The realization was brought forth by the sound of a crash, a shattering, coming from the other side of the building where Yoru and Eliza were—I’d left them alone, I’d let my guard down.

Again—again!

I kicked the chair around and leapt out of it towards the door, leaving the old man stunned where he was. Sprinting out into the hall again and whipping around the corner so fast I’d almost lost my balance and just barely coming to a screeching halt in front of a built-up wall of crumbled sheetrock blocking me off from the room Yoru and Eliza were in.

“Yoru?” I shouted. “What’s happening?”

“We’re fine!” Eliza shouted back. “Don’t break through! It’s holding up the ceiling!”

“How did they get in?”

“They didn’t! They just put a regular-ass fucking bomb upstairs. Go around and meet us in front. This place is gonna be swarming with cops in like five minutes.”

Let my guard down again—

“Go!”

I snapped to attention again and turned, running back towards the room where the old man was, but this time banking a left instead of a right and shoving through the emergency exit door there into the open air.

The humidity opening my eyes like daylight.

Behind me—standing in the office’s doorway, terrified—was the old man.

“What’s going on out there?”

I flung the droplets in a wide arc all around me and couldn’t find a single living soul—the explosion had scared everyone off, I supposed—so it was now or never.

“Get out of here!” I said to him. Gesturing outside. Holding the door open.

He didn’t move.

“Go! You’ll die if you stay here!”

The old man took a single uncertain step towards the door, and then a second one, and then he broke into a run, turning to me as he went past, saying, “Thank you!”

Gasping.

He made it about ten feet outside before he crumpled like he’d been punched in the stomach—doubled over, gasping still, gasping harder—

I knew—

“Yoru!” I screamed, taking off toward the front of the building, dashing around the corner onto the sidewalk and full-on sprinting for the puddle of shattered glass and the cloud of heavy dust in the air that masked my droplets.

“Yoru, he’s innocent!”

I leapt over the bottom of the shattered window, somehow not scratching anything as I went in, and found the two of them there—Eliza invisible in her dry dark hole, and Yoru crouched on the floor deep in concentration.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Eliza asked.

“He’s innocent!”

“Who—”

“Shut up, Erika, I’m busy,” Yoru snapped.

“The guy behind the building—”

He shot me a look I could only imagine was a toxic glare. Even without proper sight I knew. “Which one? I’m choking out four fucking people right now. I need you to stop.”

I kept on. Babbling. Panting for breath from the adrenaline. “The old man—he was in the office, he’s the guy Sal told me about, he doesn’t know anything—he doesn’t know anything! He’s innocent!”

“Sal told you that?” Eliza asked.

“Yeah, and—”

“And you believed him?”

I stopped dead. “He—he’s too old to have a key. He can’t—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eliza said, throwing her hands in the air. She walked over to the wall she built and reinforced it somewhat, the cracks in the sheetrock repairing themselves under her hand. “You really are just a kid.”

It was all I could do to not stamp my foot and scream. “You’re not listening to me!”

“Because it’s not worth listening to,” Eliza said. Any trace of tension gone. “You got played. Let’s not double down and make it worse, okay?”

Clenched my teeth. Clenched my fists. For just a single goddamn second—

“He—”

Eliza whipped around and looked me dead in the eyes. Grabbed hold of both my shoulders and held them, knowing full well how much that made me squirm.

Knowing how much that paralyzed me.

“No, you listen to me. We are going to have this conversation exactly once and then never again. You said there was a man back there, right?”

My world was an empty sphere—a hole shaped like Eliza in front of me, locking me in place—and all I could do was stand and watch the adrenaline leave my head and leave me with nothing.

“Y-yeah.”

“And he was old?”

I nodded.

“So he was the only one in the building? Hiding under a desk or something?”

“In a cabinet.”

“Perfect. Makes sense. And the bomb upstairs went off when it was just the two of you alone?”

“I—”

“So you do the math, okay? Who could’ve known you weren’t with us? Who could’ve known it was you, me, and Yoru here—knowing we wouldn’t be watching the area above us because we were too focused on the street?”

No response.

Idiot.

She took her hands off my shoulders and flicked the center of my forehead. “Stupid. You got tricked. Don’t worry, it happens to everyone. Now go check and make sure Loybol’s alive, then come back and help me roll some fucking heads. Okay?”

I stood frozen for a millisecond—an eternity in my world—and then turned, half-leaping, for the stairs. The adrenaline rush returning—the fear subsiding—

We could worry about this later. Always later—tomorrow, tomorrow—

I made it halfway down the steps before Loybol’s voice called out to me and said, “I’m almost done. Buy me sixty seconds and then we’ll get out of here. I’m taking her with us. She’s going to make it.”

I didn’t send any droplets down there. I didn’t want to know where in the process Loybol was.

I didn’t want to feel it.

So I came back up the steps and I went about collecting my bearings, taking a single deep breath as I ascended and letting it out slowly. Focused myself—imagined the energy in my body focused on my sternum, someplace central to everything—a hand over my wrist to feel my heartbeat. Reminding myself that I was here.

The beat was fast—too fast—but it was there. It would slow. This was nothing to me.

Everything was.

I arrived at the top with my soul’s metronome locked, and I exhaled the rest of my breath and shot my droplets out in every direction.

