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Maxine woke up the same way she did every morning. Rain or shine, work day or weekend.

Cold paperclip tentacles. To the face.

When she was thirteen and this was a new sensation, there'd been screaming. When she'd hit her proper teenage years, there'd been swearing, cursing, and finally, ****** ******* profanity.

It did as much good as swearing at any alarm clock.

Shame. She'd been having such a good dream. It had been... been... something; it had ended in a bright light, that was all she knew. She yawned, rolled out of bed, and blindly groped her way over to the dresser. A pair of sweat pants were dug out; any old shirt was rustled out of her hamper.

It was five in the morning. Fashion hadn't woken up yet.

Outside, her shoes hit pavement, and she ran.

The city looked different that morning. Alive, somehow; new. Like it had just woken up from some long dream, too, and was ready to just be again. It was a clear morning, the sky still dark above her—and for a second, just a second, she could have sworn she saw stars up in the black voids between buildings.

Right. Stars, in New York City? Not until hell froze over, and the world ended.

...The world ended.

The apocalypse.

Now that had been a cool dream. It came back to her in pieces, scenes and colors, textures and smells:

Riding up rubble on the back of—ha!—the back of one of her paper dogs.

God, she was glad they weren't that big in real life. She had enough trouble with the stacks of paper that hounded her ankles; she'd need a swimming pool to take down one of those monsters.

Her and the girls talking about their new home, about what it would look like, down to the stupidest details: what kind of furniture they wanted to steal for their rooms, what kind of drapes they'd hang, whether the kitchen would have an island in the middle or not. They'd all been sitting around a fire, in a lean-to formed by the tilt of a shattered building's wall; they'd been laughing. It was Sveta and Isabel who'd do the main work, of course, but it would be everyone's: their very own fortress. They'd be safe there, and everyone else would steer clear.

In the dream, Miss Bone Bikini and her? BFFs. No wait, even better: Isabel, and all the Amazons, had taken orders from her. Maxine snerked, and turned the corner that took her off the hard pavement of the city sidewalks and into Central Park's broad paths. She'd admit it, if only to herself: even in dreams, she had to have her own way.

Don't forget the zeppelin. How could she forget the zeppelin?

Or the Zephylin, as more than one survivor called it. Usually not to his face. Unless a girl was drunk enough; then she could slur together words, and he could pretend he hadn't heard, if she was paying enough.

Apparently 'Dio' was too boring a name for her subconscious mind. That mercenary Brit she kept running into? De-dubbed. Maybe she'd use that, the next time she saw him. Heh, 'Zephyr.' So her subconscious thought he was a windbag. Really, who was she to argue?

She slowed down to a jog, then a cool down walk. She didn't usually stop on her way back to her apartment, but she'd earned a coffee, right? She'd survived the apocalypse, after all. Not just survived—been a real female entrepreneur. It was a good night's work.

She ducked into a little coffee shop. Ordinarily she didn't talk to strange men at counters, but she was in a good mood, and there was something about him; something familiar. He obviously thought the same about her; she saw the way his eyes kept ducking over, then away. Did she know him from college? Maybe from a calendar signing? Always nice to meet a fan; a little spontaneous PR never hurt a girl.

"Hey, do I—"

He turned to face her fully, then. He had brown curls, but his eyes were gray. Gray as dust that choked and blinded and blotted out the sun for months; gray as crumbled walls that had felt safe when they were both together.

She heard a coffee cup hit the ground, and felt hot drops hitting her legs. She thought it was hers, but hers was still in her hands, its styrofoam sides slowly buckling under her fingers. It was his cup that had dropped.

That was when her morning went to Hell.

"I'm so sorry," he said, and his voice was hoarse. "That's not who I am. I would never—"

"Shut up. Just shut up." She had to get out of there.

"Maxine, wait!"

He knew her name. She'd known his; she'd known his for months that had felt like a lifetime, as the world died around them and something new clawed its way from the corpse. She knew him better than he knew himself. She had to get out of there, before she killed him again.

Her shoes hit pavement, and she ran. She ran fast enough to leave his name behind her, but other things rushed in to fill their place.

The gang. The woman on the bridge, and all the others like her.

She hadn't said a thing. She'd just watched it happen, because she was safe.

Living on her own. Before she found Kate, and Isabel, and Kitra, and Andrea, and all the other Amazons—those days when all she had were herself and a few sheets of growling paper.

Their first raid.

Her second kill.

Her third, her fourth; the day she didn't even think to count anymore.

Her first. The very first person who had died to keep her alive.

She was back at her apartment. She took the stairs up; it wasn't a morning for riding an elevator, alone with her own thoughts. God, she needed a shower; she needed to be clean—

She stepped into her bathroom, and stopped short. Then she laughed; a short explosive hitch of breath.

Speak of the devil.

"Get out of my mirror," the redhead commanded, with all the fire of a future Amazon Queen, "so I can punch you."

Was he real? Or was he just there to haunt her, like the name at the back of her mind? Either way, the jerk needed to get what was coming to him.

Where did he get off, dying for her?

>> “Something on your mind my dear Maxine? He could be very useful don’t you think?”

"Only the most diabolical of thoughts, my dear Syn." She didn't glance up as her fellow Amazon joined her on the porch; instead, she took advantage of the gathering at the boy's cage to properly stare in his direction. She wasn't staring at him; she was just... keeping an eye on things. It was a lazy afternoon, and with a boy-creature all penned up in their backyard, the girls might get a little rowdy.

