{February 4th}

Things turned a bit sour after Christmas that year. We had a meeting with Prochazka again, where he told us he was going to take a more actively patrolling role in our lives for a time. He didn’t say what it was about, but the rumor mill printed that something was heating up somewhere in the area and we had to be ready for something bigger than a standard mission.

Neither Prochazka nor Benji seemed all that concerned about it, though, so we didn’t let ourselves worry too much, either.

Despite it being the dead of winter, Prochazka saw to it that we learned all sorts of outdoor survival skills. He would, on days we all had off, rouse us all up at the crack of dawn and drag us out to the wilderness for an all-day session where we hunted and fished for food. He’d intersperse real lessons with war stories from his various conflicts. Over three months we went out maybe four times—he mentioned once that he wanted to do those sessions around once every two weeks, more often if we had to.

“It might not seem like it, because nothing’s really going on right now, but you are all still soldiers, and Benji and I are your commanding officers,” Prochazka had said to the assembled at one point, being myself, Yoru, Ava, and Cygnus. “Just because there’s only a few of you doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. We’ve been lax because this is peace-time, but if that stops, you all need to be ready.”

“Is this boot-camp, then?” Cygnus had asked.

Benji cracked a smile. “No. You’ll know when it’s boot-camp. This is fun.”

I realized that I had no idea how old Benji was. Odds were good that he was an ex-military like Prochazka was; but as far as a real age, I had no idea.

I made a mental note to ask him, if I ever worked up the courage to speak frankly.

On the fourth trip, we were all out from dawn to around midnight tromping around in the cold and hunting for whatever we could find. Building rudimentary shelters and such while Prochazka talked about what we could and couldn’t eat, things along those lines. It started to snow around seven o’clock, and it came down heavily for about three hours—during that time we all crammed into the structure we’d build against the side of a rock-face, sat around a fire and waited for it to stop. Benji was a fire-key, but Prochazka made us do it the old-fashioned way.

He said that we couldn’t rely on magic other than our own. We couldn’t assume that the others would always be there.

That said, it turned out that having access to an array of magic makes surviving in the wilderness kind of easy. Being able to warm and cool water meant that Ava could grow plants in patches of ground I prepared, assuming she found something edible to copy or had some seeds on her. Yoru and Prochazka could keep the snow from falling on us as we patched up the shelter, which was also a simple matter to make when Ava could just grow some misshapen trees for us to hide under.

The only person who couldn’t do all that much was Cygnus. There’s not a lot of metal to manipulate in the wilderness. Any piece of scrap metal he had on him could be shaped into any tool he needed, which was convenient enough, but outside of that there was little he could do without an earth-key to help him locate ores to use. It hadn’t occurred to me before that trip, but finding ores in rock was above Cygnus’s pay-grade.

I made another note to remind myself of that experience every time I caught myself wishing I was a telepath, because a telepath’s key wasn’t worth anything out there.

Prochazka taught the rest of the group how to assemble rudimentary fishing equipment, but I found that I could actually just scoop fish out of the nearby pond if I drove them to the surface by manipulating currents. Then, I could just pop them out with a big splash and catch them as they flew toward me.

He taught us how to clean fish and game, too. We weren’t supposed to ask non-pertinent questions while the lessons were going on, but I made a note to ask about something when we were all stuck in the storm with nothing to do.

We sat in the center of around fifteen tree trunks, each curving in and upward in an upside-down funnel shape to the center, where a hole let the smoke from the fire out.

It wasn’t big, but it was big enough for the six of us to sit in. Clockwise from myself, left of the entrance from a bird’s eye view, were Ava, Yoru, Benji, Prochazka, and Cygnus, in that order. Nobody sat in front of the door.

As soon as we verified that it was snowing hard and unlikely to stop, and we were all more or less dry (thanks to me) and more or less warm (thanks to Benji), I let loose the singular question on my mind. With us all assembled and nowhere for anyone to go to dodge me, it was the perfect time to get an answered that mattered.

“Where’s Bell?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be here too?”

I caught Yoru rolling his eyes in my peripheral vision. Just to make sure he knew I saw it, I said, “No, really. I haven’t seen her in…what? Five months? How long ago was Esther here?”

“Five months,” Yoru said. “That was September. But I saw her around Christmas.”

Ava nodded. “Yeah. Maybe a few days before Christmas. I think that was the last time I saw her, too.”

