18 - You Can't Get There From Here (2)

A few minutes later the door opened again. I instinctively muted the video I was watching—force of habit from the old days—but when I looked up, it wasn’t Ava there.

Bell said, “So this is the campground, huh?”

She walked inside, gently closed the door behind her. From where I was sitting, she looked so tall that I could almost imagine her craning her neck to fit in there—like she was eight or nine feet all stretched out.

I’d believe it. I’d believe anything.

“Did you talk to the rep already?” I asked.

“Nope,” she replied. “But Yoru did, and Cygnus is in there now. They just put her in a conference room somewhere and they’re sending all the Unit 6 people in there one by one. Ava’s next, then Benji, then me.”

“You’re going after Benji?”

“I requested to go last,” she said. Tiny smile. Impenetrable expression. God—I hated it, and I loved it, simultaneously. I wanted to know and I wanted to be.

That was it. I wanted to be. I wished I could be that dark and mysterious. God, that’d be so cool.

I knew deep down that Bell was some horrifying monster who hid her true nature from me. It had to be—this was Unit 6, after all; despite what I might say I knew that we were all fairly similar, and at least unified in a general disregard for human life if nothing else. Still, I wanted to sit down and hear every last one of her terrifying exploits, in all their cruel detail; with all their senseless violence and meaningless ends.

I needed to hear them. I needed it so badly it made my heart ache.

“Why would they let you go after the Unit 6 leader?” I asked.

“Who do you think has the most authority around here? In Unit 6, I mean,” Bell said. “You think it’s Benji?”

“I—”

I knew it was a trick question.

“Prochazka?” I tried.

“He’s not in Unit 6,” Bell said, perfectly evenly.

Bell crouched down. Even squatting, she was still a foot taller than me.

“It’s you,” I said, flat. Obviously.

“Nope,” Bell said. “Not me. I’m never around. How could I command anyone? They wouldn’t listen to me.”

I blinked.

“I don’t know,” I said. That was what she wanted, right? To get me to admit defeat.

The answer, then, was just whatever I wouldn’t guess. So I couldn’t possibly ever be right.

A game designed to make me look like an idiot.

“Well,” Bell said. “Let me help you out here. I’m going last, but who’s not getting interviewed at all, because they’re too important for a representative from another region to know about?”

“Me,” I said.

“Right,” Bell replied. “And who single-handedly changed the fabric of Unit 6 society upon her arrival, just by existing?”

“Me,” I said.

“Correct,” Bell said. “Then, tell me—who lives completely unknown to the world, because never once has there been a survivor on any of her missions? Who exists only in rumors, in shadows, in the dark corners of the hearts of the evil? Who do we keep in our back pocket—our secret weapon, our little nuclear warhead? Who would defend us against the might of New York City?”

She grinned.

And I was terrified.

“Me,” I whispered.

“Absolutely,” she whispered back.

She continued, a touch louder: “So let me tell you this: the representative knows you’re here. She’s a telepath, just like Prochazka said she’d be. She knows something is being hidden from her, but she doesn’t know what it is yet, and she can’t exactly dig it out of anyone without raising suspicion. So she’s been trying to weasel it out of them with questions, but it’s not working. Now, I’m not one to approve of secrets—I don’t think Prochazka’s going about this whole thing the right way. I think Esther Bluebird down there should know exactly what we’ve got here. Esther’s just a spy. Loybol’s probably planning to invade our territory under the guise of “helping us out” regardless of what happens here. This is just a scouting mission disguised as goodwill, so Loybol knows what she’s up against. If Esther finds us weak, which she will given the overwhelming force at Loybol’s disposal, she’ll recommend that Loybol send an army to come in here, assimilate whoever Loybol deems unimportant into her hive-mind thing—which I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out, by the way—and assume control of our territory. And if I’d hazard a guess, the only person here who could adequately fight off the hive-mind is me.”

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“Could I?” I asked.

“You would be the easiest to assimilate,” Bell said, quietly. “It would barely be a struggle.”

I fell silent, because I knew that was true, even before I’d asked it. I guess I was just hoping I was wrong, so Bell could keep stroking my ego like she did a moment before.

“That is, of course, assuming they could get to you. Loybol is a pragmatic woman. If it’d cost her five hundred or more slaves to get in here and take control of us, she won’t do it. Maybe for you, she’d send four hundred. But see—I know what you’re capable of. And you know what you’re capable of. And we both know it’d take all Loybol’s got to get you alive.”

I nodded, slowly. “Yeah.”

I was completely under Bell’s thumb. She could say anything and I’d agree to it.

God. I was so weak to that. So gullible. So easily swayed.

So desperate to trust someone.

