108 - Stare Into Death and Be Still [September 19th, Age 15]

I don’t quite remember his last words before the ceiling collapsed. He had just taken a breath. He was preparing to speak.

The sounds were lost to time. I will never know.

What I do remember is the crash, sending me to my feet before the sound could process. The dust cloud billowing through the room as the ceiling crumbled and bits of tile flew like birdshot from the hole ripped open above his head—and below the dust, below the twisted structure-beams and splintered subfloor, there was a little warm splash—and then there was a ring around his neck, almost a halo, and in one motion it spun around to put the pendant’s centerpiece behind his neck and then it shot backward, the inner side of the chain sharpened to a point, and it sliced through his neck so quickly and cleanly that it barely even dragged his body with it, just a little tug and nothing more, and Neville had no chance to even begin to know that it was over.

Of course, it was the staple through the skull that killed him. The decapitation was extra. For show.

For me, I guess.

Above the blood and the dust came a voice—

“Erika!” he shouted, returned at last for me, and one of the metal pipes running through the ceiling carrying water to some other part of the building snapped in half and bent down to come to a rest on the top of his desk, a tiny ramp up and out of the room.

And at the end of the ramp, above it all, was Cygnus—hand outstretched, screaming, “C’mon!”

For one second, I didn’t move.

I didn’t process anything. For that little bit of time I didn’t understand. Some things happened to Neville but his body was still there, a little slumped over, but still there, so everything was fine. I wasn’t sure why there was a hole in the ceiling now but I was certain there was a good reason.

And then I processed everything all at once. My mouth opened and closed. The blood shooting from his empty neck dragged my awareness to it. Caught in its gravity for another second I still did not move and then I heard Cygnus’s voice again, again my name, and then the processing finished and I knew without words that everything was over and it was all over and there were no more thoughts to think.

I did not feel anything at all. No temperature. Neville traditionally kept his office cold. I couldn’t tell. No smell. The stench of a body was something I was intimately familiar with, but I didn’t get it then.

I lost the body. The droplets had abandoned it. In the mode of total emergency that I slipped into without a second thought—training, indoctrination, something along those lines—everything aside from Cygnus and the pipe disappeared.

In my mind, everything was clear again. I didn’t need to have any thoughts. There was no purpose to such things.

I climbed on top of the desk and took a step up onto the pipe and stretched up for Cygnus’s hand. His fingers clasped in mine and between my feet and his arm I managed to work up to the floor above.

And then I was standing up there, and everything below the hole in the floor disappeared, and while I didn’t think about it then I know now that that is how Neville ended for me: I let go of the droplets under the hole, among the dust, and then I never saw him again.

And then he was gone, and it was over.

There was, simply and absolutely, no more.

Cygnus turned to me briefly and took my other hand. “Are you okay?” he asked me. “God—I didn’t think you’d actually still be there. I didn’t think you’d be, literally, right there. We were—I was just going to go in there and take him out and leave. I—God, I can’t believe you’re okay.”

I just stood there. It was over.

“I didn’t really think you’d still be alive,” he said, softly. In the distance there was some kind of shuffling commotion and I knew we didn’t have a lot of time—and then we were running towards the doors, I think it was my prerogative but I don’t really know.

When we came out through the doors there were a handful of people standing around looking confused (the sound of the floor cracking drew their attention) and seeing us emerge from the building and run off down the street took their eyes for a moment, but once we were far enough away (half a block) their interest dissipated, and we slipped into the back of a small crowd at crossing and caught our breath.

I didn’t know what to do with the droplets. I was just trying to put one foot in front of another—but given the situation I knew I was going to have to see as much as I could, so I sucked in a breath and pushed the droplets as far out as I could.

“Where’s Bell?” I asked, after a moment. The crowd shifted forward and we started to walk.

Cygnus pursed his lips. His voice was barely audible, but the adrenaline gave me the focus I needed to hear him. “She told me she could get me in, but wouldn’t go any further.”

He breathed, slowly. “Her exact words were, “This is not where I plan to make my mark.””

I did not respond, for a moment. I don’t think I understood what he was saying. In that second I was still moving without understanding—purpose, yes, but no knowledge. I didn’t know what was propelling me. I was going away, but to where or for what reason I couldn’t say.

