{December 23}

“Nobody’s explained this to you yet, huh,” Yoru said.

We stepped back into the main foyer of the factory, stomping caked snow out of our boots. Ava was down with a bad cold, so I’d gone with Yoru alone; some malcontent Santa was threatening to hurt some kids on Christmas day, and he was being relatively non-subtle about it. Cops figured he was harmless—they searched his house and found nothing that could be meaningfully used as a weapon. Yoru and I knew that they’d missed one, though—the silver key around his neck with a sapphire inlaid in it.

“I didn’t really think we did Christmas around here,” I said.

“Nah, we totally do. Every unit has their own traditions. It’s—people in the other units like to pretend we don’t celebrate Christmas because we’re all nuts or we hate Jesus or something, but it’s not like that. I mean—I don’t have an opinion one way or another on the guy, and I’m pretty sure Bell is a practicing Catholic.”

I blinked. “No way.”

“I mean, that’s what I heard, anyway. Info on Bell is hard to come by.”

“I don’t…” All I could do was just shake my head slowly.

“That’s what I heard,” he said, crossing his arms with a little smile. “Take it or leave it. She disappeared in the morning on Christmas day last year and the year before that, and she’s usually gone on Easter and the associated Easter…um…I don’t know, Ash Wednesday or something. I was a Jew, I don’t know shit about it. Prochazka doesn’t let her actually do the stuff for that, but I think she goes to the services.”

“There is…no way that’s true,” I said. “No way.”

“Hey, I just repeat the baseless rumors,” Yoru said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. “I don’t make them. I’ll admit that this sounds like the kind of thing Bell would make up and spread around about herself because it’s funny, but the actions actually kind of back this one up, so I don’t know.”

We started down the series of halls to the Unit 6 home base. Yoru returned to the matter at hand. “Christmas around here—well, with us—isn’t a huge holiday, but it’s a good time. It’s one of the only days where Prochazka can ninety-percent promise us we won’t have to do anything unless it’s an emergency, again, except for Bell who’s still on call as long as it’s after services. Or maybe she just does missions when I think she’s at church to trick us into thinking she’s Catholic…ah, fuck it, I don’t actually care that much.”

I sort of did, but I didn’t push the point.

“Anyway, we traditionally don’t get gifts for each other unless they’re a slam dunk. Benji doesn’t really believe in getting people gifts for the sake of getting people gifts, and that’s something we all kind of agree with, so that’s what we do.”

I fell kind of quiet. I was already imagining the worst-case scenario where I never got a gift for my entire tenure here, and we all just sat around watching Yoru and Ava open each other’s mountains of gifts every year.

“Don’t stress about it,” Yoru said. “It’s not a slight if you don’t get anything for anyone. We’re all busy people. But like—Rachel had the same problem I’m guessing you’re having, where you’re worrying about never getting anything, right?”

“Rachel?”

“Oh, right. Um—Rachel was the old water-key. The one you replaced.”

I nodded. Didn’t have anything to add to that. Didn’t feel anything about it, one way or another.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know for a fact Cygnus got you something already. Don’t know if it came in yet or not, but he did.”

I stopped walking, flushed red—my face suddenly gone hot. Uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of the cold I’d just walked out of.

Yoru took a few more steps, realized I wasn’t following him anymore, and stopped. He turned back and asked me, “You good?”

I nodded and caught up.

“Like—to be completely honest, you’re not that hard to shop for. I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten anything for Bell and I don’t think Bell’s ever gotten anything for anyone else, so don’t worry, you’re not in that zone.”

I guess what I felt then was relief—but as for the thing before that, I wasn’t sure.

I had a strange issue where sometimes, I wanted to be pitied. I don’t really know why, but periodically I imagine myself as even more hopeless, even more useless in noncombat situations, than I actually am. In truth I know I’m relatively capable, and in school I saw a lot of people a lot worse off than me, but every once in a while the idea strikes me that if I was less useful, a bit more of an invalid, then maybe people wouldn’t expect so much of me. Maybe then I could cry or opt out of things I didn’t want to do and people wouldn’t try to tell me to stop or force me to do those things anyway.

And maybe that life would be better, somehow.

It’s just a thought I had sometimes, nothing more.

0 0 0

The day before Christmas eve—Christmas-eve-eve, if you will—turned out to be one of the few days where Bell was milling around the factory with nothing to do. Days like that were a rarity, to the point where people unaffiliated with Unit 6 would throw passing glances at her as she went by, whispering rumors about her like she was some kind of lingering phantom.

