And so Bell and I walked down the hall, outside of Ava’s weed room, and we went downstairs and through the factory to the place where the representative was doing the interviews. Only Yoru was still standing around, and when he saw Bell coming he started to say, “Esther’s been waiting for you,” but as soon as he saw me behind her, he stopped and shot Bell a toxic look.

Bell ignored him completely. Kept walking. I just looked at Yoru and shrugged.

Bell opened the door and stepped into the conference room. I’d been told to wait outside, so I did.

Yoru looked at me, looked back and forth, then beckoned for me to come away from the door.

I did so, walking up next to him. He whispered to me—in a half-hiss—“What the fuck are you doing down here?”

I turned beet red. “We’ve got a plan. This is serious stuff.”

“I know it is!” Yoru said. “It’s—Prochazka specifically told you not to leave. God. Ava told me this would happen. Bell put you up to something, right? Fuck.”

He turned away for half a second. “What is it? What’s she making you do?”

“This whole thing is a trap,” I said. “It’s just a spy mission. Esther’s just here to scope out the competition.”

Yoru paused. “That would go against everything Loybol’s done up to now. I don’t buy it, man.”

“That’s what Bell told me,” I mumbled.

“Bell says a lot of bullshit,” Yoru said. “You’d better go back upstairs before Prochazka stops by to make sure you’re not here.”

“Esther’s a telepath,” I said. “She already knows about me. It’s too late.”

“Did Bell tell you that, too?”

My eyes dropped to the floor.

“Look, Erika, I know it sucks being stuck up there, but if Prochazka hasn’t talked about you yet I’ve got to assume he has a good reason. Beats the hell out of me what the reason is, he hasn’t told me, but it’s gotta be a good one. You really should go.”

“Weren’t you supposed to meet with him earlier to talk about it?”

He grimaced, looked down. “Yeah.”

The two of us couldn’t meet eyes for a moment—but I remembered what Bell told me, and I knew I had to make a stand here. Make a call—any call, just to prove I could.

“Bell’s got a plan and I’m following through with it,” I said. “I’m—I’ve got a plan and I’m following through with it.”

“Bell’s plan,” Yoru said. “Not yours.”

“I’m in the plan.”

“Bell’s just using you.” Yoru frowned. Shook his head. “God. You really need to stop talking to her. She’s—Bell’s a piece of fucking work, Erika. You really don’t want to associate with someone like her.”

“She’s—she’s so cool,” I said, quietly.

Yoru all but rolled his eyes. “God, Erika, what’s she been telling you?”

“Just—stuff,” I trailed off. “Cool stuff.”

“How old did she say she was?” Yoru asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“Well, she told me she was twenty-nine,” Yoru said. “Let’s see how old she tells Esther she is, huh?”

He walked over to the wall and but his ear up against it. I joined him, slow and numb.

Through the wall I heard an alien voice, presumably Esther: “…flesh-key.”

“Flesh-key, huh? Pretty rare.”

“Yeah—I’ve, um, I’ve been told that.”

The first alien voice was Bell. It was higher, more childish, than I remembered.

“She sounds like a fucking teenager,” Yoru said. “God dammit. I knew Bell was gonna screw us with this. She literally cannot resist an opportunity to put on a new dumb face and lie to someone. She literally cannot do it. It is factually, completely impossible. Fuck.”

He turned away from the wall for half a second, saw me still listening, completely still, and he turned back.

Esther said, “How old are you, Faith?”

Yoru snorted. “Fucking Faith?”

“Um—I’m eighteen.”

Yoru could barely contain the spiteful laugh. “Eighteen? Are you fucking serious?”

Meanwhile, I was frozen solid.

We listened to them talk for a little while, small talk, and all the while Esther became slowly more and more confident. I don’t know what kind of character Bell was trying to play, but it was evidently some sort of God-fearing Catholic schoolgirl nonsense who happened to have a flesh-key and no conscience, but still cripplingly low self-esteem, as if someone as powerful as Bell could ever be in doubt that they owned the world.

