97 - Portrait of a Drowning {September 3rd, Age 15}

That first step into the world was just as overwhelming as it was the first time I got off the subway—but once I got my bearings and took a few deep breaths, trying to look at this as critically as I could, I realized that I wasn’t in any danger, and I didn’t actually need to pay attention to everything.

I was already captured. It’s not like I was going to get captured again.

So I let my breath out and I allowed the red-swirl monoliths of other pedestrians fade from my perception. I didn’t need to know where they were. I didn’t need any of that extra information—where was the danger? What was I defending against?

Nothing. I’d already lost.

So I kept hold of Matthew—his shape resolved into something human, with a walk-cycle I had mostly figured out, and I kept a vague idea of where the other people near us were, and that was it.

Everything else stayed dark.

“Where are we going?” I asked him, quietly. He didn’t hear me, so I tapped his arm with two fingers, and once he turned I repeated myself.

“I’m gonna show you something,” he said.

“Show me what?”

“I’m not sure you really get it yet,” Matthew said. “I promise this is the last time I’ll rub it in. But I think you should at least see the lobby of the building you guys invaded.”

I didn’t react. It’d been a month since the fight, right? I couldn’t imagine there’d be much to see. And if Matthew was planning to show me some browned-out bloodstains with name-cards attached to them—this smear is Ava, this one’s one of our metallurgics, and so on—I had bad news for him.

After a moment, he added, “Also, I’m gonna see if Neville’s around so I can ask him what the fuck is going on.”

“That’s the main reason, I guess,” I said.

“Yeah, but I can’t leave your side and if I just call Neville, he’ll find an excuse to delay it if he can’t come up with a good answer on the spot. I always get a better reaction out of him if I go straight to his office and knock.”

That sounded like Prochazka so I just nodded and said, “Yeah, I get that.”

It turned out that the building we’d attacked was in the center of this city block, while the building with Talia’s office and the wards was the north-west corner. All of it was very close together.

Once we arrived at the spot and he said so, I realized all of this—and another thought struck me.

“Do you guys own those hotels?” I asked. “The—the ones on either side.”

“Yup,” he said. “We own this entire block.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, we knew which rooms you guys were staying in, too.”

At that point, all I could do was grimace and try not to think about it too much. “You could’ve just assassinated us right then.”

“We could have, but it was still too public for Neville’s needs. The White Plains thing was a unique case. One event like that can be written off as a freak thing, but two makes a pattern and that gets the authorities really going. We couldn’t risk another fiasco like that.”

He paused. “Ava really did tell the receptionist you were her retarded little sister, didn’t she? Held your hand and everything.”

My grimace got tighter. “Yep.”

“God, that’s demeaning. She sounds like a piece of work.”

I wasn’t sure how to process that. Was it pity, or genuine sympathy, or theater? I couldn’t tell and I didn’t want to devote too much energy to it, so I just responded with my next logical thought. “None of us are all that sad she’s dead.”

Matthew snorted. “Yeah, I bet.”

He went up to the doors, fished around in his pocket for a physical key, and unlocked them. Once that was done, he hooked his fingers into the alcove-handle and pulled them open, stepping aside to let me through.

The door slid shut and locked itself behind us.

Nothing had been cleaned except the blood and the smell. The room had once again returned to the vague stench of disinfectants and dust, but the cracked tiles and rubble-piles strewn around the room told enough of the story by itself. The room had been sanitized, but nothing else.

I regarded the whole scene without much of a change in expression. I knew what this was going to be. I saw this coming.

“What’s the goal here?” I said, turning toward Matthew.

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “What goal?”

“Why show me this? I was here already,” I said. And even though simply being in this place again was making my heart beat faster, I pointed out all the sections as I understood them—although for some, I had to walk across the room to the elevator and face outward to get the right vantage for my memories to line up. He did nothing; just stood and watched me do it. From in front of the elevator, I gestured out at a tile-crater to my left, near the entrance: “That was where the metallurgic dropped in.” Closer to me, on that side: “Bell melted him right about there.” To my right, halfway down: “That’s where Ava was shot.”

I went through a few more of those, and with each one pointed out in as neutral of a tone I could manage, the cold sweat in the back of my mind dulled. This wasn’t happening—it had already occurred. There was nothing to be afraid of in recollecting.

