I awoke in that softer place and I could breathe—and as soon as the air came through my nose and didn’t hurt, I let myself hope, and as soon as I let myself hope I reached out with my magic for a source of water. Even just the air would do, really, as the sheer relief I felt pumped a bit of adrenaline through me—but I found one: a glass of water, on a table next to me.

I took out what I needed—more than what I needed, and cast the droplets out wide, and I let out a deep breath. It was all I could do to not cry.

I was alive.

“Don’t take all of that,” a voice said from next to me. “You’re supposed to drink some.”

It was the voice from earlier. Biiri?

I pushed the droplets over to him—coming on stronger than I wanted, so he probably knew I was looking—and found a man there of slightly under-average height, thin, with a tight t-shirt and similarly tight jeans, side-swept hair and an oddly small nose. Around his neck were a pair of over-ear headphones with no cable—either a Bluetooth model or an older, wired pair with that wire removed and worn purely for fashion. For whatever reason, either option seemed equally likely to me.

For a moment, I let myself feel that relief and joy—and then I remembered where I was and why I was here, and it all vanished again.

I almost let go of the droplets.

“Take a breath,” he said. “We’re not gonna hurt you. Neville’s been real clear on that.”

I did. I took a breath and let it out.

I sent the droplets around the room, just to think about anything else. I was in a hospital room—a real one, not the approximation we had at the Radiant. It must have been a special branch of some New York hospital where they didn’t ask all that many questions.

Outside of my bed (soft, clean), there was a small table upon which stood a bulbous lamp and the glass of water I’d used as a source. Matthew Biiri sat in a chair near the door. Past him was an empty countertop upon which would normally be some medical instruments, I think, but instead only had empty jars. They’d cleared the place out for my arrival.

This, I figured, was also part of the plan somehow.

“You know,” Matthew said. “I kind of thought you’d be taller, for some reason.”

I turned toward the source of the sound. He went on: “I mean, they told me you were a kid, and—well, you are, but like…I kind of thought you’d look bigger. Delinquents on TV are always tall, regardless of gender, but…Jesus, you’re tiny.”

I was around normal height for the age I looked, so I didn’t lean into that statement much. I found I didn’t want to say anything to him, anyway.

“You know, you killed pretty much all of my friends,” Matthew continued.

He said it in such a matter-of-fact way that I didn’t quite understand his meaning at first.

Matthew went on. “I used to talk to Weston a lot. Do you remember Weston?”

I narrowed my eyes. The name sounded vaguely familiar—I thought I knew it from somewhere—

“Well, he was the sniper that almost got Bell. Most of the folks who went out on missions against your Unit 6 didn’t expect to come home again, but he did, since he was going to be so far out of the action. I remember, when we were talking the night before he left, that he thought the whole thing was no big deal. He’d be a mile away from you and there wasn’t a chance in hell you’d be able to catch him, even if he missed.”

Matthew cracked a sly sort of smile, snorted a little. “It took us a day to find his body, but that’s because we were looking for a body, not a puddle.”

I took a breath and tried to speak, but my throat was still too dry, and the rush of air coming in just made me cough hard.

He gestured to the glass of water. “Drink before you talk. I can get more for you if you need it.”

I reached over for it—not looking, but knowing where it was perfectly well anyway—and brought it to my lips. Tipping it forward with the intention of only taking a little sip—I knew I was supposed to take it slow—but as soon as it touched my parched tongue my willpower snapped and it was all I could do to not chug the entire thing.

God—it was so sweet, and so good.

I had no idea how long it’d been since I had an actual glass of water to drink.

Matthew leaned over to the door, opened it a crack, and said to someone outside, “Hey—get us another glass, okay?”

I finished the glass, sucked in a deep breath. Didn’t cough, and God, I could have cried.

I think I remember trying to, back in that room, and not being able to conjure even that much.

“Can you believe they’ve got two armed guards out there?” Matthew said, sticking a thumb behind him. “Seems unnecessary if you ask me.”

