Marie and I just stared at each other.

“Kill me with what?” she asked.

“I’m a water key, like you,” I said. For emphasis, I slowly drew all the water out of the water bottle in my hand and let it circle around my wrists. The empty bottle slipped from my fingers, and the hollow clack of it hitting the floor was loud enough to make us both wince.

“How old are you?” Marie asked.

“Thirteen,” I replied. “I’m turning fourteen in June.”

“You’re—Christ, you’re the same age as my students.”

I didn’t know how to react to that, but I felt like I had to say something.

“I’m sorry,” I said, limply. “About the crash.”

“I don’t think that matters now,” Marie replied, and her voice was so hollow and dead that I believed her.

We both fell quiet again. I was used to this by now—it happens a lot when two keys end up meeting face-to-face. They just stare at each other because they know the first one to move dies.

And now we were both there, and I could tell—from the blank look she wore and my own almost complete disinterest—that we knew. I knew I’d be faster than her, even if she was a bit above average. I was a raging tsunami, the force of a hurricane, and she was most likely less than that. Maybe a waterspout, if I’m being generous.

So I wasn’t scared, per se. The only thing that stopped me from just shooting her and walking out was the question of why Benji left the warehouse.

“Why did he leave?” Marie asked.

“I was just thinking that,” I replied.

“He trusts you to kill me without supervision, I guess.”

“I can. I have.”

“I’m sure.”

She frowned, but not out of frustration. She kept looking at me—she had to, because if she stopped to look at the floor, she was dead.

But her face went limp. Shoulders drooped.

I expected her to ask to die.

What she said instead was, “You know, I used to think I’d just gone crazy. Now, though, I guess I didn’t. I guess this is, really, all actually happening.”

“You get used to it,” I said.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever get the chance,” Marie replied.

“Probably not,” was my best response.

“I think I wish I was crazy,” she said. “Maybe then I wouldn’t be so...so...I don’t know. Aware? In the moment? I wish I was dissociating right now. It would make this whole thing a lot easier.”

“Are you afraid to die?” I asked her.

“That’s the thing,” Marie said, with a tiny nervous chuckle. “I’m not. God, can you imagine going on after all of this? After the things I've said. What I claimed I was going to do. What, in all honestly, I probably would do if I somehow managed to walk out of here with my head attached. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. None of this—none of this stuff makes any sense to me.”

And I felt a little pang of guilt in my chest for what I was going to do, because the truth is that none of this stuff really made all that much sense to me, either. I’d carved a path through it for myself—of things I understood, and bits here and there I could swallow as truths—but beyond my road there was a whole word of nuance and gray that was lost on me.

I kept to my lane and didn’t ask questions. I had to, or the whole thing would fall apart, and I’d forget where I was. Maybe who I was.

I forced myself to swallow the feeling. I wasn’t allowed to think of Marie that way. It would blur my path.

She snickered, again—a small, almost insectile noise. There was no humor in it. “Look at me. Trying to stop myself from swearing. God. Like you’re actually a fucking kid. A kid in my class. Jesus. What happened to me?”

Marie swallowed. “Maybe I am crazy.”

“I’m here,” I said. “You’re not crazy. This is happening.”

She shook her head with an empty smile, uncomprehending.

“I’ve seen a lot of crazy people,” I said. “In my day. Lots of people less lucid than you.”

“Maybe if I try really hard, I can go insane just in time to not feel it when you bury an icicle in my skull,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Not like it matters. You’re probably crazy, too.”

“I’m alright,” I said. “Do you believe in parallel universes?”

“If I say yes, will you keep talking?”

I nodded.

“One hundred percent, I believe in those,” she said.

“I think this is one of the only timelines where I don’t go insane,” I said. “Every time I think about where I came from, I think about...about how much the odds were stacked against me to turn out alright. I would’ve been damaged beyond repair if I didn’t get a key. If I didn’t run away from home. If I didn’t join the Radiant. If I didn’t meet everyone in Unit 6. I—I have friends, now. For pretty much the first time ever. It’s...God, Marie, it’s amazing. I feel like a human being. I didn’t know what it was like before, but now...now I’ve got it all, and it’s so good.”

