100 - To Be Kind [September 4th, Age 15]

Believe it or not, the sun rose in the morning like nothing had happened. The natural lights came on over our room sometime around seven-thirty or eight and Matthew rose with them, turning the TV on for the morning news and watching it in stony silence until I came out of my room in my pajamas, rubbing my eyes, around nine-thirty.

That was what Matthew told me, anyway.

Incidentally, I found that the drawers in my bedroom were stocked with a variety of clothes. Far more than I would’ve needed, to cover a broad array of styles. I hadn’t had meaningful changes of clothes in ages—not since the war started, really—and so I had a tendency to wear the same things over and over again, regardless of wear or tear on them. I remember opening the drawers that night, pulling out a matching soft top and bottom and not thinking about it too much. It was only in the morning when I realized that there was no way those things were just there—obviously someone had stocked them for me.

“Morning,” he said, once I made my presence known.

“Morning,” I said back.

He looked at me. “Where did you get those?”

“Get what?”

“The PJs,” he said.

The question caught me off guard. “They—they were just in the drawer,” I said. I gestured back to the room, as if he needed to know which drawers they were.

“Really?”

I nodded.

“Did you know there was going to be clothes in there?”

I shook my head. “I just opened them out of…I don’t know. Habit or something. And there’s a lot of clothes in there. Day stuff, too.”

Matthew frowned. “That’s odd. Would it—would it be weird if I asked to see?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said, even though I personally didn’t care much. There was no further violation of my privacy Matthew could commit beyond what he was already ordered to do. Going through my drawers seemed like small potatoes compared to psychic surveillance.

“Fair,” he said back, glancing down at the remote. “Not sure why I asked that.”

“I can tell you what’s in there,” I said. “I was really tired last night. I don’t—I don’t really remember. I just know it’s a lot more than I thought it would be.”

“Would you mind?” he asked, and I gave him a thumbs-up and went back into my room.

The chest of drawers at the foot of the bed was well-equipped. By my count—and including the five dresses hanging in the wardrobe next to the window that I didn’t plan on using—there were around twelve full outfits there. It was only just then that I noticed, but there were even a few new pairs of shoes lined up near the door.

Every piece of clothing was perfectly soft and brand-new.

I emerged from the bedroom again and gave him the report, which he took without a change in expression. “I guess you’re going to be here for a while,” he said, slowly. “And it’s not like you got to pack for the trip.”

I wasn’t as foggy as I normally was in the morning. The month in the dry room had purged me of any caffeine habit I might’ve had, but clearly my mouth wasn’t aware of that yet, because I still asked if there was any coffee around. It must have been the smell that triggered it—Matthew had made some for himself.

“There’s a little French press in the cabinet over the sink,” Matthew said, without taking his eyes off the TV.

“How do I—” I frowned. “How do I use that?”

“Put the coffee grounds in the bottom, fill it with boiling water, let it sit for a few minutes, and the press the plunger down slowly,” he said. “Then you’re good.”

That seemed easy enough, except for the fact that I couldn’t quite reach the top shelf where he’d stored the press from earlier. It was easy to find—Matthew didn’t bother drying it off when he used it and washed it a few hours ago, so it sat cool and blue up there on that shelf. I ended up turning the faucet on for a second, letting a snake of water out, and using that to drag the press and plunger out of the cabinet, catching it as it fell.

Thankfully, he’d left the bag of ground coffee out on the counter, so that was easy to get. I curled the water-snake into a tight spiral and left it hanging behind my head while I shook some coffee into the press—I didn’t know exactly how much to use and I didn’t want to bother him again. Then I took the water I had, curled it into a ball, and started vibrating it. Within a couple of seconds, it was hot, and it was steaming within a few more. At that point, Matthew stopped watching TV and started watching me instead. I let the steaming ball of boiling water drain into the press, filling it up to the metal band that wrapped around near the top (I assumed that was the fill line) and placed the plunger on top, sliding the cap over it.

Then I went over to my easy chair and sat down.

“How long should I leave it for?” I asked him.

“Like three minutes. You can just boil water in the air?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s basically the same as freezing, just…I don’t know. The opposite.”

“I’m not sure why that’s surprising to me,” he said.

“I just don’t do it very often.”

“I guess.”

He turned up the TV at my request and we both sat there for a moment. After a few minutes I located a mug and poured myself the coffee. Impatience got the better of me and I drew the coffee out 8of the mug, froze it into a ball in the air, and gently melted it back into the cup. Took a sip of the now pleasantly cool coffee.

