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There were a couple of things you could buy at the Crystal Academy tuckshop, but candy wasn't one of them. The girl groupthink behind National Health Month had brightly announced that, in the spirit of healthy eating, the sweet things on offer for the month of March would be sugarfree or carob (or an apple!). This enforced Lent of diet chocolate had seen a lot of the girls, wrathful as bears, suddenly wanting to make illicit stockpiles even if they weren't fond of the stuff in the first place.

It was only going to last a month. Hero Barrett wasn't even that fond of chocolate. Her vice was the tin of condensed milk and Graham crackers that Miriam regarded with a sickened eyebrow every time she saw it in the communal fridge, her only food group sin: otherwise it was the spoonful of sugar in her black coffee, strawberry jam on her toast. When she indulged her sweet tooth it was mornings or midnights, and she never saw hide nor hair of a Three Musketeers bar.

The First Eleven girls' field-hockey team was set to play Sacred Heart High on Monday. Their goalie was Lisa Avellan, who was eccentric at the best of times but brilliant at all the others: Hero had modestly turned down captain in order to play as center, but it was Hero Lisa had come to in the end. There was a terrible, hungry look in her eyes, that Sunday morning.

"Jellybeans," she said.

Hero had been a bit baffled, looking up from her biology textbook to see if Lisa was making non-sequiturs for the fun of it. There was no humour there. "What?"

"Jellybeans," said Lisa. "We need jellybeans for half-time."

"We've got glucose tablets."

"Hero," said the goalie. "I am telling you that I let in three goals last time because you gave me glucose tablets, not jellybeans. I'm willing to eat most jellybeans, except the white ones. But I'm not eating glucose tablets." She was flexing her fingers, jiggling the short crisp curls on her head. "We need jellybeans."

"Avellan, there's no discernable difference -- "

"Hero."

She closed the textbook and turned to Lisa with a little more attention now, rapping her fingers on the desk briefly before looking her up and down. Lisa was built on square, spare lines. She was easily one of the top three players on the team, and though she loathed to admit it she was a better hockey player than Hero was. Some unknown God had seen fit to give Lisa Avellan the gift to sit in a goal and stolidly let no ball through like an overzealous border patrol. "So you're saying this is psychological," she said.

"No, I'm saying I need jellybeans at halftime and nobody has any," said Lisa, "and Danny's friends with the Healthers and said I had to have glucose tabs until April. So I'm telling you this: if I don't get any jellybeans at first whistle tomorrow, I'm going to be a wreck by second half."

Hero Adelaide Barrett disliked Sacred Heart High School. Hero Adelaide Barrett wanted to win. Hero Barrett, poker-faced, fired off a salute.

"Mission accepted."

Hero Adelaide Barrett went off that afternoon to the corner minimart.

The neighbourhood was nice, so there were a couple of brands to choose from. There was the danger that generic jellybeans wouldn't satisfy Lisa's bizarre craving -- why, was the question that needed to be asked, just why -- so she ended up holding a packet of Jelly Belly and tilting it back and forth to see the ratio of white to every other colour. She wasn't certain what flavour white was, actually. What was white, pineapple? Marshmallow? Toothpaste? Hero was still examining the rainbow of colours with a critical eye, wondering about red, when the gunmen came in.

The mart had been empty. Somebody yelled, "Everybody down," with a tone that brooked no argument and a gun that held no debate, and she dropped to a crouch in the aisle -- nearly empty, through the slats in the shelves she could see someone else huddled in the same position on the other side.

"Please -- "

"I'm not fooling. These are guns."

As proof there was a gunshot. Whoever had been behind the counter didn't scream: there was just a gurgling, indrawn breath of ******** you do that for?"

"Pushing the button, he was pushing the button!"

Some distant portion of her brain thought this was sad, for some reason. The rest of her body had frozen up, adrenaline pooling at her joints and her heart hammering out a mistimed staccato beat. "Get down," one of the gunmen was saying, and there were strangled whimpers from another corner of the small shop. They were young whimpers and her brain identified them as probably children buying candy too, for reasons other than satiating rock-star goalkeepers. Her short-term memory recalled a man at the milk fridge. At that point Hero let go of her fear and became angry instead.