The world revealed itself to me for about three seconds, until there was another minor earthquake, a blast loud and violent enough to blow out my eardrums. My droplets were gone and the world went black—

And just as I gathered enough time to remember where I was and who I was I became aware of something long and flat hovering over my head, shaking—something held in place by magic, surely, because it wasn’t attached to anything.

Just floating there over my head in a cloud of dust.

I’d forgotten to breathe and the second that thought hit me I sucked one in and coughed it back out, hard. A voice called something out that I couldn’t make out over the ringing. Somehow, I was still on my feet. How was I still standing? The blast had frozen my legs in place, maybe…

“—Erika!”

Eliza’s voice. I turned toward the source of it but my ears hadn’t recovered enough to pick it out, and the droplets were too condensed around the rock hovering above me, clinging to it like the edge of a cliff, and I knew I had to let go of it or find more and that meant focusing on something else other than the slab of stone hovering over my head, hovering thanks to Eliza’s hand—who’d drop it on me, surely, in any other place at any other time.

Trust, trust—again and again, forever into infinity.

But now—

I let the droplets gathered around the rock scatter. It was a cloud in the sky, nothing more—nothing that required my attention. The ground was a better place to look. I repeated that to myself, out loud so I couldn’t possibly lose it in the empty cavern in my head. Repeated it over and over again—the ground, the ground—

And along the ground there was a body, and next to the body there was a pool of warm moisture.

“Grab his hand!” Eliza’s voice cracked across the back of my neck again. “We have to get out of here!”

The body—Yoru’s? I didn’t remember his legs having so many pieces.

I shook my head and slapped myself on the temples twice, just like he’d done in the car, and returned to the present world.

Droplets swung out wide and I was once again alive.

I ran forward, out from under the rock, after which Eliza shouted, “I’m dropping it!” I raised a thumbs-up and she did, letting that piece of concrete slam into the ground behind me and kick up a whole fresh cloud of dust—but I was ready this time, swirling the droplets around to pull the sediment away and keep myself from losing perception of anything.

I crouched down next to the puddle—it wasn’t mine, although I felt something warm and sticky on my shoulder that probably was—and grabbed Yoru’s hand with both of mine, saying, “We’ve gotta go, Yoru—c’mon.”

There was no reply, and he was stuck tight to the floor—pinned down, I realized, by a piece of the wall I’d written off as meaningless rubble. It must have knocked him out.

I turned around but Eliza had already seen my plight from where she was in the basement stairwell—the sheetrock and brick rubble on top of him rolled away, and behind me the stone subfloor from was left of the upstairs area split down the center with a thunderclap and each new half dragged themselves apart to reveal a gravel-strewn pathway through which I could drag Yoru’s unconscious body.

Eliza shouted again: “Erika—the sirens!”

Distantly, I could hear them too—far-off wailing from somewhere in the sky. Time had run short. I couldn’t guess how long we had and I didn’t have time to try. With the rubble cleared off Yoru and the path opened all that was left was to drag him to that staircase and we could figure out what was next from there.

So I took his limp hand and pulled. Maybe it was the adrenaline talking, but it wasn’t as hard to move him as I thought it would be. Still heavy and ungainly as all bodies are, but not impossible. Like dragging a couch.

I was more or less able to do it on my own.

Eliza was still standing in the doorway, and for a second I thought she was going to jump out and help, but instead she turned away and went back down the stairs—calling as she went, “I’m turning this into a slope, so just shove him down!”

I didn’t respond. I breathed, instead—ignoring the tell-tale sharp metallic smell, ignoring the dust, the dull stinging throb in my shoulder. There was me and the sack I dragged.

I let the droplets leave him as soon as I got him moving—it was more important to be hyper-aware of the building and the street outside, even though the air was still and there wasn’t a single living soul around.

We were perfectly alone, just like we were before the blasts.

I got to the stairwell, stepped aside, and pulled Yoru’s arm hard as I could into the opening until he was completely through—and painting a warm path behind him in what I could only assume was his blood.

There was a lot more than I thought there’d be.

And half a second later, a shout, a spew of profanity, and then: “Erika, get down here! We’ve got to fucking go!”

Without a thought I jumped into the opening and slid down, trying not to think about the wide warm line I was probably on top of. A playground slide, more or less.

And as soon as I got to the bottom, Eliza—and Loybol, together, grabbed hold of the bottom of the concrete staircase and flipped it upward, in a horrific crackling and screeching noise, sealing us into the basement alone.

The bodies of the people Loybol and I had killed were gone. Loybol had flipped them under basement floor, I imagined—like weeds in a garden bed.

And finally—with only our heavy breathing for company—we were safe.

Loybol and her captive toward the back of the room, Eliza and Cygnus closer to the center, Yoru and I near where the steps used to be. Cygnus wasn’t looking at me. Nobody was.

Everyone was looking at Yoru.

“Erika—” Cygnus started.

“What?” I asked, and then I made my next mistake.

I put droplets over him. I looked down.

Yoru didn’t have any legs. They weren’t just broken—they were gone. He only had half a skull, too.

There was no question. No doubt.

I didn’t have to take his wrist under my thumb to know.