“First time I’ve had to lay a hand on you, Ash,” he said, and he sounded so sad. “You pissed me off, scratching me like this.”

She clenched her teeth. She tried to stand and she wobbled.

“You pissed me off!”

Again, with the painful shout. She dropped back down to the ground.

“Are you going to smarten up, make this a one-time thing?” he asked. “Answer me! Don’t go mute on me like she does.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her head hurt where he’d pulled at her hair. Her mom wasn’t moving much, and seeing that hurt more.

“That’s not an answer, Ash,” he said. “Come on. If I’m going to hit someone with this, is it going to be you, or is it going to be her?”

The poker smacked against his palm.

She hadn’t made things better.

“Come on!” he shouted.

She squeezed her eyes shut, and everything went cold.

She opened her eyes, and they opened beyond the edges of her eyes and they kept going.

She saw emptiness, desolation, destruction, a… bowl of cereal floating in milk, without any milk. The ‘cereal’ was shapes she couldn’t wrap her head around, because they seemed to go on forever.

She could pull back, and she realized she was thinking on too small a scale.

She was thinking like a person and to wrap her head around this, she needed to look down on something far larger.

A sphere, cracked like an egg and cracking further, all in slow motion, with energy glowing through the cracks. Her awareness loomed above it all.

As slow as it had been, the moment she realized it was a planet, time caught up and everything moved in fast motion. The planet became dust and debris and there was nothing left behind.

She closed her eyes until they fit inside her eye sockets again. All went away, except for—for that energy that she’d seen and felt.

Ashley could almost hold it in her hands.

She raised her head and she faced him much as she had with the poker. He had the weapon now, and he approached. He said something and she didn’t hear anything at all.

He shouted something and, before she could register it, she lashed out, hand going out, the energy releasing from her arms, traveling down to her hands.

The hand he’d crushed spasmed as the energy ran through every damaged part, until she thought her hand might come apart in pieces. The darkness escaped, loud and chaotic, and with the pain in her hand, some went wide, striking the fireplace. The force of it knocked her off her feet, into the table beside the couch.

But enough struck him. It caught her father’s lower chest, his pelvis, his legs, the floor, the hand that held the poker and the poker. It twisted away everything that it touched, and flecks of her father were scattered across the living room and into the dining room. Bits of her dad splattered her mother. Bits splattered herself.