99 - Idle Hands, Idle Blood [September 3rd, Age 15]

Neville insisted that this was his ultimate goal. It wasn’t originally, but now that he was a changed man, transformed by his divine revelation, it was. This was why the propaganda about me had taken such a sharp turn away from the violent and unforgiving it used to be. This was why, when in Sal’s house, they took a shot at Bell and not me. This was why I was invincible out there. I was never meant to be targeted.

This, somehow, was an elaborate rescue mission.

We sat in room 608 in one of the nearby buildings—an apartment for two Matthew and I would be staying in now that I was well enough to not need medical attention—slowly decompressing as Neville’s words sank into us. Talia followed us back, if only to be present for when we inevitably tried to dissect what Neville said. She didn’t say anything as we walked. I got the sense that the encounter had soundly defeated her.

I was far more tired than I thought I was. As soon as I sat down in the easy chair in that quiet distant room, I got sleepy, and hungry. I suppose I’d just been suppressing all of that while Neville was talking, but now that we were alone I had the freedom to feel again.

So we just sat there. Matthew sat on one side of the couch, the side closer to my easy chair, and Talia sat on the opposite end of the couch from him. There was a big TV mounted on the wall opposite us, but nobody moved to take the remote off the low coffee table to turn it on.

I felt like the impetus was on me to talk. This was about me, after all—swirling around me just like everything always seemed to—but with Talia there I figured anything I said would get thrown right back at me. I’d seen this movie enough times to know how it ended.

Still, though—in all the versions of this I’d done before I knew that it ended in Talia screaming at me even if I didn’t say anything, so I swallowed and broke the silence anyway. Better to get it over with than let it stew.

“I kind of thought it had to be something like that,” I said, quietly. “He should’ve killed me when I was at Sal’s house, but he didn’t.”

And I braced myself for Talia’s retort, eyes closed, but Matthew spoke instead. “I agree,” he said. “I…guessed it was something like this when you were in the hospital bed recovering. It had to be.”

I reopened my eyes, as if that mattered, and traced the general orientation of Matthew’s face. He was probably looking at Talia, waiting for her to say something for herself. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at her too and double the pressure, so I kept myself small and focused on running droplets along the lines between the buttons on the TV remote.

Talia took longer than I expected to respond. When she did, she didn’t snap—her voice was just as low and quiet as Matthew and I. “I mean…he admitted he’d gone crazy, didn’t he?”

Matthew’s face didn’t change. She went on. “What if we just killed her?”

“I’m not going against Neville’s order,” Matthew said, dry.

“He just admitted he’d gone crazy,” she repeated. “Who gives a shit what he thinks now?”

“It’s probably a figure of speech.”

“Look,” Talia said. “I…” She trailed off. She probably had something planned to say, but somewhere along the line it drifted out of her ears and she couldn’t catch it again. Instead, she straightened up a little bit and started taking apart her bun, shaking it out. Her hair was a lot longer than I thought it would be.

“Any chance there’s an Advil in here?” she said. “Tied this thing way too fucking tight. Didn’t really think I’d be on the clock for this long.”

“I’d be surprised,” Matthew said. “Maybe just have some water.”

Talia frowned, stood up, and went over to the little kitchenette area to look for a glass. “Matt, listen,” she said, in between searching cupboards. “Does this not freak you out at least a little?”

“Not much does,” he said. “It’s a part of the deal.”

“Cut the Biiri horseshit,” Talia said, in as close to a proper snap as she could manage—which is to say she raised her voice slightly and that was it.

Matthew shrugged. “I don’t get rattled easily.”

“Okay, but—look. Something’s obviously wrong with him. Can we agree on that?”

He looked down at his fingernails. “Something is definitely not the same as it was, and it conflicts with the way we generally think about him.”

“So, yes.”

“So, not necessarily,” Matthew replied. “Talia, I know you’re not happy about this, but look who you’re talking to. My job is to help Neville with whatever he needs done. Erika is literally in the room with us. I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish here.”

“I don’t know,” she replied, dully. She found a glass, but hadn’t yet turned on the faucet. “Maybe a little support or something."

"Support in what? Treason?”

“It’s not treason. We’re not a country.”

