We left the motel about an hour later. Ava was a slow eater, even by my standards, so I was getting impatient around the half-hour mark. On one hand, I wanted to get this over with, but on the other, I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to sit and stare at a wall and not think or process anything for a little while.

But after listening to the TV for about half an hour, I got bored and told her to hurry up, gently.

She shrugged away my concern and said we weren’t on a tight time schedule. Rushing around for this kind of thing made us more visible to the enemy, she said.

“In fact, I was going to stop at a store on the way down. Just any random store. It messes with the trail, you know?”

I knew, but it didn’t stop me from frowning. “Nobody’s following us, Ava. It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, through her last mouthful, even though it was explicitly my job to know that.

“If anyone was following us, they would’ve broken into our room by now,” I said, turning toward the door, using the old knob as a guide to find it in the space.

“In public? No way,” she said.

“This isn’t public,” I said.

“We’re at a public motel. This totally is public.”

“Are you done now?” I asked her, which—in hindsight—was far more rude than I noticed at the time. I was only asking about her food, but I didn’t wait long enough to make that clear.

She didn’t react to it. “Let’s finish this episode first,” she said, facing the TV. “I just want to see how this ends.”

Ava was watching an episode of some cop procedural. I wasn’t particularly fond of them, even though they were easy to appreciate from sound alone. Unit 6 technically counted as cops, for most definitions of a police force, and watching real cops just frustrated me. There was all this red tape they had to wade through that we could just ignore; and that was still an over-simplified version of real policework where there was even more red tape.

The squabbles of regular people—their crimes and punishments—just didn’t seem all that interesting to me anymore.

I don’t really remember what the episode was about. I remembered, about two minutes later, that most hotel rooms had a bible in a drawer somewhere, and maybe I’d be able to practice reading that way—but the print was too small and the pages were too thin. Getting the droplets that small and fitting them into indents that shallow was technically possible, but more often than not I simply lost them in the paper, or lost them in the context of the air, or I guessed wrong on the shape of a letter in an attempt to read a word, and the end result was more along the lines of playing a game of hangman by myself than actually reading. So after a few minutes I gave up and put it away, and once I did, I realized Ava was watching me.

“You can read that?” she asked me.

“Not really,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I mean—I can,” I said, quickly. “Just, um, not efficiently. I only got through maybe a few sentences.”

“Still. That’s wild,” she said. “Seriously. I don’t know how the hell you did it.”

I turned back to the door. The metal doorknob—and the deadbolt above it—were both old steel, not rusted but well-aged. Something that was put in when this place was built and never regarded again. They would remain—in all likelihood—until they rusted apart, the building is bulldozed, or the world explodes. Whichever comes first.

Laying the droplets down over the knob cooled them. It was the same as putting your hand on it and feeling the rough little impurities, the faults in the finish, under your fingers. The sensation of something cold and solid, something that was here and would always be here. Something to ground you in the present by virtue of it being in the past and future. Knobs aren’t meant to be thrown away. They are meant to last, until everything around them has changed, and their presence no longer makes sense in the new world.

“I don’t know how I did it, either,” I said to her.

“I’ve seen a decent bunch of water keys,” Ava went on. “It’s a pretty common one. Maybe the most common. But I have never seen someone pull out of that the way you did.”

I paled. “Is—does this normally happen to water keys?”

“No, it doesn’t. I’ve never seen that happen to anyone before. I’m—uh—I’m getting ahead of myself. Whatever. The bottom line is—you need to give yourself more credit for the absolutely insane feat of perseverance you pulled off. Not a whole lot of people go blind like that—”

I flinched, instinctively.

“—and come out of it whole on the other side. Let alone someone like you.”

Ava hopped off the bed, walked over to the door and crouched down to put her shoes on.

“You,” she went on, “are invincible. I’m not sure there’s a single damn thing in the world that can stop you, and frankly—if you weren’t here, I’d be viewing this more as a righteous suicide than a war.”

The first thought to dribble out of my mouth was, “But we have Bell, too.”

Ava snorted. “Bell doesn’t give a fuck about us. She only cares about you. Therefore…”

I understood.

