I found myself with fingers crossed hoping this would work, because it felt like it was trending strongly toward another torture session, and those had yielded very little in terms of functional information—completely divorced from the fact that I did not want to participate in another one.

I asked Bell as much, and she said she had faith that this was going to be just fine as long as I followed her lead and didn’t contradict anything she did—and the absolute second that door opened, I needed to flood that house with a cloud so I would know if anyone was lying in wait for us. If there was, she’d said, tap her somewhere with a droplet so she’d know, and then—discreetly, when possible—handle it. A second tap to confirm that, and we’d be off to the races.

“With you there, and my flesh-key, we should be able to do a reasonable telepath impression,” she said. “Push comes to shove, I try to do an actual telepath impression and wring this shit out of him myself. If we get to that point, you can go outside if you don’t want to be there.”

I blinked. “I’m fine,” I said, a touch too slowly. “It’s okay.”

“I gave what you were doing when me met again a lot of thought,” Bell-as-Esther said. “And I get it. I understand why you’ve been apprehensive. It really doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere. But this is our chance, and we can’t let it go to waste. If the plan A doesn’t work, I have decent faith the plan B will. I’ve tried this once before and I got something out of it. I think I can make it happen again, but it’ll take a while and I’ll need you to guard the house.”

“How long is a while?” I asked.

“Thirty minutes minimum,” she said. “When I did it the first time, it took three hours, but I messed it up a couple times. Left her with permanent damage. Those kinks should be ironed out now, though. Should be just fine.”

I pursed my lips. Took a long inhale through my nose. Didn’t let the thought escape its origin.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said, slow.

“Let’s,” Bell-as-Esther said.

0 0 0

She did exactly as she said she would: she walked up to the door and she rang the doorbell.

She had me crawl along the lawn, with the idea that the doorbell’s lingering noise would distract and-or scare Sal long enough for me to get to a position close to the house undetected, and together—her in front of the door, me about ten feet off to her left underneath a windowsill between a pair of shrubs—we waited for Sal to meet his fate.

And he did. He opened the door, regarded the form of Esther with a smooth, sweeping look up and down, and said: “They really brought out the big guns, didn’t they.”

“All we have are big guns,” Bell said. “Nothing but.”

She flashed him a smile that felt distinctly out of place on the body I had identified as belonging to Bell.

It was almost genuine. Almost warm. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have believed it.

Sal didn’t step far enough outside to see me, and even if he could, I was crouched in a shadow behind the bushes, so I figured he wouldn’t have been able to spot me quickly even if it was possible. Bell seemed to sense that that was a possibility, though, so she set to work.

“How about we step inside?”

I set to work, too. The second that door opened—and Bell had Sal’s attention directed at her—I was able to sweep a light cloud into the room, slowly past Sal so he wouldn’t notice, directing it down by his shoes and then up into the rooms of the house once the stream was safely behind him. It took a minute or so, but I had a vague outline of Sal’s cottage planted in my memory, and I set about resolving the misshapen blobs in each room to see if any of them were vaguely personlike.

The cottage only had one floor, but in a room somewhere toward the back was a shape that felt about right. Lingering there for a moment, I found they were breathing—shallowly, but the moisture in front of their face betrayed them.

I’d never dehydrated someone from that far away before. Briefly, I wondered if I could—but instead of devoting too much thought to that in that second, I sent a single droplet toward Bell, a big one, letting it splatter into the back of her ankle to let her know that someone was there.

As for the man of the hour—Sal was somewhere between five and a half and six feet, with a five o’clock shadow that felt more like an eleven o’clock. All of his facial features sagged a little, like he’d been held in front of a flame for a bit too long. I figured he was just tired. That job, whatever it was, sounded exhausting.

That was all I really needed to know. I didn’t want to know him too well.

Briefly, I wondered if just seeing Bell in her true form would scare him into talking by itself.

He scratched his chin. “Might as well, right?” he said, in a voice that was a bit higher than I was expecting out of him.

“Tell the person you’ve got waiting in one of those back rooms to stand down first,” Bell said.

She flashed that smile again.

Sal raised his eyebrows and made a half-eye roll that sank his shoulders in response. “God. You all really want to throw the book at me, huh.”

“We sure do,” Bell replied. “Just shout at them and have them come out here. We’re gonna have a nice heart-to-heart.”

Sal pursed his lips. He didn’t seem to have a key, near as I could tell from trying to get a feel for the shape of him. He was pretty much sunk here, and if whoever he’d stashed in that room lost the element of surprise, they were probably dead in the water to Esther alone, let alone me sitting outside.

