{August 30}

Unpleasant morning.

I woke up with a hole in my head filled with stinging insects; the roar of a cement mixer between my ears. It was all I could do to sit up; all I could do to roll myself up into a tiny ball like a scared pill-bug.

Yesterday—

Cygnus and I were on a SAD mission, a search-and-destroy, where we seek to make as many people sad as possible by waltzing into a location like we own the place and just eviscerating anyone silly enough to stand still for too long. We weren’t even told what the operation was—it didn’t matter beyond the fact that they were all irredeemables, all complacent in terrible acts, and therefore they all had to die, lest they spread their pitiful disease across upstate New York.

Prochazka’s words.

Recalling them then I could just barely sense the shape of those phrases—cold buzzing outlines of words, skittering back and forth across my brain too quickly for me to gather the whole sentence—all irredeemables, all complacent—all irredeemables—terrible acts—all had to die—pitiful disease—they spread—

He made a point of selling the rhetoric, that was for sure.

So Cygnus and I had walked in there, and I had a water bottle in my hand like I always did, and we were the angels of death, and all who stood before us were mowed down without remorse.

An angel of death like I’d always dreamed I could be.

How long had I spent dreaming of exactly this? Of retribution against everyone who’d ever wronged me—of rebellion against the thing everyone said I was?

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Nobody ever said. My dad worked a menial factory job that was just barely enough to pay for our house, so he never had the money or time to get anything looked at. He always said that he’d rather be homeless than be a slave to a landlord—so he chose freedom over health insurance, and he chose having a lawn and a basement over understanding me.

I think that was okay with me. I’m not sure I ever wanted to be understood by him.

Every day I went to school as a mystery—some strange crumbling automaton that couldn’t speak, couldn’t understand. Maybe something was wrong with me, maybe there wasn’t. I didn’t know, but other people certainly felt like they did.

I still don’t know.

But see—

On June 11th, my twelfth birthday, I received the only gift I had every prayed for.

And all of that fell away; and I became invincible. Now I had the means. Now I had the will.

The truth is that I am a simple girl, and I have simple desires.

0 0 0

I didn’t really remember anything I did the night before. I had vague recollections, but nothing more. I couldn’t think of myself doing anything particularly embarrassing, so I wasn’t exactly worried, but the fact that my memory was spotty at all concerned me.

And my vision was blurry—I kept rubbing my eyes and it wouldn’t clear up.

As soon as I could stand to do it, I opened my eyes fully and scanned the room, looking for a familiar face, and everyone was gone except for Cygnus.

Something I noticed:

Half the people in Unit 6 made their beds in the morning, and the other half didn’t. I usually didn’t, and neither did Yoru or Ava, but Benji, Cygnus, and Bell all did.

Although I got the sense that Bell didn’t spend all that much time in hers, since she had that habit of disappearing at two in the morning every night.

It occurred to me, as the morning’s first real thought shot through my skull like a spike, that I hadn’t seen Benji in quite a while. Briefly I wondered what he was up to, but then the smell of coffee hit my nose and I had to stop thinking in order to focus on not retching instead.

“’Bout time,” Cygnus said, raising the coffee up in his hand as a greeting. “You looked dead up there.”

“I think I am,” I mumbled.

“There’s more than enough coffee in the pot for another if you’re interested,” he said.

“I—I don’t know,” I said. It was all I could manage, truthfully.

“I told you to drink more water,” he said. “But—nah, right?”

I supposed I was being mocked, so I turned red.

“I’m not mocking you,” Cygnus said, looking down at his coffee again. After a sip he added: “Just poking fun, that’s all.”

Cygnus was as put-together as he always was. He only seemed to own button-down shirts. Today it was a deep red, a shiny silk that he must have only been wearing since it was his day off. Coupling that with a pair of pressed black dress pants and he could’ve been ready to go for a nice meal at the town’s only boutique restaurant.

He sat, legs crossed, in one of the metal folding chairs associated with the big central table, but he’d pulled it away to face me once he realized I was awake.

“It’s ten-thirty,” he added. “Ought to come down now, huh?”

The idea of climbing down the ladder right then made me light-headed, but I’d have to get out of the bunk if I wanted to get some water, so I pursed my lips tight and squirmed my way over to the ladder.

I made it down in one piece, surprisingly enough—but if I just rolled off the bunk and hit the floor, I probably would’ve been fine, too. It’s not like the bunk was that high, and I was invincible, so it didn’t matter.

I started rubbing my eyes again, and I noticed I was making a low groaning noise about ten seconds too slowly. Everything in my brain was running ten seconds behind.

Now that I was down there, Cygnus could get a better look at me. “Good Lord, Erika,” he said. “You look like hell.”

I frowned. “Thanks.”

It didn’t even register with me that he’d said what he did. By the time I realized, it was too far in the past for me to care any longer.

