I stayed at the factory for another week and a half, checking in with Sophia every day and answering a couple of questions about my condition. It varied from day to day; sometimes the headache was especially bad, sometimes I’d be extra listless, sometimes I’d have a hard time thinking through basic questions; but by and large it was only one of those symptoms at a time, and as the time went on and my condition ping-ponged between those states they became less severe, until one day I was forced to honestly tell Sophia: “I’m fine now, I think. No headache.”

“No nausea?”

I never really had that, but I nodded.

“Everything’s clear, no other pains, no aches?”

I shrugged. “All systems normal.”

Sophia didn’t like it when I talked like that, but since we’d been talking a lot lately, I felt slightly more comfortable making that type of remark. Now that I knew they wouldn’t set her off.

Somehow, some way, we’d managed to repair a rapport I didn’t think we actually had.

“You’re probably all set, then,” Sophia told me, putting the clipboard she’d been keeping on her lap onto the desk behind her, in front of the jars of tongue-depressors and medical flashlights. “If you’re still all good tomorrow, we’ll send you back out there.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to respond to that, but luckily the opportunity was short-lived. “You know,” she said, launching into a bit of small talk for the first time in a couple days. “It’s always been kind of funny to me just how little flesh-keys can do about brains. You’d think that, since it’s—you know, flesh—that we’d be able to mess with it like any other part of the body, but I guess it just doesn’t really work like that.”

“Bell thinks it’s possible,” I said. If she didn’t know about what Bell did back at Sal’s house, I didn’t want to be the one to enlighten her. Even then, it wasn’t really clear to me exactly what Bell did to that agent to drag that reaction out of her. From my perspective, it didn’t look like anything I couldn’t do with some well-placed icicles—and it’s not like I could go ask that agent now.

“Well,” Sophia scoffed, “Bell’s probably the strongest flesh-key to ever live. For us peons, it’s just not realistic.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then how could you know?”

Sophia pursed her lips and turned down and away from me, just a little bit. “I’m just afraid to. That’s it. I don’t know what buttons to push or what…I don’t know, gray matter folds to massage. Like—obviously, the mind’s gotta be stored in there somewhere and there’s no part of a biological creature we can’t stretch or move, so clearly it should be possible, it’s just…I don’t know, the risk-reward doesn’t support trying.”

She paused for a moment. “Hey, Erika. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“It’s about when you went blind.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

“When I—when I told you it was happening, that it was an inevitability, and you walked out…well, you went completely blind, like, the next day, right? Or sometime later that day.”

“That’s—that’s how I remember it, yeah. Yes,” I said, forcing the words through my teeth.

It was gone, now. An event in a mind that was no longer my own—and if the person I am now is different than the person I was then I shouldn’t feel any particular attachment to a feeling or event that happened to that version of Erika from way back when.

A memory of a movie I saw, or a page I read, and the coincidences in name and place were simply just that.

There was, of course, nothing to fear.

“When you walked out of my office—did you go find Bell?”

I forced the thought down. “Yes.”

“And did she try to help you?”

Pursed my lips. Forced it down. “Yes.”

“What did she do?”

I didn’t know.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And Sophia regarded me for a moment. Without sight I can’t properly say what she was doing. The shape of her face only told me so much—half relaxed, eyes unmoving from where they were initially looking. No raising of the eyebrows, no movement at the corner of her mouth—nothing I could grasp.

Before, there was a nuance in the eyes I could at least guess at, even if I didn’t always know what it meant. Now, though, I was properly in the dark.

If I had to guess, I’d say she didn’t believe me.

“I believe you,” she said.

“That I saw Bell, or—”

“That you don’t know what she did,” Sophia replied, a bit slower than her normal talking speed. “When you see her again, tell her I want to talk to her.”

I had no proper response to that. There wasn’t anything to say but “okay.”

So I did, and that was that. I did not think about it any longer.

That time wasn’t a part of me anymore.

0 0 0

The next day, Loybol was at the factory. She’d wanted to check in with Prochazka, she’d said, and she’d heard the news about my recovery. Two birds, one stone, and so on.

I was just standing around in the foyer when she arrived. I’d taken to doing that, occasionally—just wandering around the mostly empty factory. Some of the units were still located there, but others—the clean-up crews and recruitment and such—were either furloughed or otherwise not working. There wasn’t much to do in regards to random petty magical crime. Prochazka was being a bit more lenient than usual, although Loybol had spared him a handful of Unit 6 replacements for emergencies.

I hadn’t met any of them yet, but I tried to make small talk with one of Loybol’s people on the day she arrived. There was a man standing in the foyer, looking out towards the door. I made an attempt at “hello”, but he didn’t hear me. Didn’t even move. I tried again and still got no reaction—so I walked over, standing directly in front of him, and tried again, this time asking it as a question—but still, there was no response.

Waved my fingers in front of his face. Nothing.

After a moment he simply turned around and walked away, leaving me standing alone in the foyer wondering if I’d suddenly turned invisible, or if everyone else suddenly became blind just like I had.

Loybol came into the factory a couple seconds later, just as crisp as ever. To an extent, I’d heard her arrive—the low rumble of a car outside and the brief rattle as the engine shut off, a door slamming shut, dull-hitting footsteps up to the glass doors.

“Perfect timing,” she said to me, as the doors listlessly drifted shut behind her.

We were perfectly alone in the foyer. Nobody around to hear us talk.

“Am I with you today?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yep. We’ll be heading out in a bit. I want to confirm something with Prochazka before we go back to the front lines.” She gestured vaguely upward toward his office. “You can wait here or in the car if you’d like.”

It kind of sounded like there were two cars out there, but as soon as I noticed the slightly lower sound of the second engine, it cut out.

The front doors opened again, and a woman—Bell—came through. For a second my spirits lifted, and then I remembered that no, this wasn’t Bell—this was Esther, actually Esther, not Bell in disguise.

She waved at me. “Hello.”

“Hi,” I said back.

“I heard Bell posed as me when y’all were talking to Sal,” she said, snickering. “Lord. How’d that go?”

“I got a concussion,” I said back, suppressing a snicker. I’d told this story to so many people in exactly the same way at this point that I was starting to see the humor in it. “But otherwise it went just fine.”

“Can she really squeeze info out of people by just massaging their brains? Like—force them to talk, saying the right info, just through physically messing with their brain?”

I was about to say that she could, but I only had her word to go on. To me, that was law—but to everyone else, not so much.

So I just shrugged. “Maybe. I think she can, but I’m not sure.”

“How good was the disguise?”

“I mean—I thought you were her when you came in,” I said. “I’d forgotten that the person shaped like you could actually be, um, you, and not Bell in disguise.”

Esther seemed at least somewhat impressed. “Damn. That’s pretty good.”

“She’s the best for a reason.”

“I bet,” she said. “Hey, Bol, let’s get up there.”

Loybol’s mouth flattened into a hard line and I giggled.

“Sure,” Loybol replied, humorless. Relaxing again, she said to me: “This’ll be two or three minutes, tops. It’s just a check to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

“Got it,” I said, giving them a thumbs-up.

Esther returned the gesture and the two of them headed off to Prochaka’s office, leaving me alone in the foyer again.

God—it really was just so large, and just so empty. I kind of liked it that way, though. There was nothing in it to distract me from pushing droplets through the whole space, searching every last corner, just for the hell of it.