When Jaylin takes my hand in the elevator, so much pressure fills my chest I think my ribs might crack. "Hey," she says, blinking up at me with those big brown eyes of hers that must break hearts. "You good?"

My mouth opens to shape words, but no sound comes out.

I thought it would be Heaven. As my first "lover," I mean. If there was someone I didn't expect in my life, it was Jaylin. When we were kids, I thought I'd fall in love with Hev. She's tough, blunter than a mallet to the side of the skull, pretty. Maybe I did love her, as a kid.

"Ang?"

When I swallow, my throat is dry and my tongue is like sandpaper. "Mmmm...hmm?"

"Not really the response I was looking for." She steps so close to me I smell faded perfume and stale coffee on her skin. Her hand slips up the back of my shirt and combs the brittle feathers of my wing. The touch is surprisingly tender, and I'm lost to it, caught in my own panicked spiral of thoughts.

When I grew older, say, fourteen, I thought it would be Gats. Not now. Not it two years from now, but like, as adults. I even had a fantasy attached, though that word holds all the wrong connotations. A story, I mean.

Jaylin frowns. "Are you with me?"

"Huh," I say, "yeah."

We'd be sitting alone in a dim-lit bar, him, squinting at a dented wedding band before flicking it into the ice at the bottom of his drained bourbon, me, wiping my hands on my crisp white jacket, shaken from the day's list of patients.

"Look," Jay says, "it's been a rough... couple of weeks. Been a pretty rough month, actually."

I'm already lost, thinking forward to the smell of bar cleaner and harsh alcohol.

"Hey, Angel," Gatsby would say with his face in his hands. He'd have lost some of his accent by then, taken on an edge to his voice. For a reason I still can't explain, I always imagined he would become miserable as a grown man. The glamorous "teenage experience" would give way to monotony. Just under the facade, though, he'd stay the same: charismatic, spontaneous, handsome. "Want to get married?"

"Yeah," I'd say, feeling all these adult emotions I didn't expect to have felt by now. Something like love, something like exhilaration, something like fear. "Why not?"

"I think we should run away," Jaylin says, bending down to grip her hobbly knee. "Like in the movies. I dunno. Cash out whatever's in your college saving's fund, take Gats' car, get a fake I.D. You look older. We could get jobs. Hide out for a little."

I start to shake my head, but then her words click. Run away. Escape this war, my fate, the torture I've put my friends through.

All at once, I wish I could read her. Her expression, utterly calm and utterly blank. Dark hair tumbles over her shoulders, framing a pale, relatively scarless face. It's hard, in it, to see the girl I fell in love with, the girl who hurt me.

"Are you scared?" I ask her.

She levels her gaze to her feet. "Of your dad? Yeah."

"If you want to leave, I'm not gonna stop you."

"It's not that!" She slams her hands on the buttons.  When she juts her chin out like that, she looks like she can rule the world. "If I leave, where do 

"I don't want protection." I'm crossing away from her, her fist still wound up in my feathers. The words come out heavily, like a huff. "I'm tired of people trying to push me around, force me to go here, do that. I like you, Jay, but I still remember—"

"Ang—"

The words spiral out, too forceful for me to still while I hold my face in my hands. "I know that you don't want to hurt me and I know that you're trying to do better and stuff, but..."

"I thought we talked about this." Her voice actually cracks, and when she bites her quivering lip, she bites it so hard it bleeds.

"No, no." I kneel, though it ignites a jolt of pain through my aching hips.  "It's just that I don't want you to protect me. I want to be your equal."

She glances over my head. "I've always felt like, like I'm supposed to kidnap you or I'm supposed to protect you. That's just how I always though it is."  She finally meets my eyes.  "And it's not."

 She isn't the one who reduced me down to this, not really. I'm a walking weapon. Looking over her head, I wonder what the pure boy, the boy I was supposed to be, would be like. If I was June's and Storm's biological son. If my genetic makeup hadn't been altered. "I know," I say, placing my hands on her shoulders. Her sweater bunches at the collar and the skin underneath is cool. "But how about instead of kidnapping or protecting me, we just watch Miraculous tonight?"

She smiles, small and tentative. "Make it Star Trek and we have a deal."

My thumb brushes her cheek. Her smile becomes a smirk. It's a sinister, beautiful thing that should fill me with dread, with the bite of old memories and a desperate desire to escape her. Instead, I lean forward so our noses almost touch, her breath a warming puff on my chin, cheek.

We've talked about it. We've talked about this and we'll keep talking about this, but there's still this nagging sense of loathing inside me, this disgust that I have to keep reminding Jay that I'm human, that Heaven has to do the same with my brother, that Gats has been broken because of it. There's a part of me that hates Jaylin. That bristles at the thought of her touching me and reels at the memory of our first kiss, when she pretended to care for more, only to use and taunt me minutes later.

And then there's the other part of me that thinks I love her.

I mean, holy spit, I think I love her.

"Should I like you? After...um, everything?"

She shrugs. "Do you think you have Stockholm Syndrome?"

"I'm not your prisoner."

"Anymore." Those three syllables make my heart slam against my ribs. Her eyes flutter toward the ceiling, her fingers drawing warmth up my spine. It doesn't match the cool glint in her eyes. "I'm trying though. I'm really trying. It's just so different. 

I  nod, my fingers lingering on the buttons. They're all lit up. We might be here a while. 

