92 - The Neon Machine (2) [August 2nd, Age 15]

And at ten o’clock we rose from our places and drifted to the door, light-footed and light-headed. Moved like dolls by God.

We walked to the elevator and stepped inside and went down.

I didn’t think. I didn’t have to. No conscious effort was needed to move my feet. Bell and I did not exchange any words. There wasn’t a point. We both knew exactly what the other was thinking. The enemy knew we were coming. They were armed and prepared to the utmost degree—and all we had was ourselves, ascended as the pair of us were.

Cygnus and Ava were less so, but that was okay—Bell and I were there, and we could protect them. It was the least we could do in return, wasn’t it?

It was all I could to do repay Cygnus for everything he’d done for me.

We exited our building and headed toward the target. I didn’t need to look up to know there were no stars in the sky. They couldn’t be seen from here.

We had nothing to follow.

I knew it was dark. I knew the lights above us were purely artificial.

I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that what we were doing was right. It had to be—even if it would be swiftly negated, it still had to be done. An effort still had to be made, or everything—everywhere—fell apart.

The world we lived in was built on the futile efforts of people like us.

0  0  0

We were a bit late. Cygnus and Ava were already there, standing far enough in front of the building to be a part of the night-time walker. They weren’t about to try and get closer without me there to scan the perimeter.

Both stood expressionless. The allotted time for self-reflection was over. Now, there were no more thoughts to be had.

We ceased all thought. This, of course, was by design.

Nothing but the task ahead—just like the way things used to be. Wasn’t that how they were? When I was given a task and trusted with its completion?

The one thing, barring all else, that I always knew I could do—I could always be trusted to try. I would do what I was pointed at. That, at the end of the day—below the setting sun—was what I was good for.

The perfect soldier, truly. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t question anything but myself—and even then it was just words and nothing more. They didn’t translate into actions. I shook the wheel, I honked the horn, but I never hit the brakes, and that was simultaneously my greatest strength and my biggest weakness. I could do anything. I was invincible. There was no job that could be put in front of me that I couldn’t accomplish. No world where I wouldn’t try. No job I wouldn’t balk at. No task too heinous. No position too untenable. Nothing I wouldn’t swallow.

Take this, destroy this, kill this, protect this—they all fell the same on my head.

Every turn of the key on my back translated smoothly to forward steps.

We were all like that in Unit 6. That was why we were drafted, wasn’t it? All of us were given the option to say no when Prochazka came to us and requested our presence on his elite strike team. We were all given the choice between this future and our present, rhetorical as the decision may have been. Nobody said no. Nobody had ever said no. Even considering the possibility would have made us weaker candidates, and then the scouting team would have passed us by in favor of someone in more dire times.

No, there was never a chance of turning this down. In all my musings about where I may have gone right or wrong I never once think about where I’d be if I had told Prochazka, “Thank you, but I think I’ll strike it out on my own.”

I would not have. Even if nothing else in my life is bolted down—not my feet nor my memories or my words—that much is. I join the Radiant in every possible universe. My life, for all intents and purposes, begins that day, after school, in the woods somewhere in the greater Albany area on my twelfth birthday when I ran away from home without a plan.

I still have no idea how Prochazka found me so fast. Ten hours after the incident. He must have had a witness.

I sat alone on a log stretched over a considerable puddle, a damp log that wasn’t particularly comfortable, and I scanned it for frogs. It was a vernal pool, albeit a small one, I think, and I knew from nature documentaries and such that frogs often spawned in places like that.

I thought nothing of what I’d done to the water main in the school. Blew the whole thing wide open in lieu of something more fatal—my one regret, as I’ve previously mentioned. Every water bubbler burst, the toilets overflowing, the faucets stuck on—I took all my strength toward the underground pipes that fed water to the school and surged it. Pushed every once as far and fast as it could go.

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Closed the school for a week and nothing more.

Splashed some faces. Ruined some documents. Nothing more.

I didn’t touch anybody. Nobody that mattered—but that was water under the bridge. It was too late to think anything of it. It was branded in memory and that was all there was.

But Prochazka found me. The word of the mysterious water main break, the strange overflow of pressure that broke damn near everything in Red Creek Middle School travelled fast. Nobody could conjure a solid cause except the man who knew, instantly, what it had to be.

A man who knew that time was of the essence. I was satisfied with that I did, but left alone with my thoughts, that could change. I was a dangerous girl. I had something nobody else had, and I had nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing inside me but endless, burning reserves of rage.

