A solo mission with Jaylin is about as appealing as a lunch bag full of spiders. Not because I hate her, not because she's even particularly bad at missions. She's done this kidnap-rescue-kidnap shtick far longer than I can guess at, and she's probably better at being a supervillain than I am at being a superhero, what with her guardians, idols. But when she puts herself in charge, I swear I'd rather drive a pen through my eardrums than listen to her order this, order that, are you listening, Hev? You couldn't do this without me, you hear!

And I think the most bothering part, the part that eats at me deeper than her snippy insults or barked commands, is that she's right.

"So, I mean, yeah, it'll be a real simple operation, as long as you don't do somethin' stupid, but who am I kidding, you're always doing something stupid..." haven't moved since Angelos left. Frozen, with the cats roving around my knees and fists. White fur clumps to my hoodie and to my dark tactical paints. Jaylin's creasing the pages of the notebook she stole from me, the crinkly yellow sheets full of plans she daydreamed during class. Scrawled in letters bunching up and over themselves in the type of pen that smears. It's hard to focus on what she says. Hard to keep my breathing slow and even, because my lungs feel heavy, like they're filling up with sand. Poison's being hurt. Tortured. "...Those Syn guys, Hev, they train like they're fighting off the apocalypse. The ones you see, yeah? They're the little wiry ones picked off the streets. The others are big, hands as big as your face."

"Let's just get this over with," I mutter against Larry's bell-collar, the sound a jangle against my knee cap as the Siamese winds circles around my thighs.

Jaylin whips her head up from her pages. Squints at me, eyes narrowed into angry little squints. Holds my line of sight until I squirm my hands into Larry's fur, and she shrugs. "Fine, mi numbero dos. Let's run in guns-a-blazing and heap us up some tragedy, ay?"

Despite the circumstances, I smile in a way that doesn't entirely hurt. "That's kind of my modem operendus, if you haven't noticed."

She returns my smile with a snort, rummaging through shopping bags she hasn't unpacked. I peek over her shoulder. Hairpins, short blade, rope coil. All of it somehow scrounged from the mall. It makes me blink once, twice, a visceral reminder that this pink-glitter puff of a girl is a supervillain, and a good one. Her fingers turn over the blade, breaks her fingerpad on the edge. A single bead of blood bubbles up over the cut. "He'll be fine," she says.

I'm supposed to say yeah, nod a little, plaster on a brave face. But the words won't come. What words stumbling in my head don't reflect that, not at all. "No," I say, the sound a huff. "It isn't that easy."

Jaylin lifts her head. Eyebrow raised, lip pulled halfway up, like in another life, she would laugh. If this wasn't so tragic. If we weren't offering ourselves up to suicide to save a suffering kid. That half-smile is so strange, so wrong, that it snaps me back from this precipice I've been teetering toward. Chin up, shoulders back, head high. Not a pessimist. I'm supposed to be Galaxy.

I try to become this person I've created. Suck in a sharp breath. Force a brave smile. Clasp her hand in mine, turning over her fingers so I can feel her nails, cool ovals, against my skin. I stare at her milky homes, willing the boy to fade. I'm willing myself it isn't Katris I'm saving, just some hostage. A shadow instead of blue eyes and a pretty smile. Just another person who needs saving in a world gone to hell.

"Lead the way." Her hand is small and warm in mine, but all I feel around me is cold, like I'm standing on a cliff looking over the artic edge of the world.

***

She can't lead as much as point in the general direction of Katris's prison while I brace her over my shoulder. Landmarks flit beneath us, Kimberly strip, an alley scrubbed free of graffiti, a flash of color, and then they flicker out of sight, like a struck match. I remember these. The black streets full of puddles, the glittering towers that give way to crumbling brick townhomes and teetering vinyl clapboard houses. The clouds are gray wisps drifting across a starless sky, and then we touch down in the ghost town Katris brought me to that night, and all the superhero in me wants to hide at the moment I need her--me, the fake me, anyway--most.

