We made it to the top floor. On the way there I executed three other random henchman who hadn’t explicitly followed the other one to their deaths. We weren’t strictly supposed to kill everyone, but it just ended up being easier that way.

Why bother trying to separate the innocent from the guilty?

On the top floor there was a bedroom with the door closed—it was the only room up there that had a door. Presumably, it was where the boss of this operation worked.

Given that the door was still closed despite all the commotion downstairs, I wondered if we could have just ignored him, gone downstairs, freed the prisoners, and left.

Ava seemed to share that sentiment. “Maybe we should just go free everyone first.”

Yoru shrugged. “I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

“I can handle this myself. You go down there,” she said.

“Got it,” he replied. “I’ll come back when I’m done, ‘kay?”

Ava grunted something vaguely affirmative in his direction and took hold of the doorknob. Yoru disappeared back down the steps, and Ava opened the door.

Behind the desk was a man clutching a small handgun; paralyzed by the sounds he’d heard coming from downstairs. He was oddly well put together for a human trafficker—that didn’t seem like a suit-and-tie sort of job, but here that man was: some flavor of eastern European, six foot on the dot if I had to guess, wearing a suit and tie and sitting behind a child’s desk in a converted bedroom, clutching a little black pistol at a young woman and child.

What a world.

There hadn’t been any screams—only squelches and thumps; a sign of a job well done. As soon as he saw Ava his finger twitched around the trigger; but then he saw me, and he held back.

“Who the hell are you?” he growled—it was the closest thing to a menacing voice he could manage, surely.

Ava opened her mouth and I cut her off. “I’m Erika, this is Ava. We killed everyone.”

She took a quick glance at me, one of no substance that I could tell whatsoever, and said: “Yeah, that’s more or less it. I’m gonna be real with you, man, I don’t really know what we’re supposed to do here. My colleague is downstairs right now busting all the prisoners out. We represent Jan Prochazka of the Radiant, by the way—I’m supposed to tell you that. Not that it matters much.”

Ava shrugged. “Listen. We’re supposed to negotiate with you for the release of the prisoners, but since you only have four guys in this whole building for some fucking reason, we just killed everyone and we’re just going to bust the prisoners out. Theoretically there was supposed to be a way you’d make it out of this alive, but at this point I just want to go home.”

She punctuated it with another shrug. “And God, I just really do not have any sympathy for you.”

Ava gestured vaguely at me, then turned around. “Do whatever you want. Dude’s too much of a pussy to shoot a kid. I don’t know if you’ve got anything resembling rage up in there, but if you do, now’s the time.”

She patted me on the shoulder once. I zapped to attention.

Then she said, “Get ’em,” and left the room.

I blinked; the guy behind the desk did more or less the same.

What was his name? Last week I was told—by the guy I froze to the side of a pool table; something he’d gasped before I decapitated him. That was only seven days, wasn’t it? Maybe eight; but either way, not that long. And for all I knew it might as well have been a lifetime, with everything I’d seen and done since then.

God, it was on the tip of my tongue. I clawed at that blank spot in my memory and could not for the life of me dredge it up.

Instead, I started thinking about how Yoru and Ava essentially didn’t do anything today. I can read a map, I could’ve gotten here myself. I’ve taken the city buses around before, it’s not hard. We didn’t actually negotiate with anyone, either, and not negotiating is one of my strong suits.

So why couldn’t I have done this alone?

“It was all me,” I said to him.

“You what?”

“I did all the dirty work today,” I replied. “Yoru and Ava didn’t even do anything. I’m just a bruiser again.”

He didn’t react to that. I’m not sure the term meant anything to him. Instead, he asked me: “That was Ava, huh?”

“Yep.”

He put the gun down on the table. “She seems like a real bitch.”

I didn’t have much of an opinion on Ava—it only went as far as this: “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“Can’t imagine why,” the guy said.

I glanced down at the water bottle. “I’m almost out,” I mumbled, mostly to myself.

