During the two years Amy had spent helping at hospitals, she had heard many expletives and curses. In several languages. Some people reacted to pain by crying, others by staying as still as possible, and others by raging against it. Usually verbally.
She used them all now as she paced on top of the roof. And for good reason.
She had run out of books.
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me books! For I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave the mental exaltation. That is why I am quoting, and badly at that, the good Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Damn it."
A Sherlock Holmes novel was not enough for a night. Amy hadn't read any of them yet, so when one of the volunteers had agreed to lend her the first book, she had jumped at the chance. It was a good book, but without anything else to do she had finished it by midnight. And the closest library in the zone had been completely inundated during the attack, so she had not gotten any more books.
Leaving her alone with her own mind. If only she could sleep, distract herself, anything!
But no. Like Holmes, her mind didn't lend itself to mental stagnation. It kept going. Thinking and thinking. Was it because of her power or just because Amy herself had too many things to think about? Too many things she didn't want to think about, didn't want plaguing her. A sword of Damocles hanging over her head. Not thinking about it wouldn't make it go away. It was still there.
"Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Just don't think about it." She raised her hands to massage her temples, a futile gesture now when she didn't have headaches anymore. Not like before. It was just out of habit she did it. Maybe it was her way of subconsciously making herself more human, or was it...
She shook her head. "I need more books. Now." Leaving herself no more time to think, and wasn't that a barrel of laughs, she started walking. Reaching the edge of the roof, she jumped and fell four floors down. There was no fear. Not only had Amy lost any fear of heights she might have with her sister's flying, her body could take greater falls now. And any damage that she might receive, she could heal. She crouched and rolled as she landed, taking care to not trample her backpack.
The impact didn't hurt. She had disconnected her ability to feel pain while in the air. Pain was a defense mechanism, a way for the conscious thought to know that the body was damaged. But Amy knew her body like a blind man knows darkness, she didn't need it. Mend, she willed as she rose to her feet, fixing the microfractures on her bones, the ruptured blood vessels and damaged muscles in her legs. She reconnected her sense of pain last. Humanized herself.
She had taken residence on the roof of a mostly empty tenement building the day before and familiarity had her come back tonight. The cold didn't bother her and it wasn't wet. It was isolated and allowed her to keep an eye on the sky. On the way from the beach where the cleaning crews gathered, there were two former bookstores. It was there she was headed, with one of them in mind.
It wasn't right to take books from there, even if the shop was planked up and the combination of water and mold had likely ruined a great deal of the merchandise. Somebody had covered the windows and put a rusty padlock on the door, so the owner was likely alive. Or had been. It was looting, raiding. Wrong. But Amy needed to do something during the nights, or she would go mad. More mad. She was already on her way, anyway. It was just some books.
And she would put the books back before breakfast, no harm done.
The streets were empty. The only light came from the sky, little as it was. After making sure nobody was watching yet again, she gained some distance from the store's door. Then she ran and kicked with all her strength. The door rattled heavily in its hinges and Amy nearly fell on her backside. She strained her ears, hoping nobody had heard the racket. It seemed she was in luck.
"I'm still too afraid." She sighed. She had all the strength of a full grown man and no problems with getting injured, but she still reacted like she was a girl on the small side. She took a deep breath.
She snapped a side kick. The next kicks grew stronger each time, just a second between each as she healed the damage she did to herself. By the sixth, the door nearly broke by the doorknob. She aimed the seventh at the cracked zone, noting how she should have targeted the zone from the very beginning. The wood broke loudly, going apart in chunks around the lock, and the door swung open.
Promising she would fix the door later, she stepped into the store. It was dark but it did not hinder her. She had changed her eyes for the first time two nights ago and now she remade them each night. More photosensitive cells, later a reflective layer inspired by a cat, more control over the pupil's size… It had been something of an experiment before she balanced the cat low-light vision with the human detailed vision. She closed the door, keeping just a sliver open, because even cats needed some light. Surprisingly, it wasn't as humid as she thought it would be. There were no puddles and the lowermost rows of books had been cleaned out. Yes, she could smell the mold from the wooden floorboards starting to rot, feel the cells and micro fragments against her skin and lungs. But aside that, it was in pretty good condition.
She started at the classic's section, looking for something substantial to read. Something that would last her for some time. Poetry maybe. She had always taken some time to analyze the verses. There was a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Interesting but much too heavy for her backpack. There were also thinner books; her eyes landed on 'Poems by W. Shakespeare' but she was fairly tired of his writing already. On the other hand, she was starting to sound really long-winded and eloquent, even in her thoughts. She grabbed a small collection of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and set towards the fiction for young adults. After skimming the summaries of a dozen or so books, she settled on a couple of fantasy ones. Norse runes and chinese dragons.
She was sliding the second book out of it's place in the shelf when she heard the noise. Something sharp and high. A whine… No. Like when chalk slid on the chalkboard the wrong way, threatening to deafen them at school.
Her image on the glass protecting the books wavered minutely.
That means... Shatterbird, and...
The counter had a glass pane. Half the cabinets and bookshelves in the bookstore had glass fronts, some broken, some intact. There was some sand swept against the corners of the room too. And the storefront had two great display windows that nearly ran from floor to ceiling.
She was in a room with a multitude of glass panes and with the windows boarded up, it had nowhere to go but inwards.
She threw her arms up to cover her head and herself to the ground as the glass screamed.
Awareness came before vision. Not too surprising. It felt its body and the visual sensory organs
eyes
And the eyes were damaged. Lacerations and perforations everywhere. More than that. Foreign material was lodged in its body, the smaller fragments being pushed out by its regeneration alone. The bigger were being healed around, a temporary measure.
