After all the pirouettes, the power of friendship, the beams, it ends with her pinned under you, your hands on her face. When she growls, abortive transformation sequences sparkle up her eyes.

You raise a fist. She spits blood, and asks: “Why?”

Alien invaders, promises of power, Earth a lost cause. It’s not a hard decision to understand. “Abigail...”

“Don’t call me that.” She writhes in your grip, glares, squirms some more. “My name is Absalom and I am not your fucking sister.”

Sure, but whoever heard of a magical boy? Those pants look so stuffy. Hardly any frills. Your hand turns to a claw. She looks at it with wordless defiance, like she would the barrel of a gun. But you have much better plans than that.

You expect her insides to be warm and tight, but then, you are in her body only historographically. Her fate is a cold void of decision, perhaps a tad denser than that of mortals who haven’t been chosen to fight eternal wars of justice. Following her heartline, you arrive at the knotted center of her fate, taut until you find purchase on the string. Abigail’s eyes gape. You press one hand to her face, so she won’t seize her head into the pavement, and pull.

She comes unwound, back arched, tense down to her toes. Pain resonates through the string: it’s like having her optic nerve spaghettied around a fork. You pull the string around your newly granted authority over the planet, constrict Earth around her fate in double bowline. When you’re done, her tears have gone silent.

“Your name is Abigail.” You pluck the string. It hums eight billion contained screams. “Say it.”

“Absalom,” she moans.

The string feeds back. The ground quakes. Near the vanishing point, one of the few skyscrapers left standing crumples into itself and dashes a thousand dreams. The same happens in Colombo, Bangkok, Brasilia, Zaragoza and Chongqing. She understands this instinctively. A breath of near-death strength returns to her. She turns from the glassy sky, towards you.

“I’m Abigail.” Like a whisper, like nobody else will hear.

“And?”

“And I’m your sister.”

The string harmonizes back in time. Right there, under the weight of your hips, she changes: skin soft, chest pert but giving, skirt three layers of flaring petticoat. She pats at herself with a fuzzy confusion, new and true memories edging out someone else’s past. You hold her tight until she relaxes, and accepts, like she used to, that her big sister knows best.