I suppose I should cover the aftermath.

The entire team was recalled to the Radiant’s home base for a little while. Loybol brought the captive there, shared some words with Ava, and then left for two days. I know what those words were about, obviously, but I don’t know what they actually were. I don’t know what she told her, and I never asked.

Ava did not speak to me after that. She didn’t speak to anyone, really, aside from Cygnus once a day or so. Cygnus, despite how much of a leaky faucet he often was, kept his apparent promise to her not to say anything to Bell or I. That was okay with me. I found that, for a least the first five days, I didn’t want to speak to her, either.

On the other hand, we did bring a new face back home with us. Loybol had said on the way back to the Radiant that aside from the losses, the actual goal of the mission was a resounding success. Not only did we successfully manage to get information out of one of the New York gang’s higher-ups, we did one better: we captured her, brainwashed her, and now she was more or less like one of the glorified standees that Loybol had wandering around the Radiant keeping track of the place.

Despite her distaste for obvious submission, she did occasionally ask those assimilated people to do basic maid-like tasks—putting things away or getting groceries for everyone. Things along those lines. If it’s an option, she’d said, I might as well take advantage of it. They’ll do things for us, too, since she’d said so—all we had to do was ask.

It made me uncomfortable, so I never used them. Cygnus saw it the same way I did. Bell more or less used them only as a booze elevator from the bar in the basement to the Unit 6 barracks, and Cygnus and I did take advantage of that, so I suppose one could say that we did use them after all. We drank a lot in those five days.

I don’t know about Ava. She didn’t live with us anymore.

0 0 0

Loybol spent a lot of time talking with Prochazka after those first two days. I felt like I never saw her outside of during breakfast, which we’d been making a real effort to take all at the same time. During those sessions, she—alongside Eliza, and with the captive next to her—would answer as many of our small questions as she could about what she’d been discussing, and what the path forward was.

In summary, the plan had changed. We wouldn’t be splitting up into splinter-groups anymore. There’d only be two: the remaining four Unit 6 members, and Loybol, Eliza, and Esther forming a new unit that’d be responsible for relaying information back and forth. We’d be the infantry, they’d be the comms.

I figured that was how it’d go down. They had Esther and we didn’t, and that made them simply more well-suited to it. Loybol needed Eliza to chaperone Esther, and she needed herself to plan with Prochazka and offer support where needed.

Apparently, managing the standees was tough from a long distance, and it was starting to wear on her. We were, more or less, just taking a pair of recharge weeks masked as “interrogation time.”

I remember asking Loybol where Sal had gone, since he was here before we left, and she’d simply told me that he’d been released up north and that was all there was to say about it.

0 0 0

This, of course, necessitated that Ava get used to interacting with us again, so on the fifth day she returned to the home base upstairs in our old barracks without a word to anyone. Cygnus confirmed for me that she’d been staying in the old attic spot where she used to grow weed, which was more or less where I figured she’d be.

She arrived sometime in the early morning hours with her pillow and a few spare blankets. I wasn’t awake then, but I assumed that was how it went. By the time I woke up, at around eight-thirty, she was there—still asleep.

It wasn’t a surprise. It had to happen eventually, I knew—but knowing she was there made the whole room go cold and alien, and I was immediately drawn toward the door like it was a drain.

I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go but I knew I sure as hell didn’t want to be there, just in case she woke up and saw me, sneaking around in my own room like I didn’t belong.

With the way I was now I couldn’t quite say how well she looked. If she was ghostly pale or still red from booze or thinning from self-starvation. I wasn’t about to send droplets under the blankets. All I could really gather from her being there was that she had decided it was time to try and see society again—if we counted as such—and make do with what she had.

Facing down at her then with these stupid empty sockets I slowly became aware: I was waiting for a fear reaction that never came.

I never liked Ava. I didn’t need her approval. What did I have to be afraid of?

I’d long since decided to let everything she said roll off me like so many raindrops.

I got dressed quietly—quickly—swiped the toothbrush and toothpaste I’d left on the nightstand Bell and I used to share and left.

0 0 0

Loybol saw me not too long after I’d gotten ready for the day and flagged me down in the hall.

“Erika,” she said, stopping me. “Can I borrow you for a second?”

“What’s up?” I asked. Part of me was prepared for this to be about Ava in some way, but it wasn’t.

“I had to wrap some things up before I formally started the interrogation,” she said. “And sometimes, people get catatonic after assimilation for a few days. The captive just regained the ability to speak, so I’m going to get started. Would you mind joining me?”

I didn’t have anything else to do that day aside from drink heavily, and I could still do that after the interrogation. We all drank heavily in those few days. It was a camaraderie thing that I willingly, actively partook in.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked.