“C’mon out,” he said, in not quite a shout but still a raised voice. “Show’s over.”

“And just in case—”

Bell held out her left and hand snapped her fingers in my general direction, which was my cue to stand up, brush a bit of dirt off my pants, and walk over to the doorstep to stand next to Bell—or Esther, or whoever it was.

Sal, to his credit, didn’t react much. He ran a hand through his hair and a little sigh squeaked out of his lips. “Guys, I really do not know as much about this whole organization as you probably think I do. Jesus. If I had real commanding powers, I’d be throwing everything we had at anyone I knew was in the general vicinity of one of your agents right now. Bringing your top telepath and top gun out to talk to fuckin’ me seems like bad play-calling.”

“Bell’s still out there,” Bell said. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Bell dies to a gunshot to the head just like the rest of us. The only ones that don’t are Cygnus, Erika, and you, and probably Loybol, but admittedly we’re not really sure on that one.”

“Might not be able to get Yoru either.”

“He’s not strong enough to deflect a bullet.”

I let my lips shut tight and tried not to say anything that’d make me look stupid.

“Point aside. You can come in. Don’t really want to attract attention from the neighbors, now,” Sal said, turning his back to us and heading inside.

Esther-slash-Bell gave me a quick look and stepped across the threshold, as did I. Once we were in, Sal shoved the door with the palm of his hand and it slammed shut.

Sal’s house was nothing special. A small kitchen, single-sized, sat in the right corner of a large central room, with a similarly small four-person table area off to the side. Between the two half-rooms was a short hallway that went back to a part of the house I assumed had a living room and a bedroom or two.

I didn’t poke around too much. There didn’t seem like much of a point when I’d already established that there were only four breathing entities in the building: me, Bell, Sal, and the agent sent from New York who’d come out of the hallway that led deeper into the house and taken a seat at the kitchen table, waiting for us to acknowledge her.

Sal walked into the kitchen. “Can I get you all a drink? No alcohol here, I’m afraid,” he said, gesturing vaguely to me, “but I have some tea. Water, whatever.”

I did not react to the alcohol gesture. I saw it, but I didn’t do anything about it.

It’d been a very long time since I’d had a drink—not since Eliza bought me one when we first met. It was never much of a habit with me. More of a crutch, really. As I warmed to the people in Unit 6, I needed it less and less to look like a normal person around them. I drank because they drank, and so when they stopped drinking, so did I.

But I did, occasionally, want one. When things were particularly boring or hard, I felt that little question bubble up: wouldn’t one beer make this just a bit easier? Two? Three?

It wasn’t all that difficult to keep that question unanswered, though, since I couldn’t buy any for myself, so I figured I didn’t meet the threshold of “having a problem.” If it was something I had to actively fight against, it’d be an issue, but just the occasional slight suggestion wasn’t enough to make me check into rehab.

So it was what it was. With the way things are now, I’m not sure having a drink or two then would’ve changed anything.

Bell walked up to Sal and clapped him on the shoulder. Esther was touchy like that, wasn’t she? I couldn’t quite remember. It’d been a while since I’d met her.

Sal, again, didn’t react as much as I thought he would. He already seemed pretty done with this whole ordeal. A true trained professional, or maybe just an apathetic.

“What a gentleman we’ve got here,” Bell said, with a little laugh. “Tea’s fine, thank you. A green, please. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

I opened my mouth and Bell added, “Two cups.”

“Three,” Sal said, pointing to himself.

“Four,” the woman at the table said. “I’m not thirsty yet, but I just want to be included.”

“So do you—”

“Yes, I do actually want one. It’s a joke, Sal.”

He rolled his eyes and put the teapot under the sink. The water surged out of the faucet in a fluorescent cold line—something real and tangible just in front of me. A proper lifeline I could grasp.

Sal filled up the pot, turned on the electric stovetop and put the pot on the heat. “You two get along, right?” he said, mostly to the kitchen walls.

“Somewhat,” Bell said. “Erika’s only got eyes for Bell, mostly, but she gets along with pretty much everyone nowadays. Not nearly as standoffish as she used to be.”

I wanted to speak—but it would be in Esther’s personality to talk for me, wouldn’t it? Bell would’ve let me talk for myself, but this wasn’t Bell. That wasn’t the point.

So, again, I kept my mouth shut and tried not to do anything stupid.

“That’s good,” Sal said. “God forbid you’d have to put up with this bitch all day.”

