But my eyesight continued to deteriorate.

I woke up that morning unable to make out a face on the other side of the room even with my contacts in, which was a sign that I needed new ones again. Normally, I would have put in an order for stronger ones already—I was going to Sophia for weekly checkups in an attempt to stay ahead of this thing, but the weekly ones weren’t enough.

I was considering having her put orders in for me in advance, just assuming my eyes would continue to get worse at a slowly increasing rate.

That morning, though, I couldn’t see Yoru’s face across the room—just a red and peach thumb-smear where his head was supposed to be—and my heart fell dead in my chest, a lump of shriveled coal. Curled up like a dead spider.

I turned to the wall and stared at it. I don’t really know how long I was at that for. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything else.

Eventually, I heard something knock at the wood of the bunk bed, and I slowly turned to see who it was. Cygnus was there, looking up at me. Thankfully, Cygnus was the easiest one in the unit to recognize, even at a distance, and he was also the one I most wanted to see.

Cygnus and Bell were the easy ones. Yoru and Ava, from across the foyer, had a tendency to blur together. In sight and mind.

As far as I was concerned, that day in particular, they were one person.

Cygnus said to me, unsure: “You’ve been staring at that wall for half an hour. I can assure you it’s not going anywhere.”

I blinked. Could barely fathom the time. Half an hour? What time was it when I started? When did I wake up?

I couldn’t tell what time it was. The blistering angry red light from the alarm clock was too jumbled to read. The numbers shifted every time I took another look at it.

“Oh,” was all I could say back.

“Prochazka wants to see you,” Cygnus said. “I wouldn’t keep him waiting if I were you. It sounded important.”

I found myself sliding out of bed without thinking about it first. Apparently, I was just going to walk over there in my pajamas—and I remember wondering if I’d put my shoes on before I left.

Cygnus watched me stumble over to my shoes for a minute, leaning down further than usual to make sure I grabbed mine. From behind me he said, “I’ll walk with you,” and a wave of relief washed down my back.

I didn’t even realize I needed that until he said it. That morning, I was only thirty percent of myself—the other seventy percent just went along, an automaton that responded to only the simplest instructions. Go here. Go there. Stay.

I tried to look at the time again. The numbers wouldn’t line up.

And I took a deep breath to quell the panic.

I told myself not to think about it. I swore to myself I wouldn’t think about it.

I said to Cygnus, “Okay.”

Cygnus walked over to the pile of shoes and kicked his feet into a pair of flip-flops that may or may not have been his, and then he went over to the door.

“You gonna go in your pajamas?” Cygnus said.

I shrugged.

“What if he actually needs you to do something?”

“I’ll come back and change,” I mumbled. My feet moved me past him out the door.

He was watching me go, standing in the doorway like a sentinel; and then he closed that door behind him gently and followed.

0 0 0

I did not feel alive that morning.

I felt constantly two steps behind myself—floating outside my body somewhere, watching it go, and having no control whatsoever over what it did.

And as I approached Prochazka’s office, completely colorless, I had no idea what I was going to do.

I was not in control. I did not feel alive.

I opened the door—Cygnus said something behind me that I didn’t catch and walked off—and inside was Prochazka behind his desk, and Bell in one of the two chairs, hands clasped behind her neck. She raised one of her hands and waved, and the phantom-me collided with the physical-me at light-speed, and I snapped back to real life.

Woozy and confused. Overwhelmed by the sudden smell of paper and leather, the whirring of the fans, the pressure from the eyes of Bell and Prochazka, assaulted by the colors from the backs of the books along the left wall and the trinkets on Prochazka’s desk. All of those assailed me at once, and I realized the scope of the sense-void I had somehow climbed out of.

For thirty-five minutes that morning, I was nothing. I was nobody.

I did not exist.

I slowly went over to the open chair and took a seat. Bell turned back around, sat in her chair more or less like a regular person again.

“Are you feeling alright?” Prochazka asked me.

I shrugged. Didn’t trust myself with words yet.

Prochazka regarded my reaction with complete indifference, turned to Bell, and said, “Are you sure about this?”

Bell nodded. “Completely.”

Prochazka glanced at me again, and for a moment I detected a flicker across his face—a slight creasing, maybe of concern? It was too fast for me to identify, and I was still too shaken to process it properly.

So I left it alone.

“I was planning to send Bell out to a facility in Utica. Utica theoretically takes care of itself—there’s a man out there who I trust to keep that city tidy. Very little ever actually goes on there, so they’re more like a rich neighborhood’s police department than anything else. The territory isn’t worth having for either us or the Buffalo gang, so neither of us really bother. Yesterday, I got word from them that they were looking for someone skilled in interrogation to help them out with a prisoner, since they’re not talking and they don’t know where they came from.”

Prochazka shrugged. “Bottom line is, none of that matters, because they’ve never asked me for anything before, and the fact that they’re asking me to send a Unit 6 person means I’m almost certain they’ve been compromised in some way and are hoping I’d send someone alone like an imbecile.”

Bell snorted.

He went on, leaning back a little bit. “Given the wording of the message, I’m pretty sure they were hoping I’d send Yoru or Ava, who aren’t nearly as strong as either of you, so they could snap one of them off, weaken the other by proxy, and then start to move in on us while we’re staggering.”