I was following Cygnus and I was doing as I was told and for a little bit again everything was easy. I didn’t need to have any thoughts, so I didn’t.

But then I had one. “She’s gone?”

Cygnus nodded. Pausing for a second. “She told me to tell you she was sorry.”

And then I had another one. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“She didn’t say anything,” I said, toneless. Between slow breaths. “She just left. Like everyone said she would.”

He paused again. "She broke a lot of rules to get me here, Erika. I think that’s enough to show she meant it, even if she didn’t say. There are a lot of bodies that are going to turn up in the next few days with…that are mangled in such a way that I don’t think normal people can square. And those are just the ones she didn’t have time to hide. And…either way, you knew Bell. Would she ever say she was sorry?”

That, I knew, was the truth. I saw it clearly in the back of my head but I couldn’t push the words out of my mouth. I’d been wrong so many times before about so many things just like this, but I’d held on to this one so dearly that even the idea of admitting it was invalid.

Despite how readily I was willing to give away all my other notions, I had always assumed that no matter how bad things got, Bell would come back for me.

It took me a moment to find something else to say. The crossing light must have turned because the group of people surged forward, out into the street, and Cygnus poked my shoulder to let me know it was time to walk. “Where do you think she’s going?”

“Are you going to try and find her?” Cygnus asked.

I paused. “I—I don’t know. I…”

I thought I’d find a way to finish that statement before I got to the end, but I never did. “I don’t know,” I repeated.

He put his hands behind his head, stretching. “Finding Bell would be nice, but…well, we all knew this would happen eventually. She’d basically told us we were getting a rental. I doubt Prochazka’s going to lose much sleep over it. Bell might be…well, she might be Bell, but I don’t think she’s the type to drag magic into the open. She’ll just wait until someone else does the dirty work.”

We made it to the curb on the other side and he stopped walking. Looking out and around at the buildings “Well, we should just try and get home. Prochazka’s got a lot of roster rebuilding to do.”

That made me pause with him. Without that I probably would have kept walking—and maybe he’d have started following me, even though I had no idea where I was going and no real way to find out.

I spoke my thoughts without consideration. “Cygnus, I—I don’t really want to do this anymore.”

He snorted. “Jesus, Erika, no kidding. I don’t either. What a waste this whole thing was. What did we even accomplish? Yoru, Ava, Benji, essentially Bell…for what? And…I mean, you were on that list until about five minutes ago. I was going to get back to the factory and just scream at Prochazka for a while and quit. Just thinking over things to say to him, really. I just…”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. The message was good, I guess, but…whatever. I don’t get paid enough to think about how we were supposed to get out of this. We didn’t even do a good job. We just got lucky. Honestly—we really did just need to go in there waving our guns around. This whole thing was cursed, top to bottom. Just…just a waste. I can only imagine what you went through. I thought they’d have had you in a cage for sure.”

“They did,” I said. “For a month.”

I’m sure Cygnus was thinking of a literal cage, but as his face scrunched in confusion for a moment he must have realized that a literal cage wouldn’t have accomplished much for containing me, which meant that the cage I was talking about had to be something else. And while he might’ve taken a second to try and figure out what that would’ve looked like, he abandoned the notion with a shrug and said, “Well, I’m only going to make you relive that once. Let’s talk about the bad stuff when we get home, okay?”

He looked down at me. Turned to me. And I turned my face up to him and for a second I was able to catch his eyes in my perception and I knew they were a little more vivid than eyes normally were—and for about half a second the thought crossed my mind that if this was all I was going to have left, then that would suffice me. If this was all I was supposed to have after everything was said and done, then I could get by.

But then there was a crack across the sky and a burst of commotion and screaming that caught me by surprise—hyperfocused on vigilance as I was—shaking loose my control for a millisecond and when I got it again I searched for Cygnus and did not find him standing there—I found him on the concrete next to me, slumped over just as Neville was, shattered cavity in his head just as Neville had, and I stood there, and I waited, and time stopped completely.

0 0 0

I stood there for so long.

The people around us scattered like dust in fear of a second shot that never came. All the droplets were gone. I did not exist.