Nothing that couldn’t make me stronger.

“And here,” I said, pointing backward, “is where the elevator fell down and I was captured.”

I turned back to him. Stuck my own fingertips in my pockets. “I know what I did, Matthew. There’s no hard feelings for me here.”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s an impressive act, for sure.”

Matthew walked past me and pressed one of the call buttons for the elevator, ignoring everything else in the room. If I’d defeated his ruse, he gave me no indication, and honestly, that was good enough for me. I held my own. That was all that mattered. “Let’s go bug Neville.”

The elevator rose to our floor—they’d fixed at least that much in the past month—and opened up. He stepped inside, beckoned for me to follow, and for half a second the thought crossed my mind, purely unconsciously, to conjure some droplets from the fairly humid late-summer air and make a stand. The air conditioning on this floor was not on, and the lurking moisture from the city outside had slowly crawled its way through the minute cracks to fill this space. In images faster than words I wondered if I could put a spike in his head before he could write a spell that would shut me down.

But then the words caught up to those pictures, and I told myself that he was already in my head. Any twitch was too late.

I would have had to do it purely on impulse, faster even than my own firing synapses, and even that might not have been enough. If I was going to get an opportunity to escape, it would have to be more clear-cut than that.

I stepped into the elevator with him. He pressed the buttons—one, four, six, seven in sequence, and then the whole set twice. Misha’s code was right, as it turned out.

But this time no assailant dropped from the ceiling. No ambush broke our silence.

The elevator doors closed and the machine whirred down.

Matthew regarded me for a moment, head tilted slightly down, and said, “Good girl.”

0 0 0

I didn’t expect Matthew to mention my thoughts, but he did. “I’m surprised you’re still looking, honestly,” he said.

I pursed my lips. Thought about hiding more, as my instincts told me—but if he was already there, then there simply wasn’t much of a point. Instead I kept my sentiment short: “I didn’t mean to.”

“Sure,” he said, hands in his pockets. He looked up at the elevator’s ceiling. “I get that. Intrusive thoughts and all. I’m just kind of surprised.”

I was familiar with the term. “Intrusive thoughts don’t have to make sense.”

“They rarely do,” he agreed, “but they’ve always got some basis in truth. They’re never from completely left field.”

I faced the closed elevator doors. “Obviously I don’t want to be here,” I said, monotone.

“I don’t know. That’s the part that sort of surprises me.”

I turned to him for a second as the elevator slowed to a stop. “Why?”

“I mean, Prochazka sent you to die. He obviously doesn’t give a shit. Half of Unit 6 hates you. Why in the hell are you so dedicated to going back to them?”

I pressed my lips together and didn’t answer that.

“I’ve got a shred of decency, so I’m not just going to pry it out of you,” Matthew said. “Although, to be completely honest, I’m pretty sure I already know. I’ve done a little bit of rummaging around in your head already, so I’m not gonna pretend like I’m an actual paragon of privacy or anything. I’m just surprised at how stubborn you’re being.”

“We called it resilience,” I said, short.

“And those rules no longer apply,” Matthew replied, as the elevator beeped and the doors opened.

We stepped out into a wide semi-circular room with a receptionist’s desk in the center. The elevator sat at the narrow end of the room, in the center of a short stretch of flat wall. Hung on the curved walls that went around us were various rectangular protrusions that I figured were probably art pieces of some kind. Instinct no longer drove me to look at them.

Matthew, however, did: he took a quick glance to his right at one of the pictures there. There were five in a line along each wall on either side of the elevator, and if I had to guess I think he was looking at the picture second from the right—but lines of sight are hard to trace without sight of your own, so I didn’t really know.

If so, it was an oddly small picture to be staring at.

He looked away from it after a second and turned his attention to the receptionist behind the desk, waving and saying, “Yo, Jerome.”

“Hey, Biiri,” the man there—Jerome—said. He seemed like a bean-pole type, but he was sitting down and I didn’t feel like sending droplets behind the desk to see how long his legs were. I just didn’t care enough. He didn’t have a key necklace on and that was all I really needed to know.

His voice was low, but not uncommonly so. I couldn’t place the accent, but he definitely didn’t sound like he was from the area.

Matthew approached him, stealing another glance at that same picture. “They got you on Neville desk duty, huh?”

