had been vandalised, and then Reagan and Roll's had been sprayed with bullets. In courtesy for the safety of their regulars, and the new finish on the bar and upper level, Laurice and Check had made the mutual call to early closes. Plus, Madi hadn't exactly been present. Until now.

Now, she was sat in booth, like she'd never left. Her hair was the same malt and honey, chocolate and forest-dark. Her eyes blue like the cornflowers from whence she came. Hands neat around the mug, pale as birch. She didn't seem any different, there was that same sadness, and at the very same instance, that strength. Madison was a paradox. A walking mystery. A living puzzle.

"You...you gunna tell me and Laurice what the fuck is up with this time flippin' crap. Next time the Watch find a kid in here we're gunna be screwed. License" Gone. Ziiiip! Madi. What the fuck, if I might be so blunt."

She'd never heard Check curse, not in front of her, or to her, or about her. She only smiled, like she did, like that answered everything. Most times, one look from her did. But not today, and not that night and never tomorrow. Their lives had changed inexorably. Orpheum Arson. Charlie dead. Lofton. WestEnd changed, and its residents changed with it. These three had learned that the hard way.

"Let's get you to bed", Laurice came strolling in the door, his hair characteristically mad, pulling off his shades. Embracing Madison gingerly, he and Check enabled her to her feet. Arriving, Check had run her a bath and gotten together a pair of jeans and a spare shirt from the small cupboard she kept out back, from the days she worked for Aliss or Maranya and had needed someone between to change costumes. Grey cotton hung off her lank frame. She needed some more meat on her. "Good idea, boys", she drawled, but her voice was rust and sleep, she knew, was hours from here. But bed was a start.

"I'll tell you in the morning."

"Promise?", the two said, ad-lib.

"Pinky swear."

Three folded into the dark upstairs.

—-



Over breakfast, she delineated the badly drawn line that was her life, deigning to color in or erase the cross sections that were sense only to her, and maybe Tag, but even that was asking too much. Between bites and recitation, Check and Laurice in the bright morning glare exchanged glances as the gaps in her story were sketched in.

"That why Charlie took such a shining to you? Because he knew what you were about?"

Madison shrugged, pushing a corner of her pancake around the plate. "That I'll never know. Stepping in this here bar that afternoon is something only the stars can answer. Not me. I'm coming to terms with all these...these things I'm never going to be able to pick apart. At least now. Now I know some things don't have answers that we would see to them."

She told them about the first time she'd tripped time, how her mother had denied it, even to herself. How no one in the family spoke on it. How it hadn't happened again until the first fire, where a hotel burned to its front door leaving her the only survivor. How they'd been some change in the fates there and then. How her life had become some sort of fracture. How it never happened while she was with Eli. But how she'd told him all about it, and he'd said he'd wait.

Laurice polished off a forkful, tines stacked with blueberries and a few swirls of cream. "What answers are you still looking for?" pointing the fork at her, "Goin' back to that. What do you mean there, Mad?"

"Say....", her turn for a glance, she tried a smile in the glare, squinting her eyes at the street, where shadows competed for angles. "Why did poor Eli do all he did, only to come back here, all those years later, for us to try and not to work out' It's hard, still, for me to come to terms with that loss."

She sucked in a breath, facing the boys. "Charlie had a heart attack and died. Wasn't fair, after all the good he'd done, when he had things he still had hope for. Some things just don't have a place we can get them to making the sense we need them to. After all those years, what fell to missing between me and my husband I....I can't tell you. But it doesn't make sense, not all we went through, especially, especially when we were apart, because it was that love, that I know, that I know in my guts, got me by. It was the skin of my teeth."

Check administered a few drops more of honey to his waffle feast across the bench, wincing. "Maybe, it isn't over. Maybe you an' Eli can try again. I mean, you're not dead, he's not dead. Only then will true love's chance really die, Madi. Corny' Maybe. But I can't agree with you on the count. Some things don't make sense because we're lookin' at em the wrong way."

She bowed her head and ate the rest of her breakfast in silence.

Keep up, now. Don't fall behind.

Thirty, forty, fifty. Eyes wide. Madison Rye leapt.

Sixty.

Legs swung, arms reached, fingers curled like fright. White-knuckles, alright. Madi propelled herself from reedy metal stairway to freight container roof using the leverage of the pole in her grip . Duck, curse, slide, crawl, run, baby, run run. She laughed as she tossed a look back towards the two giving chase. How long had it been since she had had this much fun" Hanging from her hip was nine milimetres of Ole Faithful. Grin as she dove from one freight top to the next. The two ran along side, hollering obscenities. Whore. Bitch. Bitch. Whore. She'd thought these types would get more inventive, what with all the time they had doing nothing between vandalising shopfronts and stealing cash boxes from neighbouring bars. They'd been rattling with Charlie's locks one evening until Laurice had appeared around the side, on the curb, threatening the Mako rats with a club. They hadn't come back. But two nights later, another cashbox was gone and the brother of the owner was found bludgeoned. Madison's skin crawled. Bobby Rainn. Nice guy. Hard worker. Volunteered at the shelter. Now in a coma with an uncertain expectancy. It was time for her to shape up and ship the scum out.

"HEY WHORE, COME ON BACK, WE JUS' WANNA HAVE A LITTLE CHAT"

"NO THANKS, DARLIN', I'M IN A HURRY."

That's when their first shot rang. Scalloping paint from the shipping container to her right.

"I SAID", pant, "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO TALK". The bags of coin she'd wrangled swung in the backpack she labored with. It wasn't easy getting what she got, but it was done. WestEnd was her home, it was time to honor it again, as she had, as she would, The Quarter and its Penny Moon.

Madison let out a signature whistle. It looped and keened. That's when she threw some weight into her arm, by way of Ole Faithful, and aimed a little music at the first rat. He dodged it. She laughed. "MADE YOU FLINCH?" she sung out. Whore. Bitch. Whore. Bitch was shouted in her wake. Leap, she crashed onto the hide of Marigold Two, reigns gripped, heels dug, they beat their dark path into darker streets.

Two rats bent at the knees and stared off after the Whore Bitch on horseback. What The F**k vividly painted into their expressions. Jogging up behind them, a blonde youth with shade on his chin, beanie pulled low and hands burning with agitation, looked between his pack brothers. They looked exhausted, and displeasure smoldered in their eyes. "Get her?"

"Whadda ya think, ya see her here" Eh?"

The blonde tore off his beanie and threw it to the ground. "Ya redneck", the other quipped, rolling on his heel to stalk back off down Hunter's Alley.

The blonde stared off down the avenue the men had indicated. Madison gone again.

"Come on, gotta get going"

"Okay, okay", he replied, tearing his eyes off the street. He followed. "Keep up, kiddo."

Michael deliberated, shuffled around, picked up his beanie and followed.