She hit the ground with two hands and two feet, crushing concrete and stone. With the impact, more wires and pillars stabbed upward, finding their purchase wherever they could, before snapping taut. A cage around her. One of them wounded the giantess. Another hit a shield she’d gathered around herself.

The thing that had been Hunter laughed, high and loud enough to be heard across the whole city she was in, a hollow, echoing sound.

The giantess had once had it all, when she’d been an age where a girl named Hunter had had nothing. All the luck in reality, power stolen from a family closer than blood, and she’d ended up here, naked, distorted and bleeding, weaker than the thing that had been Hunter.

The giantess had done something with the concrete she’d turned into a shield. Concrete broke, but something within was compressed, reformed on a molecular level. It was now nearly black, lace-fine, like geometric drawings that got more complex as one drew closer to the center, but it hadn’t broken with the impact. Even the parts further from the center.

The giantess’s power was reaching out further. Finding people who hadn’t run away fast enough. Cape and civilian, pulled together into a force. Weapons were being arranged, cannons and rockets.

The first of them was fired, almost as a test. The giantess manipulated the rocket’s course in the air, aiming for the hole in the face of the thing that had been Hunter. She could see with senses that weren’t sight that something had been done to its chemical payload in that brief moment of handling.

It hit home.

⊙

Her thumbnail worked at a hangnail at her other thumb, trying to catch it between thumbnail and thumbnail as if she could cut it cleanly off.

“Hunter?” the voice came through a speaker.

She looked up. All around her, black threads stabbed from ceiling to floor, floor to bed, bed to wall. She couldn’t move more than a foot before bumping into one. They never cut her, but they did frustrate her.

“Hello?” she asked the empty room.

“I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and keep them closed, and to put your hands over your ears.”

People are always telling me what to do. It makes less and less sense as time goes on. “Why?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” the woman’s voice said. “Call it an experiment.”

Hunter closed her eyes. She pressed palm flat against ear.

She was aware of her power firing off again. Drawing out another thread. This time to the one-way mirror at the one wall. She heard glass break.

“Don’t open your eyes,” a man’s voice said.

She didn’t.

She waited. A minute, the promise had been.

“Is Sam there?” she asked, nervous. Even though she couldn’t hear the response.

Cold compared to room temperature, something touched her. She kept her eyes closed.