I flew up, twisting in the air to find an orientation that would let the thing fall out. It didn’t. Instead, there was only the sensation that when it came out, a sock of windpipe would be dangling past my teeth. That was the grip it had, the expansion within my throat.

I still held the cable, and in an effort to hold onto it, I wrapped my legs around it. I let cable slide through my fingers in fits and starts, the weight of the barely-intact hook pulling it down.

I found the end, and I had to fumble with fingers wrapped in bandages and gloves that had been shredded over the course of the fight. I found the individual bands of metal that made up the cable, and I tore.

A thinner length. Bendable. I wrapped it around the stump of flesh.

Don’t tear.

The hook was too blunt to use. But a tight binding of metal served to give me a grip where I wouldn’t have otherwise had one.

With a burst of strength, I pulled it partway out.

Don’t break.

I used more Wretch-strength, and pulled again. Another two inches of progress.

Every pull threatened to see it go to pieces, or to have one piece drop off and settle somewhere inside me.

I hauled on it once more, and this time, the lump returned to my throat, impossibly large for how narrow the passage was. I was forced to pull—and in doing so I stopped being able to breathe.

In the darkness and the cold, high above Nursery’s mist, where up and down no longer mattered, and the entirety of my reality was confined to a few feet of foreign flesh and the Victoria-flesh that surrounded it, I pulled it out by half-inches, now.

The gag reflex helped and hurt. Because each retching was movement out, but the involuntary swallowing and the way my throat seemed to forget how to work, freezing up in the aftermath, it made it harder.

When the worst of it was past my teeth, there wasn’t one slug, but a hundred, of varying fatness and lengths. Vomit followed.

Can’t ever do that again, I thought, and it was a lesson etched in a hair deeper than already fucking necessary by Rain’s power. An aftertaste. That black kind of lesson.

The thought was immediately followed by me getting a grip on the cable and dropping out of the air. From hovering to falling to diving, being a projectile.

Straight back into the situation that the messy, bloody lesson was telling me I should stay clear of.

Because if I didn’t, I knew, I wouldn’t ever. This was a potential ‘retire from costumes’ level of badness and bitterness.

There was no way this was okay. Not by law, not by morals, not by regrets.