Misha had told us that there was a code we needed to put into the elevator. A sequence of numbers that we had to enter on the floor-selector panel—one, four, six, seven, then all four buttons twice. That would take us down.

We approached the elevator at the other end of the hall slowly. I had droplets hung all around us—scanning the office-building lobby for any evidence of life, of which there were none whatsoever.

But we’d been in this situation before.

Cygnus held his nail gun with both hands, drawn like a pistol. Ava followed behind him, little vines growing out of her pockets and wrapping themselves around her wrists. I’d only seen this part of her in action a handful of times—normally, she did the talking while Yoru did the fighting, but that wasn’t an option here. There was no talking to be done.

Bell simply stood, at ease. Eyes forward, eyes black.

I pressed the call button for the elevator—only up—and the doors opened smoothly, slowly. Cygnus stepped up, laying a hand gently on the open doors, eyes closed—and then he leaned into the elevator chamber slightly, pointed the nail gun up, and fired a shot into the chamber’s ceiling—the nail going faster than my perception could track it, straight through the metal roof, and straight into the head of some hidden assailant waiting for us up there.

Ava sent a vine into the chamber then, sending it straight up and through the hole Cygnus made and wrapped it around something up there—the vine formed a watertight seal with the hole, so I couldn’t tell what was going on. After a moment, she said, “Nice shot.”

“Thanks,” he replied. “There’s no way that’s the only guy.”

“Obviously,” she said back, low. “Let’s get that code in and get this shit going.”

And Ava turned to me. “You do the honors.”

I was the only person who knew the code, as far as I knew—unless Loybol told the rest of them at some point, its secret was safe with me. Gingerly I stepped into the metal enclosure and I turned to the elevator panel, facing it. I reached out and touched the metal, dragging my finger down, feeling for the number symbol and the letters that followed, holding their locations in my perception with the droplets. And once I’d found all four, I splayed my fingers across the buttons and pressed: one, four, six, seven, all buttons once, all buttons twice.

Then I put my arm in the doorway to stop the doors from closing—but they made no attempt to. The elevator did not move.

Instead, the ceiling in the lobby dropped out.

From eight or nine different places the ceiling’s big square tiles fell and with them fell eight or nine assailants, who I didn’t have time to identify—we were already leaping out of the elevator, the four of us spreading out, Ava’s vines surging toward the nearest, Bell taking off running toward one, Cygnus’s nail gun extended and taking aim—and a piece of steel from the ceiling twisting down and skewering one of the assailants through the neck right as a nail pierced his stomach.

I took in a breath, standing right in front of the open elevator doors, and I searched for any water I could feel—and found that there were no pipes, no mains, nothing, in the entire building. The water was off. It’d been off for ages—of course, of course. The pipes were bone dry. As they obviously would be.

So instead, I grabbed what little water I could from the air, tightening my fist and allowing the water to condense around me, and I stretched my mind out to the fallen soldier who Cygnus had already killed and I took hold of his body and pulled as hard as I could—his final exhalation grabbed and dragged out alongside the vast majority of his body’s moisture, until I had two balls of water around my hands large enough to properly maneuver.

And then I felt the world around me—

Ava had snagged one of the assailants in vines, but another one (a nature-key in her own right) had intercepted them and kept them from choking out their target or from entering any bodily hole and destroying them from within. The assailant in question was an earth-key, judging from the chunk of ceiling tile they held (I now understood how all of the assailants were able to reach the ground safely), and piece of one of those tiles now leapt into his hand with a speed I thought only Loybol was capable of—

And I fired a piece of ice at him, shifting my weight forward to do so—

And the second I did a blast of air, I think from the assailant furthest away from the elevator, closest to the door, smacked into me and knocked me off my feet, sending me careening into the elevator cavity and smacking my head hard into the back wall where I sat woozy for a moment before regaining most of my bearings and firing an icicle dead-center into that air-key’s forehead—she conjured some kind of wind in an attempt to blow it off-course but she moved as if through syrup in my perception, too slow, far too slow, and the icicle pierced her forehead plate and sent bone shards and moist warm-red flying across the front of the lobby.

Off to the air-key’s left was Bell, jumping over the shapeless mush-pile of one of the three she’d already handled—a hole in her chest the size of a bowling ball, one in her thigh the size of a baseball. Things simply passed through her—a metallurgic, one of the four left alive, fired a bullet at her skull that simply did not penetrate: a hole opened up in Bell’s head before the bullet had even left its home, and the bullet went right through her without touching a single thing.

The metallurgic looked at Bell, eyes wide, eyes glowing, teeth gritted—and then he looked at me, across the hall, still standing in the elevator’s cavity.

And he reached out and clenched a fist and the elevator’s doors slammed shut.

With the droplets outside I could still keep track of the action, and I shouted out for Cygnus and called some of the droplets back to wrench open the door but found them slammed so tightly shut and expanded around their edges to form a totally watertight seal—so I pulled harder and more sharply and the metal began to heave and scream under the weight of my pulling, despite my splitting headache and dizziness—still I pulled with all my heart and soul and Cygnus heard my call and as soon as he had a spare second, he turned away from the action and focused on the doors—realizing quickly that it was a bad axis to fight on and instead calling out for Ava to get the metallurgic herself.