One of the gunmen, his balaclava a cliché and his shotgun standard, was urging the man behind the counter to open up the till and put in the money. They had already shot him. He was doing this slowly. The other one was saying, "Smokes," but it was turning out to be a laborious process -- there were no windows to the outside world, so people were walking up and down the street and probably oblivious to the plight of everyone inside. The gunmen were agitated. If you were wearing balaclavas, had guns and had brought a sack, you expected things to go quicker than this. It smelled of careful preparation and greenhorn execution.

They were still talking in hushed voices --

"There's only like a couple hundred bucks in there."

"Gotta be more. Check the back." Louder. "Nobody move."

The second gunman was in the back now, crashing around. The aisles blocked the view of the checkout counter, but there were audible "Please," sounds coming from the man at the till. His voice was wet and his breath was coming fast. This was taking too long. Everybody knew it. One of the kids (and it was a child) was crying, cringing. The gunman changed his mind like a teacher who didn't have control over a maths session: "Everybody up! I want everybody with their hands up. No cellphones, okay? Hands up. I want to see everybody."

Standing, Hero could see that the owner of the minimart had been shot in the shoulder, and he was leaning over the counter with a whey-coloured face leaking blood like a juiced orange. The second gunman was patting him over for keys, taking them from his pocket, taking an untidy bunch that had been locked around his neck. The nose of the gun swung in a slow, unsteady arc around the small room. Five other people, she counted.

"Wallets out," he suddenly said.

"That man is dying," said Hero.

The gun swung around to her, but not with a lot of threat behind it. It was simply attention. She kept on, steady: "I've got a first aid certificate. I don't have a weapon. If you'd just let me -- "

"I want your wallet and you to shut the ******** up."

The girl in the aisle next to Hero who'd been on her haunches had long, smoke-blue hair, and looked to be about her age. The two other kids were in t-shirts and winter coats. There was the man she'd remembered with the milk, and there was an older woman who looked as though she was having trouble remembering how to breathe. The neighbourhood was a nice neighbourhood, and you didn't have any fact files for how to behave when your source of People magazine and Baby Ruth bars became the site of aggravated assault. She said again, slowly: "I know first aid. You've probably hit his artery. That man's going to die."

"Shut up."

The girl next to her had an even, clear voice that rang out like a bell: "This state still has the death penalty."

Shut up wasn't fitting the bill any more.

A few miles away, in Hillworth Grammar, Dylan Rasmussen was in his room. This was news, or would've been if anyone cared to notice. At three on a Sunday afternoon, there were dozens of places Dylan was more likely to be than in his room. Most of them were at least a dozen miles away from Hillworth. No one who wanted to find him would've gone looking there, which was perhaps how he'd achieved as much uninterrupted reading time as he had. Nonetheless he was there, and he was there in time to feel the impact.

He blinked. The Canterbury Tales fell out of his hand and onto the floorboards next to his bed as he grabbed for his arm in pain and surprise: a force had slammed into his upper right arm hard enough to pin him to his bed and knock his English book out of his hand, followed by a terrible, stabbing pain. It was gone a moment later. For a moment he thought, drug reaction, and considered if he'd stuck any needles into the site of the reaction anytime recently -- though it was a little high, admittedly --

There was a candelabra on the floor of Nehelenia's room and her face was crumpled and her face was in her hands, and he had his arms around her. He'd come. He'd come a half a minute too late. He hadn't known what was going on.

Dylan stepped on The Canterbury Tales as he got out of bed and crossed the room to the full-length mirror in a few strides. Along the way he rained black petals, and once he was there he wondered briefly if he should find Jesse -- but no, no time. There wasn't any time. He stared at himself in the mirror: not really at himself, but at what was on the other side, or what could be on the other side. There were full-length mirrors in Meadowview, he knew there were: goddamn it, if he'd gone to school now he would've taken notice -- there weren't any in the boys' locker room, that much he knew. The girls' locker room -- not this time. The nurse's office? Where was Cora? She'd said she was going out for milk -- how did she manage to -- going out for milk --

Cavalier Alexandros settled on his destination and cast one more look over his shoulder, pulling an arrow free from thin air as he did. He pulled up his sleeve and slashed a shallow line down the skin of his left arm with the arrow's point. I'm coming.