“We might as well be a city-state,” Matthew said. “That’s pretty close.”

“What if we killed him?” Talia said. “I can run this joint.”

Matthew snorted. “If I helped you overthrow Neville, I’m pretty sure the family head would execute me.”

“Fucking Biiris,” Talia said. “You people are so goddamn weird.”

“Not gonna disagree with that.”

“I’d help,” I said.

Talia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you’re next. Don’t get perky.”

“Good luck with that,” I replied, without turning away from the remote.

“Matthew is literally already in your head,” Talia said. “You can’t do shit.”

I let my eyes focus on Matthew. I found that doing that tended to make people really uncomfortable, especially people who knew, demonstrably, that I was blind. The droplet bouncing was good enough for me to know where objects were, so if I really wanted to I could still look conventionally engaged, but my eyes had decayed just enough where they always looked somewhat unfocused, even when I was pointing them where I intended to.

So I reined in my thousand-yard dead fish stare and pointed it at Matthew.

“Do you really think you can quick-draw me?” I asked him.

Matthew took longer than he should have to answer. It was long enough where I knew I’d won. Even though his response was, “We’d find out, wouldn’t we?”

“I’m sure we would,” I replied.

And just for effect, I grabbed hold of the water on the other side of the valve below the kitchen sink and worked it open, turning the faucet on.

Rested my cheek on my fist, elbow on the arm of the chair.

Talia blinked, surprised—then held her cup out to fill it up, to which I responded by curving the stream of water away from her, no matter where she followed it. That caught Matthew’s attention for a second—and despite himself, he smirked.

“Neville’s got a lot of loyalists,” Matthew said, after a while.

“Has a lot of loyalists,” Talia corrected. “Not guarantee he’ll still have them if we tell people what he told us.”

“He’ll contradict you.”

“Literally all we have to do is point at Erika and remind people of the orders they have not to touch her,” Talia said. “This would literally be the easiest revolt of all time. God, we were so close to winning this, perfectly clean. This is literally the only way we could possibly screw this up at this point. I swear to God. I thought I was done with this when I moved out of Atlanta.”

As an after thought, she added. “Can’t believe his parents owned Dream-World Candies, though. I used to go there all the time in college. I probably said hi to his dad a bunch of times.”

She snorted. “It’s always the weird shit like that that comes back to bite you, isn’t it?”

Then she turned to me. “Can you stop it? I’m so goddamn thirsty. I just want a drink.”

I’d sort of forgotten I was still keeping the water away from her, since it was such an absentminded afterthought, so I let go of the stream without a word.

She filled her cup. I’d bent the valve’s door out of shape when I turned the water on in the first place, so I bent it back with some extra force and did my best to straighten it out. Then she walked back to her spot on the couch, took a long drink of the water, and put the cup down on the coffee table. Put her hands over her face and rubbed her forehead for a moment, mumbling, “Jesus.”

We all sat there in silence for a while. After a time—and a couple sips of water—Talia spoke again. “There’s…there’s one more thing that’s bothering me.”

“Go for it,” Matthew replied.

“What if that’s not it?” she said.

Both Matthew and I hit our confused expressions simultaneously. “What?” he said.

“Listen,” she said. “Neville…didn’t actually tell us anything? Am I insane for thinking we got blown off?”

Matthew frowned. “He…”

“He gave us his life story,” Talia said. “Which I kind of already knew. I already knew he was a refugee and that his parents were normal people who didn’t come from money or anything. I knew they owned some kind of normal-ass business somewhere in the city. I knew that Neville was, you know, a super normal, average kid. He’s told me all of that before. He’s probably told you some of that, too, right?”

Matthew shrugged. “Yeah.”

“So…what was the new information there? That he wants to save Erika? Save her by doing what?”

Matthew’s jaw loosened like he was about to speak, but then he didn’t. After another moment, he mumbled his response: “Fuck.”

“Yeah. “Fuck” is right,” Talia went on. “He literally didn’t tell us anything. We got played.”

“So what do you want to do? Flick the switch again? He’ll lose it.”

“No,” Talia said. “Can’t do that. But…I don’t know, maybe we can figure this out.”

