“See something?” I asked. I saw the mild surprise on her face. Before she could answer, I said. “Come on. We’ll check it out. If we’re being followed, it’s important to know.”

“Do you need help?” Swansong asked.

I shook my head. “Stay put, or go to the van and wait there. Keep an eye out.”

At the nod, I took Sveta’s hand, and I pulled her along with. She used her tendrils, reaching out and grabbing things, hauling herself further down the way.

Once she was on a rooftop, she waited for me.

I looked back at the others, who were smaller in this new perspective.

“Come on. We’ll loop around.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

I brought her along with. She gripped my arm and in the doing she held my injured hand.

We stopped on another rooftop.

“I thought we could use a break,” I said. “Get away.”

I saw her expression shift slightly. The slip, the facade going back up.

“I’m sorry that sucked. Whippersnap. Chantilly.”

“I barely knew him. He was a kid in the group. But he was supposed to be like a brother to me. Like how he said brother Gregor.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“He was supposed to be mine, not possessive or anything… but they’re the only family I get and I don’t get to have them.”

The facade slipped away.

“And Chantilly, yeah.”

“Yeah! Fuck!” Sveta said, angry.

“Fuck,” she said, sad.

I hugged her, and she buried her face in the crook of my neck, mumbling now that she was talking into cloth. “She wears a white dress and that gets her points with Chantilly, but I’m the outsider? I’m the odd one out? What the fuck.”

Yep. Better that the anger get out now than in a release of bottled-up feelings. Especially when we were going up against an emotion manipulator.

I had tears in my own eyes, now, just listening.

“And she shows off her hands? I’m happy for her, I really am, I’m not that much of a bitch that I wouldn’t be, really. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a bitch at all,” I said.

“But she’s smug and showing off about how they’re practically indistinguishable from regular ones and what the fuck!”

There was a thud at her chest, then a thousand more. A hundred fists striking against the shell, the inside of the cage, protesting, unleashing pent-up feelings. It was only my grip around her shoulders that kept her upright.

Polarize 10.7

Video played on our laptop, a cartoon animation of a beautiful woman with black skin, dreadlocks, yellow stick-on nails, and a canary yellow boa in a tropical paradise. A skinny guy with rings of tribal tattoos on his arm and ‘DJ’ on his bicep sat with his arm around a curvy young woman in a bikini, with sharks tattooed at her sides.