To be fair, she sort of was. Bell rarely, if ever, talked to anyone outside of Unit 6 or high management (read: only Prochazka), and even then she only talked to Prochazka behind closed doors. She wasn’t the sort of person anyone felt the need to say anything to. There wasn’t a lot I could imagine saying to her that she didn’t already know, and unlike a lot of things I felt, that one seemed applicable to other people too.

I didn’t recognize her at first when I caught sight of her on my way to the cafeteria for a late dinner. If she didn’t stop to say hello, we would’ve walked right past each other and been none the wiser.

Bell saw me squinting at her when she waved, and then it hit her. “Oh, right.”

“Bell?” I tried. It was my best guess.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Guess I settled into something a little different than you last saw me, huh.”

She was an almost completely different person, but once she said hello to me and reminded me who she was, I saw the unifying features that kept her identity true. She’d somehow gained twenty pounds since I last saw her in passing about a week ago and lost about a foot in height. Over a week her hair had doubled in length, to about three inches above her waist.

That said—it was the same color, and her eyes were still that glazed-over gunmetal, like there was nothing at all back there.

I guess when you’re a flesh-key, it doesn’t really matter what you look like.

She looked down at herself. “I hate being short,” she said, glancing around. “Excuse me for a second.”

Bell opened a door next to her and slid into the room behind it—I think it was a broom closet—and after about half a minute she re-emerged as the person that’d snuck up on me that time when I was alone in the barracks trying to watch TV: six-plus-feet tall, barely thicker than a wire, hair down to just past her neck. This is where the drawstring sweatpants came in handy, although they were now about six inches too short, exposing ankles so thin I could almost see the contours of the joint. Her shirt, also, was far too wide and far too short for her upper body.

I paused, remembering how scared I was back then when she'd snuck up on me, but now Bell was lightly smiling—the most anyone could really get out of her around here—and the feeling dissipated. And, if I’m honest, she looked kind of silly. The whole image was much more menacing when she was wearing something that actually fit.

“It’s a quick job, but it’ll do,” she said, surveying herself. “Not bad for thirty seconds.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked, looking at the ajar door she’d emerged from.

“Why not?” Bell asked. “Because I can?”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t really know how to, so I chose to say nothing instead.

“This is what you usually see me as, right?” she asked. After a half seconds’ pause she added: “Actual question. I don’t really remember.”

“It’s close enough,” I said. “I think.”

She shrugged. “That’s my motto.”

Bell glanced at her right hand, her pianist’s fingers, and said, “You know, I think this might be what I look like.”

“I—”

“Actually, I mean,” Bell said. “What I actually look like.”

“You…you don’t know?”

Bell turned back for a second, just to make sure nobody was coming. “I spend a lot of time in a lot of different forms. I don’t feel any particular affinity for any one of them. But this one—this one feels like me.”

“How can you not remember what you look like?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. That seemed like an antagonistic question.

Bell glanced back again.

“Tell you what,” she said, looking down at me—and I do mean looking down at me. She had nearly a foot, plus maybe a few inches, on me. It was like talking to the birds on a telephone pole. “How about you go and draw a self-portrait, right now. From memory. No mirror. And I’ll tell you how much it looks like you, okay?”

I blinked. “Um—”

“Bet you can’t do it, huh?”

I shook my head.

“That’s not a slight on you, by the way. Most people can’t do that. Now imagine you’ve just spent a week and a half as a fat man with a triple chin and a Long Island accent who works in a dead-end pizza place in Albany serving fried bullshit to other fat men with triple chins on paper plates slick from the grease in the air. The menu is on a board over the counter and that board is so old it’s got clip-in letters. The menu changes, but the man can’t change the board because his stepladder broke a while ago and he won’t buy another one, and he’d get out of breath trying to reach up and do fine work for that long. The only greens you can find in the whole place are oak leaves the wind kicks in because the man leaves the door open to compensate for the AC being broken—by the way, it’s been broken for ten years, and the man’s too cheap to fix it. He’s got two poor acne-ridden teenage employees who talk shit about him behind his back whenever they go outside on break to smoke.”

She was not about to be interrupted. I wanted to, but I wouldn’t dare.

Onward: “Imagine you go home to that man’s family, and you pretend to love his daughters. You pretend to love his wife, who’s a fat slob just like he is. You tell his daughters—ten and eight—a bedtime story, a new one because you don’t know the one they love the most. You deny them their favorite bedtime story for ten days, and you try to think of a way to weasel what it is out of your wife. You think about how you’re going to try to convince them to stick with soccer even though they both hate it because the one thing you’re most afraid of is that they end up like you and your wife. You think it’s too late for the two of you—both forty—to start an exercise regimen now; you’re too busy and she won’t do it without support. Erika, I slit that man’s throat in an alley a month ago, and I was that man for ten days, because one of the patrons of his pizza shop was a high-profile mobster looking to branch off in a big way, and this was the closest thing to a benign way in we had on that guy.”

