I gave up on being silent, and chose to start drafting my apology instead. I didn’t think people like Eliza existed and I wasn’t about to let her walk away without finding out exactly what it was that made her tick.

As soon as I figured it out, she shifted from someone on Ava’s level—someone I had to be cordial with but never friendly—to someone closer to Bell or Loybol herself; an unearthly oddity that, via their existence, showed something higher than the dregs I was condemned to be.

Without a single word on the subject spoken between us I was dumbstruck by the sheer mental fortitude it took to fight on the front lines of a war that would almost certainly kill her.

I’m sorry, I remember thinking, as though Esther was already in my head and would relay my words in real-time to Loybol. I tried, I did my best.

“I’ve collected all of the normal ones,” Eliza told me. “The elements and nature. The three humanities—mind, flesh, and machine—still elude me, but that’s not for lack of trying, believe me.”

“Couldn’t Esther teach you telepathy?” I asked her.

“Loybol won’t let her.”

“Maybe—maybe Cygnus could teach you metallurgy,” I said. “Have you two been on a mission together yet?”

“Nope.”

“And Bell—”

“We’ve been together,” she said. “But the first words out of Bell’s mouth were—and I quote—“Never, under any circumstances, will I ever teach you flesh magic. You could torture me for a thousand years and you will never get it. You could reanimate my corpse as a head in a jar and the answer will still be no, every time you ask, until both of us are dust. Don’t even try.””

Eliza shrugged. “And, well, it’s Bell, so I knew she meant it. She doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.”

I nodded. Those were sage words.

I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but I asked it anyway, just to be safe: “Why won’t anyone teach you those other three?”

“You don’t give guns to someone with nothing to lose,” she replied. “Also, Loybol is remarkably good at cutting down everyone I’m close to convincing. The only reason she let me go on a mission with you is that I’m already reasonably adept with water-magic and she figured if she told you not to talk to me you wouldn’t do it.”

I felt myself turn red. “I tried.”

“You did.”

After a moment, I said, “These teams aren’t really random at all, are they.”

“Did Loybol tell you that?”

“Everyone’s told me that,” I said.

“That was a lie.”

“Loybol wouldn’t lie to me.”

Eliza sighed. “Erika, here’s an important tidbit for you. It’ll serve you well to keep this in mind. Okay?”

“What?”

My patience was rapidly depleting.

“Don’t let Loybol trick you into thinking she’s a good person. She’s very good at that, but if you’re aware of it you can see it as it happens. Nobody gets to where Loybol’s gotten without doing a few things that would cost normal people a lot of sleep. She’s on the same one-way train to hell with the rest of us. So, yes. Loybol tells lies. She tells a lot of lies.”

“And you don’t?” I asked her. It was a snippier reply than I think I intended, but there’s too much time between now and then to say for sure. My intentions with a lot of these matters are gone. Not even Esther could dig them out of me again.

“Well, you can look at it two ways,” she said, turning toward the left again. There was a gap in the buildings, an alley of sorts that fed back into the forest behind the row. “It’s either that I won’t live long enough for the lies to matter, or I won’t live long enough for telling the truth to bite me.”

I tried not to look too annoyed. People tended to take opportunities to grandstand about this stuff in front of me, thinking I’d be blown away by the wordplay and miss the point. Younger me may have been, but with the way things were now I was much better at cutting through to the point, even if that “cutting through” was essentially just always assuming malicious intentions, regardless of the actual content of the message. I’d been taken advantage of enough times to recognize when it was about to happen.

So when I said, “Which is it?”, I wasn’t nearly as star-struck as I would have been had Loybol or Bell said that. They’d earned my respect. All I’d done so far was convince myself that Eliza would, someday.

In fact, with how flatly the words slipped between my lips, and how I didn’t even bother to turn my attention to her, I may have touched on something better.

Eliza, to her credit, ignored me. She was committed now, whether I looked like I cared or not.

