She shook her head, swallowing hard, still holding the bat out. “My team’s—they’re out there. With the…”

She shook her head, hard. She made a small noise as she swung the bat, hard. The golden lash that seemed to peel off of the bat smacked Skadi in the shoulder, carving out a furrow. She didn’t straighten up right away, breathing hard.

“In the, um, the ranged fire group. The bullpen. They’d lose heart—if I called out. I can’t—can’t. They said… Wardens said. I’m one of the people who can really hurt these bastards.”

The ranged fire group. The artillery line.

The shape of Skadi and Oberon in the clearing obscured Switch Hitter’s view of the artillery line.

I felt more than a little impatient, as much as I understood where she was at. I spoke calmly, insistently, “You are. Which is why it’s important to stay in fighting shape. You’re tired. You need to go back, you rest, maybe you come back in when these guys are too tired to keep going.”

She didn’t move, gripping the bat with what I imagined was a white-knuckle intensity. I reached out tentatively, and placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped. When she looked over her shoulder at me, there were tears on her cheeks.

A dark, shitty part of me was angry at her. It hit me in a surprising way, like finding out a strange and angry dog was in the same room as me when it suddenly snarled.

Fuck. We needed everything we could get. We…

The lighting changed slightly as the fog of gas roiled and already muted sunlight peeked through. I wasn’t sure if it was the illumination on those tracks of tears, but I found my sense of sympathy again.

“Can I give you a hug?” I asked her. She didn’t respond, her expression hardening, then losing that hardness, like she couldn’t hold onto it. I, meanwhile, wrestled with my own feelings, wondering what the hell had just hit me. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ingested gas.

I had to calm myself down enough that I could give her shoulder a gentle shake instead of a more violent one. The part of the shake where I pulled her toward me a bit seemed to break the spell, or be the second invitation for a hug that she’d wanted. She wasted no time in hugging me, less like any hug than I’d had, more like I imagined a drowning person might cling to a rescuer. The bat she still held in one hand thumped against my hip.

Text appeared across my right eye: POOR GIRL.

I didn’t break the hug as I bent down, using flight to stay balanced. I picked up the second wooden bat from the rooftop.