“So what I’m going to do is introduce you,” Bell said. “I think you should meet Esther Bluebird face-to-face. She should know exactly what she’d be up against. Because God knows those first four aren’t going to be able to convince her of anything. Yoru, Ava, Cygnus, Benji—they’re not that strong, really, but you and I are a bit more than that. We want her to leave with the right impression, right? People always remember the last thing they saw. Why not make that last thing you?”

I swallowed.

“What do you want me to do?”

So eager to please. I was never going to say no. I hated that I was trapped up here. As soon as Ava asked me if I’d thought about it, I realized how unfair it was. Prochazka was still hesitant to show me off after a whole year—and even after I’d saved Cygnus’s life from ambush twice. I was invincible, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I the strongest water key in the whole wide world?

Why should Prochazka be ashamed of me?

Bell smiled. My heart dropped into my stomach, but I steeled my soul against it because I knew, surely, that this was right.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Bell said. “I want you to scare her.”

I paled.

“Benji asked me to do that once,” I said, looking down. “It didn’t go well.”

“Well, then you know what not to do, right? I’ll walk you through it. It’ll be fine.”

“Prochazka told me not to leave this room,” I said again, my heart dissolving in acid.

Bell paused for a second.

“Erika, do you want to be a bruiser forever?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“Here’s the thing. If you want to make decisions, you’ve got to prove that you’re capable of making good ones. That means you’ve got to break some rules.”

I didn’t want to break any rules. I was permanently, completely petrified that if I screwed up so badly as to disobey a direct order, Prochazka would kick me out and I’d have to go home.

I was so lost in that thought that I ended up saying, “I don’t want to go home.”

“You won’t go home,” Bell said, softly. “You’ll never have to go home again. But if you want to be more than just muscle, you have to act. If you want to call the shots, you’ll have to call some shots.”

Her eyes were as lifeless as hubcaps. There was nothing there at all.

Nothing to grip. Nothing to see.

Nothing, nothing.

I took a breath.

“Okay,” I said. And then I said, “I can do this.”

“You can,” Bell said. “I believe in you.”

She sat down on the floor, on her knees. Even then she was still a foot taller than me.

I was speaking to a wire-pole monster.

“What is the most impressive thing you can do without hurting anyone?” Bell asked. “Something requiring unbelievable amounts of control. Something that’ll show off how powerful you are without actually hurting anyone, that can fit in a room smaller than this one.”

I paused and thought about that for a moment.

Then I stood up, walked over to the faucet on the back wall of the room, turned it on and drew out a ball of water about the size of a basketball. I brought the water-basketball over to Bell, sat down again with it hovering between us, and split it into a cube of a hundred and twenty-five identical, smaller spheres.

Years of daydreaming of dancing shapes in class had prepared me perfectly for this moment.

Each sphere let out a tiny stream of water, draining it into another sphere, organized in such a way that the whole arrangement shrank into sixty-four spheres. It continued, down to twenty-seven, and then I undid the whole thing, back to one-twenty-five, and simply held them there.

No shaking. Perfectly smooth, perfectly round.

The center sphere came out, splitting into four sections that warped themselves around the spheres in x, y and z-axis lines away from them, drifting around the outside of the cube and up to the top, so it hovered above the sphere—then I drew it over to my head and stretched it into a ring like a halo.

Rather than actually do it, then, I said: “I can break the spheres into even smaller droplets, and I could use them to gently move her arms or something.”

I would have just done it, if I wasn’t so terrified of touching Bell, even with water as a pseudo-prosthesis.

“That’ll be just fine,” Bell said. “That’s more control than any other water key I’ve seen.”

“Other water keys must be bad,” I said, letting the spheres drift back toward the sink. The halo I made for myself lifted itself off my head and followed them. “That wasn’t all that hard.”

“If you can do more, do more,” Bell said. “Do as much as you can without making it obvious that you’re struggling.”

“I might be able to do a seven-by-seven-by-seven,” I mused to myself. “But that could be tough.”

“Go for it.” Bell turned, briefly, watching the water drain itself away. “You won’t be doing any of the talking; I’ll handle that. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Cool. The representative specifically asked that Prochazka not be in the room or near it. You should be okay—and as long as I’m there leading you, I don’t think anyone will make a scene.”

For half a second, Bell’s pupils expanded to fill most of her eyes. It was just an aesthetic effect, I was sure—but it was enough to strike fear in me, remembering that time she snuck up behind me when I was trying to watch TV. God—how long ago was that?

I’d already come to feel like I’d been here for my whole life.

“We’ve got a few minutes,” Bell said, back to normal. “Why don’t you try that seven-cube, just to be safe?”

That sounded like a grand idea to me, so I did.