She let Bonesaw move her arm, putting it down on the table. She would cooperate until there was an opening.

A heavy impact at her arm made her legs buckle, sharp pain shooting up to her shoulder and neck. A cleaver. Bonesaw had brought down a cleaver on her forearm. It had sunken into the bone.

Ashley reached around with her other hand, and didn’t make it the full distance. Jack moved his hand, and the skin of Ashley’s arm split.

A razor blade gleamed in the dimly lit living room. Jack had been holding it between two fingers.

Bonesaw hauled the cleaver out, and Ashley dropped to her knees from the pain. The cleaver came down again, and cut the rest of the way through the bone.

She’d hesitated, and it had cost her. When dealing with people like this, like Accord, she couldn’t afford any weakness, and yet the weakness was built-in.

Jack drew and swung a cleaver of his own.

Ashley was aware of Bonesaw saying ‘thank you’, and of the fact that there were words that followed that statement. She didn’t register them.

Her consciousness slipped away, in shock, the lingering exhaustion of her recent ailment, and the long exhaustion of the past several years.

She’d hesitated. She’d gone too long between the start and the end of this encounter without considering the task she needed to accomplish. She’d wanted what Jack was selling to her, and now she would have it.

☽

Dreams. Incoherence.

Too much was still vague.

There had been a time when there were the bad days and the days she dreaded the bad days.

Then… just bad days.

Ashley stared at her mangled hands as she sat in the car. Her fingers were blades, long enough that she could stand up and have her fingertips touch the ground. Her power was wholly under her control and yet she still couldn’t reach out to touch anything.

Jack, as far as she could tell, was keeping to his promise. He’d told her that if she had something she wanted or didn’t want, she only had to ask.

That they’d taken away her ability to speak was the monkey’s paw part of it. Jack had made a comment about her tendency to rant and rave, and he’d said that had to go, with all the other parts of her act.

In exchange, though it wasn’t an exchange she’d asked for, they’d let her communicate their destination. She climbed out of the car.

Her emotions flailed through her like taut steel cables that had been cut, whipping out in every direction, but nothing changed.

The building was nice.

“After you,” Jack told her.

She moved her hand, her fingers flexing. The components locked up before she could position to blast Jack.

“You wanted this,” he said.

She had.

Her claws flexed as she blasted.