{December 18th}

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened, but at some point during my thirteenth year, I became gossipy. Maybe it was the nature of Unit 6 as a solitary clique among an otherwise homogenous group—all the other units socialized normally, but nobody ever talked to us unless they needed something. Gossip, then, was hard to come by—but when it did, it was so much juicier.

Yoru and Ava were the king and queen of it; Cygnus knew a lot of good stuff too, but he mostly kept it to himself unless he deemed it relevant for someone to know. Once I’d established a perpetual interest in the happenings of people I never spoke to, one of the royal couple made sure to hook me up periodically.

On the 18th, Ava found me at lunch, in the cafeteria. I’d been going there more often since my vigilante outing; something about standing in that room when it was dead and abandoned at two in the morning made it less of a menace to me. I saw it as exactly what it was in that moment: a room with a bunch of seats in it that people ate in. When I was a stone of ten or eleven, I had a really hard time separating the space from the people who populated it—but I was older and wiser now that I was with the Radiant, so I knew better.

I was sitting alone. Not by choice—it was just three o’clock, so nobody was eating any meals. I had nothing going on that day so I’d been taking it slow.

“There you are,” Ava said. “Took like twenty minutes to find you.”

From behind her, Yoru added: “Who eats lunch at three o’clock?”

“It’s my day off,” I said, with a little huff. “I’ll eat whenever I want.”

I still turned a bit red, though. Years of apprehension were hard to shake.

“Get a load of this.” Ava sat down across from me; Yoru took the seat next to her. “You know how Unit 3 does the mail now?”

I nodded.

“So I was talking to Frank, right?”

“Frank?”

“The mailroom guy. He’s—oh, he’s new, I don’t think you’ve met him.”

I hadn’t met anyone in Unit 3, really. Other units tended to avoid talking to me as much as possible. All they had to go on for my personality were rumors, and rumors about me tended to not be particularly flattering.

I swear I’m personable enough once you get to know me.

Ava went on. “So he got a package addressed to Prochazka, right? And that’s a big-ole red flag since he’s not much of a well-known guy. Doesn’t exactly get a lot of mail, you feel?”

I stopped sipping my soup. Went so far as to put the spoon down completely to give Ava my undivided attention. “Yeah?”

“Get this,” Ava said, grinning: “It came from an address in Hinterland. Frank looked it up and it turns out that it was the address of this restaurant, the Veritas, which is some really fancy place on the waterfront in South Hinterland. But it’s also one of the places we have marked as one of Loybol’s offices.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So why is Prochazka getting a package from one of Loybol’s offices, right? Since Loybol’s a mostly-friendly-but-still-neutral party, we had to open it, because it could be a trap or something. So Frank called in the bomb squad, which meant that Prochazka heard about it, and it was this big to-do this morning.”

“How early?”

“Oh, um...” Ava looked up, thinking back on it. “Ten or eleven?”

“I woke up at ten-thirty today, so...”

“Yeah, you probably missed it,” Ava said. “But it was a big deal.”

Yoru picked up the story. “So they opened the box, right? And you know what was in it?”

I was dying to know. “What?”

“It was this quartz sculpture of a hawk. Apparently, there’s an earth key in Hinterland who makes amazing sculptures out of various rocks and minerals. Sells them out of his apartment in the Red Quarter.”

“And he got one in the mail?”

“No,” Yoru said. He put his arms on the table and leaned in. “Here’s the kicker: It wasn’t that guy. There wasn’t a signature on the bottom. In fact, it wasn’t signed at all.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “That’s...”

“Yeah. You know Mara? She’s on the bomb squad.”

“I’ve heard of her,” I said.

“She’s really into bird-watching, and she said that the hawk’s proportions weren’t quite right. It looked really good, but it wasn’t quite a red-tailed hawk even though it was obviously supposed to be, right? So it probably wasn’t an artist who made it.”

I wanted to ensure we were all on the same page. “Did Loybol make Prochazka a Christmas present?”

Yoru and Ava nodded in unison. Ava added, giddy, “Isn’t that nuts?”

“So when Esther came a few months ago...that actually was just a good-will checkup?”

“Probably,” Yoru said, shrugging. To his credit, he didn’t act very smug about it. “Bell’s an idiot, I told you. She’s so fucking paranoid all the time.”

We were quiet for a second. I offered, “You think Prochazka will get her something back?”

“God, I hope so,” Ava said. “But he was really pissed that we found out about this. Apparently, it showed up a day early. Otherwise, he was just going to grab it from the mailroom himself. We weren’t supposed to find out about it.”

“A quartz hawk,” I said, in loose echo.

“Loybol’s an earth key,” Ava said, glancing around for anyone who could be eavesdropping. “Well-known for having ridiculously good control. But she’s also, like, not an artist, you know? Just really observant.”

Suddenly, she turned around. “Hey, Frank!”

Someone a few tables down stood up and walked over—a man with a black goatee and muscled arms roughly the width of my neck. He looked to be somewhere around forty or forty-five, so I guessed that he didn’t have a key.