He had a mug of coffee on his desk, though, so in a pinch I could use that. It was still mostly full, too, which was a plus.

“You’re one of them key users, huh?” he said. Slipping out of formalities.

I nodded. “Yep.”

“You can manipulate water?”

“Mhm.”

“That’s pretty cool,” he said.

“It is,” I replied.

It was more or less all I had to call my own, but I didn’t say that.

Then, like a revelation from heaven—

“Jim!” I said.

“Huh?” he asked.

“That’s your name,” I said. “I just remembered.”

I turned red; what a stupid thing to say to someone. Obviously, Jim knew his own name.

“How old are you?” Jim asked.

“I’m twelve,” I said. “I joined the Radiant about a month ago.”

“Bit young for this work, aren’t you?” he replied.

“I don’t think so. I can’t really do anything else.”

“Sure you can,” Jim said, adopting some kind of mock concern. It couldn’t have been real concern; that was impossible for guys like him. “You’re young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“Not really,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to make it past thirty.”

His eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that—is that a key thing, or…”

“No, most key users live to around a hundred and fifty or sixty.” I paused, briefly; but I was never going to see this man again, so what did it matter? I was going to shoot him through the head and walk out in two minutes anyway.

Anything I said in here was as good as said to myself.

“I don’t think much about the future,” I said. “There’s too much to think about. I used to think I’d just—stop, kind of…I don’t know, blink out of existence when I turned thirty. Like that was enough life for me, or…that was all the time I’d bought, or something. Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve got it pretty good now. I could see myself going past that, but…I don’t know. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I used to be pretty dead-set on stopping then, when things were really bad. But I’ve been blessed.” I drew a bit of water out of the bottle and let it slither around in the air for a moment, just to show him that I could. “With this. And with them.”

I gestured behind me. I thought I had more to say, but somewhere in there it fell out of my short-term memory, so I just let my arm limply fall back to my side and stopped talking.

“Oh,” Jim said. After a moment, he added: “You consider Ava a blessing?”

“Yep.”

“She’s horrible to you,” he said. “I’ve seen her for maybe five seconds and even I can tell that.”

“I don’t think you’d understand,” I said.

“I’m not sure I need to,” he said. “She obviously thinks you’re trash.”

“It’s not her specifically. That I’ve been blessed with, I mean. It’s all of them. You wouldn’t get it.”

Jim paused. “Maybe not,” he said, quietly. He looked down at the gun again, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if he was going to pick it up and shoot me or pick it up and shoot himself. Neither option would’ve surprised me.

Instead, he said: “Erika, look. What are you doing with people like them? They obviously don’t respect you, and I…I mean, God. Not like they’re angels either.”

“You’re a human trafficker,” I said.

Jim looked me dead in the eye—it made my mind buzz; it gave me an irresistible urge to look away.

“Erika, there isn’t anyone in the basement,” he said. “Swear on my life. I have no idea why the hell you people are here.”

But he shrugged, gave me a halfhearted smile. “But you’re a key user and I’m just a guy with a toy gun, so it’s not like I can stop you if you don’t believe me.”

“I could just go downstairs and check,” I said.

“You could,” he replied.

“That seems like a bad idea, though,” I said. “Worst case I just wait for Ava to get back and then I kill you.”

Jim shrugged again. It seemed like all he was capable of doing, like this was some cruel jokes’ end for him. I suppose it was, after all. “Worth a shot.”

“I guess,” I replied.

I looked at him again. “Why do you care what I do with my life?”

Jim looked down into his coffee mug for a moment—it dawned on him that even if I put down the water bottle, or if I missed with my shot from it, he was dead to the coffee anyway. So there was no way out, none at all.

No outs. Dead to rites—dead on board, as Benji occasionally referred to it.

“I don’t,” he said. “I mean, you’re about to blow my brains out. But you probably should, right?”

I thought briefly about the stuffed frog I didn’t get to buy, and for half a second I was sad.

