98 - Staple Yourself Shut [September 3rd, Age 15]

Then he looked at the Talia and Matthew, and he asked, “Which one of you made the order?”

Talia raised her hand. “Me.”

She didn’t have to explain. Neville understood, immediately, what this was about. He cast his eyes down for a moment, pursed his lips, let his fingers drum out a sequence on the fleshy part of his thumb. “Okay. Let’s talk. We’ll do this in my office.”

Neville’s voice had a very slight nasal twang to it that suggested a Vietnamese accent, and I briefly wondered if he was born in the US or not, as if that mattered in the current situation at all. He was old enough to have been a child refugee from Vietnam after the war, if Misha’s word was to be trusted. Given Benji and Prochazka’s backgrounds, I couldn’t help but consider that at least a little bit—but the only conclusion I could draw in that moment was that, I guess, I now understood why he went after Benji first.

I’d probably have done the same.

Neville gestured at Jerome and he flicked another switch under the desk, which corresponded to a clicking noise inside the door off to the left of the desk. “You’re all set,” Jerome said.

He bit his tongue and did not offer anything else.

“Thank you, Jerome,” Neville said. His voice was higher-pitched than I had imagined it to be, in dreams about this moment from throughout the years.

None of them had me meeting Neville in quite this way, although the ones in which I was captured and helpless while Neville slit my throat personally, with a random switchblade he pulled from the pocket of his pristine suit pants, were remarkably close.

I swallowed.

Neville allowed us all to file through the doorway, and he closed the thick wood door behind us. If the doorway was any indication, the wall between Neville’s office and that atrium with the elevator and the paintings was abnormally thick, probably for soundproofing. In that moment it seemed oddly cruel to me, as if the wall was that thick only to prevent Jerome from ever hearing what was going on. I’d only ever seen Jerome behind that receptionist’s desk and so in my mind he was the only one who could ever be there. I knew that this couldn’t be the case, but for half a second it was, and I almost felt bad for him.

Neville’s office was almost identical to Prochazka’s. I guess everyone who runs these types of joints has similar taste. Neville had a few more knick-knacks on his desk than Prochazka did, if memory serves, but I didn’t bother to properly resolve the shapes of them. His bookcases along the left and right walls were a bit bulkier, too, although they were less full than Prochazka’s. The chairs in front of Neville’s desk had proper cushions—they were real office chairs from an actual furniture store instead of just moderately upscale folding chairs.

There were only two, though. Talia took one, and while Matthew considered taking the second, he stepped back and let me take it instead, retreating to the bookcase to lean back, arms crossed.

Neville, slowly, stepped around us, around his desk, and sat down.

He frowned, lips pursed tight. Head tilted slightly down.

Talia spoke first. “Sir, can I speak freely?”

“Of course,” Neville said, absently.

She paused. Maybe considering the extent to which she actually wanted to do that. “Sir,” she repeated, clearing her throat. Giving herself time. “We really need to know what the end-game is here if you want us to help you adequately. You’re pretty clearly hiding something from us, here, and it involves Erika, who we all know is insanely dangerous. Sure, keeping her leashed to Matthew is fine, and I trust that he’s not going to screw this up, but…I don’t know what your plan here is, and neither does Ivan, and that’s starting to make us all really uncomfortable.”

Talia took a breath. “You know I wouldn’t have Jerome hit that switch if I didn’t have my whole heart behind this. So please. Tell us what the deal is with Erika. So we can help you.”

I was expecting her to be a lot more sharp-tongued than that, but I guess she had her high-up position for a reason. Folks don’t tend to climb the ladder in organizations like this without a well-developed sense of tact.

Matthew did not add anything to Talia’s plea. He just stood there, brooding.

Neville did not respond for long enough to let my impulses get the better of me. “Why am I still here?”

“Sir,” Neville said, automatically and under his breath—followed immediately by a quick head-shake.

“Sir,” I mumbled, after.

Neville breathed. I was more aware of that than anything else in the room—a warm soft-red billowing cloud of moisture extending from his mouth more alive than anything inside the man himself—swirling through the air and dissipating.

He folded his hands over his desk and looked down at them.

Then he spoke. “This does not leave this room.”

The statement offered no possible dissension. Talia replied, “Of course,” and Matthew gave a terse nod.

Another few moments went by, and then Neville began.

“I have made numerous mistakes in the way I have conducted this whole endeavor,” he said, slowly. Each word painstakingly plotted. “When I planned it, initially, things were different. I knew what I wanted, and I knew what the price was. Loybol had a number of my good people held captive indefinitely in a prison in western Massachusetts on her land, and I knew I couldn’t leave them there to die. Breaking them out, surely, would be seen as an act of war against both Loybol and Prochazka, as I was certain they’d band together. I also knew that, since I wanted to go after Prochazka’s land anyway, this wasn’t a huge deal. I was never concerned about losing. That wasn’t ever the worry.

