36 - Heartless / Mindless / Loveless / Lifeless (2) [July 31st, Age 14]

Getting inside the kidnapper’s house was easy. He lived in an old row-house with a standard lock-and-key door, and it was well-established that those were trivial for me.

By that time, it was close to twelve-thirty. The house was another fifteen minute walk away from the bus terminal, and the whole time I was walking I was thinking about how far a mile walk was for someone as young as the person I was tasked with saving.

It was fifteen minutes for me, but probably closer to twenty for her. Twenty minutes of fear. Twenty minutes of praying we wouldn’t be followed.

I chose not think about it any more than that. One thing at a time. The door’s lock clicked open. Focus on stepping into the house quietly. Don’t make noise. Find the basement steps. Remember not to turn any lights on.

The house had, presumably, three floors—upstairs, where I assumed the bad man was—the ground floor where I entered, and the basement, where the girl was. If I just went right to the basement and right out again, nobody would ever know I was there.

Assuming the girl didn’t scream or cry when I woke her up.

I could barely remember being six years old. It was entirely possible that I went a whole year without saying or doing a single thing. It wasn’t even that long ago, really—more than half my life, but not by much—and even then, the memories were fuzzy. They just as well could’ve been things I was told, things I used to supplant the truth in favor of something that made a little more sense.

I only really remember being alone.

There was a door in the center of the floor that couldn’t have led to a room—the space around it was too small to be anything other than a staircase. So I went to the knob and turned it slowly, cognizant of every tiny creak, and pulled the door open so slowly that it was close to imperceptible.

Then I crept down the steps.

Down there it was pitch-black. There was no tiny window leading to the backyard high on a wall like some basements had—the only light in the room at all came from the door above, and even then it was barely anything.

I had to turn a light on.

So I went back up the steps—checking each stair for creaks before I put my full weight down—and closed the door entirely.

Back down again. Even with the quarter-light coming from the door when it was open, I still hadn’t found a switch or a pull-cord for a lamp. Which left me aimlessly patting around in the dark for one.

But even if I found it, I realized, I’d be flipping the room from pitch dark to full-brightness, which would wake the girl up suddenly, which could make her scream and then I’d be back to square one.

I needed a new plan.

So I sat down on the second-to-last step and thought. Set the half-drank coffee cup down next to me.

There wasn’t any meaningful source of water down here. No sinks, dry air. I’d have to break something if I wanted some water. All I had was what was left in my coffee cup.

I popped the top off the cup and drew the whole drink out, leaving gently damp coffee sludge behind. It was only a couple ounces—maybe four. I already regretted drinking so much—I was wide awake, sure, but for what?

Slowly, it occurred to me what I had to do. I split the floating ball of coffee-water into two smaller lumps—one about a quarter of the other. I stood from the steps and expanded the bigger ball outward into smaller and smaller droplets, until it was a light fog covering the whole room—so light it was barely perceptible.

But I could feel it. And I knew—from the depressions and shapes that pushed into it—that there was a big rectangle along the left wall, and a smaller, soft shape curled up on it. It was either the body on a cot, or a pile of clothes on a table—but I was willing to bet it was the former.

And so I took the smaller ball, which was no wider than a fingertip, and I sent it over to where the soft shape was, and I dropped it on the spot I assumed the head was. That ball was big enough to be classified as a fat raindrop—and I condensed the fog around her to catch her reaction.

The fat raindrop splatter on the side of her head, and her eyelids flicked open right away.

I whispered, into the air: “I’m not the man upstairs. Wake up.”

She tensed—and slowly, rolled over, facing the source of the whisper.

No scream. Minimal sound.

Warmth swelled in my chest. Quickly now—

“My name is Erika. I represent Jan Prochazka of the Radiant. I’m here to save you.”

I recollected the fat raindrop and splattered it on the floor next to the cot—collected it up again, and dropped it. A sound-marker that led her—as she crawled out of the bed and slowly walked towards me, rubbing her eyes in the darkness—to the steps where I was.

I could not see her at all. I could see nothing in that basement.

And yet—

She came to me, and I could only barely make out the shape of someone small.

But I looked down and I said again: “I’m here to save you.”

0 0 0

I drew the water back into my cup, just in case.

We climbed the steps in slow silence. Snuck out of the house. Closed and locked the door.

And only then did I let my breath out for real.

Twelve-forty PM.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where—where are we going?” she asked, quietly.

Now that we were somewhere with light, I could get a look at her. Small brown-haired girl, about six years old. Small even for her age, I think. Sort of dirty and unkempt looking. That all made sense, though. I doubted the guy upstairs was very vigilant about child-care.

I was worried that she’d look like me, but she didn’t.

“To the bus stop,” I said. “We’re in Syracuse.”

“The bus stop,” she echoed.

“Your parents are meeting us there,” I said. “And then you’re going to leave town.”

