Loybol gave us the briefing. We were to do whatever during the day—whatever we wanted as long as we stayed in public places—and at night there was a spot in the woods we were to go, where there supposedly was a secret underground bunker that held an operative or two. And we were just supposed to kill them, I guessed, and then meet at a library a town over to swap off with the next group.

And until then, I wasn’t supposed to speak unless spoken to.

Unfortunately for me, I was spoken to a lot.

We weren’t supposed to hit the base until that night, so in the meantime we had plenty of time to catch a bus to a neighboring town where there was a bit more to do. Browse stores or read in the library or whatever.

I wanted to do the latter—or at least try—while Eliza was more interested in the former.

“C’mon, that’s no fun,” she’d said, when I answered her question about what we should do in as few words as I could.

I didn’t respond.

“Hey, we get to have a good time today. This is basically day off, right?”

I gave her a terse nod.

Now that we were next to each other, I had an easier time figuring out what she looked like. Aside from what I’d gotten before, I found that she was a couple inches taller than me, and a bit taller than Loybol, but shorter than Ava. Judging from the sound of her voice I figured she was around twenty or so, but there was a hard edge to it that felt like she’d been a heavy smoker for a few years already.

She seemed like she was in good enough shape. More or less everything she was wearing was form-fitting, which made this whole endeavor a lot more embarrassing. Loybol liked just wearing things that were comfortable, or suits if it was official business; Eliza cared more about general-purpose fashion, I figured.

Looking over all those details and trying to figure out what they could mean made it much easier to ignore all her questions and side-statements.

So I had her outline memorized, and the curves in her face, the size of her head, her height, her build, all of that stored—but standing alongside the other people I knew, she stuck out. Eliza was the first person I’d met since I went blind. For everyone else, I had a memory—however hazy and overwritten they were now—of what they looked like. All the other people had color, but Eliza didn’t. She was a standing shadow, and even with everything I’d found, when I compared it to everything else, I felt like I had nothing at all.

She was just as invisible now as she was when she was an egg-shaped empty cloud on the deck.

What I did find, though, was that Eliza wasn’t wearing a key necklace. I assumed it could’ve been in her pocket or something, since a lot of people don’t like wearing them, and I was going to send some droplets into her pockets when I remembered how she’d blocked me out before and that was enough to stop me.

Instead, I decided to just feel the contours of the pockets instead, and see if there were any loosely key-shaped lumps in there—but as soon as I got close, the droplets got snuffed out again.

I pursed my lips and tried not to think about it too hard.

Eliza, however, stopped walking. “If you want to know something, ask questions,” she said.

I wasn’t supposed to talk to her. That was a direct order.

So I stuffed all my needs down and I forced myself not to think about it. I counted the mailboxes outside the houses of suburban street we were walking down instead—a tick for every mailbox, a tick for every tree, a tick for every dog running around, for every forgotten toy.

Eliza watched me for a while, silently. I must have looked deep in thought—mostly because I was—since Eliza finally stopped bothering me.

Once we got to the street corner, though, and I’d counted fifteen mailboxes, ten trees, two dogs, and one bike slumped over in front of a garage, she broke through again.

“Loybol told you not to talk to me, didn’t she,” Eliza said.

I bit my upper lip and didn’t say anything.

“For fucks’ sake,” Eliza said, with an accompanying eye-roll. “That was what she got up for? I knew it had to be something like that.”

She ran her fingers over her scalp and looked both ways for oncoming traffic. “Listen. I don’t know what Loybol’s deal is—okay, I do know, but it’s not important if you and I both acknowledge it. She thinks I’m dangerous, you think I’m dangerous, whatever. I think you’re dangerous, too. We’re all in the same boat here, Erika, we’re all ridiculously fucking dangerous. The word doesn’t mean anything.”

She was obviously waiting for a reply, but I didn’t give her one. Even when I thought she’d try again, she didn’t. So to make a point, I said in a monotone: “Loybol told me not to talk to you.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard. You just did.”

“That’s different.”

“And you’re doing it now.”

I shut up. Blood surged through my cheeks.

Eliza shook her head again, and that action alone was enough to make me flush even harder, purse my lips even tighter, stick my fingertips in my pockets and try to forget she was there.

But then she kept talking and that made it all so much harder.

“How are you such a fucking goody two-shoes? I’ve read your file. It literally doesn’t make any sense. Like—look, you’ve been in this business for…what, two and a half years? Almost three?”

“It’s not a business,” I said.

“Are you getting paid?” she asked me.

I nodded, once. A singular hard motion.

“Do you provide a service?”

Rinse and repeat.