The problem, however, was that I did care. This was a part of who she was, whether she knew how much it meant to me or not. By giving an answer, any answer, she was telling me something I would otherwise never know.

Time has obfuscated my intentions. I was between two selves, then, and I can’t say for sure which one I was leaning toward. It’s gone now, like so many other things from then, and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.

Eliza turned back to me and said, “Which do you want it to be?

0 0 0

I think I knew then that we weren’t going to find anything. Eliza’s earlier suspicion was going to be right and I was okay with that. This raid was going to be a bust just like all the other ones. It’s hard to explain exactly why I felt that way—but maybe it was that Eliza, like Ava, just seemed to want to show off in front of me. That was how I read it, anyway. The grand sweeping statements, the random flexing of her opt-in curse, the hard personality pivot as soon as I wasn’t receptive to the first one. She wanted my attention, and the absolute top-notch lynchpin of that plan was walking into a hole and killing all five people in there simultaneously—one by fire, one by an icicle (in my style, if we’re leaning into this), one by a concrete spike to the skull, one by the classical bamboo torture, one choked out without ever laying a hand on their neck.

All five at once. Turn and smile at me. Lay on another line—and boom, you’re in my heart and mind, lodged among my other idols she’d read about. Bell and Loybol were like this, weren’t they? This is the sort of thing I respected. This is the sort of thing I worshipped—and therefore, this was the way into my good graces.

I couldn’t begin to say what Eliza would do once she was there, but with the way I was now I could see the traces of these things seep into someone’s hands and words before they came to fruition. It was a pattern I could match across my history. First it was Bell, then Loybol, and now Eliza.

And if I truly believed in a cold, uncaring universe—Eliza would build all this up for the big payoff and get shafted by an empty trapdoor-covered hole in the woods behind a convenience store. It was the poetic end to all of her posturing, and I wanted it more than anything. She’d pre-empted it by mentioning it as a possibility, but I knew that it being true would crush her and that was more than enough to make me buy into the fantasy.

As we trudged around in the woods looking for something out of place, Eliza asked me, “You haven’t actually met Esther yet at all, have you? Loybol and I are the only two people you’ve seen from Hinterland, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Actually—no, I met Esther once. She came by to check our forces a few years ago. Bell made a big to-do out of it to try and scare you guys. It was a bunch of grandstanding nonsense.”

And before I could properly stop myself, my frustration boiled over. “Kind of like you’re doing.”

“I love grandstanding nonsense,” Eliza said, chipper. “It’s my favorite. I do this with everyone, Erika. Don’t take it personally.”

“You don’t get to decide what I do and don’t take personally,” I said to her, flatly. “You’re not me.”

Cygnus taught me that one. We’d talked about it earlier, when I killed that woman who was calling us names behind the K-mart. We might’ve been able to weasel something out of her with a little more time, but she said a couple magic words and that was that. I’d apologized to him, as I do with so many other things, and he’d told me that he wasn’t one to judge what I did and didn’t take personally. He would’ve done the same, he said. It was only right. Only just.

Eliza crossed her arms and looked out into the woods. “You love this stuff, too. I’ve read your file, Erika.”

“And you’ve known me for three hours.”

“I get that, but this is the kind of thing that’s easy to figure out from a log of the things you’ve done. One of your favorite ways to take out someone in front of their friends is to dehydrate them into a husk, right? You do that one all the time. Which is kind of awesome, by the way, I’d be super interested in learning—”

“No.”

“—whatever, worth a shot. Either way, you can’t look me in the eye and tell me that’s not a grand statement just for the sake of it. It wouldn’t have mattered if you just shot them through the heart with an icicle or what have you, but you took the time to literally suck the life out of their mouths in front of their friends. For what? To prove a point?”

“I guess.”

“What was the point, then? Explain it to me.”

Up to now I’d been only passively listening to Eliza’s rambling, offering a word or two where I had to in order to seem engaged, but as soon as she dropped that in my lap, I was alone on stage again and I had no idea what to say.

