{September 18}

Prochazka walked into the Unit 6 home and we all froze solid.

He’d sent a notice telling us all to be present for some meeting he wanted us all to hear, so every single one of us was there: even Benji, who never went into the big converted space if he could at all avoid it.

We were all just minding our own business when he came in, and we all immediately ceased doing so when he did. Every eye turned to him.

He never came into our space. Prochazka may as well have been an alien invader in our secret clubhouse.

He gestured to the table and like trained dogs we all put down whatever we were doing and walked meekly over to the table in the center of the room. Took seats.

Prochazka remained standing.

Everyone looked more or less neutral, except for Benji, who had a grim sort of look that led me to believe he knew what was going on.

“I’m going to say this in front of all of you because you all need to hear it, and you all will have to implement it in your own way,” Prochazka began. “Partially, this is my fault, because I’ve been directing Unit 3 to shape an official narrative among the other regions’ organizations that makes this a requirement.”

Unit 3, as I’d found out, was the one in charge of communicating with the other regions, figuring out who was going to deal with what. They came in handy when there were incidents on the borders of our poorly-defined control areas. The last thing we wanted to do was run into a border issue with the group patrolling New York City, because by all accounts they were draconian and wildly unpleasant to deal with or be on the bad side of, so everyone in that unit commanded a certain respect from us Unit 6 folks that other units didn’t quite get. Given the sheer size of area we controlled, the fact that there were so few of us was seen as a sign of weakness by both the Buffalo and NYC groups. Prochazka and Unit 3 spent a lot of time and resources keeping them off our backs for whatever the reason du jour was. I figured this must have something to do with that, since there was very little that actually concerned all of Unit 6 as a group.

“Du jour” was Cygnus’s favorite phrase this week. I didn’t speak any French, and near as I could tell he didn’t either, but he knew what that meant, at least, and liked the sound of it. I hadn’t even noticed I was using it until I saw the look on Cygnus’s face the first time I said in his presence—something between pride and confusion.

“We’re being paid a visit by a representative from the Hinterland and Western Massachusetts area,” Prochazka said.

“Hinterland?” Yoru asked. “That’s like—what, four hours from here? The fuck do they want?”

“Three hours,” Prochazka said. “They want to make sure we’re able to handle things.”

“Why?”

“They have to deal with NYC’s bullshit as much as we do,” Prochazka said. “According to their head, anyway, NYC keeps trying to push north and west of Route 23, which means they’re prodding at both of us. The last thing we want is for more people to suffer under them. I know I run a relatively no-nonsense ship out here, but in New York City people just get slaughtered for having magic, let alone ever using it. They see both Loybol and I as weak, since we—as you’ve gathered—don’t do that. Since we’re both getting annoyed by them, she’s sending a representative to ensure that we’re staffed up to her standards. Otherwise, she’s going to help us find some more people.”

“That sounds pretty fine,” Ava said, shrugging. “I think I met someone from Loybol’s group once. He was a little weird, but he seemed alright.”

Prochazka snorted. “About that. Everyone in Loybol’s group that isn’t one of the extremely high-ranked people is controlled directly by Loybol. I don’t exactly know how she does it, but she commands a level of loyalty among her subordinates that I’ve never seen. I know she isn’t a telepath, she’s an earth-key, so it can’t be that, but I have literally seen subordinates of hers who disobey her commit ritual suicide by self-immolation.”

“Oh.”

“Oh is right. Somehow, she’s controlling these people. Apparently, she has a huge number of telepaths on her payroll, and she scoops them out of surrounding regions via covert recruitment. That’s—probably why we don’t have any, although I’m pretty sure Buffalo has stolen at least one. That said, I don’t think that’s it, because trying to get multiple telepaths to do the same thing to multiple people is like herding cats. If Loybol’s that good, she’s that good, but I’d be floored if that was really what was going on.”

“So…what are we doing?” Cygnus asked.

“Here’s the problem. It’s two-fold. One: Loybol’s representative is coming to see our staff, which means she’ll be talking to all of you. I need you all on your best behavior.”

He shot a look at Bell. “Have you talked to anyone in Loybol’s group before?”

Bell nodded. “I think so.”

“Do you remember what you looked like when you did?”

She frowned. “Jesus. That’s a big ask. I went to Pittsfield—in Massachusetts—for an assassination, since the guy fled out there, and I ran into someone else looking for the same person, but I don’t know if they’d remember me or not.”

