The ghosts tried to strangle her in her sleep, so she didn't sleep anymore. Oh, she looked still and silent and restful, lying on the flaking paint of a rusted bus stop bench or curled up against the cold with brick to her back, but whenever she closed her eyes she found that explosions and faded memories writ themselves large upon the dark canvas of her eyelids and she found it was easier not to sleep for fear of what she might see. The smog in the city had a way of crawling into her dreams, you know.

She liked this city, despite that. When she looked out at the crown of rooftops and spires, the lights glittered like shards of broken glass studded across the horizon, sharp and unpredictable, flickering. It was busy here - people, everywhere, always. The anonymity closed over her, effortlessly, and the city swallowed her whole. She was an invisible glass girl now, one of dozens.

How far she had fallen!

The nights were the longest here in this city, dull and dark and restless. Sometimes she couldn't avoid it. Sometimes, she slept. And dreamed, of course. And dreamed.

Last time it had been a blond man with blue eyes and a smile like albite. He was handsome enough. He seemed heroic. He was needless, it had to be said. He was going to die, she thought, or maybe he was dead already because the image in her mind was worn at the edges with an erosion she knew to be nostalgia, to be regret, to be grief. The soldier had loved this man.

This man was lost.

She still wore the jacket she had died in. She had bled through the cloth, here, at this patch just over the heart. The stain was dark now, like brome. The stitching along the shoulders and her biceps had worn away, erasing any indication she had ever owed her loyalty and sanity to something larger than herself, the edges of the sleeves were ragged. The threads of the cloth hung past her fingertips, brushing against her skin gently like they were trying to get her attention, and the elbows had worn through so that her dark skin was visible whenever she folded her arms, like this, or put her hand in her pocket, like this. The cold bit at her through the hole, wind searching for skin with cold fingers.

It was a different kind of cold here. Bitter in a way she had rarely experienced. The other kind of chill was crisp and sharp - it cut, and left you bleeding, but you could always heal from that, something so simple. Here, it sank in deep and settled among her bones, festering under the skin like a venom.

She is festering. She knows that now. She is a wound, and she is inevitable. It is only a matter of time.

Until then, she waits. She sees. The marks on her skin earn her a kind of respect, but for the most part she remains an invisible glass girl and she reaps secrets from this city like a harvester gleans wheat, in vast golden arcs of whispers and implications. She is good at secrets. She always has been.

When he finds her, she has been expecting him. He has a bruised face and blood on his breath, and he has set parts of the city on fire. They are still burning - she can taste the smoke.

He buys her coffee. A small, cramped cafe, all rusty orange vinyl and yellow cigarette stains, lit by flickering neon and dim lightbulbs and the whir of generators overhead. Someone has removed a tile from the ceiling, and slid a radio into the space. It barks out coverage of a disaster in the boroughs. Her coffee is cold.

All the spiders in this city know one another's webs. This is what she tells him. All the men in their graffitied skin and the women with the steel against their sides, they know one another. They'll hunt him down like a dog if he goes against them, this man with the skull on his chest and the target on his head. And maybe he'll kill them, and maybe they'll send more, and maybe he'll tear apart this city in a maelstrom of brimstone and inferno like he plans and maybe he'll be found eyeless, fingerless, tongueless, lying in some parking lot or empty apartment, with all of his bullets lying around him and all of his blood on the walls.

He doesn't seem too worried about that. She almost smiles.

He's going to wrought a city of lead full of orphans and widows, but is that all different from the city now?

She doesn't think so. She writes down the names she knows, and the addresses she has heard, and if she has learned anything else about them, she notes that down too. It is not a short list. The bruised man is pleased.

Are you looking for justice, she asks, because I don't think you'll find it here, not in this city, and he says no, no, this isn't justice, it isn't vengeance, it will not be clean because this is judgement, this is punishment, and I will not stop.

He has a gun with him. It glitters, a promise, in the darkness. She wonders if he intends to use it, here and now, that she has given him what he needs.

It would be better for him if he did not.

He doesn't. He moves, and the light sends shadows flickering across a black eye and a split lip, a mass of purple and maroon and black. He says, what are you doing here?

I'm waiting for a man, she says. A man with silver skin who bleeds gold, a man of red and starlight, a man who chases storms and lost things.

The bruised man looked at her with something approaching pity in his eyes and she turned her head, inky hair swaying, to avoid his gaze. She looked at the dark tableau in the shadowed glass of the restaurant's window.

I'm going to kill him, she told her reflection. I'm going to kill him.

Let the winter soldier count his bullets, because he will not have enough. Let him pace out the miles between them, because she will not stop. Let him sharpen his knife, because he does not stand a chance. He should have killed her when he had the chance.