Jaylin spins the kitchen knife in her fingers. Around us, the buildings sagging forward, brick defaces and splattered with slimy moss. There's an itch at the back of my neck that someone is watching us. I glance up at windows glinting in the frames of steely buildings. I'd be damned if someone wasn't.

She inches toward the old cafe, which is abandoned now, gutted. Not a single table left, just the red walls and shards of a light fixture Angel shattered. My heartbeat slams in my throat. Where Katris was captured.

"Do you hear anything?"

"Huh?"

She exhales sharply. "With your supersenses? Do you hear anything?"

I pinch my brow and shut my eyes, almost a ritual. It's a shock to the senses, these sounds from across the state, enough smell to make you choke on your own spit. I soak up the ghost of the cityscape. There's quiet, mostly. A rustle of a smoky wind and the faraway scream of tires beating pavement. Rainwater sloshing down gutters so old they creak. Kittens mewing hungrily. No usual explosion of conversation, heartbeats, gasps of breath. I open my eyes, clap my hands over my ears and shut out the sound for half a second before I can shake my head at her. No go.

Jaylin groans. "Can ya' try again?"

I stare out at the strip with my heels ground down into the gravel. old shops with broken-in windows. Those towers, gray and frowning above us. I take several steps backward, relax my eyes to take in the whole scene. An inn with an ancient green door dangling from a rusty hinge, hiding a gaping rush of darkness. I peeled back the mental barrier, and for a long moment, all I hear are whispers, a rapid-fire slam of a faraway heart, teeth gnashing together. And then that quiet is snapped with a boy's low, grating scream.

Katris.

I can't say how long I stand there, fingers split over my eyes, head bloodless and aching for air. Seconds, maybe? Minutes? I can only say that Jaylin snaps me out of it with a punch in the chest that has me slamming down to the asphalt, gasping to breathe.

"Get over yourself! Or do you want him to die?"

Sticks and stones have broken my bones, but Jay is so blunt sometimes, I swear something inside me cracks. I nod and close my eyes again, knelt with my hand to the street. Bodies shift. Soft words swirling together, hardly whispers. Arguing, fearful.

"She's gonna kill us..." "You wanna run? Take your chances out there, but leave us out of it..." "...We could've split that boy's ransom, we could've escaped, and what did she do?" "...no, I can't, I can't tell you that, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

Katris' scream is even higher pitched than Angel's. Squeaky and girly, tempered with a gurgle that must rise from the back of his throat.

I race across the street toward the open door, Jaylin's fingers gripped around my belt loop. The reek of mold, the distant lull of bodies, it makes the darkness sway. Light glows on either side of me, casting dirty orange halos on the floor. There's a desk a little right of me, a hall plunging ahead into darkness. I'm guided by the slosh of water, the angry hiss of electricity. Katris has stopped screaming, his only sounds muffled sobs and groans for air.

A creak of floorboards has my head snapping to the side before a blade sinks into the wall under my arm. I can just make out the outline of my opponent's slim body, her hooded head.

Jaylin plunges the kitchen knife into the broad of the woman's chest. I can hear the sudden silence of her heart, that last wet beat. And I keep running. Stairs rise at the end of the hall. More women leave their rooms, creating a swarming black blockade. Poison sobs. Jaylin leaves my side and swings her blade in a bloody arc. I pick a breathing, bobbing target and aim a kick at an invisible bull's eye. Nail her square with my heel and fling her fifteen feet into an iron banister. An axe kick to the next woman's collarbone has her gasping at my feet. One woman knocks the breath out me in the chest with her shin, but I'm faster than them all. Uppercut to the jaw, knee to the ribcage. Katris screams, hoarser now, and I forget who he is and what he's done and the warmth of his hands clamped around him. I have to save him because I'm a superhero. This is what I do.

