{June 11th}

For my fourteenth birthday, I didn’t get any gifts. Cygnus confessed that he had yet to find something that he really thought would be a slam-dunk; and short of settling for something only so-so he opted to wait, so that he could get me something really good for Christmas. That was fine by me; my fourteenth birthday was such a bright and warm gem of a day that I didn’t want for anything.

I spent half the day just lying in the tall grass outside, staring up at the sky. Drawing water out of the grass around me to play with, making intricate, tiny designs like phantom spider-webs a foot over my head.

I was fully content to watch the clouds go by, extending the reach of my power-consciousness as high as I could in a vain attempt at pulling down rain like some kind of ancient shaman; but that eluded even me.

Maybe on a cloudier day, when they were lower in the sky.

Around two o’clock I heard some commotion outside the main entrance and got up, stretching, to take a look. There was a van out front with the back doors open, and a bunch of Unit 5 people crowding around it. They were the clean-up crew, so evidently something had happened that resulted in an object they needed to retrieve.

I wondered if, maybe, we had a prisoner. Not that we’d be able to do all that much with one.

Ever since Rochester I’d been keeping the idea of an attack from a foreign power in the back of my mind; that war Prochazka and Benji seemed to relish the idea of seemed more real than ever. I couldn’t say which direction it would come from, north-west or south-east, but either way I figured we were hurtling toward a conflict we couldn’t possibly stop.

So I knew I had to be on my best behavior.

I took a wide berth around the crowd. I’d been enjoying my alone-time all morning and wasn’t quite ready to give it up, nor was I ready to find out what was going on.

The rest of Unit 6 had other plans, though.

I re-entered the factory through a side door, and as I entered the main foyer (taking a roundabout way to avoid some additional people rushing outside), Ava caught sight of me, swiveled on a dime, and ran towards me.

“Erika!” she shouted.

I blinked. “Not so loud,” I said. “We’re inside.”

“No, look. Where were you?” she asked.

Her breathing was a bit heavy; I felt the moisture before I really took in her expression.

“Outside,” I said. “In the grass.”

“Doing what?”

“Um…just, lying there. Enjoying the weather?” I turned red. “What’s it to you?”

“Oh—whatever. You saw the van outside, right?”

“The van? Yeah, I saw it. Do we have a prisoner?”

“A prisoner? No,” Ava said. “Fuck, Erika, Bell’s back.”

I blinked. For a second, her statement didn’t register.

That said, my first response to Ava was: “Bell stole a van?”

Ava stifled a laugh a bit too slowly. “It’s—um, really not funny. That’s our ambulance. She’s, um, not doing too great.”

My expression didn’t change. I still didn’t understand. Bell was invincible, like me. Nothing could possibly stop her.

Not even bullets, I would imagine.

“C’mon,” Ava said. “Cygnus, Yoru, and Benji are out, so it’s just us. I’m sure she’ll want to see, y’know, at least someone from her own unit. Given what everyone else thinks of her, anyway.”

I stuffed my confusion. I could be confused later.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She repeated, “C’mon,” and she took my hand, pulling me toward the door in a jog; I had to run to keep up.

At the entrance, she kicked the wooden splint in the corner over and jammed it underneath the door itself, holding it open for the four people carrying the stretcher out of the van.

Over the stretcher was a white cloth.

I felt myself go hollow. Ava’s hand tightened around mine.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that she never let go.

“Is she—”

“No,” Ava said slowly. “At least, she wasn’t when she called for pickup. I’m gonna—I’ll go ask,” she said, going out into the sunlight.

I followed her, numbly copying her movements. Hands still entwined.

Bell—

Ava hailed a man in a Yankees cap with arms about as thick as my head. He wore a blank white tank-top and I doubted he owned anything else, just by looking at him. He seemed like the sort of guy to have a closet of ten plain white tank tops that he rotated through, regardless of weather.

He stood by the passenger side of the van, door open, rummaging through the glovebox for sunglasses.

The man looked up at Ava with something between surprise and a scowl.

“Hey,” he said, humorless.

“Is she okay?” Ava asked him, just a bit too hushed to cover for the commotion around them.

“I mean,” he glanced over at the stretcher, eyes following it as they pushed it into the factory. “she was alive when we got there.”

My vision tunneled.

Ava’s voice came distant, even though she was standing right next to me: “And now?”

“And she’s still alive now,” he shrugged, unfolding the shades he found. “Probably. I bet she’s got three hearts or some shit. Maybe we just listened to a decoy one. I’m consistently stunned all of her organs are in the right place.”

The three of us watched the stretcher turn in the foyer, heading toward the infirmary.

“Where was she?” Ava asked.

“In Albany,” he said. “Slumped over on the floor of a phone booth. Only thing she said to us was to put a sheet over her before she went unconscious. Once we did, well, something moved under the sheet and kind of, uh, she got taller and kind of…shriveled? God. I don’t know.”

He regarded the two of us, briefly, then looked back out at the empty foyer. “I don’t know about y’all, but if she don’t make it I’m not saying any prayers.”

With that he gestured to the driver, hidden from us, and started to climb back into the van.