Her tongue darts over her lips. When her eyes flick over my face, her blank expression softens, if only for a moment. In those big eyes, I think I see the girl she was supposed to be, if she was born to one of those stupid sit-com families, far from this life. If we had just met one day at a silly dance and fell in love, sweetly, slowly. Not this. Not this violent delight with its inevitable violent end. Our whole relationship is wreathed in violence and in this aching sense that in another lifetime, in another reality, then maybe we could've...

She blinks a few times. "I know I bring out the worse of you, and I don't want to do that. But you're the one who..." She glances at the elevator's grainy panneling. Stops. Sighs. I lace my fingers at the nape of her neck, dropping back down to her height. Under my fingertips, she's soft, warm. The touch of her skin brings tingles to mine.

"Who what?"

Her soft mouth moves against mine, a tentative brush, like a question. I answer by pressing against her small, strong body. I guess we're both tired is all, of big questions without answers, of fighting, of dealing.

Never thought I'd become this type of guy, a guy who tries to escape his problems with kissing. Never thought I'd care for it, not realistically. I like chemical equations, problems demanding careful consideration, caution. I'm a dork. It's Gats who's supposed to be the one who likes to shmooze. But I seem to have found comfort in it as well. 

Not for exhilaration. Not for excitement. Simply to forget.

Wires shriek above my head. There's a scream of metal, sending my stomach lurching into my throat, my eardrums splintering at the sound. The elevator plunges, down, down, down. I yelp, my mouth pulling away.

There's about a second for the oily feeling in my stomach to well up into this sticky, ugly glimpse into desperation, making my thoughts come in clipped bursts. Death. Free-Falling. Pain. End.

Then my wings snap open, Jay screams, and I shoot up so high my head smashes into the ceiling. I scream, too. The lights and music cut out a moment before impact. My head's jolted one more time. Below us, the floor crumples and dents up into a thousand bristling metal shards. Beneath me, the steel looks like quills.

Blood, hot and sticky, runs down my face. It takes a panicked moment for me to realize it's only a nosebleed.

"Jay!" Her head's buried in my chest, her hands cradling my hips. "You good?"

She's shaking, her face stark white. "Saboteurs," she mutters into the curve of my throat. Another rattle of the elevator fills my blood with ice.

Fingers poke through the slits in the door. For a moment, I'm paralyzed with fear, fluid and cold as it washes over me. And then, I'm pissed, fists balled, white flaring my eyelids, jaw clenched. Pissed at my own fear, pissed that if these guys had snapped the elevator cable with the wrong passengers inside, innocent civilians would die, pissed they'd dare take such a gamble, pissed that I'm the thing they're gambling for.

Twinges dance up my wings, a buzz of heat surging to my skin. Still, Luce is too weak to fight, and my powers are gone. I steal glances for an escape route, but we're surrounded by four caging walls and a ceiling that's about to crumble in. A smell of smoke and static. "Looks like we've been... ensnared," I offer with a sickly little laugh.

Jaylin presses her ear to my heart. More steel twists, groaning, as the doors creep open. My feathers brush the broken ceiling, a handful fluttering over us like blackened leaves on a November wind.

Gas hisses through the door, a misty, pink cloud that smells so sweet I think I'll throw up. Jaylin gasps. Cusses. I groan a little, that sugar-smell bringing images. The strength of Galaxy's—Heaven's—arms I melted into. Me, collapsing in a slurring, sobbing puddle on an empty street, mind frayed with nervous panic, wrists bitten by ropes the night Jay saved me.

"I hate that drug," I mutter, lightness swelling up in my head with all the pressure of a bubble about to pop.

"The elevator shaft," she slurs, tugging my shirt. "Angel! Right now!"

I glance up at the ceiling. It's split down the middle, sawdust and faded grain wisping from the split like jagged sort of snowflakes. My knees bang together, wings suddenly too heavy to lift.

Jaylin gave me a spritz of this stuff. This guy's giving us a cloud.

"I might fall." Fifty stories up, too. In a flash of red, I imagine it. Her, me, falling through the darkness to a point that feels like it will never come, then—BOOM! A crack of pain and whiteness as my eyes droop shut for what will be the final time. "Are... you... sure... ?" The words, pulled apart with pauses I have to wrestle my tongue through. The searing muscles in my wings stretch and contract, heavy as if dripping oil. this feeling I've drowned myself in sleeping syrup.

"Give it a shot," she says, twisting the hem of my shirt into a knot around her fist.  I feel her head bobbing against my pounding heart, her cheek just brushing my collarbone. A rub of warmth.

I glance up at the branches broken into the ceiling. Around us, a rumble building above us, below us, beside, the scream of swaying cables and hooks. Spindly fingers, pushing at the inch-thick doors, pale as porcelain.

We can surrender or we can take the risk. And suddenly,  I know Jaylin is right. 

With one glance at the darkness above, I pull apart the ceiling by its jags of dangling steel. A snow of dust drops into the elavator, filling my eyes and nose, drawing a taste of mold and damp concrete to my tongue. Jay's body pressed against mine, I shoot up into the unknown, wings beating, heartbeat slowing. Ba-BUMP, ba-bump, ba bump, bump, bump...

Like there's a fist squeezing around my lungs, I suddenly forget how to breathe.

Colors swell, voices deafen.

And down I fall.