In that moment I had already decided the thing I craved deep inside me was impossible but as the rage-fuel depleted and the fires leapt higher I know now with the wisdom of hindsight that there was a little coal-store I hadn’t yet touched, and if I sat there alone on that log poking around for salamanders and frogs for long enough, I’d find it, and I’d burn it just like everything else.

And then I would turn and go back home.

I knew I could have used my power to find the little creatures, somehow, but I didn’t quite know how yet. I did know, however, that nothing in that little vernal pool deserved me making a mistake. Even one drowned salamander was too many.

So I did it the old-fashioned way.

And after about thirty minutes of that—with my search turning up two frogs and no salamanders—he found me.

He approached slowly with hands raised and he said, “Excuse me.”

And I looked up at him—this man in khaki shorts and a Polo shirt and a silver key charm on a necklace with a small pearl inlaid where the hole would be.

He smiled at me. He looked kind.

I returned his look with a blank stare and no words. I didn’t know what to say. I was young then, and even if I had the time and advanced notice to think of something to say, I’m not sure I would have been able to.

He put a hand over his heart. His English was perfect, but he had an unmistakably strong accent, a Czech one, although I only knew it as vaguely Eastern European at the time—an accent that I now know he kept intentionally as a final tie to his homeland. “My name is Jan Prochazka. I’m like you.”

Still I just stared at him. I didn’t know what to say—but I knew he’d introduced himself, so I knew what I was supposed to do after that. “I’m—I’m Erika.”

“Hello, Erika,” he responded. Low, calm. “If you don’t mind me asking—was it you who flooded the water main at the middle school in Red Creek?”

I remember flushing red. My hand instinctively grabbing the piece of sapphire jewelry around my neck that I’d been given by some unknowable entity.

“I’m not here to chastise you,” Prochazka said. “I’m here to offer you a position.”

I remember thinking that if Prochazka was not as he seemed, I could probably kill him without anyone ever knowing I was here. I’d already burst pipes in the school by freezing them—I figured I could probably do something along those lines to him, or at him, if I had to.

So I wasn’t as afraid as I probably should have been about a random stranger offering me a job in the middle of the woods.

He explained what the Radiant was to me. An organization dedicated to keeping people like us from hurting people not like us—and making sure knowledge of magic stays quiet.

It’s important that regular folks don’t find out about us, or—at the bare minimum—knowledge about us is reserved to the crazy, conspiracy-theory brain-rotted type, he’d said, more or less. That way regular folks wouldn’t learn just how insane the world truly was.

It’s a bottomless pit out there, he’d said. Magic makes things possible that we’d rather normal mortals not know about.

That made sense to me. I didn’t want to get caught, above all else, and joining this man (who I could kill cleanly, untraceably, without a second thought if I needed to) seemed like a good way to go about that. I spent enough of my ten hours of magical life worrying about the exact topics he’d broached to trust him. And there was hardly much risk in doing so, I thought, and—God—I wanted to be anywhere but there. Anywhere but in Red Creek.

He came to me and offered me a way out. I didn’t even seek it—I didn’t even work for it. The out I was given was completely and totally unearned. A stroke of beautiful raw luck and nothing more.

What was I supposed to do? Say no?

Obviously—clearly—not. I would have been so much worse.

Prochazka taught me restraint. He gave me a purpose.

The horror I would have become without the Radiant would be without equal—and so I don’t wonder about where I’d be without them. I know where I’d be.

I’d be the thing they sought to destroy.

0  0  0

So I found myself before that great building, the writhing neon machine of the city and its breathing, heaving monoliths at my back, and I was at peace.

This is what I signed up for. This is who I was destined to become—and this was the true aspiration of the Radiant. A yearning for a better time—a time when secrets were secret. A stupid, futile yearning for a past we could never have—but we had to try, because the alternative was unthinkable. We had to try or we couldn’t sleep at night. It was sucking down a tidal wave with straws. Stopping an earthquake by clutching the ground.

All of this for one more day.

You can never lay down your arms, Erika Hanover—you can never lay your head to rest.

Sure as stars—you will try again.

Even though you may doubt yourself, your feet still move. Your resolve, deep down, is unshakable. You will do what needs to be done. You are nothing if not invincible.

This, too, is by design.

I stepped up to the doors and I slipped water into the lock and I froze it into a perfect key just like I’d done so many times before. If there was an electronic alarm system in this building, which I’m certain there was at some point, it was disabled. We were supposed to break in. This was a part of their plan that we simply had to play into. Any other way into this building would be met with the same—and any other way beyond doors would make a scene in public.

I turned the key. The lock clicked open.

And we went inside.