Now that my throat hurt a little less, I tried to speak again. My voice was still raspy and low. Weak-sounding from disuse. “You don’t sound all that torn up about it,” I managed, to Matthew’s surprise.

That said—my throat did hurt after talking.

“Man, you sound like shit,” he said. “Sorry.”

I didn’t have a reply to that. After a moment, he added, “Oh—oh, you weren’t talking about the guards. You meant the friends comment, right?”

I nodded. It was easier that way.

“Yeah,” he said, exhaling. Crossing his arms behind his head. “Us Biiris aren’t a particularly emotional bunch. It’s kind of a family policy.”

There was a knock on the door, and Matthew opened it a touch again to receive the glass of water passed to him. “Thanks,” he said, flashing the guard behind the door a thumbs-up with his free hand, and then he stood and walked the glass over to my nightstand.

Returning to his chair, he said, “I was pretty good friends with most of the strike team tasked with picking you guys off. All the people with keys around here hung out with each other and not a whole lot else, so we were all fairly close. I think Unit 6 was like that too, right?”

I nodded again.

“Makes sense. Like attracts like, right? Anyway, out of the…forty…two? I think it was forty-two of us that we started this war with, we’ve only got twenty-three left. So you can imagine how well everyone else is taking that.”

I pursed my lips.

“Me, I’m not too upset. I mean, I miss my friends, sure, but it’s war, you know? This kind of thing is why we get paid the big bucks. If there wasn’t a risk, we wouldn’t be getting fat stacks.”

“That’s weird,” is all I could manage before the scratch in my throat stung too much. I took the fresh glass and had another sip—a slightly more disciplined one this time.

“It’s the family training,” he said, shrugging. “Everyone in my family works in a position kind of like this somewhere for someone-or-other. It’s our business. We’re good assistants. The best around, really.”

I didn’t even know where to start with that, so I didn’t. Luckily for me, Matthew was very fond of the sound of his own voice. “That’s why they picked me for this. My family’s honor rides on me being civil with you, so I’m gonna be. God forbid they got Jessie or Johan on this. I think Johan would have just killed you and then turned himself in. Jessie probably would have left you in the dry room for a lot longer.”

After a second, he added, “Jessie and Johan are the other two telepaths.”

I shrugged, which conveyed I figured well enough.

Matthew stretched his legs out. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know what Neville wants with you either. My boss knows, but he told me not to tell you. I think Misha knew, but—”

“Misha didn’t know,” I croaked.

“Pardon?” he asked.

I took the glass and drank some more. Once my throat was a bit more lubricated, I elaborated: “We captured her and Loybol assimilated her. She didn’t know.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. “No shit.”

I nodded.

“Huh. So if she didn’t know, then…” He counted on his fingers. “Neville himself, Talia, Ivan…that’s probably it. Wow, it’s gotta be something pretty insane if he kept it from Misha.”

I gave Matthew a halfhearted shrug. I still felt too generally weak to offer more than that.

“Well, whatever. I’m glad you’re talking and…you know, being reasonable. I was really worried I’d have to push you down a bit more, but I’m happy it’s not coming to that.”

I wasn’t sure I had the strength to meaningfully fight back at the moment anyway—but given the scope of my treatment now, I also wasn’t sure force was the right answer regardless.

If they were willing to keep me alive and in functional health, the least I could do was sit, listen, and maybe figure something out later. And either way, Matthew was a telepath of at least adequate strength, I had no idea what to do against that, and if I did anything too out of line, there was always the dry room waiting for me again.

And—God—I’m glad I don’t remember much of that.

As if on cue, he went on. “Prochazka must have been a real motherfucker.”

I looked at him. At some point during his earlier rambling, my attention had shifted back toward the center of the room, away from him, but at the sound of Prochazka’s name I re-aligned.

“It’s so weird how you just, like, know where I am even though you’re blind,” he said.

“I can hear you,” I said.

“No, like—you can look me in the eye.”

“I think I could do that with just the sound of your voice.”

