Tomorrow, of course, always comes. The time presses forward forever.

I’ve always taken solace in that, even though a lot of people don’t. The inexorable march of time was, and still is, to an extent, comforting to me. It’s an absolute that can always be counted on. No matter what: seconds are seconds and sixty of them makes a minute. If you lay down, close your eyes, and start counting nice and slow, the next day will eventually come.

No matter how bad things can get—the sun always rises. That’s what they say, right?

Two days went by before we got called.

0 0 0

We spent that first day mostly in the hotel room, leaving once for breakfast, once for lunch, and then just calling in room service for dinner. Somehow, despite all the commotion in my life in the last nine months, I hadn’t lost the card tied to my checking account. I’d almost forgotten that I even got paid: the concept of money had more or less vanished into the back of my head since I didn’t have any outstanding bills. Any time I needed to swipe it to buy food, it magically cleared. I couldn’t imagine how much I actually had saved up, but figuring that out meant either logging into my bank account online—which was theoretically possible, but I didn’t have a phone or a laptop, and the idea of walking into a library and explaining my situation to a librarian made me turn inside-out with embarrassment. There was also the possibility of giving Cygnus my bank details and letting him log in for me, but I was told to never do that, and even though I trusted Cygnus with my life, I figured that was more than enough.

I could only assume I had a lot of money. Prochazka told me I was getting paid an adult’s salary. I’d probably be able to put a down-payment on a house by now, except for the fact that I looked like a child so nobody would ever lend to me, and I wasn’t prepared to commit to a mortgage.

Things like that—mortgages, car payments, a family, a white-picket fence and two and a half dogs or whatever it was—seemed so inconsequential now. Even as I got older, they never got more important. I passed by a dozen of those every time I went outside. There was no way to transition what I was into what fit into that. It simply wasn’t possible—an existence like that was a different plane, a totally different life, than what I led. It might as well have been the life-cycle of a different species for how little I had in common with it.

Key or no key, I never would have made it as a normal person. Three years at the Radiant taught me that much, if nothing else.

On TV, too, people would talk about things along those lines. The stock market crashing or housing prices falling or the hot new toy all the kids wanted for Christmas and the words about them passed straight through my ears as white noise. People used to tell me it’d matter when I got older, stuff like that ages “like the taste of broccoli,” I was once told, but it never did for me. I couldn’t imagine they would have even if I’d never gotten a key, if I’d never gotten out from under the thumb of my father. If I left myself to rot in the corner of a basement in Red Creek until there was nothing left but flesh, bones, and instructions. Would I have ever cared about who the president was? Would it have mattered to me what kind of winter it was going to be? Nothing short of nuclear war would dig into my skull—and even then, maybe not.

Cygnus and I mutually decided not to watch the news. Not like they were reporting on anything that mattered, anyway. Once I learned about the world coursing underfoot with keys I couldn’t take any news story seriously, anyway. What was arson but an angry fire-key? Politicians yanked around by capricious telepaths, flesh-manipulators running amok in the streets. Everything had an explanation, sure, but if the explanation given was just something snatched from thin air that non-keys could process without imploding, then did it really ever matter?

God—thinking back on it now: Benji was right. I have no idea how we got so lucky. The only proof of God I can conjure is that in a decade or so of social media and twice that of twenty-four-hour news, we managed to keep knowledge of magic under wraps for as long as we did.

Someone, somewhere, should’ve blown the lid off this a long time ago.

Those folks with their white dog and their picket-fence kids and their two-and-a-half houses had no idea how fragile the existence they walked in was. How little it’d take to turn the whole thing completely upside down: just a tiny shake and all of it would fall out. Nothing in life was truly bolted down, and no amount of buying power or home equity or corporate-ladder climbing would save them when the rules of life had to be re-written.

It wasn’t God, obviously, although I could only assume some of the people in charge of the magical-crime policing groups had him on speed-dial. It was the work of people like Loybol and Prochazka that kept things down. Doing just enough to keep those with keys and without ill intentions quiet, and doing just enough quieting to keep the rest in line.

Cygnus had a cool new nail gun.

0 0 0

That first day might as well have been Christmas for Cygnus. He opened the nail gun’s box slowly, slicing the tape over the edges with a nail whose end he flattened and sharpened for this purpose, taking care not to rip any piece of cardboard. Every plastic bag inside was slit open with a single stroke along a clean line. This was a ritual: he opened everything he got like this, he said. It made him cherish what he owned to take such pride in accepting it.

Yet another note for the box.

And from the box emerged the nail gun: smooth all around. Unmarked by dirt or soot or the pain of time. He held it like a baby.

“I gotta do some modifications,” he said. “But oh man, this is gonna be so cool.”

“Why a nail gun?” I asked him, laying on the bed up against a stack of all the pillows in the room.

“Something new,” he said. “I’m super jealous of y’all that don’t have to get up close to the people you’re killing. Sometimes you want to just put something between their eyes without having to stare right in the whites of ‘em, you know?”

I knew Cygnus had decapitated someone with a sword before, and I’d done the former but not the latter so I could only half-relate, but the concept itself wasn’t too hard to grasp.

“Yeah,” I said, turning away, mostly to stretch. “I can see that.”

He exhaled fast through his nose in a half-chuckle. It took me a second but I figured out why. “I could just, I don’t know, throw nails at people, but that just doesn’t have any pizzazz factor. Plus, it’s tough to get a good hold on something so small and they don’t fly super straight, so having a chamber to straighten them out would help a lot.”

He lifted the nail gun’s body out of the box and held it up like a sacred chalice. Grabbed the handle with two hands and pointed it around the room at various things—the TV, a lamp, the chair by the window.

