The remedy was to talk to someone, to get perspective. Complicated by the fact that sometimes people weren’t equipped to understand or to listen.

I stared at Ashley and the villains who stood around her. They hadn’t rejected her outright. Love Lost, Cleat, Disjoint, Sidepiece, Nailbiter.

They weren’t equipped. Just the opposite.

“I’d like you to turn yourself in, and submit yourself into our custody,” I said.

Her eyes widened slightly.

“There it is,” Nailbiter said, in that eerie voice with its whistles and hisses of breath through teeth.

“There what is?” Sidepiece asked.

“Our hooded girl here called Damsel by her real name.”

“There’s a history,” I said, at nearly the same time as Damsel said, “History.”

“Uh huh,” Nailbiter said, disbelieving. “The timing’s off. When these guys showed up. When you did.”

Damsel spoke without taking her eyes off me, “She probably came after me. I fought her family in Boston. My second trip, a while later, I fought her boss in the Protectorate.”

“Not my boss,” I said.

“No?”

“I wasn’t a Ward for long, and he wasn’t in charge at the time.”

Damsel shrugged, very easily and casually, as if she wasn’t standing over the body of the man she’d murdered.

“I’ve fought your family, and we’ve had run-ins,” she said. “Bonesaw, who brought me back from the dead, fucked up her sister and attacked her family in their home.”

“Don’t go there,” I said.

She raised her hands in a ‘I give up’ kind of way. Her power arced around the one, an aimless stream shooting off skyward at an angle before fizzling out.

“Come into custody, we’ll take you with us, we’ll have you stand down and stay off to the side until this whole thing wraps up,” I said. “I know you’ve benefited a lot from the amnesty. There are people you talk to and people who help you maintain a normal life. If you walk away from this scene, that ends.”

“Holy shit, heroes are annoying,” Sidepiece said. “Let’s go. I’ve got a bingo sheet to fill out, and I’ve gotta land a direct hit with a bit of uterus or set off a combo explosion with a spleen toss if I want to clear a row.”

She approached Ashley, reaching out. Nailbiter barred her way.

Was it worth it? The ruse didn’t matter anymore, we weren’t going to keep her in this role. Like so many things, she’d been great when the going was good. When things got rougher—we needed to figure something out later.

It only mattered in that if we didn’t end up taking her away from this and revealed her role, she’d end up in danger.