There was no good place for Bell to hide and shape-shift into something less distinct, and she didn’t have any other spare outfits on her anyway, so she decided to just go into the pizza shop as herself for this first visit, and whatever happened there would happen. She didn’t seem worried about it, so I didn’t let myself pick up the slack.

We arrived at the restaurant and went inside. It could’ve been a pizza joint anywhere in the country, at any time—the same smooth, probably wood-graphic linoleum tables, in three booths along each wall and three tables down the middle of the floor. Above the counter was a big plate that had those old plastic letters that attached to grooves. Bell placed an order for a pizza at the counter—the Sal pizza, as marked on the board—and then we took our seats. I couldn’t help but notice the squeamish looks Bell got from the cashier while she was talking, but Bell either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

There was no AC in there, and it was a muggy enough day outside as it was. They’d left both the front door and the back one open in an attempt to create some kind of air circulation in there, but it wasn’t working—and the result of that was that I was nearly omniscient. All the floor fans did was push the humid air around, essentially coating everyone’s skin in a fine layer of moisture that I could track the contours of like a permanent marker’s outline.

So when the cashier shrunk back just a touch from Bell as she’d placed her order, I felt it. And when that teenager picked up a spare cloth afterward and wiped the sweat from her forehead—a bit more than there was supposed to be—it was as though he’d erased herself from a whiteboard; a haphazard voided swish-mark across her face.

We made an odd pair. There was no conceivable universe where Bell could pass as any relative of mine, and while she didn’t quite look old enough to be my mother, she was definitely too old to be a classmate. Friendships rarely straddled this kind of age gap. Even though I was fifteen now, the key was stunting my growth somewhat, so I looked even younger. I’d only gotten half an inch taller since I joined the Radiant.

Sophia wasn’t kidding when she said I wasn’t going to pass for an adult until I was almost forty. At the rate I was going, it was looking doubtful I ever would.

Just being next to Bell in public made me feel small, and seeing the reactions from regular people—how long had it been since I’d interacted with a “regular” person?—only made it worse. There was a family out for lunch in a booth across the restaurant from us and it didn’t take a telepath to see that the children were stealing glances with little quick head-twitches in our direction and the father was chastising them for staring—but only after sneaking a look himself.

I tried to comfort myself by thinking that they were staring at Bell, not at me, but it didn’t help.

I found myself doing what I always did when I felt small. “I’m sorry for snapping at you,” I said, low—even though the family across the restaurant wasn’t listening. Nobody was.

“I didn’t mean to,” I added.

Even though I did.

“It’s fine,” Bell said. “It’s been a while. I shouldn’t have pried. I’m mostly just glad you’re doing okay.”

“I’m doing alright,” I said, clasping my hands over the table just to do something with my fingers. “It’s really not that important.”

Even though it was.

It was a silly technicality, really. In the grand scheme of everything I’ve seen and done it meant nothing, but in the moment—from one day to the next—it ate at me. This was different than the days at the Radiant. It was not the same and it differed in a way that made me pause.

I trusted Bell with everything—but this wasn’t her forte. I’d have to wait for Cygnus.

“Happy birthday, by the way,” she said. “I don’t really have anything for you, sadly, but I hope you like pizza. It’s on me.”

I couldn’t really imagine anyone not liking pizza. That seemed like a really weird hill to die on—what part of cheese, tomato sauce, or bread could someone possibly find disagreeable? I could see someone saying that a specific kind of pizza was bad, but dismissing the whole thing out of hand was a borderline alien concept.

“Thanks,” I said, cheeks flushing hot.

“How’s being fifteen?” she asked.

“Um—not all that much different, really,” I said. “Feels kind of the same.”

“Makes sense. That’s about when I stopped feeling like I was actually getting any older.”

“I guess,” I said, trailing off.

We sat in silence for just a touch too long.

“You know,” Bell said, after a moment. “There’s something I meant to tell you about.”

“What’s that?”

“I think the New York gang has a team of operatives like us,” she said. “Essentially a free-moving group who’s trying to take us on in the ground-war. I was talking to Yoru about his assassination attempt—you know, you heard about that, right?”

“Yeah—he told me when we picked up that guy. Pete.”

“Mhm. Apparently Benji nearly got picked off by that guy, too. Benji managed to chase him off, but there was another person driving the car he got away in and Benji said he thought he saw an earth-key around her neck. It’s admittedly not a lot to build a theory off of, but most of the folks we’ve seen so far have been…I don’t know, grunts, and those two have shown up more than once and seem to be a bit more capable.”

