Bell wasn’t home when I came back. I’d turned on the TV and listened to whatever was on—the news, mostly. There’d been a series of murders in a few neighboring towns and there weren’t any suspects that they were willing to admit to on local TV. The program showed pictures of the victims—I knew because they said so—and they said their names, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d killed any of them. I’d known them by shape alone, and hearing about them on TV gave me their name but no shape, and therefore I had absolutely no way of connecting the two. The names and people were entirely separate entities—a body named Sarah and a person named Sarah—and together they formed nothing at all.

A connection to all but me.

None of the names were Pete, so that was at least one excluded.

Eventually the news block ended and some family sitcom came on, which I didn’t have the heart to skip channels for, so I listened to that until Bell opened the door and came inside.

“Hey,” she said. She was still in Candace’s shape, and didn’t bother stopping to take off her shoes as she went right to the bathroom to change.

“Hey,” I mumbled back.

After a time, the door opened and the skeletal monster I knew came out and took a seat on the edge of her bed.

“How was the day?” Bell asked.

“Benji’s missing,” I said, without any build-up.

That was enough to make Bell hesitate. “Missing in what way?” she said, after a moment.

“Missing as in they don’t know where he is,” I said, flat. The words slipped off my tongue without any weight. “He could be fine or he could be not fine.”

“He’s probably fine,” Bell said.

“Yoru said that, too.”

“He’s right.”

“It’s not like him to go out like that,” I said, reaching behind me for the remote without turning around and dropping the volume a few notches. Trial and error had taught me which of the rockers on the remote was volume and which one was the channel swap, but since the remote was top-bottom and left-right symmetrical, it was pretty much always a straight guess.

“Benji follows his heart,” Bell said. “As lame as that sounds. He’s always been like that. Prochazka only gets to suggest stuff to him. They’re normally on the same page, but when they’re not—well, Benji’s plan always overrides.”

“I guess,” I said, close to mumbling. “I mean…I guess, yeah, but—I barely knew him. It feels like I barely knew him.”

“He didn’t talk to you much,” Bell said, tonelessly.

“He went out of his way to avoid me,” I finished.

We fell quiet for a moment, but not for long enough for me to turn up the volume on the TV.

“Would you be sad if he turned out dead?” Bell asked me, putting words to the question I was already asking myself via feeling alone.

I opened my mouth and waited for an answer to float out, but nothing came, and for a second, I just sat there with my mouth half-open like an idiot waiting for some unfiltered nonsense to unearth itself.

But nothing did. I wasn’t sure if that meant I didn’t have an opinion or I simply wasn’t willing to say what was on my mind in front of any company whatsoever.

Bell was facing me while she waited for my answer, but once she saw my halted reaction, she turned her attention back to the TV. It was more than enough answer by itself than I ever could have conjured.

Eventually, I found words for something, even if it was a simple repetition. “I barely even knew him.”

Bell replied to me, “He barely even knew you.”

The question lingered in the back of my skull. Not in a way where I replayed it over and over like I often did, but in the sense that it made me second-guess every interaction I’d ever had with him. Every side-part of his statements—his tone, his face, the order of his words divorced from their meaning, minutiae like that, leapt out like a surprise exam. Did Benji ever like me? I always figured he didn’t, and I’d always figured I was okay with that.

Suddenly, now, I wasn’t. Under my ribs was a hard burning knot craving a chance to apologize, and under my skull was something similar wondering what exactly I needed to apologize for.

Bell went on. “Well, I’ve got better news for you. Sal called an order in today and I got to see where he lives. Kind of burned a bridge or two to make it happen because I picked a bad initial target, but these things happen sometimes, you know?”

I didn’t know, but I was more than eager for a bit of good news. “Are we going in?”

“Any time you’re ready,” Bell said. She’d opened a bag of snack mix that she must’ve snagged at a convenience store on her way home and ate a few pieces.

After a moment, I asked her: “What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty,” Bell said.

“Let’s go at eight.”

“Sure. It’s your call. I doubt he’s going anywhere.”

Our attention went back to the TV again—hers for the sights, mine for the sounds. We didn’t speak for a few minutes, but anyone could tell we had things on our minds aside from what was in front of us. There was a gap between us that was bigger than just the physical space.