“It’s not really much of a life.”

“Any life is a life.”

“I don’t think the people downstairs would agree,” I said.

And I felt really proud of myself, because that was the first good comeback I’d ever come up with in my life. I stashed it in my memory for future usage.

His shiny veneer of care broke. The weight of his imminent death broke over him, and as he slumped forward under the weight of it he spoke his true feelings, as best I understood them: “You’re twelve fucking years old,” he said.

“I am,” I replied.

“What the fuck is happening?”

“This is,” I said. “This is happening.”

“No. You’re—God, I’m just gonna repeat myself again. This is some crazy shit. Ben’s never gonna believe me when I tell him,” he said.

“You won’t be telling him anything.”

“He’s dead,” Jim said. “He was my twin brother. He died of a brain tumor when he was twenty-six. It was…um…four years ago now? God, where does the time go. You’ll be thirty before you know it, you know. It sneaks up on you. One day you’re thirteen and all you care about is the math test and that fuck who keeps shooting spitballs at you—do kids still do that?—and the next you’re twenty-two and you’re trying to get a job out of college, but none of your skills line up with anything because you were too goddamn stupid to major in something useful, and then…well…you’re thirty years old and you don’t know how you got here or when you got so jaded. I don’t know where I am, Erika, I really have no idea. How did I get here? I don’t think I could trace the path back even if I tried.”

He looked down at his desk again, glanced over at the coffee. He picked up the mug and took a sip. “You know what, fuck it. I was gonna try and distract you with a story and shoot you, but…god damn it, that bitch was right. I can’t shoot a kid. That’s your real superpower, you know. I don’t know who Jan Prochazka is, but if he’s enough of a rat bastard to put a kid on the front lines, then he deserves whatever’s coming to him.”

“I do this of my own free will,” I said. “I want to do this.”

“Sure you do,” he muttered. “Sure you do.”

My tone did not change. “I’m going to kill you now,” I said.

“Knock yourself out, kid,” he mumbled. “You do you.”

I took hold of the coffee in his mug—it was room-temperature black coffee, which made this whole thing easier—and I made it bubble a bit, in anticipation.

“Thirty’s a blink away,” Jim said. “That’s all I got for you. You’ll be thirty before you know it. If I were you, I’d make the deadline forty or fifty. Thirty’s not enough time to figure out if life is good or bad. It’s barely enough time to figure out who the fuck you are.”

I picked a point in the center of the coffee mug and pulled it out, dragging all the coffee out behind it—freezing it as it went—and it fired itself like a model rocket into Jim’s forehead, cracking through the bone plate of his forehead and splattering his red-gray brains across the window behind his desk.

That was it, I suppose.

I don’t really have anything else to say.

0 0 0

That night Yoru announced we were gonna play some blackjack, which put me on the hook to deal, much to Ava’s chagrin.

Before we started, though, he pulled me aside.

“Can we talk for a second? Outside,” he said.

I nodded. “Sure.”

By that point I already had a beer in me, and I’m so small that it was enough to loosen me up a bit.

I never really felt like a real person until I had one. I knew it wasn’t good to drink too often, but I figured one or two beers two times a week wasn’t going to kill me. It was a small price to pay to not have to stand out when everyone was together, having fun. At first, I didn’t like it, and just suffered through the drink for the sake of it, but lately I was changing my mind.

We left the big room that Unit 6 used as a joint common-room and barracks—with two bunk beds on either side, a single bed next to each bunk set, and a big round table in the middle flanked by mini-fridges, and stepped out into the lonely hall.

Yoru shuffled a bit. He only met my eyes for a second. “What took you so long out there?”

I blinked. “Oh. Um…Ava talked to the guy up there for a bit, and then she left, and I shot him. I spent a little while just standing around up there, though.”

I’ve never been good at lying, not outright, anyway, but over time I’ve developed an equally useful skill, which is telling stories that are technically true, but don’t invoke the same conclusions. I was, technically, standing around for a while, and maybe the events were in a different order than I said, but I didn’t say anything that was outright false, so I didn’t struggle.