One by one,the women fall. Jaylin's breath come in quick, gasping pulls. There's blood on my knuckles, seeping through my shirt, into my skin. I can hear her pry out her blade from someone's chest, hear that wet gush of blood rushing from an open wound. My face is gashed and my broken wrist is swelling into a water balloon, but my opponents are lumps under my bloodied sneakers. Jaylin and I share a glance, her eyes ringed with gold.

There comes Katris's whimper, and for a second, I'm staring down at my knuckles, calloused and bruised, at the oil-black puddles of blood that seem to slither after me. At my shaking hands.

I've become dangerous.

But water and electricity dance above my head, seeping hissing through floorboards, dripping own on t. Katris's cry of pain is muffled behind a clenched jaw.

"Answer me," a woman says.

And he says: "No." 

Never expected the sneery little pretty boy to care so much about anything, but I can hear it in the desperate, clipped cadence of his cry.

Jaylin and I explode up the stairs. I'm unarmored, gashed in more places than I first felt. At the back of my neck, under the rotary cuff, along my left thigh. I'm wobbling, leaving trails of blood on a floor of torn carpet and stacked Sycamore slats. More woman ring a horseshoe around us. Bladed weapons at their sides. Torn flesh pulsing as it mends, I'm starting to sweat. My hands ache. Everything aches.

"Seventeen," Jay whispers against my earlobe. I lift my hands over my head, my heart a hummingbird in my chest.

"I don't want to fight you. You're prisoners, like the boy. Help m—"

My speech lands me a punch in the mouth and red blood spurting from a flattened nose. Jaylin beelines through the crowd, waving her blade. I shake the stars from my eyes just as I'm flung into the banister, hit it hard with a 'crack.' The pain is jarring. I slump, hitting the floor on my knees. And then the women pile atop me, a mass of fists and feet, vying for flesh. The smell of a dozen bodies, sweat and perfume, a mountain of breath, gliding in and huffing out. I squirm and struggle, bruised and beaten. With my back to the floor, I wriggle my escape form a caging hold, throwing weight off me with the flex of a super-strong chest. Kicking and punching, I snag a woman right in the jaw, toss her off me with the extension of my shoulder blades. Make a link of light through the crush of bodies. I squirm through them, crawling on broken ribs like shattered glass beneath my skin.

Katris's screams become whimpers. I shake the fingers clamped around my ankle and bolt up the next flight of steps. Farther down this level, they lead to an open door and to low, orange light.

I heave my weight against the door frame and step inside to the reek of decay, the floor sopped in blood, clumps of feathers fused together in clots of flesh strewn at my feet. I'm paralyzed, staring at the boy knelt over a plastic bucket. A battery. A pair of coiled jumper cables. His white bob of hair gone brown at the roots, the darkness slowly spreading. "My powers," he mumbles through a quiet cry.

A woman standing over him, dark hair hiding her face. Runs down her shoulders, back. Foot balanced on the edge of the bucket. Combat boot, plastic tread.

"Where does she live?" Never looks up. Stares down at the crying boy, voice even and low.

Jaylin, knelt in front of me, her quivering fist pressed to her heart. "Fifty floors up," she whispers, "Crown Springs complex home. Apartment 5018."

Angelos. Juniper, Storm, Gats. Their apartment. My heart plunges into my stomach. This is the information Katris was willing to die for. The information that leaves Jaylin in a trembling whisper. Katris makes a yelp, lifts his head. His blindfold is crooked, weighted with blood. His hair gone a honey-brown, this streaked umber color. Like mud soaked in bands of sunlight.

The woman glances over to me. "Nebula?" Her black eyes widen. "You live?"

There's a boy, gasping and shuddering in pain. Angel's address. A woman asking for my dead mother, my knuckles cracked, bloody and more than certainly broken. And all that pain wells up. Poor Katris. Poor Angel. My poor mom.

With one hiss of breath, I've flewn across the room and punched her smack across the throat.