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The Girl Who Would Be King(150)

By:Kelly Thompson




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I might have gone clear through to the other side, but I regroup and get my feet down. The floor shudders underneath me, carpet and floorboards and insulation bunching at my heels as I screech to a stop. I’m at least a hundred feet inside the building, a nice clean me-sized hole through everything between she and I. She’s seething like some kind of wild animal and something about her looks wrong. Even more wrong than before. I brush the rubble from my shoulders and talk to myself. “Hi, Lola, how’ve you been? Well, I hope. Yeah, it’s great to see you, thanks for leaving me for dead in the goddamn Hudson River.” It’s good this office is abandoned or people would be looking at me like I’m nuts.

I dust myself off and levitate off the ground a little bit, taking a brief second to peek inside Lola’s head, which opens like a flower for me. I pick up a lot of useful stuff, not the least of which is that she truly has been driving herself mad. Once I’ve got what I think I need, I hover lightly above the ground preparing to attack. I take off at bullet like speed back through the hole in the building.

Let’s see if she can take as good as she gives.

I hit her like a goddamn train and she goes shooting into a building across the street. She doesn’t go through the wall as I did, but she’s wedged so deep in the wall she’s going to leave a little snow angel shape in the stone when she gets her ass out.

I have to get her away from the hostages, and frankly, out of the city. I can’t give her the opportunity to use innocent people against me and so I take off into the air, straight up, hoping she’ll chase me when she’s able to extricate herself.





My body is a couple feet deep into the building and deep cuts all over are gushing blood. I’d anchored myself carefully for her hit, I hadn’t expected her to be able to throw me once I was prepared, not with the stone on me. Perhaps, I’ve underestimated her. I untangle myself from the rock and stand up gingerly, shaking the rubble from my suit. I spend a handful of seconds healing a broken leg and realize she’s just as dumb as she used to be if she thinks I’m going to follow her. Instead, I fly toward the Santa Monica pier and all the delicious tourists and beachgoers that await me there. Even with the storm tearing up Los Angeles and the city on relative lockdown I’m sure I can find some stragglers. She may have my ear, but I have innocent civilians all over this city.

Before I’ve even done anything, people are running and screaming and acting like morons and so I swoop onto the beach and scoop up soggy tourists and fling them into the sea. They make this delicious squealing sound as they head toward the water, but there’s no equally delicious splash sound and so I look over and, of course, Bonnie has showed up and is plucking them out of the sky as quickly as I can throw them. I stop on the beach to watch her do-gooder handy work. The people are fleeing like rats and I put my hands on my hips and wait for her to join me.

“Nice work,” I say nodding my head in genuine appreciation of the smoothness of her new moves as she sets down lightly in front of me.

“Thanks,” she says, pausing, looking around the chaotic beach. “We can’t do this here.”

“I actually think this is the perfect place to be doing this.”

“No,” she says firmly, looking down at me, acting like she’s the boss of this, of us.

“You’re not the boss of me,” I say, annoyed at myself for the unfiltered nature of the sentence.

“And neither are you of me. We. Don’t. Do. This. Here,” she says again, emphasizing THIS and HERE. This is definitely a different Bonnie. Thunder rumbles and lightning flashes across the ocean behind her. There’s no confusion in her, no hesitation. She looks like how I used to feel. Why don’t I feel that way anymore? Also, she seems like she’s glowing. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s almost like she’s radiating power. I feel small and dark in comparison. And since I have the stone that’s even more backwards than it should be. She rolls her tongue in her mouth like she’s about to speak. “It’s beneath you,” she finally says.

“What’s beneath me?”

“Using innocents as a shield. Why are you afraid of a fair fight?” she asks. That stings. I’m not that interested in things being fair, but I don’t like the idea that she thinks I’m using it as a crutch.

I stretch my back dramatically, but casually, like a cat. I’m wasting time trying to think of something clever to say when she blurts out, “I have your mother’s letters.”

I’m blinded by rage and swing my fist at her face. She dodges it, but not entirely and I catch her just enough to knock her down, but not to imbed her ass in the moon as I was hoping.