30 - The Panic Switch

{March 14th}

My new set of contacts came in. A little thicker, a little stronger. Another two months, another stronger pair.

It wasn’t getting better. Everything else was, but that wasn’t.

I did my best to not think about it. It would stop eventually. It had to, right? These things didn’t just devolve into nothing. At a certain point your eyesight would get as bad as it would get, and then you’d get a pair of contacts or glasses that worked just right and everything would be fine and dandy.

But a whole year had gone by and I was still getting new ones. Stronger ones. It wasn’t accelerating, but it wasn’t getting better, either.

I barely went seconds without having them in. At night I would take them out and put them in solution one by one, and as soon as one of them came out, that eye was closed until morning. In the morning I’d grope around in the dark for the cup, carefully as to not knock it over, and I’d slip the contacts in so quickly after opening my eyes that it would almost be like I didn’t notice that everything was blurry for the half-second they weren’t in.

But I did notice. It was a view of the void. I could see myself die, a little bit at a time. Without sight, I was nothing. That wasn’t something I could change—it was a fact. It was as true as breathing.

One morning I caught sight of that blur as I put the contacts in and I realized, the feeling carving a chasm under my ribs, that I didn’t have sixteen years—I probably had closer to two or three. Beyond that, no curvature of a lens could save me.

At that point I’d be better off just cutting them out and replacing them with something else. Seashells or marbles or gemstones.

Not that it would matter. I’d already be dead.

I went through the motions that day with a craving for alcohol. I told myself I was going to be responsible, and I was sticking to it, but I couldn’t push away the need for a mind-duller. There was too much still swirling around my head from the day before I had no intentions of meaningfully processing.

The mission I had that day was some routine goon-squad nonsense, featuring Yoru and Ava not speaking to me unless they had to. In a way it was good that they did that. I didn’t want to talk to them anyway. We didn’t have to kill anyone, and in a way that was good, too. I did more than enough of that the day before.

That said, by the time night rolled around, the craving wore off. I realized, with a slightly clearer head, that all I actually wanted was a bit of positive attention. Given that, I went back to the Unit 6 room and announced to everyone there that I’d be manning the basement bar that night if anyone wanted anything to drink.

I rummaged around in my designated clothing drawers for the tuxedo vest I wore on those occasions—not the same one my father had bought me in the faraway days, but one that was close enough—and left the room with it under my arm.

Having done so, I set up shop behind the bar, wiping down the already-spotless counter and checking the amounts of various alcohols, writing a list of whatever we needed more of. We were perennially almost out of vodka—both Ava and Benji were big into it, and Ava was down there all the time, so we blazed through bottles of it faster than anything else.

The first person to arrive was not Ava, like I was expecting. Since I’d started providing this service, we’d been reaching better terms. She still ignored me when Yoru was around, but, like Yoru himself, she was much more openly cordial when alone. I figured I was on good terms with both of them, now, even if they were both still too embarrassed by me to act like I was acceptable in the presence of their merged unit.

I was over it now. As long as they accepted me alone, I could handle being ignored. That was always preferable to open, or even backhanded, hostility.

In fact, since the bar opened, everyone in Unit 6 had opened up to me somewhat. It was a combination of a couple things: one, being in charge of something, even something as benign as a bar, gave me a big confidence boost. I found that, as a general statement, with a table between me and another person and an activity that I was responsible for leading, I could almost forget who I was and where I came from. Underneath all the layers of muck and soul-dampening silence there was a person who at least passed as normal—but only when she was doing things that ostensibly weren’t.

I’m sure it was surreal to them.

Another factor was that people like telling bartenders things. I can’t really say I know why. Maybe it’s just a cultural thing.

Lastly, through a mixture of my own experimentation and poking around online, I had a pretty wide repertoire of drinks I could make. People actually liked stopping by.

The only person who had yet to visit me while I was on duty was Benji—who, of course, then came trudging down the stairs as my first patron that evening.

His face was a bit red, and while he made a more-or-less straight line walking to me, I guessed that he’d been lightly pre-gaming for this. There was still the errant beer or two in the Unit 6 fridge for when nobody was down here, and Benji was thought to have a fridge in his office that presumably had its own stock of alcohol. There was a brewery out in Hinterland, Massachusetts that Benji liked a lot—he occasionally got shipments from them. He never let us try any of their stuff, and we never saw where the bottles were stored, so we all figured he had a secret fridge somewhere. It had to be in his office—unless he did something along the lines of what Ava did with her weed room, where he commandeered a quiet, uninhabited corner of the factory for a private retreat where he could drink his forbidden craft beer in peace and not be bothered by such petty things as his job.