“Maybe,” he replied. “Either way. He told you to push an icicle in your own skull if you ever got caught?”

I went cold. He was a telepath, so there was no use in lying—no use in locking up.

Slowly—achingly—I nodded.

The tip of that icicle still rang cold and clear on the side of my temple like a sinus headache.

“And you were gonna do it?”

Again—a nod, nothing more.

He shook his head in disbelief. “God, you are stone-fucking-cold. No wonder everyone here’s scared shitless of you. I don’t know what gets done to a kid to turn them into you, but—you know what? I don’t want to know.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, dully.

He snorted. “At least you’ve got a sense of humor.”

“Nobody’s ever said that to me before.”

Matthew shrugged. Glanced over at the door. “Well, some people find humor in hopelessness, you know? I mean, the war’s over now, right? We’ve got you. That’s it.”

“Cygnus, Bell, and Ava are still out there,” I said. And as soon as the words left my mouth I found myself doubting.

“Ava’s dead,” Matthew said. “Jason got her about half a second before Bell turned him into sludge. I think Cygnus and Bell got away, though, so I guess you’re technically correct.”

“The best kind of correct,” I mumbled automatically, repeating something Benji had often said that I hadn’t thought about in ages.

He snickered again. “Sure is.”

One of the guards, I guessed, knocked on the door again. Matthew opened it a bit, and the voice from beyond said, “Biiri, we’re ordering food. You want anything?”

The voice was artificially higher. Forced, somehow.

“From where?” he asked.

“Tacos.”

Matthew made a face. “From where, dude?”

“Antonio’s?”

“Awesome. Get me a carnitas burrito, everything. Face-melter.”

“Got it.”

The guard went to close the door, but Matthew curled his fingers around the edge of it and pulled to stop him. He turned back to me. “Erika, you want anything?”

“Um—”

I wasn’t all that hungry. Frankly, I was worried anything I’d eat would go right back up, especially something rich. “I’m okay.”

“You should eat. Trust me, it’s been a long-ass time since you’ve had anything vaguely approaching caloric.”

I blinked. “I’ll…I’ll just have what you’re having.”

“You sure about that? The face-melter sauce is not a joke.”

“Without—uh, without that.”

“Sure.”

He turned back to the guard. “You get that?”

“Um—n-no,” the guard said back.

“Clone my order, no face-melter.”

“Okay. Now—let go of the door.”

“Gotcha.”

Matthew let his fingers off the door’s edge and the guard yanked it shut so fast I had to double-check to make sure Matthew hadn’t gotten anything chopped off.

And so did he, apparently. “Jesus,” he said, flipping his hand over. “Those guys.”

He went back to sitting mostly upright and turned his attention back to me. “It’ll be thirty minutes or so. Be sure to eat slowly.”

“I know,” I said. And automatically, I added: “I’m not a kid.”

“I mean…” Matthew shrugged, and that was all he had to say to get his point across. I turned away from the door, away from him, and pointed my eyes back toward my feet, poking out of the end of the hospital bed’s sheet. On reflex, as soon as I noticed, I curled my legs in to make sure everything was covered.

So much for not being a child.

Matthew shook his head. “I really can’t stress enough how glad I am that you gave up.”

I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to react to that, so I didn’t—I hoped he’d say more, since the pattern suggested he would, and I was rewarded for my patience. “You know how long you were in there?”

“How long?” I asked, although it wasn’t much of a question, truly—I didn’t really want to know.

“A month,” he said.

I blinked. “It’s—it’s September?”

“Labor day,” he said. “September 3rd. So, a bit over a month. A month and a day.”

I reached back over to the table and took the glass of water. Sipped it slowly just to do something with my hands—something to try and take my mind off the truly dizzying amount of time I’d spent in the dry room.

Thirty-one days. And I hadn’t been rescued.

“Are they not coming?” I whispered—not really intending to say it out loud, but not really caring that I did.

Matthew shrugged. “If they did, I’d be impressed. Security around here is tight.”

