We waited until we were a few good paces away from the infirmary before we spoke.

“She’s always so fucking testy,” Ava said, rolling her eyes. “God.”

“Does everyone hate us?” I asked, ignoring her words.

“I mean—yes?” Ava frowned. “You don’t talk to anyone outside of the unit all that much, but we’re not super popular around here.”

“I knew that,” I said, slowly. “Just…everyone we’ve talked to today has been really mean.”

Ava sighed. Stopped walking, leaned against the nearest wall.

“Look,” Ava said, “I get that Bell means a lot to you, but to the rest of us she’s a fucking wacko weirdo who’s never around and gets off on acting batshit all the time. Apparently she’s good at her job but we’d never know because literally none of us have ever been on a mission with her. Once the third month of her not being here rolled around, well…I talked to a bunch of folks in the other units because, no offense, I think I’m the normal one here—and they were all kind of, ah, speaking in hushed tones, if you know what I’m saying.”

Ava swallowed, stuck her fingertips in her pockets. “Bell made—uh, makes—us all look bad. Especially in Unit 6. She’s powerful, sure, but…we all thought she was the kind of person we were supposed to be fighting. Like, she obviously doesn’t give a shit about the greater good, right? She pretty obviously just does this stuff because she likes it and Prochazka pays her. Pays her out the ass, by the way—she makes the highest wage out of all of us and doesn’t spend a fucking dime. Yoru saw the salary sheet for all of us once; Benji left it on his desk. Like, she makes eighty-five thousand. Eighty-five grand! I’d kill to make that much.”

She snickered. “Okay, maybe not kill. Doesn’t mean all that much anymore, huh?”

I knew how much I made, and it was money beyond my wildest dreams. But I was also fourteen, twelve when I started, and I knew, objectively speaking, my wage was about average for the area, maybe a bit less.

Eighty-five grand was close to double my salary. To be fair, though, I was just happy I got paid at all. I had no idea where Prochazka got all the money from. I didn’t really want to know—that was Unit 1’s job, and while they were often out and about, they were extremely tight-lipped about their methods.

Ava went on: “I thought she was dead, Erika, and I think a lot of other people thought she was dead, too, and I think now that we all found out that we were wrong, it’s…well…”

Ava grimaced. She finished her statement fast, letting the words slip out in a continuous stream. “It’s disappointing, Erika, we all kind of wanted her replaced.”

“Oh” was all I could muster as a response.

We didn’t speak or move for a second.

I liked Bell. Bell, as least to the best of my knowledge, appeared to like me. She was one of the only people who went out of her way to talk to me when I was new here, aside from Cygnus, and for that I’d always be thankful. Even if she wasn’t around to do it all that often.

Watching TV with Cygnus and Bell was still one of my fondest memories of my first year here. It was the first thing that really made me feel like a part of the team.

And here was Ava saying she would’ve been glad if Bell was dead. As if nothing Bell did for me mattered.

I was disappointed in her. Not mad, because I understood why—just disappointed, and maybe a little frustrated. How could she not see the good? Sure, Bell was weird, but I had to imagine that being a powerful enough telepath or flesh-key made it basically impossible to be a normal person. The fact that she made an attempt at all was probably a significant mark in her favor.

But maybe she only made that attempt around me.

And maybe I just didn’t know anything.

It was too much extrapolation. Any conclusion I could draw was barely better than an empty guess.

I settled with disappointment.

Ava asked, “No chance Bell told you anything about where she was going or what she was gonna do, right?”

I shook my head.

“Figures,” she said. “Not like we could trust it, anyway. How old did Bell tell you she was?”

“Twenty-six,” I replied, in a low drone. Staring at the dust caught in the crux of the wall and floor.

“Yeah, she told me she was thirty-three,” Ava said. “I think she told Yoru she was twenty-nine, and…Cygnus, maybe twenty-four? God only knows what she told Benji and Prochazka. I don’t think Prochazka actually knows how old Bell is.”

“He doesn’t,” I replied. Same tone. “I asked him about it once.”