I stood there for too long, even as the sirens spiraled closer, even as the hands on my shoulders tried to shake me to attention, even as they helped me into the back seat of a car, even after the car drifted away from the crime, hand on my shoulder, hand on the gun, hand on the receiver, hand in mine.

I stood there for so, so long.

0 0 0

“Do we know anything?”

There were voices inside and voices outside. They didn’t happen at the same time. They’d be inside for a moment with a few questions and then outside for a moment with a few different questions, and so on.

“No idea. She won’t say anything.”

These were the outside voices. They were quieter. A man’s voice and a woman’s. They didn’t seem to know anything.

“No ID?” the woman asked.

“Absolutely nothing.”

“And the man?”

“Also nothing. Neither of these people exist.”

“Christ.”

The man sighed. “We are so fucking screwed. You know that? We’ve got maybe ten seconds before every camera in the city starts knocking to find out what the fuck that was and all we’re going to be able to tell them is that neither of these kids have any ID. This guy got assassinated in broad daylight. Christ. We’re so fucked.”

“So what’s the deal, then?” the woman asked. “What’re we saying about it?”

“The current plan is to say we think it was a drug gang related something-or-other, and we’re just gonna…I don’t know, pretend the girl wasn’t there. Something like that. It’s not going to be pretty.”

“And she’s not talking?”

“You’re welcome to try,” the man said. “Dan and I’ve been at it for hours. At this point we’re not even sure she speaks English. I know people get shell-shocked, but you’d think we’d get a word or something. Nope. Nada.”

“What’s the lab say?”

“Not sure yet. Should be a few minutes. The—the bullet is plastic, which was kind of weird. Some kind of resin something. Apparently it was patented back in the 90’s, but they were never used for anything. Lam didn’t even know they made any real ones.”

He sighed again. “But to be honest with you, Jean, I don’t think it matters. We’re not getting anything out of her. I’m starting to think she might just be slow or something.”

A pause. “Let me try.”

“If you want, go ahead.” Something jingled. Keys. “Good luck.”

Then there was a clicking and a creaking and the muffled outside voice became a clear inside one.

With some shuffling of footsteps the woman’s voice came to the table I sat at and lowered itself across from me, saying, “Hello,” as it did.

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you want some water?” she asked me.

For a second I thought about it. The thoughts came to me automatically. With a glass of water I could probably break out of here. I'd have to be quick—but I could put an icicle in her before she’d know what was going on and at that point I just had to get lucky a few times and I’d be out.

Then I realized I was in a police station and everyone had a gun, and it didn’t really matter what I was capable of—“gun” still beats everything.

So I sat there. I was thirsty, though, so I gave her a weak nod and she stood again.

In a moment she returned with a small cup. Even without any droplets suspended I still locked onto the small floating lump of cool water approaching me, the woman’s warm breath, and just that bit of awareness reminded me who I was.

Always and forever, it continues.

I took a deep breath and pulled some water out of the cup to suspend droplets again and get a feel for the room. Luckily the woman wasn’t looking at the cup when I did so or she would’ve seen it drain itself about half an inch—realizing that I snatched it from the table and took a sip at least pretend to cover for myself.

The woman watched me drink, silent.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” she said. She spoke slowly, with forced-clear diction. Evidently the man’s comment stuck with her. “But we want to help you.”

Prochazka had always told me not to talk to cops, so I just shook my head.

“You may have been told otherwise,” she continued, slow, “but you’re not at fault. None of this is your fault. We—we know that it can be tough, but you won’t have to do bad things anymore. It’s over now.”

She took a moment. Frowned. Then said, “My name is Jean. What’s your name?”

I almost took it—but at the last second my lips shut tight and I did not speak.

Jean looked at me intently, face tightened, and then she said, “You look sort of familiar, actually.”

I blinked.

I was doing my best to look at her somewhere near the eyes, but I also thought I needed to avoid laying droplets on her face at all to see her. In hindsight I know that there’s no way she would’ve been able to connect the dots with that—I did not belong to the same reality as her—but I avoided it anyway, just to be safe.

The result of that was that I wasn’t quite making eye contact, which may have contributed to her confusion.

She regarded me again. “How old are you?”

Nothing.

“I promise you’re not in trouble,” Jean said. “But we can’t help you if you don’t answer any of these questions.”

