I spent long enough wandering around town where I started to recognize the faces of fellow wanders—and how on the third or fourth pass they started to look concerned for me.

So I set off back home at around sunset.

I don’t think of myself a particularly complicated person. My wants are not complex—so I spend a lot of time asking myself why other people find me so hard to understand. It’s not like I’m speaking some foreign language.

I guess it was really amazing what something as simple as a light communication barrier could do to a group of people.

Maybe I hadn’t made a good enough attempt at explaining myself, but I didn’t ever have an opportunity to. We were all so rarely in the same place together, and the idea of spilling my secrets in public like that made me nauseous.

It wasn’t proper to complain about something that was ostensibly my fault, even if I couldn’t really do anything about it through standard means.

By nine o’clock that night, I was ready to forgive Cygnus for his surely meaningless comment. I hadn’t even decided if I was offended by it or not, but I was choosing to not be for the sake of comfort. I needed Cygnus to like me and chastising him for a comment he didn’t mean (surely) seemed like a poor way to go about that.

It still nagged at the back of my head, but I refused to give it quarter.

But when I came home, he wasn’t there. I walked back into an empty room and my heart dropped through my chest; I needed to say to him that I felt nothing. I needed to tell him he was forgiven.

Now that I couldn’t, I didn’t know what to do.

So instead of working my way through that feeling, I walked over to the one computer we all shared—Cygnus’s laptop—turned it on, turned on the TV, grabbed the remote, and sat on the floor to go thumbing through shows on Cygnus’s favorite “legal” streaming website.

Since I was alone, I’d shut off all the lights. I wanted it to be dark. There was me, and there was the big fifty-inch TV bathing me in blue light, and the rectangular pictures featuring various brightly-colored characters for each show.

I went through them in order, Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad combo in hand, picking each one and reading the summary.

For a moment, I forgot I existed.

I found one I thought would be a good time-killer—I wasn’t really in the mood for anything challenging—and I started up the first episode.

“This show drives off a cliff after episode six. It’s not worth it.”

I whipped around, adrenaline in overdrive, instinctively drawing water out of a cup on the table and letting it whirl around my hand like a bracelet.

Standing there was a woman in a long black coat. In the blue light coating the room, she was dark, seven feet tall and ghostly. She regarded me with a cold stare; her eyes so dilated they were mostly pupil, and my breath caught in my throat. I had no idea who that person was or how they got in here, or how they found me, or why their first comment was about the show I was planning to watch.

It took me a few seconds to realize it was just Bell.

I don’t claim to be very smart. I never have.

“Your eyes,” I managed, as the fear drained slowly out of my head. The water ringing my hand drifted back to the bottle it came from.

Bell blinked. “Shit.”

As I watched, her irises reappeared; a sort of steel gray I hadn’t bothered to extensively at before, mostly because they were fairly unremarkable as eyes go. Without the pupil trick, they were dull. Almost lifeless.

I’d never gotten a good look at Bell before. We met rarely, and it was mostly in the context of watching TV with Cygnus. On the whole, I spent far more time with Cygnus, Yoru, and Ava than I did with Bell or Benji.

Come to think of it, prior to right then, the longest amount of time I'd spent with Bell was the time she sat with Cygnus and I and had lunch. Beyond that, we’d only had passing encounters with short words, almost all of which led me to the idea that she didn’t like me and there wasn’t anything I could do to rectify that.

But this—this was an opportunity.

Bell turned away. “Should probably take my coat off, too.”

She hung her coat on the hook—where I hadn’t even noticed it was missing—when she turned back to face me, I saw her again in just a gray T-shirt for some band I didn’t know and dark jeans, and she was as unremarkable as any random person on the street, aside from being six foot something. I could’ve walked past her a dozen times today as I was wandering around and never have known.

It was amazing how much the long coat did to make her look less sickly. With just regular clothes on, Bell was tall, sure, but rail-thin and bony. Like she was constructed from copper pipe.

“I saw you walking around today,” she said.

Huh.

“I didn’t see you,” I said.

“I figured. I was inside.”

“Oh.”

The show’s intro started playing, some sickeningly bright and happy pop song.

“Seriously, this show’s really bad,” Bell said. “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

I reached for the remote and paused it. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be home and I didn’t want to watch something we were already watching.”

No key user here was all that old, but Bell could’ve been anywhere between a harrowed eighteen and a chipper forty. She had lines under her eyes like she was aging a bit too fast, but outside of that—the rest of her face—could’ve been the face of a college freshman. I wondered when she got her key—my understanding was that the usual range was sixteen to twenty-four or twenty-five, and as per usual with Bell, I had absolutely no idea where in that range she fell.

“I normally shut off the eye thing before I have to see anyone I know,” she said. “Sorry about that.”

That, at least, cleared something up. Finally—a bit I could latch on to.

“Are you a flesh-key?” I asked her.

It was the only logical conclusion. Only one kind of person could do anything like that.

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Huh.”

She walked over and sat down next to me, legs crossed. Even sitting, she had six inches on me.

“Were you out all day, too?” I asked her, a touch more quietly. She wasn’t even sitting all that close to me, but it still felt like a violation of my personal bubble.

