So, as discussed, it fell to me to explain the situation to Benji and Loybol. Our meeting place was just a park bench in the town’s central green area, and even from a distance I could feel the concern across them as I approached, alone.

The two sat on opposite sides of a park bench, and to avoid suspicion they told me to sit between them. They could pass for my parents, they figured, so they were going to lean on that since this was a public place.

So I sat there and instinctively made myself small.

Loybol spoke first. “Where’s Yoru?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “We have a prisoner.”

Benji’s face loosened considerably. “Oh, good. That’s great, actually. How did you guys get one of these people to surrender?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. Not looking at either of them—speaking mainly to my own feet. “We came into the room he was in and he was kneeling on his desk with his hands up, and he surrendered.”

“So Yoru’s alone with him?”

“Yeah.”

I was going to say more—I had it all planned—but the words got trapped in my throat and died. I couldn’t scrape them up.

Loybol nodded. “Good work, Erika.”

“I didn’t really do anything,” I said, quietly.

I wasn’t really there. I was with Pete, still, and I was still standing over his shoulder, trying to read his letter.

Loybol looked down at me and said, “You did good. You weren’t supposed to do anything.”

“He wants us to kill him,” I blurted. “He told me. I said we could bring him up through Canada and he could get away from all of this and he told me he didn’t want that.”

That gave Loybol a bit of pause. “He wants to die?”

I nodded. I’d said too much already, even though I’d said the bare minimum to get my point across.

“But he also wants to be a prisoner,” she went on. “That’s odd. It’s—not much of a conventional surrender, anyway. What else did he say?”

I was thinking about the letter again. I wanted him to read it to me, even though that was a gross violation of his privacy. I wanted to know what was in it—what was so important to tell them that he’d spend his last moments composing it. It was probably just words of encouragement to his family, saying he loved them, and so on. Things like that. It was nothing that would mean anything to me. Nothing that would be about me in any way—but I wanted to hear it all the same.

Just to know, and nothing more.

“Erika?” Loybol asked again.

I snapped to attention. “Um—he seemed really sad. He was writing a letter to his family that we’re supposed to deliver, um, to them after we kill him.”

Loybol nodded, slowly. “We can do that. Anything else?”

“They tell the soldiers things about us,” I said. “Stuff designed to make them hate us, except apparently it’s just all true things we’ve actually done. Everyone I’ve talked to that’s mentioned it always has something to say about how it all turned out to be true.”

I trailed off a bit towards the end. I had more to say, I think, but I forgot.

Loybol did not react to that, but Benji covered for her. “Yeah, that’s pretty standard practice. Prochazka and I had to put up with that shit all the time back in the day.”

“But those were lies,” I said.

“Did he say what they told him?”

I droned off what I remembered. “None of us have families, so they shouldn’t feel bad about shooting to kill. Our strongest soldier is a fourteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know any better. Bell exists.”

That last one wasn’t technically something he said, but it would’ve been if Bell was there. The lines about Bell wrote themselves. I wasn’t sure there was a single true thing you could say about Bell that wasn’t a stone’s throw from being a psychopath bent on world domination.

Benji shrugged. “Well, those are all true. Except Bell existing, jury’s out on that. Also, I had an older sister who I kept in contact with until she died a few years back, so that’s at least a lie for me. I don’t think anyone else in Unit 6 has any relatives, right?”

“I have a dad,” I said, quietly.

“Do you, really?” Benji replied, and I couldn’t really argue with that. It was the closest thing to an understanding we’d ever had and I wasn’t about to ruin it with extra words.

Loybol wasn’t paying attention to us. She was still stuck in the idea of this guy being a double-agent martyr. When she stood up, I thought she was going to share the results of her pondering, but she didn’t. All she said instead was, “Let’s go. We shouldn’t leave Yoru alone for too long.”

“Pete’s got nothing,” I said, barely above a whisper

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not dangerous,” she said. “There are ways you can be dangerous without magic or a gun.”

