The one with braids moves first.

  He's fast - not trained-fast, not boxer-fast, but confident in the way people are when they've done this before and it's always worked. He closes the distance in three steps and shoves me hard against the McDonald's wall, one hand on my shoulder, getting in my face. Testing. Seeing if I flinch.

  I flinch. Not because I have to. Because I need to.

  "You Sam Small?" he asks, even though he already knows. He's got the photo, same as the last guy. Probably the same circled face, the same red marker, the same curved letter I don't want to think about.

  "I don't know what you're--"

  He hits me. Open palm, across the face, hard enough to snap my head sideways. It stings. My cheekbone lights up with heat and I taste copper where my teeth caught the inside of my lip. My hands come up instinctively - not to fight, just to cover, just to protect. Scared girl. Civilian reflex. That's the performance.

  "Asked you a question," he says.

  "Yes," I say. "I'm Sam Small."

  The other three have formed a loose semicircle. The two from the car are behind me - I can hear them breathing, can feel their positions through the blood sense, warm shapes at my seven and five o'clock. The fourth guy, the one who laughed about the bounty, is to my left, watching the street. Lookout. Same role as the van driver at Donovan's. These people really do have a playbook, even if it's a bad one.

  "You know why we're here?" Braids asks.

  "I can guess."

  "Then you know how this goes."

  I know how this goes. I know exactly how this goes, because I've been on the other end of it a hundred times. I know the rhythm - the questions that aren't really questions, the escalation from shoving to hitting to real violence, the way they need to feel like they're in control before they commit. I know that the two behind me are going to grab my arms soon. I know that the lookout is going to keep watching the street but periodically turn to watch the show, because he wants to see it, because that's the kind of person he is.

  I know that the woman with the dog across the street has stopped walking. I know that the teenager on the bike has his phone out. I know that somewhere behind me, someone just came out of the grocery store and is standing very still, bags in hand, watching.

  Good. Watch. All of you, watch.

  "So here's what happens," Braids says. He's got a cadence to this, a script. He's done this before—maybe not exactly this, but close enough. Intimidation. Message delivery. "You've been causing problems. Running your mouth. Hanging around with freaks. Someone decided that needs to stop."

  "And you're the stop button?"

  That earns me another hit - closed fist this time, right side of my jaw. My jaw engages before I can think about it, neck muscles clenching tight, and the punch that should have rocked my head barely moves it. His knuckles make a sound against my jaw like hitting a sandbag and I see his expression flicker - confusion, just for a second, before he writes it off as adrenaline or luck or whatever story his brain needs to tell itself.

  I let myself stagger anyway. Sell it. Hands up, palms open, the universal language of please stop. "I volunteer at a community center," I say, loud enough for the street to hear. "I work with kids. What is this?"

  "Shut up."

  "I'm a high school student. I just came from--"

  The two behind me grab my arms. There it is. Right on schedule. They wrench me off the wall and one of them kicks the back of my knee so I drop - not all the way down, just to one knee, arms held wide. It looks helpless. It looks like exactly what it is: four men attacking a teenage girl.

  I could break free. Right now, this second, I could twist out of both grips, elbow the one on my right in the throat, sweep the one on my left, and be on my feet before Braids even processes what happened. I could end this fight in fifteen seconds.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Instead I stay down.

  Braids hits me again. Body shot this time - right side, below the ribs. I tighten my core just enough to protect the organs but let the impact land. It hurts. It's supposed to hurt. Pain is the price of admission.

  "That's for the community center," he says. Another hit, same spot. "That's for being a cape-loving bitch." Another. "And that's because someone's paying me to do this."

  Three body shots. Not enough to do real damage - he's hitting me like someone who's used to people folding after one, putting his weight behind it but not his full strength. If he knew what he was doing, he'd be targeting my liver, my solar plexus, the spots that shut a body down regardless of toughness. He doesn't know what he's doing. He just knows how to hit.

  The lookout has turned around to watch. Of course he has.

  "Walk away from the center," Braids says. He grabs my chin, forces me to look at him. "Stop volunteering. Stop showing up. Stop playing hero. Next time, we won't be this nice."

  I stare at him through watering eyes - the tears are real, the body produces them automatically when you take shots to the face, it's a physiological response and not something I can control - and I say nothing. Let him read the silence however he wants.