“I came back here at noon,” she said, glancing at her fingernails. “Nobody was here so I took a nap for six hours, then I got up and went out for a quick assignment.”

“I guess I just missed you, then.”

I stopped looking at her. I just couldn’t do it for that long.

“Heard you were really hungover last night,” she said.

“I—”

It took me a moment to realize that Bell wasn’t there the night before. It took me another to realize that Bell was almost never there when we sat around the big conference table in the middle of the room and gambled our nights away over blackjack.

Where did she go all the time?

So I asked her: “Where do you go every night?”

She frowned. “It’s not every night.”

“But where?”

“Out,” she said, simply.

“At two?”

“So you were just walking around because you were hungover?”

I blinked.

“Um…”

“I can put two and two together,” Bell said, reaching around me and sliding the remote out of my still hands. “It’s fine.”

She backed out of the listing for the show I was on and went scrolling down the list for something else.

“Was Cygnus right?”

“About what?” she asked, clicking on a show’s icon and reading the synopsis.

“You being a torturer.”

Bell frowned. “Didn’t realize I was being interrogated tonight.”

“I—”

I turned red. I wanted Bell to like me.

But—God—I wanted to know! I wanted to know so badly!

The list of truly dark and mysterious people in my life was so small, and now that I finally knew one—just like in the movies, with the dark coat and the dull cold dead eyes like a fish’s corpse and the hideous secrets—I wanted to know everything there was to know about her. I wanted to know where she came from. The nature of the flesh-key that I’d heard so many people mutter about here. Was she the only one at the Radiant? What could flesh keys do? How powerful was Bell? Was she stronger than me?

I’d barely used the extent of my power here so far. I hadn’t gotten a chance to truly flex yet—I knew I was capable of so much more than just what could be stored in a plastic water bottle. The need for at least a trivial amount of subtlety kept me chained—but I could rise. I could be a force of nature unlike anything anyone here had ever seen—Prochazka said so; and he knew a strong key when he saw one.

What did power look like for flesh keys? For water keys, it was obvious—shifting lakes, rivers, whole oceans in some godly sense. For flesh keys, the canvas was a body—what could someone do with a body that would be on that sort of scale?

I had ideas, but I didn’t want ideas—I wanted truths. Musings were worth nothing. I needed the facts.

“Who are you?” I asked her, the fervor of my thoughts coursing through me.

“I’m Bell,” she said, flat. “Who are you?”

I blinked again and the red heat dropped out of me like a dunk tank. Splash, laugh, and wait for the red bloom across the face. You set yourself up for failure. You have nobody but yourself to blame.

“Look,” she said. “I know you want to know all this stuff about me, but I’m not going to tell you anything I don’t want to tell you. I’ll tell you about me in time. Okay?”

“How old are you?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

I just had so many questions. I couldn’t bear to let them all die.

She made a terse smile. “Guess.”

I knew having a key made this a trick question, but I also knew that basically everyone in Unit 6 looked their age. There was a high turnover rate here—people had a tendency to die relatively often.

So I said to her what I’d said to myself earlier: “Somewhere between eighteen and forty.”

Bell chuckled a little. She had this sort of schoolgirl laugh that was completely at odds with how tall and bony and gaunt she was. God—she was an expressionist’s idea of a human body. None of her proportions looked quite right—like they were all designed to be just a little off. Her arms were slightly too long. Her torso was slightly too thin. Her head a little too small, or maybe her eyes were just a little too big.

It was hard to look at, but hard to look away from. Every time I’d had my fill and looked away, I found myself looking back.

“I’m twenty-six,” she said. “And yes, Cygnus was right. To an extent. There’s only two flesh keys here—one of them is me, and the other is Sophia, who I’m sure you’ve already met, hmm?”

I went a bit pale. Sophia and I did not get along very well.

“We have,” I said.

“I mean, you literally have to,” she replied. “She does checkups on all of us, except me.”

“Except you?”

She smiled, put a finger to her lips. Then, I suppose, she thought better of being coy: “You want to know a secret?”

Yes! God help me—I needed to know.

Bell had me in the palm of her hand.

She leaned in close—as if anyone could be listening—as if the rest of Unit 6 was there, and simply invisible.

There was nothing between us but the blue light from the TV. The inanimate characters staring blankly down at us.

Backlit by that cold blue glare, Bell whispered to me: “I’m not real, Erika. I don’t need checkups.”

0 0 0

Bell, obviously, was real. She was a person you could touch—assuming she’d ever let you—and hear and see; so I had no idea what she meant by that. And I thought about it the whole time we were watching TV, and I never came to a good conclusion.

That seemed to be happening to me a lot in those days. In these days, too. It never stopped. People say things they expect to be simple, and I lose track of myself trying to figure out what it all means.

I’d considered the possibility that Bell was just messing with me—but why? Did people really derive that much amusement from confusing an easy target?

I’ve always been an easy target for that kind of thing. I’m still annoying easy to confuse, if you try to trick me in the right ways. None of that has changed—it’s all just as it was when I was a stone of ten or eleven.

Here is the truth:

I am a simple girl, but the world is very complex.

My simple machinery is overwhelmed.