She emerged from the door at the top of the steps—thankfully not locked—and found Randy standing there with his phone out, scrolling through something or other.

Bell made sure to slam the door harder than normal to get his attention. He popped awake, jammed his phone away and said, “That was quick.”

“I didn’t talk to him yet. I want to see Wyatt.”

“He’s—”

“Available,” Bell said.

Her eyes swelled black.

“Listen. I am not here to fuck around. This is bigger than you. You will take us to Wyatt, or I will take your head from your shoulders and find someone more accommodating.”

He swallowed. “Uh—right. He’s…he should be upstairs. That’s where I last saw him, anyway.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“He went into his office with someone I didn’t recognize. He told me to let her in and I just did it. He hasn’t come out since then. And that was…oh, God, six hours ago? Seven?”

“What did she look like?”

Randy blinked, ghostly pale. “Um—God, she…mid-height, brown hair a little past her shoulders? Kind of—um—small head? Expensive looking jacket.”

“Did she have a key?”

Randy sucked in a deep breath, calmed himself down.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was in her pocket or something.”

Bell stepped closer to Randy, looked down at him. Somehow, in the last few minutes, she’d made herself grow a few inches without anyone noticing. Randy wasn’t all that tall, but Bell was close to six foot four, and she towered over him.

“Take me there.”

Randy nodded, fast. “Yep. Sure. We’ll—uh, we’ll do that.”

He set off toward the back wall, at a quick clip. Bell kept up with him easily, because she was a monster, and I had to jog a little to keep up.

We got to the steps, and Randy opened his mouth again, starting into some idle nervous chatter. “Who was that?” he asked. “I mean, I just sort of assumed she was—”

“Walk,” Bell growled.

Randy gulped so loudly I could hear it.

“Yeah,” he said.

He screwed up the code for the door twice, and each time he reentered it with a shakier hand.

“Upstairs,” he said. “Just a bit.”

He took them two at a time, as though he could outrun the six-foot-six monstrosity that easily took them the same way to keep up.

At the second floor, he twisted the handle and wrenched open the door, and took us down a few doors to one marked “Suite 208.”

“This is—this is where Wyatt works,” he said.

“Thank you,” Bell replied.

She pointed at me, and then a bit down the hall. I got the drift and took a few steps further down.

Then she whipped around, palmed Randy’s skull with an immense hand, and with a single jerk of her palm, both of his eyes burst out of his skull in a torrent of blood, gushing from his nose and out of the corner of his mouth in a single cough so body wracking it expelled his soul.

He dropped to the floor in a puddle.

Then Bell turned to me, crouched low so she was at eye level, and she said to me, “Erika. Listen. If you feel anything strange—anything that doesn’t seem right at all—you tell me immediately. You understand?”

I nodded. Electric tension in the hall making my head bob up and down far too many times. Like an invalid.

“Good,” Bell said. “If this is who I think it is, you’re about to meet someone.”

Then she turned and opened the door to Wyatt’s office.

Inside was a beige-painted metal and fake wood desk, an old laptop shut on top of it, and a man slumped over in a blue-fabric office chair. From the corner of his mouth drooled something black and stretchy, and it looked like it was dripping from the inner corner of his right eye, too.

“He’s not going to make it, I’m afraid,” a voice said.

Bell turned, and in the left corner of the wall we came through was a woman sitting in a black-frame chair. She was the woman Randy had described—short-ish brown hair, expensive looking jacket. Otherwise nondescript physically. Didn’t look all that tall. Normal-sized head, despite what Randy had said.

But I could not look away from her. Something about her—maybe her perfect posture, the stillness in her arms and her cold expression; maybe the culmination of all those things—made me freeze.

There was no sound in the room when I saw her. No gentle breeze, the barest sensation of life in the air from the AC. It was still. The world was dead.

There was only the three of us, and I could not look away.

I had never seen anyone who could take control of a room’s attention away from Bell simply by existing—but something about the woman there unnerved me. It made my skin shake. Where she was, there was a vortex, a black hole sucking all the warmth and light from the office—all into some still human figure who knew exactly what her effect was on someone.

Something was wrong.

She looked mid-twenties, which meant she’d had her key for a while. At the same time, though, her face was creased in such a way, and there was a heaviness in her eyes, that made her look like she was much older, and simply well-preserved.