  He lets go of my chin. Nods to the two holding my arms. They release me and I drop forward onto my hands, catching myself on the sidewalk. Gravel bites into my palms. My ribs are screaming. My jaw aches.

  I stay down. I don't look up.

  "Smart girl," Braids says.

  They walk away. Not running - walking, casual, like they just finished a conversation and are heading to get lunch. The sedan pulls forward, they pile in, doors close, and they're gone. The whole thing took maybe ninety seconds.

  I stay on my hands and knees for a long moment. Not because I can't get up. Because I need the image - girl on the ground, beaten, alone, in front of witnesses who did nothing - to sink in. I need every phone that's recording to capture this part. The aftermath. The girl trying to get up after four men knocked her down.

  Someone approaches. Footsteps, cautious. "Hey - hey, are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?"

  I look up. It's the grocery store guy. Forties, heavyset, brown skin, still holding his bags. He looks horrified. He looks guilty. He looks like a man who just watched something happen and didn't intervene and is now trying to make up for it in the only way he knows how.

  "I'm okay," I say. My voice sounds thin and shaky, which is partially genuine and partially useful. "I'm - can you call 911?"

  "Already called," someone else says. The woman with the dog, from across the street. She's closer now, phone in one hand, leash in the other. Her dog, a beagle mix, is sniffing my knee with profound disinterest in human violence. "I got it on video. All of it."

  "Thank you," I say, and I mean it more than she knows.

  I sit back on my heels. Take inventory. Jaw: sore, slightly swollen, but no fracture. Lockjaw took the worst of the punch. Ribs: bruised again, same side as last week, which isn't ideal. One of the grabs wrenched my shoulder in a way that's going to hurt tomorrow. My palms are scraped from the sidewalk. My cheek is hot and probably already changing colors.

  Nothing serious. Nothing my regeneration won't handle in a day or two. The pain is real but manageable - a tax, not a toll.

  My phone is intact in my backpack, cushioned by books like I planned. I pull it out. The group chat is frantic.

  Maggie: torresdale WHERE on torresdale Tasha: sam respond Lily: i'm leaving the center heading your way Maggie: SAM

  I type with scraped fingers: It's done. I'm ok. Stay at the center. Don't leave the kids.

  Then I open the camera and take pictures of myself. The swelling cheek. The scraped palms. The bruise forming below my ribs where I lift my shirt just enough to document it. I take a picture of the street, the sidewalk where I was kneeling, the McDonald's wall. Evidence. My evidence, to go with whatever the bystanders captured.

  Lily: what do you mean it's done what happened

  I don't answer yet. I'm thinking.

  Four guys. Organized, sort of. Cars, communication, a plan that adjusted on the fly when I didn't take the expected route. The bounty is higher than $300 - "way more than that," the guy said. Someone is funding this. Someone with enough money to make four people commit assault in broad daylight on a commercial street.

  And they think they won.

  They think they delivered their message: stay away from the center, stop playing hero, or next time it's worse. They think I'm sitting on a sidewalk crying and reconsidering my life choices. They're going to go back to whatever forum they crawled out of and post about it. Job done. Girl got the message. Easy money.

  But the actual message - the one that's going to spread through Mayfair and Tacony and maybe beyond - is different. The actual message is: four grown men beat up a seventeen-year-old girl for volunteering with kids. In broad daylight. On a Friday afternoon. On a busy street. While people watched.

  That's not a message that makes the Songbirds look strong. That's a message that makes them look like exactly what they are - bullies. Does Maya think she's the only one that knows how to leverage PR? I can swallow my pride for a day or two to cut off your strategic options. There's a lot I'd do to take away Maya's advantages.

  Assuming, of course, that this is Maya. But I bet one of my currently-singing internal organs that it is.

  I get to my feet, slowly, letting the grocery store guy hover and the dog lady keep her phone nearby. A cop car turns onto Torresdale - the 911 response, finally. I need to be here for this. I need to give a statement. I need to be the victim, on the record, with badge numbers and an incident report that someone can FOIA later.

  I sit down on the bench outside the barbershop and wait for the officer, holding my ribs, looking exactly as hurt as I actually am.

  Which is hurt enough. But not broken. Not even close.