Then he started running -- and kept on running even when the silver surface turned to liquid and swallowed him whole.

Some distance away, but not quite as much distance as Hillworth Grammar, Dr. Perry Westerman was treated to a very odd sight. Alexandros had been running when he entered the mirror and thus came running out of it and into the biology lab: which, on a Sunday, he had hastily presumed would be empty. Being proven wrong did not cause him to stop running.

"Sorry, Dr. Westerman," he called out as he sprinted by the dumbstruck biology teacher and out the classroom door, the location of which two years of attendance at Meadowview had thankfully familiarized him. The animal-skull-decorated door slammed open and smacked back and forth on its hinges as he ran down the hallway, taking what he remembered as the fastest distance between two points, the points being his current location and "out" -- the halls were not full of people, thankfully, but he heard a murmur of voices from the direction of the locker room and skidded to a halt, caught his balance and turned right. It was an odd case of deja vu: he dimly remembered that he was about to pass his own former locker. A janitor stared at him as he ran by. Oh, well. Nobody believed janitors.

He was getting a little winded. He spied a pair of double doors and took a deep breath for a final sprint that took him out both at the same time (in the case that one was locked, which was possible) and onto the sidewalk outside. There were a few people in the parking lot, who promptly stared at him. He took the moment to catch his breath and gain his bearings: he was on Collingswood Street, he knew his way around Meadowview, surely -- of course, his family had never lived around Meadowview, but that didn't stop him from -- actually, it entirely stopped him from knowing where one would buy milk around Meadowview.

There was a strip mall near the intersection of Collingswood and Clark. It was better than nothing.

Alexandros took off running down the street. A little girl eating a candybar pointed at him and shouted "Senshi! Senshi!" but he hadn't the time to correct her, so he just tossed her a smart salute and sprinted past.

"I'll bring it if you let me see to that man," said Hero.

"This isn't a negotiation," said one of the gunmen, the first one, but the second one said: "Wait. Just do it. I'm gonna lever open that god damned safe."

So maybe we need an ambulance had kicked in, too. "Slowly," he said, and Hero did it slowly, bent down and picked up the unobtrusive blue Nokia to furtively disconnect the call. The other girl acquiesced when she moved to sling one arm over her shoulder, her blue eyes communicating I'm not that hurt -- but girl in one arm, phone in the other, they made their limping way over behind the counter.

"Everyone act real normal and shut up," said the first gunman, "or I will just shoot that ******** point blank."

He had taken the cellphone, eyed it up and squashed down the off key until it bleeped into shutdown mode. Huddled over the shot shopkeeper, Hero waited until the second gunman made his way into the back and the first one barricaded himself behind a gum display -- gun still wavering from head to head like eenie, meenie, miney, mo. There was blood on the floor, puddles of it. Hero was taking off her jacket to wrap around the man's shoulders. He was lying back against the wall and didn't seem to want to be moved.

"Don't elevate his legs," said the other girl, without moving her lips.

They were trying to staunch the wound. There was a lot of it. The gun kept on swinging their way as well, every so often, as though to simply remind them that it was there: outside people obviously strolled past but the gunman had flipped the sign on the window to say Back In Ten Minutes.

"There's not much we can do," she said back, her lips moving as minimally as they could. Their heads were bent together over the man's chest. Hero took his hand in her hand and squeezed it, and after a few moment she received back a faint, limp squeeze in return.

The gunman's attention was elsewhere. His hands were shaking from adrenaline or -- something else, and at the other girl Hero mouthed, high? Mute charades didn't seem to work, so she mouthed again: Drugs?

The dark-haired girl looked up in assessment, then returned a confident shake of her head no -- whether this confidence was borne of some experience or was more of her normal mode of operating was unclear, but she didn't seem to have any particular first aid experience. She kept at trying to staunch the wound with her good hand.