It reminded me of Bell a bit, but less outwardly, intentionally creepy.

She regarded Bell with no expression whatsoever. Said, “Hello, Bell.”

“Hello, Loybol,” Bell replied.

I went pale. It was her, in the flesh, or…whatever unearthly substance it was her body was made out of, if not flesh. If it was just some good simulacra. Some model of a human body that was ninety-five-percent right.

“This is Erika,” Bell said, gesturing at me. I waved, meek, and immediately flushed red and stared at the floor.

“I assumed so,” Loybol replied. “Bringing her was probably not a great plan.”

“When the plan was to nuke this building from orbit, it was fine,” Bell said back. “Now, though, I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“How’s Jan doing?”

“He’s fine. Same old.”

“That’s good,” she said.

We all watched the apparent corpse of Wyatt drool for a while. I found the courage to speak. “Is he dead?”

Loybol shrugged. “I’m giving him another minute before I make that call, but it’s fairly rare for anyone to push through at this point. It was worth a shot, I suppose.”

“What…what is that?” I asked, staring at the slowly dripping black liquid. Wyatt being dead or almost dead had no meaning to me; it was only the method I cared about.

Loybol stood. My earlier guess about her height was correct—but somehow, that made me feel worse. At least if she was freakishly tall like Bell I could be afraid of something I could properly quantify.

Nobody would believe me about her aura or something silly like that.

She walked over to Wyatt with slow, purposeful steps, and placed two fingers on his forehead—as soon as she did so, the little stalactite of drool hanging from Wyatt’s lips curved upward, magnetized to Loybol’s touch, and wormed its way up across his face to her fingernails.

From every orifice on Wyatt’s head, some amount of that black liquid emerged, flowing lazily, against gravity, to the contact point. After a few moments, it was done—and all the liquid had been drawn out of him, into her fingernails, and—apparently—into the void, never to be seen again.

“I’ve theorized that this could exist for a while,” Bell said, once Loybol was done. “But I couldn’t ever run an experiment to try it without a telepath to work with.”

Bell looked over at me. “It’s a hive-mind of micro-organisms, I think. One of the only real “collaboration projects” we know of between two different keys that really matters. At some point a long time ago, a reasonably powerful telepath and a reasonably powerful garnet got together, and I’d assume one of them had an education in microbiology or something, and they created these things. They can mimic all of a body’s functions, at the cost of—literally—replacing your entire body minus bones and skin with themselves. The hive-mind can overpower weaker minds, and it allows the host mind—in this case, Loybol—to access…some amount of the victim’s mind, I think.”

Loybol shrugged, didn’t say anything.

“The main reason you’d risk dying to these things upon infection is that it gives you—at least, as I’ve thought of it—immunity to telepaths, since there’s no real single mind-source to target, and it buys you a lot of time against garnets, because there’s a lot of bodies to chew through. Also, you’re probably properly immortal, right?”

Loybol returned to her chair. “You’ve given this a lot of thought, I see.”

“If we had any telepaths in upstate, I’d probably have done this by now,” Bell replied, gesturing to Wyatt. “Seems like an upgrade, anyway.”

“It’s a side-grade,” Loybol said. “With some ups and some downs. My life expectancy is longer than a regular key, but not by a ton, I think.” She scratched the back of her neck. “Maybe two-fifty, before they eat my skin.”

Bell grinned. It was all she could do to not start jumping. This was the closest I’d ever her to being truly happy—for a moment there, she looked like a schoolgirl. Except six feet tall and gaunt and dead-looking.

“How did you do it?” Bell asked. “I mean, you’re not a flesh-key or a telepath, right?”

“I got lucky,” she replied. “The main concern with these things is that you try to bite off more than you can chew, and you attack someone who has better defenses against telepaths than you do. It could re-assign the host mind to them, and then you turn into a slave.”

Bell nodded, quickly. “That makes sense. Can I—can I take some, have a look?”

Loybol went to flex her knuckles—I expected to hear them crack, but nothing happened.

“No,” Loybol said, and that was the end of that.

Bell didn’t react to it, but I knew she was at least a little disappointed. Moving on, she said, “There must have been something big going on here if you came in person.”