“With what, Talia?” Matthew’s hands tensed, twitched. “So he got sentimental. He’s what, fifty? Fifty-five? He could just be having a mid-life crisis.”

“A mid-life crisis like this? Where he throws away everything he’s built?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time someone over fifty did something stupid.”

“But…him?”

“You said it yourself,” Matthew said, leaning back. Looking up at the ceiling fan over the coffee table, which nobody had turned on. “He admitted he’s lost it.”

Talia frowned. “I—I don’t know,” she said, quiet again. “I guess I just want to believe he’s not this stupid.”

“I’m sure he’s got a reason,” Matthew said.

Talia took a deep breath through her nose and let it out again. Matthew picked up the conversation thread again, before she had a chance to piece a retort together. “Erika, what do you think?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Why do you think Neville wants you?”

My lips pursed tight. I knew I couldn’t possibly win here. It didn’t matter what I said—it was getting blown up regardless. I didn’t really have any evidence that that was going to be what happened, but I’d already decided it and therefore it was law.

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The least I could do was be honest. The least I could do, if I was getting yelled at anyway, was say what I really thought.

“I don’t know,” I said. And I shrugged. “I just don’t know. I don’t know why I’m still alive. I don’t know why these things happen to me. I’m just…I’m just here. I just exist. I don’t try and make it make sense anymore. I just have too much on my plate. I—honestly…do you want to know what I think?”

I’d found a new direction without knowing exactly where it pointed. Matthew raised his eyebrows at me and I took that as an invitation to continue.

And the words floated out of my mouth, just as new to me as they were to Matthew and Talia: “I just want to go home. I don’t even really know where that is anymore, though. I don’t know what I mean by that. I know the feeling is—it’s the same one I get when I’m out waiting in line somewhere and I’m bored and I’m thinking about my bed, or something like that, but…I don’t know what place it’s referring to anymore. It can’t be the Radiant because there’s nobody there. It can’t be my dad’s place, because that place never really felt like home, even when I was living there. And it’s sure as hell not here.”

I looked down. “I don’t know why people keep expecting me to know things. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t know anything. I just do what people tell me to do. There’s nothing here, guys. There’s just not. It’s—I don’t know. It’s not fair. Nothing that’s happened to me makes any sense. I keep getting rewarded for things I should be punished for, and I keep getting punished for things I should be rewarded for.”

Matthew shrugged. “Fair? You’re asking about fair?”

I paused, realized I’d already braced for this, and let it happen. But Matthew didn’t snap as hard as I was expecting him to. “Nothing is ever fair, Erika,” he said. “”Fair”” is a delusion. It’s a lie people tell themselves before they realize that fair isn’t ever possible. What’s fair to you isn’t necessarily fair to me. There’s too many factors to balance. The whole concept of something being “fair” is just stupid. There’s only what is. Cause and effect is only a thing in science. In life, it’s never that black-and-white. There’s too many causes to ever actually tag them to an effect directly. You can’t ever really know what something you say is going to do to someone else. You just can’t.”

He paused for a moment. “I don’t know either, Erika. That’s the secret. Nobody fucking knows. Nobody knows anything. If people knew, things there wouldn’t be any conflict, because we’d know how to avoid them. Conflicts only ever happen because someone doesn’t know something.”

Matthew glanced at Talia, who’d gone completely blank. Then he returned his attention to me. “I can’t believe you haven’t already figured this out. This applies to you more than anyone else I’ve ever seen. The sheer ridiculousness of the concept of “fair” is better shown off by you than anyone else I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of really screwed up, totally nonsensical people. You ran away from home at twelve to join a magical mercenary group so you could take out your frustration at having a bad home life by murdering hordes of more-or-less mostly-innocent people with icicles in increasingly devious and disgusting ways. You started drinking heavily at thirteen. You’ve got a sixth-grade education and an absolutely ice-cold soul and you’re out here asking why shit isn’t fair.”

Matthew snorted. He totally failed at stifling a laugh. “How do you not look at your life and just cackle maniacally at how stupid it is? Do you not see the huge cosmic joke here? Can you not guess the punchline? Look at you! Jesus Christ, Erika, look at you!

“Of course it’s not fair! Of course it doesn’t make sense! Why would it? Why would anything, ever, make any ounce or semblance of fucking sense?”