I blinked a few times. See—there's this really convenient thing about being a water-key: nobody ever has to see you cry if you don’t want them to. They were welling up—just from thinking about everything I’d gained—and with barely a thought I wicked them away, and I was whole again.

Whole and powerful. Invincible and unmovable.

She continued to look at me, uncomprehendingly. “Maybe you just haven’t gone insane yet.”

“Odds are against that, I think.”

“Look at yourself,” Marie said. “Thirteen years old and you’re on the kill squad for that piece of shit. How many people have you slaughtered? For him?”

I shrugged. I truly did not know.

I expected her to berate me for it. Maybe with some last bit of bravado generated from staring into the pit.

Instead, she asked: “What’s your name?”

“Erika Hanover,” I said. She was a dead woman, what did it matter?

Marie blinked, surprised.

“Oh,” she replied. “That explains a lot.”

“What does?”

“My friend—um—he was an eighth-grade math teacher at the middle school in Red Creek,” she said. “A year and a half or so back he said a student went missing and that they never found her. It was really sad, because she was one of the weird kids, so everyone just assumed she’d killed herself. Guess that was you. At least you’re not dead, right?”

I froze solid. All I could do was barely squeak out a repetition: “At least I’m not dead.”

She continued: “The school had a candlelight vigil for you. Bunch of kids and teachers spoke at it. Lots of people claiming to be your friend, very few who actually had anything concrete to say.”

I went so red it was almost difficult to see straight. It was all I could do to not take her head off there just so I could stop hearing about it.

“You didn’t have a whole lot of friends, did you?”

I shook my head. I’d already said that to her. It was a redundant question. Mocking me.

She was mocking me.

“Any?” she pried.

“No.”

She nodded, slowly. “Couple of kids in my classes like you. I’m just—I can’t look at you and not think about what would happen if they got keys. On one hand, I don’t want them to feel powerless anymore, because I want them to succeed—I really, honestly, truly do—and I look at them and I see how they’re struggling and I want to help, I really do, but...God, middle school kids are fucking vicious. There’s just not a lot we can do. Policies don’t matter. Punishments don’t matter. I—I wonder how many of those kids fantasize about killing their bullies, and I wonder how many of them are close enough to the brink that they’d actually do it if they could do it remotely, without a chance of getting caught.”

She let her breath out slow. Then she asked me: “Did you?”

“Think about it?”

Marie nodded.

I thought about shooting her again. Right then. I’d never have to say what I thought. Never have to deal with the consequence of that day. I could bottle it up forever, and it would stay there, because the only person that could end me was me, and therefore the world was mine to do with what I pleased.

There would be no secret-spilling if I didn’t allow it.

But then I recalled the man in that house on High Street back home, some year and a half ago now, and I figured that if I was the only person alive who remembered what I said, then it didn’t matter if I said it or not. I would get to say it to another person, and experience whatever experience there was to gain from that, and then that person would disappear, and I’d never have to deal with the aftermath.

It was like practice. It made perfect sense.

So I said, “I did. I—I got my key on my twelfth birthday. I woke up that morning and I saw it, and I just automatically knew what it meant, as—as I’m sure you did, too, right?”

Marie made an affirmative grunt.

“And as soon as I touched it, I knew I was going to go to school and—and do it. I needed to. It was the only thing that could make my life make sense. Without it, I—I would’ve suffered for no reason. That, um, that was what I thought at the time. So, I went downstairs and my dad was still passed out on the couch from the night before, so I just—I made myself breakfast and put the TV on, and there was some superhero cartoon on, and I don’t even really remember what it was, but I sat on the floor in front of the TV with my bowl of cereal and I...”

The image was clearer than reality: cross-legged on the shag carpet in front of the sixty-inch monster that was such a hit to my dad’s meager paycheck that he had to do two years of payments on it. He was dead to the world behind me; but in front, there was a bright and beautiful world where good always won and evil was always petty and simple.