She rose, shoes on. Ready to go.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” Ava said. “We’re going to walk in there. You’re going to shoot down everyone but one person, I don’t care which one, just pick when we walk in. Then you’re going to raise the humidity in the room until it’s nice and sticky. Then, I’m going to do unspeakable things to whoever is left until they tell us everything they’ve ever known. Okay?”

She smiled at me and I had nothing more to add.

“Okay,” I said.

0 0 0

So we were in the basement.

We’d opened up the bulkhead doors—I’d undid the lock from the outside via forming some ice just inside them, as Esther guessed I’d be able to—and we came in and went down the stairs and within ten seconds four out of the five people in the room were dead.

Two of them had headphones in and were paying attention to some readout from the computer. They hadn’t reacted fast enough to the creaking of the bulkhead doors and took icicles to the back of the skull before they knew what was going on.

The commotion drew out two more people into the main room, one of which was a woman with a gun and the other was a nature-key with a vine slithering around his shoulders. They didn’t matter. I put an icicle between the eyes of the non-magical one before she could get a clear shot in the dim room, and Ava took hold of the vine-snake the other was using as a sort of familiar and gained control of out out from under him. From there it was a simple matter to have the snake wrap itself around the man’s throat and start squeezing.

She turned to me while that was happening. “Is there anyone else in here?”

I closed my eyes and felt through the already fairly damp basement for a lump that didn’t make sense as a piece of furniture. I found one—crouching in a corner of another room, clutching a gun and shaking.

“One more. They’ve got a gun.”

“Perfect,” Ava said. “Mind turning on the humidifier?”

“Let me just—um…”

This was the basement of a residential building, presumably an empty one, so I assumed there would be a water heater somewhere. I spread my consciousness out, sending droplets in all directions, looking for something pipe-shaped that distinctly colder than its surroundings. I found one, formed a spiral-toothed icicle, and carefully spun it around like a drill-bit, putting a hole in the PVC pipe about half an inch wide so water started pouring out of it.

The water dissipated into fog before it could even hit the ground.

“It’s on,” I said.

“Awesome,” Ava said. “Go lock the door. We should be able to hear anyone coming.”

“On it.”

I went up to the bulkhead and slotted the lock-bar back into place, scooping up the chunk of ice I’d formed to push it up and out of the hole in the first place.

Then I came back down and stood next to Ava.

“I’m just gonna wait for this room to get a bit more humid before I start,” she said. “It’ll be easier that way.”

I’d been thinking about what her secret power might’ve been, and given that it seemed to require a damp basement for it to work best I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it could be weaponized to work on humans.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

“So I was talking to Bell a while back, right?” she said to me.

“Shouldn’t we be—”

“Just freeze him if he comes in here,” Ava said. “It’s no big deal. He can’t get a shot from here, and if he wants to try and put one through the wall, he’s more than welcome to. The walls down here are strong enough to mess with any straight shot, if not completely stop it. Anyway, I was talking to Bell, and you know how she’s still mad about Loybol having that black-slime thing she can use to mind-control people?”

I was well aware of that. “Yeah.”

“Well, she’s been studying up to see what the deal is. Her main thought is that it’s some kind of collaboration effort between flesh and telepathic magic to create a parasite that can control humans and “replace their bodily functions with stylized copies of itself”—her words, not mine—but we don’t have a telepath around here and Esther is fucking terrified of Bell, which seems totally reasonable if you ask me—”

“Definitely,” I said.

“So Bell came to me and asked me if maybe it was more like a fungus than a bacteria or something. Like a mold or something. So she asked me if manipulating fungi fell under the umbrella of nature keys or flesh keys, and I told her I didn’t know, so we set about looking for a mushroom and it turns out that it’s actually both, weirdly enough. Now, I’m not all that interested in helping Bell on her research because I personally enjoy not being a part of Bell’s flesh singularity, but there was an ulterior motive here, you know? Mutual back scratching and all that.”