Matthew watched me do it in silence, and then went back to the TV.

“Is something wrong?” I asked him, between sips.

“No,” he said. “Well, aside from all of last night.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Makes sense.”

Matthew glanced at me for a moment, his face loose. I had to imagine the expression was wary—not a whole lot else made sense to me. He asked: “What do you think?”

“About what Talia said?”

He nodded.

I, out of habit, turned my head briefly back to my room. “I didn’t believe it last night, but…now that I’ve slept on it, it’s…I guess it makes sense.”

Matthew shook his head. “If it’s real, I guess.”

He looked back at the TV, which was just playing ads at this point.

I returned to my coffee, sipping it slowly and listening to the ads—one about vacuums, one for a painting company, another for Pepsi. In the last one before the morning show returned (by my guess) Matthew broke his sullen silence again. “You’ve been betrayed before, right?”

The coffee made me confident. “Depends on your definition of betrayal,” I said.

“Someone you trusted went against you for their own benefit,” he replied.

I thought back on that. “I don’t think anyone’s ever really trusted me. Only tolerated. Bell and Cygnus were with me until the end, and Yoru, Ava, and Benji were never with me at all. I don’t know if Prochazka was or not. I…I don’t know about that one.”

I made the gesture to go along with my next statement—a little finger gun waved limply around my temple. “Gun to my head I’d say no. I’ve never been betrayed. Everyone I’ve ever been with has made their intentions for me pretty clear right from the get-go.”

“Even Prochazka?”

“I just said I don’t know about that one.”

“That’s the only one that matters,” Matthew said.

I considered it, as the morning show returned from its break—the audience’s applause climbing through my thoughts, the hosts shouting over the ravenous assembly, thanking them for existing and all that. “Prochazka rescued me to fill the sixth slot on Unit 6. I filled that slot until the end. So…no. I don’t think he betrayed me.”

But that didn’t feel quite right to me. Something about it was still off. So I added one last little bit: “Maybe ‘betrayal’ isn’t the right word for it.”

Matthew raised his eyebrows at that. “Huh.”

I realized, just a touch too late, that I’d opened a can of worms I couldn’t possibly close again. Despite that, I tried. “I don’t know. He gave me a place to live when I didn’t have one. He’s always going to have that—I mean, we’ll always have that, you know, together. He’ll always have done that for me, or…or something like that.”

I frowned. I’d shot myself in the foot with my mumbling.

Matthew didn’t seem to mind, though. He reached for the remote and turned the TV down—not quite to silence but low enough where his voice was the only focus point in the room. “I don’t know if I explained the whole Biiri deal to you,” he said. “But basically, when we reach adulthood, we look for someone to latch onto and help. We’re a family of helpers, it’s—it’s the business we’re all in. We’ve done work for all kinds of folks throughout…ages, really. And I knew Neville was going places, I’d heard about him from other folks in the family, so I agreed to come out here and do whatever he needed doing. I had a key then, so it was a pretty appealing deal for him, especially since Loybol kept poaching all the telepaths, so he was strapped in that department. And—”

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Matthew dropped his thought mid-phrase and swiveled towards the sound. “Who the hell—”

“Talia?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe? I’ll—I’m just gonna go get it. Stay here.”

I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, so I gave him a thumbs up and slumped a little deeper down to make myself less visible.

Matthew mumbled to himself, as he went past me: “I shouldn’t be telling you this, anyway.”

And he went over to the door, rubbing an eye, turning the knob—and standing there was Neville himself.

Matthew, upon realizing who was there, snapped to attention. “Sir,” he stammered. “I—I didn’t think you’d be here.”

“Is this a bad time?” Neville asked him.

“No, it’s—it’s fine,” he said. “Come in. Erika’s over there.” He gestured to the easy chair, which was my cue to straighten up and raise a hand.

I kept my mouth shut tight, though.

Neville’s presence entered the room before him—a dark cloud that suffocated even the bright coffee smell with a kind of dampening field that pulled all awareness toward him. The man showing up unannounced occupied the entirety of my attention and thoughts. I found that I didn’t much care about the morning show, or Matthew’s fingers nervously working through each other, or the orientation of the remote on the table.

I cared about my breathing, forced even and low, and about him—and about his breathing, just as even, and just as slow.

“Hello again, Erika,” he said.

“Do you need something, sir, or…?” Matthew trailed off, eyes flicking between me and him.

