We stood in our row—Cygnus, then Bell standing up straight for a full eight inches over him, then Ava who refused to look anyone quite in the eye, and then me.

We all stood with our hands folded behind our backs, at ease, like true professionals. Like real soldiers before the sundown.

We all knew exactly what we were walking into.

This, as Prochazka explained, was the plan:

It was too risky to simply drive up to the building in Manhattan that Misha had mentioned. Our leadership had ascertained that there was no guarantee that the adversarial Neville Nguyen even lived in that building anymore. Our data was only as good as Misha’s time of capture, and Misha admitted she hadn’t received any orders from New York in almost two weeks when we got her.

So, before we marched in and gassed the place, we had an obligation to verify that anything was there at all.

This sat unpleasantly with us. If it turned out that Neville wasn’t there, and that all of this was a ruse we’d fallen for, then we were completely up a creek. Neville would take his victory lap and we’d get picked off by assassins posed in high city windows, perfectly undetected.

This was our only lifeline.

Prochazka remained confident. “He’ll still be there,” he said. “It’s too much work to actually relocate a headquarters, especially one that’s been in use for as long as Neville’s. The New York gang in its current form has been running things over there since the mid-nineties, and while I’m sure there are loads of secret basements in Manhattan, there’s probably fewer than you might think. On top of that—Neville has an interest in actually being where he says he is.”

“He does?” I’d asked, falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

Prochazka nodded, eyes closed. “He wants to see you personally, doesn’t he? Knocking someone out and dragging them halfway across the country is harder than it sounds.”

I pursed my lips and did not speak again.

“Neville’s plan,” he said, “is to lure us over there and catch us off-guard somehow. We’ll be walking into enemy territory, so—”

“No, we’ll be walking into enemy territory,” Ava said, low. Gesturing back at us. “Don’t act like you’re gonna do shit.”

Prochazka stopped. Raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

Cygnus leaned back slightly and glanced at me, around Ava’s back. Bell didn’t, but she cracked a tiny smirk that was just enough to show me we were all on the same page.

The three of us, yesterday, had discussed this as a possibility. Ava had too much rage to be totally bottled up, and given that killing me was out of the question, the next best thing would be to snap at the man upstairs.

All these orders to protect me had to come from somewhere, didn’t they?

“You’re gonna sit here and watch us die,” Ava said. “What part of that didn’t make any sense to you?”

Ava was still fairly disheveled, despite cleaning up quite a bit today. In the past week she could’ve passed for one of the homeless drunks we occasionally saw in town on late nights, but when I came across her in the hall today she’d seemed better. I only caught a passing reference, but she was standing up straighter, sober, her hair not quite as matted. I had no way of telling what the look in her eyes was like, but I could easily imagine it: still dull, still dead. Empty. Like mine, or at least, what she saw in mine.

And to think I used to want to model myself after her. Now it was more like the other way around.

A lot of that had slipped away by then, though. She wasn’t standing up as straight as she had been that morning. She swayed a bit. Biting her lip to keep the words in order—maybe she was drunk, maybe not. I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to get close enough to her to smell the booze on her breath.

I had my guesses, though.

“Ava—”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s fine. Really. I’m okay. I mean, fuck this, right?”

Her words dropped out of the air and nobody moved to pick anything up. She continued. “You’re sending us to die, Jan. This is a suicide mission.”

“It’s not a suicide mission,” Prochazka said. He did not move. His face didn’t change. All of this went straight through him. “It’s the next step. That’s all.”

“No. You don’t get it. I told you, it’s fine. I don’t care that this is a suicide mission. I just want you to say it. Just once, when you say you’re giving us the business, I want you to actually fucking tell the truth. We’re all gonna die.”

“I know you’re upset about Yoru,” Prochazka said, slowly. “But—”

“You think this is about Yoru? God, Jan. I miss him every day but I’ve been over that shit for days. Love comes later. I don’t have time to worry about petty shit like that right now. All I want you to do is say what we’re all thinking. I don’t care about the mission—I’m gonna do it no matter what. I’ll die for you, you piece of shit. You know it, I know it, we all know it, and it doesn’t matter because I’m still gonna go out there and try. And I don’t know if that says more about you or me.”

Earlier this week—maybe yesterday, maybe the day before that—Cygnus, Bell, and I all put five dollars in a pot on Ava. Cygnus won if Ava said something about Yoru, Bell won if Ava lashed out at Prochazka specifically, and I won if she cried.

