I shoved my assailant off me, then flew closer to the ceiling, holding the computer tower with its stray wires dangling down. Winning the fight wasn’t important. Coming out ahead was.

My notes were everything.

Flying out of reach, near the ceiling, I had a view of the entire room.

⊙

Was it over? Had I won?

Well, won insofar as I’d denied him what he wanted.

I shut the window.

“Two bullets to the back of the head. The first will take out your forcefield. The other will end you. Drop the computer. Fly away.”

I turned around slowly.

A girl in a black leather bodysuit with a black leather jacket and a scarf around her lower face. The face I could see was covered in a gray mask, with eyes slanted to match the angle and slant of a woodland animal, each lens an opaque black.

“That’s not flying away,” Imp told me. “That’s standing your ground.”

She was holding up a lighter. I was very worried the vapor in the air would ignite.

“Put that out. We can talk,” I told her.

The lighter flicked closed. “I’m not here to talk.”

“We had a good working relationship a couple of days ago.”

“That was then,” she said. “Put the computer down. You’re going to tear out the hard drive.”

I drew in a deep breath.

“No games,” she said. “I’ve got to protect the kid I’m looking after. Your kid baited him into sharing secrets. In the course of sharing those secrets, he used mundane networks, no encryption. People have seen. Some of those people are mentioned in the pictures.”

“Sounds like a failure on your part.”

“It’s a problem for all of us, Glory Girl. But the kids are most important.”

My volume raised, “It’s a failure on your end, and our home has to burn to the ground? Fuck that.”

“The people who were alerted are going to pay more attention to you, G.G. If they think you got nothing, if you avoid making specific searches about names, and if there’s a nice fire to assure them that all evidence stops here, the buck stops there.”

“It’s never as simple as that. This isn’t about protecting us. This is about protecting you.”

“Us, not me,” Imp said. “I’m armed, you’re not. Let go of the computer. Let it fall to the floor.”

“If it sparks—”

“Just do it,” she said.

I did. It clunked on landing. There wasn’t quite enough accelerant or anything on the floor here to allow for a splash.

“I’ve been really nice,” Imp said. “I could have humiliated you. Instead, I’m sticking to nonlethal weapons and careful use of fire.”

“Uh huh.”

“Stay where you are,” she said, keeping the pistol on me.