I remember watching the last fifteen minutes of that cartoon and I realized that if I did what I wanted to do, I would become the villain. I would be the petty mustache-twiddler that a man in a cape would eventually dispatch with a simple flick of his finger.

Like so many times before, my rage suffocated and died in my throat. Still impossible. Even with the key. Even with my boundless power. In the self I saw in my memory, I watched my shoulders slump like Marie’s did a few moments before as I came to my conclusion.

I watched myself wither.

“I realized that I was...that I was giving up. If I did what I wanted to do. I could be so much more than just a killer if I...if I walked away. The strongest thing I could do was walk away. The best revenge I could get was—was to do nothing. To vanish from their lives. And go off somewhere, forever, and be someone else somewhere else. I didn’t have to be the Erika I was. I could be someone else.”

For thirty minutes that day morning, I was an unstoppable force of nature, but nobody would ever know. My dad wouldn’t even see me leave. Wouldn’t see me quietly slip out the door with a plastic shopping bag of various foods and a change of clothes. He wouldn’t ever see me again.

In front of the TV that pale misty June morning, I wilted.

I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t hold eye contact for any longer.

I looked at the floor, and as soon as I did so cold electricity shout though my whole body and I looked up again, but Marie hadn’t moved. She was just waiting.

I forced myself to keep looking at her. I could do this. This was easy—someone invincible shouldn’t struggle with eye contact.

Not like any of this mattered, anyway. Marie would die and I would go on. This story would be lost to the air and I would walk away from it. I would never return here, and the dust of my words would haunt this place for me forever, but I’d never come back, so it wouldn’t matter.

Nuclear waste buried in a mountain. Out of sight, out of mind.

I turned red again. Why was I talking about this? Why bother dredging up all these memories? What good was it doing me? Marie wasn’t a therapist. She wasn’t supposed to help me.

What was I building up to? I had no idea at the time. An apology? An ice-bullet to the brain?

Or was I just going to walk away from Marie, like I walked away two years ago?

The indecision of it paralyzed me. I had to actively move my jaw to force words over my tongue. I wanted to stand there stock-still and wait for Marie to do something. To direct me, so I could react and go on from there.

But that was something the old Erika would do. The automaton Erika who only reacted, because she was incapable of autonomy.

When I was twelve years old, I was given a present beyond my wildest dreams. One to make up for all the lost gifts I’d missed. All the hardships I’d endured. All the pain and loneliness and everything that makes a child’s life hollow.

And I—

“I was wrong,” I spat.

I balled up my fists. Shaking. Iron-planted to where I stood.

“I should have gone to school,” I growled. Through clenched teeth. “I should have stood outside the windows and picked off, one by one, all the people who hurt me. I could pull water out of the faucet in the lab. I had it all planned out. In the thirty minutes when it was still possible, I figured out—exactly—what I was going to do, and I blew it. I fucked it all up. And it’s too late now. I can’t go back. I should have done it.”

“But you didn’t,” Marie said, quietly.

I expected the fire to subside.

It did not.

“I should have. I needed to.”

Marie looked me in the eyes. It was all I could do to meet it.

I was wrong. She didn’t have Bell’s eyes. In Bell’s eyes, there was nothing—but in Marie’s there was resignation. No life, but they weren’t lifeless on purpose like Bell’s. In Marie’s, there was defeat. Emptiness.

Void—but now, a tiny glimmer of something else.

“I’m happy you didn’t,” Marie said, barely above a whisper.

That was it. That was all I could take.

My fist leapt upward and I shot three, six—maybe as many as ten, I don’t know—bullets of ice dead center into her forehead. The first one shattered her skull; the rest made sure it was shapeless mush by the time she hit the ground.

She dropped. Essentially headless.

I pulled moisture from her corpse to replenish the ring around my hand, and then I turned around and went to the door.

0 0 0

I was seething rage. I was known—and pitied—for what? By who?

Who was Marie to say what I should and should not have done? The one regret I carried—the one mistake I made in two years that was truly irredeemable—was not carrying out that act of vengeance while I still could.

