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Corinna was pacing back and forth in her room. She was, by nature, often an agitated person, prone to pacing, brooding, stewing, and any other number of dark and ponderous ways of expressing her mood. But on a Saturday night, with Veronica sitting by on Cora's bed with a pillow bunched in her lap, Cora paced back and forth like a zoo exhibit and felt more off than usual. She was nervous.

She wasn't accustomed to feeling nervous, or if she did, it was about tedious, everyday sorts of things, occasionally emotional matters -- never matters of state. This was a matter of state -- but it was also emotional, no use lying to herself about that. Corinna despised lying, including the self-directed variety. But it had been a stressful past few days -- from the comet to the investigation to running afoul of the Dream Priest himself, in the flesh, just earlier that day. Corinna wasn't at her best.

She'd thought about what she was going to say to Ronnie -- had practiced it when her parents were out picking up hoagies for an early dinner, even. Still she hesitated. She was not a person who hesitated: this in itself was a telling symptom that she wasn't feeling quite right. She ate a handful of popcorn, but all this did was make Corinna feel guilty for stalling.

"Veronica," she said slowly, "Suppose you were involved in something very important, and countless lives were depending on you. And say you needed help, but you couldn't directly ask someone for help because once you explained things to them, they'd have to accept or you'd have to kill them. Don't make a face at me, just -- listen. This help would be -- life-threatening. Permanent. A -- a very big change. What would you do -- in that situation?" Corinna paced still, staring at the floor, at the motion of her fuzzy-slippered feet.

"No," Corinna snapped, shoving her bodily backward so that Ronnie fell back into a seated position on the bed again, baffled. "Listen to me, Ronnie. I need you to listen to me. You're my friend, my best friend. It's important to me that you know I do not enjoy this." She stared down at her, hard, with a fair amount of frenzy glowing in her bright blue eyes.

"I know how you feel about Dylan -- this has nothing to do with him. And I know you love me enough to want to help me if I have a problem, which I do." Corinna wasn't completely stupid, though she sometimes let it slide if her loved ones found her a little more facile, a little more dense than she was. She might not have any friends otherwise. "Don't try to step around me on this, Ronnie -- I'm giving you as much latitude as I possibly can."

Corinna stepped back, but her stare was unrelenting. "I need to know if you love me so much that you'd die for me, that you'd become someone else -- not theoretically, literally. I need to know and -- good lord, you're seventeen -- I have no idea how I can possibly expect you to know that yourself."

She crossed over to the window, parting the curtains to look away. To look to the moon. She shivered -- terrified of what her friend might say. She was frightened of the possibility that Veronica might refuse, that she might say she didn't love her enough to lose herself for the sake of what Corinna needed her to be. And then again, she was frightened that she wouldn't refuse -- that she did love her that much, and all Corinna was going to do was destroy her.

"Tell me if you love me enough to give up your life," she ordered, her voice drawn taut. "Yes or no."

Veronica watched the back of her head drop as she slumped forward, her forehead against the windowpane and both of her hands braced against the sill. Something had drained out of her, leaving not relief but resignation in its wake. When she turned back to face Veronica, her eyes were shining. "Alright," Corinna said, "alright."

She didn't walk back over to where her friend was seated, as she might've expected, but instead crossed over to the full-length mirror in one corner of her room that was raised on cherrywood legs and sturdily framed. "Come here," she said, holding out her hand, her small palm open. Veronica rose and moved to where she stood, a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She put her hand in Corinna's, and for a moment, they just stood there while the smaller girl stared at the two of them reflected back, side-by-side.

Slowly, she reached out her free hand, and her delicate fingers brushed against the glass. The reflection in the mirror rippled like water and changed as it settled, until it looked like Corinna and Veronica were suddenly standing somewhere else, no longer in the fussily decorated bedroom of Corinna Grant. The desklamp on the nightstand next to them said otherwise, of course -- they had gone nowhere.

In the mirror, the two girls appeared unchanged, and lit by warm yellow lamplight. But stretching out behind them was a field of dark grass and a deep, starry sky full of strange, backward constellations; it was night in the mirror just as it was here.

Silhouetted black against the deep indigo of the sky, speckled with the orange pinpricks of torchlight, was a tall castle in the old-fashioned, storybook style. Little blurs of black, tiny people, marched the ramparts between parapets, everything a perfect movie scene. Corinna's face in the mirror was full of a sad, strange longing as she watched it -- finally, in a faroff voice, she said, "this is my true home, Ronnie. I'm not from your world." She was holding onto Veronica's hand tightly now, as though afraid she might run away, might not believe her if she let go. "We come from a place on the other side of the mirror, from an Earth where Alexandros -- Dylan -- is a crown prince, and a moon where I am a queen."

