{March 13th}

Benji came to me that morning, over breakfast. He didn’t sit down, but he addressed me by name, and that was more than we’d had in a good while as it was.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you free today?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “More or less.”

“Cool. Can…can you help me with something? I need your help,” he said, and the grimace that followed told me everything I needed to know about how that sentence tasted.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Well…” He looked down. “I need a bruiser with me today and everyone else is busy.”

I figured. “You want me to be your bodyguard?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Again?” I asked.

By this time I was so far removed from the event that split us apart that I could regard it coolly, completely detached, as though it had nothing to do with me whatsoever. It was an old Erika that was a part of that terrible day, and the Erika I was now knew of it only through stories.

It was in the past. It meant nothing.

Benji, however, valued it a lot more than I did. His eyes went to the floor for half a second, then he shifted his weight a bit and made eye contact again. “Yeah. Again.”

And all at once the façade against the event I’d been building up faltered—a second chance! I could make this whole thing right.

I could make this whole thing go away.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Cool,” Benji said. “I’ll—I’ll send you then info as soon as I have it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He nodded and walked away.

I looked down at my two remaining pancakes and found that I wasn’t all that hungry anymore.

0 0 0

The mission, on the surface, felt a lot like the last one I tagged along with Benji on almost a year and a half ago.

God—it had really been that long. Days at the Radiant just breezed by.

Benji wanted me to stand behind him and look menacing while he tried to talk some sense into a certain Marie Kilmer, a fellow water-key.

Benji wasn’t sure how sane she was, and—as a rule—was against killing anyone he thought could still be saved. I wasn’t so sure it was worth the effort, especially since she lived in Rochester, so she was fair game for getting scooped up by the Buffalo gang—they split patrol of Rochester with us, so it was basically open season on anyone from there with magic. He told me that he was hoping that making a stand with or against Marie Kilmer, who was by all accounts fairly powerful, would deter the Buffalo gang from making a scene there, and possibly open a door for Prochazka to take control of the rights to the area. It didn’t really matter which side we took, he’d said, as long as we did something proactive.

I thought that was a slim possibility, but this needed to get done anyway, and everything else was just upside.

Marie Kilmer was, apparently, a middle school math teacher who scooped up a key at what was commonly considered to be the last possible second (a couple days before her twenty-fourth birthday) following the deaths of her parents and sister in the plane crash over the North Atlantic that happened around a week and a half before. The kicker: at the same time, the annual class trip to Europe was happening at that school, and that happened to be one of the flights home.

So sixteen students were dead, too.

It was an international tragedy, but Marie Kilmer wasn’t in the spotlight for it. The fact that her parents and sister were incidentally onboard was initially a fun fact for them—they'd get to meet some of Marie’s students on the way back, how nice—but it ended up being such a psychological one-two sucker punch for Marie that the emotional trauma of it was enough for whatever higher power controls these things to decide she needed a key.

God only knew what she could possibly use that key for. The system is kind of stupid sometimes. It seeks out traumatized, damaged people, but it doesn’t select for the causes of the trauma. So you end up with people like Marie, broken beyond repair by the whims of some mercurial god, and you give them magic, as though that would ever bring her family back. I could only imagine what someone like that would try to do with a flesh or telepathic key.

She’d been on sick leave since. Benji had it on good authority that she was planning to lash out against all of her least favorite colleagues. Not that it would accomplish anything, but motives are motives, and people like her didn’t tend to think straight.

Cases like that happened all the time. It’s what Benji specialized in. Talking people down from metaphorical bridges. Making them see that their magic can be used for good—or, barring that, at least not for evil. Or, alternatively, convincing them to jump. As long as they jumped in a self-contained, easily cleanable way.

I never said Benji was a saint. He said it himself: we were the bad guys. A lot of the time, he successfully talked the person down. A lot of the time, he maneuvered them into a position where they couldn’t hurt anyone. Whether that’s moving to the wilderness, or jumping off a bridge, or whatever, it didn’t matter. And, rarely, he rolled heads. When all else failed.

It seemed to me in those days like Benji failed more often than he succeeded, but that was because Benji rarely ever talked to me, and when he did, it was because he was at the end of his rope for some reason or another. I never really got to see him do well, so all of my stories of Benji talking someone down successfully were second-hand.