It turned out that we were all getting our money back. Oh well.

“You’re brave,” Prochazka went on.

“Brave?” Ava asked, shaking her head. Fists hard. Tears down her cheeks like streaks of ice. “No, Jan, I think I’m just retarded.”

Bell rolled her eyes. Nobody seemed to notice it but me.

I thought Bell was going to leave it at that, but then she decided against it at the last second. “Are you done?” she asked, glancing at Ava. “Can we let the adults talk now?”

Bell generally wasn’t the type to publicly choose violence like that, so Cygnus shot me another look, to which I could only respond with a returned glance and a shrug. I’d had this crisis already. Ava could do this shit on her own. She certainly didn’t need my help.

Ava pursed her lips. “Oh yeah. I’m done. That’s all I wanted to say. To be honest, I just wanted to scream for a minute. I’m gonna get so unbelievably fucked up that I’m not going to know what direction the sun’s in, and then I’m going to choke out a bunch of people with vines, and then—I don’t know, maybe I’ll hang myself or something. I haven’t gotten that far. But I finish what I start, at least, and I started this, so I’m seeing it through one way or another.”

Five of the six of the assembled outside of the two active parties were more-or-less equally confused. Esther glanced at Loybol, who didn’t say anything. Cygnus and I shared our looks. Bell had her eye-roll.

Eliza, who’d been uncharacteristically silent throughout this whole thing, was the only one who seemed like she’d seen this coming. They’d been talking a lot, hadn’t they?

Maybe this was rehearsed.

Ava cleared her throat. “I’m done, Jan. I’ve said my piece. Go ahead.”

Any evidence that she’d been crying was gone. Wicked away like the tears were never there.

It was an act convincing enough to me that my mind started to wander to quarters: maybe, with my last few seconds here at home, I needed to go back up there and find that old styrofoam cup I kept in my single drawer of clothes that held all my spare change, so I could split my five in half.

It could be said that Ava would mention her lost love, and it could be said that she’d lash out at Prochazka, but no matter what it came to, it could not be said that she’d cried. I was almost certain she did—but in that moment I remember second-guessing.

I guess she’d always have that over me, no matter how many times I told myself I wouldn’t cry for anything anymore.

0 0 0

Prochazka finished his talk with the details. We had rooms booked for us in the hotels that flanked our target building: one toward the front and one toward the back on the left side, and one in the center on the right, making a rough triangle that surrounded Neville’s supposed home.

This obviously excluded me, who’d be performing the role of bodyguard, rotating between the rooms as necessary to dissuade any would-be assassins. Hotel room windows don’t open, usually, and especially not tenth, fourteenth, and eighteenth floor ones, which were the elevations we’d be watching from.

Normally I’d be upset about being left out, but I was okay with it this time. Reconnaissance was mind-numbingly boring and I didn’t want any part of it.

I was told to rotate my shift every two hours, except on every third rotation, where I’d go after an hour. This did have a vulnerability where the three watchers would be alone in the ten minutes it’d take for me to run across the block to the next hotel, but that was the best we could do with only four soldiers.

Technically, we could’ve had eight, but that wasn’t on the table. The brass did not ride into battle.

“But above all else,” Prochazka said, finishing his talk. “Use your discretion. You’ve been on enough missions now to have a sense for it. I trust you all the make the right calls on the fly. Esther won’t be able to get info to you in any reasonable time frame, and I’m not giving you cell phones. The enemy’s cell phones are what got us this far in the first place—without Sal’s phone, I don’t think we’d be anywhere near this close to victory.”

At the sound of that word, my breath caught. He still believed, didn’t he? If he did, then I needed to, as well.

But then I thought about it a second longer and I realized that the statement was completely meaningless. He was obligated to say that. What else could he possibly say? This is our last chance; we’re about to lose? Even if that was the truth?

No. He could never. What kind of general would he be then?

I’ve always thought of non-optional lies as a backdoor to truth. When the only choice is to fluff up a limp sentiment as the truth and parade it out to the masses, the correctness of it doesn’t matter anymore: you have to believe, you must believe. At that point, what’s the harm in swallowing the bait?

So I closed my eyes and I swallowed my fear and I did my very best to believe.

And that’s all I have to say about that, I suppose.

0 0 0

We were instructed to take public transport as far as we could, so we all walked over to the bus stop in town about an hour later and waited there for our ticket to the front lines.

