“Okay,” she said. She took her phone back from Eleni, along with the headphones. She turned to Sam, phone in her hand. “Want to exchange numbers?”

“My phone’s dead.”

“Do you have a pen?” she asked, as she picked up her bag.

He reached for his stuff, and in his initial searches, didn’t turn up anything. She might have thought he was trying to find an excuse to let her down easy, but there was a frustration evident in his actions that made it pretty obvious he really wanted a pen.

Auntie looked impatient, arms folded, dildo clearly firmly in place.

Eleni tapped her on the elbow. She looked over, and saw Eleni holding a pen with a plastic figure on the end. She took Sam’s hand, and wrote the number down.

“We need all the friends we can get at times like this,” she said.

“Totally,” he said. And he smiled, clenching the fist she’d just written the number in. “Keep each other’s heads on straight.”

It was a weird thing. An awkward conversation where they hadn’t said much at all, she’d given him a laugh, and he’d given her a much needed ‘you’re right’, and that was pretty much it.

But at a time like this, when they had pretty much nothing, it mattered so much.

Her uncle put his hand on her shoulder, guiding her forward, with an impatient kind of insistence, and she bit back the urge to shrug it off or get angry. There was time for that later, when Sam wasn’t watching. They could have had a house and instead they got a tent, and she was pretty sure a few nights of sleeping in a tent would only drive this feeling home.

They pushed open the doors, stepping outside, and into the brand new city that stood on the edge of the end of the world. The sun was bright and the golden city even brighter, to the point it brought tears to her eyes.

⊙

She faced down the giantess, viewing her with senses that had nothing to do with eyes. The world was littered with shattered glass that nobody could see, and she could see all of the reflections in that glass. A woman too bright to look at, too intense, every aspect of her pulling, tugging, driving, manipulating. It was like standing beneath a waterfall, the water crashing down from above, and trying to swim to the top. Impossible.

Just by being here, the giantess made everything harder.

The thing that had been Hunter touched a long-fingered hand to a hole in her face. Then she laughed, high and loud, the sound vibrating from the columns and cords that decorated her surroundings.

So ridiculous.

The way she was now, she could swim up waterfalls.