“Obviously not that capable,” I said.

“Capable enough to try,” Bell replied, humorless. “Real incompetent people wouldn’t have even gotten that close. I’m not particularly worried about them, but it’s worth noting. I could imagine this being a trap they’ve set for us. Maybe Sal doesn’t actually exist, or he’s a honeypot. It’s something you should be aware of, that’s all.”

I expected this knowledge to spook me, but it didn’t. The idea of another water key trying to do anything against Unit 6 seemed like a complete waste of time. There wasn’t anything he could do they hadn’t already seen out of me, dialed to eleven.

Bell shared that thought. “I’m not worried about it. I know this is the narrative, but—as someone who’s been around the block a few times—I really cannot overstate just how much more powerful the two of us are than the average key holder. Even if these people were the pride of their towns, they would still pale in comparison to Unit 6. I think we’ve all dodged an assassination attempt at this point, no?”

I paused. “I haven’t.”

Bell frowned. “Really?”

“Yeah. Not—not that I know of, anyway.”

“That’s odd,” she said. “I—guess I know why that’d be, but it seems weird that they wouldn’t take a shot if they think they’ve got one.”

“Maybe they haven’t yet.”

I was, after all, invincible. How many times had I survived assassination attempts already? It had to be at least four or five. It was a hopeless endeavor and they knew it.

The plan, therefore, must have been to simply take out the rest, one by one, until there was nobody left to save me. And then every unit New York controlled could be devoted to this singular task: have a telepath grab my skull and hold me still while every other key in the city took potshots at me. A backyard execution by firing squad.

Could it ever have been anything else? There was never going to be a surprise bullet in my neck. It was unlikely when I had normal sight and it was even more unlikely with the way things were now.

“Maybe not,” she said. “I know Yoru and Benji both had one against a water-key. Ava ran into a little localized forest-fire, but got bailed out by Eliza. Eliza had an earth-key try and shoot her with an obsidian dart, but she blocked it. I think Eliza was the only one to find her assassin and take them out—everyone else just got away. Loybol said she had one too but didn’t elaborate on it. Cygnus just out-muscled a metallurgic who tried to get him to stab himself, but I think that guy got away. Personally, I think what they’re doing is a waste of time, but if these people are all a part of a single team like I suspect they are, then there’s at least four of them, plus one whose key we don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s six or seven. If I was putting together a strike team to take us out, I wouldn’t start with a group any smaller than seven, anyway.”

I wonder if they knew just how herculean their task was. I could only imagine being the one assigned to try and kill Loybol or Bell or Eliza—how could they possibly muster the courage to take a shot? If you point an icicle at someone like them—or me—you’d better not miss. The retaliation would be swift and absolute. The surefire iron will required to look an end like that in the eye and march straight into it was beyond my comprehension.

Didn’t they know it was certain death? Didn’t they know their task was impossible?

And yet they still tried. To me, it sounded like desperation, but that also didn’t make much sense given how little headway it seemed like we’d made.

Maybe Sal was more important than we figured.

“I’m glad we’re not them,” I said, and Bell nodded in agreement.

They must have known that they were completely outmatched on all fronts. There was no chance their water-key could hold a candle to me. There was no chance they had a flesh key who could outmuscle Bell. I would’ve been surprised if they had any individual key who could do their magic better than Eliza could without one. All they’d have to do to assassinate Eliza, essentially, was trip her. Have her stub her toe a bit too hard on something. A regular person could lob a rock underhanded at her and if the rock was big enough, it’d kill her. Taking her out quietly was a different story, but if they were resorting to these tactics at this point then I felt it was safe to assume that optimal strategies for this were off the table in favor of “anything that worked.”

Those brave, stupid souls. What choice did they have?

There was no quarter for cowards here.

“I know that—that we’re all on the same page about our ultimate end,” I said, slowly. “But it’s different for us. For them, I…”

I felt what? Pity?

I grimaced. “I wonder if we could convince them to defect.”

Bell raised an eyebrow. “Benevolence from the Acheron. Doesn’t seem like you.”

I didn’t know what that was, but I assumed it was a complement, or at least close enough to one where I was just supposed to take it in stride.

“It’d be easier than killing them, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” Bell asked, with a little smile.

Another downside of my current condition: I could no longer see Bell’s eyes. Not that I ever got anything out of them anyway, but it was another memory-barrier between the way things were now and the altar of an idol I could always return to when all else was failing.

She was, as always, right.

“I guess not,” I said, quietly.

“They signed up for this,” Bell said, matching my volume. “They knew what they were getting into.”