“I’d like to borrow Erika for a moment, if you don’t mind,” Neville said.

Matthew went to point to himself and Neville clarified. “In private.”

“Oh.”

Again, Matthew’s eyes went back and forth. “Is that wise?”

“You tell me,” Neville said.

I considered it again. I really did. Knowing full well that Matthew was both watching and listening, I found myself wondering what would become of me if I cut loose. If I did my absolute best to take out both Matthew and Neville, right there, right now. I’d have to go after Matthew first, I knew, and I’d have to do it faster than the thought could even register. I didn’t know much about the logistics of telepathy as it related to this but I figured that Matthew would have to know what my intent to kill him felt like as opposed to actually reading a distinct thought, and I didn’t know if he had that nailed down yet. Recognizing an image of an icicle going through his skull was one thing, but would he know to translate that red pulsing throbbing ball of spite and hate that sat gently glowing in some dark corner of my head as anything more than a white-noise background-drone? Would he know it as I did?

Maybe. I wasn’t sure. I don’t remember thinking about this in direct terms—I’m trying to translate the feeling I felt as I remember it in that second. All of this occurred over maybe one second. It’s a lot of description for what boils down to not a whole lot of actual thought—but then again, that kind of feels like par for the course for me.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The actual set of actions that occurred in that second are as follows:

Neville asked his question. Matthew looked at me, at my eyes, and read something in my head that I don’t know about. I don’t know what he saw—but I know what he could’ve seen, if he looked in the right places, and if what he saw in my head matched what I saw in myself. That’s not really how telepathy works, as far as I understand it—people’s thoughts resolve themselves according to an a format the telepath sets upon their subject, as Esther once explained it to me, so there’s no guarantee the physical forms of my thoughts would translate—but that’s the gist of it.

I had my half-second consideration—a limp ball of probabilities poorly calculated and only vaguely defined. No words were given to it. No proper images tacked on.

And then Matthew looked back at Neville and said, “Yeah, I think so.”

And I found myself nodding along with that, because I’d decided, after he looked away, that I couldn’t kill both of them in time. I could get one but not the other, and that wasn’t quite good enough.

That aside—I was curious about what Neville wanted. I wasn’t sure I knew anything anymore, and I’d flailed around in the dark enough times to recognize when I should hold my fire.

So I paid attention.

“Just to be clear, sir,” Matthew said, slowly. “You want me to back out of her head for a bit.”

“Yes,” Neville said. “That’s what I said. As long as you think it’s fine.”

“Go ahead. If I can offer a recommendation, sir, I don’t think you should take her for too long.”

“I won’t,” Neville replied.

“Okay.” Matthew turned to me. “You should—”

“I know,” I said, standing up and going over to my room. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

I closed the door behind me and set about getting changed. I didn’t hear them say anything to each other while I did.

000

I came outside in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. I have no idea what color any of it was. Maybe it matched, maybe it didn’t, but I knew it was hard to screw up jeans, so I figured I would look at least passable no matter what shirt I took.

And I wasn’t about to attempt any of the dresses in the wardrobe. Not unless I absolutely had to.

Neville regarded me for a moment without a change in expression. He said, “We’re going to leave campus now. Would you mind backing out?”

Matthew took a breath. “Sure. Just…maybe be back in an hour or so? Sir,” he added, quickly.

“That was all I was planning to take,” Neville replied. “I know this makes you nervous. If you don’t think it’s safe, tell me, and I’ll come back some other time.”

I can’t say what Matthew was thinking—but I can guess at the calculations he was running, and I knew that the choice he was making there, on the spot, might have been the single most important one of his life. It was a leap of faith into a cloud of fog over a canyon. I’d already made up my mind to tell him what we talked about—because we’d entered into a kind of uneasy alliance on this, even if we hadn’t cemented it with words—but to him, who’d never gotten a true confirmation that just this once we wanted the same thing, he simply had to guess.

I said, in my mind: I’m going to tell you. I want to know what’s going on as much as you.

My intentions in the moment may not be my intentions when I left. Who knew what Neville could say to me—or where he was taking me, or what our plans were? Too many of those bridges had been eroded already.

But Matthew looked back at Neville and said, “Yeah. It’s fine. Go ahead.”

Neville nodded. “Then you’ve done well.”

Matthew blinked. I expected him to hold in confused silence, but instead he asked: “Sir, what does that mean?”

And I expected Neville to give some kind of cryptic nothing-response, but instead he said: “It means you’ve been a good friend and a reasonable person, like I knew you’d be.”