I was so used to this sort of outburst now that it all went through one ear and out the other. I knew, perfectly well, that I didn’t make much sense. There were cause and effects, I’m sure, but the net they formed was too tightly woven for me to pick out threads. It wasn’t worth the effort. That was well-established.

So my only response to Matthew’s explosion, his first, and frankly the first kind of strong emotion I’d ever seen him have, was a halfhearted shrug. And then I said, “I know, Matthew. I just misspoke, that’s all.”

That deflated him, and he didn’t say anything else.

Talia filled the gap. “Y’all,” she said, softly. “I figured it out.”

Matthew, still too frustrated to talk, left it up to me to respond to her. “Really?” I asked.

Talia didn’t ignore me, or give me a dirty look, or anything like that. Matthew had said more or less everything she’d wanted to say, I guessed. She crossed her legs. “I was trying to figure out what Neville would’ve wanted to do with you,” she started. “So I started thinking about what aspect of Neville’s life you would improve, or something like that. He obviously needs you for some plan, right? That much is clear. So—so I was trying to figure out what was missing. And…God, I think I got it. It’s so fucking stupid. It’s—it’s honestly mind-boggling how dumb it is. How brilliant, if it’s real, but how…just…I don’t know. It’s insane.”

“Spit it out,” Matthew muttered.

“I was thinking about Neville’s life story. How he came up from nothing. How—I don’t know. He’s so…what, normal? No, not that. He’s so—white, I guess. Conventionally so. His name’s Neville, his English is perfect, his story is this kind of uplifting bootstraps-bullshit. But it’s missing something. It’s missing an antagonist.”

“Prochazka,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s where he fits in,” she said. “But when you’re looking for a standard American bullshit story, you need a third element. There’s gotta be a MacGuffin to win. Treasure or something. Or, more traditionally, a damsel in distress.”

I didn’t have a response to that. Matthew did, though. “Why are we looking for this, again?”

“I’m getting there,” Talia said. “Neville talked about how he was upset at himself for his methods getting more and more brutal, right? It really seemed like that’s one of the things that caused his breakdown. But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a sign of the times. I think he’s losing faith in our ability to keep magic under wraps.”

Neither of us, now, could muster an answer.

“We’re all thinking it, aren’t we?” Talia asked. Her voice had taken on an edge of desperation. “That this shit can’t last. There’s too many of us and too many cameras. Someone’s gonna get something on film that can’t be definitively written off as a prank or a stunt at some point. Someone’s gonna blow up a building on live TV. It’s only a matter of time. It’s coming, and we all know it. Neville’s not stupid. Prochazka and Loybol aren’t stupid, either. There’s this war, sure, the one between the three of them, but there’s another, greater war that we’re all united in—and it’s a war against time, and we all know that it’s straight-up, stone-cold unwinnable. All wars against time are.”

Matthew drew in a breath, slowly.

Talia continued. “So what Neville is doing here, I think, is trying to create a narrative. He’s trying to build a squeaky-clean little story that paints him as a hero in a universally-palatable way so that people can see that the magical community takes care of itself, and that people don’t have anything to worry about it because it’s self-policing. I don’t know how he managed to figure this shit out with the situation we have, but it’s honestly insane how well it works out. I mean, look at the country. Look at how divided it is. Getting everyone under one roof on something is basically impossible, but if anyone can do it with a story, I think it might be this one.”

Talia let that hang for a second, and then started into it. “Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Neville Nguyen, who came to the United States after fleeing communism looking for a better life. His parents were good citizens who learned good clean English and opened a candy store, bringing one of their favorite parts of their country to the US. They helped other immigrants do the same. Neville’s family is everything the right wants out of immigrants combined with everything the left wants out of them. It’s perfect, guys. They somehow fit both requirements to a T. They’re diverse, but perfectly sanitized. They integrated flawlessly and everyone loved them.

“But the enemy—a black communist named Jan Prochazka from the old Soviet Union who fought our good American soldiers in Vietnam—had invaded the United States to finish what he started. And he’d captured an innocent little girl, Erika Hanover, someone who’s also vaguely diverse but mostly just white, and he’d been brainwashing her into becoming the most powerful child soldier ever.”

