Damsel[ed]: Rescue Required (#3 of the Damsel[ed] Series)

Chapter Twenty: Rescue Required

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.