But to act as Glory Girl, to have Amy so easily take that away, all over again? It made me feel like my essential being, my heart, wasn’t even there anymore. That heartless emptiness inside me wasn’t anything new. But it had never hit me to this degree at a moment that I felt like I was functioning.

It wasn’t me that I heard or imagined with that small, nothing-left fuck, but her on the other side of a room, as someone banged on a door. A scene framed not by wood, but by a length of my body, by hands that reached up, groping at the air, toward her.

The moment after she’d let me start registering memories again.

I landed, and my legs buckled beneath me. I dropped to my knees, fires burning high just twenty feet away. A steel beam gave me a modicum of cover, but it had been lying in the blaze long enough that I could feel the heat radiating off the metal, which didn’t help manners.

One hundred and ten percent. Give it your all. Do your best, Victoria. An endless refrain I’d heard for far too long. From my mom, from my dad, from my teachers, from my teams.

I couldn’t figure out what mode to shift to, where I had that one hundred and ten percent to give. I couldn’t reach for the Scholar or the Warrior Monk in this moment and have it fail me. I needed something else. Something more raw.

Wretch, I thought. Forcefield up, I reached for the beam. My hands fell short, but the Wretch didn’t.

Glory Girl can’t win this.

So what does a one hundred and ten percent Wretch look like, then?

I lifted up the steel beam, The Wretch dug fingers in with enough force to leave indents in the warm metal’s surface.

I took off. Lung was preoccupied, sending flame in the opposite direction from me. I had a moment, so I looked up, flying higher to where the air was cooler. A twenty-foot steel beam dangled from the Wretch’s hands, one end held firm enough that metal distorted in multiple places, the other end swinging below us.

In the cool air, looking up and trying to find my center, trying to tell myself I wasn’t making a mistake by bringing the Wretch into this, I could see the blue circles and lines.

A constellation drawn against the night’s sky, directly above Lung and the scene. The motes weren’t moving, though. It was being drawn.

I exhaled slowly, and my breath shook slightly in the process. A tension I hadn’t realized I’d had was released. If Byron was capable of doing this, then he’d confirmed Kenzie was okay. That situation was dealt with.

In the weirdest, most twisted way, it wasn’t even a good ‘dealt with’. That tension had helped in its way, holding me together. Now I had to deal with me.