After a few quiet minutes he said, “Shit, I forgot to finish the story.”

I snapped out of my thoughts and glanced at him so he knew I was listening, and then he went on. “Roundabout 1981, Albany wasn’t too great of a city. I was getting robbed at gunpoint after a night drinking, I was walking home alone, and I was so drunk that I sort of relapsed into Vietnam-mode, and I just lit my hand on fire and burned the guy to the ground. So hot and so fast that the guy didn’t even get a real chance to scream. Stuck my hands in my pockets and walked away. Nobody saw me do it, nobody ever caught me. It was a local legend for a while. I’m sure you can find it on conspiracy-theory websites about spontaneous combustion or something.”

My eyes went wide. “That was you?”

He blinked. “Wait, you heard about that?”

“Kids used to talk about it in school occasionally,” I said. “It was one of the scary stories we told.”

“Forgot that you grew up in Albany,” he said, and after a little chuckle, added: “Damn. Still got it, huh?” He smiled a bit. Probably for the first time in my presence. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and it made my heart bloom warm.

I was doing it! Really doing it!

I was gonna make it!

His smile faded, but only a little. “So I did that, and I guess there were rumors about a spontaneous combustion happening, but nobody I talked to ever accused me of doing it. Then, a few days go by and I get a letter in the mail. Read the damn thing so many times I’ve got it memorized. It said: “To resident—I would like to begin by saying that I am not accusing you of anything, nor do I have any intention of reporting you to any authorities. I have reason to believe that you are behind the spontaneous combustion of Edwin Watts, and furthermore, I believe we have met before. Now that the war is done, we are simply citizens, and I would be interested in speaking to you civilly, as man to man. I trust that we will have a lot to talk about if you decide to meet me. I will be on a park bench in Washington Park by the water on June 17th, from six o’clock PM until nine—I believe you will know me when you see me. I will not be there at any other time, and I will not contact you again. That said, I’m looking forward to meeting you, and I can only imagine you’re looking forward to meeting me. Signed, the Black Hurricane.

“And I thought this was some kind of joke, right? But that was after work, so I figured, what the hell—I’ll go over there and see what’s up, and if it’s just some kid playing a joke on me, I could always threaten him into silence pretty easily. So around seven o’clock I headed over there, and I knew him as soon as I saw the back of his head. I wasn’t afraid, even though I probably should have been—I just saw it as catharsis for twelve years of insanity. I knew I saw him, but in ‘Nam that meant fuckall. Lots of people saw lots of things. But I knew—I knew he was real. Everyone had a story about seeing the Black Hurricane but I knew, for myself, that he was there. I insisted on it when everyone else laughed theirs off. Made me look like a bitch, but I stood by it because I knew how weak he made me feel in that moment. How wrong he made me feel for being there. Like I was beating at the tides with a baseball bat. I had to see the man again. I don’t think I ever had a choice to not see him.

“So I sat down on the bench next to him, and I didn’t look. I just looked out at the pond. And next to me he said, “Benjamin Kozaki?”

And I just nodded. And then he turned to me, and I turned to him, and he was there, it was him, and all at once my heart dropped into my stomach and my brain turned inside out. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten validation like that, but…”

“I have,” I said, even more quietly than before. It was so quiet that Benji didn’t stop for me.

“…he extended his hand, and I shook it, and he told me his name was Jan Prochazka, and that he was a Czech citizen who was born in 1906, fought for the Soviets in World War II, and afterward spent ten years travelling Asia and preaching about communism before settling in Vietnam. War broke out and he took up arms. He told me he’d always liked war. It was the only thing that truly made sense to him.

“And—my God, did I relate to that.”

Benji stopped talking, for a second. He turned the car off an exit.

“Now, I’m not a commie, I think communism is kinda stupid, but I was in such awe at this man that I wasn’t gonna argue politics with him. He was twice the man I’d ever be. We talked about the war for a long time—hours, and I mean it was close to midnight when we stopped. I went from wanting to slaughter that guy in some backwater ritual fashion to him being my closest friend in five hours. He asked me if I was interested in helping him, and at that point I would’ve followed him to the ends of the earth, so I said yes before he even explained to me what we’d be doing. Then he said he was going to start an organization that tracked and policed people like us, because he wasn’t sure what would happen if America found out, if the world found out, and he didn’t want to experience that future if he thought he had a snowball’s chance of stopping it. And that was a cause I sure could get behind. So I shook hands on it, quit my job at the steel plant the next morning, and we founded the Radiant.”

He sighed. “Maybe that’s why I was so hurt when he put you on my team. I trusted him so fully. I trusted him with my life. And putting a twelve-year-old girl on my team felt like a violation of everything I thought we both believed in. To me, this was always about protecting people like us from people like us—protecting the seven against the three, I guess. Justice isn’t much of a consideration anymore. When you get to my age, you stop caring about that kind of thing.”

I couldn’t imagine not caring about justice. I tried to think about what would happen to Cygnus if he heard what Benji just said. What would he do? What would be left?

Nothing, I thought. No—I didn’t think. I knew. Certain.

“How?” I asked Benji, quiet.

“How what?”

“How do you stop caring about justice? Isn’t that—isn't that the whole point?”

Benji shrugged. He held the steering wheel with one hand, the other limp at his side. Leaning all the way back like he had not a care in the world.

“The whole point? I mean, maybe for Cygnus it is, but it’s not for me. I do this because I feel obligated to, now. I don’t think I could quit even if I wanted to. Without us, and by “us” I mean everyone who does what we do across the whole planet—without us, the ones just trying to get by would be hunted down by the government and slaughtered. When was the last time America took steps to really understand a new problem rather than just point some guns at it?”