He appeared to be in a good enough mood when he hit the bottom of the stairs, but with each step he took coming toward me a little bit of that good-will leaked out, and by the time he dropped himself onto a barstool he was a bit grayed out and limp.

As he sat, he mumbled, “Yep, still weird. Okay.”

Benji watched me clean a glass for a moment. I let him take his time, and after a few seconds I asked: “Can I get you something?”

He looked up at me. “Gun. Head.”

Once I got to see him up close, I realized he was a bit farther gone than I originally thought.

"I’m sure someone on High Street will do that for you if you ask nicely,” I said.

“Fuck,” Benji said, and his face fell. He turned his attention to the patterns in the granite. “Why does this work for you?” he asked, after a moment.

In other settings, I’d have to ask for clarification. But I knew what he meant.

I was laser-aware. It was the position of control—it made everything make sense to me. From here I had the high ground—I could see everything I couldn’t normally see. Everything hidden from my normal eyes.

“Why does this make me normal, you mean,” I replied.

I’ll admit: I was getting sick of that. Benji had almost two years to suck it up and get used to me. I joined this place a week or so after my twelfth birthday and I was turning fourteen in three months. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere. He knew Prochazka would overrule him on matters concerning me until the end of time. All he had to do was take a deep breath and acknowledge that I was going to be a part of the team, forever.

But instead he just kept sulking.

“Yes?” Benji asked. “Maybe? I don’t know. I mean, you’re thirteen and bartending. Nothing can really make that look normal.”

“Maybe “Why does this make me look not disabled” was what you meant to ask,” I said. “Did you want a drink or not?”

A tiny fraction of the rage I’d felt that day in Rochester rose in the back of my throat. It was a glowing pinhole into a burning world.

But I was too powerful now to succumb to it. I held the upper hand here. In this place, Benji was looking for things from me, and not the other way around.

We were together in a circle of light from a few overhead lamps; around us was the dark factory basement, with crates of forgotten objects stacked along the walls and in loose rows in the middle of the room. It was a tiny island of civilization in a world of neglect; unless you were Benji, and then it was the other way around.

The pinhole got a little wider; or maybe I got a little closer to it. I saw the whole world drowned in boiling water. I could do that. With a snap of my fingers, I could do it. Nobody would be able to stop me.

And I let myself get pushed around because I was afraid that someone didn’t like me.

Stupid. How silly—as if anything Benji thought or cared about truly mattered to someone that could extinguish him with both hands tied behind her back.

Briefly, I wondered if—in a crisis—if Benji and I pointed in opposite directions: who Unit 6 follow? By that time, I’d saved just about everyone in Unit 6’s life at least once. They knew I was powerful beyond their wildest dreams.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Who would they follow if it came down to it?

And then I understood Benji. I understood everything about him. It rushed into me all at once.

I put the glass I was cleaning down. “Do you want a drink, or not?” I asked him, again.

He said, “Just—a beer, I guess.”

“Any preference? Otherwise you’re just getting whatever we have the most of,” I said.

“On…um…on second thought, just…get me something with gin,” he said. “I don’t care what. Just…anything.”

I was in complete control. I moved smoothly; efficiently. No stuttering. No second-guessing.

I made him a quick gin and tonic—nothing complicated, I doubted Benji was the sort to like craft drinks anyway—and put it in front of him. He cupped his hands around the glass but didn’t pick it up.

He muttered, “This is so fucking weird.”

“Isn’t it?” I replied, picking up another glass to clean. It was already almost spotless; I just wanted to do something with my hands. It seemed like the right call for the moment. Plus, I saw bartenders do it on TV all the time, when they were one-on-one with a down-and-out patron, and I wanted to see what it felt like.

It turned out that it felt a lot like cleaning a glass.

Benji blinked, like he didn’t expect me to be listening.

I wondered if this is what I looked like to him: weak, barely there. Uncertain. Unstable. And I wondered if I had now become what I used to think Benji was, before I solved him. Some menacing, distant figure, vaguely disapproving and completely impenetrable.

I knew I’d get away with it. I asked Benji, point blank: “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

If Benji was gone, would Unit 6 follow me? If not—who? If they were all out there in the wilderness, in that great war Prochazka spoke of like a prophecy: who would fill Benji’s place?

If Bell was still out there, I thought, probably her. If not, and if we were truly in a desperate place, and if power-worship held sway as strongly as it did among most keys—then it would be me.

And I thought to myself: I should prepare for that outcome.

Benji did not respond.