“They might,” Prochazka said. “There’s some kind of voodoo hive-mind nonsense going on out there. Assume any one agent knows everything all the other agents do.”

“Damn,” Bell said, leaning back and crossing her arms behind her head. “That’s something.”

“Do you remember or not?”

“I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee anything. It was four years or more now. Just say that that agent is dead and say I’m a replacement. It’ll be fine.”

“We replaced one flesh key with another. There were three flesh keys in my area. I don’t think so.”

“They didn’t even get to know my name,” Bell said. “Chill. It’s not a big deal.”

Prochazka let out a breath. “If you don’t remember what you looked like then, then go as whatever you normally look like. Or—no. What you’ve got now is going to be your public face when we’re dealing without any group like ours from now on. Okay? Take some selfies if you’ve got to.”

The sound of someone as old as Prochazka saying “selfies” was enough to make me chuckle, and it slipped out before I could stifle it. At the sound, Prochazka’s attention snapped to me and he said, “Something funny, Erika?”

“No—no, sir,” I stammered, pale.

Bell frowned. She looked like the same tall wire sculpture I usually saw her as, and despite the record that she liked this one, she still said “fine” with enough of a huff to convince me otherwise. I wasn’t quite sure which part of what Prochazka said to her was making her frown—it could have been the tone, or the selfies, or the reminder that he still outranked her, even if she could extinguish him at her leisure.

I was still too caught off-guard by Prochazka’s callout at me and I didn’t recover in time to draw a conclusion about Bell before he went on to the next thing.

“I need you all to be on the same page. About everything,” he said. “And here’s the other problem.”

Prochazka paused for a second. “It is likely that Loybol still thinks Unit 6 is a five-man team.”

That was my cue to actually participate.

I blinked. Took a quick breath to re-center. “I’ve been here for a year.”

Prochazka grimaced, for just half a second. Nobody else noticed it. “I know, but I haven’t told anyone,” he said. “And unless Loybol has been spying on us, she shouldn’t know about it. I’m fairly sure that the reason she’s looking to help us out is that she thinks we’re struggling to find you all a sixth. Obviously, we did. However...”

He grimaced again, for longer this time, and stopped talking while he did so. Across from me, Benji leaned back, crossing his arms and staring down at his lap. “What I’m getting at is, while the representative is here, Erika doesn’t exist. Nobody talks about her, nobody references her, nothing. I haven’t yet figured out how I want to go about making this public yet.”

“You’ve had a year,” Yoru said. “You haven’t figured out the spin on this over a year?”

“I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t done anything,” Prochazka said. He gripped his own hands, folded in front of him, just a touch tighter. “There’s pros and cons to every approach.”

Benji made a terse little smile. Nobody else noticed it, I’m sure.

“For fuck’s sake,” Yoru said, leaning back. “I mean, whatever, it’s fine, but—seriously, man. A year?”

“If you really want to know, we can speak in private later,” Prochazka said.

“I do, actually.”

“Let’s talk, then,” Prochazka replied. Prochazka didn’t make bluffs he wasn’t willing to be called on if push came to shove, and as soon as Yoru realized he’d just accidentally made an appointment to talk policy he frowned and looked at his fingernails.

Prochazka went on. “Erika, just hide in the room where Ava grows her weed.”

Ava frowned. “Shit, you know about that?”

“Did you seriously think I didn’t?” Prochazka replied with a sly half-smile. “Please.”

She grumbled something under her breath and didn’t elaborate on it.

“So that’s the plan,” Prochazka said. “I’m going to do my best to get this representative in and out of here in short order. I don’t want them to be here for too long. Knowing Loybol, she’s going to send someone with a fake key. They’ll have something benign like a water key or an air key around their neck, but that’ll just be a piece of jewelry, and there’ll be a real telepath key in their pocket or something.”

“We’ve got a metal detector in storage,” Cygnus said. “That’ll nab the fake, at least.”

“Exactly the plan,” Prochazka replied, evenly.

“So...what should I do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Prochazka said. “Explicitly nothing. Take Cygnus’s laptop with you if you get bored. Someone'll come get you when the representative is gone.”

I swallowed.

I said, “Okay.”

0 0 0

So I took Cygnus’s laptop and his charger and I plucked my little stuffed frog off my bed for companionship and I let Ava lead me up to the room where she grew her weed, listening to her grumble the whole way up that all of her secrets were forfeit and that nobody respected her privacy.