Another moment passed in silence and then she held up two fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Again, I almost spoke—but at the last second I held up two fingers in kind.

“What number is that?” she asked.

I frowned. Just a little wouldn’t hurt, I guess. “Two.”

“Okay,” she said, a little relieved. “One moment. I’ll be right back.”

She stood and left the room, and again the voices returned outside.

“Well, she speaks English,” Jean said to the man, who I supposed was still there. They’d lowered their voices but still not quite enough—I could still, if I focused, hear them.

“More than I got,” the man said.

“I don’t know what we’re looking to get here,” Jean said. “I—I have a suspicion, but I don’t think there’s any way to actually prove it. I think I might know who she is? It’s a bit of a long shot, though, and…well, she’d look older than that by now. Do you remember the Red Creek case?”

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“I’ve only been here for a year, Jean, I don’t know shit.”

“Right, yeah. It was a missing child case from a few years back. Little girl went missing from an Albany suburb, just—vanished into thin air, that kind of thing. Nobody was really looking into it, though, because the father didn’t even report her as missing. She had a single dad and was—was definitely being neglected at home, at least emotionally, but her dad wasn’t even there the night she disappeared—he was picking up a double shift at the factory in the morning. Loads of people saw him. She just up and ran away from home and he just kind of shrugged. It was really sad, but nobody ever got prosecuted or anything. Once in a while someone would phone saying they thought they saw her in random places around the state, but nobody ever went out of their way to solve the case. It’s not like she had anywhere to go, really, and sometimes—sometimes kids just fuck off, right? But that was three years ago. I was just going to go look at the files.”

“How old was she?”

“Twelve.”

“So she’d be fifteen now?”

Jean shrugged. “More or less.”

“Jean, there’s absolutely no way that’s the same person. Twelve-year-olds don’t look like fifteen-year-olds at all. Whoever that is, that’s definitely not a fifteen-year-old.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Some people develop really late. It’s—look, I just wanted to look at the file. Maybe it’s her sister or something.”

“Did she have a sister?”

“I don’t know, Mark, that’s why I was going to look at the stupid file.”

“Yeah, that’s…that’s fair. I don’t know. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with this, and the longer we keep her here for no reason…I’ve just got a bad feeling about it.”

“She’s a kid, Mark, we can’t just let her back out onto the street.”

“Well, in about forty hours, we’re gonna have to, unless you wanna slap a charge on her.”

“I just…I don’t know. She’s gotta be being abused somewhere, right? And if we just let her back out onto the street, she’s just going back to it.”

“Does she look abused to you?”

“I mean…she’s got a bunch of scrapes and shit. Like she looks banged up.”

“More than a child normally would?”

“I—I guess? Look, Mark, I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do either. I’m just gonna go look at the file. I just want to see the picture in there.”

“Whatever. I’d say just tell her she’s getting released to wherever she wants to go and move on. We’re not getting anywhere with this and we’ve got a lot more important shit to worry about right now.”

“I’m looking at the file first,” Jean said, turning and starting off.

I went pale. The key keeping me young was going to do me some favors—probably—but the risk that she’d draw the line between the case and me was too strong.

I shifted in my chair.

Mark did not respond as Jean left down the hall—and then the lock turned and Mark came inside, took the seat across from me.

He looked at me blankly for a second before he started talking.

“Listen, kid, we’re not going to be able to do anything here if you don’t say anything. And that’s fine, if that’s what you want, but if anyone is forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do, they’re just going to keep getting away with it unless you help us.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Home to where?” he said.

I paused. “I can go home myself. Please just let me out of here.”

“You’re free to go as long as you tell us who that man was.”

I shook my head.

“Was he forcing you to do anything?”

Again—“Please just let me go home.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Please let me go home.”

“I can do that if it’s very close to here.”

“Please just let me go home.”

My hands sat cold on the table. The words dragged trenches over my tongue.

He looked towards the door. “I’ll wait for Jean,” he said. “And then if she doesn’t find anything, you can go. We’ll need to call your parents, though.”

“Please just let me go home,” I repeated.

He blinked. “You—you have parents, right?”

“Please just let me go home,” I said.

