{July 21}

“We’re dropping the hammer today,” Prochazka said.

I sat in his office with Yoru and Ava—the two of them directly in front of his desk, and myself off to the side. I wasn’t originally going to have a chair, but it turned out that he kept a folding chair under his desk for this exact purpose.

So there was Yoru and Ava in comfortable office chairs and myself in a little black metal folding one, with paint that peeled to reveal rust in a few places. A well-loved char, as it were.

“Sure,” Yoru said.

Today, Yoru and Ava had matching leather jackets, complete with useless zippers. I think they tried to coordinate their wardrobes often; essentially, they were one mind, and from the stories I heard they tried to make themselves of one body on every available occasion.

That’s what Cygnus told me, anyway, but I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time.

Yoru was an air-key and Ava was a nature-key. Air-keys always struck me as kind of useless; but he insisted it was good for all kinds of things. I’d asked him if he could fly a few days before and he said no, so that summed up my feelings on the matter.

And I’d never seen a nature key in action before, since my only exposure to the two of them as a team were when they were the negotiators, and I was the big stick they were supposed to speak softly and carry. Not that Yoru or Ava did a whole lot of speaking softly in the first place, but that was the sentiment, I supposed.

Prochazka was an air-key, too, although he didn’t wear his on the usual necklace like the rest of us. From Yoru’s, I knew that the physical air keys itself was the usual little silver key-charm on a chain, but with a single small pearl where the hole should be. Both he and Ava wore theirs all the time, so I knew that nature-keys had an emerald in the hole. Water-keys had a sapphire.

The keys were just fun little trinkets we could hold to remind ourselves that we weren’t ever going to be properly human again. The physical objects themselves, near as I could tell, didn’t serve any actual purpose aside from being pretty.

That aside—

Ava was much taller than Yoru. If I had to guess I’d say he was barely five-five; Ava was pushing five-ten. They made an odd-looking couple. I’d heard that Yoru was a bit sore that I was here, because my presence was a constant reminder that he was only handful of inches taller than a twelve-year-old girl, and—surprise—he didn’t like that very much.

“We received some intelligence that makes this matter a bit cleaner, actually,” Prochazka folding his hands together. For once, he sounded somewhat upbeat. “It turns out that they’re holding the hostages in the basement right in that building.”

“Huh,” Ava said. “That’s…kind of dumb of them.”

“These people don’t strike me as high caliber,” Prochazka said with a halfhearted shrug.

“Fair.”

“So we’re just going in there and…well, not just doing a slaughter, obviously, because then you’d just send the kids, but—”

“Right,” Prochazka said, interjecting. His voice was sober again. “We don’t know how they’re holding the hostages. Could be a number of things. We know this organization knows about magic in some regard, but we don’t know if they’re employing anyone. So the guards could be magic or they could be not. Alternatively, there could be a telepath that’s just keeping the hostages in place via mind-locks, but that’s sort of unlikely, unless their telepath is extremely powerful.”

“You know, I’ve still never actually seen anyone do that,” Yoru said. “I think it’s just something you think would be a good idea, and you keep hoping someone’ll be doing it so you get proven right.”

Ava started to giggle but sucked it back down as soon as she saw Prochazka’s face.

“I have seen it,” he said. “Just not in a really long time.”

“Not since ‘Nam,” Yoru said, grinning.

“Yeah,” Prochazka replied. “It’s not something you need when you’ve got the time and space to build proper jails.”

Yoru’s smile slowly faded. “Oh, right.”

“You fought in Vietnam?” I asked.

Prochazka nodded. He made a little wistful smile but didn’t elaborate on it.

“Don’t let him launch into this bullshit,” Ava said to me. “It’s not worth it.”

“I’m sure you can ask around in Hanoi and find some people who remember me very fondly,” Prochazka replied.

I blinked. “Is that…um, ironically, or…”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you later,” Ava said. “So, what exactly are we doing?”

Prochazka leaned in. “You’re going into 51 High Street. I want you to knock on the door. Demand to be taken to guy in charge and have Erika shoot each person who tells you no. Once you get up there, negotiate for the release of the prisoners, and then…well, the rest is personal discretion. The contract doesn’t specify any particular punishment or post-op action for these people, so do whatever strikes your fancy. How’s that?”

Yoru and Ava glanced at each other and nodded.

I sat behind them and nodded too, on a two-second delay.

0 0 0

High Street was a back-alley better suited to an extended dumpster than anything else. It was the sort of place you needed three reasons to be anywhere near. The only things there were the seediest dive bars in town and crushed, sloped sorts of dilapidated apartments with boards over half the windows that likely rented for a dollar a month.

51 High Street was one of those buildings, from what I could gather from the slowly increasing numbers and the road ahead of us. Every time we passed another storefront—open or closed—I’d scan for a number and mutter it under my breath without really meaning to.

After twenty-three, Ava told me to stop, so I did.

At least the sky was beautiful and blue, so you could almost imagine all was right with the world.