“See—nobody knows shit. And we’re supposed to trust her? She’s barely even a part of the team. I had half a mind to tell Prochazka to make a Unit 7 that’s just Bell and hire someone else in her place that we can actually work with, but…well, that seems like in bad taste now.”

As if.

“You just said you were disappointed she was still alive,” I said, monotone. “I can’t imagine you actually care.”

Ava blinked.

“I mean, not really,” she said, surprised. “Just—yeah, not really. I don’t really care.”

Again we fell silent. I felt like the conversation was over—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous from my attack—but Ava didn’t say anything about it. After a few more moments she added: “I mean, Yoru and I have been here for four years. Bell was here when we got here. I can count on my fingers—and maybe a couple of toes—the amount of real conversations I’d had with her in the whole two years before you got here. And I remember thinking, when Cygnus got here with all his delusions and grand designs, that he’d fall for Bell’s antics just like you did. He’d get enamored with the dark vigilante I had to convince him she wasn’t.”

Ava’s tone changed—she went from detached to fully engaged, and for the first time in the whole conversation she made an effort to look at me, and when she spoke it was almost pleading: “Erika, please listen to me. Bell does not care about you. Bell does not care about anyone. Bell does not care about anything. Whatever she’s giving you, or whatever she’s promising you, it’s not worth it. At the end of the day…”

She trailed off, and when she picked it up again her voice was as thin as the light breeze outside. “At the end of the day,” she repeated, “I’m not afraid of war with the Buffalo gang or with NYC. I’m not afraid of dying. I’ve watched two people in this unit die already. In the back of my mind I’ve always known I was going to die here, and I’ve always been…sort of okay with that. In this world there’s no other place for us. It’s here or nowhere. But I am afraid of Bell. Because, God help us, imagine if she turns. What the fuck would we do? How could we possibly fight her? Bell is both the reason I’m not afraid of war and she’s the only thing I think we could lose to. Because if NYC gives her a better deal, I don’t think she’d stay here. If she gets a better offer somewhere else, I doubt she’d stick around out of the kindness of her heart.”

After a second, Ava added: “Maybe she’d stay for you.”

I had no response to that.

Ava stood up, pushing off the wall with her foot. “I’m gonna go see if the others are back.”

She walked away, the chain on her jeans gently clinking as she went.

I watched her go out of the corner of my eye, disappearing into the hallway at the other end of the foyer, but that was out of my peripheral vision before long, and I didn’t bother to follow her beyond that.

I didn’t move.

0 0 0

I checked in on Bell three times a day, every day.

Knowing that she was there, not dead but possibly soon to be, and that there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it—since Sophia couldn’t even open the body to look around, that was how large the power gap between the two was—knowing that ate at me. I spent the whole time looking over my shoulder. Wondering what I’d do if Sophia walked out of the infirmary one day to the assembled, shrugged to us all and said, “Well, there wasn’t anything I could do. Eventually, everyone loses a battle.”

But not me. Not Bell. We were invincible—we would persevere through time immemorial; or, at least, she would. The only things that could stop us were us—and for Bell I believed that more firmly than for anyone else. The only thing standing between Bell and eternal life was an eventual, hanging proposition that she’d get bored of living and cut her brain from her neck.

Anything short of that was just a flesh-wound. Anything short of self-decapitation was a scratch; a slight; a nothing. Somehow, Prochazka had contracted a god. Someone so far above humanity that the lives and dreams of others were just the scramblings of ants to them.

And yet—

For almost a week, there Bell was: lying unconscious on a hospital bed, intravenously hydrated and fed, with Sophia sitting on her little green-leather stool watching her, waiting to see if there was enough of Bell left to fix herself.

Every morning, right after breakfast, with my coffee in hand I’d come to the infirmary, knock on the door—to the point were on the third day Sophia simply said, “Come in, Erika,” by the knock—and I’d stand next to Sophia, hoping the smell of coffee would awaken something, or my presence would make Bell try harder, somehow. I never doubted for a second that she knew I was there. Bell knew the ways of all flesh.

