=== Curt ===

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Smash Gal . . . I saw Kari grab Cindi by the throat. She was squeezing and snarling. I side-stepped another feckless blow from Professor Mind. He was injured. So was I, but I was less so. He gestured and another wave of blue psychic energy blasted forward. I snapped and appeared behind him. I elbowed him in the neck and he fell forward. He reached out and said, “Kari, don't!”

I glanced up at the fight between the only two women I had ever cared about. Kari dropped Cindi to the ground and she landed heavily. “No!”

I didn't pop forward. I couldn't summon the concentration to do that. I ran to her. I ran to Cindi. Kari started charging forward but a blue wall appeared between us. It didn't stop her for long. She smashed through it. But I didn't care. I got to Cindi. I leaned over her and I could see the bruises. The scrapes. Her eyes were closed. I felt my breathing quickened. I couldn't see her chest moving. I tried to find her pulse but I couldn't. My own blood was rushing violently through my body. I couldn't hear anything. I leaned over her. “She's not breathing!”

Smash Gal landed in front of me. So did the Professor. I was shaking.

“Turn yourself in, Curt. It's over. You can't win.” Kari's voice was steel. I stared up at her, Cindi in my arms.

“Y-you k-killed her,” I whispered. Her eyes widened. Professor Mind clutched his head. But I blocked him out. My vision narrowed. The only thing I could see was Kari. And with that focus, came a plan. My rage ran hot but my mind was working furiously. I had enough of Kari's bullshit. “You fucking bitch! You killed her!”

Distantly, I heard the man say “Kari, you need to get out of here. I'll stop him. Go!”

“I'm not afraid of him! He's just some little bitch thief. They're a dime a dozen and I've stopped all of the others. I'll stop him too!”

“Kari, he is going to try to kill you. He's . . . He's so angry.” I stepped forward.

“He's powerless!” Kari charged forward. I teleported behind her and she slammed into the ground. I turned to Professor Mind. My head was pounding. My body was shaking with my heartbeat. I busted out one of my batteries and slammed it into him and activated it. His body convulsed and he collapsed, screaming in pain.

“Stay down,” I growled. “Or I'll kill you, too.”

Kari screamed and launched herself at me. I stepped to the side and she landed next to me. I tracked her movement and opened a portal. She threw her punch and it slammed into Professor Mind. She screamed in rage and flung more fists at me. I didn't bother moving. I tracked her movements and her fist slammed into her and the Professor. “Why!? Why are you doing this!?”

“You killed her,” I growled. “I'm going to kill you.”

She laughed and charged back. “Yeah, right. Better people than you have tried and failed, Cee. Powered people. Not someone with a parlor trick. I'm not going to die to some two-bit thief. Not her and not you.”

“She wasn't trying to kill you. And I have never tried to kill you before. But you have burnt up every. Piece. Of. Good. Will. You. Had.” She launched herself down at me. She was fast. I could only barely track her movements. But I could track her trajectory. She threw a fist forward and I opened a portal in front of it. Then I constricted the portal around her flesh. The constant spinning energy that my portals were made of cut into her flesh. She tried to pull her arm from it, but when she did I just tightened the grip around her arm. I walked up to her. She kicked out and I caught her leg in a portal and did the same. The same energy cut through her stockings and then into her flesh, spinning like a saw of sheer energy. She struggled more. I slide on around her other arm and leg, constricting them to a tight point. She roared and struggled against it.

I stared up at the face of the first woman I ever loved. She was gritting her teeth. Tears were streaming down her face, smearing the makeup that somehow always stayed immaculate in any other circumstance. I felt nothing but contempt for her. Hatred. Not only had she abandoned me but she had killed the only other person I had ever loved. And she did while sanctimoniously calling me a thief and insulting me. I grinned. It was painful. There was no joy in it. I don't know that I had joy left.

“Curt! Stop!” A voice from behind me cried. I ignored it and watched her struggle. “I know you're angry. But you have to calm down.”

I finally turned back. Professor Mind was standing again. “She's not dead, Curt. She's breathing. It's shallow. Please. Don't do this.”

“You think I'll believe the lies of another fucking hero!? You pieces of shit do whatever you want.” I pointed back to her. “She has tried to kill me countless times. All because she thinks that she has the right to because of her stupid fucking powers. You idiots and your powers. You're all so sloppy because you never have to try!”

“Curt, I know you're angry. I understand that. I . . .” The man before me winced and stumbled back. “I can feel it. I feel all of it. But think. Look at her. Look at Buck Cherry. She's breathing.”

Something he did washed over me. The rage cleared for a moment. My eyes focused and I saw Cherry. Her chest moved. But the rage came back. “Desperate act from a desperate man.”