From where we were you couldn’t see the huge old factory we called home—it was buried behind the row of decay we walked alongside, somewhere behind it off to our right. To our left was a park that was more dirt than grass, with some old playground equipment in the distance and a baseball diamond that probably had bases marked on it at some point. Behind that was a basketball court that about a dozen people were using. Both Yoru and Ava were walking and talking, staring more at the game than where they were going.

I could imagine that all three of us were thinking of places we’d rather be.

“Oh, I said I’d explain that, didn’t I?” Ava said, as part of a conversation with Yoru I wasn’t a part of.

He scratched his head. “Yup.”

“Alright. Guess I’ll do that now, then. Hey, Erika,” she said.

I looked up at her.

“Remember what Prochazka said about ‘Nam?”

I nodded.

“You know he fought for them, right?”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Yoru interjected.

“Huh,” I replied.

I looked out again at the storefronts; counted thirty-seven, thirty-nine.

0 0 0

Ava wanted a soda, so we popped into a tiny bodega at 41 High Street.

The place was a microscopic hole in the wall featuring two floor racks packed with all kinds of salty and sugary snacks, some booze in fridges the back, and other random items. Everything not for sale appeared to be covered in a fine layer of dirt, but I figured that was due to the age of the place and not neglect.

Ava went right to one of the fridges along the wall next to the counter—the cashier eyeing her briefly as she went.

Behind the counter was an array of cigarettes and lottery tickets, the latter of which caught Yoru’s attention as he waited for Ava to go pick her soda. The man in the denim jacket behind the counter sat on a round stool, quietly waiting for Yoru to pick one, if he so chose.

Sitting on the counter was an adorable little stuffed frog with yellow feet. It was maybe nine inches long front foot to back foot—if I had to guess—with rings of green over black-bead eyes. It was tagless, but a little folded card next to it said that it was for sale; five dollars.

I went to pick up the frog—glancing over at the man behind the counter, who nodded in approval—and once I was holding it I found it was filled with tiny plastic beads. I bounced it up and down a few times, letting the arms and legs flap from the motion. Rolling some of the beads between my fingers through the frog’s velvet skin.

Then I put it back down, reached into my pocket, and realized I forgot my money at the base.

Yoru was still scanning the lottery tickets, but then he looked over at Ava—who was removing bottles of soda of different brands one by one and hefting them like she was testing their weight—and he muttered to himself, “I should be responsible,” and stopped.

Ava came over with the soda she decided was the heaviest, I guess, and also glanced down at the stuffed frog. “Cute,” she muttered, reaching into her pocket for some cash.

But she only bought the soda, and we left the store with the frog still on the counter—I took a glance back at it as we walked out, in time to see the cashier return the frog to the sitting position it was in before we came in and messed with it.

In the doorway, I said, “That frog was really cute.”

Ava said, “It totally was.”

0 0 0

Outside the bodega, Ava asked Yoru: “What do you want to do with the chaff?”

Yoru shrugged, pausing. “I don’t know. I guess we can just kill ‘em, right?”

“Sure, why not. Kind of what I was thinking.”

“Not like they deserve better.”

“Nah.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“The head guy?”

“Yuh.”

“Jim.”

“Funny. No, really, what is it?”

“Jim. His name is literally Jim this time.”

“God, really?”

“Jim’s a really common name, dude.”

“I know. It’s just—ah, whatever. Jim it is.”

“Yep. You good to go?”

Yoru was eyeing Ava’s bottle. “Shit, I kind of want a soda, too.”

“Go get one.”

He made a vaguely affirmative grunt and went back to the store.

That left me alone with Ava. I knew there was some kind of friction between us, but I wasn’t sure what it was about—it was just a strange invisible wall—and I didn’t know how to address it. She never went out of her way to talk to me without a reason; even Yoru did that, if only to lightly make fun. I never got the sense that Yoru was really being antagonistic, even though the teasing made me squirm. He always made sure to pull back if it seemed like I was taking it too hard. Ava, on the other hand, just didn’t talk to me. She was too tall, too cool and collected, to associate with someone like me. In a lot of ways she reminded me of an older, cooler version of myself—she had the black bob I wanted to do when I was older, the piercing eyes I wished I had—and in the same blue, too—and she was tall enough to make the biker jacket work, which I was still too young and too small to do. I could almost pass as her younger sister, assuming nobody looked too closely. Her hair was dyed and mine wasn’t—and I had just enough of my mother in my genes to not quite make it as any completely white person’s little sister.

This was one of the only times I’d been with her without Yoru. Now I had a single chance, for a minute and a half, to ask her why she was always so cold to me while Yoru was not. I could finally find out what it was I did.

But instead of coming up with something that had nuance, I just asked her, point-blank: “Do you hate me?”

Maybe it was the crystal-clear sun making me crazy, the light refracting through her green soda bottle, the liquid inside catching and glinting with the glare behind it.

I was never that forward, never in my whole life.

Ava finished taking her drink, and she re-twisted the cap back on, and said, “You’re better at dealing blackjack than me. Why the fuck do you know how to do that?”

Yoru emerged from the store with a soda and we set off again.