Plus, I was a little tipsy already, so it was fine. It helped me not think about it too much.

“Okay,” he replied. He pursed his lips for a moment, and looked away from me, but when he opened his mouth to speak again it was about something else: “I’m sorry about Ava. She…isn’t really comfortable around you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Oh,” Yoru said. He scratched his neck, looked away from me. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“She basically said so.” If I wasn’t a little out of it already, I never would’ve spoken ill about someone I had to see every day, but I was, so I did. “She said “I don’t know if you’ve got rage, but if you do, now’s the time. Or, um, something like that.”

“That’s sort of underhanded,” he said. “Sounds like something she’d say, though.”

“Is she going to be pissy at the table again?”

He shrugged. “Beats me. I don’t know if she’ll even play. I mean…look, Erika, Ava’s a nice girl, I swear. You just…kind of freak her out a little, that’s all.”

That kind of comment used to make me uncomfortable, because it was a signal that I was about to be treated like a subhuman. But nowadays I was too used to it to care, and being a little drunk did little to change that.

“I get it,” I said. “It’s fine.”

But I didn’t get it, really, and it wasn’t really fine.

“That’s good,” Yoru said. He took it straight at face value, and I realized that I’d just lied to his face, and it didn’t make me uncomfortable.

Or maybe it was one of those half-truths I told so often, but at that time I couldn’t really tell how much of what I said was true and how much just adjacent to the truth. It was a complicated net of things I couldn’t prove, couldn’t see, and couldn’t properly understand—it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Well, it was—truly it was—but the truth is that I didn’t think about it because I couldn’t.

I just didn’t understand. It was beyond me. It was too much work for too little payoff. Maybe, with it all written out and with a good couple of hours, I could draw the lines from one word to one feeling and back around through all of everyone’s actions and properly draw a net that encompassed who I was to everyone I cared about, but what did that matter when I could just choose to take everyone’s word at face value instead, and hope everyone did the same for me?

Surely, that was good enough.

Yoru went to go back inside, but instead he stopped and faced me again. “Can I ask you a frank question?”

I was still in the glow from a job well done, or maybe it was the alcohol. I wasn’t about to let something as puny and insignificant as words stop me. Sure, maybe Ava didn’t like me, and maybe Yoru was still on the fence about siding with his girlfriend or trying to change her mind about me, but that was all inconsequential—it had nothing to do with me, really, because there wasn’t all that much I could do about it.

It was foreign affairs to me, nothing more.

“Okay,” I said.

“There’s no connotation,” he added. “Just a yes-or-no thing.”

“Okay,” I repeated, a little more forcefully.

“Is there something…you know, wrong with you?” he asked.

And I considered that for a moment. I did what I was supposed to do, and I did it well—I filled the entirety of my role and I exceeded expectations. Sure, there was a rocky moment there at the end—but if I didn’t think about it, it didn’t exist; it was only an event in my mind. Nobody else was there that’s alive to corroborate it; therefore, it didn’t matter if I decided it didn’t matter.

I did a perfectly good job. Full stop. And if I did a perfectly good job as I knew I did, then there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with me. Everything was exactly as it should be. As it was ever supposed to be.

On the other hand—how was I supposed to know if something was wrong with me? All I really knew was myself, and even then my grasp on that was tenuous at best. Other people, who knew themselves and more, could make that call, but I couldn’t. My sample size was one, and I remembered from science class that we weren’t supposed to draw conclusions from just one piece of evidence. I didn’t know enough about, say, Yoru or Ava or Cygnus to say if anything was wrong with them. By my standards, we were all essentially the same.

So maybe the question didn’t have an answer. Maybe it did, and I simply wasn’t the person who could answer it. Or maybe the question didn’t matter. No matter what, though, I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

So I shrugged and said to him: “That’s not really my call to make, is it?”