Every afternoon, after lunch, I’d stop by again, for a shorter visit this time—except for the fourth day, where I had a mission to attend do—just to see if anything had changed. Once in a while Sophia had an update: Bell had twitched, her eyes were open a bit but that was just an unconscious movement, her heartbeat was a little stronger, I thought—but for the most part she left me to my own devices. Staring at the body and wishing desperately that I had a better key. Something I could use to contact her.

But we had no telepaths. We had no other flesh-keys. All we had was time and trust.

And every night, sometimes when Sophia was still there, and sometimes not, I’d go in—picking the lock with ice if I had to—sit on the stool Sophia used, and watch Bell for a while. Some nights I’d be sharp enough to see her chest rise and fall in miniscule amounts as she breathed—other times, with the lights off and the whole room still and gray, my eyes wouldn’t let me.

It was strange—around the third day, I thought for the first time that maybe, just maybe, Bell wouldn’t make it. The idea was so alien to me that it physically stopped me in my tracks when it struck; how could Bell possibly not make it? But since the words came into my head, I knew I couldn’t deny them; any rejection was just superficial, it would only serve into deluding me that this was just a delay in Bell’s life rather than an actual, real, fight against death.

I’d always believed that Bell could slay the reaper. If anyone could, it was her.

Nobody had died yet in my tenure in Unit 6; I wasn’t sure if any of us could. We were all so strong, so vibrant—the idea of an empty bed, a truly empty one, wasn’t even something I could really imagine.

But there was Bell, unmoving and barely hanging, and there was the empty bed in the Unit 6 barracks, and I would always force my imagination to stop before it could go further.

What would we do without Bell?

The question rang through the whole unit. We were all thinking it. We went from vibrantly social as usual on the first night, to a little quieter on the second, a little more on the third, and by the fourth we basically did not speak.

I was the only person who felt like they knew Bell, even though I knew I didn’t actually. My concerns were for her; but for everyone else, it was a more pragmatic worry. Loybol knew about Bell now. Presumably rumors of Bell existed in other groups, as well. What would happen if they found out she was gone?

How much was the existence of Bell holding back?

I knew that Unit 6’s status as an elite group kept a lot of the garbage in our region in check by rumors alone. And it kept some amount of pressure off us from the north and south. Prochazka keeping things friendly with Loybol helped with that, too.

None of us knew exactly what Bell did around here. We all just knew that most of it was so important, so top-secret, that we couldn’t ever be allowed to know. We all just had to accept that Bell was off-limits.

And even when she was gone, for the entire six months, I never once thought that Bell was dead. Even during the stretches of no correspondence, at their longest, four weeks, I never entertained the idea that Bell wasn’t coming back.

She was invincible, just like me. Everything would always work out for her.

The disconnect between the unearthly figure I knew—too tall, too thin, too gaunt, too dark, too knowing, too powerful, too interested, too unknowable—and the bandaged, unconscious girl on the bed in the hospital room rattled me.

The Bell I knew was towering, she was an imposing monster who filled a room with her presence, an emotional vortex with her quiet smile—she was impossible to ignore.

The Bell I saw on the bed was small. Shriveled.

I’ll admit it. I was scared.

Scared for her, scared for us. I’d always figured I’d take on the burden of defending this place with her, if it came down to it. Since we were the strongest. But it was always “we”—she was always by my side. I had long since decided that that was the reason she took so much interest in me. She knew that, if the greater powers that be came for us, we were the only defenders against annihilation.

But to do that alone—

And with my own future that I was hurtling towards—

It scared me.

And I remember lying in bed on the fourth night wondering: what will become of us? What was I going to do?

The bunk underneath mine was empty, again. Bell was here, but she wasn’t here.

I was replaying our interactions in my head, in catatonic repetition, trying to find any hint of premonition or advice she might’ve left me in the event of her untimely death. Bell wasn’t a telepath, but if she told me she could see the future, I’d believe her. Unlike everyone else, who trusted nothing Bell ever said, I believed everything, because I knew she could do anything. Who was to say she couldn’t see the future?