Ava started walking toward the opening, behind which—and off to the left somewhat—was this hole’s last survivor. “Now, Yoru and I always had this problem where we couldn’t actually torture anyone. Not that torture is all that useful, but it’s a case-by-case thing, you know? Some people crack under it and some don’t, especially if it’s something you can completely undo. Yoru could stop people from breathing for a while by just not allowing air to go into their lungs, but I couldn’t do anything like that. So this wasn’t an issue before, but now that our teams are all scrambled, it’s a concern. And nature keys don’t really have a good option for torture that doesn’t involve things that are hard to recover from. Sure, I can put a tree through someone’s arm, but that’s no fun, is it?”

From the other room, the person with the gun coughed. Something clattered to the floor, followed by a heavy thump that I usually associate with someone falling over.

“This is much, much better,” Ava said.

We walked into the other room, and it didn’t look like anything had changed, except that the man was slumped over, the gun off to the side, and he was hacking his brains out. Every breath was a ragged scrape of air across his tongue, and every cough spat out fat globs of mucus.

Occasionally he would try to reach for the gun, but the involuntary coughing kept shifting him in weird ways, the coughs so heavy and hard that he couldn’t restrain them through will alone.

I walked over to him, scooped up the gun, and walked back to Ava.

Over the din, Ava said, “Hi there. I’m Ava, this is Erika. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

He did his best to align himself with Ava’s eyes, but speaking was completely beyond his capabilities.

“Oh—here, let me help you with that.”

The man’s eyes bulged and he made a truncated choking noise like a truck backfiring and a lump of something soft and wet shot out of his mouth.

He drew air, clean air, hard and fast.

“Here’s the deal,” Ava said, crouching down to his level. “I’m going to grow black mold inside your lungs repeatedly until you tell us everything you know about this operation. And—to be clear—I mean everything you’ve ever been told. I want it all. I want the plans, as far as you know them, I want the location of every place like this you’ve been, I want the names of your superiors, I want their contact information, I want their addresses, I want their wives and childrens’ addresses. I want to know the protections for your families New York is offering. I want to know the extent of your dental plan. I want to know where they’re sending you guys food, and I want to know how often you guys swap holes, because the two schmucks out front looked like the last bit of sun they’ve seen was Sunny-D.”

“In return, I’ll let you know that Erika and I have a motel booked for the foreseeable future and we’ve got nowhere specific to be. In the worst case I’ll just tell Erika to go to the meeting point and say we’re busy. It’s really no skin off my back to do this for as long as I need to. Erika will keep you hydrated—or dehydrated, your choice—and there’s a raspberry bush out back that I can grow over to here to keep you fed, so I hope you like those. I can offer you my promise that no, you’re not going to die here, and that no, short of the lord Hashem himself coming through that bulkhead, there is no cavalry coming to save you.”

She let that hold in the air for a moment. Watched his face as he stared out blank, uncomprehending, his body slack.

“Now—”

Ava sat cross-legged on the floor, about five feet away from him. The moist ball of black mold on the floor quivered and started rolling toward the man. In a single sharp motion he pulled himself tight, crawling backward into the corner for about half a second before he realized he was already in the corner and that there was nowhere to run.

Nowhere at all.

“Let’s get started, shall we?”

0 0 0

Ava’s list of demands went mostly unfulfilled. After an hour or so, she was sufficiently convinced that he only know the name of his immediate superior, the locations of six other holes, and a very, very rough idea of New York’s defense plan as gathered by his time in the holes. Most people that outranked him had cyanide pills. We’d have to knock them out and frisk them if we wanted to try this again with someone up the ladder.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

After around fifteen minutes I relocated myself to the other room to examine the equipment, which I very easily could have done from Ava’s side in the room with the man and the mold.

I’d folded some ice around my ears in hopes of blocking out the body-rending coughs to no avail, and a single wall was not even close to enough to stop the sounds from piercing right through the drywall—right through the concrete—and lodging deep enough inside my ears to close tight around my brain like a fist.

I wouldn’t be able to tell what was on the computers—they might as well have been blocks of concrete for all I could tell—but I figured I’d look at the food supplies. Maybe they had some paper documentation I could read.

Food amounted to a small desktop burner and canned goods. There was no paper documentation.