The thoughts swept through me. I could kill him—tears welling in my eyes—I could kill everyone in here and everyone in the building and then everyone in the city, and once the world was empty I could take my own two feet and walk back to Canajoharie and then I could kill everyone there, and then maybe I could follow the I-90 west to the place Bell conquered and kill everyone there, and then I could go north and north and north until nobody would ever find me, until all signs of humanity had faded away, and seeing as my presence would hardly change that at all I could kneel down in the snow and then—finally—I could stop.

Breathe. Tears could wait. Strength now—tears later, as always, as always.

There was never any time to cry and there never would be.

Of what purpose are these tears to you? What, exactly, would you be hoping to accomplish by crying?

The world does not respond to such petty things.

Mark looked at me. I must have tensed up. Something must have been amiss, but I couldn’t possibly have known what it was. For a second I left my body alone in the chair and I had gone someplace else. If he wanted to, he could have shoved me off it and I would have hit the ground limp. It was all I could do to breathe—one in, one out, again and again.

A knock on the door brought me out of it, temporarily bringing my thoughts back into order—slow, and then with a brief spike in panic as I realized it was Jean back with the file.

Mark looked up at the door, then got up and took a chair from the corner for her.

“I can get my own chair,” Jean said, snide. “I’ve got arms.”

Mark just sat there, stone-faced, and she read the room and sobered up.

She produced a folder with a few pages in it. From the folder she took two and put them down in front of me. In private and with concentration, I knew I'd be able to read them—but I was fairly out of practice with that at this point, having not done it in a few months at least, and with the state of mind I was in I knew I wouldn’t be able to. Not without looking like something was wrong with me.

So I sat there and picked one and pointed my eyes vaguely at it and waited.

“A few years back a young girl named Erika Hanover disappeared from the town of Red Creek, up near Albany. I couldn’t help but notice that you—” she frowned. “You look kind of like her. She’d be…I don’t know, fifteen or so now. I think this is her school photo from fifth grade.”

Immediately the image in question produced itself in my head without my consent. I remembered standing in line for that—school picture day was always a weird day for me. I knew my father wouldn’t have bothered paying for those if it wasn’t a de-facto requirement, and I knew that more often than not he did it just for appearances. I’d found the previous years’ pictures in the trash more than once. That was always fine with me—I hated having my picture taken—but the act of paying for photos and then throwing them away just so his co-workers wouldn’t look at him weird never made sense to me. Most of his co-workers had already written him off; it was only a handful of the other single guys who didn’t care.

There was not a single picture of me that looked good from that era—frankly, the only one I ever thought I looked good in was the picture that sat on Prochazka’s desk, the one of Unit 6 all together in some alley in Canajoharie.

I smiled for this picture, sure, but I smiled in that one.

It was all I could do to keep perfectly still. Not a single word was allowed to get through to me.

Jean kept her hands folded. “I’m just going to ask you point-blank. Is this you?”

I did not move. But then, at the last second, I realized that if I waited too long it would look like I was lying—so I barely managed a weak head-shake after God only knows how much time.

Jean looked at me. She looked me in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

I shook my head again—then changed it to a nod after a second.

She pointed down at the other picture. “This is the picture. That page is blank.”

I froze.

“Are—are you visually impaired?”

“No,” I managed, immediately.

Mark turned to Jean. “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, softly. “She wouldn’t look like that anymore, and—”

He paused, then gestured at the door. Both of them got up and left the room, with Jean turning to me and saying, “Excuse us for a moment,” as they went.

Outside I strained my hearing and picked up the thread: “Jean, this is stupid.”

“Yeah, no, you’re right. I’m just grasping at straws. She answered how many fingers I was holding up, so…so she’s obviously not blind, I just…when I was in the car with her on the way here, I—I got the sense that she wasn’t really looking at anything? Like she was just sort of there. And at the time I just chalked it up to being shocked, but now it’s been a few hours and it still feels like she’s just sort of guessing where things are.”

“It’s because she’s slow, Jean. She can see fine. She’s just slow. I was trying to talk to her while you were out getting the file and she was just repeating “Please send me home” over and over again. She wouldn’t even tell me where she was supposed to go.”

“Maybe being in a police station is just freaking her out.”

“She’s not five, Jean. She’s too old for that.”