I figured now was a good time to try some nice, benign words. I chose them carefully, letting them take full shape in my head before I let them go. “What do you want us to do?”

Prochazka folded his arms behind his head. Shrugged a bit. “Basically, I want you two to nuke them from orbit.”

Bell nodded. “Not my usual fare, but sure, I’m in.”

“The reason I’m asking you and not Cygnus,” Prochazka said to Bell, “is that I want you to nuke them from orbit in a way that makes them never want to speak to us again. In all likelihood, everyone from the Utica outpost is dead or compromised in some way. I have no interest in appearing soft to aggressors. You are to keep up the pretense of an interrogation until they drop it. I trust the two of you not to get caught off guard.”

At the sound of the word my heart dissolved. Prochazka trusted me; he trusted me for this, which was ostensibly very important, despite my failings. Despite everything.

He didn’t know where I’d just been. Didn’t know I could barely speak.

Unless—

Unless he wanted me to harness all of that, somehow.

I swallowed.

Bell said, “So we interrogate the prisoner, and then what?”

“Well, if they just let you interrogate the prisoner and leave, then do that. I admit, I could be wrong.” Prochazka reached out to the little quartz hawk on his desk, and I blushed thinking about it. He picked it up between two fingers, admiring it for a moment, one hand still behind his head.

“I could be wrong,” he said again, more slowly this time, “but I’m not.”

“I want to be crystal-clear on this,” Bell said. “This is a blank check.”

Prochazka nodded. “This is a blank check.”

“We’re going in at night,” Bell said, wringing her hands.

“Yes.”

“Where’s the facility?”

“In the middle of some farmland,” he said. “It looks like a factory farm at first glance. One of those big buildings. It’s like this place.”

“So nobody will see us.”

“As long as nobody sees you come or go.”

Bell smiled.

I watched her smile, and I felt something unhinge in the room.

I became aware of the presence of a terrible thing.

That said, I couldn’t figure out what the terrible thing was. It made all the bones in my spine rattle, it made my blood flow backward. It made me cold.

Was it Bell, or was it me?

Because I realized I was excited about this too.

Bell said to Prochazka, “That can be arranged.”

And then she turned to me.

0 0 0

Bell got the keys to the Unit 6 car from Benji and jangled them as she walked. I didn’t even know she could drive.

Another entry for the endless list.

“We’ve never been on a mission together, have we?” I asked her.

I was already feeling better. The color had come back to my face, and walking felt like a natural movement again instead of an alien puppeteers’ idea of a cruel joke. My breathing came normally, and the standard lightly-musty smell of the factory was present but not too strong, and the few colors present in the walls of the factory stayed in their respective locations, not screaming at me, and I could form sentences and speak about as well as I usually could.

My eyesight was better than it was that morning, too. Maybe it was just a one-time thing.

I felt normal again, or as normal as I ever felt.

Minus the excitement I had for the opportunity to truly cut loose, which both buzzed in my head like an upcoming birthday and sat hard and black in my stomach like an upcoming funeral.

But I was okay. Everything was okay.

I was with Bell and it was all going to be okay.

Bell said, “I don’t remember the last time I was on a mission with anybody. That’s why I asked Prochazka if you could come with me.”

I was requested. A bit of warmth dripped down into my chest.

Wanted.

We got into the car and set off on the roughly forty-five minute drive to Utica. Prochazka had been stretching the truth a little. The place we were headed was so on the outskirts of that city—and I say “city” with heavy quotation marks—that it barely qualified as a part of any place. Utica was just the closest named location it could cling to, so a part of Utica it became.

Bell, to my surprise, was an extremely careful driver. She took the speed limit as a hard law, not a suggested minimum like Yoru often did. She broke cleanly and early for every traffic light, and never got too close behind anyone. I asked her why, since it seemed so against what I knew, and she replied, “The most embarrassing way I can think of dying is in a car accident.”

And I remembered Prochazka’s story about Senator Cunningham’s daughter, who disappeared in a car wreck. That mythical, elusive human whose name was apparently Campbell.

I remembered that and filed it away.

We drove for a while down stock-straight farm roads for a few minutes, my eyes locked on the rising moon over the horizon. Farms always made me feel lost; like I was teetering on the edge of civilization. It was tough for me to imagine the progression of city to suburb to rural farmland to uninhabited forest as anything but completely linear—no other suburbs to break it up, no little downtowns dotting the squared-up land. Once you hit that line of trees, that was it. There was nothing else.

The forest beyond stretched forever and ever.

It was about half an hour past sundown when the big factory rose up in the distance; about a mile later Bell eased the car off the side of the road and turned it off.

We sat in the car in silence for a second, taking stock of the area.

“Here’s the plan,” Bell said. “We’re going to go in there. We’re going to follow their lead until they give us a reason not to. It’s not going to be an obvious line. There’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

Bell turned to me. Her eyes were swollen black.

She said, “Do you trust me?

And I felt her power.

I wanted her to feel mine.

I said, “I trust you.”

And to match her display, I cast the moist ambient discharge from the air conditioning up into the air, fogging all the windows with intricate spirals of condensation.

Bell smiled at me.

She said, “Let’s go.”