{October 19}

Benji must have been avoiding me.

I’d suspected it for a while. It was something in the way I was—we clashed on a level I couldn’t understand. In theory, he was supposed to be the one in the unit most accepting of who I was, but he wasn’t the one who recruited me. Prochazka subverted his own process to drop me in Unit 6, against Benji’s wishes.

So Benji avoided me, because he didn’t know what I was capable of and didn’t want to find out. That had to have been it. He must have thought I was insane or retarded or both, somehow.

I tried to imagine what that would be like, but I wasn’t very good at imagining the motives of people who weren’t right in front of me.

Despite being there for almost four months, I barely knew anything about him. I knew he was a fire-key; but that was about it. To be fair, I hadn’t exactly tried to look. We weren’t on speaking terms and that was fine. I didn’t need anything from him and he didn’t need anything from me.

It wasn’t until October was more than halfway through that Benji cornered me, of his own volition, to sort everything out.

When he came to me in the hallway leading up to Unit 6’s converted row of conference rooms, I thought it was time, and my breath had caught in my throat: he was going to read me the riot act, because he was no longer afraid of me. He was, of course and surely, afraid of me—I was some strange enigma-child forced upon him by the secretive and unknowable Jan Prochazka himself. How was someone supposed to react to that, except with fear and confusion?

Wasn’t this how horror movies started?

“Hey, Erika,” he said, voice low. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

I was on my way back to the rooms for the night’s TV watching—Cygnus said he’d wait for me.

“Cygnus is waiting for me,” I told him, despite that he was my superior and that was, in hindsight, extremely disrespectful.

“I—whatever. Look. I’m gonna need your help tomorrow.”

He looked away from me, one arm folded over the other, holding his limp arm’s elbow. This was already the longest conversation we’d had in months—the last time we’d exchanged more than a nod was in late August. Maybe earlier.

“Is it a mission?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Benji said. “I’m in a negotiation right now and it’s not looking super great. Tried my best, but, y’know—um—dumb people are gonna be dumb, right?”

“Right,” I said.

Maybe a little too earnestly—his face creased up slightly.

He continued: “I gave Prochazka an update on it earlier today and he said I should probably take a bodyguard with me. I was going to take Cygnus, but he’s busy, and Yoru and Ava are on their own thing, and…well…Bell’s Bell, so…”

I grimaced. “Yeah.”

We fell quiet for a moment. For once in my life I decided to break the silence.

“What do you want me to do?”

Benji shrugged. “Hopefully nothing. Pretty sure Prochazka’s just being paranoid. These people are weak—like, they technically have keys, but I’d be damned if any one of them knew what the hell they were doing. They’re a weird hippie cult centered around a couple of small-time emeralds, based out of—get this—Schenectady. It’s seven or eight people that get together in Vale Park at night and mess with the foliage. Prochazka’s worried someone’s gonna see them, so he sent me out there to just, like…tell them to be more subtle. Not even to stop, just—like…”

He realized he was rambling and got to the point. Cleared his throat. “What I’m getting at is that I need you to stand behind me and be quiet unless one of them threatens me. Then…um…threaten them back. They’ll crack if we push at all, I’m sure, but we don’t really want to kill anyone who’s not actually doing anything. They’re not committing any crimes, y’know? They’re harmless.

“But, well, they do have keys, so if one of them decides to sneak up on me and run a tree up my ass, well—I doubt any of them are actually strong enough to do that, but it would kill me.”

He snickered. I didn’t, initially, but then I started to just to make him not uncomfortable, which actually seemed to make it worse.

Benji frowned. “So, yeah. I’m meeting them at sundown tomorrow. Schenectady’s a forty-minute drive, so we should probably head out at around five.”

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s it,” he replied. “Um—dismissed, I guess.”

We immediately stopped looking at each other, stepped around the other at the widest berth possible, and went our respective ways.

0 0 0

Benji’s not a bad guy. I didn’t think he was, and I didn’t really blame him for avoiding me. If anything, it was my fault for being too nervous to reach out earlier. We both stewed in our anxiety about the other for so long that we couldn’t step past it when we needed to.