“Yeah, and someone just got shot right next to her. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

“If she wanted to leave so badly, why won’t she tell us where she lives?”

“I don’t fucking know, Mark,” Jean said. “I’m gonna have a chat with the captain. You’re right. We’re clearly not going to get anywhere with this.”

A pause. “But dear God, having the picture in front of me…if Erika had an identical twin, that’s her. She looks exactly the same. It’s like nothing’s changed.”

“No, I agree with you that it’s fucked up, but there’s literally no way it can be the same person.”

“Maybe she…maybe she’s just really malnourished? Or was for a while between now and then?”

“Outside of being a bit banged up and, like, a bit dusty, she looks fine. She looks normal. Healthier than loads of kids I see outside with good living conditions.”

Jean sighed. “It’s just…I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’d put money down that that was some kind of a trafficking thing and…maybe some gang violence in there, and she’s just caught up in it. And maybe she is kind of slow and doesn’t want to rat out her only home. It’s really sad.”

“I’m not denying that, but I don’t…I don’t think there’s anything we can actually do. If whoever she’s with is feeding her and putting a roof over her head, it’s probably better than being an orphan in the system.”

“That’s fucked up, Mark.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I can’t say someone getting sexually abused for money is in a better position than anyone.”

“I’d rather get three square meals and a bed and suck a dick occasionally than have no square meals and no bed and not have to suck a dick. And I’m just saying, it looks to me like she’s getting three square meals.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Tell me I’m wrong!”

“You are wrong.”

“Jean, I’ve worked with those shelters. I’ve seen those kids. That system is so fucked up, especially out here. If someone came up to me, twelve-year-old Mark, and told me, homeless, helpless me, that I could be well-fed and have a bed and all I’d have to do is suck a few dicks, I’d do it. If I had nowhere else to go? It’s not a bad deal, Jean, you gotta understand. Some of these kids, they’d take that shit in a heartbeat if it meant living somewhere. And having someone, literally fucking anyone, care at all about what happens to them.”

“You’re implying that pimps running trafficking rings give a shit about the people they have.”

“Well, this hypothetical one we’re imagining for this girl clearly does, because my kids go to school with kids more fucked up than that.”

“I can’t believe you’re seriously arguing this right now. Christ, Mark, have a little compassion.”

“This is compassion. Sending her from a passable situation to a worse one would be a lack of it.”

“You’re calling that a passable situation?”

“If I could send her to a loving home I would, but obviously that’s not on the table, so—”

“In the foster system she’ll get a loving home eventually.”

“Or not! You know how expensive it is to adopt? You know who often foster kids get plucked from one abuse situation into another? It’s so fucked up out there, Jean, you don’t understand. I seriously think this might be better. She’s in good shape, she’s not malnourished, she’s got like two scratches. Being a bit dusty doesn’t mean anything in the city, there’s loads of ways for your clothes to get a little dirty. There’s construction all over the place. I walked in dusty today.”

“I’m not arguing this anymore. I’m talking to the captain. Eat shit.”

“Whatever. I’m—you just deal with this. I said my piece, I’ve got other shit to do, and you know as well as I do the captain’s just gonna tell you to quietly shove her out the back door.”

That made Jean stop walking away. “I hate that you’re right.”

“I kind of do too, but what’re we gonna do? We’ve got no leads, we’re not gonna get leads, neither victim exists and the guy was taken out from a window somewhere with a fuckin’ sniper rifle using a bullet that the lab didn’t even think went actually into production. We’ve actually got nothing. The captain is just going to want to make this go away as soon as possible, which it isn’t going to do because a guy got shot with a sniper rifle in broad daylight in Manhattan. Christ. We’re all so fucking screwed. And maybe that’s Erika and maybe it’s not, but I just don’t see how that matters when the only thing that actually matters is that we have to let her out of here in forty hours anyway if she’s not being charged, so why waste everyone’s time wringing blood from a brick?”

There was silence for a moment, and then Jean spoke again. “I’m talking to the captain.”

“Go do that.”

A few more seconds passed and then Mark opened the door and came back inside. He sat down and didn’t say anything for a bit longer—long enough for some part of my brain to trip and find something to say for myself, even though he was about to speak.