Ava wasn’t about to take shit from someone I was certain she viewed as beneath her. She snapped into a scowl. “Hey. Yankees cap. What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

The man put on the sunglasses and looked down at the two of us. From the way he breathed, I got the sense that he’d rehearsed this in his head a number of times. It was something he’d dreamed of saying—and here he was, face-to-face with his big chance. He regarded the two of us coolly, without feeling, and said: “You people are so fucked up. I hate this stupid job and I hate all of you. If there was any decent God in the universe, none of you would’ve been born, but I guess there’s not because here you are, doing all your shit, and here I am cleaning up after you.

“So you go take your little sister and go visit your spawn-of-Satan friend, and maybe you’ll get to kiss her on the forehead before she goes home to Hell. Or maybe she’ll wake up and regenerate herself or something like the demon she is. I wasn’t ever a religious man, but I just can’t think of any other explanation for the shit I’ve seen you people do. You know how many exploded brains I’ve mopped up? How many rooms I’ve repainted because the smell of blood won’t come off the walls? I don’t know and I don’t fucking want to. I wasn’t ever a Christian, but working here made me believe in Hell, because, Christ help me, I think this is it. It’s gotta be.”

Again he looked at Ava, and he looked her right in the eye—surely made easier with the shield of the sunglasses—and said, “I don’t get paid enough to pretend to be nice. Let me tell you—y’all need us more than we need you. Without us, the government would’ve shot you all down a long-ass time ago.”

He sat down, turned to the driver, said, “Start the fucking van, Pierce,” and slammed the door.

The van rumbled off, leaving the two of us, and a few stragglers from Unit 4 who saw the man’s outburst.

“You’re not my sister,” was all Ava said in response.

She let go of me; our arms dropped limply to our sides.

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I’d ever thought of the messes I’d made when I had a hit to take out. I just did it. It never occurred to me to think of the people who came in to fix it all afterward.

But that was an after-thought for that moment. I had one real concern. I wasn’t in the head-space to juggle two worries at once.

“Let’s go,” I said to Ava, and started off in a brisk walk toward the door.

She stayed, paused in time by the sidewalk, looking at the empty space where the van used to be. A second or two went by, and I was about to repeat myself before she said, “Right,” and followed me.

0 0 0

We arrived at the infirmary just as the stretcher-carriers were leaving; taking their gloves off and disposing of them or stuffing them back in their pockets if they were clean enough. Sophia had laid out a clean sheet on the medical bed in there, and Bell’s body had been shifted onto it.

She was still covered with the sheet that she’d been removed from the van with. Sophia didn’t say anything to us when we walked in. She was sitting on her stool with her hands put together over her nose. Intermittently glancing between the floor and the bed.

Ava spoke first. “Is she—”

“Alive? Sophia interjected. “Yeah. Alive.”

Her hands shifted from her face into fists; she balanced her chin on one of them, attention fully on the body.

“There’s a “but”, I’m assuming,” Ava said.

“Yeah, there’s a “but.” It’s fucking Bell.”

Sophia didn’t move.

“What…what does that mean? Can’t you just—”

“No, I can’t,” Sophia snapped. “Prochazka hired me on the condition that I’d probably never have to operate on the weird eldritch abomination he hired for you people.”

We both fell quiet. I couldn’t possibly put a word out even if I wanted to. Part of me was a little relieved that Sophia’s disdain extended to all—or at least most—of Unit 6, but the fact that two people in a row had snapped at us for existing felt a bit like getting kicked while down.

So I let Ava do the talking. “What happened to her?”

“You wanna see?” Sophia said, looking at Ava only with her eyes; her head was still pointed at the bed.

Ava gave a half-hearted shrug. “I’m pretty sure you just want to dramatically rip the sheet off. I’m kind of just looking for a word-overview, but you do you, Soph.”

Sophia didn’t react to the nickname. “Not looking for gore today?”

“Did I do something to you?” Ava asked. “Seriously. Just tell me.”

Sophia closed her eyes. Sighed. “No. Just stressed. I—I was really hoping this wouldn’t ever happen. Bell is—two, maybe three times as powerful as I am. She’s probably the strongest key in the building.”

I opened my mouth to object, and Sophia just gestured vaguely at me and said, “Shut up.”

I shut up.

“I just sort of assumed Bell was invincible and stopped worrying about it. So I’m assuming whatever she did, she got ambushed by basically a whole fucking army. Or she did something stupid and flashy because she wanted to and she’s a fucking idiot. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand what goes on in there.”

Slowly, she stood up. “I’m taking off the sheet. Might as well show you what I’m working with.”

She walked over to the bed, took hold of a corner, and pulled it back.

Lying there was a person. That was the extent to which I could recognize her as Bell—she was somewhere along the lines of the shape she usually appeared to me in, although not quite as tall (caveat being it was hard to discern height while she was on the bed) and not quite as sickly-thin. Her entire body was covered in splotchy, black or fluorescent red burns—and I mean her entire body because I could see her entire body; all of her clothing burned away save for charred strips of cloth here and there. I saw some things, accidentally, that I really do not ever want to see again.