I watched the seconds trudge forward, dragging me behind them, and I searched for another word or two and couldn’t find one.

I realized I couldn’t even really remember what she asked me. All I knew was that I wasn’t allowed to answer it—this was the question that made Loybol warn me about Eliza, surely, and I had to keep the secret but I wasn’t even sure what secret it was. God knew I had so many already.

Maybe I’d already spoiled it and it didn’t matter. Maybe it was in my file, and Eliza had already read about it, and this was just a test to see where I’d draw the line.

A line across what? Dividing what from what?

I said, “I don’t know,” and I truly, truly meant it.

“And that’s exactly it, isn’t it?” Eliza went on. She wasn’t facing me—she was still just going through the woods a few steps ahead, at just an angle where it was awkward to read her facial features. I’d have to send the droplets around her and read them backward, and even the slightest changes from the normal made that more difficult.

But still I made an attempt to—and as soon as I did they were snuffed out again. Dropped into a black-slab abyss in front of the human figure just past the fallen log on the path we walked.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” the slab said. The shapelessness extended backward until the thing in front of me wasn’t even a human anymore—and as I frantically moved the droplets around the edges of the heat-zone trying to get a feel for the size of it I found it to be more complex than the blank egg it was back at the ice-cream stand. It was taller, longer, something four-legged—some kind beast without depth or color, something only I could perceive, shaped from burning air. A beast designed for me and me alone.

And from behind me, Eliza tapped my shoulder.

And I was afraid.

“It’s just so you feel powerful, isn’t it? It’s just because you can. It’s just because they can’t. There is no reason. The reason is that there isn’t a reason against it.”

And again it all came clear—

The only reason anyone would choose the life Eliza led—

“I think we are going to get along, actually,” she said, walking forward into the beast of burning air, where her body simply passed inside it like the illusion it was.

An illusion designed for me and only me.

“You just need a bit of convincing, that’s all.”

0 0 0

I got my wish. We found the trapdoor a few minutes later, brushed the leaf matter off it. Eliza sent some prospective vines down there to feel out the place and there wasn’t anybody there. We went down inside and turned on the light, a bare bulb on the ceiling that illuminated a single dusty room that nobody had been inside for weeks. Every scrap of useful paper had been taken with the rooms’ last patrons. There wasn’t a computer or a file or anything. Not even any cans of food.

It crossed my mind that they might’ve built this hole, put nothing in it, assigned nobody to it, and had an earth-key cover everything with a fine layer of dust just for laughs, to see if we’d fall for it.

I got my wish, I supposed, but Eliza had already made her point. I was wrong—she didn’t need this hole to prove it to me. Maybe she realized, sometime during out search in the woods, that she needed a contingency plan in case the hole was empty. Something else to scare me into believing.

My thoughts wandered so far as to wonder if Loybol put Eliza up to this, as a subtle threat to not mess with her or her people. Maybe she, like Benji, didn’t trust me with anything out of her eyeshot.

That wouldn’t make sense given what Eliza said about Loybol, but I considered it like it was a valid option, anyway.

The only words we spoke between the two of us for the rest of the day were as follows: I said to Eliza, “I’m not your enemy,” and Eliza responded, “I know.”

That was it. We did not speak again, but—God, I wish we did. I didn’t want to leave it like that. I needed her to say something else, anything else, so I could try and figure out what the hell this all meant, but she’d picked her shot and hit her mark perfectly, despite everything.

Somehow she was a step ahead of my own personal development, and I was certain that couldn’t have been in my file. Prochazka couldn’t have seen that coming, unless that was his plan all along, and suddenly I was lost down a path of hypotheticals I had to physically shake my head and realign myself to pull out of. Find something real and concrete to focus on and feel the shape of to take my mind off things.

The machinations of those above me weren’t important enough to lose sleep over.

I got my wish, but then I wished for something else.