“Did they really?” I asked her. “Could they have seen this coming?”

And Bell replied: “With people like us in the world? How could they not?”

In my mind’s eye where things still had color I saw them again: cold and dead, vortex-windows into an unfathomable oblivion.

She was right.

I thought that was going to be the end of it, but it wasn’t. Bell relaxed—I hadn’t even noticed she was tensed. It hadn’t occurred to me to check. What reason would she possibly have to be stressed?

The moisture over her eyes shifted down. She wasn’t looking at me.

While reclining a bit, she said, “You really don’t blame me at all, do you.”

And I asked her: “For what?”

0 0 0

After our meal, Bell made a note of the person behind the counter she was going to replace, took a couple of discreet photos with a small camera she’d brought, and we left. She booked a motel for a few days and spent some time practicing transforming into that poor teenager who’d taken her order while I listened to an episode of an evening game show. I made sure to turn the TV up loud enough that Bell could hear it clearly from behind the closed door and we’d race each other to the answers—buzzing in by knocking on the nightstand’s fake wood top or the bathroom counter so it didn’t become a matter of who could talk faster. My answers came through my normal voice, but hers, periodically, were distorted with under-tones of her normal lower voice slipped below the higher-pitched, younger voice of her replacement target.

She ended up beating me by a score of thirty-seven to eight, but I was just glad I’d gotten a few. It wasn’t a surprise to me that Bell knew a lot of random trivia. She knew everyone and everything and had first-hand experience in every profession.

After half an hour Bell came out of the bathroom. If I didn’t know she went in there, I wouldn’t have known who it was when she came out. Her hair was a bit longer, proportionally speaking, and less thin, and her lips were a bit thicker. She was almost a foot shorter, a splattering of acne across her cheeks, less bony but not by a whole lot, spine curled into a question mark from an eternity of slouching. Bell never had amazing posture to begin with—a side-effect of her usual giant stature—but this was more pronounced. None of the clothing she wore was even vaguely in the vicinity of fitting correctly, but that was a normal side-effect, too. Bell was very lucky if she got to keep the same pants from shape to shape.

“How’s this?” she said, with that higher voice I’d heard parts of during our contest, and no hints of her usual dusty drone.

I shrugged. “I didn’t pay much attention to the cashier. You’re the one who took the pictures.”

That, in itself, was odd for Bell. I’d never heard of her having to do that.

“True,” she said, examining her own arms and looking down from there. Surveying the room through a freshly lowered point of view. “God, everything’s so big now. I hate being short.”

“You’re still taller than me,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, but you’re also short.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“I never said it was,” she said, taking a seat on the second bed. “I normally don’t take pictures—and it rarely takes that long for me to get a shape—but since I’ve, you know, done this shit to the people who work there before, I get the sense they’re kind of suspicious now.”

“I can’t imagine a lot of those people are still there.”

“One of the chefs was. Can’t hurt to be safe.”

“I guess that’s fair,” I said.

She had this all planned out—it was what the things in the bag were for, I supposed. Bell’d overheard someone in the back say the cashier’s name—Candace something, apparently—and from there she managed to use a laptop in that bag to locate her Twitter account with her first and last on it. After that, it was fairly easy to find her address and phone number. She spent the next few hours memorizing everything there was to know about this Candace-something, looking at pictures of herself with her friends, learning a couple things about them, too. I couldn’t perceive anything on the laptop screen, but that’s what she told me, in short answers to the odd question I’d ask her every five minutes or so.

After the fourth, she told me: “You don’t have to worry so much. This ain’t my first rodeo, you know?”

“I know,” I said, but it didn’t make me feel any better. If anything, it made the pit in my stomach that’d be slowly growing since the afternoon widen ever so slightly.

At around eleven-thirty, she closed the laptop. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep until nothing in the room was moving—and the odds after that were still against me—so I’d kept listening to cop procedurals until she was done.

Finally, she shut off the overhead light and laid down in bed. I reached over and found the knob for the lamp and clicked that off, too.

“G’night,” she said. “Busy day tomorrow.”

“For you,” I said.

“True,” she replied.

I closed my eyes and the world did not change. It was blank before and blank now.

Nothing was different. All the same, every last thing.

What was on my mind leaked out before I could stop it.

“We’re going to die here too, aren’t we?” I asked her.

“Of course,” Bell mumbled. She didn’t turn to face me or anything. Her answer was automatic, in a voice that wasn’t hers from a voice-box that didn’t belong to her trapped in the throat of a stranger in a strange place. “That’s just showbiz, baby.”