It was stock horror-movie garbage, but Esther didn’t appear to be outwardly questioning it.

After a few minutes, Bell—or Faith or whatever—said, “Actually—I don’t know if, um, if you’ve found out about this already, but there’s actually six of us.”

“Six of you. Six in six. That makes sense.”

“Her name’s Erika. I—I brought her with me. Prochazka told us not to show you, but I really think you should see her.”

“Is she outside?”

“Yeah.”

That was my cue.

I looked at Yoru, who shot me one last pleading look.

I came down here because I wanted to call some shots. These were shots, weren’t they? I was calling something, I was sure. This had to be good enough. Esther was a telepath. She already knew I existed—so what harm could this do?

The least I could do was show her I wasn’t weak.

So I looked at Yoru and shrugged.

And he grimaced.

And I turned around, and I opened the door, and I stepped inside the conference room.

Esther Bluebird was there, at the foot of the faux-wood conference table. She wore a crisp black dress that revealed close to nothing, with no designs and no accessories whatsoever. That was all I could see of what she was wearing, since I could only see whatever was above the table.

She was relatively normal-looking, I guess. Blonde hair of an indeterminate length tied back in a bun, no earrings or anything, kind of an angular face. I figured if I walked out of the room, I’d immediately forget what she looked like.

What did strike me was the way she was looking at Bell before I came in—a kind of predatory half-smile that reminded me a lot of Bell herself, and that I only realized right then was almost exactly the way Bell looked at me.

I forced myself to feel nothing. I mostly succeeded.

Then Esther looked at me, and all at once her posed look melted into confusion.

And out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bell smile.

“This is Erika,” Bell said.

She no longer sounded meek.

Esther looked from me to Bell and back at me. To me, she asked: “How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” I said. “I’ve been here for a year, though.”

My water key, on its necklace, glinted a little in the meeting room’s fluorescent light.

“Do you mind if I do something?” Esther asked.

I shrugged. “Depends.”

“I’m going to put your key on the other side of the room and see if it goes back to you like it’s supposed to.”

I said, “Okay.”

Instead of letting her touch it like she was reaching to do, I took it off and lobbed it into the corner, then walked backwards until I was in the opposite corner of the room.

After a minute, I reached into my pocket and pulled the key out. “See? It’s mine.”

Esther blinked. Turned a bit pale. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “That’s—that’s not supposed to happen.”

I blinked. “It’s not supposed to come back?”

Stupid. Of course it was.

“You’re not supposed to have one,” Esther said. “That’s—fuck. That’s crazy.”

She took on a weird thousand-yard stare for a second before adding: “Where the hell did Prochazka find you? And why didn’t he say anything?”

I felt a weird pang in the back of my head; it was strange enough and sharp enough to make me wince.

Bell said, “You’re going to get out of her head now.”

Full confidence. The Bell I knew.

The pang subsided. “Okay, Erika,” Esther said, all tensed up. “Who are you?”

This was my time, I supposed.

“I’m the strongest water-key,” I said.

Esther did not visibly react. “Really.”

“I’ll show you,” I said.

I closed my eyes and found the nearest source of water—a leaky faucet in the men’s room across the hall. I drew out that basketball-sized ball of water like I did upstairs, and as it drifted into the room I said, “I can’t raise a tsunami in here, so this is what I’ve got.”

I went through the whole routine with her, with a seven-by-seven-by-seven cube. Each ball perfectly still. Like seamless glass. Perfectly spherical. Even as they melted into each other, they did so in an even fashion, never becoming oblong or misshapen in any way.

I grimaced. It was, however, the hairy edge of what I could control. Simultaneously holding three hundred and forty-three perfect spheres was, as it turned out, kind of hard.

Esther watched, entranced.

Then, at the end, I shattered the whole thing into mist, and with that mist I gathered it around Esther’s limp hand, and gently curled her fingers into a fist, and lifted her arm onto the table, and did the same with her other hand and her other arm, so they were crossed.