“This was…August of last year,” he said. “We had heard rumors of Prochazka’s new hire, but hadn’t actually seen them yet. There weren’t ever any survivors to tell complete tales. All we had was triple-layered hearsay. But that August, we found out who it was. A child. You.”

He looked up at me and I froze.

“Prochazka and I have never been on good terms. And discovering that he had conscripted a child into his killing force made my blood boil.”

And he said that with such fury that I, instinctively and immediately, believed him.

To Neville, Matthew and Talia no longer existed. This speech was now for me and me alone. “My hatred for Prochazka grew. Understand this, Erika. Prochazka is a mercenary, in the depths of his heart. He goes where the money goes. He fights for whoever pays him. He does this not because he loves money, or that he wants to be prosperous, but because he loves fighting. He loves war. When I was forced to flee my country with my family in 1975, I heard rumors from the other refugees of this man who fought for the North who could control the winds. Who had slaughtered dozens of Americans and South Vietnamese alike and laughed while doing so. And me and my family—we had no particular allegiance to any given political ideology. It wasn’t important to us. We didn’t have enough money for that to affect us in any relevant way. My mother and father ran a candy store. There were always going to be children who wanted a piece of kẹo dừa. I remember my parents being reasonably optimistic about starting life over in a new country, actually—if only because candy-making is so universal. Everyone loves candy, and even if the candy they’d be making would be different, it would still serve exactly the same purpose. I wasn’t quite so happy, though. I couldn’t stop thinking about that man, and not so much about the man himself but what he was to us: some odd otherworldly force, a divine smiting of sorts, designed to punish us. For what? What did we do?

“I remember saying what so many other children have said, in situations both just as dire and far less so. I just remember tugging on the end of my mother’s dress and asking her why. Saying that it wasn’t fair.”

He paused. Closed his eyes for a moment. “I was too young to really understand what I was saying. My mother thought I was just talking about the act of fleeing, but it wasn’t just that. It was about everything. It was about getting knocked over by forces and machinations completely beyond my control. There was nothing any of us could do about anything that was happening to us. It had been decreed from on high and that was that. No amount of coconut or sesame candy could stop the North from sweeping in and doing…whatever it was exactly they were planning to do.

“Sometime between then and a few years later, I don’t know exactly when, I decided I never wanted to be powerless again. I couldn’t bear to let that happen. And so I did everything I could to make sure of that. My family settled in New York City, and I found myself thriving in the city. I learned how to play people. I learned about leverage, about gives and takes. And I found out that the rumor I’d heard about the man who could control the winds, through asking the right questions to the right people, may not have been a rumor after all, because people like that really did exist.”

Neville sighed. “At risk of boring you, I’ll skip the details of my actual rise to power. What I will say is that I had already grown steel-skinned from the frustration of existence. As pretentious as that sounds—it was how I thought of myself. Nothing could pierce me. And when I found out that people like that man who could control the winds were getting away with all sorts of heinous crimes thanks to their magic, I considered myself as the only man for the job when it came to stopping them. I was the only one tough enough, connected enough, to get it done. This may sound familiar to you if you’ve ever heard Melissa Loybol’s life story.”

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I couldn’t muster any words, so I just nodded.

Neville continued, acknowledging my nod with one of his own. “Loybol and I understand each other in a way Prochazka never could, for either of us. Every time I apprehended another person for a magical crime, I imagined it was, at least on some level if not directly, Prochazka. Someone who would kill for fun. That kind of thing. And when I heard that Prochazka had conscripted a child…that was the last straw for me.”

Again, Neville stopped and collected his thoughts. “Erika, this may come as a surprise to you, but I have children.”

That was, in fact, a surprise. “Really?”

He nodded. “Yes. I married a nurse, twenty years ago. We were both around thirty, both gotten a little too comfortable with the idea of being alone. At first, we only saw each other as a kind of psychic self-care requirement, like we needed the human contact to check something off our to-do lists. She was far too busy to devote any real time to a relationship, and so was I, but we both knew that some part of us was slowly melting away without any semblance of intimacy, so we made time for each other. I don’t think I need to go into details here. We married two years after we met, once we were certain we wouldn’t ever want anything else.”

He shrugged. I already knew how this ended. “We had two children, a boy first, and girl a year and a half later. My wife left her job to raise them, but my own work only got busier. You probably know how this ends. It’s a tale as old as time.”