And somehow that meant even less to Matthew than if he’d said nothing at all.

Neville turned towards the door, beckoning for me to follow. Something felt different in my skull, but I couldn’t quite identify what it was.

“We’ll be back in an hour or so,” Neville said. “Let’s go, Erika.”

I let my eyes flick towards Matthew, who was looking back at me, face slack. The tone of his eyes would’ve meant so much there, if I could get that—but I didn’t, and even though I was holding his face in my metaphorical hands I found that our connection was so much less than it was a moment ago, now that we were back to strangers, and he had no more sight than me.

000

Neville and I stepped outside of room 608 and he let the door close slowly behind him.

We began our trip down the hall toward the elevator, and about halfway there I worked up the courage to ask him for details. “Where are you—where are we going?”

“There’s a bakery across the street that makes amazing muffins,” Neville said. “Did you eat breakfast yet? I don’t think I had anything other than coffee put in the cabinets.”

“No,” I said.

“Ae you hungry?”

“A little,” I confessed, although it was equally offset by nervous nausea.

“I just thought we’d get some muffins,” Neville said, “And talk about the accommodations.”

I could have killed him. It would’ve been so easy. The air was humid enough, and I had my own saliva if nothing else—and he was healthy. I could have dragged the water out of him like I took the base of his stomach in my cold fist and pulled it straight through his throat. Turn him inside out until everything above him was wet with his vital fluids and everything inside was bone-dry. I could have done it. It would’ve been so easy.

Standing right there in front of the elevator. Let him drop dead to the floor, step into the elevator, let it ride smooth and slow down to the ground. Dust my hands off on my brand-new jeans and walk right out the door.

Mission accomplished. Problem solved.

It would cost me nothing. It would’ve been so easy.

But I wanted to know. All of this had to be happening for a reason, even though my whole life up to this point was a conspiracy to make me doubt a logical universe.

There had to be something. Limp as that declaration was—there just had to be something.

So I said to Neville, “Okay.”

And I let any thought of rebellion in that moment drain out through my spine.

Not now—just like everything else.

Wait and see, Erika Hanover—wait and see.

000

The place took me, out in the world I ignored intentionally, was right where he said it was—across the street and a few doors down. It was the kind of place businessmen went to get better coffee than the offices provided, or where trust-fund kids went to squat all day.

The kitchen-area inside was enclosed in a big octagonal half-wall, and a bare lightbulb enclosed in a wire cage hung above every table. There weren’t all that many tables in there, but there was a single open one, and Neville took a glance at it before he went up to the counter.

All the pastries sat in a line of baskets behind the counter. I assumed there was glass in front of it, but it was open from the back because the people before us in line had gotten something. In front of each basket was a little smooth card that labeled the basket’s contents.

But before I could even ask, Neville said, “They’ve got chocolate chip, banana, blueberry, apple-cinnamon, and double-chocolate today. I recommend the apple-cinnamon one, personally.”

He added after a moment: “There’s other stuff in there too if you don’t want a muffin, but the muffins here are really good.”

“I’ll do an apple cinnamon one,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my loose debit card.

Neville waved me off. “Hi there,” he said to the cashier.

“Hey, Neville. Usual?”

“Two today,” he said.

The cashier took a brief glance at me, and for a second my spine ran cold. But he didn’t say anything to me or Neville, and the chill drained out. Neville added, “And a medium coffee for me—unless…”

“I’m all set,” I replied, distant.

“Just one then.”

“Gotcha,” the cashier said back.

000

Neville and I took our seats at the table he’d scouted out earlier.

“I come here a lot,” he said. “Every other day for the past few years, I’d say. Pretty much all of the cashiers know me now.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him, eyes titled toward the muffin sitting alone on the plate in front of me, as yet untouched. The question burst out of me and I never had a single snowball’s chance of stopping it.

Neville paused for a moment, sipped his coffee, nibbled his muffin. “Call it atonement,” he said.

“Atonement,” I repeated, tonelessly.

“I said I wanted to save you,” Neville said. “I meant it.”

I couldn’t muster strength in my voice. “Why?”

“Every word of what I told you in my office is true,” Neville replied to me, slowly. “I know Talia and Matthew don’t want to believe it, but it is. Nothing breaks a man quite like realizing he’s become his own worst enemy. That day, I realized that in my quest to destroy everything Prochazka had built, I’d become just like him, as…I don’t know, cliché as that seems. I remember thinking that I’d know if I went down a dark path, you know? Everyone always thinks they do. It’s not until something makes you turn around that you realize how far you’ve come. And when your life is as fast-paced as mine or yours, you don’t get a whole lot of opportunities to do that.”