Then I re-gathered all the water into a ball and let it drift back to where it came from.

Esther blinked, again.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Bell smiled. “Listen.”

Esther looked over at Bell. “What?”

“I know why you’re here,” Bell said, abandoning the meekness of Faith. “I know you’re a spy. And I want you to know something. If you’re scoping us out—if you’re trying to figure out how many slaves you need to recommend Loybol to bring to clean out the Radiant, I want you to keep in mind that what Erika just did didn’t even cause her to break a sweat.”

Not entirely true, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Yoru, Cygnus, Ava, and Benji are one thing, and Prochazka himself is one thing, but Erika and I are another.”

“You?” Esther asked.

“Me,” Bell replied.

And then, in front of Esther, Bell’s face began to distort. She shrank somewhat, filled out a bit more. Her nose became a completely different shape, eyes angled differently, jaw re-set, hair changed color.

She turned into Esther.

And then Bell leaned in, and I could just barely catch that her eyes had taken on their mostly-pupil look, so they were just endless empty black holes surrounded by tiny slivers of cornea, and when she opened her mouth a superposition of the voice Bell used with me and Esther’s own came out.

“You show up with an army,” Bell said as Esther, “and you’ll have to get through Erika and I. And we will cut you down.”

Bell reached out. Took hold of Esther’s chin with two fingers—fingers just like Esther’s, slim pianist’s fingers unmarked by callouses.

“And if you think you can throw some Umbroids at me and make me your own…”

And Bell angled Esther’s face upward so it met her own.

Bell stood over Esther.

Bell spoke, and Esther’s voice came from her mouth, layered over her own. The two entwined.

“Think again.”

0 0 0

Prochazka was outside when we all filed out—I saw him there and instantly froze solid.

He regarded me with complete lack of expression, then looked at Esther. “I trust you found our team more than capable.”

Esther, to her credit, had swallowed her fear remarkably fast. By the time she was standing in the hall with Prochazka—Bell standing next to her and myself stuck frozen in the doorway behind the two of them—she almost looked normal again.

But the paleness couldn’t be masked, and the light shaking in her hand.

“You all seem fine,” Esther said.

“You go tell Loybol we’re doing quite alright, okay?” Prochazka asked, cracking a smile.

“I think I’ll do that.” Esther glanced around, lingering on Yoru who was still leaning against the wall, scrolling through something on his phone as though none of us were there.

“It’s been a pleasure showing you around,” Prochazka said, with his best and brightest face. “Why don’t I show you back to your car?”

“That would be lovely, thank you,” Esther said.

She took a quick glance back at Bell, and a second, even faster one at me, and then she headed off down the hall with Prochazka.

Bell waited a few moments for them to be out of earshot, and then she said to me: “Hey--good work today. That was just right.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, still staring down the hall Prochazka disappeared down.

“You’re not going to get in trouble,” Bell said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Evidently that was enough to rile up Yoru, who made some loud huffing noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a growl.

“Yeah, but you’d better,” Yoru said, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “What the fuck was that, Bell? Faith? Eighteen?”

Bell laughed, and I almost believed her.

“Not like anything I said to her mattered. She was a telepath, Yoru, you really think she was asking us about demographics because she needed to know?”

Around that time I realized that I hadn’t actually seen what Esther’s key was—she wasn’t wearing it. Maybe it was in a pocket somewhere, but dresses like the one she was wearing didn’t tend to have those. Was she carrying a bag? I’d already forgotten, even though she’d only been out of eyeshot for maybe a minute and a half.

Maybe Esther was just designed to be forgettable.

Yoru frowned. “Why did you drag Erika down here?”

“Because she’s a part of the team. Scaring the spy seemed like a good idea, given that she was here to scout out the competition, not to figure out if we needed help. We don’t need help, do we?”

“No, we don’t, but—”

“Then why should we act like we do? What does that give us?”

Yoru pursed his lips for a second. “You coerced Erika to disobey a direct order.”