I recognize that I’m hard to like. It’s more important for me to be liked by certain people than others, and despite Benji being my immediate superior, I didn’t much care if he actually liked me or not. We never spoke, I barely ever had to see him since I was rarely assigned anything directly—I generally tagged along with one of the more senior members as an extra set of hands—so it didn’t matter much what he thought of me, as long as he didn’t see me as something small and pitiable. That was the only thing I asked from everyone—just to not be belittled.

Lord knows I’ve gotten enough belittlement already. I’d take silence over that. I’d take being invisible over that—the best days at school were the ones where I’d vanished completely into the beige paint and the peeling red of the lockers. Passing through the halls like a perfect chameleon. Melting into empty desks. I walked home; I had no social presence on the bus or on the pick-up sidewalk. Every day the other kids watched me disappear into the distance as one of the tiny handful of walkers—and the best days were when I got to sneak out, a minute and a half ahead of the rest of the class, and disappear behind the tree line before anyone got to notice I was gone. Before anyone got to watch me go, back facing them, deaf to the comments and ignorant to the stares. That little twinge of anxiety as I walked, each step wider than before, trying to get past the big oaks before I heard that door open again behind me.

And the relief when I did, and the fear when I didn’t.

So if Benji chose to not see me over the alternative, that was okay with me. It was better than Ava’s thinly veiled disdain, anyway.

But, I supposed, that mindset had to survive two forty-minute car rides.

0 0 0

The “weird hippie cult” was called the City-Nature Harmony Coalition. The name sounded very official. If I wasn’t told they were a “weird hippie cult” I would’ve believed they were an official department of the City of Schenectady.

Near as I could tell from the documentation on the case I found on the nightstand I shared with Bell—as if she was ever there to share it with me—the City-Nature Harmony Coalition was a nearly microscopic organization devoted to the “re-greening” of the City of Schenectady, which I suppose implied that it was ever green in the first place.

Maybe they meant before there was anything there at all, and that place was untouched forest.

They weren’t doing open recruitment yet, but they had their tendrils into the magical heart of Schenectady and Albany, scouting for interested nature-keys to help them in their endeavors. They really did seem harmless—they acknowledged, in their official flyers, that there was an upper limit to the extremity they could reach with their actions while still having a functional city. They were looking for a middle-ground between nature and human creation.

It sounded nice. I’d throw them a dollar.

I suppose the peacefulness of the whole ordeal was why Benji’s rhetoric on the matter was more “knock it off or be more subtle” and not “stop or we’ll slaughter you in a way where nobody will ever find your corpses.”

I was reading through those papers over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. Sometime in the last month and a half, I’d developed a coffee habit. It was better than an alcohol habit, I supposed, but Prochazka viewed both as equal spiritual weaknesses, so I tried not to drink any in front of him. Coffee made me bold; it helped me ignore the stares. Helped me focus my own head on a task in front of me. For a little while I was the very image of the prime American homeowner in the golden days, sitting at my family’s kitchen table with a coffee and a newspaper, king of the house, master of my two-point-five children and all else within the confines of my white picket fence.

Or, at least, I felt like that.

Nobody came to bother me as I scanned through the papers—not even Benji, who I’d seen out of the corner of my eye go up to the counter and get some coffee about fifteen minutes before. He didn’t see me—or maybe he chose not to—and walked right back out, briskly as he came.

But I didn’t want to be bothered anyway, so it was all fine.

There wasn’t a huge amount to look through in the files. Generally speaking, these people were clean. None of them had any criminal records worthy of note—one of them had been slapped on the wrist for eco-propaganda graffiti, as if that was something worth taking someone into the station for.

I wasn’t sure what “eco-propaganda graffiti” even was, really.

0 0 0

Five o’clock rolled around, and Benji made an appearance in the room to fetch me—and by “an appearance” I mean barely even that—he walked inside, looked and pointed at me, put that finger over his shoulder, and we left.

No words exchanged. A most efficient encounter.

We left the old factory and came out into the afternoon sun. It was warm for October—pushing seventy—but the breeze was just a little bit too cold for it to be completely comfortable.

