{April 5}

Winter came and crouched low over the town, and it squatted there long after it was welcome. Even as April drifted in, there was still enough snow on the ground to bury the grass. It wasn’t going to last long, now that the temperatures were consistently fifty-ish, but it was still cold and damp and miserable and it didn’t seem likely to stop any time soon.

I sat on a medical examining bench, one of those green faux-leather tables they have in doctor’s offices, and the Radiant’s resident physician Sophia sat across from me on a stool with some latex gloves on, doing a good impression of a checkup.

Now, though, she was just typing on a laptop.

Sophia was a flesh-key like Bell, but unlike Bell, she was a real person.

“Okay,” she said, slowly. “One last thing. Can you—ah—go stand against the wall over there?”

She gestured to a spot past the end of the bench, directly across from the eye chart.

I got up and went over to that spot.

Our relationship was limited to her questions and my answers. We were not destined to get along and I was okay with that. I knew she wouldn’t let me die on the operating table if it came to that, and frankly that was all I really needed.

She, like Benji, had been overruled by Prochazka on vital subjects.

Sophia kept her statements to me to a brusque minimum and I kept my answers likewise. Anything beyond that could and would be used against us; anything she said would be internalized by me as a threat or a statement of dislike, and anything I said would be analyzed to death as proof of my insanity.

But she’d assured me she’d save my life on the operating table. If I had a bullet in my chest she’d do her best to take it out.

I believed her. I had to.

“This is the last thing,” she said.

“Okay,” I replied. I was good at this one. It was the one that most made me seem like a regular person.

“Read me the third line.”

“A, 6, G, B, C.”

This eye chart had numbers in it, which struck me as non-standard, but I think Sophia just made one in a word processor and printed it on a sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper and stuck it to the wall with a piece of tape. It was hardly official issue.

Funding a doctor’s office when the doctor is a flesh key is pretty easy, but there’s some things flesh keys can’t do.

“Fourth line?” She stepped over to the laptop that she’d left on the stool and typed something I couldn’t see.

“Q, W, D, 9…”

I squinted. “S?”

“That’s a 5.”

“Why would they put S and 5 on the same chart?” I asked. “That seems bad.”

Sophia paused for a moment. “Yeah, no, that one’s on me. I made this one and stuck it to the wall at one AM last night. Just didn’t think it through. Fifth line?”

The fifth line was really small. I tried to squint at it, but the letters kept dancing—there were five of them, I knew that, but as for what they were, it was anyone’s guess.

I gave it my best shot: “A, R, F, P, L?”

Sophia shook her head. “Zero out of five.”

“Oh.”

“You missed one on line four, too,” she said. “And I’m gonna assume line six is right out, then.”

She typed some more. “Hell, you might need glasses soon.”

“Glasses?”

I realized only after I said it how horrified I sounded.

My fingers were numb.

“Yeah, glasses. Or contacts or something,” she said.

“Can you fix it?”

“Your eyes?”

I nodded, quickly. I was acutely aware of every part of my body at once. “Can—can I try reading the fifth line again?”

It was all I could do to keep formality.

“Um…no? If you got to guess and check there’d be no point in an eye chart,” Sophia said without looking up at me. “Prochazka’s got contacts, too. It’s a normal thing.”

I couldn’t look at her. My world extended just past my hands. Anything else—everything else—was out of reach. It might as well have been gone.

A lonely rock in the middle of non-existence.

“Can you fix it?” I asked her again.

“Why are you so stressed out about this?” Sophia shut her laptop and put it on the counter. “Jesus. It’s not that big of a deal. Loads of people don’t have perfect vision. Most people can’t read the sixth line anyway. Don’t worry about it.”

All I could do was ask again: “Can you fix it?”

“Maybe?” she asked. “Eyes are weird. I don’t really know much about them. You wouldn’t be the first person who needed some kind of eyewear in Unit 6 and you won’t be the last.”

Her words echoed through my ears. They went in one and out the other.

I took a deep breath, and another, and another. I was told this would calm me down, but it didn’t work. There was a hole somewhere deep in my chest that was stealing air from my lungs without my permission—no amount I could suck back in was enough. The air went in my mouth and disappeared at the base of my throat. It was gone. Unrecoverable.

I tried and tried and couldn’t get enough.

“Good lord, girl,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “You’re not gonna fucking die.”

“Please fix it,” I said. Even voice. Breathless. Forced that way.

“I’m not outright saying no because I theoretically can, probably, but I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t want to make it worse by accident. I don’t even know what’s causing it. Lots of people nowadays just have deteriorating eyesight. You’re a—fuck, you’re not even a teenager,” she said, trailing off. “Jesus Christ.”

She put a fist over her lips and looked at the floor.

More breaths. I closed my eyes. I said, to myself, “It’s okay.”

“It is okay,” she said. Evidently she’d swallowed whatever derailed her a second ago. “It’s fine. Come back if it gets in your way, okay?”

I nodded.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had a breakdown in her office. At least this time I stopped it before it got too bad.

Thank God.

0 0 0

Everything I did, I did because I could see.

Without sight, I would’ve had no idea what anyone was saying. I’d have their words, sure, but that was only half the meaning in language. I knew that if I wanted to seem like a regular person, I had to know the hidden other-language, and for other people they knew it instinctively, but I didn’t. I had to learn it manually, through real, conscious effort. At night, if I was too tired, I’d lose my ability to do it, and become really hard to talk to. Alcohol seemed to counteract that, which was a concern in itself.

It was enough to make me wonder.

It’s another weakness of mine. It makes me small. It keeps me up at night worrying about it. It makes me the pitiful nothing-invalid I have spent my entire life trying not to be.

0 0 0

Some nights back then, I would have a nightmare. I would be wandering through a desert, an infinite desert, with no food and no water and nobody around, and I would be sightless—blindfolded or otherwise obstructed. Nothing but rising and falling dunes forever and ever. The air so dry I couldn’t even use my key.

I’d have no idea where I was or how I got there or if I was ever going to get out. All that existed was the burning sand on my bare feet, the sun scorching my back, and the weight of knowing that there was nothing but this, that there was no escape, never ever, and that I was completely helpless and alone.

I didn’t know what part of that nightmare scared me the most: losing my key, losing my sight, or losing everyone.

The truth is that for all my strength and all my invincibility, I’m still afraid of the dark. In the dark all three of those things are true: I become senseless, I become useless, and I become alone.

To some extent, that’s still true. Even through everything I’ve seen and done, I am still afraid of the dark. The definition of “the dark” may change, but the thing it symbolizes is the same.

Cold, alone, helpless.

I live in fear of becoming an invalid.