There was an unspoken understanding among all of us at Unit 6 that we were going to die here. There was no pension at the Radiant, no retirement plan. Being a Unit 6 agent was a job you held for life. This wasn’t something that ever had to be explicitly mentioned—it was baked into everything we did. All missions were done under the understanding that there was a chance, no matter how small, that you wouldn’t come back. And the old adage goes that if you gamble enough times, you’ll win, no matter how long it takes—no matter how big the odds or small the pot.

We stood to lose everything, but we also had nothing to lose. Who would know if I died? Hal Hanover likely already assumed as much. My old classmates in Red Creek had surely forgotten me by then, and certainly by now—or maybe the memory of the candlelight vigil the school held for me outshone anything anybody actually remembered about the girl in the picture.

Cygnus had already lost his only family when his father was shot. Benji was too old to have any family he could still contact while keeping magic under wraps. I only stood to lose Bell. Yoru and Ava stood only to lose each other. Bell only stood to lose me.

We had no possessions. Nothing to inherit, nobody to bequeath to. Sure, the price was death, but that wasn’t much of a price at all.

We had long since decided that we were not afraid to die, and that was the long and short of it.

0 0 0

Ava and I exited the library and headed off to a motel that was about a miles’ walk down the road. We didn’t speak much, although that wasn’t for a lack of things to say. I hadn’t seen Ava in two weeks—the struggle was finding something I knew was a safe topic.

The least I could do was prepare the ground for a possibly unsafe one. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, again, after we’d been outside the library for five minutes or so.

“I told you,” she said, “I’m not mad. I get why you did that. I know we don’t get along. That stuff’s in the past, okay? I told you I wasn’t going to be judgmental and I meant it. I know we don’t like each other all that much, but I promised you I’d be civil so I’m holding up my end of the bargain. You don’t have to wet my face to figure out what I’m saying. It’s the truth. Okay?”

“Okay,” I mumbled.

I hadn’t quite realized just how much I relied on physically seeing someone’s face to discern their reactions. I was never particularly good at dissecting tone, and while under normal circumstances I could lay the droplets on someone’s face lightly enough where it wasn’t meaningfully distinct from the ambient humidity, inside dry places like libraries it was much harder. Human skin is really sensitive.

For the most part now, I just take people at their word. It’s too much work to do otherwise—although sometimes I still feel obligated to put in the extra effort, like with Ava. Despite all our years together, I still found it hard to completely trust her.

She reminded me too much of my old classmates.

“Esther should be contacting us any time now,” Ava said.

I swallowed. “She’ll just be talking to you, right?”

“It’s random, Erika. Could be me, could be you. I don’t know.”

I grimaced, gave a small affirmatory grunt.

We kept walking down to the motel. The land here was flat enough that we could almost perceive it from the library, and it didn’t seem like it was getting all that much closer until we were almost halfway there.

Ava walked tall, with wide steps that I could barely keep up with. Every once in a while she’d slow down a bit to let me catch up, but for the most part she just went at her own pace and expected me to follow.

When we were just a few doors down, she abruptly turned toward a corner store we were passing on our right. “I’m just going to grab a soda. Okay?”

“I’ll get one too,” I said.

“Sure.”

We stepped into the little shop—which had the AC on for some reason, despite it being a nice fifty-five outside. She grabbed a glass-bottle cola and I took a cream soda, and when we got to the counter she plucked the soda from my hand and said “Two sodas” to the cashier.

She paid for both and handed me mine on the way out. As we got back to the sidewalk, she bent down and plucked a bit of grass out from the ground and wrapped it around the bottle cap. With a small exertion, the grass bundle swelled and popped the cap off, and then she took the grass ring off and tossed it back into the underbrush. She slipped the cap into her pocket and took a long drink, head tipped back and her eyes closed to block the sun, and again I saw her, just briefly, as an older, better version of me. The person I could’ve been if I wasn’t myself. She had the same hair, the same eyes, the height I wanted, the style I wanted—the collected stance I wanted. Nothing stuck to Ava. Everything rolled off her like rain dripping down plastic—stainless, trackless.

She regarded me with a brief side-eye. “I’m not mad,” she said again, firmly.

“I’m not still worried about that,” I said. Now I felt a little obligated to show off, so I drew a bit of ambient moisture from the air, made a ring of water just under the bottle cap and froze it, which accomplished the same thing.

“You are. I can tell.”

“I’m not,” I said, but—truthfully—I was.

How did she know that?

Ava looked out ahead of us and snickered a bit. “Wanna know something funny?”

I blocked a little pang of worry before it could swallow too much of my attention. “Sure.”

“So I got there right about when Loybol did. To the library, I mean. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you catch how Cygnus kept trying to look over Loybol’s arms to figure out what she was reading?”