“Yeah,” she said, crossing her legs. “Well, maybe, maybe not. It depends. But I can’t say I’m not glad to have backup.”

She looked at Bell when she said that, which made me feel rather small.

“The prisoner is a telepath,” Loybol said. “You made the right call, Bell. I’m fairly certain everyone in this facility was compromised when I arrived. I’m willing to bet that soon enough, someone else from the prisoner’s organization will come by—and by “come by” I mean stand close enough to the door to let the telepath implant whatever that organization needs to know directly into the outside person’s head.”

“So we kill the telepath,” Bell said. “Which you can do easily, right?”

Loybol nodded. “That doesn’t get us anywhere. You don’t put a band-aid on a plague sore.”

“So I’m going to get to do my job after all,” Bell said.

“How good are you against telepaths?”

“Very,” Bell said.

“And Erika is—”

“Not.”

Loybol nodded, slowly. “Figured.”

I turned red. Was there literally nothing useful I could do here? I was alone with the strongest garnet and one of the most powerful people in the country—and yet I was a sack of potatoes. Dead weight. Worse than useless—a liability.

“I can just…leave,” I said, slowly.

“No, you can’t,” Loybol said. “Because then we’d all have to leave.”

“You could just walk me to the car. I’d—um—I’d be out of range then, right?”

A dead-weight.

“Then we’d be leaving the prisoner unattended. How far away did you park? Half a mile?”

Bell nodded.

“That’d be, what, ten minutes?”

“Seven-and-a-half,” I said. Desperation creeping in. “I was quick in school.”

She shook her head. “Still not fast enough.”

A sack of potatoes.

Loybol grimaced. “I don’t want to just chop this off and be done with it.”

“You think it’s the city?” Bell asked.

Loybol did not look at either of us, but she nodded all the same.

A victim.

“This might be the first attack,” she said. “A warning shot to scare us. We need to show that we are not afraid.”

And I felt the power in her voice. The assertion. What she said was objective truth. It could not possibly be denied.

We were not afraid.

I was, but I was not. If I was, it would contradict Loybol, and that was impossible.

So I was not afraid.

I forced myself to feel nothing. I hyper-focused on every syllable from their mouths, and the ichor-slick of fear coating the back of my mind slowly began to melt away.

“Do they know you’re here?” Bell asked.

“They shouldn’t, thanks to you.”

Bell let herself crack a smile. “You want to send a message.”

“Yes.”

“I think we can make that happen.” Bell relaxed; she returned to her more-or-less regular height of six-foot-two, eyes back to fish-corpse gray. The Bell I knew.

Seeing her look regular again made me feel regular again.

“You have a plan?”

“The makings of one.”

“Go.”

“You go downstairs. Assimilate the telepath. I’ll stay with Erika and make sure they don’t do anything last-minute. Once you’re sure the telepath is down, we’ll go down there and extract whatever we want out of them.”

Loybol was into that. “And then we’ll send Erika outside to greet the welcome party while we sift through the findings.”

Warmth crashed over me. God—I wasn’t going to be useless. Thank God, thank God.

I took a breath and let it out slow. Neither of them reacted to it, although I’m sure they both noticed, as they were surely omnipotent, and I was but a simple human in a world ruled by gods.

“Exactly.”

“What if the welcome party has another telepath?”

“I doubt it,” Bell said. “NYC is operating under the idea that I’m here alone. They don’t know you’re here, and they don’t know I brought Erika with me. Given that I’m pretty well-known to be hard to rattle among those that do know of me, I would be very surprised if they’d risk another one of their most valuable wartime keys when they know it won’t be all that effective. The welcome party, assuming it contains reinforcements, will likely be all elemental keys. Erika can go hide in the cornfields and as soon as they arrive, they’ll be in for a very unpleasant surprise.”

“And the prisoner?”

“I’ll kill them afterward,” Bell said. “Let them find what’s left. Write a message in their blood on the walls.”

Loybol shook her head. “No.”

“No?”

“That seems like a waste of a perfectly-good disposable spy.”

Bell broke into a smile. A real one, or as close to a real one as they ever get.

“You know—I like the way you think,” she said.

“Likewise,” Loybol replied.

“Sounds like a plan, then?”

“It does.”

Loybol stood.

“Let’s go.”