“Nobody forced me to do anything,” I said, quietly.

Mark abandoned whatever train of thought he had immediately. “Are you sure about that?”

I said, “Yes,” but it was instantly obvious to both of us that I didn’t mean it.

“What kind of things did—were you doing?”

That was too far. I shook my head and he got the drift. There was nothing he could do or say to get me to talk about where I was.

Instead, I said, “Did you really mean that?”

“Mean what?”

“What you said to—to Jean.”

“About…”

“Orphans,” I said, slowly. “Foster kids.”

Mark sighed. “Yeah, I always forget we need to stand further away than that if we’re going to talk. I’m kind of new here. They don’t really tell you that kind of detail half the time.”

He paused. Looked away from me, out at the corner of the room. “I don’t know what I mean, and I don’t know what I believe. I’ve seen so many insane things in the last few months. Crimes I couldn’t have ever imagined. The shit you see on TV, it’s not even close to what’s actually going on in the streets. People just disappear sometimes. Just, you know, vanish. And we do our best with it, but it’s a big city and there’s a lot of people. I don’t like giving people candy and telling them we’re gonna fix everything, because, you know, we’re just not. It’s like this all over the place, but it’s extra bad in the big cities. The usual stuff, the normal crimes, you know—burglary, gun crimes, that kind of thing, we know what we’re doing. But…this case? With what we know? And…I mean, with how important it clearly is to you to keep the cards close to your chest…you are the literal only lead we have on this. I mean it. If you can’t tell us who you think did it, this case is probably going straight into the trash. Was he your friend?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

That was real. I knew that much.

“Did he have enemies?”

“We all do,” I said, absently.

“Not “shot in the head in daylight in Manhattan” enemies, we don’t.”

I didn’t respond to that and he figured he’d crossed the line again. “What was his name?”

“We called him Cygnus, but…I don’t think that was his real name, and I don’t think…I don’t think I ever found out.”

“Cygnus, huh? The swan?”

“The what?”

“The swan. You know, like…like the constellation.”

“Is that what that is?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Did he never tell you?”

“I never asked,” I said, distant again.

Mark let that sit for a moment. “Well...I can tell you what I’m almost certain is going to happen from here. The captain is going to tell us to quietly escort you out the back door, somewhere away from the crowds of cameras that I’m sure are hanging around out front. We’re going to say we took you home to your family, but...well, I don’t know. You seem like you know your way back to wherever it is you came from.”

“I hope so.”

He raised his eyebrows at that but didn’t push on it. “And I guess we’ll just give you some money for the train and bus fare and we’ll just...call it from there.”

“Okay,” I said.

We did nothing for a moment, and then Mark reached under the table and twisted something. It came loose and he put it face-down on the table, prying open a battery compartment and taking out a few double-As.

“We keep a recording device under there,” he said. “The cameras here have microphones, but they don’t tend to pick up sounds that well. If you’re quiet they’ll miss you.”

I didn’t respond. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “So if we’re quiet, we’re off the record. Okay?”

“Are you going to get in trouble for that?” I asked, face pointed toward the batteries.

He pursed his lips. “Lots of shit can get me in trouble. This isn’t in that category.”

I hesitated. “Please just let me go home.”

“I’m not going to force you to answer anything, but…I just want to know. Is it real?”

“Is what real?”

“Are you Erika Hanover?”

He was looking directly into my eyes and I couldn’t match him. Head pointed straight down to the table, I couldn’t possibly bring myself up to task. Not to admit something so shameful.

Shameful as what, though? Shameful as existing? Shameful as who I am?

I never had a choice!

He came to me alone in the woods that summer day and I said to him—

“What if I was?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We’re off the record. It’s just for my own curiosity. I’m not telling Jean and you’re still going to go wherever it is you’re going. We don’t have the capability to deal with both of those disasters right now, and I’m not planning to make more work for myself. You obviously ran away from home for a reason, and…well, Jean told me about the case. It doesn’t sound like sending you back home to your father would accomplish much.”

I nodded, slowly. “He doesn’t want me and I don’t want him.”

“Even if it means being homeless?”

My words were measured. “I’ve gotten this far,” I said. “I’m not all that worried about it.”

