She was ready to go until she saw the giant wading through the water, as it had done the day prior.

Ashley changed direction.

Judgment was hard and judging time was harder. The giant was like a building in the distance that she kept closing the distance to, where she could have told herself she would be there in five minutes. Five minutes later, she would be saying much the same thing.

Forty-seven or forty-eight employees had worked under her. Then there had been eighteen. Fourteen if she didn’t count the mercenaries.

Then thirteen, because O’Brien had run.

Then twelve. Of those twelve, some had likely arrived, heard the news, and they wouldn’t have turned up tomorrow.

O’Brien would communicate to the ones who remained. They wouldn’t show up to look for her. As the decisions were made, the imaginary ticker of people in her employ would dwindle to nothing. It might have been inevitable.

Eight, and then seven.

Six, and then five, four employees. They left. Had they been hers or had it been convenience?

She got close enough to the giant to see its scale.

She scaled the side of it like she’d scaled the building face, on the evening the giant had first appeared. With reckless, haphazard blasts, feet scrambling for footing and legs working to keep her more or less upright.

The tentacles unfolded. They didn’t move fast, but as they slapped against the upper body of the giant, they shook the mossy skin and a shower of dust and debris rained down on her. It stuck to the spatters and gobbets of blood that her power hadn’t erased from her hands and arms.

Her emotions were twisted, now. As she climbed, working her way to a height well above the building face she had scaled, a false, excited joy swelled in her breast, at odds with where her heart was.

Three, then two. Who would be among the last to truly abandon her and lose faith? Had there been any faces in that crowd who had liked everything about her, who would hold out a hope that she would turn up and that things could resume? One person that she hadn’t talked to enough?

This was as close as she’d ever gotten and J might well have been right in suggesting she would never get there again.

She wanted to feel something and she felt no connection to the feelings in her chest. They didn’t count at all.

She reached the neck and the head, and she blasted. The blast sent her skidding along the stone-like, mossy hide of the giant. The blast tore, ripped, cracked, and annihilated, but of all the things she had blasted, it was the most durable. Remnants remained, condensed and twisted. More than she had ever seen. She found a ridge and stuck her foot out, stopping herself.

Tentacles reached up and the sky seemed to darken as they loomed above her.