“Curt, I'm not faking that. I wouldn't. Because I know that you would kill me in an instant if you caught me.” I walked past him and leaned down over Cindi. Her chest moved slightly. My hands were still shaking and my pulse was too fast. I wouldn't be able to verify anything. I hadn't let Kari out of the bonds. The other half of her limbs were being crushed under the weight of the entire ocean. Probably freezing, too. The Mariana Trench was the coldest, cruelest place I knew of. And I was using it as a weapon.

“If you're faking this, I will drop you, piece by piece into a volcano,” I said. I picked her up. With a flick of my hand, the portals around Kari's limbs loosened and spit her out. She landed on the ground with a freezing, bloody splat. I had overtaxed my system a lot. Normally, when I overtax the system, I can't teleport for twenty to thirty seconds while I sap ambient energy from the entire planet, especially from large, wasteful energy generators. I normally found it ironic that my teleportation depended on the energy sources that I hated so much and wanted to abolish. That, in my perfect world, I never existed. Or what I had thought was my perfect world. Having seen Cindi die . . . Or at least I thought. I hope it was just a thought. I realized that more than anything I wanted to be in a world with her by my side. And these fucking bastards kept trying to take her away! I shook with rage and crushed her into my chest. I could finally hear her breath. I started walking away. I picked up her clothes and put them in a bag.

=== Kari ===

The pain was unbearable. My arms and legs were so cold. I watched Curt walk away with Buck Cherry in his arms. I tried to stand up but he had cut through my legs and arms ferociously. I collapsed to the ground. I had been hurt by so many people lately. Chuck was just sitting there, watching them. Same as me. I screamed at him. “What are you doing!? Get them! They're getting away, PM!”

“No, Kari,” he said softly, getting to his feet. He shambled over to me, clutching his side. “Not this time. If I went anywhere near him right now, he'd kill me. He's barely containing his rage and hatred for us right now.”

“What . . .” I started, tears welling up in my eyes. “What fucking right does he have to hate us?”

“Kari, you went too far again,” he said softly, brushing the hair out of my eyes. “You almost killed her. And you're wondering why he hates you? What you did to him? He has never fought like that before. And you brought that out in him.”

“I was just trying to bring him in!”

“No, you were trying to hurt him,” Chuck said softly. I shuddered with a half scoff and cry and winced. “After almost killing his girlfriend, you mocked him. You degraded him. At some point, you stopped seeing him as a person and as an obstacle for justice.”

“He breaks the law. He hurts people!”

“And you do, too.” Chuck's tone was somber. “And so does Bion. And me. And Jenny. And Thunderblast. We're all criminals by the letter of the law. And with any other criminal, you try to take them in. But with Curt, your friend . . . Maybe someone who was more than that, and his girlfriend, you have always tried to kill him. Every time you've fought.”

“I . . . I didn't . . . I wouldn't . . .”

“You did.”

“I . . . He is a criminal. A thief and a murderer.”

“Not today. And not even in general. As far as criminals go, generally, he is rarely lethal.”

“Does this look nonlethal to you?” I tried to gesture to myself but ended up collapsing onto my face.

“No, it doesn't, but he also believed that you killed someone he cares about more than I think even he knows.” Chuck watched as several reporters, ambulances and the police closed in. The police must have been scrambling after I shattered their ceiling and Curt and Cherry's assault. It took them forever to get together.

“Smash Gal, what do you have to say about Esvanir's words? Do you think you're sloppy?”

“Do you feel like you underestimated Esvanir?”

“Do you think it's right to break into a police station like you did?”

“What about the collateral damage that you caused in this fight?”

The reporters asked a million questions and they all ran through my head as I was rushed off to the hospital. I lay there as the doctors tried to figure out what to do with me. My skin was tougher than most of the tools they had. They had turned on the TV and the news was recounting the battle. They had used drones to get closeups of our faces. I saw my face when I was choking Buck Cherry. I saw her fear. I felt her fear when I looked at myself. Her identity had finally come out. Well, her identities, I guess. She had forty-two known aliases. It was thought that her original name was Cindi Drei, but honestly who could know at this point. I doubt even she could keep it straight.

My parents came around and offered their expertise to help cure me. Part of the Grignau physiology that I had inherited from their experiments was quick healing. There would be scars. And I was basically bedridden for a while. But I would be fine. When I saw the footage of what Esvanir . . . what Curt had done to me. His face contorted in that terrible rage. Rage that matched mine when I was choking Cherry . . . Cindi . . . We were both so terrifying.