I offered, “I respect your privacy,” but she didn’t seem to think that was funny or worth a response, so I didn’t say anything else until we got there.

“Can’t imagine this’ll take long,” she said, glancing over at the group of potted plants by the window. “Just don’t touch anything, okay?”

“Okay.”

The room was a converted attic-like space, with a few windows along the back wall that Ava clustered a bunch of plants I assumed were marijuana around. The plants themselves looked healthy, if a little small and thin, but I figured marijuana just didn’t grow well indoors. Not that I knew much of anything about that.

Casino games and booze, sure, but weed was a bit above my pay-grade. My dad stuck to the occasional cigar on special occasions and that was it.

“Ugh,” Ava said, glancing at the plants. “Hey, can you do me a favor?”

I was about to open the laptop, sitting cross-legged on the floor, but I stopped. “What?”

“Can you dehydrate a few of these leaves for me?” She went to one of the plants and pinched a bunch of leaves off with her thumb and index nails. “I’m gonna smoke before the rep gets here.”

“That—um—that doesn’t seem like a great idea,” I said.

“What’s Prochazka gonna do about it?”

“Disapprove?” I tried.

“Prochazka can eat my whole ass,” Ava said, heading to a nearby table to grab a small sheet of paper. “Bell gets to go out every night and do God-knows-what to who-knows-what and not tell anyone or file a single damn report and I don’t even get to have a room to myself in this whole gigantic fucking factory where I can relax and smoke weed. There’s like four of these rooms in this facility and he specifically calls out mine in front of the whole group.”

“We all already knew about it, if—um—if that makes you feel any better.”

“Yeah, I know you all already knew about it, but Yoru was the only one who knew where it was. Maybe he snitched,” she said.

“That doesn’t sound like something he’d do.”

Ava pursed her lips. Swallowing some other statement. “Yeah, you’re right. Maybe he just knew the whole time and let me have it.”

“Maybe.”

“Fuck it, whatever. Oh—the leaves, please,” she said. I obliged her, shriveling the leaves in her hand with negligible effort.

“Thanks,” she said, crushing the leaves in her fist and laying them down on the paper she’d set aside.

Then she rolled her joint, walked over to a window, opened it, and took a lighter out of her pocket.

“How the fuck does Prochazka not tell anyone about you after a whole year?” she asked, to the air outside.

Then she flicked the flame on from her lighter and lit up.

“Beats me,” was all I could offer.

“Like—does he not think that rumors travel? Is he just pretending you don’t exist? He was so gung-ho about putting you on the team—like, when he scouted you out he sold you to us as the best bruiser we’d ever have—and then he went and just...never said anything? That doesn’t add up.”

She took another hit. “Don’t you think?”

“I guess,” I said, opening Cygnus’s laptop. I put the stuffed frog on my shoulder—it fit really nicely there.

“Yeah,” Ava said, to no one.

She paused for a moment. “Doesn’t it bug you?”

“What does?”

“That you’re stuck here. Don’t you feel disrespected?”

I stopped typing. “Um—maybe a little?”

“Or have you just not thought about it at all,” she said, in such a neutral tone that I couldn’t pick out any animosity, even though my instincts told me it was there.

My instincts tended to be wrong about that stuff nowadays, and Ava promised me she’d be better, so I disregarded it.

“Whatever,” she said. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Loybol’s gonna send a fake key that’s actually a telepath and we’re gonna find out that they’re fake, and big whoop, we’re not gonna be able to do anything about it because if we turn the rep away Loybol’ll know something’s wrong.”

“It might not be that bad,” I said.

Ava frowned. “I mean—I guess so. I came up here to relax, so...”

She took another hit. “Whatever it is is whatever it is. I’m not gonna talk about you, Yoru’s not gonna talk about you, Bell hopefully won’t decide it’d be funny to sabotage this for no fucking reason, and as long as you don’t leave this room I doubt anything bad’ll happen.”

We sat around in more-or-less silence for about half an hour before Ava stood up and announced that the representative had arrived. She must have gotten a text about it.

“I’ll be back when this is over,” she said. Then, putting her blunt down in a dish on the table, she said, “I guess you can take a hit if you want.”

One vice was plenty for me. I swore I’d never smoke—smoking kills. It’s terrible for you.

“I’m good,” I said.

“Then don’t touch it, because I’m gonna finish it when I get back,” Ava said, walking to the door. “I’m gonna need it.”

She opened the door and left.