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She had passed her rainbow hand effortlessly “through” trailer walls; she had walked through—although it felt like sliding “around”—the LPG tank; she had lain on her flea-ridden cot in the shed and had dropped through it without effort

Then, she had nerved herself up to the ulti leader’s own trailer Not through like she was inside the trailer, but sort ofthrough and around, like the trailer was a flat box within which she could see the Big Man eating a burrito like he was on TV and she was a 3-D person floating above it But even that wasn’t quite it, because she had not just seen hi down his throat to settle in his belly She had seen his heart and his lungs and both the inside and outside of him simultaneously

She had even tested her nerve, as well as her power, by walking across a busy highway and letting a Costco tractor trailer blow through/around her

Francis Specter had acquired a power She was Rockborn 20

She spent a long ties full of talk about extra diraphic universe

And then she had chanced upon a snippet of video showing sory black feline walking erect, with dreads that ended in snakes’ heads, but sitting on a very nice motorcycle On a motorcycle while black, which the Mojave Huns considered a sort of race crime, as if bikes were only for white people

Francis had long considered running away No day passed without Mangohead or one of the others hitting on her; no day passed without being offered meth, mescaline, Oxy, occasionally cocaine At fourteen she knew she should be in school, but her last day of school had been three years ago, back when her mother was a respectable school librarian, not a brown-toothed, haggard, hollow-eyed junkie

But each time she’d dreamed of escape, the question was always the same: Where? She was a , the odds were she’d either end up busted or picked up by so The gang would call it treachery, and she would take a beating, which, based on previous beatings, would leave her stiff and sore at best, bleeding and incapacitated at worst A previous “traitor” was buried in the desert a few miles away from where she stood

But the “dangerous” black cat-girl on the bike? Well, in Francis’s i her over Dekka had become a destination

Francis had started to plan First things first: money

On the next supply run to Tucuo bank, where she effortlessly slid around the wall and into the bank It had been a Sunday, so the bank was closed and e drawers and finding nothing, before finally confronting the heavy steel vault door

It did not eouely nauseous to see since they made no sense at all But she slid around the door and into the vault There she reached effortlessly into safe-deposit boxes She walked—slid—aith 3,200 in cash, plus a stash of fake green cards, a very nice necklace that old, and a little pouch full of what

Francis hoped were rare coins

She noted with pleasure that while she was Rainbow—her self- ters with her—her clothing, for a start, which was extremely useful But also, obviously, her loot from the bank

She’d hidden her cache out in the desert under a flat rock The spare key to Mangohead’s chopper—a six-bend ape-hanger hog—was now in her jeans