Chapter 2: The Fortune Teller's Vision
The cobblestones of Colonial Center were slick with a fine, cold mist. Ruby walked, her heels clicking a staccato rhythm that felt like the only real thing in the world. The cash in her pocket was thick, the ghost of Richard’s release still a damp warmth between her thighs, but her mind was a shattered mirror. She kept seeing it: the white suit, the mask, her own eyes staring back from a magazine that now, in memory, refused to hold its shape.
A neon sign buzzed, flickered, and died. In the sudden gloom, another light glowed—a deep, amber radiance from a sunken window below street level. A hand-painted sign, the letters curling: Madame Zora, Seer of Truths.
Ruby stopped. She didn’t believe in this crap. She dealt in tangible currency—skin, sweat, whispered promises, cash. Yet her feet carried her down the three worn stone steps. The door opened before she could knock, as if she’d been expected.
The air inside was thick, a cloying blend of sage, vanilla, and dust. Velvet, the color of dried blood, draped every wall, swallowing sound. Mirrors with silvering flaws reflected fragments of the room, of herself, from impossible angles. In the center sat an ancient woman behind a grand mahogany table littered with the tools of her trade: tattered decks, murky crystal spheres, and a ledger open to a page of names. Some were crossed out with violent slashes.
Madame Zora’s eyes were black pools in a landscape of wrinkles. They fixed on Ruby with an unsettling familiarity.
“You are far from your harbor, little bird,” Zora said, her voice a dry rustle of leaves.
“I get around.” Ruby’s smile felt plastered on. “You see truths? Let’s hear one.”
“Sit.”
Ruby sat. The chair was hard. Zora extended a hand across the table, her fingers bony, nails long and yellowed. “The touch tells more than the cards. Give me your hand.”
A warning thrill shot up Ruby’s spine. This was stupid. She should leave. Instead, she placed her hand in Zora’s. The old woman’s skin was shockingly cold, papery.
The contact was instantaneous.
Zora’s back arched violently. A guttural gasp tore from her throat. Her head snapped back, eyes rolling white. Her grip became a vise.
And Ruby saw.
Not with her eyes, but in her mind, a torrent of images, sounds, sensations that were not her own, yet were.
She was standing in a vast, hushed hall. The air smelled of ozone and old stone. A marble floor stretched beneath her sensible flats. She held a tablet, her fingers—sleeker, bearing a silver wedding band—tapping on the screen. A voice, warm and masculine, filled her ear through a headset. “The Thracian funerary wreath is confirmed for the next exhibit, Dr. Nikos-Coleman. The courier arrives at three.”
“Thank you, Martin,” she heard herself say. Her voice was different. Cleaner, clipped, possessing an academic precision. She looked up, and the world resolved. A giant skeleton of a prehistoric bird soared above her. The Queen City Museum of Natural History. A placard in her hand read: ‘Curated by Dr. Athena Nikos-Coleman.’
Athena.
The name echoed in the vault of this borrowed memory.
The scene ripped away, replaced by wind and a vertiginous rush. She was moving, faster than running, the city a dizzying blur of light and geometry below her feet. No, not below her feet—she was above it. She was flying. The sensation was exhilaration and terror fused. A white glove gripped a gargoyle. She perched, scanning the midnight streets. A cry for help, electronically filtered, whispered in her ear.
She moved.
It wasn't like flying on the marina, that clumsy terror. This was grace, a powerful leap that carried her from the gargoyle into nothingness, where the wind became a solid thing she rode. The city grid unfolded beneath her, a circuit board of light and shadow. Her descent was a controlled plunge, boots impacting asphalt in a crouch that should have shattered bone, but merely sent a crack through the pavement. Two muggers froze, their knives glinting under a streetlight, a elderly man cowering against a dumpster.
“Leave,” she said, and her voice was different. Lower. Resonant. It wasn’t Ruby’s melodic warmth; it was a command that vibrated in the chest.
The vision shattered, reformed.
She was in a dark bedroom, the only light from a digital clock. 3:17 AM. Strong arms wrapped around her from behind, pulling her close against a muscular, warm chest. A man’s scent—sandalwood soap and something uniquely Virgil—filled her nose. His lips pressed to her bare shoulder. “Can’t sleep, Athena?” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep. “The city quiet?”
