I’ll warn you now: I don’t remember much of this.

We’ll just have to make do with what I have.

0 0 0

Something vaguely sulfuric. I remember that much for sure. It was akin to Hell, I think, but maybe I was just imagining that. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Given the size and scope of my concussion—the blast had slammed my head against the back wall of that elevator hard enough to crack—it wasn’t really a surprise to me that I was having a hard time remembering the days when my head didn’t ache and all my senses worked the way they were supposed to. It wasn’t my first experience with a major concussion, but it was only my second, even if it was my second in a little under two months. Two or three, probably two. My first concussion was back in June, on my fifteenth birthday, and I knew it was at a minimum August now (because it was August 2nd when we attacked), but any number of days could have passed during my confinement and I’d have been none the wiser. The exact dates and times of each of these random recollections from my heavily concussed—and then heavily sedated—days elude me and I don’t expect to ever find concrete proof of their occurrence.

Like I said: I really don’t remember much of this.

From my vantage here in the future I can pick these memories apart with a more surgical eye, but I know enough to know that in the memory’s present, things were much less clear. I remember, in my brief moments of clarity, being terrified. Teetering on the edge of a bottomless pit—below a black-hole swallowing all and yawning wide above me. The light was gone, the future forfeited—I was alone and I had failed.

I had failed. That one rang the strongest. The skinwide sting of failure—you let yourself get captured, you didn’t obey Benji’s last request—his dying words, in a way. The droplets would not come. I sat in pure blackness. No light for my useless eyes and no moisture for my makeshift ones.

Rotten licorice taste of failure on my lips, the stench of it through my nose—and, I suppose, something vaguely sulfuric.

This prison had been prepared in advance. They knew, full-well, what it took to contain me.

I didn’t have much of a choice in how I recalled this. I have to use this clinical air, or I get lost in the sheer scale of how badly I’d managed to bungle the whole thing. From where I sit some seven years beyond this, and knowing what I know about how the next few years following this resolve, I can say with more certainty than any savvy reporter (who I’d never sit down with) or any studious historian (who’d never be able to dig this up) that my complete and total failure to accomplish the simple task that’d been set upon me (kill—kill! Them, yourself, everyone if that’s what it takes) knocked over the first domino. In the versions of this universe where Cygnus, Bell, Ava, and I successfully navigate down that elevator shaft, disarming all the traps and dispatching all the combatants, right down to Neville Nguyen’s office—smoothly removing his head from his neck and carrying it home, dragging it backwards behind us by his hair like the trophy of a dragon slain—in all those variants, I think we get another few weeks, at least.

I think things go down differently. They initiate in a way that isn’t strictly my fault.

The key lies with him—as always, it doesn’t strictly lie with me. As I’ve said, revolution follows in my wake. All this flagbearing comes with a price, and that price is that you meet and are subjected to the whims of many powerful people, including a certain Neville Nguyen—in other universes, dead; but in this one, alive.

Alive and interested. Alive, and having gotten everything he’d ever wanted.

At the end of the day—Misha was right. We weren’t ready.

We thought we knew what we were walking into, but we didn’t. We may have had the guts to walk in there, sure, but what we didn’t have were the guts to escalate. Nguyen’s men had shot at us in public—first in the backwoods of sleepy suburbs, and then through the windows of a house, and then it was bombs in daylight, in public—in full view of the public.

It was up to us to escalate. The ball was fully in our court on that. They’d already shown a willingness to make a mess and deal with the clean-up later, and we had to follow suit or we’d get left behind.

There was no moral high-ground here, despite what Loybol and Prochazka may have so stubbornly believed. Wars are not won with good intentions alone.

That, I guess, was lesson number one.

If we truly wanted to win—if we truly wanted one more day as much as Loybol preached she did—then it was up to us, to me and Cygnus and probably Eliza—to simply collapse the building Neville’s gang was based out of. Eliza could weaken the concrete, Cygnus could bend the I-beams out of shape, I could break the water-mains and clear the area of pedestrians. We create a national disaster and we deal with the clean-up later, from home.

Nobody would ever know it was us. How would they? Magic, at that point, was still locked to the imaginations of crazy people.

That was the correct solution. Nuke them from orbit. Take no prisoners. Show our strength in a manner and style befitting of us, the strongest collection of magical individuals in the world. Have Bell stand among the rubble and mash any survivors into gristle and slime. Have me stand with her and dehydrate the rest.

No survivors, no prisoners, no war—no more fighting. End the war.

But instead, we tiptoed when we were supposed to torpedo, and we lost on the spot.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I know that much for sure.

0 0 0

I came to those conclusions during my handful of lucid moments tied to a chair in that bone-dry room. I also, at some point, figured out—more or less—how they were containing me. It was right around how I’d drawn it up in my nightmares—close enough to what I’d dreamed that I’d once wondered if that was how they discovered it. As if I needed any other ways to determine how I’d dug my own grave.

For starters, the room I was held in had industrial-strength dehumidifiers running twenty-four hours a day. The air in there was dry enough to keep my throat parched to the point of being barely able to create any noises beyond a low creak-rustle, and my nose scorched enough to spontaneously bleed every once in a while. More than once I woke up and found the front of my shirt soaked in blood, or a cotton swab stuffed into the offending nostril, or both, if my mysterious attendants noticed the deluge a bit too late.