“Then it’s a business, Erika, that’s all there is to it. What I’m wondering is—you’ve got a body count on par with mine, and that’s a pretty serious body count. It’s in your file, Loybol’s been keeping track. And—and you’re out here doing that without batting an eye but Loybol tells you not to talk to your own damn teammate and you take that like the word of God? What kind of wacko fucking hierarchy do your priorities take?”

“What do you want from me?” I asked her. In my head, I sounded a lot more angry—but it came out of my mouth in the same dry monotone as when I told her I wasn’t supposed to be talking.

“An explanation,” she said, “but I don’t think I’m going to get that in a general sense, so all I really want to know is why you’re so dead-set on following an arbitrary nonsense order like that. One that is, mind you, clearly set up to get you to not trust me, which is absolutely one-hundred-fucking-percent gonna bite us in the ass if we let it.”

Eliza reminded me of all of my least favorite parts of Ava rolled up into one. Luckily, I had developed a relatively thick skin toward that kind of thing, for better or worse, and people like her could pound all day on my hollow skull and I wouldn’t bat an eye.

“Because Loybol told me to,” I said, spelling it out like she was a child, “and I trust her.”

Eliza rolled her eyes. “You realize we’ve got to communicate to have a team, right?”

“This must be why she didn’t want us together,” I said.

“No, this”—Eliza gestured vaguely between the two of us, presumably referring to this conversation—"isn’t it.” She was looking around for something, but I only devoted brainpower to noticing the action—as soon as it was registered, I let it go. “I know what the damn reason is.”

Something struck her and her whole tone changed. “Okay, listen. Actually listen. This shit’s important. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, flatly.

“I’m gonna tell you two things about Loybol,” Eliza said, holding two fingers up to me. “And you can take this shit to the bank because I can guarantee you I know Loybol way better than you do. These are literally the only two things you need to know about that woman, and knowing them will get you further into her brain than anything else. You ready?”

“Ready,” I replied. Eyes straight ahead.

“The first thing is that—”

“You know what?” I said.

Eliza blinked.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Loybol told me not to talk to you.”

“God,” she replied. “I need a fucking beer.”

She abruptly swerved left into a storefront I hadn’t even noticed we were walking past. It was some kind of convenience store, apparently, so I just waited patiently outside and enjoyed the silence while she did whatever she was planning to do.

About three minutes went by, and I just sat down against the brown brick wall of the building, aside and under a window so I was out of the clerks’ eyeshot, and I felt the cars go by, shoving the damp air out of the way like billowing curtains as they whipped past. I tried not to think about Eliza. I tried to think about tomorrow, instead—when I could pass her off to someone else and go back to being with people who knew me beyond a file with my name on it.

I wanted to make her stop prodding me, but I couldn’t shake the idea that Eliza had to be Loybol’s main enforcer for a reason. I wasn’t entirely sure what her key was, but it had to be a pretty powerful water or fire key, or maybe an air key, although I wasn’t sure if what she was doing to the droplets fell under that purview.

Every action had a consequence, I knew, and I wasn’t about to take a step I couldn’t at least make an attempt at predicting. The last while had given me more than enough warning to tread carefully.

And suddenly—just like that—Loybol’s advice seemed all the more sagely.

Part of me wasn’t expecting her to come outside with an actual bottle of beer in hand, but she did—with two, actually.

She must have taken some deep breaths or something, because she wasn’t as tense.

“You want one?” she asked me, holding one out.

I glanced up at her—just for emphasis—and out at the street again. “What time is it?” I asked.

Eliza’s eyes narrowed. “You—oh, right. It’s…like, three? Mid-afternoon sometime.”

I was sitting with my knees up and my arms clasped around my elbows. “I’m all set.”

“I read your file, Erika. Don’t act like you’re above this.”

Eliza looked down at me and I did not respond. I was done responding.

Then Eliza walked around to the other side of me—so she was further from the entrance—and she sat down, in more or less the same way I was. She put one of the beer bottles directly in front of my shoes, and with that now-free hand, reached toward the concrete sidewalk. Her hand clenched just a touch, and a chunk of the rock broke free and leapt up into her hand, which she used to pry open the bottle cap.

I blinked. “What?”

Eliza took a long drink, one that would’ve put even Benji to shame. “We got off to a bad start,” she said, slowly. “I took this the wrong way. Let’s try this again, okay?”

I faced the beer bottle and felt the cold condensation beading up around the outside—a cool bright spire emerging from the lifeless ground.

I was thirsty, I guess.

I took the bottle in my hand, collected all the condensed water into a thin ring around the top, lodged that ring under the cap and froze it to pop it open.

Then I also took a swig.

Eliza spoke. “My name is Eliza. I’m twenty-one years old, and I don’t have a key.”

I swallowed, regarded her again, and answered her with a plain, “What?”

