We had a lot to talk about, Plagg and I, when we got back to my room and transformed. I flung myself down on the bed, surrounded by the consoles and pool-tables and widescreen TVs that usually put me in mind of ancient, brooding monoliths when I come to bed at night. But tonight, they were all friends--they were all beautiful.

"Best night ever," I said, in a breathless, grinning rush. "She-danced-with-me-I-made-her-laugh-she-touched-my-arm-she-smells-like-strawberries!"

"Why?" said Plagg, stalking across the bed, too angry to even ask for cheese. "Why didn't you say we'd hang out with her? This could have been our chance to get to know her--find out who she really is!"

Plagg loves her too. He's in my skin when she touches me, and you can't get in the middle of a reaction like that without feeling something.

I sat up, the smile fading. I wanted to dwell on her strawberry-scented hair, and this was an unwelcome distraction.

"Plagg, I'm not going to be another one of the obligations that are driving her crazy. I'm not going to be another favour she can't say no to. I'm going to figure out a way to spend time with her and give something back."

"What are you talking about?" said Plagg. "People don't ask for something back when they're spending time with their friends!"

"Until I know she's not just offering it out of kindness, I'm not going to take her time. But I'll think of something, Plagg. What else have I got to think about?"

***

"I've got it," I said, the next time we were alone together. I don't count the bad guys, or the reporters, or the civilians who've been zapped and turned into grotesque minions of the akuma-victim. Usually, there are so many crashes and screams, so many missiles whizzing through the air, that it provides the perfect cover for a private conversation. And today, at least, we weren't at ground level. We were in a rooftop garden on top of the Japanese Consulate--with a koi pond, and blossom trees, and pits of gravel teased into loops and lines and swirls. It would have been beautifully tranquil if it hadn't been for the Switcher.

That's what he calls himself. He can substitute things for other things in a hurry. It's very disorientating. He touches your arm and you're suddenly standing on the other side of the street, and some terrified traffic-cop is under his hands where you should be.

At that moment, he was using his power to throw handfuls of gravel that turned in mid-air into road signs, bikes, scooters and parked cars. Some of them were occupied, and needed catching before they fell fifty feet onto the Rue Petrarque down below us.

He was a street magician before he was akumatized--dressed in a cloak and top hat, with eerily-spotless white gloves. But magicians don't like it when their tricks are revealed, and this one was willing to embrace real, dark magic to keep the sleight-of-hand stuff private.

I say 'willing'--I really don't know willing they are when Hawkmoth akumatizes them. I've seen one or two of them try to fight it, but they never get very far. This one, though, was not a great guy to begin with. There was not much better nature to appeal to.

"What?" said Ladybug, flinging herself backwards to avoid the Switcher's hands. He needs to touch you with those gloves in order to switch you, so he was coming at us with arms outstretched, like a mummy in an old horror movie.

"Dancing lessons," I said, as if that explained everything.

"What are you talking about?" she snapped, but half-way through, her voice got distant, because his hand had clamped down on her arm and zapped her into the air. A seagull was suddenly screeching and beating its wings in the space where she had been a second before.

She plummeted, but I saw her yo-yo catch on the edge of the rooftop, and she hauled herself up after it.

"That's what we can do in our evenings," I said, edging back from the Switcher's white-gloved hands. "I'm incredibly good, and you could use some practice."

"You said I was fine," she said, momentarily distracted. I jerked her back and the Switcher's hand scythed past, a millimetre away from her cheek.

She kicked him in the stomach, annoyed with herself, and bowled her yo-yo around his hands as he doubled up, binding his wrists together.

She climbed onto his shoulders to pin him down, but he was already bucking and struggling underneath her. He threw her backwards as he stood up, but I used my stick to knock his feet out from under him, and she pulled at his bound hands, reeling him in like a fish.

"How do we get the gloves off him if we can't touch them?" she hissed, out of the corner of her mouth.

She didn't really need an answer. She was already squinting round, assessing our surroundings, wearing the determined pout she always gets on her face when she's thinking. She would use her lucky charm soon, and I'd only have five minutes to reason with her before she skipped away.

Here's another thing she does--and it's slightly the Ladybug magic, and slightly the inimitable genius of the girl under the mask. She builds things with the world around her--with the debris of a fight, with railings and shop-awnings and sculptures, with bad guys and pigeons and innocent bystanders. She sees the trajectory they're going to take and knows just how to pull them together for her advantage. She assembles the moment like a jigsaw puzzle, and when you see the final picture, it's so awesome that it strikes you dumb. You can't help but love her.

What does she do with that fertile imagination when she's Marinette? She imagines all the hideous ways in which things could go wrong. She imagines how people are going to look at her and judge her. But she brings the same kind of magic to bear on that. Because she imagines it, because she pulls it all together in her head, it happens. She doesn't want it to, but her restless mind won't stop building.

Anyway, I didn't know that then. And I'd better not go too far down that road. When I talk about Marinette's despair, we're getting perilously close to The End, and I only want to talk about that once.

"The best part is," I continued, as she reeled the Switcher in, "nobody in your real life would be suspicious, because you really would be learning dancing. You could show them."

"Kitty, I don't think this is really the best time."