Look at me. Really doing it.

How swell.

I reached down and took her hand. It seemed like the right thing to do.

As soon as I did, though, she sniffled.

“He—” she started. “He lit his hands on fire. In front of me. And he didn’t get hurt. And he—”

She sniffled and gulped back a noise, and her sentence trailed off into nothing.

I kept walking. We couldn’t afford to stop.

I couldn’t afford to think about the fact that he used magic in front of her.

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How had we managed to keep magic a secret for this long? There’s so many wackjobs and so few of us. Something, eventually, will slip through the cracks—and the odds are good it’ll be someone who thinks a random six-year-old is the antichrist instead of someone looking to bring fresh water and vegetables to the famine-stricken.

“You can’t tell anyone about that,” I said to her. “Promise?”

She nodded, teary-eyed.

Maybe a story would work. Anything to keep us both occupied.

I swallowed. I was like him, though. What would she do if she found out? Did she just associate that kind of thing with evil, now?

I could nip that in the bud right away, at least.

“You can’t tell anyone I told you this,” I said. It didn’t matter, though, did it? She already knew. Nothing I could say would make her forget the time she was kidnapped and a man lit his hands on fire in front of her. Probably accused her of unimaginable things. Nothing I could do would make her doubt herself on this. No words I could make could undo what had been done to her.

And I didn’t want to try undo it. Her impression of magic was truer than she could know. Filtered through a child’s polarized lens, sure, where everything is black or white or good or evil—but the line was just so thin. I was one of the bad people. I could not lie to her—I couldn’t say I wasn’t just a different shade of the man who claimed she would be the serpent that swallows the world.

Any mediating statement I could make would be a lie. Deceiving her like that when she had so much to worry about already—

Don’t look back, now, Erika—don’t look back.

“He was magic,” I said.

“Magic?”

“I’m magic, too,” I said. “But he’s a bad magician, and I’m a good magician.”

She blinked, and so did I. But now I had to go through with it. I committed.

To show it off, I flicked the lid off my coffee cup—which I’d thankfully remembered to grab off the steps on my way out—and drew the water out of it. I shaped it into a heart in the air, let it beat a few times at about half the speed of my own, and then put it back.

The girl watched, entranced.

“I can control water,” I said. “My friends are magic, too. One of them can control the air, and one can control plants, and another can control metal.”

I decided not to tell her about Bell. Not that it mattered, but in the moment I was lucky enough to realize that there was no good way to describe what a flesh-key did that wouldn’t scar a child for life.

And Benji wasn’t my friend, anyway. And I was being fairly generous including Ava in the list—we had an agreement to be civil to each other, but I would hardly call her any more than that and I doubted she would do the same if pressed.

“Wow,” she said, but it was distant—she wasn’t really listening to me.

That was okay, I supposed. Not listening to me is the right call about half the time.

We crossed the street at an illegal time—she didn’t want to walk when she saw the red-hand sign, but I pulled her across and said it was okay, so she followed.

“The man said I was going to be magical one day,” she said. “That was why he kidnapped me.”

Fire keys don’t get to know that kind of thing. I wasn’t sure anyone did.

Delusional people.

“I don’t want to be magic like him,” she went on. “I want to be magic like you.”

I went cold. For longer than I wanted to, I was lost for words. My response came too late to be organic. I messed it up.

“Magic is a big responsibility,” I said. “It’s hard enough just to get by as an adult. You don’t want the extra work.”

Was that only true for me? I looked down inside myself and realized I was jealous of this girl—someone who’d never get magic, who had a family that loved her, and—shamefully—who’d only have one trauma, a single event she could point back to and say this—this is the reason I can’t make heads or tails of who I am. This is the reason my life doesn’t make sense like it’s supposed to.

This child would search for evidence that would prove this night true for the rest of her life, and God—I hoped with all my soul she’d never find it. God grant her the grace to accept this for what it was; a bad dream one night in a normal childhood. A blip on the radar. A nightmare vivid enough for life.

I’d lied to her again. Magic was awesome. It was the only thing that kept me sane. It was the one, singular thing that I could take true solace in.

I didn’t know what I wanted her to think, and I realized that the more I opened my mouth, the worse I would make it.

But she kept talking. “I’m scared, Erika.”

I was, too.

I glanced around, looking for the handful of landmarks I’d noted on my way there to use as progress-points for the way back, and I found that—as we walked by a gas station—we were barely halfway.

Not a single car had passed us since we locked the door. The earth was still and silent, and the sky a deep black void, a shadow cast on the heaven by the ground. No stars over the world. In those moments it felt like the entirety of existence was limited to the handful of square miles that comprised the neighborhoods of Syracuse that girl had been brought to. Everything else was undetailed, a landscape drawn on a wall. There was no forest. No highway in the distance—the little blips of car-headlights that moved by were nothing more than projections on a screen, and if I turned back just for a moment I could see the projectionist and his films, the cameras pointed every which-way, as a he simulated the empty universe we walked through.