“The backlot receptionist shift is awesome, dude,” Jerome said. “Nobody ever comes down here who doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for. I pretty much just get to sit here and play Runescape all day.”

“You’d be doing that even if you were out in one of the holes.”

“Yeah, probably,” Jerome shrugged. “Whatcha want, then?”

“Is Neville in?” Matthew asked. “I wanna take the princess to her.”

Jerome glanced at me, vaguely surprised, as though he’d just noticed that Matthew didn’t arrive alone. He blinked. “Shit, that’s her?”

“Yep.”

“She’s—so small,” Jerome said. “Jeez.”

“Why does everyone talk about me like I’m not here?” I said. “My name is Erika. I’m a person that exists.”

“Clearly,” Jerome said. “Having fun?”

I frowned. “Tons of it.”

He swirled a finger in the air. “I have a really fucked sense of humor, so I find the run-around Neville’s giving y’all hilarious. I’m not super invested in the actual going-ons of the organization because I’m just, like, an idiot behind a desk, but like…honestly, what the fuck is he doing?”

“We were hoping to figure out exactly that,” Matthew said.

“How come nobody here has any idea what’s going on?” I said. My frustration was starting to boil over. “How the hell did we lose to you people?”

“Feisty, huh,” Jerome said, shrugging. “Well, I wasn’t in charge of it. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“We really should’ve just stomped in here and mowed you all down when we had the chance.”

“If only,” Jerome replied. “God knows I could use a good long nap.” He turned his attention to Matthew. “Well, you’re out of luck. Neville fucked off about thirty minutes ago. You just missed him.”

“Shit.”

“I can tell him you were here,” Jerome said.

“Yeah, do that. Let him know I want some answers.”

“You want me to add stage directions to that quote?” he said, patting around on the desk for a pen and a slip of scrap paper to jot down some notes. He eventually what he was looking for, spun the pen once between his fingers, and wrote a few words left-handed.

“Any idea when he’ll be back?”

“No idea,” Jerome said. “Actually—it’s what, five-thirty?”

“Something like that.”

“Huh. Well, he might’ve just gone out for dinner. If you stick around for a while, maybe he’ll come back.”

“You think?”

“I mean, if you’re not doing anything else today, what’s the harm?”

Matthew glanced at me for a moment, as if I had more pressing matters to attend do and he needed my permission. “You’re just saying that because you’re bored.”

“What part of “I get to play Runescape all day” did you miss?”

“That doesn’t mean you’re not bored.”

Jerome glanced down at something under the desk. “Yeah, if I had to stare at ammonite crabs for another hour without any other stimulus, I think I’d blow my brains out.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“I can help with that,” I said, through a tight mouth.

“I’ll give you a call when I’m good and ready,” Jerome said. “Hey, at least she’s fun, right?”

“This is more fun than usual,” Matthew replied, with a small smile.

That was about all I could take. “What part of this is supposed to be fun?” I snapped.

Jerome and Matthew both fell quiet, glanced at each other for a second like they were a true comedy duo. Jerome spoke first. “For you, me, or Matthew? I’m having a ball, I don’t know about you two.”

Matthew shrugged. “Babysitter wasn’t high on my list of dream jobs, but sometimes you gotta deal. It’s certainly more interesting than basic surveillance duty. God, that shit blows.”

Jerome rolled his eyes. “Boo-hoo, Mr. Telepath is sad he has to do work. Oh, the humanity.”

Matthew ran his palms down his cheeks. “It’s so boring, man.”

“Dude, I’m just a fuckin’ rock over here. At least you’ve got a key.”

Matthew chuckled. “Yeah, you wouldn’t be saying that if you went through the shit I did to get this.”

“That’s not the point.” Jerome didn’t sound like he was honestly all that torn up about it.

“Whatever.”

I didn’t expect the conversation to circle back around to me, but it did. Jerome looked at me and said, “Well, for you I’d assume the fun part is that nobody’s forcing you to murder anyone for no reason and you’re not being, I don’t know, emotionally neglected or something like that? But given that you already offered to put me out of my misery twice I’m going to assume you were at least a little into it, so that’s probably a moot point.”

I didn’t respond to that. I just frowned and turned away from him.

