Trapped, pressed in on both sides, Jodie waited to die. She turned her head, a futile move, there was no benefit to opening her eyes save letting the grit floating around the air scratch at them. She activated her Sense and closed her eyes. When it was just an auxiliary measure she had no issue parsing the information, it was instinct, but when she leaned into it as much as she did now, even seeing the blackness around her made it fuzzy. She waited for it, for the edges of her confines to trace themselves within her mind. It tickled at her, at the edges of her mind. One moment. Another. A third. On the fifth, she tried to move her hand to feel the ring, Nothing. No ring, no hand. The shoulder, the elbow, but no hand. She tried Chloe’s trick, a conduit of blood, but her mouth tasted of iron. Wherever she traced just washed it about her mouth. She tried to move her body. Clenching her abdomen, she shifted slightly, hitting her head against something then swung back like a pendulum, hitting something hard sending pain lancing through her skull. Pain, that was an odd one. The Sense dulled it, made it a reminder, an alert, not something debilitating. She couldn’t think when it racked her, distracted her. Ugly, wretched thing. Pain meant fuckups, weakness, it meant somewhere along the line she’d failed. Pain meant an aggressor, it meant letting someone hurt her. It meant not letting someone hurt her, and them doing it anyway. It was humiliating. She was glad, in that moment, that nobody could see her pain.

Dotty pounded the walls of her cavern and ran her throat raw calling for someone. She’d started with the fire services, then switched to Chloe, then back again. Now she just screamed to be heard. It was a small cell, the size of a toilet stall. At the lowest point of what had once been the stairs leading down to the basement that now made up the floor she wouldn’t have been able to stand straight. She crouched and pounded on the walls, sending dull thuds echoing to whoever could hear.

Jodie’s arm was lodged, parallel to her body, between two chunks of what had once been the building. She couldn’t feel it, that meant it was dead, gone, useless. In one swift movement she pulled, and the sound of shrapnel, gravel and cracking lit up the space for a moment before returning it to a tomblike silence. One hand free, she felt around her crevice. It didn’t take long. She was crushed from the waist down in rubble, her legs were either as dead as her hand or held tight, she couldn’t move them. Whatever she was pressed against it was flat, or had been, the seam of a broken corner ran up her body. There was a space of about three inches between her face and the wall on any side, her body was worse. That meant two things, drawing any kind of circuit was essentially impossible, and she had only a few minutes of air left.

Dotty cradled her fists and willed the tiny, elusive patch of light to grow bigger. She’d noticed it when the pain in her hands forced her to stop pounding. However many millions of miles away, the sun shot out rays of light. A precious few of them threaded the needle between the clouds, the rubble, and landed on a patch of brick, illuminating it a dull orange. Far, far away, Dotty looked at that brick, memorising it. It meant freedom, a path to the outside. And, if the wind blew just right, it meant an ephemeral curl of fresh air.

Jodie relaxed, and waited to die. This was it then. Death. It was oddly calming, knowing she would die. It had a sense of finality about it, a concrete assurance. The only constant in life, since Jodie didn’t pay taxes. She felt cheated slightly, she’d wanted to die for something. But this wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It was a better death than the one on the table a few hours ago, before Chloe had saved her. The realisation hit her like a flash of lighting, she jerked and cracked her head against the wall again. It had been filed away, but the Sense had picked someone up before the explosion. Chloe. She was close by. Then it had to be her who had set off the bomb. It was equipped with a failsafe that didn’t affect anyone within five feet, Sid’s idea in case of emergency, but Chloe didn’t have a remote detonator. She was in there somewhere.

Dotty cursed herself, again. She was an idiot, a hopeful, naive idiot. She shouldn't have followed Chloe into the building when she had a perfectly good hiding spot, she shouldn’t have gone into the basement. She shouldn’t have moved into a building owned by a terrorist. She shouldn’t have let Chloe start any of this in the first place. It was her fault, and now Chloe was dead because of her. Dotty sat down and angled herself as comfortably as she could, and gazed at the patch of light. It was growing smaller, the eye of the needle was shrinking, and the sun was moving in the sky. She would start screaming again, soon. She just needed a minute

Jodie rammed her dead, loose hand between her belly and the wall, the only flat space. It folded and turned when she moved it like there were too many bones. Or the same bones, splintered and mashing into each other. She was bleeding, though, that was enough. Jodie rolled her hand around, as close to a circle as she could. As soon as it joined the Sense returned. The pain in her head subsided and every surface of the rough tomb lit up in her mind. It was a child’s tomb, never more than a few inches from her body. A series of collapsed walls with just enough space for her to not be crushed. Jodie closed her eyes, whispering curses to herself, and pushed the Sense further, fading from the literal to the conceptual the further it reached. There were clusters of life above her, in the direction of her feet. Rats, probably, and a few larger ones, dying hunters. Further, through the maze of cracks and crevices, one life. Solitary, faint, but there. Her.

Jodie inhaled, spluttering up the already stale air, and waited. Any movement to the rubble would crush anything not already broken, worse, collapse the entire structure, but she had to try. Still touching the circle, she shifted the rubble. Pain lanced up from her pelvis, an edge that had punctured her spleen tore out of her side, but it was nothing with the Sense. No longer impaled, Jodie slid downwards into a crack, her broken hands doing nothing to stop her, and as she broke contact with the circle it rumbled back into place.

Dotty looked in silent shock through the darkness at the boulder that had replaced her right knee, it had fallen on her stretched leg, uncaring, marked only by the sound of a crunch. She tried to scream, but her breath caught in her throat and it came out as a desperate gasp. She moved her right leg, it came free and moved with much less weight. She waved her hand where her lower leg would have been. When her palm grazed the tip of her own thigh bone, she found it in her to scream.

Jodie lay, crushed on all sides, bleeding, broken, unable to move, to turn, to shift her arms, and waited to die. She wouldn’t wait long, the steady drip, drip, drip of her own blood running in streams reminded her of that. It was uniform, constant. Whatever part of her it came out of, it wouldn’t stop soon. It would take hours to die of blood loss, which meant running out of air was more likely, but she would pass out soon enough. Falling asleep was preferable to suffocation. Falling unconscious would stop her from using so much air, prolonging her a little more. It was nearly funny, the different forces vying for her death prolonging her life. A cruel joke from the closest thing she knew to providence.

Dotty screamed. And screamed, and screamed. She pounded at every surface, desperate, the pain in her fists long forgotten. She screamed for nothing, and nothing answered. On the ground, invisible to her, tears pooled with blood, gently spinning chips of bone. As conscious thought gave way to instinct, Dotty was sure only of one thing, she would dig herself out if she had to, but today was not the day that Dorothy Ferguson died.

Jodie woke up under a bright light. Heaven. She’d sometimes wondered if she would make the cut.

“Welcome back.” Sid. Not heaven, then. Jodie looked around. Neither of them, apparently. She was in the base. She brought her arm up to wipe the saliva from her mouth, her broken hand was back to normal.

“You were nearly dead when we found you.” Sid explained, “It was a coin toss, for a while. I was… I’m glad you’re back.” Jodie’s heart swelled slightly, “It was the right call, planting that bomb. You took a lot of them out”

“Chloe?” Jodie croaked, her throat dry. Sid opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated.

“We couldn’t find her. She might not have been in the blast.”

“No. I didn’t detonate it, she had to be there.” Sid pursed her lips.

“I’m sorry.”

The world grew fuzzy and Jodie realised she was blinking back tears. Sid put an arm around her and pulled her in, hiding her pain from the world.