“For now,” she whispered back, turning in his arms. Her hand found his cheek in the dark. Their kiss was deep, familiar, a balm. This was hers. This peace. This man.
It tore away again.
Now she was pinned. Cold metal against her back. A warehouse. The stink of ozone and burnt wiring. A figure loomed over her. It was the woman from the magazine cover, the one they called Empress. She ia a beautiful, very curvy woman of Mediterranean decent. Kneeling on the floor behind her was Captain Valiant, his expression full of anguish, as if two separate realities vied for his heart and soul.
“Sorry, hon, but not sorry! Your existence confuses my consort, so it's time for you to get a new life. Don't worry, you're gonna love it in Jade Cove,” Empress sneered, raising a crackling fist. "Honestly, you're gonna have so much fun as a hooker, you won't even be able to fight it!"
Then, nothing.
A void.
Not darkness, but an absence of everything—sight, sound, self. A silent, screamless eternity.
Ruby wrenched her hand back as if burned. She slammed backward in her chair, gasping, her heart a frantic animal trying to escape her ribs. Sweat plastered her hair to her temples, soaked through her dress. The scent of Virgil, the crushing pain in her chest, the void—they clung to her, more real than the velveted room.
Madame Zora slumped forward, panting, a string of saliva connecting her lip to the ledger. She looked ravaged, aged another decade. Her black eyes found Ruby’s, brimming with terror and pity.
“You are not who you think you are,” Zora wheezed, each word a labor. “You are a ghost wearing skin. A candle burning in a stolen window.”
“What did you see?” Ruby demanded, her voice raw.
Zora wiped her mouth with a trembling hand, her gaze fixed on the stained tabletop as if reading the wood grain for answers. “I saw the loom,” she whispered. “And the hand that cuts the threads. A woman of profound hunger, seated on a throne of twisting streets. She rewrites the world with her boredom.”
“What does that mean?” Ruby’s voice was a blade.
“It means your life is a pet. A kept thing. Your memories, your pains, your childhood in the South—they are embroidery on a blanket she stitched for you.” Zora finally looked up, her eyes gleaming. “You were someone else. A warrior. A scholar. A wife. She found you… inconvenient. So she made you into something convenient. Something fun.”
The words landed, each one a puncture wound. Athena. The museum. The flight. Virgil. The crushing void. They weren’t a hallucination. They were archaeology.
“A hooker,” Ruby stated flatly.
“The legendary one,” Zora corrected, almost bitterly. “The happiest. The best. A masterpiece of degradation painted in joy. Your prison is that you love your cage.”
Ruby stood up so fast the chair screeched. The mirrored walls multiplied her movement, a dozen furious Rubys spinning in the cloying dark. Her fists were clenched. The phantom scent of sandalwood was gone, replaced by the pervasive sage. It smelled like lies.
“How do I break it?”
Zora laughed, a dry, cracking sound. “You don’t. The cage is the world. The bars are the memories of everyone you know. To them, you have always been Ruby. You always will be.” She leaned forward, a desperate intensity in her ravaged face. “Run. Be the masterpiece. It is all you have.”
Ruby slammed a wad of Richard’s cash onto the table. It was too much, but the value of money had just dissolved. “Thanks for nothing.”
She burst out into the misty dawn, the cold air a slap. Colonial Center was waking up. A baker rolled up a steel gate. The smell of fresh bread, a universal truth, made her stomach turn. A masterpiece of degradation painted in joy. The words coiled inside her, venomous.
She walked, not seeing the streets. She saw a laboratory table. A pottery shard. Virgil’s sleeping face. She felt the exhilarating drop from a skyscraper. The solid impact of her fists on a metahuman’s jaw. The purpose. It was a ghost limb, itching, aching.
Her feet carried her, instinctively, downhill. Toward the harbor. Toward the smell of salt and fish and diesel. Away from the antiques and the whispers. She needed noise. She needed a rhythm to drown out the screaming wrongness in her skull.
She needed to fuck.
The Gutter’s Kiss was closed, Mags long asleep. Ruby didn’t break stride. She moved into the tight warren of streets near the working docks, where the bars never closed because the shifts never ended. She found The Rusty Winch, a place of sticky floors and palpable exhaustion.
She stood inside the doorway, letting her eyes adjust. The auburn hair, the grey eyes, the dress that clung like a confession—she was a sunbeam in a coal sack. Conversations stuttered. A dozen male glances hooked into her.