He offered a dry smirk, a completely humorless gesture. “I lost. The short version, and what I told myself, was that I lost. Keeping magical crime under wraps only got harder as the population of the city exploded. As hopelessness among the destitute increased.”

Neville paused for a moment. “People who get keys tend to be miserable. I’m sure you’ve gathered that. The system, whatever it is, does its best to give keys to people who need them. I was one of the lucky ones. Even as a refugee, my parents were lucky, and their luck passed on to me. They were able to re-start their candy-making business fairly quickly, and so I fared far better than a lot of my fellows. I had new clothes, my parents drove a decent car. Their business was successful, and completely above-water. Their pasts, as far as the United States was concerned, were squeaky-clean. They paid their taxes and all that.”

He waved that last sentiment away. “Sure, some of my friends were jealous of us, but my parents did their best to employ people in dire situations like they were. They were generous with their prosperity, and so, despite all the odds stacked against us, I lived a fairly comfortable life. It certainly helped that my mother spoke better English than a lot of her compatriots, and passed that along to my father and me. All of this is to say that we did well here, and so I was never really eligible to get a key. It would have been oddly cruel to give me one, given how many of my fellows needed it so much more.

“What the system doesn’t realize is that most of what these people need isn’t magic, it’s just money. They just need a fat wad of cash.”

Neville chuckled again, a hollow, blank sound that reminded me a lot of Bell. “I’m weaving around the point, but the bottom line is that my job as magical police commissioner only got harder, but I remained just as stubbornly mortal as ever. My methods had to get more and more unforgiving as the number of truly desperate, broken people rose. It happened so smoothly and slowly that I didn’t even really know what I was doing. I’m sure you understand.”

I blinked. Didn’t react.

Neville ignored that. “To cut to the chase, my family grew distant because I did. I just didn’t have time. My son stopped speaking to me, moved out at eighteen. My daughter got involved with non-magical gangs. Picked up a heroin habit somewhere along the way.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, instinctively. Without any semblance of true feeling.

Neville caught on to that, his eyebrows popping up for half a second at my reaction. “My wife cut her losses after that. And then, alone again, I turned back to my work for emotional support like I used to, and all that made me do was get more brutal. It’s textbook stuff, Erika. It always goes down like this. That stretch of a month ripped me open, and instead of letting it heal like I should have, processing it and understanding what made what, I just stapled myself shut and went on with my life. I thought I didn’t have the time to heal. And, to be honest, I was right. I didn’t.

“But I started having my telepaths hold criminals still while I executed them myself, a bullet to the back of the head, just to show them I could. I, someone without a key, could exert that over them. Of course, it was only possible because of a telepath, but still. It was the sentiment of it all.”

He took a breath, turning to one of the objects on his desk. He plucked it from its spot with two fingers, and I took that time to actually figure out what it was: a little, smooth sculpture of a turtle—probably glass. When he spoke again, his voice was hard—hard enough to realize how softly he’d been speaking before. “And so when I found out that Prochazka had conscripted a child into his army, I was already teetering on the edge. I remember being aware enough to ask myself if I should fall.”

Neville paused. Put the turtle down. “Have you ever done that, Erika?”

I thought back to the warehouse in Rochester with the teacher I killed for asking me a bad question.

I thought back to the people I dehydrated in the basement of the office in White Plains, just because Loybol asked me to make a scene.

I thought back to the countless others I poked full of icicle-holes for little and less.

“No,” I answered, quietly.

“Then there’s still time for you,” Neville replied. “You haven’t fallen as far as you think you have. The stronger you are, the further down you can go—for you, I’d imagine, that pit is as deep as Hell itself.”

Neville glanced briefly at Talia after that, whose brow furrowed a little at what he’d said. She didn’t interrupt him or offer anything, though, so Neville went on. “I remember asking myself if it was okay to fall. Like I needed permission from my own heart to do it. And, well, I got it. I decided that if Prochazka was going to sink that low, then the only thing I could do was drag him down with me. If that was the grand point to my whole life, then so be it. So we went to war.”

“And then, about two months into the war effort, I found out that my daughter had passed away of an overdose two weeks before, and no one bothered to reach out to me.”

Silence. I couldn’t even begin to think of what to say, and judging from Matthew and Talia’s similar stunned silences, they couldn’t, either.

“I remember looking down at some of the notes on my desk and not even being sure what language they were in anymore. I remember trying to pronounce the English vowels like they were Vietnamese and not being sure why none of it quite made sense. It was close, and some of the words were the same, but at the same time, it wasn’t. This was a language I spoke, right? I was supposed to understand it—I mean, I wrote it, and yet…in an instant, all of it was gone.”

