Chapter 1: 01

The book had pride of place on a table at the front of the book store. The wrap-around cover was shiny and flashy, the subtitle promising all sorts of scandal and horror.

Valour Girls: The Shocking Truth Behind a Reality TV Crime

She should have been expecting it. It had been fifteen years after all. And yet, she was surprised – she hadn't thought anyone remembered them. There were much more exciting and scandalous reality stars these days, even if the shows didn't usually end with someone going to prison.

But there she was on the cover, with four other girls, looking frightened and hopeful and small.

She picked the book up, flipped it over in her hands and studied the back cover. By the looks of the quotes on the back it was sensationalist nonsense about supposedly shocking secrets and tragically traumatised children. She rolled her eyes and put it back. She sure didn't feel traumatised.

A hand reached out for another book on the table. Long lacquered blood red fingernails on a graceful hand closed around the latest Haruki Murakami. Maxine's eyes followed the line of the person's arm up to look at the woman's face. She smiled at Maxine and pushed a strand of bleach blonde hair behind one ear.

"Did you, uh, did you watch that show a lot?" the woman asked. She was pretty cute. Gleaming red lipstick, hair in fluffy waves. Her top was a loosely draped blue knit and her jewellery was all that dip-dyed wood stuff that had been popular at the art markets a few years back. Not the trendiest hipster on the block, but the best looking woman in the store.

"Sure, you know, now and then. It was a guilty pleasure." Maxine let her eyelids get low as her lips curled into a smirk. She tossed her fringe out of her face and watched as the woman's eyes followed her movement. Oh, yeah, this woman did not come to talk about trashy entertainment as anything more than a pretence.

"I should stick to one book," the woman said, curling her hand harder around the novel she held, "but I am kind of tempted by that. Who doesn't want to know?"

"It's probably all on Wikipedia," Maxine said.

The blonde laughed an awkward laugh. "I'm so embarrassed. I used to beg my parents to let me watch when I was 13. My favourite was Jill. I thought she was so funny."

That kind of embarrassment meant she had to have been a huge fan. Maybe she had posters of them on her walls back in the day. Maxine had seen a lunch-box with her name on it on eBay once. Ridiculous stuff. She wished she had an excuse to buy it all and glorify in her reality TV past, but that would defeat the purpose of living the most bland, incognito life possible. Her employers wouldn't approve.

"Yeah, Jill was cute," Maxine said. "I had a huge crush on her when I was 12. I loved it when she punched through solid objects. It was the coolest thing ever."

"Really?" The woman laughed. She had a nice laugh. "I mean, I thought she was cool, but I always thought the cute one was Claire. I think her wings sparked my adolescent sexuality crisis."

Maxine breathed into the stuffy air of the bookshop. "Claire, huh? I guess so. She seemed like a nice person. She's probably gone on to be a very sensible accountant or something like that."

"If I could do things like that I don't think I'd be an accountant." The woman bit her lip and tilted her head to the side. Maxine could see a bit of lipstick on her teeth. Still cute, but now Maxine was trying to figure out what that would say about the woman in a personality profile. Messy hair, lipstick on teeth – appearance of indifference to appearance, but did it imply carelessness? She sighed and wished she could turn that part of her brain off.

"Yeah, me either," she said.

"Do you ever wonder what happened to all of them?" The woman waved the book around as she spoke.

None of that would be in that book. At least, nothing about Maxine; any journalist that tried to investigate too deeply into her life would run straight into complicated laws about privacy and the government's ability to make freedom of information requests seem like they'd never get a response. Not that she thought it was particularly hard to find her – she hadn't changed her name, after all, and was still listed in the phone book. Whoever wrote it hadn't even tried to call.

"I think it's just awful, what happened to them," the woman continued. "They must be really messed up. I feel kind of bad that I watched the show, like I was enabling that stuff."

"Don't. They're probably all fine now," Maxine said, no longer in the mood to flirt. "And I bet that book is just about Mr Temple and his unfortunate business dealings."

"Mr Temple?"

"I'm not going to call him Dick. What an unfortunate name.'

The woman laughed, and it was even more awkward than before. "Right? No parent should name their kid that."

Maxine wasn't really sure how to gracefully extricate herself from the conversation.