“Yo, Frank, can you confirm the hawk story?” Ava asked.

His eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah. Shit’s wild. Here I was thinking Loybol was some evil overlord like the New York City folks, and now she’s up giving Prochazka Christmas presents? Hand-made Christmas presents!”

He extended a hand. “I’m Frank, by the way. Frank Quinn.”

I completed the handshake. “Erika Hanover.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Whatcha think it’s about?” he asked us all.

Yoru shrugged. “Brain says gesture of good-will for the next year. Heart says they’re secret lovers.”

Ava swooned. “God, please. Have you seen the two of them together? That would be so fucking funny.”

I barely saw Prochazka anymore, and I’d never met Loybol, so that was a solid “no” from me.

“What’re they like?”

Yoru got to it first. “Stupidly, aggressively, formal. They never break eye contact. Always maxing out on formalities. It’s like their from fucking sixteen fifty-six. I thought they hated each other, but this...this is news, let me tell you.”

Frank laughed. “God. I’m gonna keep an eye out for anything else. Maybe she’ll send a menagerie.”

That was enough to get a chuckle out of all of us.

0 0 0

Yoru and Ava had a job to do, so they left a little while after that, leaving me alone again to finish up my lunch and go back upstairs.

I hadn’t considered Prochazka the type to like receiving gifts. I wondered if he’d ever gotten one from someone in the organization—and I also wondered how many of the other assorted trinkets in his office were things he’d received from people.

Had he gotten gifts from Loybol before? Were they dating?

I knew Prochazka was around a hundred years old, but I had no idea how old Loybol was. I’d never seen her before. And at that moment I wished I wasn’t alone in the Unit 6 common room so I could ask someone—and as though I was heard, Cygnus walked into the common room right then. He was walking more slowly than usual, and rubbing his eyes as he came in, so I figured he was just there for his noontime second cup.

I put my book down.

“Hey, Cygnus,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“How old is Loybol?” I asked him, from the high ground on my bunk.

“Loybol? Geez,” he trailed off, scratching the back of his neck. He had to nudge the sheath strapped to his back to do so. “Maybe fifty?”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s…kind of a big gap.”

“Gap between what?” he asked.

Cygnus, I remembered, was not a telepath.

“Between her and Prochazka,” I said.

He smirked. “You got word?”

“Yup. It’s wild.”

“Sure is.”

“It’s kind of weird, don’t you think?” I tried.

“I mean, it’s not as weird as it could be, you know? They’re both adults with keys. Realistically speaking they’re probably around the same age anyway, assuming they both pursue treatment for when they get cancer. Physically they’re probably around the same age. It’s—kind of complicated, you feel?”

I certainly didn’t know where the line between “weird” and “not weird” was in this context, so that was a sentiment I could get behind.

He went on. “The pickings for people with keys are kind of slim. You kind of have to date someone else with a key, otherwise you just get to watch your loved one get old and die. So unless you’re into that kind of thing…”

I didn’t laugh. Cygnus pursed his lips. “Yeah, that was a bit far. Sorry. Anyway—for Loybol the pickings are probably even slimmer, right? Like—she’s probably one of the most powerful people with keys in the country, and she can’t exactly date down, for, you know…security reasons. Prochazka might honestly be the only person in the area that ticks all the boxes and is, I don’t know, reasonably attractive, I guess?”

“That’s kind of sad,” I said.

“Yeah, but if Loybol was in it to get laid, I’m sure she could. I mean, she’s got, what, eight hundred people in her organization? And like, seven hundred and ninety of them are being mind controlled?”

That wasn’t all that funny, either. “Man, I’m just sour today,” Cygnus said, rolling his eyes and pushing out a sigh. “God.”

“Christmas got you down?”

He took his sword off and leaned it against the wall, then pulled up a chair to sit across from my bed, where I was. He crossed his legs and did his best to relax.

“Rough mission yesterday,” he said. “Got a lot dirtier than I wanted. Mind if I show you something?”

I shrugged; he reached down and yanked up the leg of his khakis to reveal a savage jagged slash of pinkish flesh.

“Jesus,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he replied. “Just rattled. I got lucky; the guy missed.”

It occurred to me then why he was moving so slowly.

“I should be okay in a day or two,” he said. “Sophia fixed me up but she still doesn’t want me going around and doing big stuff for a bit.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said.

“How are the contacts?” he asked.

Fine, except for the implication.

“They’re good,” I replied. “I can see the sign at the end of the hall again.”

“That’s good. You didn’t do, like, archery or some shit as a kid, did you?” He frowned. “I mean, before you came here.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Because your aim is inhumanly good,” he said. “If you didn’t, then you would’ve been a natural talent at it.”

All I did was shrug and smile.

That kind of comment, three years ago, would’ve been just what I needed—and now, it still was, but the desperation was gone. The craving, still a dull ache in my chest, had mostly subsided—but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love the ego-stroking.

I deserved a little of it, didn’t I?