She picked one. Not the biggest, or the most eager. She picked the one who looked the most tired, the most hollowed out. A long-haul trucker, maybe, with grease under his nails and a weariness that bowed his shoulders. He was perfect. She wouldn’t have to pretend to feel anything. She could use him like a hammer.
She slid onto the stool next to him. He smelled of diesel and stale coffee.
“Long day?” she asked, her voice summoning its legendary warmth from some deep, automated well.
He looked at her, suspicion and craving warring in his bloodshot eyes. “Long month.”
“I can make you forget the last ten minutes of it for two hundred.” She let her knee brush his. “The back of your cab work?”
His name was Leo. His cab was a sleeper, a cramped aluminum box that smelled of old sweat and microwaved noodles. He fumbled with the keys, his hands rough and shaking slightly. Ruby felt a distant pang, not of fear, but of a vast, yawning disconnection. She was about to let this stranger inside her, and she felt less than she had watching the baker roll up his gate.
The bunk was narrow. He was on top of her, his weight a dull pressure. He kissed her neck, his breath sour. Ruby turned her face, offering her profile, her eyes staring at the laminated picture of a mountain scene stuck to the wall.
“Yeah, fuck,” Leo grunted, fumbling with his belt, then with her dress. He pushed the silk up past her hips. He wasn’t hard yet. She reached down, her hand practiced and efficient, and took his soft cock in her grip. She stroked him, her thumb swiping over the head until he stiffened against her palm.
“There you go,” she murmured, the words empty. She guided him into her, feeling the blunt, familiar pressure. She was wet. She was always wet. Her body’s betrayal was absolute.
He pushed in with a groan. It was a mechanical joining. He pumped into her, his rhythm frantic and shallow, his hips slapping against her thighs. The cab rocked on its springs. Ruby wrapped her legs around his waist, locking him in, taking every thrust. She matched his pace, her hips rising to meet him, a perfect, fucking machine.
“Oh shit, your cunt is so good,” he panted into her ear.
“Deeper,” she commanded, her voice flat. “Give me that cock. Fucking own it.”
He obeyed, driving harder. The metal wall of the bunk creaked. She felt him swell, the pulse beginning. She clenched around him, a vise grip, and he cried out, a raw sound of release, spilling into her. She held him there, feeling the hot flood, until he collapsed, spent.
He rolled off, breathing heavily. Ruby sat up, pulling her dress down. She felt the familiar trickle. No different than before. No different than a thousand times before.
“Christ,” Leo mumbled, zipping his jeans. “You’re… something else.”
“Two hundred,” Ruby said, not looking at him. She stared at the mountain scene. A pristine lake. Eternal snow. A place that didn’t exist.
He paid her. She left the cab without another word, stepping back into the grey dockyard light. The sex had changed nothing. The void inside her was still there, wider now. It had swallowed the encounter whole.
She walked toward the water, toward the endless, monotonous lap of waves against pilings. A seagull screeched, a sound of pure emptiness.
Run. Be the masterpiece.
The gull’s cry faded into the industrial hum. The water slapped the pilings, a sound without meaning. Be the masterpiece. Zora’s words curdled in the morning air.
Ruby stood very still. The cold mist touched her face like forgotten tears. Inside her, two realities ground against each other: the vibrant, perfect memories of sun-baked trailers and her first night in Jade Cove, and the jagged, stolen visions of a museum, a flight, a man named Virgil. One set was embroidery. The other was the torn fabric beneath.
A slow, burning sensation began in her gut. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t confusion. It was a pure, undiluted fury. It rose through her chest, hot and metallic, scalding away the last traces of disorientation.
Someone had done this. Someone had taken Athena Nikos-Coleman—a curator, a wife, a protector—and scrubbed her mind clean. They had painted over the original canvas with a garish, grinning portrait of Ruby Thompson, legendary whore. They had made her love her cage. They had made her heaven out of someone else’s hell.
The fury focused, sharpened to a needle point.
“No,” she said aloud, the word leaving her lips as a cloud of vapor. It wasn’t a rejection of Ruby. Ruby was a fact. Ruby was strength. Ruby was the tool that had been forced into her hands. The anger was for the artist. For the hand that had presumed to cut and stitch her soul.