I wasn’t looking forward to going into the city. Syracuse was right around the maximum city size I could handle. Even back in the old days, when my father took me to a few museums in New York, I’d been uncomfortable with the sheer number of people there. There was simply too much going on. I couldn’t possibly give every little thing the time of day it deserved.

Even though I was older, that part still worried me. I might’ve been better at ignoring random small stimuli like that, but bouncing droplets around to keep my surroundings steady in a place as hectic as that sounded just as hard. All I’d done was trade one hobble for another.

As if that’s not the story of my life. At least there was a coffee shop on every corner, from what I’d heard, so as long as I could keep myself sleeplessly wired for four straight days I’d survive.

The other alternative was to get absolutely blasted in the hotel minibar before we started to try and relax, but I was going to have to be quick, so “jittery but alert” was preferable over “relaxed to the point of lethargy.”

Ava, as she’d said while talking at Cygnus on the bus, was looking forward to the trip. She was from the actual city-of Chicago, and she absolutely hated any half-assed signs of civilization.

“Either pack everyone together or don’t,” Ava said. “This shit—” she gestured out the window at the rolling farmlands the bus was probably rumbling past—“should’ve been fully automated a long time ago.”

“Well, you’re the nature-key,” Cygnus replied, blunt. His eyes did not leave the book he’d brought. “Go on, hop to it.”

“I would, but I’m dead as fuck,” she said. “Ain’t no way I’m getting out of this alive.”

She said that with a borderline grin. We sat in a square cut-out of the bus’s interior, Bell and Ava in the two seats in front of us and Cygnus and I together behind them. Ava spent most of the trip turned around, arms draped over the back of her chair, with both Cygnus and Bell desperately trying to ignore her.

Bell had it easier, given her position near the window, but it was tough for Cygnus.

“Awfully cheery for a death-row inmate,” Cygnus said back, with the same treatment as before.

“I don’t know. I feel like I should be more upset than I am, but—things are just really clear now. I don’t know, Maybe I overrated autonomy. Maybe I just wanted to be pointed at shit.”

She gestured vaguely at me. “Maybe Erika was right all along.”

I blinked. “Um—”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Ava said, still bright. “This isn’t an apology. If anything, I should’ve been meaner to you.”

That more or less passed straight through my head. “Oh.”

“The only person I owe an apology to is Bell,” she went on.

Bell perked up at the sound of her name. Like Cygnus, she’d brought a book along for the bus ride. She must have figured that was her cue, because she closed her book and joined the three of us in the conversation, if this could really be called one. “Oh?”

“Yeah.” Ava didn’t quite turn to face her, but she angled herself slightly enough. “I shouldn’t have called you weird. I totally understand why you don’t want to associate with us.”

“No, you really don’t,” Bell said, flatly. She looked down at her book again.

“Seriously, no. I do. I get it.”

“You realize that if you get taken hostage, I’m letting you die. Right?”

“That’s fine. The feeling’s mutual.”

I don’t think Bell was expecting that, but given the pattern of Ava’s responses I kind of was. “Fair,” Bell said. “Although I don’t think you have to worry about me being taken hostage.”

“’Cause they’ll just shoot you.”

“They’ll certainly try,” Bell said, committing to her decision and reaching for the book again.

We fell quiet. Bell and Cygnus turned back to their books. I didn’t bring anything of the sort—and out of force of habit I angled myself toward the window as if I could see out of it.

Ava saw it and chuckled. As soon as I heard that—as a whip-crack across my neck—I flushed red and reached up to the latches to open the window a crack.

“C’mon, everyone. Chin up. We’re almost done.”

“We’re not,” Bell said.

“Are you just saying “no” to everything I say, or—”

“This might be the last mission, but there isn’t a chance in hell this is actually close to the end.”

Ava paused. “You don’t think he’s gonna be there.”

“Of course not,” Bell replied. “If Neville had half a brain cell he’d be managing this war through a Zoom call out of Bermuda by now.”

None of us were willing to actually entertain that thought, as realistic as it seemed. Neville bailing and running this whole thing remotely would mean that everything we’d fought for was completely null and void. It was just another entry in the long list of things that would do that: “if Neville wasn’t here” joined “if Neville decides to just go scorched-earth”, “if knowledge of magic gets out next week anyway”, and “if Neville gets what he wants with me.”

I shook my head and let them scatter. There was just a small handful of realities in which anything we did here meant anything to anyone and we just had to assume that one of them was the one we called home.

But Bell’s grimace didn’t waver and I couldn’t help but worry all over again.

Ava eventually found an answer for her. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said.