Major muscular systems were cut, preventing movement. It needed to fix its arms to remove the bigger fragments of glass? Of glass. Its face had taken major damage but the brain was intact. No, the brain was intact now, the shards that had damaged it pushed back through the eyeholes in the skull. More worrying was the amount of damage and blood loss. It was drawing nutrients and material from the body's stores of fat tissue, bit it would exhaust them. It would have to fill them up later.
It could think about that later though. Regaining functionality was paramount.
bicep tricep brachial artery lungs bronchus urinary bladder intestine appendix ovaries uterus fallopian tubes
She. It was female. She was. It-She should have remembered that.
No. Not just. It was missing...
me
Amy gasped. Awareness of a different sort flooded her. Awareness of herself, the person, not the body. Awareness that she had not been aware until that moment too. She stopped all the operations in her body and reconnected everything amiss in her brain in a blind panic and-
Pain. Pain unlike anything she had ever felt before. A strangled scream out of wet lungs reached her ears. Her own scream. She seized and more pain swept over her like a tidal wave. She was paralyzed, overwhelmed. Her body couldn't move without hurting and her mind was trapped by the same.
Amy had always reacted to pain by staying as still as possible and hoping it would pass soon. Being a good girl, no matter where which kind of pain it was.
Infinitely long seconds passed. She cried. Instinctual hormone release, a way to ease and release the stress without moving. It hurt, the tears leaving her half torn out tear ducts, but eventually it abated. No, better to say she got used to it. It was still there, all the nerves red hot in her mind's eye, throbbing and demanding attention. Haltingly, she reached for them before stopping and directing her attention closer to her brain. With a thought, the pain stopped.
She breathed in relief. Her nerves lit like a christmas tree in her mind, but she felt no actual pain.
Never again. Amy swore to herself she was never going to do that again. She couldn't think with all the pain and without being able to think she couldn't fix herself, she couldn't even take away the pain. Maybe she should impose a pain threshold on herself. Some sort of protection, like a fuse or a circuit breaker.
She spent the next minutes working over herself, meticulously going over her injuries like she was one of her patients. With care she unmade parts of her muscles and organs to fix other more important parts. Somewhat detachedly she removed the bigger fragments of glass, then picked the smaller ones out of her skin. She became able to blink, see and move again, and only then did she witness the destruction around her.
The books were cut and torn, pieces of paper doting the room. There were red splatters everywhere, the books, the furniture, even the ceiling. Underneath her spread a dark stain on the wooden floor from where she had bled out. A million jagged pieces of glass, blades and needles and shards formed a shining carpet of deadly grass and a thousand more were stuck on the books and walls where they had found purchase.
They had made mincemeat out of her. Amy Shish Kebab.
She had the evidence all over her clothes, torn being use and darkened with copious amounts of vital fluids, but the true evidence laid inside her mind. She shook at the last memories she had before her brain was struck. She could review them in slow motion, like the news' high-definition playback of a favorite touchdown. Better even. Human eyes and brains could process only a certain number of images per second; Amy's enhanced eyes were somewhere between that and cat's.
The glass had exploded. Vibrated until it just burst apart with tremendous force. It rebounded on hard surfaces, stabbed the soft ones. It stabbed into her while she fell to the ground. She remembered the pain as veritable spears of glass from the display windows caught her sides and ran through her. The soundwave reached her before the glass stabbed into her eyes and bored into her brain. It was loud; loud and deep like standing right next to the bass columns on a live concert, a sound that had physical impact. She didn't remember hitting the floor.
"Ah-ah. I don't remember." Amy said out loud. It was important.
This was the first thing she didn't remember after her trigger. It made sense that she didn't. Her brain had been damaged after all. But she was still alive, her power having recovered her and all of her memories and those were intact. Which meant her power worked even while she was completely out of commission and that it was automatic. But it was her awakening that sprung to attention. For moments she hadn't known who or what she was, just like the first time. She had just been… not. She hadn't felt human, at least.
She tried remembering what had transpired while she had been out but her mind refused to cooperate. These memories didn't hurt like the others but they were reduced to minuscule flashes of information, useless all in all.
Were the two situations related in some way? Had she been hurt too the first time and triggered again to survive? She groaned and shook her head. She shouldn't dwell on that. She had other things to do. After all, Shatterbird had just-
Amy froze.
Shatterbird had just hit the city.
"Oh. No."
She scrambled to her feet and lunged for the door, throwing it open. Under the moonlight, the city glittered with broken glass. Screams and moans heard over the distance, here and there, everywhere. The death toll had to be gruesome, the injured in the thousands. She started running. It wouldn't help that the hospitals were overcrowded, undersupplied and understaffed after the Leviathan. They had also certainly been hit and...
She stopped mid-stride.
Where was she going? What was she going to do?
What was she supposed to do? She couldn't heal people. She would just be in the way. Maybe she could help and take people to the hospital or something. And have them bleed out in the way without proper care or… No, no. She was thinking too big. She wasn't somebody who could help on a large scale or be helpful at the hospitals anymore. She had to scale down.
Establishing priorities and compartmentalizing. The first thing they had told her when she had realized she didn't have time to heal everybody.
She could focus. Her priorities were her family, her friends, the heroes, the people. Personal feelings should be kept separate from doing the right thing, but Amy always had some difficulties on that front.
New Wave first. They should be alright. If people on the street knew about the Slaughterhouse Nine, then the PRT knew too and they would inform Carol. So they should be safe. And it wasn't like Amy could go back.
Family, done. Friends…
She ran down a short mental list. Most were not in town, she thought, and those that were… A name sprang to the forefront of her mind.
"Oh no, no, no."
Danielle.
Danielle, at whose house she'd been just the other night. Danielle who lived in a high-rise apartment with windows and a television and all sort of other things that could be affected by Shatterbird's power.