Jerome gave me a few seconds to respond before going back to his one-on-one with Matthew. “Where does Prochazka find these people?”

“Red Creek,” I said. Somehow I found the patience to attempt diplomacy again. A deep breath and a pause helped a lot to that end. “Jerome, just talk to me. I’m not going to hurt you. I literally can’t. Matthew’ll shut me off. If you’ve got a question, just ask me.”

“That’s fair,” Jerome said. “It’s just sort of novel, I guess. I heard all these stupid stories about you and now I’m actually seeing you. And it’s sorta weird. They really made you out to be larger-than-life. And…I don’t know, somehow scarier and more pitiful. You just seem like some kid to me.”

I still hadn’t quite figured out what to do with that sentiment. It was really common, and I’d had a lot of time to consider it, but I still hadn’t dredged up an answer. Which direction did I want the sentiment to swing? I think if it went either way, I could manage—either full hatred or full pity—but the fact that it sat squarely in the middle, centered to the point of apathy, stalled me.

What was I supposed to do with that?

My answer surprised me. It slipped through my lips too fast to think it over. “It’s because I am.”

Jerome raised his eyebrows at that. “Really now.”

I shrugged. It was the most I could do to hide my own confusion at what I’d just said.

Jerome bailed me out by changing the subject. “Well, just sit tight for a bit. He’ll probably be back at six or so.”

“Sure,” Matthew said, and for a moment we all just stood there without much rhyme or reason. After another second, Matthew asked me, “Can I show you something?”

I had a suspicion he’d forgotten a very key aspect of me, but I wasn’t about to disobey what I was viewing as a direct order. “Sure.”

Matthew walked away from Jerome and pointed to one of the paintings hung on the wall by the elevator. It was off to the elevator’s left, the center protrusion on the wall—the one he glanced at when we first arrived on this floor.

If he really had forgotten I was blind, he covered for it cleanly. “I know you can’t see this, so I’m going to describe it to you,” he said—but he said it with the slight hesitation that made me think this wasn’t his original plan, and that tiny crack in Matthew’s demeanor, just the knowledge that he’d screwed something up, was enough to make me smirk.

He didn’t notice, or didn’t acknowledge that little act of rebellion. “The picture’s not very big,” he said.

“I know how big it is,” I replied. And just to hammer that point home, I reached out and gently ran a finger along the top of the frame, and then along the bottom.

I was expecting to pull up some dust—to feel some kind of forgotten gunk collecting up there—but it was squeaky clean.

“Okay, fine,” Matthew said. “But you can’t see the picture itself.”

“I don’t see why I’d need to,” I said, and I knew I was slipping into that same mode I often did when I was frustrated with something that was out of my hands.

But this time, I had the wisdom of hindsight, and I knew that while all the other times I’d gotten snippy didn’t have lasting, serious consequences (there was no way to tell what caused what, truly), this one could.

I didn’t need to give Matthew more excuses to throw me back in the dry room than he already had.

So I frowned and pursed my lips and said, “Describe it to me.”

Matthew’s eyes flicked downward, toward me, I assumed, and then back at the painting. “It’s a picture of a woman,” he said. “A woman without any eyes. Her head’s tilted back. An arm that extends back off-screen is holding a pitcher of something red—it could be wine or blood, honestly, I don’t know, and it’s pouring the red stuff into one of the woman’s empty eye sockets. The socket overflows, and the red goes down the corner of her eye like tears, collects in her slightly open mouth, and that overflows, too. Like a fountain. And the red goes out of her mouth, down and out of a corner, like drool, and it drips off her chin and out of the frame.”

I didn’t bother putting in a lot of effort to piece that together as he explained it—at first, because I didn’t want to, but then because I didn’t have to—the image, without my permission, assembled itself from the fragments of visual memory I still retained and sat there shining and red like an apple, or a droplet of fresh blood.

“What about it?” I asked.

“What about what?” Matthew asked back, absently, before he blinked and shook his head a bit. “I just like this painting, that’s all. It’s my favorite of the six.”

I remembered a nice word I read once. “How very macabre of you,” I said slow, drawn, turning away from him and his favorite painting and walking toward the other side of the room, just to do something.

“I don’t know if it’s blood or not,” he said.

