Briony failed her driving test while I was opening a bookshop in her face.
The message arrived just as the owner handed me the ceremonial scissors. I glanced down at the phone concealed behind my shield, read apparently you're supposed to stop BEFORE the white line, and had to turn a laugh into a cough.
“Are you all right, Daystar?” the owner whispered.
“Dust,” I said, in Briony's lovely ringing voice. “Old enemy of mine.”
The people behind the barrier laughed. Gold light shone through the ends of my hair. A small girl in a homemade Daystar cape was standing on her father's shoes to see over the crowd, and I made sure to wave at her before I cut the ribbon.
I liked that part. People thought I only liked fooling cameras, or getting Tansy out of appearing in two places at once. I liked those things too. But when you waved at somebody and she went rigid with delight, you could keep that feeling all afternoon.
You just had to remember whose name she was calling.
Across the street, the Palace Theatre was shuttered and grey. A paper advertisement had peeled down from its facade, exposing half a painted woman's smile. I could see someone moving behind it, but then Briony emerged from the side street in her brown bob and driving-test misery, and I forgot the theatre.
She ducked behind the bookshop's banner. I followed, ostensibly to straighten it for the photographers.
“You look very commanding,” she muttered.
“You should try it at junctions.”
“Romy.”
I tapped twice against the inside of my wrist. Our signal for look at me, not what I'm handing you. Then I unpinned the gold star and laid it in the silk fold of the banner.
I remained Daystar. Putting down a trinket didn't end a transformation, which was convenient if you wanted to change clothes and very inconvenient if you dropped one down a lift shaft.
Briony covered my hand with hers. Silk between us; nothing happened. I rolled the star out from under the fabric into her bare palm.
Gold flashed behind the banner. The long shining hair settled down her back instead of mine. I was myself again: short dark curls, a nick through my right eyebrow, the small gap in my front tooth that the dentist kept calling a chip.
Briony stepped out to receive the applause. I held the banner straight.
Later, in the stockroom, she pressed the little release catch on the star and became ordinary Briony again.
“Thanks,” she said, leaning against a box of atlases. “I owe you.”
“A driving lesson. I want to see what happened.”
She threw a folded promotional leaflet at me.
I had borrowed Daystar six times by then, Redshift eleven, and once had spent a long, unfortunate evening trying to eat noodles through another girl's transformation veil. Mostly it was emergencies. Sometimes it was a girl needing to be visibly civilian while her magical identity was visibly elsewhere. Tansy had once lent me Redshift to attend her own birthday party so she could sneak out of it.
I was good at their entrances. I knew Briony's tendency to pull a binding ribbon tight too soon and the five-note run Tansy played before her big comet strike. I knew the little pause after the fourth note, because on my third outing as Redshift I'd missed the fifth and hung in the air, shining furiously, while a monster hit me with a bench.
I knew where all the catches were.
That afternoon Briony went to console herself with an iced coffee. Tansy was somewhere across town, being late. I was folding the spare banner outside the shop when the theatre's narrow door opened.
“A girl shouldn't have to hold up scenery at her own curtain call,” said the man inside.
He was very tall and very thin, in a grey velvet coat. Tawny wings lay folded along his back. His soft, feathery antennae bent towards me as though he was listening with them.
“It wasn't mine.”
“Precisely. Come and see something.”
The Palace smelled of dust, cold plaster, and the sweet paint on old scenery. The stalls had been cleared. Flats depicting a ballroom stood crookedly around the stage, and a gold moon hung from a rope above them. Up in a narrow booth, a row of handles caught the daylight leaking through the roof.
“I make transformations,” he said. He opened his velvet coat, showing pockets of clasps and beads and little lacquered cases. “You have a wonderful range. But you haven't a single thing cut for you.”
I wasn't embarrassed until he said it.
He took out a round black compact edged with small pearls. Its clasp was a mirror no bigger than my thumbnail.
“Your own trinket,” he said. “Made from your experience. A transformation that is entirely—”
“Yes.”
I took it and opened it.
There wasn't even time for him to finish saying yours.
Black silk rushed out around my hands. It climbed my arms in loose, cool folds and snapped into sleeves. Boots took the floor under me; pearls clicked into place at my throat. Above my head, seven pieces of broken mirror arranged themselves into a floating crown.
For one breath I couldn't move because it was so beautiful.