“No key,” she repeated. “And I’m not getting one. I’ve done things that would make your head spin and you’ve done things that I could only dream of. As much as I love getting into power Olympics with people, that’s not a productive use of our time. I’ve read your file a lot. I used to read it for fun, like a novel, because some of the shit in there was just so wild. The stuff you were getting up to at your age, it blew my mind. Like—if I had magic when I was your age, I wouldn’t even have dreamed of this stuff. I thought you had to be this absolute stone-cold badass. Seriously—I was excited for this. I was hoping I’d get assigned to you since the war broke out, because I’d finally get to meet you. I bet you must’ve felt the same way about being on missions with Loybol.”

I’d done a few, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little star-struck whenever she perfectly analyzed a situation, knew exactly where to go, what to cover, who to capture and try to squeeze information out of. If her schemes and her quiet, steel-lock command of everyone’s attention didn’t dazzle me. I’d be lying if I hadn’t wondered what life would be like with access to the umbroids, whatever they were. She wasn’t quite on a pedestal as high as Bell was, but it was close, and her proximity to me meant that that pedestal was rising all the time.

Loybol trusted Eliza. She must have, or she wouldn’t have brought her along. Surely, somewhere in me, I could find a little scrap of trust to throw her, too.

Eliza went on, after another long drink. She was more than halfway through her bottle already. “I thought we were really gonna hit it off, but—I guess not. And that’s okay. We’re not required to get along. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed, but you know, people are more than words in a file. There’s some aspects no amount of logging can cover.”

That was, by far, the nicest way I’ve ever been put down.

I said to her, “I didn’t know you existed until Loybol told me I was about to be on a mission with you and that we weren’t supposed to talk.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t exactly sing my praises, but whatever. I don’t need the affirmation much. I know when I’ve done good.”

She sat up a little, bracing herself with her palms flat on the concrete. “We’re probably not gonna have to do anything today. I’m pretty sure this is gonna be a bust. But, you know, I’m glad we got this cleared up. And I’m sorry I came on so strong. It was a bit of a disillusioning for me.”

“It’s okay,” I said, in the same way I always said it.

Eliza picked up her beer again, tipped her head back, and downed the rest. “Let’s get going, shall we? I’m gonna show you a couple things.”

I wanted to ask her what she was going to say when I cut her off earlier. About Loybol. But at the last second, I decided that was a level of weakness—of vulnerability—that I wasn’t about to show in front of someone as powerful as I knew Eliza had to be in order for her existence to make sense, and so I let the question die in the back of my throat unsaid.

0 0 0

Eliza spoke to me as a transformed woman. The person who walked into the liquor store was not the one who walked out. It wasn’t a virtue of the drink—I had the same thing she did, and it didn’t do anything to me—but the act of switching that got me. Moving through the doorway shifted her completely from one person to another, like someone swaps a hat.

I knew what it meant to not have a key. It’s one of my many personal nightmares. There wasn’t a whole lot I was thankful not to be, but a keyless magical person was one of them. Everyone with magic, at some point, was told stories about the unfortunate few who never ended up getting a stabilizer. They weren’t limited to a certain kind of magic, but they had an average life-span of about twenty-four years. Without a key to lock the power inside them, they were uncommonly fragile. Twenty-four wasn’t a hard line, but it was the average that people went before they fell down some stairs or tripped over a curb, smacked their shoulder too hard on the concrete, and all the magic spewed out at once.

I was told it was a horrible way to die. Bell had seen one or two of them, and Benji occasionally mentioned them, but they were definitely a small minority of magical people. If I had to guess, I’d say the number was around the same as the number of flesh-manipulators or telepaths—somewhere on the order of five percent or less. Which wasn’t all that many, sure, but it made the nature of it so much worse. People with magic and no key watched their lives tick away, second by second.

I wasn’t really sure what was worse, to be honest: knowing about your own fragility as a keyless magical, or not.

It all made sense. She vaporized my droplets and used a rock to open the beer. Not only did she not get a key, but she had wholly rejected ever getting one. As soon as you use a second kind of magic, you forfeit your right to a key. The system passes you by. You are alone with what you chose until you expire.

I had always assumed that no one would do such a thing—but I was wrong.

We continued down the street and Eliza spoke to me differently. “As I said—I don’t have a key,” she said, opening someone’s residential recycle bin and dropping the empty beer bottle in there as we walked past. “And as you saw, I’m never getting one. And that’s okay.”

“And you chose to be here,” I said, in a hollow whisper. All the parts were slotting together at once.

“Yes,” she said to me. “I did.”

All of it crashed over my head simultaneously—not only what Loybol had warned me about her, but the reasons why Loybol said what she said—and not even only that, but as I unconsciously went back through every interaction I’d ever had with Loybol I realized that ever last word she’d ever said to me—every single phrase—was colored by Eliza standing over her shoulder.

It all came clear.