“No,” Amy said. “No, Vicky. Maybe before, but when I got my powers, it was to save you from being hurt. You don’t get hurt, not in a way that lasts. You will be a top heroine, a champion, beautiful and awe inspiring, and I will be behind you, keeping you in that fight, keeping you beautiful and perfect.”

I didn’t move. I thought of Dad, seeing him hug my mother, able-bodied and well. I’d been so pissed when she hadn’t healed him, I’d wanted that, for him to hug my mom and to be whole again, albeit without the emotion as he told her that Amy had run away.

I wanted this, what she described.

“If you want it,” Amy said.

I didn’t know what I wanted. Want was emotion and I didn’t trust emotions. Logically? What was logical? Spending the rest of my life weak?

It was logical, maybe, to reach out, get that second opinion. And if I couldn’t do it from an emotional standpoint because I didn’t want it for me, I could at least want it for Amy, because she wasn’t doing great. She was shaky, and she wasn’t acting like herself. I had the excuse of being compromised, but she seemed almost drunk.

But I really wanted to be a heroine. I really wanted to be okay. I really wanted Amy to hug me, even if I hated that want. Should have hated that want.

Amy’s fingernails combed through my hair, fixing it where it had fallen across my bare shoulder.

Last chance, Victoria, I thought, my eyes closing as I felt the sensation of the fingernails, my head rocking with the contact. Her power didn’t work while she was touching hair. Throw her through the wall. Follow the protocols.

Her hands moved away.

Amy’s fingernails combed through my hair, fixing it where it had grown out, draping another bare shoulder. I turned my head to look at the other head she’d grown. That breathed with the branching windpipe—that hole that had made it so hard to talk before.

I should have felt horrified.

Your real last chance, Victoria, I thought, my eyes half-lidded, watching. My fingers dug into the sheets that covered my upper body.

The words slipped from my lips, in a tumble of logic and emotion. Logic because I was asking her to undo that. Emotion because I wanted what she’d been selling to me. That future. Being a heroine. I’d wanted to be one all my life.

“Please fix me.”

“I thought you’d say that,” she said. And tired as she was, shaky and not entirely herself, she managed a wink.

⊙