I continued: “Do I make you uncomfortable?”

I put the glass down on the table, drew some water out of the faucet without turning the knobs, and had the glass clean itself. Realizing I was wasting my time, I pulled some more water out of the faucet and had all of the glasses hanging behind me clean themselves—some twenty-five independent streams of water I controlled swirling and scrubbing. I reached behind me and pumped a bit of soap onto the countertop—each stream of water dipped down again, went through the soap-puddle, picking some up, and returned to their respective glasses.

Benji watched the whole contraption whir along.

I rested my head in my hands, elbows on the bartop. Right in front of him. Just an untouched gin and tonic between us.

I did my best to look him in the eyes.

Again I asked him: “Do I scare you?”

He looked at me, blank.

I wondered what he saw there. In my eyes. Was there life, humor, joy, all those other things like I saw in Ava, Cygnus, and Yoru? Or did he see a pale lifeless blue, an ocean-equivalent to Bell’s?

Or maybe he didn’t see those things at all. Maybe it was just me that put so much meaning into something other people probably never thought about.

I’ve never been particularly good at reading faces. Growing up, I had a lot of time to learn, trying to determine how my dad felt at any given time without asking him and risking that being a trigger—but I could never quite get the hang of it.

Right then, though, his face told me everything I needed to know. He looked away from me. He was the one to break eye contact. He found the ice cubes in his drink, sitting still in the glass, particularly interesting.

The one sound in the room was the gentle swish of the glasses behind me cleaning themselves.

I only wanted one thing from Benji.

Quietly, he said: “Yeah. You do.”

I cracked a tiny smile. “Do I.”

“Because I don’t understand,” he said. A bit of life dripped back into his eyes—clenching his jaw as the forced the words out. “Why you’re here. Who you are. Why Prochazka thinks we need you. Maybe he’s playing some kind of 4D chess bullshit and I’m just not ever going to understand what he’s planning. Maybe he was just trying to pull you off the streets because he’s a nice guy. It could be anything. I don’t know. I was hoping I could try and figure it out through your work, but that didn’t get me anywhere, either. You kill so efficiently. So—so unthinkingly. I’m not sure you have a remorseful bone in your body. What happens to a twelve-year-old girl that makes them like that? I don’t know what kind of abhorrent shit your father did to you, because it must be something completely unspeakable, unless you’re just that way to begin with. Maybe you’ve always been like this. Maybe you were broken from the start and your father just didn’t know what to do. Maybe it was both. Maybe he made it worse. Maybe—I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Maybe this is Prochazka’s idea of saving you. But I’m going to tell you right now—I am afraid of you, Erika. Because every day I wonder if you’re two bad days away from snapping and drowning us all. Every day I wonder what happens if Loybol or New York or something offers you a better deal and you leave us. Every day I wonder what happens if your eyesight keeps getting worse and you go blind. Because don’t think I don’t know about that. Sophia’s been keeping me updated. I know how you react when you think about it.”

I forced my face to keep the same shape. Now was not the time. I was in a position of power. I was strong now—Benji was not going to break me with a mere mention of that.

He would not.

“I know what this is about, Erika. You’re acting all smug because you’re sitting behind the counter, and you think you’ll get an apology out of me. Well, fuck you. I’m not going to. Because when we drove home from Rochester, I started to wonder about what happens when you’re not here. Maybe you go blind and you kill yourself. Then what? We lose our nuke. New York sweeps in. You saved my life that day. The Buffalo gang sent more than enough people to take me out if they had to. And you just, God, just snapped your fucking fingers and dropped them, and then you turned one of them into a fucking mummy like it was nothing. And I’ve never seen another water-key that can do that at all, let alone without passing out. And you’ve had your key for what? Two years? Less than that, even. What’ll you be capable of when you’re eighteen? When you’re my age? I don’t know. All I know is that I have no idea what the hell goes on in your head, but I know two things for sure: you’ve got some kind of degenerative eye condition that doesn’t appear to be getting any better, and that if the rest of Unit 6 had to get together to fight you, we’d fucking lose. Maybe Bell could take you, and the fact that I’m even questioning Bell’s ability to take someone on at all scares the piss out of me.”

Benji folded his arms, leaned forward. “So, no. I’m not apologizing. I’m thankful you saved my life. I’m thankful for all the times you saved the lives of the rest of us. But I don’t want you to think for a goddamn second that I trust you. Because I don’t.”

He looked down at his glass and didn’t touch it.

I let his words go in one ear and out the other.

I let them flow through me, and I let them flow out again.