Eventually, it became just too big. Yawned a bit too wide.

“Do you think Benji’s alive?” I asked her.

Bell replied immediately. “Not a chance. He’s dead as hell.”

That caught me off guard, which Bell took as an invitation to elaborate. “Remember when I was talking about that other unit that’s probably out there looking to hunt us down?”

“Um—yeah, them. I remember that.”

“It was probably them,” she said, shrugging. “He probably got shot in the back of the head because he went after some strange noise he heard by himself. He was with Yoru, but Yoru’s not as good at keeping an awareness of his surroundings like you are, even though I know he can do more-or-less the same thing. All they’d have to do is distract Yoru for a second to make him lose his bearings, get Benji to be a step behind and pop.”

Bell snapped her fingers and I flinched.

She leaned back against the stacked-up pillows and put her hands behind her head. “Wouldn’t be that hard. Everyone else has some benefit that makes them tough to assassinate except Benji. Can’t sit in a tree if you’re trying to take out Ava, can’t use bullets for Cygnus, can’t stand on pavement or near concrete for Loybol—I mean, I don’t even know if shooting Loybol in head would do anything, so there’s that, too. Benji’s not the weakest key among us, that’s probably Yoru or maybe Cygnus, but he’s the easiest target and a leadership figure. Taking him out first is just good war sense. Realistically speaking—if I was calling the shots—he’d be sitting in his office at the factory, making plans with Prochazka, and leaving the war front stuff to the professionals.”

I was hung up on a specific. “You—it sounds like you’ve, um, thought this out.”

“Thinking about your own weaknesses is a good way to make sure nobody else gets to,” Bell said. “Gotta know all the rules so you don’t break any.”

“It just sounds like you…”

I couldn’t bring myself to say it. It was, in a sense, an attack on Bell—and even though my brain knew it was justified, I couldn’t quite muster the courage to criticize.

But Bell took a shot in the dark on my concern and mostly hit it. “Benji knew what he was signing up for, Erika,” she said, more softly than before. “That’s the dance. It’s showbiz, baby. Shit happens—the show goes on.”

She reached for the bag of mix again. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

0 0 0

I was hoping I’d suddenly get tired so I’d have an excuse to delay the outing. It’s not really like me to do that, but Benji’s half-life was occupying the majority of my thoughts as it was, and I was at least a little bit worried about my ability to adequately cover for Bell in a real combat situation.

They had to know we were going after Sal, right? How could they not?

Bell told me, when I’d voiced those concerns, that I shouldn’t worry about that. “Worry about you,” she’d said. “I can handle me.”

That didn’t exactly make me feel any better when the part I was worried about was the “handling” in the first place, subject aside, but it was enough to make me not ask about it again. Bell seemed hellbent on getting this done as soon as possible, and as much as I—at least superficially—didn’t want to, I didn’t have a good reason to delay.

A few moments before we left, Bell said she needed to change her clothes—and when she was done, she was wearing an evening dress that didn’t even vaguely come close to fitting her. It must have been made for someone a foot shorter than she was. By and large, Bell chose form over function when it came to clothes, so her being in a tiny dress (that was obviously not intended to be tiny, it simply was when on her) with a thin bow over the chest for what was ostensibly a stealth mission felt a bit odd.

I knew she had to have a plan, though, so I didn’t ask about it.

At around nine o’clock that night, off we went.

Bell didn’t have her car, so we were stuck taking public transit and walking to get to Sal’s house. Ridesharing systems were a no-go with both Benji and Loybol, as they agreed that getting into a vehicle with a stranger was a bad call given our circumstance. Odds were low that anything bad would happen, but some kamikaze nutjob could easily fry everyone in a car if they weren’t all that concerned about themselves, and our leadership felt fairly confident that things could come to that eventually.

Maybe if we got lucky and stayed patient, we could pick off all their cronies first, so there wouldn’t be anyone left to drive a minivan around Nyack until one of us got inside it.

Either way—

At around ten-thirty, we came to the sleepy suburban street where Sal supposedly lived. There was a small, squat cottage at the end of the lane—I could see it just fine, but Bell had to squint for it, apparently, since there weren’t any lights on.

The other houses lay just as quiet and still, as if they’d been empty all this time.