“This bitch” was the agent; who scowled at the remark and said, under her breath, “Yeah, sure,” but didn’t elaborate. She had a key, but I couldn’t really tell what it was. Another downside of my condition: without a fight or a question, the actual scope of my enemy was lost on me. The most I could hope for was to end fights before whatever they had ended up mattering. That was the plan A to begin with, I supposed, but it was another asterisk in a long line of exceptions to droplet-sight.

She wore a simple t-shirt and a medium-length skirt, key in full view around her neck. I assumed the peacoat on the hook near the door was hers, just judging from the shape of it. Sal didn’t seem like the type to wear a nice jacket, and there were only two people who lived here, so by elimination—

Either way, she faced us with a muted half-frown, but didn’t speak.

I figured if she was a telepath, she would’ve blown the lid on this thing wide-open by now, so we were safe enough. Nothing, really, to worry about.

“Wire’s on now,” Bell said. “Smile, you’re live.”

“Wonderful,” Sal replied, flatly. “Let’s all sit down and talk this over like adults, okay?”

I pursed my lips but didn’t say anything. Wasn’t the time.

“Seems fine to me,” Bell replied, walking over to the table with a light, almost skip-step that was completely unlike her. She went behind the agent, and as she walked past, she reached out and ruffled the agent’s hair for half a second, which made her go all lock-jointed like she’d been electrocuted. For half a second, I thought she was going to straight-up lash out at Bell, but she held back, sucked in a breath, and stayed civil.

Bell, as Esther, just giggled at her—but I knew what that was for now. She clapped Sal on the shoulder for the same reason.

She took a seat on the table’s back side, or at least what I as such since it was the one opposite the entrance. I sat to the left of her, facing the kitchen, and Sal sat across from me. Bell took the last remaining seat, at the agent’s front and center.

I was starting to think there was a slight change of plans.

Bell cleared her throat. “Okay, let’s get started. I’m Esther, here with Erika. It’s a fine warm evening here on June 14th. Tonight, we’ll be interviewing Sal, regional manager of operations for the New York magical policing group, whatever y’all are called, I don’t care. Joining us is a special guest…” She gestured at the agent and added, “State your name for the recording, please.”

“No,” the agent said.

“Gee,” Bell replied. “I sure don’t remember asking for your permission.”

The agent crossed her arms. “You’re the telepath here. Why don’t you just go pry it out of me?”

“If you insist,” Bell said. “It’s gotta be on record, though. Management needs me to have this on tape, so it’s still gotta be you saying it. You can either say it of your own volition, or not. Up to you.”

She still didn’t say anything. Bell flexed her fingers back, cracking her knuckles, and said, “Okay then. We can do this the hard way.”

I pursed my lips. Held my tongue.

Braced—

The agent’s neck snapped upright—she wasn’t quite facing the eyes of the person she thought was Esther before, but now she was. Her jaw jumped sideways and down and froze there, twitching, and from somewhere deep in her throat rose a low hum-growl that sounded more like some beast than something a person could make.

I couldn’t see if there was fear in her eyes, but I can imagine.

The growl’s singular tone jumped and spluttered—occasionally she’d hit a hard consonant noise, a “k” or a “p” or a “t”, or she’d slide into a long string of “shhhhh”—and in that last held noise it dragged into a wider “aaaah” and down into a borderline shouted “puh” like a truck backfiring.

Shap—stop?

Bell found it. “Oh, you want me to stop?”

The agent could barely twitch her head up and down, but it did, in a jittering tensed motion a fear-struck hand.

“Okay,” Bell said, and she let go.

A single huge breath dropped out of the agent all at once and she slumped back in the chair, just breathing for a bit. She patted a few of the things on her face—her ear, two spots on her forehead, her nose, her lips, her left cheek—and once she was confident everything was still there, she said, “You know, we had to undergo telepath defense training before this.”

Her voice was still low and weak.

“How was it?” Bell asked.

“Fine,” she said. “I didn’t get top marks, but I passed. That was—completely unlike anything they did to us. And they did some pretty bad things to us.”

“Us being a group that includes you, a person who still needs to tell me her name for the tape,” Bell said.

The agent looked up and away for half a second, eyes flicking toward the kitchen cabinetry that I was facing. There was an in-set part of the wall there—a window, I figured.

It occurred to me that I didn’t check nearly as far into the woods on that side of the house than I did on the side we came from.

“Sally,” she mumbled.

“Sally?” Bell repeated.

“I know,” she said. “Don’t start.”

“Sal and Sally,” Bell said, snickering. “Good lord. No wonder you guys hate each other.”

“I’ve been assigned to tail this shitheel in case you all find him for the last two months. He keeps leaving weird notes for me around the house and in the yard because he knows I’ve got to case the place every once in a while, and I literally have to pick them up because it’s a fucking security hazard if I don’t since they have my goddamn name on them.”

