“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t have the fight in me. I’m a warlord at heart, but things never go according to plan.”

“You will never,” J said. His expression twisted with pain, and he bent forward.

She heard the tone of his voice. The words. She told herself that the J she’d known was too kind and too cool to say that, even with grievous wounds.

One point for me, she thought.

No, she deserved to be greedy. Ten points.

“Never… Another… Me. Never. This.”

“You’re not making sense anymore, J,” she said, even though she fully understood his meaning.

It was all she could do not to wipe him from existence. She had to hold back, because—because it would be too easy to destroy him.

She took his legs with a sweep of twisted darkness.

Then she watched, and she waited.

Not fast, like her dad had been. Her mother.

Fast was too kind, if he deserved it. If that five percent of her that doubted this was right, then he deserved the chance to say something that would hurt her and stay with her.

He was silent, but for pained breaths and grunts.

When she was sure it was done, she used her power on the hotel room. She was aggressive, and she was thorough, and coldness became something desperate and mad as she eliminated every trace of evidence, turning blood pools into splinters. She picked her way through it, blasting anything that was recognizable.

In the midst of it, she found one oblong bit of condensed matter. Dense, twisted in space and time until only a kernel remained, while the kernel in her breast had unfolded into something that scared her and fluttered in her chest.

And then, because she was sure police or heroes would be on the way, she ran. No things but what she wore. No bag, no books.

Her thoughts were a blur and her feelings were worse, too smeared and stained to be make sense of.

She was ready to leave Boston.

She was ready to go until she saw the giant wading through the water, as it had done the day prior.

Ashley changed direction.

Judgment was hard and judging time was harder. The giant was like a building in the distance that she kept closing the distance to, where she could have told herself she would be there in five minutes. Five minutes later, she would be saying much the same thing.

Forty-seven or forty-eight employees had worked under her. Then there had been eighteen. Fourteen if she didn’t count the mercenaries.

Then thirteen, because O’Brien had run.

Then twelve. Of those twelve, some had likely arrived, heard the news, and they wouldn’t have turned up tomorrow.