I also caught the words I had said in my rage. Chuck was right. I had been mocking him. And he had proven me wrong. Incredibly wrong. The woman with the magic sword couldn't kill me but Curt almost had. I suffered from severe frostbite. They say that my arms were covered in seawater. When my limbs were trapped in his portals, I could barely move them. It was so painfully heavy. I felt my bones pop. I shivered. The memory was terrible. I still felt cold. My fingers were blue by the time they got me in the ambulance. I had apparently got hypothermia.

“Honey,” mom began when she saw me. She threw her arms around me. “Oh my god! Look at you. Look at what he did to my girl.”

“It's fine, mom,” I lied. She worked hard to make sure that I'd still have full use of all of my limbs, but I think my body would've taken care of that already. But I let her. It was something that made her feel like she had control over the terrible thing that had happened. The thing I caused. The thing Curt caused. When I thought about him, I still felt rage but I also felt pain. I never thought I'd see him look at me like that. With that much loathing. And now when I close my eyes, I see Buck Cherry's face.

About a week after I was admitted, I had most of the function of my fingers back. It still hurt to do things, but I could work through the pain. And I had made a decision. Curt, Cherry, Lady Blade had all gotten the better of me. I couldn't let that happen again. I was strong. I was really strong. But they were martial artists. And my strength might overcome that, but they also could use it against me. So, I made a call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Jenny. It's Kari.”

“Hey, Kar. How're you feeling?”

“Exhausted. Beaten. Tired.”

“Yeah, I've been there.”

“You have?”

“Oh, yeah. I wasn't born in a wheelchair, you know?”

“Oh . . .” I didn't know that about Jenny. I really didn't know much about her at all. Just that I liked her.

“Ask.” It wasn't a question. It was a command. That's when I remembered that the one thing I did know about her was that she was a domme in some of her relationships. I shuddered.

“What?”

“Everyone always wants to ask, but they think it's rude or whatever. And that is way more annoying than almost any of the actual questions. Except for the sex ones. Those can get really uncomfortable.”

“Wouldn't that mostly depend on the position?” I asked. Jenny took a moment, then I think she dropped the phone laughing. I laughed too. For the first time in a week, I laughed.

“Anyway,” she managed, barely catching her breath. “What's up, girl? What can I help you with?”

“Well, I . . . Do you know anyone who knows martial arts?”

“The world's strongest woman wants to learn martial arts. That's horrifying. I have a couple of people I could call. But you'll have to be a bit gentler with them than you were with Buck Cherry.”

“Yeah . . .” I sighed, feeling the guilt well up again.

“What happened wasn't your fault. Esvanir took that too far.”

“Chuck doesn't agree.”

“Well . . . I don't know. It doesn't seem cut and dry to me. And Esvanir went way farther than you did. And even now, he's on a warpath. I hear he's doing an interview with David Thrawn. Thinking about it, that's happening today.”

“He's doing what?” I demanded, sitting up.

“Well, since your fight, he's been on Twitter constantly, releasing videos about the authoritarianism and might-makes-right nature of heroes. How it creates an unjust hierarchy or some such nonsense. And it looks like David Thrawn wants to capitalize on the fact that he's trending. Some people are resonating with it.”

“Really? That sounds . . . Weird. Do people really think that we're like that? Aren't authoritarians fascist?”

“Sometimes . . . A lot of the time, yeah. It also doesn't help that he and Bion have been arguing for the last thirty-six hours. And Curt is pretty well-spoken.”

“He always was. The prick,” I said. I couldn't imagine what people wanted from an interview like that. What would David ask? “I hope Thrawn nails him to the fucking wall.”

“Yeah, me too. He's kind of insufferable,” Jenny said, absently. “So, I got word back. I have a trainer who is willing to take you on. She's the best. Can train you in whatever you want really.”

“She's that good?”

“She's the best. Trained in both weapons and hand-to-hand. I'll give her your number and she'll reach out. How much longer are you in the hospital for?”

“I'm basically healed up.”

“Uh-huh. Do I have to call your mom to make sure you stay until you're healed up?”

“N-no! Don't do that.”

“Then heal up. No use learning a bunch of new stuff if you kill yourself from overwork. Speaking of. I also have to call Chuck's mom. Since he's been overworking himself too. Or become his mom and spank him.”

“You're such a domme.”

“Sometimes.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “But sometimes I like to be dommed. Just depends.”

“Well, tell Chuck I say hi when you see him.”

“He hasn't visited you?”

“Uh, no, not since the first night.”

“Oh. Well, I'm sure he's just busy. He'll be there when he has a little more time. I know it.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I know him. He's a dork, but he's really reliable. And also, he was in bad shape that night. I know he passed out for a couple of days after he got home. Because he's an idiot.”

“Men usually are.”

“Just means we can train them if we try, right?”

“Do you believe that?”

“Believe? No, I know.”