But there was no response from Ava—in the commotion I’d lost track of her and didn’t have time to re-identify her. I knew where that metallurgic was, though, because I had so many droplets hung around him that even though a closed door he burned red like the sky in Hell, and I pulled those droplets away for a moment as he was running and condensed them into an ice-spike to drive into his heart—

And his eyes were wide—his eyes were glowing—

And he, in the final seconds before the spike destroyed his heart—he clenched his fists.

And the elevator I was in made a great heaving groaning sound and dropped, knocking me off my feet, dizzy from the head-hit as I already was, fear and bile rising alike in my throat—

And I heard Cygnus’s scream—his scream of my name—and I heard a second scream, a gurgling noise that could only have meant Bell had reached another—

And all was drowned in the screeching of the elevator’s collapse dragging itself down through the shaft—and the distance and concrete and steel between me and the droplets became too great and I lost them, I lost Cygnus, I lost Bell, I lost the entire lobby.

I lost everything.

The elevator free-fell and it was all I could do to hold myself.

I lost everything.

0 0 0

The elevator fell for a good five or six seconds—I have no idea how far or how fast—and then it slowed and stopped, even though the cable holding it up had been cut.

It bobbed and screamed and I knew a metallurgic, another one, was holding it up.

And a slit appeared between the fused doors and I immediately shot droplets into the crack and spread them in tiny hail-stones across the hall that lay there but found nothing soft, no flesh, nothing—

And then the hailstones fell.

And then I could not move.

Eyes wide and unseeing I became fully and completely blind again, paralyzed, and I knew what was happening to me well because it had been prophesized since the day we went to war. This was the moment. This was the time—all else became nothing, all else became gone, and I knew what I had to do—

The doors creaked and heaved and dragged themselves open and vaguely, from the sound of footsteps, I knew that there were two figures deep in the hall, running toward me, but I didn’t know how far and I didn’t know where and all I knew was that this was the prophesized time and if I did not do what I was told to do now, then all was lost, the world was forfeit—we would die, we would lose.

This was the logical conclusion of all things.

I squeezed my useless stupid eyes shut and surged against the telepath’s hold over me—and I reached out and found the tiny ice particles, as small as snow, scattered on the floor outside the elevator, and I pulled them together into a single icicle with an exertion to rival God—

And the two figures had stopped coming towards me but I didn’t know which one was the telepath and which was the metallurgic. There was no way to know. I didn’t have enough droplets over there to resolve their forms. There was no time—there was only the prophesized action, the trumpets blaring harsh through my empty skull—now, Erika, now—prove your worth—show your resolve—take what you’ve been told and perform your greatest act in service of the world!

All of this for one more day—

All of you for one more second—

The pair was far but I was close, and as the doors began to open wider I spun the icicle around and it leapt through the open crack to the ground before me, and I lurched forward and swept it into my open hand, every muscle I had straining, every piece of my brain caught in turmoil, and I clutched the icicle sharpened to a point to pierce reality itself and I held it up to my temple, the point breaking the surface of my skin with just the lightest touch—

And I pushed—

And I tried to push—

Benji’s promise, my promise—

All of this for one more day—

But I could not bring it in. There was a crash from the hall as one of the pair fell to their knees—

“Just shut her off!” a voice—a male voice—shouted—

“It’s not that simple!” a second male voice shouted back—

“Just do it!”

“I’m—”

Their words became lost to me. My hearing cut out—and then my sense of touch shorted out as well, and suddenly I didn’t know what was up and what was down and I could no longer feel the cold of the icicle in my hands nor the pressure of the icicle’s point against the side of my skull and in the pit of my stomach I knew that something was wrong and that this was not death, this was not what death was supposed to feel like—there was supposed to be hellfire, there was supposed to be burning, there was supposed to be pain and the screams of the damned and the sense of finality and forever—

I pushed—

And for a moment I felt the pressure on the side of my skull again—

And then I felt it relieve.

I heard—in half-measures, as the sound cut in and out—something clatter. Something shatter against the metal floor of the elevator.

And then I felt nothing at all.

0 0 0

And then, I awoke alone. Barely. Scarcely conscious—awake, alive.

Alone.

Didn’t even try to move. Everything hurt too much. All my limbs too heavy—and I had a suspicion they were tied down, anyway.

The air came into my nose so hard and dry it made me cough.

Couldn’t move. Could barely think. Didn’t try to. Couldn’t raise the droplets. Too weak. Too slow.

I knew what I’d done.

Somewhere—distantly, or maybe it only felt that way because of my condition—I heard a voice. The second male one from before: “She’s up already?”

And the first: “We’re not ready yet, are we?”

“Not even close.”

“Then—”

“Yeah, I know. Gimme a sec.”

And then everything cut out—hearing, smell, touch. No longer aware of the completely dehumidified air scraping my lungs.

And then I was no longer aware of anything at all.