My reflection filled the compact. My curls had grown into a black cloud threaded with pearls, but my face was still mine. The nick in the eyebrow. The chipped tooth. There was no gilded Daystar face between me and the mirror, no red comet eyes borrowed from Tansy.
I smiled.
The theatre's front wall folded outwards.
Daylight struck the stage. The ballroom flats went sliding past me into the street. Boards streamed out over the pavement, lifting the bookshop barrier and rolling it away. I stumbled as the floor carried me forward, into the middle of the crowd I'd waved at an hour before.
Three enormous horns above the Palace entrance crackled.
“BEHOLD,” said the costumier's voice, “PRINCESS ROMY, SOVEREIGN OF YOUR RUIN.”
A woman dropped her shopping bag. Apples rolled between the new floorboards.
I looked down at the compact.
“No,” I said.
“AND NEMESIS OF YOUR BELOVED GUARDIANS.”
Every phone along the barrier was pointing at me.
The machinery booth rode out on iron supports above the stage's left edge. A narrow stair still joined it to the boards, with the open theatre behind it and the bookshop crowd in front of me. The costumier rose past my shoulder on his tawny wings, settled into the booth, and spread his hands over the controls.
“Lovely projection,” he said. “I knew you had it.”
I turned for the stair leading up to him. Something huge swung across it: the theatre's old chandelier, its chains shrieking through their pulleys.
“Stay down there, darling.”
Gold flashed on the bookshop steps.
Briony had heard the horns. She came through the crowd as Daystar, already taking a ribbon of light between her hands.
“Romy?”
“I think I've done something bad.”
She looked at the crown. Then at the swinging chandelier.
“Hold still.”
Her ribbon flew towards my waist. I knew the loop she'd chosen, the one that would pull me neatly off my feet and into her arms. I reached to guide it around the falling edge of a ballroom flat.
The compact sprang open in my hand.
The ribbon doubled back.
It crossed Briony's wrists, slipped behind her elbows, and snapped tight. The remaining length whipped round the hanging moon. She was hauled clear of the boards, both arms pinned behind her.
I knew that knot too. I'd used it, wearing her hands. Pulling against it would only bury her fingers in another fold.
“Let it go!” I shouted.
Briony tried to turn her wrist.
“Not your star. The ribbon. Stop making the ribbon.”
She shut her eyes. The gold line thinned, went dark, and dropped her.
A red streak caught her before she hit the stage.
“What,” said Tansy, setting her down, “are you wearing?”
Redshift's long red ponytail flared behind her. She had a brass whistle on a red cord between her teeth.
“Don't send any magic at me.”
The chandelier swung back.
Tansy blew a low note. A red comet swelled beneath the chandelier, catching the mass of glass and iron before it could plough through the people scattering off the pavement.
It wasn't coming at me. I thought that made it safe. I knew how to help that spell: you pushed at its tail, not its head. I'd done it before.
I put out my hand.
The compact opened again.
The comet split into a dozen white-hot pieces.
One gouged through the bookshop's new sign. Another punched a hole in the boards beside Briony's boot. The rest gathered in front of my outstretched hand, trembling, pointed at the crowded pavement.
I could feel the turn they wanted to make. It was the turn I would have used against Redshift, if somebody had asked me how to hurt her.
I threw my shoulder round and drove my palm towards the empty theatre.
The pieces followed.
They struck the stair up to the booth. Wood erupted into the air. The landing came down, taking the last intact section of the Palace's front wall with it.
I stood in a rain of plaster, staring at the route I'd just destroyed.
Above me, the costumier laughed.
“Every little trick you've learned. Every bad habit. Do you know how long it takes to fit a counter-transformation from a photograph? But you had the whole pattern in you already.”
Tansy took the whistle out of her mouth.
“Romy. Stop helping.”
I curled my fingers into fists.
Briony was rubbing the red marks on her wrists. The little girl in the Daystar cape was crying behind her father's coat. I couldn't see the bookshop owner at all.
I shut the compact.
The black sleeves stayed on my arms.
I turned it over, looking for the catch, a button, a tongue of metal hidden under a pearl. It had sprung open for the ribbon and the comet; under my nail, every seam stayed shut.
I put it on the boards and lifted my heel. Then I saw my own eye in the little mirror clasp. If I broke it while I was still inside, what would happen to me?