“Go drink some water,” he said. “And take some aspirin every couple hours until you feel better.”

“You’re fine?” I asked him.

“I don’t get hungover,” he replied. “I’m responsible and shit.”

Behind him, his newest pipe-sword—from yesterday—lay up against the wall, unsheathed, balanced against the drywall only by the bottom of the hilt and the pressure of its tip.

“Did I do anything after…um…”

I stepped into the fog of my own memory, trying to recall the last sequence of angry red numbers on Yoru’s side-table digital clock. 9:45, 10:21, 11:13…midnight-something? One or two?

“After one?” I guessed.

Cygnus frowned. “Yeah, I knew I shouldn’t have let you have that last one. That’s on me.”

“Did I black out?” I asked.

“If you have to ask that question, the answer is always yes,” he replied.

“Oh.”

“But to answer your question, not all that much,” he said. Took another sip. “You laughed a lot.”

“Laughed a lot?”

“You just thought everything everybody said was a riot. I don’t think I’d ever heard you laugh before.”

Even through the mire, that made me pause. I suppose saying I don’t laugh much makes my life sound far more pitiful than it actually was. I wasn’t an orphan, I wasn’t slaving away in a coal mine somewhere for pennies. My life, in the grand scheme of all possible lives, wasn’t actually all that bad.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t happy to leave it. When I came home to that place every day—mostly alone—I spent every waking second waiting for the time when I could have something better. Even if I felt like I didn’t deserve it because of the things I wanted to do.

I wasn’t ever expecting to have one of my wishes granted. I’d always assumed—miserable as I was—that wish-granting was a linear process. It went backward from the most miserable forward, to ensure that everyone who’d been wronged got their revenge.

It turns out that it doesn’t really work that way. In a perfect system, that would be the way it was—but in the world we had, it was far more arbitrary. Sometimes, people who’d never wished for anything in their lives get powers beyond their wildest dreams—and for every child like me, there was another who choked to death on coal dust.

What more could I ask for than a purpose, a will, and a set of people who at least tolerated me? I had none of the three before and now I had all of them. Asking for more than that was just greedy.

I couldn’t let myself ask for more. I just couldn’t.

“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” I said, after a moment.

“I’m sure.”

“I’ve never felt like this before,” I said.

Cygnus nodded.

I blinked. It turned out that I didn’t have anything else to say.

“I mean—” Cygnus started into something, but thought better of it and bit his tongue, for the first time in the two months I’d known him. God only knew what it was—and even through my fog I caught it. In the time I’d been at the Radiant, I’d become very vigilant of how other people reacted to me. I paid a level of attention that bordered on fanaticism to it. I knew it made Ava uncomfortable, because it was accompanied with an amount of staring that she didn’t like.

So I was hell-bent on making sure nobody here hated me. I wanted to know what they were thinking. I spent more time than I’m willing to admit day-dreaming of being a telepath—how cool would that be? No more mysteries. No more wordplay. Only truths. It wasn’t something I found myself actively wishing for—but it was an alternate reality, no better or worse than this one, that I played around in.

It would be so much simpler.

Cygnus liked me well enough, I figured. The teasing was just a part of his personality. I hated teasing, don’t get me wrong—God knew I’d had enough of that—but he’d had my back enough times during missions where I felt fairly confident that he actually did, in fact, like me. If not, then at least he respected me, which was new in itself.

Yoru seemed to like me okay, too. Ava didn’t, but Yoru made a point of defending me against her on a couple of occasions. Something in his demeanor changed after our mission together last month on High Street—he’d started asking how I was when he saw me in the factory’s halls. Our conversation would never go beyond the simple script, but it was better it was before.

I felt like I was getting somewhere.

Benji, I didn’t see often enough to know. He was busy with management stuff, and going out to talk to people. I’d only seen him a handful of times.

Bell was a complete enigma. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other since that day at lunch, even though I’d seen her once or twice. I had no idea what she was doing and I didn’t yet feel comfortable just asking her.

I snapped back to attention just in time to catch Cygnus talking again. “I didn’t realize you could drink away your problems that efficiently.”

I blinked. Didn’t really know what to say.

“I mean…last night, you were…”

He faltered. His eyes dropped to the mug. “Man, this isn’t worth it. Forget I said anything.”

I didn’t.

I never could.

0 0 0

I spent a lot of time that day walking around outside, trying to nurse the remnants of my hangover and enjoy the sunshine, but it wasn’t until three or four that I felt up to speed again.

But I couldn’t shake Cygnus’s half-thought. It wasn’t possible to drink away what I had. It just doesn’t work like that. And yet—if he thought it did, wasn’t that just as good? Wasn’t that the same thing?

Did it matter what I had if nobody else thought it was there?

But I supposed it didn’t matter. Alcohol was for nights after missions, nothing more.

If I only got to be normal twice a week, so be it.