Or maybe they already had. She sat up a little straighter, craning her neck; was he... having some kind of seizure on the cage floor? His arms were trembling, and she could practically hear his shakey breaths from here. Had one of the gathered women hurt him? Maybe Andrea—those snakes of hers seemed to be getting in a bit close. Or Allison—she hadn't seen any of them touch him, but from this distance, a quiet snipe of ink to the brain would be virtually invisible. Or Isabel: it was her cage, and he was a boy; it was a logical conclusion that she'd seen played out more than once. Kaitlyn was about the only one above suspicion, and that was only because nothing had exploded yet. The tremors in his body looked to be getting worse; seven, eight, niiiiine—

...Or maybe he was just doing push-ups.

Ladies and gent, the Queen had her work cut out for her. If Celeste saw anything like that charming display, she'd be lucky to even afford a shoestring with his hide. It was time to step up, and do what she did best:

Delegate.

>> "Ladies, come on... You said it yourselves, I'm Maxine's 'catch' and if she hasn't told you anything yet, maybe it's because you don't need to know?"

"You heard the cage-boy," Maxine said, standing up and taking a step towards her gals. "I don't think it's any secret; there's something I've been wanting for a long time now." Many was the raid she'd lamented the lack of good lootable shoes. "He's not exactly what I had in mind, but he's here, so he'll due."

A warm little smile crept across her lips. "He's going to need some work before he's fit for my needs. I think... we need to start with a bath."

She was pretty sure that dust brown with sweat streaks wasn't his natural skin tone.

People were not being nearly stupid enough lately. What she needed was a councilman who was hiding his mutation for nefarious ends, or a unicorn whose church was a front for something more than a soup kitchen; an evil assassin laying low at a school, or a dramatic shakeup in the dark underbelly of the mutant supremacist world. Hell, she'd even settle for an expose on the M drug, if something new would just happen with it. But alas, nothing of the sort was brewing in the Big Apple.

What she had was a low-level do gooder in tights. A PR pusher. Honestly, Maxine felt a little dirty.

She had the front desk secretary send the girl on up; at the elevator doors on the nineteenth floor, the red-headed reporter met her charge with the most welcoming of smiles.

"I'm so glad you could make it, Rebecca. You would not believe how excited I am to have you on the show. Can I get you anything before we start? Water, coffee, soda?"

A noose? God, if something didn't go down in this city soon, she'd have to start doing re-runs. The Isabel Kiss special was always good for ratings...

"I'll let you know," the redhead replied without missing a beat, "that she didn't pick you for your keen fashion sense."

Speaking of: as cute as it was that she could make him blush as easily as when he'd first tumbled out of her mirror, the boy was a boy. And she was an upstanding adult citizen, wearing too-tight clothes on a couch in a high school. She wasn't worried about the innocence of the underage eyes that might walk in on them; she was more concerned with the camera phones underaged eyes carried. Any publicity that landed her on the cover of a trashy celebrity magazine was bad publicity.

...Actually, making the cover would be a big step up in the world. She hadn't made it past page nine yet.

"Now, are we going to keep couch snuggling until your girlfriend comes huffing in, or are you going to help a girl raid your closet?"

How old was he, now? Sixteen? Seventeen?

Too to young to gamble, too young to drink, and too young to try playing coy with her.

The last thing she remembered... oh, falling asleep on the couch with him definitely rang a bell. There were a few details he seemed to be dancing around, though; that just made her all the more certain that they were true. Maybe she could refresh his memory a bit.

The redhead scrunched up her freckle-specked nose. "I remember... we were watching a movie." A finger came up, to tap at her chin. "Sleeping Beauty! That was it. And I was... I was... leaning on your shoulder, like this." Demonstrations always helped a girl remember. She wiggled around a bit, just to be comfortable while she thought. "We've... spent the last few days together, haven't we?"

Her voice wasn't like honey; more like... ginger.

"I remember..." Nose scrunched; finger tapped; shoulders wiggled. She met his eyes, and grinned. "I remember you getting owned by a twelve year old."

She was covered in dust. It was on her face, her hands, the back of her neck. It was a light brown; the same color of the parched ground. It stretched out in all directions, broken only by the shallow pits dug around them.

"Careful Rex, the femur of an archaeopteryx is a delicate thing."

Octosaurus Rex held a brush in each of its eight tentacles; it was poised over the newly excavated skeleton, dusting off eons of dirt with painstaking dedication.

"Maxine?" An intern researcher said from behind her, "Maxine ya really should be in your own b... wait. Maxine?"

Her own 'b'? Oh, of course.

"The brachiosaur is already on its way to the museum. Don't—hey!" He poked her. How dare some grad student poke her?

"... please don't freak out on me."

And again! With the poking!

"...but I think ya're back to normal."

Stop. That.

"Maxine?"

"Stop that!" The redhead said, sitting bolt upright, her sleep-mussed hair forming a wild halo around her face. "What school are you from, Berkeley? I'll have you off this dig faster than you... can say... good morning."

"Oh."

Oh. She was... where was she? On a couch. With Mirror, somewhat pinned under her. Which didn't make any sense; after all, she'd gone to sleep in her apartment, and had... the strangest dreams. She was a kid again, but still doing the news, and talking about paleontology, and then she was a paleontologist—

...Except that the first part of that dream had been... awfully realistic. And had ended with her, and Gawain, on the couch, falling asleep.

"I don't freak out," she said. Which, if she remembered right, was a fact they'd already established.