I set my foot down beside it, then moved the compact onto a broken bench and backed away.
My crown went with me.
“Where's the release?” I called up to him.
He leaned over the booth's rail.
“I left it off.”
For a moment I could hear people running and the faint ringing of the chandelier. Nothing else.
Tansy approached with her whistle held out on its cord. I took it in my bare hand.
Nothing happened.
You couldn't put on a second transformation while you were still inside the first. I knew that. I'd known it for years. But I held on to the whistle for another second anyway.
Then I gave it back. I picked up the compact again and shoved it into my skirt pocket. I still wanted him to show me the release, even after he'd told me.
The costumier pulled a handle. A painted palace wall rolled towards the bookshop steps, where people were still trying to get clear.
Briony caught it with a band of gold light. Her feet skidded across the boards.
He called down to Daystar and Redshift. “The star and the whistle. Give them to your understudy. She knows how to collect things she hasn't earned.”
“Stop the wall.”
“Bring me the trinkets.”
There were people behind that painted wall. My hands were shaking. I put one flat against my skirt to stop it and felt the hard round edge of the compact through the silk.
I looked at Briony. At the ribbon holding the wall. At the fallen bookshop banner tangled in its wheels.
“All right,” I said.
Tansy stared at me.
“Bring them on cloth. Not in your hands.” I tapped twice inside my wrist. “A new chapter, remember?”
Briony's eyes flicked towards the banner.
She was the one who moved first. Keeping the band of light taut, she unpinned her star and laid it on a torn piece of gold sash. Tansy put the whistle beside it. They brought the little bundle towards me while, overhead, the booth's handles creaked.
Tansy stopped close enough to speak without shouting.
“You'd better be about to do something extremely stupid.”
“Something familiar.”
I took the cloth. Neither trinket touched my skin. Both girls kept their forms.
“We have them,” I called. “Now stop.”
The machinery halted with the painted wall a hand's width from Briony's face. She let her ribbon dissolve.
The costumier climbed onto the rail of his booth. His wings spread, dusty gold against the wrecked plaster, and he drifted down to the stage.
He flew straight over the broken stair. He hadn't needed it at all.
I went behind the fallen banner, pulling its free end across my arms as though I was frightened of dropping the things on the floor. Briony came to my left. Tansy remained beside the scenery ropes to my right.
“The little one first,” the maker said, looking at the whistle's red cord.
I lifted the cloth. The brass whistle gleamed on top of it. Beneath the fold, my fingers closed around the compact.
“You want to wear her?” I asked.
“I want to see what she can really do.”
He reached with his bare hand.
I tapped twice inside my wrist.
Briony looked into his face. So did Tansy. I had done this behind banners, behind a bus shelter, once under a table while a reporter was interviewing the wrong girl. It helped if somebody else was looking at the person you wanted to fool. People liked to be looked at.
I let the red cord slide over the edge of the cloth.
He snatched for it.
I turned my wrist and slapped the compact into his palm.
Black silk struck upwards between us.
My crown vanished. My ordinary shoes hit the stage. For half a breath I was only Romy, with my chipped tooth and the red whistle lying in a fold of cloth against my other wrist.
I grabbed it.
Red light burst through the banner.
Across from me, my own face looked out of the pearl collar. The costumier's antennae and wings had disappeared. He was wearing my curls, my crown, my furious eyes.
Tansy stood by the ropes in her ordinary cropped hair and battered jacket. Briony's hand closed around the sash and the star before either could slide to the floor.
The maker opened his mouth. Even his voice was mine.
“You—”
“Yes,” I said. “It does that.”
He lunged for the whistle.
I jumped. Redshift's legs carried me over his hands and up onto the fallen palace wall. My breath came back. The terrible pull of the mirror had left my chest; whatever he did with it now would cost him, not me.
But when he turned towards Briony, the compact snapped open, ready for the light gathering between her hands.
It still knew her.
I put the whistle between my teeth.
“Don't,” Briony said.
The maker smiled with my chipped tooth.
I played Redshift's first note.
Red light gathered beneath my boots.
The second carried me off the painted wall. The third turned the light into a long comet trail. On the fourth, the spell caught and held me above the stage.
I could feel the fifth waiting in the whistle. The high, clear note that would drive the whole burning tail into him.
