Chapter 2

The first thing I noticed when I walked into my apartment was the smell.

Takeout, embarrassingly enough, is my main source of sustenance - when you study full-time and work part-time, it’s hard to put the effort into cooking ... especially since no matter what I eat, I never gain an inch of fat.

It’s a perk of having the Potential.

But I don’t have a fridge, and so sometimes I play the game of roulette known as “will this last long enough to be my dinner tomorrow?”

Tonight I lost.

Throwing it out, I was surprised to find an egg in the cupboard - it didn’t seem like it was going to kill me, and so I put it on to boil (exciting dinner, I know) and counted up my pay for the night.

That son of a bitch.

Marty’s always been sketchy, but he’s at least been reliably sketchy. Like I can 100% rely on the fact that as soon as we get a new dancer, he’s going to hit on her. I can depend on him firing her if she doesn’t sleep with him within a few weeks, and I can always count on the fact that if she goes through with that repulsive act, he’ll dump her for the next pretty face.

And hell, I can practically set my watch on the knowledge that he’ll hit on me, each and every time he sees me.

But one of those reliable aspects has always been my pay. I don’t make much, as a waitress, and I especially don’t make much if you take into account my bodyguard duties as well. But it’s enough to live on, enough to buy take-out and apparently the occasional egg, and I get the added bonus of knowing I’m making the world a slightly better place.

Not that Marty’s strip club could be a much worse place.

So yeah. Finding Marty suddenly short-changing me, that took me by surprise. I knew that tomorrow, I’d have to kick his ass for it, but I didn’t much feel like trekking back over town to deal with it tonight, and I didn’t want to go to sleep angry.

Back when I thought I was going to be the Protector, I convinced my parents to sign me up for some martial art classes. Antioch isn’t exactly a cultural hub, but there were still a few options - turns out white folk love their kids learning Asian fighting styles.

Thanks to my (super)natural abilities, I mastered them all pretty quickly. Nowadays I barely even use them on the rare occasion I get into a scuffle, but I find them pretty relaxing. Most nights I’ll run through a few katas before bed - if I’m particularly worked up, I can spend up to an hour just doing them over and over, the repetitive exactness relaxing me until I can just fall into bed and have a mostly-dreamless sleep.

That night, I was so riled up from the fight (and Marty’s cheapness) that after eating one lonely egg, I spent a full 90-minutes doing routines, going through every form I could remember over and over until I finally felt like my mind was clear and my anger was ... well, not gone, but definitely postponed.

But when I stripped off and collapsed into my bed, it wasn’t a dreamless night that met me.

Quite the opposite.

I was on a stage.

I don’t think it was the stage at the club - it was too clean, for one. But there were definitely elements of it - I could smell the cigar smoke that’s always present at Marty’s, the lights looked like they were arranged in the same way, and the whole room had this weird sense of familiarity.

But, unlike Marty’s, it was packed.

There were people everywhere. Men, most of them, but peering into the crowd, I could see the occasional woman as well. Some of them were dancers, some of them were old high school friends, but most of them were strangers.

And they were all looking at me.

Stage fright has never really been a factor in my life - I’ve never really had any interest in performing, but on the few occasions I’ve had to stand in front of a crowd, I’ve always been too busy looking out for something suspicious to be nervous.

But standing in front of all those strangers, I was suddenly shy. They were all looking so ... expectant. They were here to see me, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why.

And then ... I looked down.

I was wearing a tight black top, barely enough to cover my boobs yet somehow managing to push them up. It had a strap on either side, connecting to the collar I suddenly realized I was wearing. My panties were equally revealing - a tiny scrap of fabric, only just preventing me from being completely naked.

My hands were encased in gloves, and my feet were adorned with something similar - black, shiny boots which ended just above my knee, making them by far the part of my outfit that covered the most skin.

I was standing in front of an enormous crowd, almost entirely naked.

And they were waiting for me to start.

A spotlight suddenly hit me, proving without a doubt that I wasn’t in Marty’s club - he didn’t have the setup for a spotlight, let alone the budget to pay someone to operate it. I opened my mouth to try to explain to the impatient crowd that something had gone wrong, that I wasn’t meant to be up here ... when someone started hissing.

“Hssssss.”

It was such a simple, disappointed sound. I squinted, trying to see through the light and through the haze who was voicing their dissent, but I could only see an outline, a silhouette. Whoever it was, they were clearly a male, and there was something strangely familiar about them, but I couldn’t make out a face, and soon their hissing was being echoed by the rest of the crowd.

“Hssssss.”

“No,” I tried to feebly protest, but before I could continue, it was as though someone yanked an invisible leash, and my collar jerked forward. Suddenly I was on my knees, tears welling up in my eyes, looking at the huge crowd, silently begging them not to put me through this ... And then the music started.