“I didn’t coerce anyone,” Bell corrected. “Erika’s a human, she can make her own decisions. I offered her a plan and she agreed to it. She could’ve said no and that would’ve been that.”

Yoru swallowed, took his phone out again, and went back to aimlessly scrolling. “God, you’re impossible,” he said.

Bell frowned. Like she was actually, honestly annoyed.

“What, because I’m right?” Bell replied.

He grimaced and put his phone away again. “No, because it’s impossible to prove that you’re wrong. So maybe Esther was a spy and maybe Loybol wants to kill us all, secretly, and maybe this whole thing was actuallt Erika’s idea in the first place and you’re just fucking with me, but I’d never know, right? All I can do is just trust that whatever bullshit you’re spinning now isn’t bullshit, like it’s been literally every other time.”

“When have I ever lied to you, Yoru?” Bell asked, quietly. “When have I ever?”

“All you do is lie!” Yoru shouted. “I...”

He appeared to realize something; the dawning crashed over his face in an instant. On a dime he turned around and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Fuck it, it’s not worth arguing with you. Waste of my time.”

Apparently, though, he was of a bunch of minds, because yet again he thought better of what he was doing and he turned around again. “Stop fucking with Erika, okay?”

“What, exactly, do you think I’m doing?” Bell asked, all innocently. It would’ve been perfect if the words weren’t coming out of Bell’s face, from under her dead-fish eyes.

“Corrupting her,” Yoru said. “Making her like you. I don’t know. Whatever the hell you two are up to, it’s probably bad.”

“How so? What am I corrupting? Please. Do tell.”

Yoru made a face that was something along the lines of a stroke. “Out of everyone here to latch on to, she had to latch on to you. The person who’s never here, doesn’t talk to anyone, barely interacts with the team, and only goes on solo missions.”

“This sounds like an issue you should take up with Erika,” Bell said. “I mean, you’ve already established that you don’t think she can make her own decisions. Why don’t you two have a nice talk, so you can tell her exactly what she’s supposed to think, hmm?”

I was still hung up on getting in trouble for all of this. Most of what they talked about went in one ear and out the other. All the pretext was lost on me.

I was just standing there, I guess.

Bell turned to leave. “You two sort this out, okay? I’m going to go talk to Prochazka.”

And then she went down the same hall Prochazka and Esther went down, turned the corner, and disappeared.

Yoru looked down the hall after her for a moment and sighed. “What the fuck is wrong with her? Good lord.”

It began to dawn on me what this whole thing was about. It was the first clear thought I’d had since everyone started talking, so I dived onto it.

“Neither of you think I can handle myself,” I said.

“We both do,” Yoru said, instantly. “That’s not it.”

“No, it is. You don’t think I can make my own decisions, and Bell doesn’t think so either. She—she's just pretending that she thinks I can.” More quietly, I said, “But she doesn’t.”

“I think you can,” Yoru said. “Trust me, I do. But Bell—Bell's whole thing is lying. She lies with her whole being. Maybe this is the one time she’s actually honest about something, but I’d side with the majority on this one if you know what I’m saying. If—if this is something you’re worrying about, which it looks like it is, then—well, you’ve gotta make some of your own calls, I guess. I don’t really know when you’ll get the opportunity to do that, but...”

Yoru trailed off. “Fuck, that’s what this was, wasn’t it.”

I nodded, silently.

“But you didn’t make a decision,” Yoru said. “Bell made your decision.”

I nodded again. Words were failing me. I could barely comprehend what I'd just trapped myself in, let alone put it to words.

The overflow fell into an endless pit. It was disregarded—and in time, it all was.

Yoru and I stood in silence for a moment, considering my condition, I guess. He might have just been staring at the floor, hoping the condition would change on its own. I don’t know.

Then, breaking the silence, he said, “Fuck it. Let’s get ice cream.”

I was desperate for a new thought. Ice cream was a good enough distraction.

He set off and I followed.