I’d be lying if I said that nothing Misha said stuck to me. Having to see her for two more weeks certainly didn’t help matters much. Every time I caught sight of her in the hallway and she’d smile and wave at me I’d remember—and then I’d remember again, and I’d return the gesture.

Weakness—as always—was not an option.

It turned out that her statement about working for Loybol was, in fact, true. I didn’t get to ask Loybol about it for a day, but when I did, she was up-front about it, and repeated the same reasons Misha had given me.

The rest of Unit 6 had varying feelings on Misha. Cygnus didn’t like her at all, which surprised exactly nobody. He especially hated how she liked him in spite of it. “She just sees a weapon when she looks at me,” he said. “Nothing else. She spits in the face of everything we’re trying to do here. Everything we’ve ever done. Honestly, I can’t believe you’d even stoop to talking to her.”

“I’m bored,” was my response to him.

“So am I, but I’m not out here interfacing with terrorists.”

Ava, as I found out from Cygnus second-hand since she wouldn’t talk to me for long enough to go into details on something like this, actually liked Misha a decent amount. That also wasn’t much of a surprise—Ava and Eliza got along fairly well, and Misha was basically the same person as Eliza, anyway. Plus, they could talk shop together, since they were both nature keys.

The only thing Ava had told me was that she’d learned a few new tricks from her, which Misha had shown her under the banner of “not that it matters, anyway, since none of this will help you survive what’s coming.”

Misha, to her credit, didn’t just go around doomsaying all the time. She could have and none of us would’ve been able to stop her, since Loybol had taken her in, but she generally stayed civil. Most of her time was still spent alone with Loybol, who I assumed was doing her best to exhaustively ensure that no part of Misha could possibly disobey her in a way that mattered.

I’d asked Loybol, one day, if she’d lend us Misha to help fight the war since she presumably knew all the plans, but she’d shot that down. “Misha knows one version of the plans,” she’d said. “Presumably there’s a new head of operations now who’s built new plans based around us knowing the old ones. She’ll stay with me.”

I wanted to ask Loybol why she wasn’t going to provide us reinforcements if Misha was so confident we were going to lose, but I didn’t. At the end of the day, I couldn’t really tell the difference between fact and bluster, and despite all the time that’d passed between our first meeting and now, I still was not quite able to let myself look stupid in front of Loybol.

0 0 0

On August 1st, Prochazka came to us and relayed the news: it was time. Today, we were heading out for the final push. Hell or high water, we were bringing this home.

All four of us were there, so all four of us heard it. Those last words.

One last jump. One last try at it.

Stick them clean in the heart or don’t do it at all.

Prochazka stood at ease. “I know this probably isn’t the way we drew it up,” he said to us. “But it’s clear to us now that this slow approach isn’t working. By leaving Loybol and Eliza here, alongside Misha, we’ve got plenty to defend our home with in the event that they try and sweep in while you four are occupied. You know where to go and you know how to get there. We have a name and an address. It’s time to strike.”

“Why not just wait until winter?” Ava asked.

“Winter’s four months from now,” Prochazka said. “Five, if we’re looking for the first real snowfall, which doesn’t normally come until January. That’s too long to bum around here, staying safe. They’ve already had too long to prepare—giving them an extra five months to bolster their defenses is out of the question. Plus, it’s going to be on-and-off thunderstorming for the next three days. It’ll be ninety and dripping-humid every day. That’s about as good as a blizzard, isn’t it?”

I nodded. I’d seen the forecast, too—and a few days ago, when I saw this stretch coming up, the thought crossed my mind that Prochazka might take advantage of that time to do something drastic.

This counted, I guess.

Prochazka looked at his watch. It was silver, if I remembered correctly, a cheap unit for someone with expensive tastes. “It’s eleven o’clock now,” he said. “Ava, Bell, Erika, and Cygnus—you’ll be heading out at nine tonight. This is everything you’ll need to know.”

For the first time, in all my memory, Prochazka came to our table in the middle of the barracks. He took one of the chairs—Yoru’s, now that we had an empty slot—and sat down as one of us.

He sat down and told us all there was.

0 0 0

After a few hours of the various logistics and pathways and situations, he turned us loose. Meet outside the factory doors at nine o’clock sharp, he’d told us, and the rest of your time is up to you.

Once he was gone—and out of earshot—the four of us dissipated. Ava left to go to her old attic room. Bell returned to her bunk and opened a book, and Cygnus and I headed outside.

I could already feel the humidity creeping in. I had to imagine the sky matched it—some gray stormclouds like warships sailing over the horizon. To anyone else, it’d be an ill omen, but for us it was anything but.

I’d had a different relationship with the sky once I went blind. Before, you can see it—the clouds, the blue expanse, the bright hole of the sun, the pinpoint specks of stars, and so on—but I didn’t have that luxury. Above me was void. There was ground and then there was nothing. Even though, logically, the sky’s too high for any human to properly reach, it’s still a lid on the world. It still gives people a sense of a ceiling—a shield between us and ours and the vast nothingness of space.

I may as well have been walking on the moon. Back in the day, when this was all still new to me, I used to send the droplets straight upward, just for fun. Just to see how high I could reach. I found, though, that the distance tended to make me dizzy. The world was just so huge. Even a water-key of my caliber was still short of being able to pull down the clouds.

Believe me—I’d tried.