It was time. I closed my eyes—just as a force of habit, for focusing—and let my awareness spread out over the street and deep into the woods. It’d been a humid day, and the leaves and blades of grass shone cool with leftover moisture.

And I was everywhere.

Bell paused only for a second at the end of the lane before she pressed forward down the street, sticking to the sidewalk until we came to a wooded gap between two of the houses, at which point she banked a hard left into those trees, going that way until we were behind the left side’s houses. Then we continued down the lane through the forest that surrounded it, stepping carefully over sticks and walking on the edge of the lawns and over logs where we could minimize the noise, until we came to a downed tree that extended deep into the woods. Bell beckoned to me—slowly, and with an exaggerated motion—and we walked across that log and crouched down to stay out of sight of the house we were behind.

“Do they have lights on?” I asked, gesturing to the house. It wasn’t all that far away—maybe a hundred and fifty feet. Bell said, “Of course not,” and that was enough for me.

“Okay,” I said, slowly. Breathing. Speaking while holding that kind of focus was hard. “What’s the plan?”

“I have to assume Sal’s got cameras on his property if he’s as paranoid as everyone says he is,” Bell said, barely above a whisper. “We’re not going to be able to sneak in. We’re probably just going to ring the doorbell.”

I went pale. “Ring the doorbell?”

Bell smiled. “Do you trust me?”

I did. Completely.

But I was slow on the response. “Yeah.”

“Can you feel details of his house from here?”

I bit my upper lip. “I—yeah, but…I might lose the trees in the back.”

“Is there anyone there right now?”

“No.”

“Then lose ‘em. Nobody’s going to show up there in the next five minutes if they’re not already close.”

“They could be close,” I said. “I—people are hard to tell apart from trees at a long distance. I don’t know if that’s safe.”

“It’ll be fine,” Bell said. “Trust me. This’ll be quick.”

I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want me to look for?”

“Check if any of the windows are open.”

As fast as I could, I swirled a loose cloud of droplets around the house like a tiny invisible whirlwind—taking care not to splatter sideways rain on the windows.

“No,” I said.

“Can you get in the house in any way?”

I shook my head. “Not well. I—I can feel two pools, I think they’re toilet basins, but I can’t move them much from here and I won’t be able to put up a cloud in the house and keep up the one out here.”

That was a lot of words for what I was maintaining. I winced from a headache-pang and for half a second, I lost the cloud and everything went black.

But I got it again, a moment later, in between breaths. My heart restarted and we were good to go.

“That’s fine,” Bell said. “We’ll just do this the old-fashioned way, then.”

“By?”

“By taking a few risks,” she said. “Now for my end. This is by memory, so it’s probably not going to be perfect—I think the last time I saw her was two weeks ago—but it should be close enough for Sal, who’s probably only ever seen one or two pictures of this person in his entire life.”

She drew in a long breath and her form melted. Lost about a foot in height, until she was only a few inches taller than me, and became considerably less bony—much more normal-person sized. Her hair became a bit longer and thicker, and—as a general statement—she softened; her expression, all the angles in her arms and legs.

I couldn’t remember who she was turning into, although I felt like I was supposed to know. Bell—after about a minute and a half, after she’d ironed out the details, turned to face me. “Remember me?” she asked, in a voice higher than her normal one.

Slowly, I shook my head. “I—I don’t really…I recognize the voice, but…”

And then she spoke in an overlaid, two-tone I could never forget: “How about now?”

From back at the Radiant, when Loybol first sent someone to check on us.

I swallowed that pang of fear—a hold-over from when I first came to understand just how powerful Bell truly was.

“Esther’s not gonna like this,” I whispered.

“I think she’ll find it funny, actually,” Bell-as-Esther-Bluebird said, turning back toward the house. “She’s got a dark sense of humor. This is the kind of thing she’d do if she was a flesh key.”

I didn’t know Esther well enough to dispute that. Instead, I disputed something else. “You’re not a telepath, though.”

“Neither is he. I’m wearing a wire, so we’re going to be recording this, anyway. He doesn’t have to know I’m not the real deal—he just has to think so, so he gives up.”

As far as grand plans go, I wasn’t all that impressed. “What if he doesn’t?” I asked her, mostly re-centered.

Esther/Bell smiled, and the façade was lost completely. “I’m considering that consent for an experiment.”