I went very still.

Talia continued, speaking fast, fingers working through each other. “The good Neville Nguyen couldn’t bear to see a child be abused by this evil black communist, who was terrorizing the primarily white, good clean country people of upstate New York, and so he told his organization—an organization of cops, who kept New York City safe and sound like this is a fuckin’ Marvel comic—that they had to engage in a rescue mission. Save Erika Hanover before it’s too late.”

She breathed. “It’s perfect. It’s traditional enough for the right. It’s got all the parts, even the quiet parts, perfectly in order. It’s a tale as old as time, and it can easily be read as a white supremacist allegory for the turbo-crazies out there. But it’s got the trappings of diversity to throw people off the scent. It’s also got a message of peace and unity across cultures, a kind of one-world joy that all the hippies want. Neville is an immigrant, Erika is—I don’t know, vaguely East Asian, kind of. You’re cute and small, that’s all anyone’s really going to care about. On top of that, the way magic actually works is probably really appealing to the left. It’s an equalizer. The people who need it are the people that, generally, get it. The lost, the abused, the destitute. The folks on top rarely ever do. It’s a defense mechanism against exploitation by the privileged classes hard-coded into human existence that the we’ve forced ourselves to suppress for all this time.”

“The narrative Neville creates with this perfectly shifts the world without magic into the world with. It’s a blueprint for a new world. It’s—it’s probably the best shot we’ll ever get to making a clean break of it. And…and it might be our last possible chance for anything even vaguely resembling a peaceful reveal.”

Talia buried her face in her hands. “Fuck. It’s—it’s all there. God. I probably sound like I’m going nuts. I don’t know. I’m having a pretty bad day.”

“I think we all are,” Matthew mumbled.

Silence.

“Obviously I can’t prove any of this,” Talia said, under her breath. Just loud enough to carry across the room to me. “But I’m not sure I can draw any other lines. I think it’s gotta be. It connects the dots. It’s grand enough to need to keep secret, because it inherently betrays our organization, but it’s something we all know, deep down, needs to be done at some point. Someone has to blink, and—all our petty squabbles, all our fighting, that’s all it’s really about, isn’t it? It’s all an elaborate staring contest.”

I couldn’t muster a response. I wasn’t sure if Matthew was going to, either—and he didn’t, for a good ten seconds. And once he did, I could tell that even he was disappointed with how limp it was—how unfulfilling, how pedestrian it was. This simple thing was all he could say. “I think you’re overthinking this,” Matthew said, dull.

“Maybe,” Talia said, with equal soulless tone.

“There’s just no way. I don’t even think people would see it like you do. That’s an awful lot of assumptions.”

Talia didn’t reply for a moment, but when she did, a little bit of that fire was back. “It doesn’t matter what I think about it,” she said. “It only matters what Neville thinks. If he thinks this’ll work, that’s it—that’s the plan. He doesn’t have to actually be right. He just has to think he’s going to be. Or he just has to think this is the best possible shot at it, and…well, I agree with that. I think it might be.”

“There’s just so many ways it could fail,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “And all of them fail spectacularly and catastrophically for everyone involved.”

“But the alternative could be so much worse,” Talia went on.

“That’s what we’ve always worried about,” I added. “It’s just…I don’t know. Is that a catch-22?”

“Not really,” she replied.

“Oh. Either way, it’s—it’s a…I don’t know. It sucks.”

That, at the very least, was something we could all agree on.

“Yeah,” Matthew said, and Talia grunted in agreement.

We fell quiet again for a second, waiting to see who’d speak next. Talia picked it up, as she often did. I got the sense that she didn’t like silence, especially silence around people she didn’t like. I got the sense that she didn’t like either me or Matthew all that much—frankly, I wasn’t really sure who she did like.

Maybe she was just having a bad day, as she said.

“So what do we do?” Talia asked, to the air. To the stopped fan above us.

I shrugged. Matthew said, “I don’t know.”

“Do we just do nothing?” Talia said. “I mean…do we just…let him do it?”

It was Matthew’s turn to muster an absent shrug. “I don’t know,” he said again, with a slighter sharper edge. “If I knew, I’d have said so by now.”

“Right,” Talia said.