Don’t look back, now, Erika. Don’t look back.

Very faintly, somewhere off behind the curtain of buildings to our left—a lone speaker playing quiet music. Loud enough for me to tell there were words in it but not loud enough for me to figure out what they were.

Existence was just a single street, a sidewalk on either side. There was a man in the gas station convenience store. His head angled down, but he was too blurry to properly determine what he was doing. It would have been tough to discern even without my condition, but my inability to do so sent a shiver-pang down my back anyway. Maybe he was counting money, maybe he was plotting something. I couldn’t know and I never would.

Before us was a flickering streetlamp. One blink every fifteen seconds or so. We approached it slowly, the girl’s hand in mine, even measured steps like we were coming before an altar.

I had to respond to her. I couldn’t just let her be scared. Even though I was. Even though it was totally justifiable to be scared—but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her again. Now that I was aware of it, I had no excuses to mask what I was doing from that little core part of me that paradoxically cared about things like this but not about things like what I wanted to do to that man, but wasn’t allowed to.

Don’t look back, now.

I needed a backup. A work-around for myself. The stress of thinking about it made me squeeze the girl’s hand a little tighter, and when she squeezed back I remembered she was there—a real life warm body that needed me, right now, just this once—and in the numb world we walked through, where there was no air but also no need to breathe and there was no sound and nothing but raw distance, nothing but a pure calculation of footsteps from here to there, I remembered.

I returned.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Bella,” she said back to me.

God, really?

Small-talk was king. Anything I could do to keep me from thinking about the projectionist, who I knew for absolute one-hundred-percent certainty was there, and once I saw him I would never be able to see the world for what it was again.

Don’t—

“I know someone named Bell,” I said, slowly. Every word was a triumph over myself. “She told me it was short for something but wouldn’t tell me what. I always thought it was Campbell, but maybe it’s Bella.”

“My name is Campbell too,” she said. “But everyone calls me Bella.”

What were the odds?

I snickered, despite myself. “What?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said. I couldn’t explain it, anyway. I wasn’t about to try to explain irony to a six-year-old.

“Is Bell a magician like you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“A good one?”

I grimaced. “I think so, but I don’t think my friends really believe me on that.”

“Why?”

A flash of frustration popped into my head, and it suddenly became clear to me—for reasons outside of my own existence—why Benji hated kids so much. But I took a step back from it, like I was taught, and came to the conclusion that she was doing exactly what I was doing: looking for something, anything, to keep her from looking back and seeing the projectionist.

How was I supposed to explain Bell to a six-year-old when Bell couldn’t even explain herself to me?

As long as I said something, enough of the purpose would be accomplished to make the actual meat of my answer not matter. We were both just trying to get by, right? Just trying to fill the stale air. It didn’t matter what I said as long as I said words.

God, I was exhausted. This was the part in rescue missions where I’d shut up and fall back and Ava or Yoru would take point. Talk to the target. Comfort them.

What was I supposed to do? I was this girl. We were closer than she would ever know. Ten years from now, when she’s struggling through school because she’s bogged down by the memory we were making that night, haunted by the knowledge of magic she could never find, she’d think about the strong, quiet girl who took her hand and led her home—the girl who would age alongside her in her memory, even when she’d be older than I am now.

She would never know how hard this was for me.

“Do you like math?” I asked her.

“It’s okay,” she said, with a completely limp tone that suggested.

“Well—” I pursed my lips. Ran a trial of my next few words before I spoke them. “Think of it like this. If we’ve got a list of numbers, one through ten, and “one” is someone who does only good things, and a “ten” is someone who does only bad things, Bell is—a three or a four. She’s a good magician who…occasionally does bad things. I rank her at one, but other people wouldn’t do that, so I’m saying “three” as a compromise.”

The girl nodded. I wasn’t sure if she understood or not, but it wasn’t really important that she did. What was important was that the bus stop was only a block or two away.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Me?”

“What number are you?”

I wanted to stop walking, but I forced myself not to. It kept the idea from sticking in my head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure this is something you can really rank yourself for.”

“Why not?”

“Even the bad magicians think they’re doing the right thing,” I said, before I had a chance to process the implications.

She didn’t say anything for a while and neither did I.

The bus stop was just across the street. Sitting silent in a cone of white light. The safe place where nobody could ever find us and nothing would ever hurt us again.

No—not us. Her. Just her.

Not me.

I wasn’t so lucky.

“You’re taking me home, aren’t you?” she said. A little more quietly. Maybe she wasn’t so sure, now.

I knew I had to put that to bed. “I am,” I said.

“So you’re doing a good thing,” she said. “You’ve got that, right?”

I don’t look at her. I can’t.

“At least I’ve got that,” I said.