So we set off back toward the hole—Benji, Loybol, and somewhere down there, me.

0 0 0

Loybol took point with the plan, and Benji filled in bits here and there. We were going to take the guy out of the hole to an open place where Yoru and I could keep track of the air to see if anyone was coming up near us while Loybol and Benji received the info.

And then, well, we were going to play it by ear. I asked Loybol, point-blank, if she was going to kill him like he wanted, and she didn’t answer me. Benji took the question instead, and he said the plan was to wait and see.

I wasn’t sure when exactly they’d had this conversation. Was I so deep in thought at one point that they’d talked around me and I hadn’t noticed? Or were they just whispering to each other as they walked in front for the first half of the trip back?

I suppose that I wasn’t really there, so it didn’t matter much.

We went back into that basement and found Yoru munching some chips while he talked to—or at, more accurately—Pete about something or other. A TV show they’d both seen, apparently.

Pete, to his credit, looked like he was listening. I sent some droplets over to his desk and found the sheet of paper with the tiny indents still there, the ink dried now, and before I could stop myself, I instinctively tried to read just one word—just a fragment to show that I could—but it was too far and the angle was off, so I got the page a bit wet over that word accidentally.

Pete looked over at me, folded the page in half, and put it underneath a book so I couldn’t feel it.

“You two must be Benji and Loybol,” Pete said, as they walked in. “I didn’t really think so many of you would be in the area.” He’d warmed up since we’d captured him. Yoru had softened him, somehow, maybe with just a lot of aggressive small-talk. That made me feel a lot better about the way we’d—I’d, really—planned this out. Leaving Yoru here was the right call by far.

So I took that to heart as a job well done.

“We meet up and switch off partners,” Benji said. “As I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. He almost had a semblance of a smile—like he knew this was the right thing to do—but then he looked at Loybol, and it evaporated.

“Let’s get out of here,” Loybol said. “We’re going to question you outside.”

Pete swallowed hard. More than just saliva, I was sure. Loybol was all business now. I’d seen this before, back when Bell and I met with her in the Utica outpost. When I’d met Loybol for the first time.

I knew it tended not to end well for anyone on the receiving end of her.

“Okay,” Pete said. And he was just as scared as he was when we came in. It all turned real, in that instant, and he knew that no matter what he said or did there was no turning back. Again he was marked for death. The future was a foregone conclusion.

There was no force in his arms as he stood up and drifted between us—in front of me and Yoru but behind Loybol and Benji. He moved like a limp kite. Did he know this day was coming? Did he know, when he signed the employment contract with the New York gang God knew how long ago, that this was in his future? Could he see this day? No, obviously, he couldn’t—but I couldn’t imagine a world where he didn’t have some kind of premonition of this in his days to come. A day in which four unknowable beings escort him out of a cave into the afterlife, after draining him of all his knowledge. A memory-vacant husk to discard when we were done—a human dust-form with nothing to call its own, blown away in the early summer breeze.

This may have been the most important thing Pete had ever done.

0 0 0

The hole was a bunker outside a crumbling house on the outskirts of a town whose name I’ve since forgotten. It was only about a mile away from the park I’d met Loybol and Benji in, but it felt like it was halfway across the world. We sat cross-legged in a square around Pete—Yoru and I behind, with him facing his true captors.

It was a gorgeous day, the perfect temperature. The air was a little dry, but I did my best. I assumed Yoru had the scouting covered, since my whole droplet-bouncing echolocation thing is essentially just a pale, bootleg imitation of what air-keys do normally. I could only imagine that the sky was blue and the grass was green and nothing had ever gone wrong, anywhere, in the whole wide world.

Everything was exactly as at should be. All things in their rightful places.

So I leaned back and turned my head to the warm place and pretended I was here alone.

Benji had a small object in his hand that wasn’t quite phone-shaped but I assumed was some kind of device to record Pete’s obituary with. Loybol gestured to him and he pressed something on it.

“State your name for the recording,” Loybol said.