I would lay in the grass and let tiny droplets rise on the warm air straight up into the sky and I’d keep track of them for as long as I could. A weather balloon into the great unknown.

But after a while what’s up started to feel like what was down, and the sheer distance between me and it would start to feel like I was teetering on the edge of a pit—and a few moments after that, inevitably, I’d let them go.

I never did reach a cloud. I never did hit the roof of the world. I had to assume it was impossible, and anything that might’ve been up there was strictly out of reach.

And to think people used to believe God was up there somewhere, reclining on a star and giving sinners the stink-eye from on high.

Cygnus was looking up there, too, as we walked toward the coffee shop we frequented downtown. We didn’t have much in the way of actual plans, so we just did what we’d normally do.

We didn’t really know any better.

“It’ll be good to get away from Misha,” Cygnus said, after a longer stretch of silence than I was prepared for. He shoved his hands in his pockets roughly and kicked at a piece of loose sidewalk. “God, I fucking hate her.”

“I’m not really a fan, either,” I said, more or less copying what he was doing. “Even though she likes me for some reason.”

‘Same,” Cygnus said. “God, what was it she said to me? She “admires my spunk” or some shit like that?”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Yeah. She’s just so full of shit. I kind of hope Loybol rips her brain out, honestly. A year or two of drooling and sweeping floors might do her a bit of good.”

We fell quiet for a moment. Someone had to address the elephant in the room, I knew, so I did it before it got any worse. “She really does think we’re going to lose, doesn’t she?” I said, after a time. Quieter than I’d meant to. Slower, too.

“We’ve still got you and Bell,” he said. “We’re fine. They can’t do shit to us.”

“As long as Bell’s here,” I replied, dully. “And I’m not being mind-controlled.”

“And none of that shit’s going to happen,” he went on. “God, please tell me you’re not actually listening when she talks to you.”

“I try not to, but it’s hard. She’s persistent.”

“Then you’ve gotta be persistent, too.”

“Persistent with what? Not listening?”

“Yeah,” Cygnus said, stopping. We’d arrived at the café we were known to frequent. Prochazka always said it was bad to show your face around a place too many times, and we followed that rule in general, but we ignored it just for this. They had the best pastries in town, and Cygnus wasn’t settling for second-best. It was also fairly well-known around Unit 6 that if you ever needed to bribe me for any reason, it could be done with one or two of their mint double-chocolate cookies.

We all have our weaknesses, I guess. I could take or leave sweets as a general statement, but I’d shoot someone for a lifetime supply of those.

Although, I suppose that statement doesn’t mean as much when I say it.

“I mean, I know you’re getting better at that,” Cygnus said. He reached out for the door’s handle, but didn’t actually take it. “Ava told me all about what happened at the bar. I can’t say I agree with the way you started it, but shaking that off is a big step forward. In the past it wouldn’t have been as easy to get back to normal.”

“I guess,” I said, turning toward the door. In the past, there were flyers and things taped up inside there—ads for local shows, the café’s hours, the like—but now it was just a blank wall with hinges.

One of those things, I suppose. You don’t realize all the things you lose until you meet the hole they used to fill.

“You don’t sound convinced,” Cygnus said. “It’s a good thing shit like that doesn’t knock you down anymore.”

“It didn’t really make me feel much of anything,” I said. “It sucked for a few minutes and then I got over it.”

“That’s how it should be,” he said.

“I should just be numb to it?” I replied, a touch sharper than I wanted to. Turning a bit red, I went on: “Because—because that’s how it felt. Like it just bounced off me. Is it supposed to do that? Am I supposed to just feel…I don’t know, nothing? Pity? No—no, it was nothing. I didn’t really feel anything at all. I mean, the first thing I remember thinking after she left was…was that she couldn’t possibly kill me even if she wanted to. I went straight to the logistics of her acting out her anger. It didn’t bother me at all that she hated me enough to try, and…I don’t know. I feel like it should have.”

“I don’t agree,” Cygnus said, and the bluntness of it startled me. “If Ava wants to have a hissy fit over something that’s ostensibly not your fault, then she can go scream in a corner by herself. We all knew something like this was going to happen eventually, didn’t we? Yoru got over it when Benji dropped, and Ava’s going to have to get over it too.”

Maybe Cygnus was just in a sour mood. None of that sat right with me.

“Yoru didn’t get over it,” I said, quietly. “I saw him a lot more than you did. He wasn’t okay. When Benji died, he got—he got sullen. It really hurt him, and he never really got passed it.”

After a pause. “He lashed out at me, too. In the car, on the way there.”

“Yeah,” Cygnus said, shrugging. “Yoru was always a bit two-faced. He was just better at it than Ava was.”

“I really thought we got along,” I said. “I really thought we had—I don’t know, maybe not a real friendship, but we at least—you know, were work acquaintances or something. Civil coworkers. Ava, I…if I’m honest, even though she said so, I’m pretty sure she always hated me, but I thought Yoru was—I don’t know, helping her with that. I just…”

I shook my head. I didn’t have the brainpower to process things like that, and either way, one of the involved parties was dead and the other was dead to me, so it hardly made sense to worry about it any further.

We’d have plenty of time to discuss the nuances of it in Hell.

Cygnus decided that we’d stood around long enough, and went to grab the door handle. “You’d be surprised how easily people lie,” he said. Pulling open the door and leaning against it to hold it there.

He made a sweeping gesture with a free hand and added, “After you.”