Dive hard. Extend my arms out, and experience the wind through those fingers, feel the air resistance… my actual hands still in my pockets. I folded them in close, hugging them in tight and close to my body, and felt the resistance decrease. An umbrella open in rushing wind versus one that was shut, spearing forward.

Fly harder, between buildings this time, because air flow tended to go over buildings, curling before continuing forward, and with the forcefield out I was vulnerable to the vagaries of wind, even with everything tucked in closer.

“No,” I breathed.

The apartment building was at the edges of the cracking, but the blurred, broken separations in reality had speared it. Some fundamental support had given, and it had slumped over to one side. The apartment I’d shared with Ashley. Technically the first place I’d lived ‘on my own’, with no parents supervising or managing me, even though Ashley or Kenzie had been there at various points.

Toppled. My things, my files, my clothes, my stuffed lion that I’d salvaged past the end of the world. Ashley’s things.

I landed with enough force it made my knees and hips hurt. I navigated around the slices in reality, putting out one of my forcefield hands that I could afford to lose.

The distinction between one place and another was clear. The air lensed, like I was looking through prisms, magnifying glasses, or water droplets. But when it was air meeting air, there was little distinction. Perhaps temperature.

I walked across a landscape that looked like a stained glass window, with some ‘panels’ filled with snowy urban area and others with soil. Drawn in every hard-edged shape that wasn’t a square, some extending up or down.

The forcefield died. I had to experiment to see why. Certain pockets of air close to the cracks were dangerous, slicing any passing limb by sending different portions to different realities. Like thickets of nigh-invisible, ultra-sharp brambles.

I’d spent so motherfucking long trying to build a life for myself. Collecting my files, rebuilding a wardrobe. Gone.

I seized the roof and lifted it with more ease than I’d ever lifted anything as Glory Girl. It wasn’t that I was stronger—I wasn’t. But having eight extremities to balance out the distribution of weight meant it didn’t crumble to anywhere near the same degree when I held it up.

I threw it aside with more violence than was necessary.

Fuck.

Digging my way to the living room, using pieces of art and a general sense of what should be where to find my way to where it should be.

Fuck!

Some of the furniture had been shattered by the fall. Ashley had tended to buy nice things when she bought stuff, so it was sturdy… but that made the ones that were unsalvageable that much worse.

Fuck!