The car ride cooled off after that. We drove in silence for a time before Loybol made some limp attempts at small talk again, and once I’d gotten a little bit of space between that and myself I relaxed.

Everything was fine. We’d cross that bridge when we came to it, just like we always did. For now—focus on now.

No need to have a plan for something that could never happen.

We re-entered that realm of familiar places: I’d rolled down the windows again when we were stopped to get a feel for it: streets like chasms between three-story buildings of chipped bricks and dirty windows. I’d long since lost the ability to read the signage but I didn’t need to read it to remember what it was like: plain text, flat backgrounds. Local places, specialty shops. Sidewalks held together by inertia, roads returning to dirt.

It was so much like my hometown that I asked Loybol if it was, to which Loybol replied that this was Middletown, the Home Depot was two-and-a-half miles that way, and we’d be there in less than ten minutes.

One of the restaurants along the street had their doors propped open for air flow and the smell of something frying drifted into the car, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I asked Loybol if we could stop and get something before we met with Cygnus and Bell and she said it’d be better to do it afterward, which was okay with me. I didn’t have that strong of an opinion one way or another.

We pulled into the parking lot of the Home Depot a few minutes after that—close enough to the front to make a swift getaway if we had to, but not so close as to have the car be easily visible from the doors.

“Here’s the plan,” Loybol said to me, unbuckling her seat belt. “We’ll go in. I’ll grab Bell—she should be standing near the front somewhere. You go find Cygnus. I’d imagine Yoru and Esther beat us here, so you two should just find each other, hang out for a while, and then head over to the hotel just to the south of here. Cygnus should have a pair of room keys already. Then you’ll just hold there until we need you. It’ll probably be tomorrow, unless Esther and Bell need more time. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, opening the door and letting the warm air rush in. “God knows it’s enough work getting the thralls to stop the honorifics as it is.”

“Just “yes,” then?”

“Or you could call me by my name,” she replied as she stepped out. “We’ve all got one and it doesn’t wear out.”

0 0 0

I never liked home improvement stores much. I didn’t have any plans to be handy when I got older, and the smell always reminded me of unfinished basements, which I had plenty of awkward experiences with as it was. There was no need for me to conjure more by fumbling my way through a renovation.

This may have been unforeseen on the managements’ end, but it was a little tough to keep track of the droplets in buildings like that. High ceilings, a propensity for dryness, and poor air circulation meant I ended up doing most of the legwork pushing them around.

Still, though, I managed to track down Cygnus. He was standing in a section past the registers by the power tools, holding a box. In front of him, on top of the shelving unit, was a display model for what I was pretty sure was a nail gun, although I couldn’t confirm it.

“Hey,” I said, walking up to him. My breath caught at the last second—what if it wasn’t him, and it was just someone about the same shape and size—but the man turned around and grinned when he saw me and the fear scattered like dust.

“Been a while,” Cygnus said, slapping the top of the box. “How’s it been?”

“Fine. You know, um, same old.”

“How’s the concussion?”

“Gone now.”

“Told you you’d be back on your feet in no time,” he said. Looking down at the box again.

“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at it. Every time I had to do this the imagery of it wasn’t lost on me: someone walking by would see me, talking with Cygnus as though I clearly knew where he was, and yet confused about a box in his hands that I’m sure had a big, aggressively-colored label over a picture of its contents.

I’d buried the hesitation associated with that under heaps of repetition at this point, but the thought still bubbled to the surface every time I had to ask about something right in front of me in public.

“A nail gun,” he said. “Thinking about getting a new weapon. We’ve got a big bust coming up, so—”

“Did Esther already fill you in?”

“Yeah. She came by a little while ago.”

“So you know—”

“Yeah. I know. Bell and I talked to him about it. I didn’t really think Bell would go out of her way to offer advice, but she did. Didn’t think the two of them gave a shit about each other, and maybe they don’t, but it was nice just to have a little team solidarity for once, you know?”

I nodded. I knew.

“Anyway,” he went on, “figured I should give a more flexible weapon a try. These things have a safety lock on them that stops you from just firing nails into people, but I can bypass that with my key, I think. Just using it as a clip and an aiming assist, more or less. And they make electric ones, too, so I don’t have to wear a big compressor backpack like I’m a fuckin’ Ghostbuster or something.”

“Just have Yoru sit on your shoulders,” I said.

Cygnus snickered. “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

He spent a couple seconds just looking around, contented. “Man, I love hardware stores. All these possibilities.”

I shrugged. “They’re okay, I guess.”

“You don’t smell the progress in the air?”

It got a smile out of me. God, the first in how long?

“Not really, no.”

“Sucks,” he said. “I’m gonna buy this and some nails and then we’ll head out.”

“Are they gonna let you buy that?” I asked him, as he walked past me to the aisle across the way where the nails were.

“Let me?” he replied, hand over his heart in mock surprise. “I’m eighteen now. They’d better.”

He crouched low at the rows of nail-boxes, looking for ones of the right size. Face wrinkled up in concentration.

Briefly, it occurred to me that I was now as old as Cygnus was when I met him.

“Man,” he said, reading my mind. “I’m getting old.”

“I don’t feel much different,” I said.

He went on like I hadn’t said anything. “Felt like I was fifteen yesterday. It’s been…what? Three years of this? Not—like, this specifically, but three years of the Radiant.”

“Three years,” I echoed.

“The time just flies on by, doesn’t it,” he said, the sentiment repeated.

The time goes so fast, but where is it going? There’s no future to rush to. No end-game there. Only time, ever onward. The next day always comes. That’s what got me through those days when I first went blind—who was to say I couldn’t use that again? Why fix what wasn’t broken?

So, again—I arrived at the same stop I always did. That simple thing that got me through the days—that thing I did best: I chose not to think about it. Every time I felt that I was about to, I started thinking about now instead. No next month—only the cool-blue glowing leaves on the trees we walked past heading toward the hotel. No next week, only the fresh sun-baked tar lines in the pavement, slightly raised over the rest of the road. No tomorrow—only Cygnus, here now with me, and the nail gun’s box in his hands and the bag of nail-boxes balanced precariously on top of it, and his stories about evildoers he’d cut down and mine about much the same, I thought.

Only now, only now.

No tomorrow, never ever.