“I’ll think about it,” Matthew said. “And I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. How about that? You think about it too. And...” Matthew gestured at me. “Erika’ll think about it too. It’s about her, anyway. Maybe she’ll come up with something.”

I nodded, even though I couldn’t imagine an idea I could come up with making much of a difference here. I couldn’t help but turn a little red at his statement, though. I thought I was getting mocked again. That said—I was probably just reading into it too much. I just remember feeling embarrassed when he said it.

It doesn’t really matter, though. We were all having a pretty bad day.

Silently, Talia rose from the couch. She walked around us—past Matthew, through the gap between the couch and my easy chair—and went to the door, where she’d left her shoes. She stopped there, before crouching down to put them on, and looked back at both of us. I wasn’t facing her, but I had droplets collected there, so I knew what she was doing: looking out, face loose, shoulders drooped. Eyes a little too wide. Breathing hard and slow—steady breaths, calming ones.

“I’m going home,” she announced, as though it wasn’t already obvious. “Matt, I’ll just—I’ll just call you if I think of anything. You call me if you do. Okay?”

“If me or Erika do. Sure.”

“Yeah,” Talia grunted. “We’ll…I don’t know, Matt. We’ll figure this out. This is really fucked up. I’m sure this is harder for you than it is for me, what with…you know, the whole Biiri ordeal.”

“Mhm,” Matthew said, low. “This doesn’t happen to us very often. Not sure there’s a line in the playbook for it.”

I wasn’t sure if that was metaphorical or not and I wasn’t about to ask.

“Who knows,” Talia said, straightening up. She was actually pretty tall, now that I had an easier time resolving her shape. She was taller than Loybol by a decent amount, if memory served. “Maybe this’ll resolve itself.”

“Maybe,” Matthew replied, convincing absolutely nobody.

Talia shrugged. “Well, I’m going to bed. See you tomorrow.”

She reached for the door’s handle and stopped. “I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier,” she said. “I was having a shit day before all of this happened, and now…”

“It’s fine,” Matthew replied. “We’re all having a shit day, and we all said some things we don’t mean. I’m not holding it against you.”

I tried to think if I’d said anything I didn’t mean today, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Putting myself on the spot for recollections like that rarely worked out well, and even though I’d only put that pressure on myself and had nobody to explicitly answer to, I still couldn’t quite do it.

So I shrugged and tried not to worry about it too much.

Talia nodded, mouth pulled tight. “Well, good night,” she said in a small voice, as the door swung open, creaking gently.

Matthew offered her a halfhearted wave which she returned, and then she closed the door behind her with a soft click.

Sitting there in total silence now, and without Talia’s presence distracting me, I realized that I didn’t fix the sink’s flow valve quite right, and it wasn’t forming a good seal. The sink was leaking, just a little—a drip every ten seconds or so. I thought about going back in there and trying to straighten it out again, but enough time had passed between now and when I’d messed with it in the first place where I couldn’t quite remember just how I’d altered it.

I didn’t want to make it any worse, so I left it alone and didn’t say anything. Matthew knew I’d messed it up, too—after a few drips, he turned to the faucet and watched it for a little while, just to see if it’d have the audacity to defy him and drip right before his eyes—and it did. Matthew frowned, like it had insulted him personally, but didn’t say anything to me or it.

Obviously, it was just a faucet. Obviously, it doesn’t think or plan these things. It drips because someone made it do that. It doesn’t know who it was. It doesn’t know why it drips. It doesn’t even know what dripping is. It was an inanimate fucking object and I’m not sure why I spent so long thinking about it—all I know is that Matthew spent about as long as I did with it, too, staring at the faucet like he was daring it to keep dripping. Drip and see what happens. Drip and see where that gets you.

And, of course, it did—like clockwork, like sunrise.

After a few minutes of silence and staring and shifting in his spot on the couch, Matthew got bored and reached for the remote, scattering the droplets I’d laid on it earlier and forgotten to remove.

He touched the remote and winced, because it was gently moist. Glanced at me and I instinctively turned away from him, even though his gesture was just two wet balls rolling in their sockets, even though I couldn’t see it—even though it didn’t mean anything to me.

We were all just having a really bad day.