Had Bell ever told me she could never die?

It was late that fourth night—so late it was technically the fifth morning—but I needed to see her again. I needed to ask her if she could die. Not that she could hear me at all. What I wanted was to hear the words leave my mouth. The silence could be my answer. I wanted to ask the question. That was all.

I couldn’t get past the idea that without Bell, we were all dead.

So I climbed out of the top bunk and slipped on my shoes without bothering to put on socks. I stepped quietly to the door, opened it just enough to slip outside without making it creak—lightly resting it shut without closing it fully.

I walked downstairs, across the dark foyer—pausing briefly to glance out through the glass front doors, imagining the van that brought Bell home sitting in the driveway out front. Imagining the people scrambling to bring her inside—people who hated her, people who wanted her gone.

People who didn’t appreciate everything Bell did for us.

And as I turned back toward the hall, I found that I couldn’t quite read the sign that pointed to the infirmary. I knew where it was by heart—but the fact that the sign was morphing before me, shifting from nonsense word to nonsense word too fast for me to grab any particular letter or phrase—made my spine rigid and cold.

The truth is that I needed Bell. I needed her desperately. I didn’t quite know why that was, but in my heart I knew that she was the only person in the whole wide world who could really understand me.

And maybe the only person who could help me.

She was the only one who spoke plainly to me, even when it was something I didn’t want to hear.

The only one who never minced words when I was around.

The only one who, I was certain, was on no level afraid of me.

Yoru, Cygnus, and Ava were civil, and Cygnus was more so—but Bell was the only person I could truly call a close friend.

So I needed Bell. I craved her attention. It makes me feel weak to admit it. How deeply I required her validation to feel like I meant something. How much that quiet smile fueled me.

I came to the infirmary door, and I opened it slowly, quietly—it wasn’t even locked. Sophia must have stopped bothering. The room inside was not quite pitch black—some medical instruments Sophia had been using but didn’t put away had dials and displays that glowed blue, casting a pale light just barely bright enough to illuminate the shape, but not the form, of the person on the bed.

I took my place on Sophia’s green-leather stool, and I looked at Bell.

The few missing patches of hair were gone, and her face burns—while still splotchy and blackened—weren't quite as omnipresent as they were a few days ago. It looked like she was getting better, although it was entirely possible that it was just my imagination.

I whispered, mostly to myself: “Please wake up soon.”

Sophia had told me, on the second day, that if Bell didn’t wake up after a week, she pinned it at “unlikely” that she ever would. This fourth night was starting to cut it close.

“Please,” I whispered, again.

And then Bell shifted. Her head turned—and slowly, she faced me.

My heart froze solid. I got up from the stool so fast I left it spinning—rushing to the side of the bed.

Bell whispered, “Erika.”

“I’m here,” I replied, breathless.

She started to speak again, her voice barely above a breathy creak, but in my haste I cut her off, saying, “Let me turn on the lights—”

“No,” she said. Quietly—only barely audibly over the whirr and buzz of the machines and air conditioning—but loud enough for me.

I stopped dead, crouched back down next to her.

“Erika,” she said, again. “How long has it been?”

“Four days,” I replied. I spoke in a whisper—not that I had to hide; but the weight of the dark room and Bell’s presence, weak as she was, crushed my voice down to that small sound.

She was alive!

I should have been rejoicing—

Bell cracked a smile. Just barely I could make out the shape of her mouth curving upward—and something large and dark in her opened eyes.

The dark patches of burned flesh on her face began to flake. They peeled themselves away, and underneath was something lighter, cast gray in the dim blue light.

Again she spoke my name—

“Erika,” she said.

“I’m here,” I replied, again.

It was like she was molting. Everything dead came free.

She shifted under the sheet. Eyes locked on mine.

I could not look away.

She pulled her legs in and—with what was unmistakably a large effort—pulled herself up to a seated position. Legs crossed with the medical sheet pulled around her like a robe.