I had no response. My mind was blank.

Benji said, “Exactly. Sometimes we’ve got to do things that, well, that don’t sit well on the mind, but when the alternative is that we all die, it gets easier. It used to be about justice for me, Erika, but after a while you just can’t reconcile justice with shooting a sixteen-year-old kid in the head because he got a fire key and wanted to burn down his school.”

My eyes dropped to the floor. I stopped moving, and maybe even stopped breathing.

He ignored me. “You can’t think about justice when a young mother of two sons loses one in a car accident, gets a flesh-key, and starts looking at the other one in a weird way, and—surprise—you're just a teensy bit too late. Justice only matters when there’s people to save. With magical crime, you can’t really stop it. It happens, in a flash, and then people are dead or scarred forever, and half the time you’ve gotta kill the victims too to stop them from talking because all of the telepaths in our area keep getting drafted by the Buffalo gang and New York and probably Loybol, too, if I’m honest. The system gives broken people keys and half the time they go ahead and do broken-people things with them. Who would’ve thought?”

He frowned. “If it seems like I’m bitter about the whole telepath thing, I am. In case you missed that or whatever.”

I did not miss it. For the record.

“The alternative to just mopping up after people forever is to try and predict when people are going to do terrible things. Loybol does this via having a ton of telepaths and a relatively small, densely-populated area to patrol. We do it by watching social media for keywords and getting lucky. Otherwise you’re just doing something to make yourself feel good, and isn’t that the literal textbook definition of being selfish?”

Benji sighed. The fire that had been creeping into his voice drifted away. He repeated: “Justice only matters when there’s people to save.”

He shook his head, and his voice got a little lower. I stared off at the road in front of me. Unsure how I managed to fuck this one up, too.

“When he drafted you, I felt...I don’t even know how I felt. Violated? I sure felt like something’d been violated. Maybe it was me, or it was my trust in him, or it was the integrity of the Radiant or something, I don’t know, I just felt like shit. I felt like we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. And, well, he assured me that you were so far above the barrel you were embedded in the ceiling, but I didn’t believe him, because—God, Erika, look at you.”

I looked at my feet. They looked like shoes. Worn white sneakers, the same pair I’d had since I arrived. Terrible in the rain, comfortable enough. They’d gone gray from use and dirt and soot, but they still fit me just fine, and while I had more than enough money to afford another pair, I didn’t feel like going through the trouble of breaking in something new.

The key was stunting my growth, according to Sophia, so I’d be able to fit in those sneakers for a while yet. She said I wouldn’t look eighteen until I was forty or more.

So I looked at me.

He went on: “Maybe I’m just half the man he is, so I’ll only understand half his mind. But I just didn’t get it. And, I mean…”

He trailed off. I expected a follow-up, but I got nothing.

I thought about the mission, and it occurred to me that I never found out what exactly it was I’d be doing. I assumed it was going to be just like last time. Now that I was thinking about it, and presumably Benji was thinking about it, the warmth between us in the car we’d worked so hard to cultivate was swept out like the windows were wide open.

I asked him, point blank: “Benji—what am I supposed to do with Marie?”

He did not respond.

We spoke only briefly, about little nothings, between then and our arrival.

0 0 0

I’m not stupid. I figured it out pretty quickly. In the back of my mind, I think I always knew.

We arrived at the designated meeting place—an empty warehouse on the edge of town, which only further confirmed my suspicions about my role in all of this—and we entered it in silence.

Through the door, onto the warehouse floor. Above us were some catwalks and office spaces and such. It wasn’t strictly just a warehouse, but it mostly was.

In the center of the room stood Marie Kilmer, hands folded in front of her. She was small, but still taller than me. Brown hair she’d tied back. She looked like a teacher—modestly dressed, glasses and everything—and she’d really look unassuming if she didn’t look so tired. Her skin stretched over her face was a bit too yellow, and her eyes were bloodshot. She wasn’t quite standing still, either—swaying a little. Maybe she was drunk, or maybe she was malnourishing herself, I couldn’t tell at the time.

Either way, she looked unwell.

Benji shoved his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t told me to stay behind, so I followed him right up to about fifteen feet away from her.

“Hello, Marie,” Benji said.

"Hello,” she replied. Despite the stress, her voice was clear and calm—the measure and evenness from teaching, I supposed. “You brought your daughter, I see. Maybe hoping that would make me feel guilty. Low, Benji, that’s low.”

“No,” Benji said, simply. There was no tone in his voice. No righteous fire like last time. He sounded as tired as Marie looked—two halves standing apart from each other. “She’s not my daughter.”

“Some girl off the street, then,” Marie said.

Benji shrugged. “Close enough.”

“Well? Go on.” Marie turned to me, now. “Make your case.”

Her eyes reminded me of Bell’s. Red and grayish, dry and dead.

“She doesn’t have a case,” Benji said.

“Then what’s the point?” Marie asked. “This guilt-trip bullshit, it’s not going to work. I told you. I don’t care. I don’t anymore.”

“I know,. We talked at length already.”

“So you took a full day to find a girl to put in front of me as a last ditch effort to make me…do what? Not feel? Feel? I—I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get,” Benji said.

“Spit it out, then. Why’s she here?”

Benji looked at her, then looked at me. He took a hand out of his pocket and patted me on the shoulder—which made me laser-snap to attention, tensing everything I had.

“Kill her,” he said to me.

Then he took his hand off my shoulder, put it back in his pocket, and walked out of the warehouse.