Aria Nightwing's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Aria Nightwing crouched behind a dead sedan in the Sunstruck parking lot and pressed her folded wings flat against her spine until her teeth hurt. She had held them like this for seven years, ever since she was seven, ever since she watched a man's boots from under her bed while her parents stopped making sound. The wings twitched now without asking her. A scale of orange dust drifted down her tank top strap. She was fourteen and she had taught herself this trick alone, and the trick was breaking. She opened the sketchbook on the hood of the sedan. The pages were full of the same face. Sharp jaw, broken nose, a scar that climbed into the hairline. She had drawn him close to a hundred times. She turned to a clean page and drew him again, faster, hoping her hand would remember a detail her head had lost. It didn't. The lot stayed empty. The asphalt cooked. Her wings jumped under her shirt and a seam popped at her shoulder. She pressed her palm flat to her back and felt them shove against it like something alive that did not belong to her. She could not hold them down through one more town. She could not walk into a market tomorrow folded like this. The choice arrived without asking. She unbuckled her sword, set it on the hood beside the sketchbook, and let go. The wings opened. Monarch orange filled the air around her, wider than she was tall, shaking off seven years of cramp. The pain went bright and then went quiet. She breathed. She stood in the middle of the lot with her wings spread and the sun on them and understood that anyone could see her now from the road. At the lot's edge, nailed to a wooden board by the chain-link, a weathered poster lifted in the wind. Her name was printed at the bottom in thick black letters. She had not put it there. Someone had been looking for a winged girl before she ever showed them one. She folded the sketchbook shut, buckled the sword back on, and walked toward the poster with her wings still open, because hiding was over and the man on her pages was not the only hunter in the story anymore.