The compact opened wide. He lifted it towards me, its naked glass facing the comet.
Briony cast a loop round his wrist. The free length shot back and bound her hands. She kept making it. Dropping to one knee, she leaned back until the gold line jerked taut between them.
“Tansy,” she gasped.
Tansy hauled on the scenery rope.
The ballroom's painted balcony swung down behind his heels, hemming him against the edge of the stage. He flinched, then turned back to me, the mirror braced in front of him.
He tilted the open glass towards my mouth.
I let the fifth note die in my throat.
The comet shuddered. I hung in the same horrible, brilliant pause as the day the monster had hit me with a bench.
I took the whistle out of my mouth and threw it.
No fifth note. No comet strike. Just brass, moving as hard as I could make it move.
It hit the glass with a small, disappointing sound.
Then a crack ran straight across my reflected face.
The crown broke apart. Black silk fell inwards like burnt paper, and the maker's tawny wings burst out behind him.
Briony's snare vanished. Her next ribbon caught him round the knees before he could rise.
I fell.
Without the whistle I couldn't give the stalled comet another note. I had time to regret the throw, and then a band of gold caught me beneath the arms and lowered me into a heap of fallen velvet.
For a little while I sat there, looking at my borrowed red boots.
“Bad,” said Tansy, panting beside me. “Very bad. Terrible technique.”
She held up the whistle in a scrap of curtain. It had a dent across its side.
“Did we win?” I asked.
“You threw my trinket at a trinket.”
“I know.”
“You know there's a proper fifth note?”
I put my head against her shoulder and started laughing. It wasn't a happy sound, but she let me finish it.
Behind her, Briony was wrapping the costumier in the bookshop banner. The words A NEW CHAPTER ran crookedly across his folded wings. He was still talking, very quickly. She tucked the loose edge over his head.
The theatre had stopped moving. The broken stair was still broken. The bookshop sign hung by one bracket, and a long dark gouge crossed the pavement where I'd turned the comet pieces away from the crowd.
The owner was alive. I saw him help a woman out from under a tipped table. He looked at me without recognising me and went to help someone else.
Sirens had reached the far end of the street.
We went behind the remains of the Palace's front curtain. Tansy took the whistle in her bare hand. Redshift moved from me to her, and I was ordinary again.
I picked two pearls out of my hair. They were real. Apparently I got to keep those.
Briony had found the compact among the broken boards. She brought it over on a piece of cloth, though it no longer shone. The mirror was smashed. One side of the black case had folded round the dented hinge.
I couldn't look at it for long.
“I'll tell them what happened,” Briony said. “Stay here a minute.”
But beyond the curtain somebody was calling for the girl who had been at the bookshop. I thought perhaps the owner needed help. I stepped out in my own shoes.
The woman nearest the cordon saw me first.
She looked down at her phone, then up at my face.
“That's her.”
I stopped.
A man beside her turned his screen towards me. Princess Romy filled it, black sleeves spread, a white-hot fragment leaving her hand. The video shook as the bookshop sign broke.
“There,” the woman said. “That's the one.”
An officer was coming towards us. More phones lifted. They had my face from every angle. They had my name, in the costumier's delighted voice. Behind one raised phone, I saw the father holding the little girl in the Daystar cape. He drew her closer.
I went back behind the curtain.
Briony was waiting. She'd heard.
“He was wearing you too,” she said. “We can explain that.”
I nodded. There were going to be explanations. All those cameras, and the ruined sign, and the man pulling his daughter out of my way. Somewhere there was a frame of me smiling into my new mirror, just before the wall came down.
“I can't go out like this yet,” I said.
Briony glanced towards the corridor. Tansy was there with the bound costumier, keeping him well away from the broken machinery.
“Dressing room,” Briony said.
She took me through the surviving side door. The room beyond had a cracked mirror and a rail of old coats. Briony shut the door, unpinned her star, and held it out on her palm.
“Use the side exit,” she said. “Wait for us round the back.”
I didn't take it straight away.
“The catch still works?”
She pressed it. The gold went out of her hair. For a moment it was only my friend standing there, tired and angry and holding a little piece of jewellery.
“Still works,” she said.
I took the star and pressed the point that woke it. Her light spread through me.
Out at the front, someone started calling for Daystar. Other voices took it up. I waited until Briony was safely behind the door, and went out in her face.