“Mhm.”

“Well—I read fantasy novels, right? So I was just picking up where I left off on the last book I was reading before the war broke out.”

That explained the bigger book Ava had. I vaguely remembered her saying something about that at some point in the past, and I think I remembered seeing her with an e-reader, too, but I never asked her about it.

E-readers seem especially cruel to me now.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well—I got to see Loybol’s book before she hid it from me. I only caught a bit of it, but it was called The Prince and the Chef, so I’m assuming she reads trashy romance novels.”

The idea of Loybol getting into something like that—juxtaposing the person I knew with the kind of person I assumed read those books—was enough to make me giggle.

“I mean, if you asked me what Loybol would read I would’ve said Machiavelli or some shit like that, so I guess I would’ve been two-fifths right if we’re going by words in the title alone.”

She didn’t look at me, but she was smiling—I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stand being in the dark. Even if what we were talking about had nothing to do with me, I had to keep tabs on it.

I shouldn’t be as afraid of these things as I am.

But Ava was smiling—yes, and she was walking fast and tall and long and from her perspective, from her eyes outward, everything was just as it was supposed to be. It was a warm early afternoon in April and all was right with the world.

“You’re in a really good mood,” I said, absently.

“I am,” Ava replied.

“Did Esther brief you yet?”

“No,” she said. She turned towards me—down at me, just for a moment. “But I’ve got a good feeling this is gonna be the one.”

0 0 0

We checked into the motel and took up temporary residence in our room on the second floor. Ava ordered takeout from the Chinese restaurant across the street, went and grabbed it, and we just sat on separate beds eating our orders, experiencing TV in our separate ways, and waiting for one of us to hear a voice in our head that wasn’t our own.

I was hoping it was going to be Ava who’d get the message, but I’ve never been that lucky.

“Erika?”

I snapped upright. Dropped my fork in the box, whipped my head around looking for the source of the sound—

“It’s—Erika, it’s alright, it’s me. It’s Esther. Loybol’s chief telepath.”

I sucked in a breath and let it out, slowly.

“You don’t have to reply or anything. I know it’s tough for you. The hole you’re looking for is under the bulkhead doors behind the duplex at 54-to-55 South Street. They’re gonna be locked by a bar on the inside, but the doors aren’t airtight, so they’re also not watertight if you make the droplets small enough. Ava might be able to snake some grass down there too or something, I don’t know. My estimate puts four people down there. One of them is either a fire-key or just…really cold all the time. I found it on a drive-by so I don’t have much, but you two should be fine. Get in, get out, don’t waste time. Go back to the motel when you’re done. Okay?”

Eyes shut tight, I nodded, as if she’d understand.

She did, luckily. “Good. When you’re done, stay the night at the motel you’re at. Meet up with the other team at the pizza place next to the fire station in Slingerlands. Okay?”

“Okay.” I said it out loud.

“Awesome. Good luck.”

And then her voice was gone, and the sound from the television drifted back into my awareness.

“I hate that,” I said, mostly to myself.

“What’s up?” Ava said.

“Esther told me where we’re going. Why couldn’t she have just told you?”

“It’s gotta be random in case we get separated,” Ava said, reaching for the remote. “You know that.”

I did, but my question was still valid. She clicked the volume down a few notches. “Where are we going, then?”

I told her what Esther told me. She nodded, slowly, and a tight smile spread across her face.

“It’s a basement?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “Ooh, yeah. This’ll be great. I’ve got some new tricks to show you, by the way. Since you’ve—you know, been like this, it’s been making me wonder—ah, making me think about other ways I can use this old thing, you know?”

Ava took her necklace’s charm—a silver key with an emerald inlaid where the hole would be—between two fingers. “And I did some experimenting with Yoru and figured out a really cool upgrade. Maybe this is standard practice for nature keys somewhere else, but fuck if I know, right?”

“Right,” I said, slowly.

“Do you want to know what it is?” she asked me.

I had to stop and seriously consider that for a moment. I couldn’t imagine what about my experience Ava would’ve found inspiring. I certainly wouldn’t have, if I was an outsider looking at me. All it amounted to in my head was me bashing my face against a concrete wall repeatedly until I found a softer piece of cement to hit.

I had lost so, so much, and all I got in exchange was this. It was a pale imitation of what I used to be.

I found that I didn’t know how to respond to Ava’s question. It was the kind of statement I’d have to see a twinkle in an eye to verify; I’d have to measure her mouth again, check the contours of her cheeks, but she’d already made a fuss over that once and I was not about to open that can of worms again, no matter how often she asserted that it wasn’t a big deal.

The most and least I could do was defer the question.

“Surprise me,” I said.