“For two days, I left my office only for water. I did not speak to anyone. I did not eat. I simply looked at my notes, my war-plans, and tried to decipher my own handwriting. I took the notes and translated them to Vietnamese and back to English and back to Vietnamese again, maybe three or four times, every time finding a slightly new way to wring meaning from them, until the plans no longer really resembled plans at all, and instead became some kind of clinical, violent poetry. I couldn’t quite recall what the point of all of this was, in any language I spoke—not in English, not in Vietnamese, not even in French, which I hadn’t used in years. But I remembered two things: kill Prochazka, and I remembered about you.

“But what I couldn’t recall, and what haunted me for those forty-eight hours, was what exactly I was going to do with you. I couldn’t even begin to remember. I just knew you were there, and that I wanted to kill Jan Prochazka. Beyond that were semantics I couldn’t resolve.

Again, Neville pulled in a deep breath. He closed his eyes. “What pulled me out of that stupor was the memory of my parents. Those good people I came from. Both of them have passed by now, but I remembered standing behind the counter in the candy store after school while they worked taffy in the back. I loved working the cash register, because my classmates would frequently come into the candy store to see us there, especially the other immigrants like us. We were a beacon to them—successful business-owners, even if the candy store was a ramshackle corner-lot in a slumped-over dirty part of town. I remember taking orders and ringing up all kinds of my classmates, at first only the other southeast Asian ones, and later the other immigrants—the Poles, the Russians, the Brazilians—people who had no connection to this candy at all would come in just to marvel at what they, too, could hopefully own one day. And after a time, the classmates who weren’t immigrants came, too. Warily at first, and only for the American candies my parents learned to make to cater to people like them, but later for the others, too. My parents originally only sought to bring the candies and sweets they grew up with to the world, but after our Russian neighbors came to them and offered to show them how to make churchkela so they could sell that, too, they found a new dream: to unite the world through candy.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Neville said. “It’s a simple dream. It’s good and pure. It’s what dreams should be. And so soon my parent’s candy store had traditional delicacies from around the world. I think, at one point, they sold homemade candies from over thirty countries. They expanded, buying a newer store in a nicer part of town, rebranding to “Dream-World Candies and Sweets.” Their store was featured in the New York Times at one point as one of the top spots for sweets in the city.

“It’s still there, even though my parents are not. After my father passed away from lung cancer, my mother didn’t want to run the shop by herself. We were very close with the family that gave us the recipe for the churchkela at this point, and their now-adult children loved the store and the sense of community that it brought. They offered to take over for my mother so she could retire, and they still run the store to this day, making all the candies my parents made and a few others. They have an online store now too, and a larger facility, and they win awards for their sweets and such.

“I remember thinking about them then, sitting there in my office alone, and I finally spoke to someone. I asked them to get some kẹo dừa for me, as the first peep anyone had heard out of me in two days.”

He chuckled again. “They probably thought I’d gone crazy, and they’d have been right. I’d completely lost the plot. But they brought me that little white box with that coconut candy in it, and I took it back into my office alone, and I tasted it, and I remembered. It was just the same as it’d always been. The family we’d trusted with the recipe had not changed it at all. It was completely, totally identical to what I remembered as a child. And even though he was long gone I could taste the work of my father’s hands in it. I could feel them with me still.

“And I sat there in my office chair deep in the heart of the city, with my mangled, mistranslated war-poetry, and the dueling memories of my mother’s hands guiding mine over sugars and syrups against a cold pistol pressed against the back of an earth key’s neck, and my fingers curled around some pieces of coconut at the same time my finger curled around the trigger.

Neville sat back. He tilted his head up to the ceiling. And in the corners of his eyes—against all odds—were little red droplets. Warm and pulsing.

“I lost. I lost everything. I knew that I had become something despicable. That dream my parents had of peace died with me, and I was too consumed by myself to see it. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t kill myself from shame, as much as I wanted to when that feeling broke over me. I wasn’t allowed to. The void I’d leave would leave so much more destruction in its event horizon than I could ever wreak on my own. I had to finish what I started—and as I pored over my scattered notes I put together, slowly, the only way I could possibly make this right.”

I realized then that I completely misread the way he regarded me when I walked in. The comparisons were right—it was like a little lonely moth, or a single oak leaf, or scrap of paint—but I drew the wrong conclusion. He wasn’t looking at me like those things were inconsequential. He looked at me like they were: like they were something innocently wronged, left behind, to dry and die. The moth would never reach the sun, the leaf would be ground into dust underfoot, the paint scrap would fall.

It was pity, and it hurt me.

Neville took a breath. “Erika Hanover, I want to save you.”