“Stop being such a weirdo, Biiri,” Jerome called, hands cupped over his mouth, and the sound of that third voice caught me. When I went up to the painting, I’d let the rest of the room drop out of my perception and I’d forgotten that Matthew and I weren’t alone.

“Fellas, is it gay to like art?” Matthew muttered under his breath.

“Depends,” Jerome said. “Is it gay art?”

“Why does that matter?”

“What time is it?” I interjected, stopping both of them.

Jerome glanced at something on his desk. “Five-thirty-three.”

“So, twenty-seven more minutes of this?” I asked, waving a finger between the two of them.

Jerome chuckled. “Give or take.”

That statement came out of me without getting any clearance first, and I found that Jerome’s response didn’t surprise me as much as I thought it would either. None of that interaction, while all unplanned, felt wrong to me.

I wanted it like that.

Jerome looked back at Matthew. “How long has Erika had a sense of humor?”

“Near as I can tell? About five minutes,” he said.

“They sure as hell didn’t tell us that,” Jerome replied.

“Most people don’t really expect me to,” I said. Recognizing that I didn’t need Jerome to look at me to participate in a conversation that was about me—the expectation was just that I’d speak whenever there was a gap.

“I mean, no offense, but you get why,” Jerome said to me.

“Yeah. I get it.”

“Did you have a sense of humor when you were with Prochazka, too?”

I thought back on it—the dealing, the drinking, the stories I’d tell. The things people expected of me. I spoke loose when the liquor permitted it. Just saying dumb shit with a straight face to get laughs—just, pitiful as it sounds, to get people to smile at me for something benign.

Somehow, standing there, I felt that way again—and as soon as I realized it, I swallowed hard and tried to feel anything else.

That, above all else, was not allowed.

“I guess it depends what you’d find funny,” I said, slowly.

0 0 0

We stood around talking for another thirty-five minutes or so, and I found that—against all odds—I kind of liked Jerome. He was an easygoing sort of guy who didn’t seem very intimidated by me. It’d been so long since I’d talked to anyone with no skin in the game that I’d forgotten what it was like to simply be—a person without any pretense behind her. Jerome knew who I was, but he didn’t care. The inner workings of the organization he worked in were simply not important. He was a secretary, a night-guard, that kind of thing. Tangential jobs with no knowledge or decisions required.

To him, I was just some kid, and talking to him—despite the fact that he technically worked for the enemy—was kind of fun. At some point it occurred to me that I had no indication that he actually knew that magic was real. It was totally possible that he thought this whole organization was a sham, some kind of weird occultist joke. Neville didn't have any powers, and I never told him I couldn't see.

Despite our patience, though, Neville did not show up. At six-fifteen or so Matthew asked Jerome for the time, and once he got that info he shrugged and said, “Well, Neville just went and fucked off, didn’t he.”

“You’re welcome to stick around to see if he comes back,” Jerome said, shrugging, “but it looks like it. Oh well. I can tell him you were here when he shows up again.”

“Yeah,” Matthew said, looking away from Jerome—looking back toward the elevator. His voice went a little quieter than normal. “Sure.”

“Don’t worry too much about it,” Jerome replied. “Neville’s got it covered. I mean, he got us this far, right? Against her.” Jerome gestured at me, flapping a limp hand. “And Bell. And Loybol and…you know, everyone on Unit 6.”

“And we lost like twenty of our keys doing it,” Matthew said. “He was always transparent before. Everything he did was open to discussion. Why is he being so secretive about this? It’s just…God, it’s gotta be something bad. I can’t help it. It’s gotta be something everyone’s gonna hate. It can’t be anything else, right? He’s gotta be just standing there sweating knowing he’s made a huge mistake and that it’s way too late to pull back on it now.”

Then Matthew turned to me, for half a second. “I mean, I guess it’s not too late. But still. Neville’s not like this.”

“He’s not,” Jerome agreed. “But right now, he is, so you can either trust him or…I don’t know. Drink.”

“I’ll probably do both,” Matthew muttered.

“I’ll join you,” I added.

He snorted. “Maybe we’ll get that far one day.” Then he straightened up, rolled his shoulders back, and waved back at the front desk. “Thanks for the help, man. See you later. I’m going back to the main building.”

Jerome waved. “Yeah. Good seeing you—you two. Let me know if you ever figure out what the hell’s going on, ok?”