I was a bit miffed that they’d both seen her while I hadn’t. As far as I knew, she’d been gone for more than twice that long.

How much of that time was she here, and just avoiding me?

Yoru added, “And…yeah. I’ll admit. I’ve been wondering where she is, too.”

We all looked at Benji and waited—even Prochazka, which caught me a bit off guard.

“She’s alive,” Benji said, simply. “I get correspondence. No idea what’s taking her so long because she won’t put it in the mail, but she’s existing. I get a letter from her maybe once every ten days or so. She must be really deep undercover.”

“For five months?” I asked.

Benji shrugged. “We’ll find out when she gets back, I suppose. Believe me, Jan and I have already had this talk. I trust Bell to get the job done and get back here.”

Trusting Bell seemed like a weak cause to everyone else, and upon seeing the others’ apprehension Benji persisted: “Look, Bell does good work. I know she’s not popular among the rest of y’all, but without her we’d all be dead a couple times over. She’s probably more important individually than the rest of you, and she’s definitely less replaceable.”

That shut everyone up.

He decided to go on, after a half-second’s hesitation. “I don’t know what the fuck she’s doing out there but I’m going to assume it’s important. If she’s not back in another month or two, then I’ll start getting worried. But for now, I’m just going to let her do her thing. And besides, Bell already knows all this stuff.”

“She does?” Ava asked.

Prochazka nodded, and that was the end of that subject.

I didn’t stop thinking about it, though. I wondered where Bell was the whole time we sat in the hut. What could she possibly be doing that would take that long? How deep undercover were we talking?

Who was she, at that very second? How many people did she have to become?

Would she remember who she was when she came back?

I imagined her as some bright-eyed young recruit into some nefarious organization, painstakingly working her way up to the trust of the organization’s head, spending every waking second trying to win their favor, just so they could be left alone together sometime half a year later—and only then would she strike. Six months spent as someone else. Six months of abandoned self.

I couldn’t imagine the effort that would take. I wondered if, after a while, it stopped being hard to hold a new body shape; if it simply became you, like clay. It would settle, until the thought of returning to who you were before would be as alien as the thought of becoming who you are now.

I was thankful I wasn’t a flesh-key. That whole ordeal sounded very hard.

I didn’t listen to any of Prochazka or Benji’s stories—if I did, I would’ve found out right then that Benji fought in Vietnam like Prochazka did, but for the American side instead, rather than finding that out secondhand from Yoru later on.

I tuned back into the conversation in time for Cygnus to ask another question: “Hey, Jan. Can I be frank with you for a second?”

Prochazka pursed his lips. “That reminds me. It’s not important now, but if things get serious, you all will use the appropriate honorifics to refer to Benji and I. I’m okay with being friendly now because I’m too old to be a hardass twenty-four-seven, but if we get to a point where everyone has to buck up and fall in line, I’ll be enforcing that. Understand?”

Cygnus shrugged. “Sure. But can I ask the question?”

“Go.”

“How likely do you think it is that we’ll actually use any of this stuff?”

Prochazka pondered that for a second. “Honestly? Not all that likely.”

I caught Yoru scowling.

“It’s sort of unlikely that anyone who’d want to attack us would drive us out to the wilderness, unless we agree beforehand to fight this out away from civilization. It’s just as likely that they’d simply try to ambush us all on various missions rather than fight it out face-to-face.”

“I’d like to see them try,” I said.

That got at least a chuckle out of Cygnus and a light smile out of Prochazka, who were the only two that knew what I did that time.

Prochazka squinted out of the entrance of the hut. “Looks like the snow’s letting up. We should probably be getting back.”

That was perfectly fine by all of us.

So we crawled out of the hut, and Ava killed it—made it shrivel, cracked the wood, until it was just a pile of timbers next to the rock face.

Then Benji set his hand on fire and shot a fireball at it, and a few more, until the whole thing was up in flames.

We all stood and watched it burn, a bonfire bigger than any of us, smoke rising into the star-speckled sky. We were perfectly alone—nobody around but ourselves, nobody to answer to but the one.

We watched it burn down to nothing. Prochazka called up a wind and swept the ashes into the woods, scattering them across the snow, and I set to work directing the snow with Yoru’s help to cover the ground we’d used.

And then it was as though we were never there. Fleeting as it was.

Wordlessly Prochazka turned around and started along the path we came, following the snowfall-dampened footsteps we’d taken to get here. He hummed a song I didn’t recognize, something pentatonic, something that made Benji grimace.