She looked around the book store, hoping for a distraction. Everything was so crammed in, she could barely see anything, the store bisected by an L-shaped shelf. She looked back at the strange woman, half-heartedly smiled, and looked in the other direction at the harried shop assistant. Having the cash register at the back of the store didn't make a lick of sense.

Most of the other patrons of the store were as could be expected – two uni students in even more layers of black than Maxine was wearing, making fun of the literary fiction titles; an enthusiastic guy in a Firefly T-shirt expounding on the virtues of his favourite space battle series to a bored-looking date; a simply-dressed older woman carrying a stack of women's fiction, with cats and cafes and farms on the spines. But two guys nearing the register wearing baggy clothing, the blond one of them looking surprisingly nervous, didn't fit right into the picture. Maxine could feel her attention narrowing to them as they hissed at each other. One was hiding the shaking of his hands by clutching at his over-large jacket, of that pseudo-military style that had briefly been in around 2001, and was probably coming back again. The other was looking intensely out from under a fringe of dark hair at all the patrons. It didn't bode well.

Maxine turned to suggest to the woman she'd failed at flirting with to get down, just before one of the baggy clothes boys yelled at everyone to, "Get down! This is a hold up."

He took out a gun. Someone in the shop screeched.

Great, just what she needed.

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The nervous man's hands shook an illegal semi-automatic weapon out of his jacket. Maxine put her hands up and started to kneel, not wanting any trouble on her day off.

The woman next to her screeched.

"Hey, it will be fine," Maxine whispered.

"No talking," the dark-haired robber snapped.

Maxine nodded, already tired.

"If you talk, you don't get to live," he threatened.

The shop assistant started to cry.

"Hey, calm down," Maxine said, leaning over the book table.

The gun went off. Maxine felt the bullet tear into her abdomen and lodge somewhere it shouldn't be. A pile of books fell to the floor. For a moment the pain was blinding, white-hot, and she stumbled, but she breathed through it and looked up at the fumbling robbers, both of them increasingly nervous.

"Oh, god, I shot her," the more nervous of the two cried. "We're ruined, Barry. We're done. The cops will put us away forever."

"No, I'm fine," Maxine said. She looked down and her dress was wet, increasingly damp with blood around the wound. Well, this is why she wore black.

"We're in it, now, Chris. We've shot someone. We can't go back," said the other, Barry apparently. He looked like a Barry.

"Oh, god, they shot you," said the woman behind her.

"Seriously, I'm fine," Maxine said, starting to rise from her kneel. "Would I be able to talk to you easily like this if you'd shot me?"

"Where else could the bullet have gone?" Barry asked.

Maxine could feel her body objecting to the presence of the bullet, slowly starting to eject it from her organs. It was tearing again on the way out, pushing through freshly healed flesh.

"You probably just shot a clearance pile of Bukowski novels and did the world a favour," Maxine said. Finally stood up straight.

"Stay back," Chris said, shaking his gun at her again.

Maxine tossed her hair back and moved forward. "Your friend's right, you know. The police won't look kindly on you if you shoot someone, at ten AM in the morning, with an illegal semi-automatic weapon someone obviously smuggled into the country. It's bad enough that you even have it in your possession."

Chris had been the nervous looking one before, but as Maxine advanced, she could see Barry turning nervous, sweat beginning to bead on his skin. He gulped and his hands shook as he leaned toward his friend.

"I mean, really?" she said. "Trying to hold up an independent book-store? They don't even stock Nora Roberts here. They are not making big money. But if you put the firearm down and nobody gets hurt, things won't be so bad for you. Be reasonable."

"I... I..." Chris mumbled, as she got close.

She pressed her hand around his wrist and caught the weapon as he dropped it, then hit Barry hard in the jaw as soon as he tried to move. Barry fell, and slumped over the sales desk. Maxine calmly unloaded the gun.

The bullet finally pushed its way out of her body and dropped on the floor.

In front of her, Chris the robber looked up with shock, his eyes becomingly freakishly round as he gasped. "I did hit you."

She smiled. "Today's your lucky day."

From behind her, the woman wearing the craft necklace stood up and said, "It's you! You're the Amazing Maxine!"

Maxine turned to wink at her. "You're damn right I am."

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