So instead, I sat on the floor and tried to picture the world outside via some droplets. When that wasn’t enough, I took the block of ice I’d been holding and melted it into a perfect sphere and did that multi-ball exercise I used to do when I was younger—one sphere, eight spheres, twenty-seven spheres, sixty-four, all equidistant, all perfectly still.

After a bit—I don’t know really how long—I heard my name and dropped the spheres.

“Erika,” Ava called again, in the same tone.

I rose and went back into the room. Did my best to not look on the floor where the man was, but my instinct was to feel every shape and I was not prepared to fight against that in that moment.

He was still there. Still alive, somehow. Not moving all that much, but still breathing.

“He’s done all he can,” Ava said.

“Okay,” I responded. “And?”

“And I’m just wondering what you think we should do now,” she said.

“We—we said we’d let him go, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Ava said.

“We—”

I wasn’t sure, in his place, what I’d want after all of this. I had no idea how long it had been but I knew that in his shoes it was multiplied by a hundred. Every passing second was another lifetime.

His eyes bulged out of his skull and he gasped in wheezing, shaking breaths for every last scrap of air. What was the point in going on after that? I certainly never left anyone alive that I found in that condition.

I supposed any life was better than no life, but I never did have a solid opinion on that.

Ava regarded me plainly. “Do you have an opinion?” she asked me.

“No,” I said, before I knew if that was true.

“Okay,” Ava said. She didn’t sound disappointed. Maybe she didn’t care about my opinion at all. It certainly didn’t seem like she did, after the fact.

“How about you?” she asked the man on the floor. “I can’t guarantee your safety if you walk out of here. I know that you’d have about, ah, maybe a day to get out of the country before an agent from the New York gang has you assassinated. Maybe less, given that I’d assume there’s regular check-ins and they work pretty fast over there. If you like those odds, you’re more than welcome to leave. Otherwise, I can accommodate you. I’m pretty flexible, you know.”

The man didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure he could. Briefly, it crossed my mind that maybe he tore his vocal cords apart from coughing so hard for so long but I didn’t know enough about anatomy to know if that was possible, and I decided that I didn’t actually want to know.

“I’m going to take silence as a vote for life,” Ava said. “No sense wasting a perfectly good body. You can get past this, you know. I believe in you.”

I looked at Ava again, and she was still smiling.

And still, the man did not speak.

“Okay,” Ava said. “I respect that. There’s always a chance, no matter how small. Chase the light, dude. You can make it.”

She gave him a thumbs-up. “A word of advice, though—maybe next time think twice about enlisting in an unwinnable war, okay?”

And then Ava gestured to me. “C’mon, Erika, let’s go get pizza.”

I wasn’t hungry.

0 0 0

We walked back to the motel without much of a plan. It was still daytime, although a little later now. The sun was about halfway down to the horizon, so maybe it was about three or four o’clock.

“How was that?” Ava asked me, arms crossed behind her back. She didn’t even look winded.

“That was terrifying,” I said to her. To the sidewalk, mostly.

“That’s what you’ve gotta do to get info out of these people,” she said. “They’re well-trained. You gotta pull out all the stops.”

I was counting the cracks in the sidewalk and trying not to step on them. Every clack of my shoes against the cement was close enough to a cough to remind me.

“Chin up,” she said, after a few more moment’s silence. “We got good info out of that.”

“I guess,” I mumbled.

“You’ve killed so many people,” Ava said. “It’s just the deal, you know? It’s what we do.”

“I kill people fast,” I said.

“I’ve seen you dry people out like they’re fuckin’ jerky. Don’t tell me you kill people fast.”

I swallowed. “That’s only for special occasions.”

“Was this not a “special occasion?”” she replied, with air quotes.

I did not respond. She went on: “And I didn’t kill anyone. These people know what they signed up for, you know?”

I turned to her. Stopped walking. “Did we sign up for that?” I asked her.

I asked her because I truly did not know. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to imagine there was someone in this universe powerful enough to do that to me.

And above all else, I did not want to find out.

Despite everything I’ve done I still saw him there, sprawled out on the concrete, moist blobs of mucus shining like warning lights in my memory, tensed tight and extended and wheezing, every breath a war in itself.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to find out.

Ava regarded me again. “It’s war, Erika. Forget it.”