Corinna changed in the mirror, very briefly -- her long hair was longer, a deep indigo cascade of waves that tumbled down to the floor, past the boundaries of her mirror. There was a black diadem on her forehead and woven up into her hair, and her eyes -- the serious, staring eyes that Veronica was so used to had gone gold at the center, inhumanly lit from within. Her tanktop and plaid flannel boxers were a dress in satiny black silk, overlaid with antique lace -- then all that faded, and there was Corinna just as she had been a moment ago, in her fuzzy pom-pom slippers. The images were starting to feel overwhelming; her hand shook.

"My mother died when I was born," Corinna went on ruthlessly, "and my father was killed later the same year. I've been queen since that time; I never knew my parents. My advisor -- my guardian -- Zirconia -- was to rule as regent in my stead until I came of age, but it was difficult going -- for us both, I suppose. The cats are -- an old race, an alien race, and they hold sacred posts within the kingdom. They are seers with great magic, and they serve closely alongside the sailor soldiers and royalty, but their appointed posts are as -- viziers, you would say. They don't fight, they don't rule, and so Zirconia, who was not human, was -- not well accepted.

"For my part, I was a lonely child, looking back. But for my part, I can't make excuses: there are no excuses significantly large for it. I became something very awful -- we both did, Zirconia and I -- I did terrible things, Veronica. And when I had consumed everything within my reach, laid waste to my kingdom and the kingdom on the innocent Earth down below, then, at last, I looked through my mirror to this world, the White Moon and the White Earth, and they were mine for the taking too. I thought.

"Your world has so much more magic than you know, Ronnie. There's a prince here too, a prince of Earth, as dark-haired as Alexandros is fair, and a princess of the Moon as fair as I am dark. They saved this world from what I would've done to it . . . they saved me, too. They gave to me what, by rights, no one else is ever given in the whole of the world: a true second chance. By their magic they cast me back through the mirror, back to my childhood, to let me do everything again. Do everything better. And I've tried. With everything I am, from each moment to the next, I swear to you I have tried to be better than I was before.

"I think I even was, you know. I think I was doing fairly well. I made friends, and I loved them very much. They understood me. It was -- on the whole, I guess it was just -- a happy time.

"That all changed. The princess of the White Moon came through my mirror without warning, and she stole the Great Crystal, the Marcasite Crystal, that sits as the source of all my magic. She fled, trying to destroy my mirror so I couldn't follow, but that was, somehow, beyond her power.

"My kingdom is vulnerable if I don't have the power to defend it -- and without the Marcasite Crystal, I don't have much power at all. And so, at the limits of the magic at our disposal, Alexandros and I sent our souls across the mirror and backward through time, to summon our guardians when the time came, to find the princess of the White Moon when she returned to Earth, and take back what was stolen. Now we're calling our banners, because we believe she's here."

She turned away from the mirror, let go of Veronica's hand and reached up to lay her fingers against the side of her best friend's face, instead. "I need you to be one of my bannermen, Ronnie. I need you to be my Captain. And I know none of this means anything to you, I know it all sounds unreal, but -- it's your right to know what's going to happen, and why."

She stepped backward a few paces. "Don't run away," Corinna told her quietly. "I'd sooner die than kill you, but it's my responsibility to do otherwise. I'll kill you if you run."

Veronica had never imagined even the possibility that tiny Corinna would be physically capable of killing her, even in her imagined scenarios where everyone Veronica knew had become a cannibalistic zombie. Now she looked dead serious, and worse, she looked as though she was entirely certain she was capable of it.

Corinna held up a slightly gaudy gold compact, and said the incantation, "Cosmic Moon Power, Make Up!" There was a flurry of black ribbons, and the glow of old magic in the air, and then the sailor soldier had taken the place of the schoolgirl. Corinna Grant was but one aspect of the whole.

"I am Nehelenia, the first of my name, Queen of the Black Moon, lady regent of the Tranquil Sea, holder of the Marcasite Crystal, current bearer of the title of Sailor Selene, Soldier of the Mirror. By my divine right I carve a place for you at my side, a place that once was and will be again. Aphrodite."

Sailor Selene shimmered in the golden lamplight.

"Ronnie," she said in a low voice, "look behind you."

Sailor Selene bent towards her first, closest, most loyal retainer, the captain of her guard. There was an uncommon gentleness, a sense of loving regard, in the gesture -- she reached out with both hands and led Aphrodite back to her feet, hands cupped beneath her elbows. "You've never yet failed me," she soothed in a soft voice. "Never. But now I need you as much as ever -- and there may not be much time. She may already be here."

Selene took a step -- the mirror that had drawn in Veronica disappeared, leaving only the cherrywood mirror that stood on the floor behind it. She settled herself on the hope chest at the foot of her bed, creamy ribbons trailing loosely around her dainty shoes.

"I ran into the unicorn at the park today -- you remember I told you about the unicorn?" She looked agitated, suddenly. Nervous, preoccupied. "He's hidden himself in the body of a girl our age, the redhead from that group of bad carolers? That does seem like just his sort of thing." She picked at the brass splinterguard on the nearest corner of the hope chest, running her fingernail around the edges of it. "He could be hiding her -- he wouldn't say."