For the last little while, she had been eating more. Thanks to J. Her fingers were still thin, but the bones and the tendons at the back weren’t quite as defined as they had been.

The window was open, and she put her hand outside. Dangerous, to let the wind push and pull at her hand, but she was careful to keep it rigid.

She felt good and she didn’t trust the feeling. She’d felt good when she’d robbed the bank with Kidney Stan’s group. She’d felt good when she’d looted the clothing store in Stafford at four in the morning and made off with bags of clothes. The bank robbery had gone wrong and the ‘good’ had become something else, and the good feeling from the looting of the clothing store had soured with a quickness that suggested the feeling hadn’t been real.

No good days. There were the bad days and there were the days she dreaded the bad days. Right now, she was caught between a low-key excitement that wouldn’t quit and the dread.

Almost, almost, she was tempted to do something stupid just to get it out of the way and alleviate that dread.

Hm. Maybe not so almost. She couldn’t quite recall the train of thought that had led to her scaling the side of the building with her power. There hadn’t even been thought, when she tried to remember the sequence of events. The noise had demanded her attention, and somewhere between the point where she had rationalized that she needed to get up higher to see what was going on, needed to do it fast, and couldn’t climb up the ladder without her power getting in the way… had she felt a kernel of that desire to alleviate the dread? Had she pushed it out of mind and acted on it, in her hurry?

That spooked her more than the electronics robbery or the rumble had.

“Holy shit, there it is,” J said.

Damsel tilted her head to see through the side window, and she saw the giant. It hadn’t moved. More helicopters with lights were circling it. Nobody was fighting the thing, and the thing wasn’t fighting anyone.

“Blasto’s, probably,” she said. “He was making something big.”

“You’re not bothered?”

“Not as long as he keeps it out of Deathchester.”

“Half the city must be shitting itself right now,” J said.

“Because they’re weak,” she said.

She’d wanted to say something clever, to elaborate on the thought, but she heard the way she said ‘weak’, the harshness of it, and it surprised her enough that the rest of the statement caught her off guard.

I would fight past ten of Soldat’s soldiers, a hundred of Blasto’s plant heroes, or disobey a thousand of Edict’s orders, if it meant not feeling like this.