I’d spent the morning preparing some lines and plans for a couple different ways the encounter could go down. She was a water-key like me; maybe I could show her what being a water key could be like and inspire her to not throw her life away. Maybe we’d draft her as a seventh.

Maybe just seeing someone who could very well be one of her students would make her break down. One way or another, this job was ending that day. That’s what Benji said: it was going to be the final stand for her. Whether she knew it or not.

So I spent all that time, maybe three or four hours, thinking through every possible permutation of the next six. Everything she could say and how I’d respond. Every way she could attack and how I’d retaliate. Every possible thing Benji could ask me do to, and how I’d fulfill it.

I was ready as ready could be.

Then Benji walked into the room and told me we were going to do it tomorrow instead.

0 0 0

I hadn’t felt that deflated in quite a while. I was so ready—so pumped—to finally make this whole thing right. I was so ready that I’d physically written out my plans. I had literal lines that I’d reviewed. I’d even come up with a couple of snazzy one-liners to use if the situation called for it.

I was so ready!

And Benji didn’t even have the kindness to tell me why he was delaying it—he’d just walked into the room, gotten my attention, told me the mission was being delayed, and walked away.

Ava was there when it happened, and she saw me just sit on my bed with all my papers in front of me, lightly frozen, trying to figure out why he’d do that.

I came up with nothing.

Ava said, “You’re going on a mission with Benji again?”

Slowly, I replied: “I was. Um, I think.”

“You probably still are,” she said, looking at the door as though Benji was still there. “He’s just pissy for some reason or other. God, that guy could do with a pair of balls.”

“What’s he done to you?” I asked.

“Nothing. I just don’t like him.”

That was a good enough answer for me.

“I had everything all lined up,” I said. For proof, I picked up some of the papers and gestured to them.

“I can see that,” Ava replied, flatly.

“Do you think...” It came to me as I was speaking. “Do you think he’s giving it one last shot on his own?”

Ava, who was sipping a drink and browsing through a magazine, said, “Almost definitely.”

I frowned. “He really doesn’t want me for this, does he?”

“Benji holds a wicked grudge,” Ava replied. “Dude’s just hateful. I don’t know why.”

I followed her eyes to the door. All I could do is shrug. “Well, I guess I don’t have anything else to do today.”

Ava snapped to attention. “Oh, right! I almost forgot to tell you. Remember how I keep complaining that there’s no real bar here?”

I didn’t really remember that beyond a spare mention here or there, but I pretended I did. “Yeah?”

“Unit 3 finally pulled down the funding to get it built. It’s in the basement, so it’s a hike from here, but it exists. Self-serve, though, we’re not hiring anyone to tend it.”

“Is it stocked?”

“Sure is,” Ava said. “I checked it out this morning.”

She seemed sober so I assumed she left it at “checked.” And while Ava was a fairly heavy drinker, even by Unit 6 standards, she wasn’t so far gone as to help herself before two o’clock.

“I know a bunch of drinks and I’ve got a decent head for coming up with stuff on the spot,” I said. “My dad—um—taught me that stuff. If you don’t feel like helping yourself and I’m around, let me know.”

“Will do,” Ava said. With a smile, nonetheless.

Progress!

I slid off my bed and started toward the door. “Might as well take a look, right?”

“Have fun,” she replied, turning back to the magazine.

0 0 0

I checked out the bar; it was a bar. There wasn’t a lot to say about it. The factory’s basement was a big concrete wasteland underneath the main floor, but it didn’t extend to the full size of the room above it. If I had to guess, it was a space around thirty feet long and wide, maybe a bit longer.

All that was in there was old rusted-out factory equipment and a brand-new bartop with eight seats in front of a wide cabinet of various liquors. There was a rack holding some twenty glasses and beer mugs, a sink and a few small refrigerators. All of this was pushed up against the left wall from the entrance—just there, as the only thing in that space built new in twenty-five years.

Kind of odd, to be sure, but a welcome addition to that place. The mini-fridge in Unit 6’s barracks was never quite big enough.

I went around the bar and peeked into some of the refrigerators back there. They had pretty much any mixer I could ask for back there. Briefly, I thought about the tuxedo vest I wore when I dealt—and I said to myself, maybe tonight.

Then I went back upstairs.