“My name is Pete,” he said. “I’m choosing not to share my last name. It’s on the letter in the bunker if you need it later. But I don’t want it to be a part of this recording.”

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“Because if you guys lose, and this recording falls into my employer’s hands, they could use it as evidence to track my family down. There’s a lot of guys who sound like me. In fact, I’m trying to speak with a slightly different voice than normal right now to hide it. It’s not a foolproof safety measure but it’s all I can do.”

“Is Pete your real first name?”

“No,” he said. “My real name is on the letter in the bunker. I won’t say it in this recording.”

This all seemed rehearsed. Maybe he hasn’t been listening to Yoru at all, and he’d just spent that time dreaming up how he was going to spill the beans in the safest possible way.

Loybol considered that response for a moment and found it satisfactory. “Okay. That’s fine. Who is your immediate superior?”

“His name is Sal. All the managers, all the people above our rank, have a designation they’re supposed to use to hide their identities from you guys and us, but Sal thought that was stupid, and he hated his designation, so he had us use his real name. His designation was Pine, I think. All the people who manage individual holes have trees or flowers as their designation.”

“How many other hole managers do you know?”

“None. We’re not supposed to know who they are.”

“Where is Sal?”

“He never visits. He manages completely remotely. All the managers control four holes each, anyway, so he wouldn’t have time. All I really know is that he orders a specific pizza so often that his local place put it on the menu and named it after him. You can probably use that to track him down. Sal should’ve told them not to do it, but he’s not the brightest. I know for a fact his managers don’t like him because of that, but you can’t exactly interview replacements in this kind of work without getting a telepath to mind-wipe the previous person or having them killed, and HQ doesn’t like killing people that don’t need to die.”

“Really.”

“Yes. We’re not supposed to be in the line of fire. The fact that your main plan involves blowing up all our local magical-tracking stations has got people scrambling. Not because it’s actually useful in terms of you getting any relevant information, but because it’s stopping the arms of our organization that are still trying to do their normal jobs. You know, policing petty magical crime. They can’t do their jobs. Sal described it as having your mail delivered to a neighbor’s house across town and then driving to go get it. Sure, the government doesn’t know where you live, but who actually cares?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Neither do I. Sal is a weird, suspicious guy. He didn’t trust anything or anyone.”

“Okay. And I’m assuming Sal knows more about the real hierarchy of your organization than you do?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, that’s a better lead than we’ve ever had. So...thank you for that.”

Loybol pursed her lips, then gestured to Benji to shut off the recording.

“You’re off the record now,” she said. “I have a personal question for you. I’m fairly certain you’re not wearing a psychic wire, so I just want to ask you this personally.”

“Okay,” Pete said.

“Why?” Loybol asked. “Why surrender?”

Pete frowned. “Can I speak freely?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how many people you’ve killed in this operation so far?”

Loybol grimaced for a moment. “I don’t know the exact number off-hand, no.”

“I do,” Pete said. “It’s a hundred and thirty-seven. Assuming that’s split fairly evenly between the eight of you in the field, that’s…about seventeen a head. Which means you people have forced a literal child to murder seventeen people.”

I didn’t feel particularly forced, but I figured that wasn’t a relevant point of distinction.

“What’s your point?” Benji interjected.

“How many of those people, do you think, actually knew anything about anyone worth a damn?”

Neither Loybol nor Benji could come up with a response for that before Pete finished. “One. Me. That number I gave includes me, by the way. Which, to add on, means you’ve forced a literal child to murder seventeen people for no reason.”

I did wonder, however, what would happen to me if I refused. If, just once, I said I wasn’t going to do it. Just to see what would happen.

Would Loybol still trust me?

“So this is a last-ditch emotional appeal to try and get us to back off,” Loybol said, flatly. “Understood.”

“No, that’s not it. Would I have helped you if that was the case?”

