Three nights later, Meihua stood on the rooftop of the Ping An Finance Centre, the tallest building in Shenzhen. Below her, the city was a river of neon and headlights, a modern myth of steel and glass. But above her, the sky was wrong. The stars were blinking out one by one, replaced by a single, terrible eye the color of spoiled tea.

After school, Meihua didn’t go to bubble tea with her friends. She took the metro to a nondescript office building in the Nanshan district, rode the elevator to the 14th floor (there was no 13th), and walked into a waiting room that looked like a cross between a DMV and a Daoist temple.

The problem with being a magical girl in China wasn’t the monsters. It was the paperwork.