“Back me up and remember what’s being said,” she said. “That’s all.”

I could do that.

“Okay,” I said, and she led me to where the captive was.

0 0 0

Loybol led me to that odd side-room Esther had talked to each of us in way back when. God. It felt like an entire lifetime ago at that point. I hadn’t thought about that room in so long that I’d forgotten where it was, but once Loybol opened the door and the droplets found the forlorn human figure sitting in a wheeled office chair toward the back, I found a fragment of memory that told me half the story—and the smell, like an empty classroom, brought me the remainder.

“Hello,” Loybol said, to her.

She offered a small wave and a handful of words. “Good morning, Loybol.”

“It’s almost noon,” Loybol replied. “Not that you’d know, I suppose.”

“I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours,” the woman said. “And I don’t feel tired at all. Honestly—I don’t feel much of anything, really. I remember my name, I remember my—my missions, but…everything else may as well not exist. Shouldn’t I be tired?”

“It’s a side-effect,” Loybol said. “You’re just as fatigued as a normal person, maybe a touch less, but you just haven’t processed it yet. Give it a few hours and you’ll collapse.”

“Collapse dead?”

“Asleep. There’s no death for you, Misha.”

“Of course,” Misha replied, shaking her head. Eyes just a touch too wide. “Of course not.”

She seemed alright enough. It reminded me a bit of Petri, from back in the Utica facility when we’d first realized this war was coming. Completely aware of what was going on and completely powerless to stop it.

I couldn’t imagine being in that spot. I’d rather be one of the maids wandering around the factory doing menial jobs than be stuck with full knowledge of what had happened to me.

And I will fully admit—I lingered on that thought longer than I think I should have.

“…started, shall we?”

Right. I needed to pay attention.

“Not like I can stop you,” Misha replied.

Misha was a bit short. Taller than me, but not by much. She had very close-cropped hair in a military style that ran counter to what we’d seen from other people in the New York gang, so I figured she kept it that way just because she liked it. She had a key, but I had no idea what it was and Loybol didn’t tell me, so I figured it wasn’t relevant.

Outside of that—tank top, jean shorts, like she was going to the beach.

I suppose coming to the Radiant counted as a vacation. She wouldn’t be doing any work, and she was in a fresh location, and I think that’s all you really need to file it away under that, right?

“Let’s cut right to the chase,” Loybol said. “Who do you work for, and where is he located?”

Misha’s face scrunched in concern for half a second, but her mouth opened and the words came out all the same. The entity answering that question wasn’t Misha—it just lived in her skull and shared the memories.

“He lives in a secret area of the building at 251 West 30th Street in Manhattan. If you go into the leftmost elevator and press one, four, six, and seven in that order, and then all four buttons at the same time twice…” She made a claw-like gesture to illustrate the point. “You’ll go down instead of up. From there, it’s pretty easy. The actual HQ is super bare-bones. It’s his office, an office for me, and a few more for the others on my level.”

“And what’s his name?” Loybol asked.

Again—Misha fought it. Valiantly, if I might add. But this battle was waged and lost in White Plains. Everything after that was a formality.

She managed to keep the word—the name Yoru and Benji had died for, the person our entire lives now railed against—off her tongue for the entire length of about three seconds. “Neville,” she said. “Neville Nguyen. Goes by Nev. He’s—he’s around fifty years old. No key, but knows his way around a deal. Smart guy.”

Misha cracked a smile. “You know, I’m not sure why I was trying to stop myself from saying his name.”

“Not that it matters,” Loybol added.

“Yeah,” Misha said. “But not in the way you think. It doesn’t matter because you can’t do anything to stop him.”

The slight did nothing to Loybol. “Really now.”

“Oh, certainly.” Misha shifted a bit in her chair, leaned forward. “Why do you think I was still there when you guys arrived? We had two full weeks of lead-time to get ready for y’all to storm the place, and I volunteered to stay, because by that point we all knew that we had this shit in the bag and it didn’t really matter anymore.”

“How do you figure?” Loybol asked, deadpan. Still unfazed, somehow—much more than me, who was struggling to hold a stoic face.

“Well, it’s like this,” Misha said, counting the names on her fingers. “Benji’s dead, Yoru’s dead. We all know Bell’s not going down with the ship, so she’s a non-factor, really. You and Eliza will dip if this ever looks totally hopeless because you guys have your own territory to deal with. You can’t afford to die here, so you won’t do anything that truly puts your lives on the line. I mean, look at y’all. You’re having the remainder of Unit 6 band together into a single four-person group to do all the dirty work while you, Eliza, and whoever the telepath who spreads your orders around—she’s definitely one of yours, you’ve got like six of them—just hang out in this factory and “make plans.” So what does that leave you with? Well, I’ll tell you what it leaves us with. It leaves us with three and a half months to put a bullet between Ava and Cygnus’s eyes. Ava’s probably going to take care of that on her own at this rate, and Cygnus is pretty weak, so—”

“He’s not,” I said, low. “You take that back.”