“Like Christmas morning,” he said. “This is gonna be so sick.”

“What’re you going to do with it?” I asked. Vaguely I remembered some home improvement show that was on in a waiting room somewhere and I fumbled my way through the thought. “Don’t you have to—um—press it up against a wall or something? Or the floor or…wood, or…”

“Yeah, there’s a safety thing right here,” he said, tapping the tip. “It’s a little pressure-nub that stops the gun from firing if it’s not pressed in. It’s just a mechanical system, so…” With his thumb, he pressed on it until it went in, and then took a piece of a nail he’d broken off in his other hand, flattened it into a tiny disc, slid it under his finger, and fused it to the gun’s nozzle.

“There,” he said. “Should just be able to pull the trigger now.”

“What’s it powered on?”

“Me,” Cygnus said. “I mean, it’s electric normally, but I’m never gonna charge it. Who needs that?”

I shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lazy.”

“I doubt it. Besides, it effectively locks any non-metallurgic out of using it, which is totally fine by me. Not like anyone’s ever gonna have it but me, but still. Security. You know.”

“I guess.”

He stood up abruptly. “Hey, let’s go out.”

“Out? What if they—”

“They’re not gonna. This’ll be an hour, tops. If they were gonna get us, they would have already. Or we’d get a heads-up.” He was already loading a box of nails into his pocket. The decision had already been made—the least I could do was put up some token resistance so I could say I didn’t just roll over. That was the right move.

“Loybol’ll be mad,” I said.

“She’s not our boss,” Cygnus said, flashing me a smile. “Call me when Prochazka gets his old ass out here to chastise us for having fun and then we’ll talk.”

I shrugged. He knew as well as I did that I wasn’t going to put up any more of a fight than that.

I slipped my shoes back on and we went out.

0 0 0

It was about a ten minutes’ walk to the stand of trees Cygnus had identified earlier as being thick enough for testing. Nobody’d see us there, and there weren’t any houses around to disturb. We were home free, assuming we got there in one piece.

He took me through the hotel lobby without drawing a single look, holding the nail-gun in his left hand so it was facing away from the front desk, his other hand extended slightly behind him—an invitation for me to take it, maybe, but I couldn’t be sure, and my hesitation closed the window. After a few moments he let that hand return to his side, wiping off the moisture until it mostly disappeared from my perception, and it wasn’t offered again.

We passed through the automatic doors at the front of the hotel and stepped out into the evening air.

0 0 0

Once we arrived at the little forest, if it could even be called that, Cygnus stopped and so did I. It was only barely enough trees to cover us. I could still clearly hear the road noises surrounding us from two sides, still smell the asphalt of a parking lot just outside where we were.

It wasn’t so much a forest as it was a group of survivors.

The gun was already loaded—he’d taken care of that back in the room. I had half a mind to ask him what his plan was—how exactly he planned to fire it—but there wasn’t much of a point. Even if he could explain the machinations of his magic, it wouldn’t mean anything to me.

The result was all that mattered. The nail buried halfway through a forehead.

This, surely, was all an attempt at catching up to me. Metallurgics, I’d gathered, were fairly weak as far as keys went. It was tough to do anything super flashy. Even in a city, where you’d think being able to manipulate metal would be at its most useful, earth-keys had the market cornered by being able to flex concrete. The niche for metallurgics was vanishingly small, frankly, and I sort of felt bad.

The fact that he still had to buy a nail gun just to have something he could shoot was a bit sad. He could’ve thrown the nails, sure, he’d already covered that, but it just wouldn’t be the same. The sorts of things water keys or earth keys could do without trying, he needed a tool to emulate.

Swords are cool and all, but they were replaced by guns in warfare for a reason.

Cygnus hadn’t said anything in particular that made me believe that. I’d simply looked at the evidence before me and decided it had to be so. He’d never said anything about a nail gun or being annoyed about having to get up close and personal to his prey before (and I’d remember if he did, I hung on his every word), so it was only when he knew he’d be seeing me again that this idea must have struck him.

He’d heard about how I took down Bell’s would-be assassin, maybe, and got jealous.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly ask him if this was true. It was conjecture and it had to stay that way—I’d already decided that and so it was so. My guess was simply a guess, even though it was as true as I decided it was.

Still, though: I could not deny that that gun made him happy.

I watched him fire that nail-gun into trees from fifty feet or more, the nails flying so straight and fast because he’d flay the flat heads of them as they left the gun like arrow flights. Bolts red hot and water-evaporating. They sank through the bark and wood with barely a splinter and within a couple of shots he’d gotten the technique down to a science. There was not a human alive who’d survive a shot to the head from that thing. A two-inch nail in the skull was enough kill anyone or anything, and there was nobody alive, surely, who could move fast enough to deflect one of those. Not a stronger metallurgic or anything besides.

Me, maybe.

I asked him, after a moment, if I could try.

“It’s not charged,” he said. “You probably can’t.”

“No, I mean—I just want to hold it. You can shoot it.”

He walked over to me and held the gun out. I took it from him lightly, gently: holding it just like the newborn he’d made it appear to be when he’d bought it. Pulling it free from its plastic birthplace—what, eight hours ago?

It was already a part of him.

“I’ve gotta be touching it too,” he said. “I get the best shots that way.”

And so he came up next to me, his hand half-over mine. I knew perfectly well where the tree was, but I let him direct the gun to its target anyway.

I wanted to feel the power surge through that weapon. Power that wasn’t mine pushing a projectile I did not create into an object I could not possibly feel anything for—and there was no better time for that than here and now, with Cygnus and Cygnus’s nail gun, his hand over mine, his power alongside mine.

A confession: I had a simple desire.