“That stuff about Sal could’ve been a lie.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you. Killing me after this is a mercy, which I’m sure you’ve—you’ve already figured out. I can’t risk the chance you’ll leave me alone here to be collected. They tell us, in training, about a place called the sin vault. It’s a throwaway line in the main training manual with a punchy name designed to make us wonder. My brother works in marketing, so I’m familiar with the concept. They don’t tell us what it is, but they do tell us when someone’s been sent there. And—and when they’ve come back. So I don’t know what it is, specifically, but I know it’s some kind of emotional torture pit. Did you know that HQ has an extensive research and development arm?”

Loybol pursed her lips. “Do they.”

I suppose I just chose not to think about those things. I had more important matters to attend to. Those concerns got locked away; I couldn’t devote thought-space to them. I couldn’t before the war, and I thought I’d have time now, but I didn’t.

“I’m sure you do, too,” Pete said.

“I may or may not have one.”

“Here’s the deal,” Pete said, and he looked down from Loybol. He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. “I’m helping you because I think you’re the lesser of two evils, and you’ve literally forced a child to murder seventeen people. I don’t know what happens in the sin vault, and I don’t know exactly what the R&D group does at HQ, but I know that the two things are related. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, here, but—if I have to make an emotional appeal—I want to say to you, directly, to stop going after the people in the holes. They don’t know anything. They’re just trying to do their jobs, and their jobs aren’t even dangerous or evil. They’re doing good work. Please just—do whatever you have to do to make Sal talk.” Pete squeezed his eyes shut. “And then follow the ladder up. There are real, evil people in this place, but the people in holes aren’t them. They’re innocent.”

And, after a single exhalation, Pete finished: “And please—give that letter to my family, when you see them. They deserve to know. The contents of the letter aren’t anything grand. It’s essentially what I just told you. I want them to know that I tried to help. I did my best, but—it turned out that I just didn’t really understand the problem. I jumped into this and I didn’t know who the players were. I took this job and I didn’t understand the scope or the scale. And this, this is the best I can do now. This is helping, it’s got to be.”

And Pete sighed. “Okay. Okay. I’m—I’m ready.”

He opened his eyes, looked at Loybol, and then squeezed them shut again. “Please make it fast. Don’t do a countdown. Just do it.”

Loybol looked over at him, then reached with an open palm to the ground. From among the grass, with a barely audible hiss, rose a cloud of fine dust.

She stood, walked over to him slowly. One step in front of the other. On her other hand was something running across her fingertips; something lumpy that I assumed was a bit of extra dirt. She was going to shove this dust through Pete’s head and disintegrate his flesh, as I’d heard she could do. It was instant death, and too fast for anyone to notice anything had happened. The extra dirt was for good measure, I figured.

Loybol stood over the kneeling Pete, his eyes closed. Tears glimmering in the corner of his eyes.

I took a single breath—

And Loybol dropped her other hand on his head, and Pete’s scream was cut off by a choked gargling drool, and all at once I knew what was happening.

I stood and tried to say something but the words died in my throat—

The umbroids drained from her fingertips, running into his ears, and inside there they cut through the soft flesh to his brain and I didn’t want to know what happened after that.

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t.

I sat back down and turned around and put my fingers in my ears and pretended I wasn’t here. I was somewhere else, somewhere with a blue sky and green grass where this never happened.

Pete’s scream was short, but his low gurgle went on for longer. No amount of pressure in my ears could block it. Yoru just watched, empty-faced. No expression at all.

He’d never seen this before, but I had. I knew what it was.

And I wanted to ask her why—why couldn’t we have just killed him—but I couldn’t.

I wanted to ask Loybol why we kept killing these meaningless pawns, but I couldn’t.

I wanted to ask Loybol what her plan was, what the grand overarching plan for all of this was, but I couldn’t.

The machinations of my superiors were beyond my understanding. I couldn’t waste time thinking about it. It was simply too much to bear alongside everything else. I took up too much of my own space to house someone else in my head, too.

So I took this thing and I locked it away with everything else.

I wanted to ask why I couldn’t take it for what it was, but I couldn’t.