In the circle of pavement in front of the sprawling factory campus was a small tan sedan, a mid-2000s Camry that was completely indistinguishable from any other car on the road. I could almost remember days in my past where every car on the road was some variation of a tan Camry from 2005 or 2006. It was the perfect getaway car. Anyone who stepped into a Camry from around that time may as well be stepping out of the timeline through a hole in the universe. They would cease to exist and nobody would ever know.

The car was just sitting there, unlocked and running. That all seemed very unsafe to me, but I didn’t want to speak to someone so intentionally quiet.

Benji got in the driver’s seat and I put myself in the passenger side and he pulls out of the driveway.

0 0 0

I had a lot of bunch of time to stare out the window and daydream, something I hadn’t done in quite a while.

In a different life, I think I would’ve liked to be a painter. I’ve always been passable with my hands, and it seemed to be the closest thing to a nexus of the things I was good at as anything else—my near obsessive observational skills, my eye for random details that mean nothing to anyone else. A job where I could be alone with colors and nobody ever has to see how my internal clock misses ticks.

And my key—

I could make frozen landscapes, in small scale, that nobody could ever dream of. In the level of detail that can only come from close observation. And maybe one day, when having magic won’t be something to be ashamed of, I could bring my worlds to life—shift into sculpture, maybe, and show the world the landscapes I had to pretend were fake for so long.

Developments in my life have made this dream impossible. It’s something I’ll never have—another one in the list.

But I remember dreaming of it then.

Thinking of it now doesn’t make me sad, like one might expect—instead, it makes me frustrated: I was a victim of a force beyond my control, and I had sworn when I was twelve years old to never, ever be a helpless victim ever again.

It turns out that when you truly are a helpless victim, there isn’t anything you can do about it—otherwise, you’re just a victim, not a helpless one. Being a helpless victim isn’t shameful—but subtract that one word and now it is. Maybe when you don’t have magic, one doesn’t imply the other—but when you do, there’s a definite stigma around not fighting your way out of things you theoretically, if the stars aligned, had a chance at escaping.

Being a helpless victim isn’t shameful, because it’s not your fault, but it is frustrating. And when there was something you could do about it, it’s shameful, but it’s not as frustrating.

What happened to me is something nobody had anticipated, and nobody could cure. It simply trudged its way through my life until its conclusion. It simply was. It exerted its will over me and there was nothing at all I, or Cygnus, or Sophia could do about it.

In those days I was in a fast car hurtling towards oblivion and all I could do was stare out the window and daydream.

Dead on board. No outs. Handshake, part ways.

Oh well.

0 0 0

We did not speak until we were twenty minutes down the road. Benji had done a great job of ignoring me, even as I gently twiddled the knobs for the air conditioning. Benji was the sort of person who liked his car frigid, and I was not.

That, it turned out, was enough to break the ice. “Stop messing with my AC,” he said.

My hand, currently on the knob, shot back to my side. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

I wanted to say it was cold in there, but it seemed like a bad time.

“God,” Benji said. It was more of a groan than anything else. “I’m fucking stupid.”

“What?”

“There’s a literal zero percent chance bringing you along makes this any better. I’m trying to play the good cop here. I don’t actually care what these idiots get up to as long as they keep it quiet, but if I’m threatening them with a twelve-year-old I lose both pedestals. Now I’m strong-arming them into obeying and I’m using a goddamn child to do it.”

He touched his head to the steering wheel briefly—while going eighty on the highway, which made me twitch—and said, “Look. Change of plans. I’m gonna park at the Days Inn. I want you to follow me in, but at a large distance. Don’t let any of the wackos see you. I’m—probably just wasting your time today. I’m not gonna call you over unless things go south. Okay?”

My time wasn’t exactly being wasted, since I had no plans anyway, but I shrugged and said, “Okay,” anyway.

“And if I do need you—” He hesitated. “Hopefully I won’t, but if I do, just do something to startle them. Nothing dangerous. Big enough to make us look stronger than them, but not enough to make us look evil. Okay? Just a little nudge.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Good,” Benji replied.

His tone was hard.

That was all we said until we got to the inn.