“So this is atonement,” I said, dull. I’d condensed so many droplets around the muffin that it was starting to get meaningfully wet. I could already loosely perceive it even without any droplets—the cake itself was moist enough to show up very faintly, like a wisp of smoke, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I needed it to be clearer. I needed to see every hole in the bread. Every contour of the top.

Every little speck of cinnamon resolved and crystal.

“When I realized Prochazka and I were the same, I became very depressed,” Neville said. “But I already explained that. It wasn’t really depression. It was more of just…shock. Disbelief. Despite everything I’d built, I’d still somehow managed to fail. It’s…it’s not a good feeling.”

He snickered a bit. “Yeah, it sucks. But when I was sitting there, at rock bottom, I suppose, I realized that I still had a chance. I wasn’t totally irredeemable. There was still a pathway out of this, a path that a lot of other people who’ve hit rock bottom see. You see it with drug addicts who become motivational speakers. I could escape by helping someone else escape.”

Neville looked down. “But I knew I’d already done so much to hurt you. It was the only chance I had, though, so I had to go for it. Without it—or without realizing it, at least—I think I might’ve just given up, right there and then in my office.”

He looked up at me now—in my eyes, as best he could. “So, yes, Erika, this is a selfish endeavor. If that’s what you’re thinking. At the end of the day, it is. Although I think you can make a case for everything being that way, really—nothing is ever done without a single shred of self-interest. I am hoping that I can save you, and in turn save myself. Selfish, yes, but it’s honest. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, Erika. Nothing more.”

But I wasn’t buying it. Enough people had tried to talk their way into my good graces that even this burst of so-called selfish honesty wasn’t enough. In the past, when the simple act of telling me the truth would’ve been enough to win me over, it might have—but I’d seen too much now for simple words to sway me.

So, in a low drone, I said, “Is this the part where you put on some big show of force to prove something to me?”

“That’s what people usually do, right?” Neville replied, sipping his drink.

I nodded.

“I’m not going to. If you really need one, you can look at the dry room, but that doesn’t particularly count, since that wasn’t really my doing. I needed a place to keep you where you couldn’t do anything rash for a while before I could be certain that Matthew could handle you, and that we weren’t going to get instantly rushed by Prochazka’s remaining forces. But since we’re sitting here talking, obviously I determined that Matthew could handle the responsibility of keeping an eye on you, and that I am reasonably certain that no, Bell and Cygnus are not coming to save you.”

“Or,” he added with a shrug, “if they are, they’re not doing a particularly good job.”

“They’re coming,” I said, with finality. It was the one thing I truly believed in. “They’ll find me.”

Neville, on the other hand, didn’t believe that for a second. “We’re sitting in public, in a coffee shop anyone can enter, with no guards. At any time they could simply come in here, stand you up, and take you out of here, and I’d be powerless to stop them. I don’t have a key, Erika. I’m on the gray side of fifty years old. I’m no match for Cygnus, let alone Bell. Hell, both of them could probably overpower me even without their magic. I’m in passable shape, but I’m hardly a bodybuilder. So I’m reasonably confident that I’ve navigated this whole endeavor to a place where it is safe for both you and I to wander around in public without a worry. If that counts as a show of strength to fit your definition, go ahead and log it, but I’m not going to demonstrate anything else. There’s nothing left to prove, and either way—that’s not how I want to operate.”

He picked up his cup and swirled it a bit, absently. “Long term, it just doesn’t really work all that well.”

“So you want to be a pacifist?” I asked him, cold. “After you’ve killed all my friends?”

“Yes,” Neville said. With just as much finality as I had a few moments before. “That’s what it took to make me realize. People can change, Erika, and I realized that I need to if I want to build something true. Something long-term, that I can be proud of.”

“That’s why I’m here, then,” I said. “Talia figured it out. She told us. You want me to be a—a pity piece. Something you can trot out to show you’re not a monster.”

His face tensed up for a bit. “A pity piece?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she tell you?” Neville asked me.

I paused—unsure if this was crossing the line—but thought better of it after a second. The decision had to happen too fast for me to actually weigh anything. “She said you were going to parade me out there as an example of, um, your humanity or something. When you show magic to the world. You’d have me as an example of someone innocent you saved to soften the blow and show that we take care of ourselves and that people don’t need to worry.”