For food, they gave me dried fruit, crackers, hard chickpeas that hurt my teeth to crunch. Never a glass of water—but I found that, in one of my lucid times, that there was a sore spot on my arm that hadn’t been there previously. Later on, when I recalled that moment, I decided that they must have been giving me water through in IV while I was unconscious—the absolute bare minimum to keep me going.

And so I couldn’t quite conjure any droplets. I could barely make enough saliva to swallow, let alone spit, let alone spread out wide and feel.

Near as I could tell, I wasn’t being drugged. There was a telepath standing outside the room that would wake me up for meals and such. As prophesized—there was very little I could do about that. I didn’t even know where to begin with stopping an alien force from doing whatever it wanted in my empty skull.

So it was a difficult system to set up, but not hard to manage once it was going. It required some amount of specialized medical equipment, but nothing a reasonably-skilled garnet couldn’t handle without it.

A telepath and a dehumidifier were, as it turned out, all it really took to freeze the strongest water-key in the world.

0 0 0

Some time later—I have no idea when—I was awoken, and then there was a voice.

“Are you up?” It came slightly augmented, through a speaker somewhere—whoever was talking wasn’t in the room. A safety measure, even though there wasn’t anything I could possibly do to stop them.

And—frankly—at that point, I’m not sure I would have even wanted to.

At that point, I’d lost track of time completely, and I was rapidly losing track of language. The inconsistent way by which I’d been awake or not made just about everything I could experience feel fake, or at a minimum, filtered. Without any semblance of sight, and with nothing to hear but the low dark whirr of the dehumidifiers and the air, and with nothing to taste but my own metallic dry mouth and the occasional drop of nose-blood and the rare sweetness of the dried fruit or the salt from the chips, I’d found that I had to take refuge in the one thing offered to me: the complete and total silence, the detachment from all sense: deafness, sightless, touchless—heartless, mindless, lifeless.

I turned back into a stone.

So when those words came to me through that speaker, I had nearly forgotten what language was. I didn’t even know I was supposed to respond. What could I say? Physically—what sounds could I make? Fear kept my tongue locked down. I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth would resemble, in any way, a language spoken by man. In my mind it sounded like the raw-wailing, tongue-lolling drooling mutters of a full-eclipsed invalid. The dehumidifiers dragged my spirit out back and shot it. There was nothing to say or think—any syllables would have had to come from the vocal chords alone.

I had nothing to say that wouldn’t immediately conjure the words associated with my failure.

But—when I heard those words, I moved. I still reacted, even if I wasn’t fully aware of what I was reacting to.

I could have let them kill me there and I screwed that up, too. A few more days and I would have reached nirvana, I was sure: just a couple more words to forget, a few more smells to lose, a bit more taste to wash away until I could be truly alone with the echoing empty chasm of my mind. Until I could fall backward and out, and I would never again have to worry or wonder.

I was so, so close.

But I perked up. Weak as I was.

“You are,” the voice said. What was the emotion again—happy? Relieved? I wasn’t sure and not even the wisdom of hindsight can bail me out on that one.

I didn’t move. Didn’t know how to.

“Well,” the voice said. I assume, now, that there was a camera, or a bunch of cameras, in that room that the owner of that gently-metallic voice had access to. “If you’re up and listening, we can talk.”

Talk?

“I guess you probably can’t,” the voice went on. It—he, I was fairly sure, although it was a bit high for a man’s voice—sighed. “God. It’s a little surreal, you know that? Seeing you like this after everything.”

Blank.

He cleared his throat. “Well, listen up. My name is Matthew Biiri. I’m—I’m the telepath assigned to making sure you don’t try anything fancy. We’d like to take you out of here, but we first need your solemn promise that you’re not going to do anything rash. It’s not like this room is going anywhere—and it’s probably not going to be used for anything else—so we can always just put you back if you mess up. But if you pinky-swear that you’ll be a good girl, we’ll fix you up to normal-ish and proceed. I can’t imagine you can talk right now, so I’ll settle for a nod. Okay?”

The loss of language was wishful thinking. As soon as I processed where Matthew was going with it, the rest of his words were crystal-clear. The clearest thing I’d ever seen.

Nothing had ever been so obvious to me. Nothing ever desired more.

I was so desperate for it that I opened my mouth and tried to speak, and the unholy cracking noise—and subsequent cough—that erupted from my throat was enough to put my whole body in aches. Matthew chided me: “Nods, Erika. Up-and-down or back-and-forth.”

Up-and-down. Up-and-down.

“Thank God. Frankly, this whole thing was starting to make me really uncomfortable anyway. You held out way longer than I thought you would. I don’t know what Prochazka was teaching you guys over there, but…”

Matthew trailed off. “Whatever. I’m gonna get started. See you in a bit, okay?”

And the speakers turned off, and I was once again locked in silence. I don’t know when he knocked me out again for the rehabilitation. It’s not like there was much of a difference between consciousness and darkness.

But I know that I woke up in a softer place.