“If I’m allowed to.”

“Deal.”

Matthew prodded me on the shoulder—a sudden sensation I wasn’t expecting, since I wasn’t keeping close track of Matthew in that room—and said, “Let’s go.”

0 0 0

We didn’t talk much in the elevator. Both of us, independently, found that we simply didn’t have all that much to say. I had enough to process without having to do Matthew’s processing for him, and given the way he kept his head tilted slightly down, eyes pointed loosely at the foot of the elevator doors, fingers tapping on his jeans’ leg, he felt the same about me.

The elevator rose silent and smooth, came to a calm halt at the lobby we destroyed a month or so ago. After the little limp ding, the doors slid open and I let a surge of droplets fly out into the open room—and almost instantly they collided with a form about eight feet back from the elevator.

I paused, surprised, and before I could set about trying to figure out what it was, Matthew dealt with it. “Talia?”

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said. “I was just looking for you.”

Matthew straightened up and gestured for me to leave the elevator, as if I was just going to stand there, shocked, until someone called me somewhere else. “Quelle surprise,” he said. “How was the meeting?”

“Shit,” Talia replied, with half a glance at me. “I talked to Ivan. He doesn’t know anything, either. This is the first he’s hearing of any of this. I know I said I expected that, but…I was really hoping I’d be wrong, you know? Finding out I was right on that was…” She sighed. Let her attention sink for a moment. “Disappointing. We’ll say that.”

Again—Matthew faltered, like he was legitimately caught off-guard, and I took a little drop of joy in him squirming. “That’s…that’s weird.”

“Yeah. I don’t know about you, but I’m pissed,” Talia said. “Ivan said he’d talked to Neville a few days ago, and that he seemed…weird. Off. Like he wasn’t all that thrilled about winning the war. That was all he said.”

Matthew frowned, but didn’t seem all that surprised, at least from his tone. I had to assume Matthew had talked to Neville at some point in the past month—how else would he have gotten this secret assignment—and he must have drawn a conclusion close to Ivan’s when he did. All Matthew said in response was, “Huh.”

Talia went on. “There are things he can’t tell us, sure, I get it, he’s a big-shot exec and we’re not, but if whatever this is is so damn secret that he can’t tell his own head of missions what the deal is—well…”

She trailed off. “I don’t know. Get back in the elevator. I’m pulling the plug on this.”

She stepped past us and slammed the elevator call-button with the side of a closed fist.

“Pulling the—” Matthew mumbled, lost for second until he found it. “Oh. Oh, shit. Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You really think it’s come to that?”

Talia shrugged, like this was the most natural thing in the world. “Neville can’t get away with this.”

“He’s the boss. He can get away with whatever he wants.”

She frowned, tent-poled her fingers across her face. “No, no—I mean he can’t think this is okay. Keeping us in the dark about stuff like this. Look, he wants to have help running this joint, fine. Everyone needs help sometimes. But it’s a two-way street, you know? He’s gotta help us too. He can’t just keep important shit from us for no reason.”

“I’m sure he’s got one,” Matthew said, absently.

“And I’m sure we’re gonna find out what it is,” Talia said, as the elevator arrived back on our floor. We stepped inside, she punched in the code, and the elevator went back down.

0 0 0

Jerome, somehow, didn’t seem all that surprised to see us again. I got the sense that not much would rattle him.

“Back so soon?” he said. “Oh, hi, Talia.”

“Hit the button, dude,” Talia said.

“The—”

He frowned. “He fuckin’ hates it when people do that. Really?”

“Yeah. This is an order.”

Jerome paused, shrugged, and flicked something under his desk. “He’ll be here in like twenty minutes.”

“Cool.”

“What’s the switch?” I asked, even though I’d already more or less pieced it together.

“It’s just an emergency call button,” Matthew said. “The only reason Neville would get mad is that he’s a real stickler for things being used for their correct purposes, and he really doesn’t want to set a precedent that you can just flick that switch and make him show up for a question.”

“That seems fair,” I said.

Talia glanced at me for a moment, and didn’t say anything. Just that brief flash of her attention was enough to make me shut up.

Jerome regarded the three of us, standing there again, and after a pause that was just a touch too long he said, “Well, the gang’s all here, huh?”