Neville fell quiet for a moment. It took longer than I expected for him to find a response. “That’s a pretty good idea.”

“I mean, it’s your plan,” I said. And when he gave no reaction to that, I paled, the blood draining from my face, the life dripping down through my spine. Hands went cold. “Right?”

Neville, slowly, shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking about that at all.”

And after another second, he added: “I think I might do that, though. I…it’s a collective lie we all tell ourselves. That we can keep this under wraps forever. We’re—at least, up here in the Northeast, this is how we feel—we’re basically playing hot potato with the responsibility for shouldering the burden of the reveal when it happens. It’s an endless game of whack-a-mole and it’s only getting faster, and none of us like to admit it, but…it’s true. I’m sure you think about this too. Everyone on the front lines of this whole thing thinks about it more than their superiors want them to.”

I sucked in a slow breath and tried to make my mind go blank.

“It’s a nice story,” he said, looking back at the counter of pastries. “Easily digestible. Not a lot of moving parts. A good emotional core. It’s…don’t let me give you the wrong idea, Erika. When magic comes out, it’s going to be ugly. No amount of pleasant nursery-rhyme tales are going to soften the blow that much. I’ve tried to run the numbers, I’ve talked it over with Ivan and Talia, and we all kind of agree that when something blows up and we can’t contain the fallout anymore…the low estimate is a few million people, the upper is a double-digit percentage of the population of the world.”

He was practically mumbling now, just making sounds for the sake of making them. “Ten, twenty, twenty-five percent. Mostly non-magicals. Make no mistake.” His voice went harder again as he found his footing. “Magical people will win if there’s a war. We’re virtually undetectable, already in a bunch of positions of power across the world, and I can guarantee you, more well-connected people with keys have contingency plans for this than people without. I would assume the US has a fairly well documented plan for putting down a magical rebellion. It’s probably deeply classified, but I’d be willing to put money down that it’s there. Smaller governments might not know about magic at all. And the United States’ plan probably involves killing a truly biblical number of civilians. Which, after traumatizing a whole generation of youth, would lead to a huge spike in the number of keys created, which would prolong the war even further, and…well, you can do the math.”

Neville sighed. “Diplomacy is our only chance, but the US isn’t particularly good at negotiating with terrorists that they’re not getting anything from. Maybe we can set up some kind of mutually-beneficial relationship, but…I guess that all starts with how we phrase it. How we come off on that first encounter.”

He straightened up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to start mumbling about work.”

“It’s fine,” I muttered—automatically, absently.

“How’s the muffin?”

“It’s good.”

He pursed his lips for a moment, turning down, thinking about something or other. He did that a lot. Neville went out of his way to plan his words.

“Don’t worry too much about the future,” Neville said. “I have to because it’s my job. But you’ll be fine. I believe that.”

I didn’t respond.

“All you have to do now,” he said, slowly, “and all I should be doing, is focusing within. My only task for you is to help me help you. And my only task for myself is to help you help me. If that makes any sense.”

I let myself look up at him, with all the usual caveats. I was hoping, in a last-ditch effort, that my eyes would confuse him. Scare him. Something like that. I didn’t know what I wanted and it’s been too long now to say for sure.

The thing he said after that haunts me to this day. It will never stop haunting me because of how true it was, and how I knew it, intrinsically, before it was said.

“History books will be written about how we conduct ourselves in these moments,” Neville said to me, quietly. “All we can do is try and be people we’d be happy to read about one day. Because everything we do is set in stone. It’s far too late to pretend that neither of us will be in them: hell, the books will probably be about us. So don’t worry about the future. You’re not going to write those books, you’re just going to be in them. Worry about now, and do what you think will be remembered most fondly.”

Neville smiled, softly, and for a moment I became aware of the warmth of his face. The droplets I had around him were heated above the ambient temperature and they glowed a gentle orange-red, a wispy smoke-outline of a man’s face—a man looking at me, smiling at me, hands folded on the table, voice low, eyes low, speaking little words that I realized then that he meant with every ounce of his heart.

There was no deception here. I was looking for a catch that wasn’t there.

Neville was changed. He was not the person I thought he was, and the longer I spent looking for the old version of him, the more confused and angry I would be.

Neville said to me, “And if you want this in simpler terms, I can give you some.”

I nodded.

“Just be kind, Erika,” he said. “You and I just need to choose to be kind.”