Naturally, Madison began to find herself some friends. Not that it ever really went beyond a hello while they hung around a Burning Betty; a bunch of trash that the waifs set fire to and stood around in Winter, but it was developing. It was how she met Benji.


She had heard some of the kids talking about it as they loitered outside of the one of the safehouses near Orror Lane. They would chatter amongst themselves not giving her any acknowledgment except to hand her a napkin or plastic fork as they were passed along down the line. Madi kept her head down most of the time anyway, so if anyone did look her way it was lost. But on her third night of standing with a meal in hand watching the debris go up in flames, orange glow fanning across all the hardknocked faces, the kid beside her who had been edging down the group her way for two nights suddenly piped up with a hello, handing her some extra napkins, which she accepted and tucked away into her coat pocket, mostly in case she needed to make notes on anything at work and scribble on. He introduced himself very casually, smiled a lot and tried to make her laugh. She supposed, in all her honest to goodness, that he was a cute guy and he was actually pretty funny, but he talked about drugs a lot and that bothered her. It was not as if she had never been offered Mary Jane or had not taken a bud of peyote, but generally she steered clear. It wasn't her thing.

Benji, it turned out, associated himself not only with various street candy, but with a few girls who Madi could tell, almost straight away, hated her. The kind of hate teenage girls have in them for a girl they don't know who was even the slightest bit attractive. And while they hardly saw much of her face in truth, they saw how her smile lit up the space around, and even though she covered them up, there was no mistaking those pins. Envy. Something so terribly juvenile and petty, but that during those tender years, those wonder years, could create the biggest canyons between young women. Especially when people couldn't help how they turned out, same went for someone who was pretty, as it was for the buck toothed kid with the overly large ears, it wasn't their fault.


So while they spat crude words her way amongst throwing-dagger glares, she made herself at home in the company of the boy who liked making her laugh and who had an interesting perspective on the world. He had been doing this for a long time. Since he was eight. In and off the street. Mostly on it or as close as one can get; the revolving doors of foster homes in a town like this. He was too rambunctious, too free wheeling. He said he'd grown to love it, now that he was older and curfew was his playdough - no one to hold him back, to tell him what to do. He was Of Age. The world was his to take on and he had pulled a job at the docks which only made his will more ferocious.

"So how long you been Pavin' it?"

"Pardon?"

"Y'know, street livin'. Long? You don't smell it."

"Only a... a while. You know." She nodded, and she was sure the attempt was poor, but Benji let it fly. He believed her enough. There was the want that they should not think her fresh. She was too vulnerable then. If she kept up some sort of exterior, of being street savvy, it would help her. The tale got around and soon a few more were coming up to get to know her, to hear her story, the tidbits, and offer her smack, ecstacy and what had to be an ironic joke ultimately, something called Elysium. Some of the kids who weren't All Human were into that. Most of the humans kept to the stuff they called Tame. As she stood there she couldn't help but think back to that Paulette, the Victorian Scientist, who would be in cultural study bliss out here, in the Wilds, with mixed heritages getting high and finding a euphoric union in the wasted utopia of the rundown West Side. In either case case, the smack, the ecstacy, were both not tricks that Madison wanted to try. She did, however, take Benji up on a decadently plain cigarette, as he led her off to a chainlink spot with a few ruined couches spread around. He gestured to them and she diverted to one for herself, when he shook his head, grabbed her hand and led her quietly over to a smaller fire, so they shared the one seat. He pulled her onto his knee and grinned. "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"I'm eighteen. Y'don't mind do you?"

Dark brows furrowed and she glanced away.

"I love when you do that..."

He trailed off, let his intimation hang on the air. It had her turn back. And that is when he kissed her.



Later, he insisted on walking her back to the fabled "Thunder House", intrigued by her description, but she didn't let him in. So in the shade of the imaginary doorstep of her wonderful manor (tumbledown warehouse) they necked and cuddled and shared some heat until she lifted her hand, pressed it at his chest and said "No more." Then she smiled the slightest, knowing her boundaries, and rosy-cheeked, slipped inside and chained the door, taking the rungs up to her bed. There was no tease in it.


Benji stood there wide eyed, nonetheless, with a lopsided grin. He took a few steps back, shook his hand and laughed a bit.

"Well damn."

Halloween.


She stood outside one of the small stores on Hope Lane and stared at the masks hanging in the shopfront. Each face was illuminated by a small spotlight from beneath, so every curve to the horrible plastic mask and its threatening features was exaggerated and made even more menacing. There were goblins and ghouls, werewolves and clowns, giant insectoid-like eye covers, wart-nosed witches, and, of course, the vampire. She stared at that face the longest. Her breath caught after a while in a seized sigh and she turned away, made herself trail off back the way she had come. In light of Artsblood's revelation she felt sour and so were the thoughts that came from that place, but no less, that primary one before the window bore its own ugly truth.


Madison wouldn't have to dress up this year.

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The WANTED poster flapped like an erstwhile flag, tacked to the place above her bed, not so much as a memento mori as a memento vivere remember that you have to live, and as it shivered on the wall it seemed to echo the painted tree on the door downstairs. Everything was a circle.

Whoever Madison Rye had been, whatever she had done, was of no concern to her. Really. It would be forgotten in time, and while maybe not by all, those who mattered would, and come to think only on the Madison Rye that sat before them. No matter how different or similar she might come to be, in the few years left to age before the Turning would have the teenager for all time.