I couldn’t go back now. It was too far gone. Two years of separation was too much. And God forbid someone recognized me, sent me back to my father.

No. I had to deal with that unseized opportunity forever.

The audacity—

The nerve—

I couldn’t think straight.

At the time, I had no idea where all of that came from. I’d never once been that angry, not in my whole life. But right then I was mad enough to slaughter the world.

Not even in hindsight can I really say why I was so mad. It was Marie’s fault—and why she had to die, even if I was going to kill her anyway—but why exactly it was her fault was beyond my simple machinery.

I couldn’t say. It just was. It had to be.

I stepped out into the sun engulfed by rage. Fists clenched so tight my knuckles hurt. I wanted to kill. I wanted to put someone in the ground. Nothing else would do. Nothing else could sate me.

There were six bodies out there—one of them was Benji. The other, standing close behind him, held some kind of metal object, and that was as far as I got before I decided that I didn’t know any of them except for Benji and that they all needed to die.

I went from one footstep into the sun into firing an ice bullet directly into the eye of the man standing behind Benji—it wasn’t quite a direct hit, but it was enough to make him back off, at which point Benji twisted around, lit both of his hands on fire and ripped off the man’s ear. Glared at him as the right half of his face dissolved.

The world was slow and simple as the other five zapped to attention. Another fire-key, a nature-key, and two with nothing; Benji had already handled the last one on his own.

For the two with nothing, I had ice bullets—in the eye and dead-center through the forehead—before they could draw their guns.

I turned to the fire-key, and he was breathing heavily—and I felt the moisture, and I grabbed onto it and followed it down to the source, inside him, and I pulled it out. With every exhale more and more water left his body, and from the heat he was generating around himself to protect from an ice-bullet, he boiled.

Benji just watched it happen. It took maybe three seconds to kill the others, but for this last one I let him scream for fifteen.

When it was done, there was a dry husk.

And then, I suppose, I felt better. Or at least, I wasn’t angry anymore. Everything was back to normal. All good.

The rage was gone, and I looked around at everything I’d done and felt nothing.

I looked at Benji and said, “Marie’s dead. Let’s go home.”

Benji stared back at me.

0 0 0

In the car, on the highway again. We did not speak for twenty-five minutes. Benji had eyes for the road and nothing else. He held the steering wheel with both hands. Laser-focused to the dotted lines.

When he finally spoke again, he said: “What did Marie say to you?”

I didn’t feel like playing games. That act of pulling the moisture out of someone is certainly theatrical, but its practicality is limited, and it’s very draining. I might be the only water-key alive who can do it without passing out, so I feel obligated to show it off whenever I can. It’s the one thing I can do that I think Bell would like.

The adrenaline was swirling down the drain.

I felt like last time—I knew saying the wrong thing would make Benji snap again. But this time I saved his life; this time, I won. His anger was misplaced. It was invalid. I was right, finally, unequivocally, and there was nothing anyone could say or do to counter me.

So I answered him plainly. Closing my eyes just to rest them. “She knew who I was.”

I left off the “before,” because I thought it was obvious, but Benji just shook his head like he didn’t understand, so I clarified. He said, “I know,” and didn’t elaborate any more.

Fifteen minutes from home, he spoke again.

“Erika,” he said.

“Yeah?” I asked. I didn’t look at him—I was counting the lit streetlamps whizzing by, one by one. Even though my eyes were closed, that dark field of vision would flood orange whenever we passed one—a soft rhythmic pulse inside my head.

It was only sundown but I was already thinking about crawling into bed.

Benji said, “I figured it out.”

“What?”

“Why this is so hard for me.”

He didn’t look at me, so I didn’t look at him. We were speaking to ourselves, or maybe to nobody, but certainly not to each other, and certainly not with the intent of having a conversation.

He spoke to the road. I spoke to the glove compartment. It just happened that our halves aligned—but we really didn’t have any interest in what the other had to say.

I’m not sure we ever did.

I waited for Benji to say what he meant. What he figured out.

But instead we drove the rest of the way home in absolute silence.