She wasn’t giving up who she was now. This energy, this body that never quit, this magnetic pull she had on people—these were weapons. They were her weapons. Someone had fucked with her reality six months ago. They had vanished White Owl and thought they’d created a happy little plaything.
Nobody gets away with fucking with Ruby Thompson.
A plan, cold and clear, assembled itself in her mind. It clicked into place with the certainty of a vault door closing. She turned her back on the water, walking with a new purpose that swallowed the dock’s despair.
She went to a place called Fantasies, a shop in a part of town where the streetlights were always broken. The window displayed mannequins in torn nurse outfits and cheap leather. Inside smelled of plastic and floral air freshener.
“Help you?” asked a woman with tired eyes, looking up from a tabloid.
“I need a wig,” Ruby said, her voice all business. “Long. Brown. Wavy. Good quality.” She ran a professional hand through a synthetic blonde tangle on a nearby stand and dismissed it. “Something that can handle movement.”
The woman appraised her, then nodded. She brought out a box from behind the counter. The wig inside was a deep chestnut brown, the waves full and natural-looking, the cap sleek. Ruby pulled it on in front of a smudged mirror. The woman with the ice-grey eyes and auburn hair vanished. In her place was a stranger, softer, more academic. Athena’s hair.
“It works,” Ruby said, her own voice sounding foreign coming from this other woman’s head.
Next was a costume shop catering to the theater crowd and fetishists. She bought a white leotard, sturdy, not cheap lingerie. White opera gloves that reached past her elbows. Thigh-high white boots with a low, practical heel. A black utility belt, empty. A white domino mask. She paid in cash, her expression unreadable beneath the brown waves.
Back in her cramped studio apartment overlooking a fire escape, she laid the items on her bed. She stared at them. This wasn’t a costume. It was a key. A lure. A declaration of war.
She packed a single bag: the disguise, her favorite silk dresses, her makeup, thick stacks of cash. She booked a one-way train ticket north. The landscape outside the window changed from sun-bleached coastal scrub to grey industrial sprawl, then to dense, cold forest. The air in the train car grew sharper.
Queen City rose from the mist like a cluster of shattered teeth. The architecture was older, heavier than Jade Cove’s neon whimsy. The light was different—a pale, watery glow that seemed strained. There were banners, huge and new, hanging from lamp posts and buildings. They showed the same image from the magazine on the boat: the voluptuous woman in purple and gold, the Empress, her smile benevolent and absolute. Kneeling at her side, his face a mask of devoted anguish, was Captain Valiant. The text read: ‘A New Era of Order.’
The train station echoed with a different kind of silence, not the lazy hum of Jade Cove but a tense, watchful quiet. Eyes tracked her, but not with hungry interest. With assessment. Ruby hoisted her bag, the weight of the hidden costume a secret anchor, and walked into the city’s breath. The air tasted of coal dust, old rain, and something else—a buzzing, electrostatic hum that prickled the skin on her arms. Power. Raw, unsubtle power had been poured into the stones here.
She found a hotel called The North Star, a place with thin carpets and water stains on the ceiling. It was perfect. The clerk didn’t ask for ID, just a week’s rent in advance. Ruby paid, took the key, and in the dim room, she unpacked. She placed the bag with the wig and the folded white leotard at the back of the tiny closet. She hung up her silk dresses. She lined up her makeup on the chipped dresser.
Then she went to the window, peeling back the brittle curtain. The street below was a moving diagram of the new order. People walked with a hurried, heads-down gait. On the corner, two men in crisp, grey uniforms that weren’t quite police attire stood observing the flow. Their arms were crossed. One of them glanced up, and Ruby let the curtain fall. Her heart didn’t race. It beat a slow, ready drum.
Reconnaissance.
She changed into a crimson dress that clung like a sigh. She applied her makeup with ritual precision, the familiar motions grounding her. The ruby-red lipstick was her war paint. The happy, talented redheaded hooker was her weapon. She went out as the sun bled away behind the granite skyline.
She found a bar called The Gilded Cage. The irony was almost charming. It was upscale enough for gossip, discreet enough for transactions. The air inside was rich with the smell of bourbon and polished wood. She took a stool, ordered a gin martini, and sipped. The alcohol hit her tongue, fizzed, and then its effect dissolved into the same frustrating nothingness. A tool, not a solace.
A man in a beautifully cut but slightly rumpled suit sat down two stools over. He had the look of city government—sharp, tired, and swimming in something he couldn’t control. He ordered a double scotch, neat, and drank half of it in one go.