Her left eyelid half-peeled down like it was flayed, with the hint of a dull gray-glass underneath.

Where the burns were especially bad, the flesh surrounding them was yellow, almost brownish in places. She had somehow managed to keep most of her hair, although it was missing in a few patches. The burns were primarily on her torso and down through her legs; her face had some too, enough to scar her cheeks, chin, and right temple and shrivel her lower lip, but they weren’t charred like the rest of her was.

And still, I could feel her breathing—shallow, mostly dry, but it was there.

I swallowed the bile and held still.

Sophia returned enough of the sheet so that Bell’s lower body was covered. Upon second thought, she pulled the sheet up a bit further to cover Bell’s chest, too.

She walked into a back room and emerged with an IV drip stand, lifted the sheet over her arm and hooked Bell up.

When Sophia finished with that, she sat down hard on the stool again.

“Well, she’s definitely well done,” Ava said.

Both Sophia and I just stared at her, blank. Ava mumbled an apology, shifted a bit.

“I just don’t really know what to do,” Sophia said, rubbing the garnet-inlaid key around her neck between two fingers. “I feel kind of powerless here. Nobody tells me what Bell actually does around here, so I have no idea how important she actually is. I’ve got—options, I guess, but they’re all risky. She’s hanging on the edge as is right now, but I think if I keep her hydrated and fed she’ll more or less fix herself. Us garnets heal pretty quickly. If I just, I don’t know, keep my hands off her for a few weeks, she’ll probably be more or less okay? But that’s assuming she wakes up. Because the passive healing isn’t too great for major injuries like this. Oh, also both of her legs are broken. Dunno if you caught that.”

We didn’t. Ava and I shook our heads.

Sophia folded her hands over her nose again, rubbing both of her eyes as she did so; breathing deeply. “I could try and speed things up. Burns are pretty treatable for me, but it’s not exactly a pleasant experience. Not that Bell would complain, I’m sure, but—well, depending on what she was doing there could be smoke inhalation damage to her lungs, her legs are broken so obviously there was some kind of blunt trauma that went on so maybe something else is damaged, too, and…well, it’s Bell. I don’t know what she’s done with her body. God only knows if all of her organs are in the right places.

“The safe option gets her back to normal in…two weeks? But I wouldn’t want her going on another undercover bullshit God-knows-what mission for at least four so I can keep an eye on her. If I try and help, I could probably get her up and going in a week, but there’s a decent possibility that I fuck it up. There’s also a good chance I literally can’t do anything because she’s a more powerful garnet than me, and we can’t really heal up the power-scale. I’d ask her what she wants but she’s unconscious. And I don’t know enough about Bell’s anatomy to know why she’s unconscious because she shapeshifts all the fucking time and I also don’t know why she’s unconscious because nobody ever tells me what the fuck she’s doing.”

“I—don’t think I’ve ever seen you ask,” Ava said.

“I don’t ask you,” she said. “I’m hounding Benji all the goddamn time for info on what you people are up to so I can help if you ever get hurt, and it’s fine when Cygnus shows up with a big slice in his leg because I don’t need to know for that, but Bell gets wheeled in here with two broken legs and full-body third-degree-burns, enough to kill any non-flesh-key, and I’m expected to just fix, as if I’m capable of doing that when Bell has a good case for being the strongest flesh key alive.”

Sophia’s hands gradually curled up as she spoke. “I swear to God, Prochazka treats me like I’m fucking disposable. Just throws bodies at me and expects me to patch them all. Like if I’m ever gone he can get Bell to do my job or something. Loybol doesn’t have a single garnet on her entire payroll. I think all of NYC has one, we’re maybe a hundred people in this building, a tenth of the size of Loybol’s operation and an even smaller fraction of NYC and we have two. Prochazka takes me for granted, I swear. I’m asking for a fucking raise.”

“Maybe you should—” Ava started, and then cut herself off. “You know what, never mind.”

“She’s not gonna die,” Sophia said. “If she’s still breathing, she should make it.”

“She is,” I offered. It was the least I could do to be helpful, I thought, and I was long overdue for a contribution, lest I just end up standing there spectating this whole thing like an invalid.

I chose not to think about the uncertainty Sophia slipped into that statement. To my surprise, I didn’t.

“I know,” Sophia snapped. “I’m not fucking blind.”

I blinked, blank.

She took a deep breath again. “God. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you guys. You didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, not right now, directly related to this. I still don’t think you should be here,” she said, gesturing to me with a limp hand, “but that’s beside the point.”

I swallowed, said nothing.

“Look,” Sophia said, standing up. “I’m going to gently poke around and see if I can get any info on what’s going on. I’m gonna see what I can actually do to help here. There’s—well, if anyone asks you before they ask me, which would be par for the course as far as I’m concerned, tell them Bell’s probably gonna be out for three weeks, and that starts after she wakes up.”

Ava blinked. She fidgeted a bit. I kept expecting her to start a fight—Ava never let herself be talked down to like that, not in all two years I’d known her—but instead she just looked down at the floor for half a second, said, “Okay,” and then she turned to me and said, “Let’s go,” like I wasn’t listening to this whole conversation and wasn’t already on my way out the door.