Prochazka walked with sure, big steps—like he was a young soldier again, powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, with a secret to destroy the world.

And I couldn’t say for sure if he was happier back then or happier in the snow-covered forest with us. I didn’t know him well enough.

But I know what I’d guess, gun to my head.

It was a half-hour hike back to the cars, and an hour’s drive back to the factory. Packed into each we all became aware of who we were again: smoke-soaked, sweat-drenched. Tired and cold. We all looked like hell, glancing at ourselves in the rear-view mirror whenever Benji drove past a streetlamp.

The soldier’s life we’d never been given. Miserable and cruel as we were sure it’d be if we had to do it for too long—but for one day, it wasn’t too bad. The killing wasn’t the hard part for us—we were all well-versed in that—but the exposure to the elements, and the grappling for survival; now that was where the thrill lied, at least for me.

What a strange, twisted world we all lived in. If all there was to soldiering was the killing, I thought to myself, anyone could do it.

What strange, twisted people we all were.

It was only in the car-ride home that I thought again about all the things I’d done at the Radiant. I used to keep count of how many people I’d killed, but I’d since lost the number. It had to be over fifty by then; Cygnus was probably close to that, too. In any other place, as any other person, that would be enough to have me shot on sight or worse.

I never really thought of myself as a murderer. I thought of myself as a mercenary, or maybe a solider. The context was everything, I supposed.

But despite all of that, I never really felt like what I did was wrong. Maybe my moral compass was poorly calibrated. Maybe I just didn’t have one. Periodically I would wonder if I was supposed to hate myself for all the things I’d done at the Radiant—and I’d try to feel some kind of anger or something—and nothing would come.

I just wouldn’t feel much of anything at all.

Maybe that was the reason Prochazka picked me: he knew I was too damaged to care, right from the get-go; so what could being a mercenary do to me that wasn’t already done?

The stone of eleven wanted to kill. I can’t deny that.

In my heart I’d always figured I’d be too afraid to actually do it, if given the chance—but magic made that whole argument disappear. There was no fear of getting caught. Who was going to catch me? The people we killed did not exist. We did not exist. In the society we inhabited there was only vigilante justice. No jail. Only death.

Death and telepaths, I suppose.

Maybe being a soldier was all I ever wanted to be.

I can never be thankful enough for falling backward into the Radiant.

And yet—

In the back of my head the idea still lingered: that stereotypical soldier’s life, the one Benji and Prochazka lived some forty years ago, was what we all deserved for the crimes we committed—and the fact that we all got to come home to a warm room and a clean bed, with food on the table whenever we wanted it, and regular break days where we could just mill around and enjoy the sunshine or stay in and watch TV—wasn’t that horribly unfair to those who couldn’t enjoy what we had?

I lived a perfect life. I had all I ever wanted in the world.

Who can say that, really? Even those more fortunate than me—those who had more money, those who didn’t have my demons—who can say that they live the perfect life? Who but me?

What more could I possibly ask for than what I had? People who respected me. Goals I could achieve. A steady paycheck, steady food, good company.

I was a champion of the downtrodden—a hero of people like the stone I’d left behind.

That’s all there was to it—and I had the dream of life at an age where everyone else is still lost in planning. I was already there. I’d already reached the end-game. Thirteen years old. That had to be some kind of record.

I looked out the window of the car, counted the streetlamps as we pushed on down Route 10, steadily forward like the march of time.

My lifelong dreams had finally come true.

0 0 0

It was around two in the morning by the time we came back to the factory, and I found myself looking up at the sky—and I was saddened by the fact that so many of the new stars I’d found were gone.

And the freedom I’d had in flexing every bit of power I wanted to while catching those fish—accompanied by the little pang of regret that I didn’t even try to shift the whole pond. I could have, I was sure. I promised myself I’d do it next time. There’d be a next time, I was sure—hopefully in spring, when it was a little warmer.

Those of us who wanted to wash the sticky smoke-smell off us before we went to bed filed through the showers; the rest of us gave up and went to sleep.

I took a shower, and as I came back I saw Bell’s empty bed as I’d done every few nights for the past few months, and I tried to imagine where she could possibly be. What was going on in her secret world that we never got to see.

But that much distance was too much for me. Any more and I’d get lost in it.

And in that time, I wanted to enjoy the passing of seconds for exactly what they were—time passed in a perfect life.