“Rough day at the office?” Ruby asked, her voice a warm, melodic intrusion into his solitude.
He glanced at her. Saw the dress, the hair, the smile. A flicker of weary understanding. “You could say that. New management. New… protocols.”
“I hear it’s a new era of order.” Ruby nodded toward the window, where a banner fluttered.
He barked a laugh, sharp and humorless. “Order. Yeah.” He finished his scotch, signaled for another. “Order means re-writing the rulebook every fucking Tuesday. It means… compliance reviews.” His voice dropped. “It means your boss might start asking you why your quarterly reports don’t include a pledge of personal fealty.”
Bingo. Ruby slid onto the stool next to him. “Sounds like you need a compliance break.” She let her knee press against his thigh. “I’m Ruby.”
An hour later, she was in his apartment, a sleek high-rise with a view of the river. His name was Alistair. He was a mid-level commissioner in the city planning department. He was also desperate, touch-starved, and loose-lipped from stress and expensive scotch.
He kissed her, his mouth tasting of peat and anxiety. His hands were clumsy on the zipper of her dress. She helped him, shrugging the crimson silk off her shoulders, letting it pool at her feet. She stood before him in just heels and her smile. His gaze drank her in, a momentary respite from his crumbling world.
“Christ, you’re stunning,” he mumbled, pawing at his own belt.
“Let me,” she whispered, pushing his hands away. She unbuckled him, pulled his slacks and boxers down. His cock sprang free, already half-hard. She knelt on the plush carpet, taking him into her mouth without ceremony. She sucked him deeply, her tongue flattening against the thick vein underneath, her hand working his shaft in a tight, twisting rhythm.
“Oh fuck, your mouth,” he groaned, his fingers tangling in her auburn hair.
She hummed around him, feeling him swell to full, rigid hardness. She wanted him talkative, pliant, spent. She pulled off with a wet pop. “Bed. Now. I want you to fuck the stress right out of you.”
They tumbled onto the mattress. He was on top, his weight heavy. He pushed into her with a single, grateful thrust. She was soaked, as always, her body opening for him effortlessly. He set a frantic, deep pace immediately, pounding into her as if he could escape his own head through her cunt.
“That’s it,” Ruby moaned, arching beneath him, her nails scoring his back. “Use me. Fucking ruin me. Forget about the reports, forget about the fealty. Just fuck this pretty, wet hole.”
Her filthy encouragement shattered his last restraint. He pistoned into her, the bedframe slamming against the wall. “Yeah… yes… you have no idea… the things she asks for…”
“Who?” Ruby gasped, hooking her legs higher around his waist, taking him deeper.
“The… the Empress…” he grunted, each thrust punctuating a word. “Personal… histories… of every department head… psych evals… she’s looking for something…”
“What?” Ruby whispered into his ear, her voice a husky promise. “What’s she looking for, baby? Tell me while you fill my pussy.”
“Loyalty… or… or obsession… something broken…” His rhythm was becoming ragged, chaotic. “She reshapes people… Captain Valiant… he’s not… he’s not right…”
He came then, a sharp, broken cry, his body shuddering as he emptied himself inside her in hot, pulsing jets. He collapsed, his sweat-slick skin sticking to hers. He was crying, softly. Ruby held him, stroking his hair, her mind ice-cold and racing.
She reshapes people.
The words from the boat, from Zora’s parlor, crystallized. A masterpiece of degradation painted in joy.
Alistair drifted into a stupor. Ruby extracted herself, cleaned up in his marble bathroom. When she returned, he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
“She made everyone forget her, you know,” he said softly, his voice hollow.
Ruby froze, toweling her hair. “Forget who?”
“White Owl.” The name hung in the air. Ruby’s skin went taut. “One day she was there. A symbol. The next… it was like she’d never existed. The newspapers, the archives, even the police bulletins. All edited. All replaced with the Empress narrative.” He turned his head, looking at her with glazed eyes. “But you can’t erase a feeling. The city feels… unguarded. It feels orphaned. People remember being protected, but they can’t remember by who. It’s a ghost limb.”
He was asleep minutes later. Ruby dressed in silence, took the extra cash he’d left on the dresser, and let herself out. The high-rise hallway was silent. The elevator descended. Her reflection in the brass doors was Ruby Thompson, legendary hooker, a perfect mask.
