Timing, I thought, as I hit out. Account for who I’m fighting. Keep my grip on my weapon…

He reared up, limbs up in a flash, then coming down just as quickly, like a half-dozen guillotine blades with a truckload of weight driving them. I flew under.

Remember the lessons Uncle Neil taught you about fighting, and stay inside their reach.

I flew to the underbelly. Nursery’s growths reached up to me. Slats like blades were above me. To my left, the tongue, bound to one limb by cables. He was shrugging off the cables.

I flew to the looser section of that cable, so I caught one at my shoulder. The Wretch absorbed the impact as it pulled short, but it didn’t extricate me. The cable pulled against my shoulder, and I spun in the air, hard. My arm throbbed.

I’d killed the tongue, pulling the cable tight enough against it to cut it in two.

You’re better than this, I told myself, and it was a condemnation. A feeling that had followed me all my life. You have so much potential, my teachers had said. But if I focused on friends my teachers would point it out, saying I needed to focus on my schoolwork. If I focused on my school, I lost friends, got called stuck up. If I was Glory Girl I was neglecting my life in the daylight hours and if I was Victoria then I was neglecting my dreams. If I separated the two then I fell to pieces and if I commingled then I fucked that up too. That was when I couldn’t be sure if my friends were with me because me or because I was a superheroine, and when my mom had to tell me to take my headphones off or correct how I dealt with the public.

A silver blade caught Lord of Loss. He turned to go after Precipice, and he was strong enough in his bounding that I had trouble keeping up. He got faster with every few paces.

So much fucking potential, I told myself.

There had been very few people who had apparently accepted me as me. Two. One had made me her plaything before discarding me, and—

Rain’s power enhanced that stab of guilt that came in the wake of a thought I knew was unfair, glossing over context for the sake of absorbing the brunt of the hurt.

—and the second was Dean, and I’d let him die.

I plunged, driving my foot toward Lord of Loss’s tailbone, to drive his hips down and break his stride. He dodged me, and I shattered floorboards instead.

I flew straight for him. He had lost momentum, as part of that change in direction.

The cable was still partially wrapped around him, caught on slats and ragged edges of his white metal strips. I could see those parts moving, even pushing the cable out.