0 0 0

We all stood around in relative silence for a moment. Jerome made a limp attempt at small-talk with Talia, who was simply not interested in it, so he gave up and went back to talking to Matthew about some game they both played.

It took a couple of minutes, but it started to sink in: Neville was coming. I was about to meet him. The man who ordered the deaths of all my friends—who would destroy everything I loved—

For what?

Sure, this wasn’t exactly the circumstance in which I thought I’d meet him—but instinctively, somewhere deep in my heart, the thought crossed me: if I put an icicle in his skull the second those elevator doors opened, and let whatever became of me after that happen, would that be a good enough atonement?

We’d win the war then, wouldn’t we?

But then Matthew flicked my shoulder and I remembered the situation I was in. Swallowed down hard and mumbled an apology.

“It’s instinctive,” he said, quietly, while Talia was off looking at the paintings on the other side of the room. “Don’t worry.”

“I mean it,” I said. Before I could stop myself. “I want to.”

“I know. Probably better than you do.”

Clenched my fists. Forced my voice steady and found it harder to do so than I was anticipating. “He took everything from me.”

“And we’ll finish the job if you don’t behave,” Matthew said. Glancing quickly at Talia to make sure she wasn’t paying attention. “God knows the dry room isn’t good for much else.”

That was the first time, in this whole fresh chapter of my existence, than Matthew had explicitly threatened me.

I believed him. There wasn’t a good reason not to.

And so, just like always—just like every goddamn time I found the insolence within me to feel something—I stuffed it down and tried not to think about it.

I told myself there would be time to feel these things latter, to process them for all they were worth, but as time went on I found that harder and harder to believe—and with the way things are now I can say definitively that no, you don’t ever get that time. Maybe normal people do, but I don’t.

Things just happen too fast to me. Every day, there’s a new total absurdity to hurdle, and there never has been nor will there ever be time to look back with anything longer than a cursory glance.

I can name the things I’ve done and the people I’ve been, but I am not allowed to understand them.

And so even though I wanted nothing more than to strangle Neville Nguyen to a curdled bloody rasp-gasp death in front of everything and everyone he’d ever loved—as much as I craved the ability to sever his drooling head and impale it on the antenna of the Empire State Building as a warning—a threat in no uncertain terms to anyone who would wrong me (us, Unit 6, the Radiant, but me, really, only me)—I was not allowed. I can look back and remember that I experienced this feeling but I’m not allowed to dissect it and truly understand why this boundless rage flowed through me.

I think I know, but there’s just no time to be sure. Every day there’s another battle.

I’m certain all of this will catch up to me one day. My skull can only fit so much.

All of that sat stewing in my head for so long that when the elevator doors slid open and I heard that same limp ding, it startled me. Matthew and Jerome had resumed their small-talk without me, and Talia was still examining the pictures on the walls—but my attention was plucked from me between two fingers and dropped squarely on the elevator in the middle of the wall.

And, therefore, on the figure standing in the cavity there.

Jerome, behind me, waved. “Sir,” he said.

The man there gave a terse nod in Jerome’s direction and stepped forth from the elevator.

He was a touch under six feet tall, around Matthew’s height and about the same size. Sim, with a perfectly-fitted crisp suit. To me it was as though he’d taken his sweet time getting here, as if he’d planned this whole thing this way right from the beginning, so he’d have plenty of time to comb his hair and smooth out any wrinkles before Jerome flicked that switch.

I couldn’t tell how old he was. Misha had said he was bordering on fifty, if I remembered correctly, but I almost didn’t believe it.

He did not have a key necklace.

And so I stood there, wide-eyed for whatever reason—I remember, specifically, the instinctive stretching of my eyebrows upward in surprise even though it made no difference whatsoever in my ability to perceive him. Wide-eyed and perfectly empty.

He tilted his head down, ever so slightly, at me. Regarded me plainly, with no particular change in expression. The man who would destroy everything I ever loved looked at me as though I were a little flap of peeling paint, or a moth swirling around a lamp, or an oak leaf on the sidewalk. Something that exists without a second thought—something that could be described with nothing more than that phrase itself: to him, I was simply “something that exists.”

Nothing more, nothing less.

“Hello, Erika Hanover,” Neville Nguyen said to me.