I didn’t care what Benji thought of me. I cared what the people I saw every day thought of me—what Cygnus and Ava and Yoru and Bell thought. Benji was some distant management nobody who I barely ever saw. Most of my missions came from Prochazka, anyway. As long as Benji and I could stay cordial; who cared if we hated each other?

It did not matter. It had no meaning.

I let his words flow through and out. I took two deep breaths.

I said to him, “Okay.”

“Okay?” he replied.

“You can think whatever you want,” I said, drawing some more water out of the faucet to clean the soap puddle I’d made off the counter behind me. I did so without turning around. Latent humidity in the air was good enough for me to find my way. “I’m not going to stop you.”

Benji looked away from me.

It was about that time that Yoru and Ava came down the stairs. As soon as I heard the footsteps, the spell was broken; whatever Benji and I were reaching was lost. I glanced back at the hanging glasses. Benji picked up his drink and drained it in one gulp, wincing as it burned him, exhaling loud when he was done. Yoru and Ava took seats to Benji’s right, placed their orders—smiling, laughing.

Benji watched them. Watched me talk to them.

He watched in silence.

Cygnus joined, later—and finally, after a few moments, Benji started to talk, too. He got a letter from Bell, he said. She was doing okay. She thought she’d be done soon.

We stayed there through the early hours of the night—by one AM, everyone had dispersed back home. I was alone in the bar—there was nothing but me and the gentle creaking of the building slowly settling into the mire it was built on.

I drew some more water out of the faucet, scrubbed everything clean without physically moving, all except the last dish, which I washed by hand. Not that there was any particular need to do so—but I wanted to do something with my hands. After a bit it had become surreal, even to me, that I could do so much maintenance work without lifting a literal finger.

And half of that water-manipulating cleaning routine was just to show off, anyway.

I dried all the glasses off by simply pulling the moisture away and dropping the collected ball into the sink. No cloth needed.

In the empty basement all things were so still and cold that it may as well have been the vacuum of space. I would’ve been willing to believe that the conditions down there were so harsh and dystopic that nothing but bacteria could make it. That this place was unfit for human life in any fashion. The only evidence anyone had ever been there, now that I was done cleaning, were objects long since left behind. It could have been an abandoned moon base. It could have been the last remnants of a collapsed skyscraper ten thousand years in the future when all humanity had crumpled and the last word had long since been spoken.

Then I looked out at the dark, at the rows of empty crates outside of the cone of light I inhabited, and my spine locked. Deep in a dusty corner of my soul I didn’t look at any more there was a primal urge to move. There was something out there lurking in between the rows of empty crates and dust-caked equipment. Something that ate magic and drank darkness. Something, surely, both invisible and ten feet tall.

I needed to escape the basement—whatever was out there, it preyed on the lonesome; nobody would ever find my body. I would be gone and that would be the end of it; maybe it would eat everyone’s memories associated with me, too, so that it would have been like I was never, ever there.

It would hear me if I ran. It would get me if I stayed—and the cone of light I stood in at the bar would only protect me for so long.

I knew I’d only have precious seconds before it would sprint toward me, invisible, on all fours like a tiger. In the five seconds it would take to run from the bar to the steps. Five seconds to make it from the bar to the steps along the wall.

It wasn’t that far, and I’d always been called quick for my age, but faced against that—

So slowly I reached up—

Maybe if it didn’t hear me flick off the lights, I could get the jump on it—

My finger grazed the top of the switch, and I looked out at the stairs, trying to figure the distance, and all at once I dropped my dead-weight hand on the switch, flicking the lights off, and I was sprinting to the steps, and I could feel the beast gaining on me as I made the dash, knowing fully that it was there but too desperate to look back—

Eyes locked shut, leaping up the stairs, two, three at a time—

And I emerged from the staircase unscathed, and I slammed the door behind me loud enough and hard enough to knock dust from the jamb and rattle the doorframe.

I stood still, staring at the closed door for a full ten seconds, bright red from a mixture of the effort and embarrassment—what was I running from? What was down there?

I’d seen the whole basement. I knew the only thing that lived there were cute little pill-bugs and dust-mites. I’d even peered into a number of the crates, looking at all the old tools and discarded things that were stored down there. Anything useful had long since been removed and repurposed; it was essentially an oversized trash-room now.

There was nothing down there to be afraid of. But in that moment, I was so dead sure that I was about to be dismembered by something unknowable and unseen.

Now, though, staring at the door, I just felt stupid. Stupid and played.

God forbid I ran from nothing at all.

I grimaced, disappointed in myself, and went back to the Unit 6 room.