I swallowed. Nobody was coming. We were alone.

Bell continued. And despite the fervor with which she spoke, her eyes never gleamed, never changed. They were polished rocks. Unmoving.

“Ask me to draw a self-portrait after I was that guy for a week and a half, and I’d draw you that guy. I’ve been doing this, in one form or another, for ages. I’m lucky I remembered what gender you thought I was, let alone what I looked like at the time. I mean—shit, Erika, I did a pretty damn good job for thirty seconds, don’t you think? Isn’t this the Bell you knew?”

I needed to change the subject. She towered over me, looking down with the same quiet smile, and I was so completely lost as to tone and subtext that I couldn’t begin to review the script to try and figure out what it all meant.

My simple machinery was overwhelmed.

I blinked. Tried to reset. “I—I wanted to ask you a question,” I said, stumbling through the words. Pushing them through my numb mouth.

Bell shrugged. “Depends.”

“Are you—are you a, um, are you a practicing Catholic?”

Bell broke into a wide grin and burst out laughing. I couldn’t tell if it was real or fake. If it was fake, it sure was convincing; if it was real, it didn’t sound like she really thought that was funny.

I was about ready to ball my fists and scream. Making someone feel that stupid without so much as laying down a single attack was an art I would never quite be able to grasp. I couldn’t make heads or tails of her. I wanted to, and even then I was still scrambling to find some kind of meaningful conclusion that I could use as a reference to speak to her and be spoken to by her—but I had nothing. There was nothing.

And I wasn’t convinced there could ever be anything.

Bell calmed down and said, “God, Erika, that’s adorable.”

She reached down to tousle my hair, and the second her palm made contact with my head I zapped to attention, every muscle tensed. Electrified.

Her hand snapped back, and she muttered, “Ooh, bad touch. Got it.”

We stood around silent for a second. Bell looked at the floor, briefly. It didn’t seem like she felt bad. It didn’t really seem like she felt anything.

I couldn’t tell if she was reflecting on what she’d just done, or if she was just running calculations. Or if she was thinking about the weather. Or if she was thinking about what she’d just ate. Assuming Bell actually ate food, and didn’t get her nutrients through photosynthesis by turning into a plant on sunny days. Assuming flesh-keys could do that. Assuming Bell was alive and needed nutrients at all, and wasn’t just a strikingly well-preserved zombie who died in a freak industrial accident “ages” ago, one that involved a lot of radiation and a touch of special magic that existed beyond the confines of keys—something wild and alien, unfathomable by mortal man.

God. I wanted to sit down and ask her for everything she knew. I needed to know.

Who the hell was she?

Why was she?

But instead, I had a story, and I supposed I was going to have to dissect that on my own time. If there was one thing I was good at, it was dissecting a piece of text for every possible trail of meaning. I was always best in English for a reason—reading into things that weren’t there was a personal strong suit. Anxiety weaponized for bonus points in English class.

What a way to reward personal failure.

“Sorry about going off like that,” Bell said. “I don’t mean to be antagonistic. I just—feel strongly about that. It’s one of the only things, you know?”

That, at least, was relatable. The one graspable thing she’d said.

“I know,” I said.

“I figured,” she replied. “It’s weird not having anything to do. I keep stressing myself out just trying to think of something I’m supposed to be stressed about. And I just keep drawing blanks.”

Her face creased up like she was going to say something. That much I was certain of. Dead certain, one hundred percent—there was something back there, something in that gaunt face with the paper-thin, paper-white, paper-sharp skin.

But she didn’t say it, so I’ll never know what it was.

Instead, she said, “You know, I heard it might be snowing around this time. Might get a white Christmas after all.”

Standing in the middle of the nest of hallways in the depths of the factory’s buildings, we were at least a two- or three-minutes’ walk from a window. We might’ve been underground, honestly—this place was so mazelike that outside of Prochazka’s office, the cafeteria, and the unit 6 barracks, I had no idea where anything was. I didn’t even know where the infirmary was, really, despite having been there a few times for checkups and whatnot. Someone led me there every time, and every time the path faded out of my memory piecemeal like so many rain-splatters.

“You wanna go check?” she asked.

I shrugged. That seemed like a good time.

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t find it in my heart to burn this bridge—and, God, I didn’t want to.

Out of everyone, if I only got to speak to one of them ever again—I knew who I wanted it to be.

So I took a breath and we were okay again.