"And there'll be a dance," I continued, as if I hadn't heard her. "There's always a dance, whatever school you go to. Some end-of-term thing where you have to dress up and take a partner. I could coach you for it."

The Switcher was panicking now, flailing around, knocking over potted ferns and turning them into cats.

"I wasn't going to go," she said sniffily. "I'm too busy. And there's nobody I want to go with who's going to ask me."

"Who do you want to go with who isn't going to ask you?" I demanded. But I shut my eyes and tried to be calm. She was a pretty girl with a beating heart and there was bound to be somebody she liked. I had always known that.

Trying to ignore the sour taste in my mouth, I said, "Well, maybe if he saw how good at dancing you were, he would ask you."

She looked up at me, and then down at the Switcher, who gave her a look of silent rage but also--almost imperceptibly--shrugged.

That was the last straw for Ladybug. She's touchy enough about me getting involved in her private life. When the supervillains do it, something tends to snap.

She yanked the Switcher off his feet with the yo-yo string, pinned his wrists under her boot, and then cried out, "Lucky charm!"

The magic did its thing, and into her hands dropped a red-and-black spotted lighter--the kind you don't see so much anymore, since vaping came to town.

She looked at me again--tentatively this time, as if asking permission. I shrugged. It would be pretty cruel, but it would definitely get his gloves off. And any burns would disappear once she'd captured the akuma and brought everything back to normal. But this wasn't the first time I'd suspected that the nature of the lucky charm worked in accordance with her mood.

Still, I can't judge. There's nothing cute and cuddly about the Cataclysm.

"I'm not going to hurt him," she said, as if she was trying to convince herself.

"I know you're not."

But we shouldn't have taken our eyes off him. The Switcher had managed to squirm round under her boots and get his palms flat on the rooftop. He glared into the distance, where the sun was twinkling through the girders of the Eiffel Tower. And then we were there—or rather, it was here, rising out of the Rue Petrarque, and our peaceful little rooftop garden was over there, looking diminutive in the middle of the Champ de Mars.

We staggered, trying to find a footing between the rivets and girders that stretched up in an endless metal cage above us.

I don't know why people always try to kill us with the Eiffel Tower. I guess it is pretty eye-catching. But if you'd seen Ladybug zipping between its levels like a spider, weaving webs and nets and traps with the string of that yo-yo, you'd think twice before using it against her. It's her element.

"OK," she said, trying to steady herself and shout above the howling wind. We were a lot higher up than we had been in the rooftop garden. "OK. So he's got to be touching one object and looking at the other. Then he can switch them."

She didn't need to say anything else. I've been listening to her plans for so long that I can fill in the details in my head. I saluted and pushed off with my stick, working my way up and over the girder where the Switcher stood. Then I dropped down on his shoulders and rammed his hat down over his eyes.

He lurched backwards and we fell, flailing, but the yo-yo caught his wrist and he dangled by it, one glove completely exposed, his hat still covering his eyes. I was hanging by his legs but I climbed up carefully, reaching for his other arm and pulling it wide so that he couldn't touch anything.

"Any time you're ready, milady," I said, through gritted teeth.

She was whistling as she came over the girder towards us--actually whistling, as if she had all the time in the world. She knelt down and touched the lighter to the hand he was dangling by.

"I've always wanted to learn how to dance," she murmured, as she struggled to get the fire to catch. I imagined his gloves were pretty damp by now. "I'll take the lessons, but not the coaching. I'm not going to take romantic advice from you."

"Not going to offer it," I said, climbing onto the girder and pulling the Switcher after me. The sour taste was still in my mouth.

She somersaulted over us, torching the Switcher's other glove on her way past. He was already crying out, but not really in pain—more in irritation. It sounded like Hawkmoth's voice to me, not that I've heard him use it often. A hiss of frustration, too harsh for words. The knowledge that he'd lost again and was no closer to—well, whatever it is he wants our miraculouses for. And every defeat makes him that little bit more desperate.

The Switcher was pawing at his hands, trying to strip the gloves off without touching the flames. But he didn't even have to. The fabric was breaking up, singeing away as we watched, and the akuma slipped out as it crumbled, rising from the ashes like a very suspect phoenix.

His skin was pretty much unscathed where the gloves had been, and I wondered if they had been miraculous Ladybug flames--tight and controlled and judicious, just like she was. As streamlined as a scalpel.

After she had captured the akuma, after the miraculous red rush—the thing that always looks like a storm of flower petals—had whipped round us, ruffling our hair, restoring everything to its proper place, after we had bumped fists and said 'Pound it', we were back in the rooftop garden, with an ordinary street magician looking sad and disoriented at our feet.

"Week-nights," I said, before she could even lower her fist. "Eight o'clock. I'll find a place."

It was worth it just to see the look of panic on her face.

"What? I said I could manage an hour a week! Thursday nights or nothing."

I regarded her critically, like a proper dancing-master, as if I was sizing her up and finding everything wanting. It made her giggle and glare at the same time.

"Tuesdays and Thursdays," I said. "It's going to take lots of work, Cinderella, if you want to go to that ball."

She sighed. "You'll get sick of me and my two left feet."

"Two evenings a week with me as your teacher?" I said, leaning casually on my stick. "You won't have two left feet for very long."