“I am invincible,” she whispered, her voice a little bit louder. Hoarse and broken—but there.

I was still crouched, staring up at her.

Bell looked down at me. The blue light caught in her eyes, and I saw there the vast black empty circles she filled them with whenever she felt truly powerful.

She looked down at me like some ancient oracle, wise beyond human years. All knowing. All seeing.

Bell could have told me anything, and I’d believe it.

What I would have given to be a presence like that!

It was what I craved—Benji's fear was a start, but it was nothing compared to the sheer emotion Bell could pull from others just by existing.

I needed it. From the core of my bones.

Only Bell could teach me how.

Bell’s head rolled back for half a second—and I was worried she was about to metamorphose into some eldritch monster, show me her true form as an unknowable, unfathomable goddess—but all she was actually doing was cracking her neck.

“They’re going to have to try harder than that,” she said.

And her eyes were back to normal, or, at least, as normal as they ever got.

We sat in silence for a second. I desperately tried to find something, anything to say—and I couldn’t.

Bell said to me, “Stand up.”

I didn’t even notice I was still crouching. Bowing, of sorts.

I stood, sheepish.

“Thanks for keeping watch,” Bell said, quietly.

“You knew?” was all I could manage at that time.

“Of course.” Softly, slowly. Barely more than a whisper.

I didn’t know if that was true or not. I didn’t care. I wanted it to be, so it was. It became truth by the sheer force of my will.

I nodded. I intended to keep quiet, but instead I blurted: “Ava thought you were going to die. The—all the others did. I was the only one who knew you’d make it.”

Bell smiled.

“Of course I was going to make it,” she said. “I can never die.”

“I—”

Shame burst into my face. I couldn’t possibly waste her time with what I was about to say.

But she was the only person who’d really listen.

“Everybody hates us,” I said to her, quietly.

“Of course they do,” Bell said, quietly. “Does that make you feel ashamed?”

Every inch of my skin burned. I drooped. I couldn’t help it.

Bell knew. “Don’t be ashamed, Erika,” she whispered. “You are invincible, too.”

And I wanted to believe her. Every sinew in my flesh ached to believe her. Every cell in my brain, every fiber in my heart—

But instead—

“I’ve been worried,” I blurted. Too fast to stop. Too scared to look her in the eye as I said it. “About—about my future. What I do. I’m—I want to be like...”

I took a breath. Evened myself. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

Bell asked me: “Afraid of what?”

“Of—of my future. Of what I could become. What I’m...”

I swallowed. It hurt me to say it. It went against my entire nature to admit that what was going to happen to me had no cure. That it was inevitable.

My soul seethed against it.

I hadn’t been told it outright, but I knew it was. Sophia was beating around the issue. She knew what I was heading towards—and she knew it was only a matter of time before no lens could save me.

I was already pushing the limits of what contacts could do.

I squeezed it through my teeth, because if Bell was strong enough to pull herself back from the brink, I could at least do this.

I said, in a suffocated whisper: “What I’ll become when my eyes don’t work anymore.”

The word for it still eluded me. I couldn’t say it. It wasn’t in my vocabulary.

But the sentiment—

Bell looked down at me. The mythical oracle of Unit 6.

Mouth held in that quiet smile.

“There is only one way I know of abandoning fear completely,” Bell said.

I had to know. She owned me. I was completely in her grasp.

“Please,” was all I said.

The whirring of the air conditioning grew louder in my ears. Blood pumping through my face—vision tunneled to show Bell and only Bell—

There was nothing in the world but—

Bell’s right arm reached out from under the sheet—blackened skin falling away and disintegrating. She was being reborn, right in front of me—

She took hold of my chin, pointed it up so I was facing her. So I couldn’t possibly look away.

I stared longer into Bell’s eyes than I ever have. Than I ever wanted to again.

And even with that length of time, I still found nothing at all.

No joy. No fear. No love. No hate.

The freedom that I craved.

Bell said to me: “Let yourself die.”