Double fuck, I thought, as fire came down from above, far too close to me. He’d manipulated the fire of a spear of flame that extended high above me. The prickle of heat and the wave of it that seemed to soak into my core and take the breath from my lungs and the oxygen from my blood hit me harder than the last time. It was that staggering, fall-to-my-knees kind of heat, and it hadn’t been a direct hit. This time, even though there wasn’t a physical component to it, my flight wavered, my speed suffered.

All at a time it counted most.

Fuck, I thought, and it wasn’t an angry, forceful, empowered fuck, in defiance of the world. The fuck that I couldn’t even voice was the kind of sound that came out with a whimper, that made someone sound half their age, uttered just before they broke down into tears, slumped against a wall.

And even that image evoked half-formed images of my sister, hollowed out, harrowed, her hair greasy because she’d spent the last few days working on me. Her arms and her old costume had been crusted with bodily fluids, my bodily fluids. With dogs and cats, insects, and rats, probably, pulled apart into their constituent parts and used to build me.

To have it driven home that my weak point was this weak, this capable of breaking my focus. There were moments my emotions choked me up, gripped my throat, tied my stomach into knots, paralyzed me or made me agitated.

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.