{October 20}

I left that meeting and felt nothing. This new Erika did not have opinions about what happened last night. She had a list of facts memorized, and nothing more. She could recite those facts at a moment’s notice, rattle them off like a terminal call, but if you asked her for an opinion on them, she’d throw up her hands and shrug.

This new Erika wanted to talk to Cygnus, the only person at the Radiant who appeared to have an interest in actually understanding her. Nothing made good sense but Cygnus—he was always perfectly clear. And when he wasn’t, he said so. He had a clear mission in mind and everything he did seemed to follow some kind of internal chart.

I wondered how he did it—how he had the conviction to be so consistent in the face of a warping, shaking world full of variable and inconsistent people.

I came to him when he was in the main room, sipping his second mug of coffee like he always was at about noon. He said hello, gestured to the coffee pot and offered me some. I poured the rest and set to work putting another pot on.

“It was all a ruse,” Cygnus said. “I duped you into making more coffee. Got ‘em.”

As I had come to expect from him.

I shrugged, took my own mug. The convenient thing about having a water key is that you never have to wait for drinks to cool. As long as you’re not drinking pure mercury or something with no water content, you can just freeze bits of it to make your own ice cubes. It’s harder than it looks, though.

Fun fact about water keys: slinging water around like you see in cartoons is actually one of the easier things. Every water key can do that. The thing is doing it fast enough to matter, having a good grasp of ice formation, and having impeccable control. Ava told me, a while after we broke into that trafficking ring, that she’d never seen a water key pick a lock before. It didn’t occur to her that it was possible, but after seeing me do it she wondered why other water keys hadn’t thought of it.

I told her that it was harder than it looked, and she nodded like that was the most sagely advice she’d ever heard.

“Harder than it looks” seemed to be my catchphrase, whether I wanted it to be or not.

Maybe she was high that day. I wasn’t supposed to know this, but she grew her own weed near some lonely window on the top floor of the building. It was the couple’s private stash, but secrets in Unit 6 tended to live and die with Cygnus, who knew everything about everyone, somehow, and he told me.

He’d offered to get me some, but I declined. One vice was plenty for me, and smoking is bad for you. My dad smoked a pack a day, and his voice sounded like an engine.

I cooled my coffee to a drinkable temperature—read: lukewarm at best; I could burn my tongue opening my mouth in the summertime if I wasn’t careful—and asked Cygnus this new Erika’s burning question: “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” he asked, legs crossed at the knee in the chair he was in. He sipped his coffee with one hand, the other laying limp on the big table, fingers feebly tapping some rhythm I couldn’t identify.

“Stay so consistent,” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

I frowned. It was harder to put into words than I thought. “Everything you do—you’re always the same,” I said. “You—um—you always seem like you’ve got a plan.”

“I do always have a plan,” Cygnus said, eyes closed for another dainty sip. “Thanks for noticing.”

“What is it?” I asked him. “What’s the plan?”

He set the mug down on the table.

“Everything I do, Erika,” he said, slowly, “I do for justice.”

“Justice,” I repeated.

“Always justice. See—out there, someone is being wronged. And they’re being wronged in a way they can’t even fathom, because they’re being taken advantage of by someone with magic, and there’s fuckall they can do about it. You follow?”

I nodded. I could listen to Cygnus talk all day.

“Who is there for that wronged person to go to? Not the police. Not the government. No—those people can’t do anything for them. Somewhere out there is a child being shadowed by a pedophile, and that child can’t escape because that pedophile is a telepath and always knows what the child is thinking. Who can help that child? Not the police. Not the government.”

Cygnus smiled. “But we can. We know what’s up.”

He took a drink.

“But all we do is kill,” I said. Slowly. I faltered. “It’s—it’s all I’m good for.”

“I don’t see it that way at all,” Cygnus said. “I see it like this: I’m the man on the ground. People more capable than me, people I trust—they find the injustices, and they’re gracious enough to allow me the satisfaction of carrying them out. Would I like to scope out my own? Sure, one day. But I know I’m not ready yet. Training to do, things to learn, et cetera.

“See, Erika—there’s a lot of bad people out there. Look at what you’ve already done. Three trafficking rings. A serial killer. A domestic violence dispute—you saved a man’s life, directly. You. Not anyone else. That’s justice. We’re the good guys, Erika. And there’s a lot of bad guys. There’s a lot of work to do.”

He paused for a second. “I was the victim of injustice. I got my key when my papa got shot in our own home. Left me on the street. First thing I did with that key was track down the guy that put a bullet in my dad and return the favor fivefold. Was that violent? Yes. Was it an eye-for-an-eye? Yes. Was it justice? You better fuckin’ believe it was.

“See—people like to think that this sort of justice doesn’t work because they think it’s a slippery slope. They think that killing someone that did you a wrong of the same magnitude makes you equal to the murderer. But that’s not true. See—first, before there was a crime, there was a person with intent to do an innocent person wrong. Retaliation for that, therefore, isn’t as bad as the first person—because the person you’re killing isn’t innocent. They say this is a slippery slope, but that’s only if you slick it. You know?”

Not really, but I nodded. I got the gist of it.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Cygnus said. “Ever since I got my key. And I came to the conclusion that if I live my life in pursuit of justice, forever, then I can do right by my father, by me, and by everyone who was ever wronged by someone who they were powerless against.

Cygnus paused, for just a half-second. Barely long enough for me to register the hesitation. He finished, slightly more quietly: “I don’t see any other way I could do it.”

“How do you know what’s right?” I asked him. “How do you know—when it’s not clear. How do you know justice is being served? When both people are…are doing questionable, um, questionable things.”

Cygnus took a breath. “This is gonna sound stupid, Erika, I know.”

“What?”

He said to me: “I just know it by the way it is.”