One of the robbers was looking for something to try and pry the safe open with, and the other was now going around collecting wallets. There weren't many wallets: there was the older man, and the two children. The two children, shaking furiously, dumped small handfuls of coins into the robber's open hand -- to which he said, "<********>," and stepped away.

"Loop my umbrella around your wrist," the girl was whispering to Hero. She pulled her hand away from the dying man's injury long enough to slide the wrist-strap off her blood-soaked hand, and used her knee to shove the umbrella over against Hero's own shin. "In case you need it."

Hero did so -- but answered, "Let's keep him stable." The man's life was a higher priority than the contents of the register or the back safe, and if, as they both hoped, the police were on their way, their best option was to sit tight. One travel umbrella versus two guns: not hard to do the math on that.

One of the gunmen was bent over a shelf near the door, trying to pull out one of its support bars from underneath while occasional bags of potato chips fell from above and rolled over his shoulder to the floor, at the same time that two things happened. First, the other gunman called out, "I think I found the keys!" and withdrew his hand from beneath the register. Second, a bell jingled over the door as it suddenly burst open.

It was at this point that the second gunman came out of the back rooms with a dented crowbar and some keys.

A lot of things happened at once. One look at his suddenly milky-eyed, unresponsive companion and he took aim at the young man in the cape instead: the young man in the cape's position as a possible Negaverse agent second to everything, Hero Barrett took her blood-sticky umbrella and smashed it down hard into the man's arm. She was up on her feet and using momentum to struggle his arm against his chest, pinning it away as she forced him into a wall -- he had the better weight, and with his free hand he was quick enough to scrape the keys over her collarbone. She window-washed the edge of her shoe over his shin, but with another push she'd ricocheted back against the countertop.

But the blue-haired girl was already there, even with one arm useless and soggy with blood. They bookended him, both going for the gun -- three hands, going for the gun -- and the young man raised his bow, took aim at the space they'd created and shot the second gunman in the chest.

There was no blood. He just suddenly went a little limp, dozy, and the gun slipped away and into Hero's fingers where she locked on the safety -- grasped it with both hands and swung it around to the fair-haired, fey young man anyway. She was breathing hard. He was breathing hard. He looked bewildered more than offended.

"Call the ambulance!" Her voice clattered through the superette. She sounded a little hysterical, highly ramped-up; that was embarrassing. Hero realised that she was also being ridiculous, because the boy was lowering his bow immediately in the universal courtly gesture of oh dear, you have a gun.

Hero lowered the gun; in response the archer switched his bow to his other hand and started looking around the store for something. His eyes fixed on the unisex restroom in the back. That found, he looked back at the group of people -- at Hero, at the wounded man, at the other people in the store, but mostly at the dark-haired girl. He looked like he was considering what to say. The dark-haired girl looked back at him with a curiously stern look: a curiously forced stern look.

Sirens blared from outside. It turned out that Riverina Street wasn't too hard to find after all.

The archer glanced outside, at his only way out, which was currently in the process of being blocked by police cars. He turned and picked his way to the other side of the store, towards the doors; along the way he passed Hero and the dark-haired girl and paused.

He reached into his sleeve. Hero flinched -- but what he pulled out was a black rose, and as she watched he tucked it behind the dark-haired girl's ear.

"You'll pardon me, ma'am," he said, and grinned, and then turned and dashed into the unisex bathroom. It was at this point that the first police officer burst in.

"I usually hear 'stubborn,' " she confided with a shrug and a half-smile, as though sharing a private laugh about something most people didn't understand. "It's nice to meet you, Hero -- I'm Corinna Grant. But just Cora's fine."

She stood up, having a look at Hero that made her feel a bit uncomfortable, like she was analyzing a racehorse. "You really impressed me, you know," Corinna said. "That's why I asked to see you. Are you -- "

They both looked over to the doorway, where a flaxen-haired high schooler stood with a bottle of Tazo iced tea in either hand. He didn't look like any kind of relation to Cora, who was petite with very thick, dark hair. He smiled placidly at Hero like this was all just a friendly social call.

The boy tucked one bottle under his arm and uncapped the other, holding it out for Cora with a slight flourish. "Thanks so much, baby, I was dying," she answered.