He didn’t question it. “Hypothetically speaking,” Mark said, slowly, “if you knew someone named Erika Hanover, would you know what she was up to?”

I nodded.

“Would you tell me even if I wasn’t a cop?”

Shook my head.

After the brief silence that followed I found something I wanted to ask about. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When you said that—that you’d seen some crazy crimes. How crazy do you mean?”

He pursed his lips. “Stuff I can’t explain. Not because I’m not allowed to, which I’m not, but because even if I had an open mic and the freedom to say whatever I wanted, I still don’t know what I’d actually do. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder how the world works. If anything is actually…if what you thought was real actually is.”

“Magic,” I said, slowly.

“Would you know anything about that?” he asked me.

I turned my attention down to the water cup. It was mostly empty, but there was still a single water droplet in the bottom. I scooped it up, letting it rise by itself out of the cup and spin around in the air a few times.

Then I let it go and it dropped back in.

Mark watched it move in silence. “I’m going to get that footage and delete it.”

I nodded. “Please—please do that.”

“So…it’s real, then. It’s not a joke.”

“Not a joke,” I repeated. “It’s real.”

“And you are Erika Hanover.”

Slowly—hesitating—I nodded, again.

“You ran away from home because you got…this? This ability?”

“I was probably going to anyway,” I said, slowly, “but I think I would have just been homeless instead.”

Mark held still. “Fuck,” he said. His fingers folded inside each other. He looked away—eyeballs shrinking back in fear. And suddenly Mark’s world did not exist, and he looked outward into mine.

He stared into death and he was still.

I looked up at him. Did my best to match my eyes with his. “I’m blind,” I told him. “I see by moving water droplets around. That’s why I couldn’t see which picture Jean took out but why I could see how many fingers she was holding up. I can feel the contours of your face to know where your eyes are, and I—I can see your eyes because they’re wet.”

His voice was smaller. Quieter than before. “Are all people with magic like you?”

“No,” I said. Stone. “Magic doesn’t make you blind. I can do this because I am the strongest water-key who has ever lived.”

I hadn’t done anything to prove that to him but he believed me, immediately. He looked into my eyes and saw the instant truth: that they were unfocused and empty and yet I still knew exactly where he was. He saw the evidence that I was blind. Everything, instantly, made sense, and instantly he became afraid.

“The—the people you were with. What did they do?”

“I’m a soldier,” I said. “Or a cop. I was fighting a war, but…most of the time I do what you do.”

“Enforcing…what?”

“Order,” I said. “Making sure people don’t find out about this stuff.”

“But you’re telling me about it right now.”

“Because you already know,” I replied. “You’ve already seen it. You just didn’t know what it was called.”

He grimaced. “If we’re seeing crimes committed with magic, then, well…you probably aren’t doing a great job.”

“The head of the people who did this in the city was assassinated today,” I said. “But he’d been…” I swallowed. Forced the language through the smallest possible hole in my brain. “Distracted for a few months. I don’t think much policing was getting done. I was with the people in central and western New York. We did a lot better.”

“Was…was Cygnus the head of the group here?”

“No,” I said. “Cygnus assassinated that guy. And then got picked off by someone else from here. We were at war with each other.”

“Over what?”

I paused. Blinked. The answer came to me so clearly that I almost didn’t trust it—but, in its simplicity, it had to be true: and all the evidence I had made it so.

Was it ever about those hostages?

“Over me, I guess.”

Mark frowned. “So…did you…did the good guys win?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I guess that’s what I was hoping to address with this whole story—I was hoping that, through reliving this whole chapter of my life, I would find an answer to that question that was in any way satisfying.

I still don’t know. Depending on which part I look at I come to a different conclusion—which would be fine if they didn’t all lead into each other; but they do. Things go one way and then they go another and it winds around to nowhere.

I have nothing. It was what it was, and now it’s over.

Maybe someone else can succeed where I failed.

In the moment I found some words, and even with all this hindsight I now have I’m still not sure I can come up with anything better. It’s the closest thing to a neat bow I can conjure. Mark found it good enough and in that moment that was all I needed; now, with the years I can put between me and that moment in that little room in New York and I can say that it’s good enough for me, too.

It’s the only way any of this makes sense.

“No,” I said to him, “but we did.”