“Oh, she’s got a nerve, huh,” Misha continued. Smirking, even. “You wanna know what a real strong metallurgic looks like? Loybol’s got one running around unchecked in Hinterland. Goes by Sawtooth. Bit of an aside, but one of my exes was one of her exes, and he introduced me to her band. They’re super cool, no joke. I’m a big fan of hers. Once you’ve got me sweeping the floor at the Veritas all day I’d love it if you could get me an autograph.”

I suppose the downside of being Umbroid-filled was that it messed with your filter. I didn’t know who that was, or where the Veritas was, but all of it was enough to put a little crack in Loybol’s armor. “You were saying?”

“Mmm. Right. As I was saying, we’ve basically got three and a half months to kill Cygnus. We’re literally ahead of schedule. Can you believe that? Nev thought it’d be deep September before we got this far.”

“You forfeited your life for this,” Loybol said. “You volunteered to get caught? Did I hear that right?”

She shrugged. “More or less, yeah. I mean, it’s nothing against you, Loybol. Nev actually really likes you. He respects you a lot. You run a tight ship up there and he likes your model. Personally, I can take or leave it, it’s whatever to me, and it’s a bit late to implement it in NYC, but I know he’s taking notes. So don’t think this is about you—it’s not. It’s Prochazka he wants to stick it to. So he told me, when we were talking about this, that if I was okay with taking a new line of work, he could stick me in White Plains as a lynchpin for the plan. I’d let myself get assimilated, and he was fairly certain I’d retain most of my autonomy and all of my personality, but it would all but guarantee that we’d win, and he could collect me later once relations were repaired between the two of you because let’s face it, there’s no real bad blood here, is there? You don’t actually care one way or another how this goes.”

“People are dying under my watch, Misha,” Loybol said, quiet. “Don’t tell me how I feel.”

“Then you do it,” Misha said, resting her chin in the palms of her hands. “You tell me how you feel. You care that much? Why not put yourself in the line of fire? For real, none of this sideline planning bullshit. Put yourself as the last thing between our army and Prochazka’s skull. Would you take a bullet for him? Would you take a bullet for her?”

She stuck a finger at me, and Loybol did not even look. She didn’t even pause. The answer came so automatically and so naturally that I did not doubt for a second that it was the truth—it had to be. Only something pure can come so simply.

“Yes,” she said, instantly. “I would.”

Misha’s smirk faded ever so slightly. “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we? You’ve got a name and an address. You know exactly how to find him. Come and fucking get it, Loybol. Take what’s yours, if you think you can.”

“The amount of autonomy you have is a luxury,” Loybol said, in that perfectly even tone she used when something was a matter of life and death. “It can be reduced. Significantly.”

“Didn’t I already account for that?” Misha said. “I asked you to get me Sawtooth’s autograph when you’ve got me sweeping the floors at the Veritas. I prefer French maid outfits, for what it’s worth, but I’ll accept a butler suit if you’ve got a nice one.”

I had half a mind to strangle her on the spot, but the other half was trapped back a few sentences ago when Loybol said she’d take a bullet for me.

Loybol paused. Took a breath. I knew her well enough at that point to know she wasn’t going to follow through on that threat, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t at least consider it for a moment. From the silence that settled over the room, it certainly seemed like Loybol was going to drive some discipline into her.

She sort of did, I guess. “I think I have a use for you,” Loybol said, after a short time. “A use beyond sweeping, I mean—although there’s certainly plenty of that to do if you’d like.”

Misha shrugged. “Either’s fine with me.”

“Then let’s talk like adults,” Loybol said, “so I’ll feel comfortable giving you a job for one.”

That was enough for her. She saw the writing on the wall. “Okay,” Misha said. “Fine. I’ve had my fun. What do you need from me?”

Loybol cracked a smile, and for just a second that old fear of her I had rushed back in. The situation finally hit me, I suppose. Misha was already a slave, whether she knew it or not. Any flashy words or sentiments were meaningless. The battle was already lost. Loybol’d won a long time ago—so there was no point in being upset. No point in retaliating over meaninglessness.

If it were me in that chair, Misha’d be long dead by now—but it’s not, and it never really would be.

I didn’t want that. Still, even now, I don’t.

“Everything,” Loybol said, leaning in. “Give me it all.”