It was a hand, cool to the touch. With that touch, a shiver ran through her body. A tension she’d felt was now relaxed.

With a tug, the hand pulled on her wrist, moving hand away from ear.

“We’re okay now,” the woman said.

She looked. She saw a face that had looked in through a window earlier. Freckles from forehead to chin, densely packed to the point there was as much brown as pink. Hair in brown curls with less frizz than Hunter had in her own hair, which was blonde and straight. The woman had tattoos covering her hands, and red fingernail polish on short fingernails.

“There we go,” the woman said.

“My power…”

“It’s under control. A bit of a tweak,” the woman said. “But it won’t keep. It won’t stay like this. Powers are very big things, and as strong as I am, I’m a lightweight in this fight.”

Hunter bit her lip. She wasn’t sure how to feel, but the relief after weeks of struggling with a power she couldn’t control was the biggest thing. It overwhelmed her, really.

“My name is Amy Dallon, and I want to help you,” the woman said.

“I talked to you on the phone. Victoria’s sister.”

Hunter saw a shift in expression, brief, sad.

The kind of thing she wanted to ask about, to question, challenge, or pick apart.

Except asking put distance and time between where she was now and getting help.

“Please help me,” she whispered.

“If I can,” Amy Dallon told her. Her tattooed hand stroked Hunter’s. “What’s the first thing that you’re going to do?”

Hunter let out a half-laugh, incredulous. She hadn’t even let herself believe hope was in reach. “Dance. Hug my friend. Cry.”

⊙

She laughed, her back arching backward with the motion, one hand to the hole in the side of her head. Her emotions ran wild, like fire to accelerant, no body to contain them. There was no functional difference between this form she wore and the pillars and threads of blackness that webbed this landscape, tearing it up.

She danced. Stepping on threads, running along a pillar, spinning in the air to avoid a spear of carefully arranged molecules, slapping it aside as spear became whip—became blade as she slapped it. It cut deep into the back of her hand.

The giantess could see her before she acted. Could see every incoming blow before it could strike home. The thing that had been Hunter dove in close, trying to grab. She touched only air, and was touched in turn, a grazing contact from the giantess, who was now wreathed in a fractally arranged lace of fine molecules. Still backed up by an army of people who had been brought into her influence. The contact distorted the thing that had been Hunter, tugged at parts of her that controlled the threads and pillars.

This too, she resisted, fought with her entire being.