Things were falling into place, these were the things to focus on, to Live. Not only did she work the stables on Tag's days off, but she was now helping Aliss with her newly established farm as a groom, and visiting Seeker to exercise her horses and tend to them. Seeker had insisted on paying her, and so she had begrudgingly accepted, if only to satiate Seeker and to accept some help she sorely needed.


But still, that Bill on the Wall proved powerful. It reminded her of the Dark Queen and her Mirror on the Wall, shimmering half-truths and visions of the future. It was a Moment in Time that was not her life, it was a stranger's, a woman she shared the same name with, perhaps the same road, but paths had diverged and Madison Rye the Gunslinger had gone one way, while Madison Rye the Younger, had taken another.


She had been taken from her own timeline before the move to Lofton, a move that in Madison Older's life had been fateful. In Lofton she had become the Gunslinger, she had married and become widow soon after, known that particular breed of pain that annihilated many of her beliefs and ideals, like a great black beast of a horse, thundering over the heart and changing her deeply, it was because of Lofton she had become the woman who sauntered into a bar late one afternoon called Zeal's, a day when the penny dropped with her arrival, where she had fatefully met Charlie Renauldt. From there she had brought down a circus of creeps with two allies, taken on Rhy'Din's own black market, and become assistant to a Magician, the man she had loved and felt connected to beyond all she could comprehend.


The only thing the two Madison's still had in common was that they had both ended up in Rhy'Din. She was meant to be here. But what ever for?

"Psssst. Baby-doll. Come on."


Her eyes opened wide and she turned to peer off the ledge of the rooftop. Below, a sole Burning Betty was blazing and beside it was Benji, smoking a cigarette and grinning up at her. She rose and leapt down from the lowest point of the building to the next ledge and skittered along the side on the tops of her sneakers until the place where she could leap from next jutted out aways. Her leap always had her fall a little from its lopsided height, and this time she had Benji to thank for the steadiness. Her hands held onto his jacket as he pulled her to her feet, both laughing. He smiled at her warmly. "You okay?"

"Yeah", she answered as she tucked curls behind her ears and looked either side of them for the Girls That Hated Her, usually flanking him, or sign of one of the candy kids he kept pace with. "You doing okay?"

"Thought it was you up there, 'sa been a while. We gotta talk."

There was no threat in the words he put between them like soldiers in a line. "You an' me. Some stuff I heard." He trampled his cigarette with a sneaker and toe-dug it into the gravel. Her blue eyes went towards the burning trash can and the thickening smoke it bore. "What do you mean, Benji?"


"You got a boy you weren't tellin' me 'bout?"


If she had remembered, she would have been worried he was addressing one messy night in an alleyway. But she didn't remember and Benji didn't ask. They walked off to sit on a pile of junk steel. Latent metal roasting in the late afternoon. "I don't have a boyfriend."


What he meant, Madi did not know, but it made her feel uneasy. She remembered him, of course she did, and she recalled everything else; she'd been away a while, come back and here was more confusion for her to wade through. A boyfriend?


"I thought it's why you went away", he confessed, lighting up another and watching her pensive profile in the fire glow. "You had to leave for some other reason?" But Madi wasn't having it. Whipping around she set her eyes on the stoner jesus straightly and arched a brow. "I had to go. I don't know who you're talking about."


"The older guy. Seen you walkin' with him not long before you left. He your brother?"


Madison gave a start and burst out laughing. "Tag?"


Benji leant back and exhaled lifting a brow of his own. "Tag?"

"You mean the Dark Man?"

Benji nodded awkwardly. "He is dark, hair, clothes... eyes."


Shaking her head, she raked a hand through her hair and stood, shuffling off. "I gotta go, Benji. I'll catch you later."

He was left alone, perplexed, and out of smokes.

Madi moved on quickly, until the buildings grew more and more dense and she was certain her ex-flame was out of sight. The she rounded the closest corner, backed up against the stone facade and let out an unexpectedly great sigh.



From a West End window on high, dark glazed and cracked, Andy Jacob looked on.

A gun. It was the first thing Madi saw. A stranger holding it up at the scarce crowd. Had she not been where she had against her will, might she have braved the threshold and found a room above. A full day she had known only the pitch-black room with its judas hole staring back at her. Andy thought her some sort of prophet. Some sort of awful angel. But he tired, and as he waned, she fought, and she ran.

And there was the Inn. Beacon and bastion. How long since she had been inside? She crept the few stairs to look inside.

A gun. It was all she could see.


Hers was the face in the glass of the Inn front window, eyes widened with blanched-lip surprise. One hand rested against the rail behind her, the other curled uneasily around the strap of her backpack. Going inside just wasn't going to happen. She glanced back at the street, cursing her timing, and shuffled back against the steel, a frown working across her features. Sanctuary sought and denied, she touched tenderly at the bruise on the side of her skull, wincing. The home-spun stitch work was poor and splitting already. But that was no matter, it would be looked at later in her small mirror at the warehouse, the only matter was getting there.


As it was, the cold street offered little more than the inside. It was a flickering glance down the length of the porch that told she was spooked, that diminished the brilliance of her eyes. Was there no escaping the fevered promise of violence. Shoes squeaked, lines of grey crossed and followed.


Shylah breathed in and knew her presence, but Madi never did open the door.


Instead, she had jogged through the etudes of sneaker and concrete echo, in the false-dusk of building husks, until the faithful locks of the warehouse were undone in her palms. Once her face was looking back at her in the small, chipped-brass frame near her bed, did she let go her breath. It steamed the glass.