But beneath it, a tectonic plate had shifted. She made everyone forget.
It wasn’t just Ruby’s mind that had been scrubbed. It was the entire city’s. The Empress hadn’t just defeated White Owl; she had deleted her from reality and inserted herself as the new fundamental truth. The scale of it was monstrous. The power it implied was terrifying.
Ruby walked the night streets, Alistair’ words and the phantom scent of Virgil’s sandalwood weaving together in her mind. Captain Valiant… he’s not right. The man on the banner, kneeling in anguished devotion.
She needed to see him. Not on a poster. In person. She needed to see what “reshaping” looked like. And she knew just how to get a look. The Gilded Cage had yielded a bureaucrat. The streets near the old warehouse district, where the new order’s glow didn’t quite reach, would yield different fruit—soldiers.
She found a dive bar called The Grindstone, a place where the grey-uniformed enforcers went to drink off the shift. The air was thick with testosterone and a simmering, bitter aggression. She sat at the bar, ordering a beer she wouldn’t drink. She waited. She didn’t have to wait long.
Two of them approached, their uniforms unbuttoned at the collar. Big men, with the cold eyes of those used to being obeyed.
“You’re new,” the first one said, his voice not asking a question.
“Just visiting,” Ruby smiled, letting her gaze travel over him. “Seeing the sights.”
“The sights are under curfew,” the second one grunted. But he was looking at the swell of her breasts against her top.
“I bet you boys know how to make an exception,” she said, her tone dropping to a conspiratorial purr. “I’m very… grateful.”
Twenty minutes later, she was in a squalid bunkroom in a nearby enforcement barracks. There were three of them. They weren’t like Alistair. They didn’t want to forget. They wanted to dominate, to imprint their new authority on something soft.
The first one, Kirk, bent her over a footlocker. He didn’t bother with her dress, just shoved the hem up around her waist and yanked her thong aside. He spat into his hand, slicked his cock, and drove into her dry. Ruby gasped, a real sound of sharp surprise that they mistook for pleasure.
“Tight little cunt,” Kirk snarled, pounding into her from behind. Each thrust jolted her against the metal locker. The other two watched, drinking from bottles of beer, their eyes glazed with lust and boredom.
“Think she can take two?” one of them laughed.
“Fuck yeah she can,” Kirk grunted. He pulled out, his cock gleaming. “Your turn, Miller. Stuff her pretty mouth.”
Miller, younger, with a nervous energy, grabbed Ruby’s hair and pulled her to her knees. He shoved his dick past her lips. She took him, deep-throating him easily, her eyes watering not from grief but from calculated performance. She moaned around him, the vibration making his knees buckle.
“Holy shit,” Miller whispered.
Kirk positioned himself behind her again, re-entering her pussy with a brutal thrust. They used her in unison, Miller fucking her face, Kirk hammering her from behind, a rough, rhythmic violation. The room filled with the sounds of grunts, slapping skin, and low, dirty encouragements.
“Yeah, choke on it, you bitch.”
“Look at that ass jiggle. Pound that slut-hole, Kirk!”
Ruby detached her mind, letting it float above the sweat and the sex and the pain that her body would register and then instantly erase. She focused on the fragments of their talk, the things said between thrusts.
“—patrol route for the Consort tomorrow—”
“—same as always, the park at dawn, like a fucking ghost—”
“—Empress wants the perimeter clear, no one sees him cry again—”
The word Consort hooked her. Captain Valiant. The park at dawn.
Kirk came inside her with a roar, his fingers bruising her hips. Miller followed, spurting hot salt down her throat. She swallowed, dutifully. The third one just watched, finished his beer, and tossed her a crumpled bill. “Good whore.”
Ruby left the barracks, the taste of cheap beer and semen in her mouth, the information burning in her mind. The park at dawn. She walked back to The North Star, her body already smoothing away the aches, erasing the fingerprints. In her room, she stared at the closet door.
The wig and costume stayed hidden. That was for later. For the ghost they all forgot.
Now, she was Ruby. And at dawn, Ruby would go to the park. She would see what was left of Captain Valiant. She would see the raw material of her own reshaping staring back at her. The anger in her gut was no longer a burning coal. It was a shaped charge, waiting for its moment.
She sat by the window in the dark, watching the banners flutter, and waited for the night to bleed away.