“This isn’t really relevant, but—define weird.”

“Love notes,” she said, flatly.

“You could’ve told me you didn’t like them. I’m crushed,” Sal said. He was so toneless with everything he said. I could barely make heads or tails of it, but just this once I had a pretty good guess.

“I’m not actually supposed to ever talk to you.”

“There was plenty of space on the back for you to write a reply.”

“God, just…just shut the fuck up.”

Bell cleared her throat. “Well, if either of you decide to turn yourselves in, we can play Dr. Phil in the car-ride back to the base, but until then, let’s stay on topic, shall we?”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

Bell launched right into it. “I’m assuming you’re one of the members of the team assigned to pick us off?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be interviewing Sal?”

“Not anymore. Not while I’ve got you here.”

Admittedly—I stopped paying attention at that point. The information Bell was about to get strictly wasn’t all that important to me. I’d long since abandoned trying to actually follow the course of the war in favor of keeping to me and myself. As long as I was doing what I was supposed to do, and I wasn’t getting yelled at for anything, and I was something vaguely approaching happy, it didn’t matter all that much to me what the next mission was, or what a mission three times down the line could be.

Just point me at something. Whatever.

At that moment, though, I was trying to find a gap in the house I could use to get back to the outside. Sal had closed the door behind him, so agenda item one—after finding that no walls in the house were leaking or anything—was getting that door open again, just a crack, without anyone noticing.

I rounded up a bit of moisture in the room—lately I’d taken to collecting moisture along the baseboards of a room and in the corners, places where people wouldn’t notice it, just in case I had to strike suddenly. With the water skimmed off the moldings, I slid it down toward the door, squeezing it along the doorknob and trying to twist it, just a touch. It was slick, though, the smooth metal offering me no purchase. As a second attempt I waited until the eyes of Sal and Sally were directed toward the person they thought was Esther, and as soon as they weren’t looking, I froze a thin layer of ice around the knob and twisted that instead, using the dry surface and the screw-hole that held the knob in place as a hold to get leverage over it.

And the knob turned, slowly, the latch pulled back, and as soon as I could open the door a crack and break the weather-stripped seal on the bottom of the door, I sent all the water I’d gathered out there and felt the world outside again.

With so much space between me and it, it was a bit of a struggle to find my footing. All I had to go on were the memory of shapes outside the house, the arrangement of the bushes in the front yard and the mailbox at the end of the driveway alone to orient me.

Coupled with the total darkness I now sat in—

I swallowed. Ten seconds. Maybe twenty. No more than thirty, and I was done.

I sent the water out east, expanding it out into a vast cloud that drifted through the forest, a hundred-foot square patch of droplets touching every last leaf and stick out there, all the way out as far as I could go, looking for something, anything, that didn’t feel quite right.

And somewhere out there, up high in a tree, was a soft shape on top of a bough that did not belong.

Ice shot through my spine and instinctively my head flicked right toward Bell, but neither of them were paying attention to me in any true sense.

The soft shape out in the woods was slowly moving. Extending from it was a pole—no, too detailed to be just a pole—an arm—and at the tip of that arm was a finger and on the end of that finger was a cold, pointed rock. A bullet.

Pointed at—

And the shape drew in a breath and let it out and—

I leapt out of my chair and grabbed Bell by the neck of her dress and yanked her down to the ground with me right as the window across from me in the kitchen shattered and that cold thing shot like a laser directly to the ground, and it was so large that it skipped off the floor and bounced upward and smacked me right in the side of the head.

And for half a second I lost everything.

Bell stayed put on the ground as Sal and Sally jumped out of their chairs and instantly collapsed right to the floor, paralyzed by the contact Bell’d put on them both when she walked in, and even though my head felt light and sloshy and I wasn’t certain I could stand up even if I wanted to, the adrenaline kept me steady.

I gathered up all the water in the room, sucking it down to zero-humidity instantly, and forced it all out through the broken window out into the forest, where the soft shape had dropped from the tree and was rushing backward into the woods trying to get out of range—

But they could not run fast enough.

As the cloud chased them back, all subtlety lost as I’m sure it appeared to them as a wall of solid fog swallowing their wake, they took a look back at that fog and the sheer size and scale of it—it scraped the treetops and kicked up leaves as it pushed forward like a tornado, and within a second the fog was around that soft human shape and all at once it crushed down and in and the soft shape was shredded by thousands of tiny, indiscriminately pushed icicles as the fog froze their explosion solid.

Into red-snow mush.

I breathed out.