I didn’t respond. He, as was tradition at that point, went on. “It was really something, y’know. I mean, the narrative for most of the ground-folks when we started was that you were some kind of weird mutant monster-thing who killed for fun and didn’t experience emotions, and that we weren’t supposed to view you with any semblance of pity or anything, but…that was only for the grunts. People like me didn’t get that memo. We were told that you were taught to be like that, and that—well, it wasn’t really your fault. You were too young to fight back when Prochazka stole you away from your family. You were too young to know any better when he trained you to be…I don’t know, this.”

He gestured broadly at me. “And it turns out the truth is somewhere in the middle, I guess.”

“He didn’t steal me away from anyone,” I said, hollow. My eyes, surely, just as blank out and in. “I wanted this.”

“Did you?” Matthew asked me. “Or did you just not want what you had?”

Again—I found myself silent.

“Keeping you in the dry room for that long was legitimately the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I want you to know that. The family training tends to bleed any trace of empathy out of us, but…lord, it was hard keeping you locked in there for that long. You just kind of…I don’t know, stared blankly at the floor. Like you were trying to cry and couldn’t. It’s probably a good thing you were catatonic. Doesn’t seem like you remember much of that.”

“I don’t,” I said, quietly.

“That’s good,” he said, and it almost sounded like he meant it.

Matthew stretched, arms crossing high over his head. “God. I’m glad that’s over. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I hope there’s no hard feelings here. I tried to not make it too miserable. I mean, I had to, so you’d agree to be civil, but…it’s business. You’ve done similar stuff, I’m sure.”

I thought, briefly, of the untold dozens I’d dehydrated in a similar manner.

“I guess,” I offered.

“So we’re good, then?”

He regarded me clearly then: looking me in the eyes near as I could tell. Chin held upright by the fist of his left hand, that elbow balanced in his right’s palm, the whole assembly balanced on his crossed legs. He looked at me the same way a dog would look at a new table—vaguely bemused, vaguely interested, but nowhere too close to either side.

Just enough to look engaged.

I couldn’t imagine he actually cared. What reason did he have? He put me in the dry room for a month—and by his own admission he didn’t feel all that much. I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another on the Biiri family as he’d described, but if it was all as he said, then it was only yet more proof that all of this was elaborate empathy-theater and it didn’t matter what I said to him.

What I did have, though, was the knowledge that I’d been blown out by my own unchecked animosity too many times in the last six or seven weeks. Lashing out, or saying what I really felt, or whatever you wanted to call it, hadn’t been a very successful strategy for me as of late. As good as it felt in the moment, the high was always short-lived, and the comedown never dulled: it stung just as hard and throbbing-wide across my skull the first time as every other.

If there was one thing I learned from those last two months, one thing I could separate entirely from my success or failure at playing soldier, one thing I could lift from the twisted iron nettle of the war and the people that were shredded by it, it was this: I needed to pick my battles better.

Dried out as I still was, nose stuffy and eyes cracked, reeling from the scope of time lost and people lost, brain still half-pickled from the catatonic haze—and the true realization of where I was and what had just occurred not fully digested yet—I knew that this wasn’t a fight worth having.

Just take what’s handed to you, Erika, and don’t ask too many questions. Doubt was what got you into this mess—doubt isn’t going to get you out of it again.

Those were my words. That was what I believed.

And knowing Matthew Biiri was waiting politely for my answer only made the call easier.

In hindsight, it’s easier to dissect these events for what they were. In the moment I may not have known why there was an olive branch being extended to me despite everything I’d done, but what I did know was that the universe didn’t seem particularly interested in making sure I got my just desserts. I’d been rewarded for heinous deeds more than once, and punished for trying to be kind just as often.

In the moment I took this all to mean that I shouldn’t ask questions about why I was being spared when I knew in my heart I didn’t ever deserve to be let out of the dry room. If I was Matthew, I would have let Erika Hanover rot in there. Slowly, biologically—without magic except to keep her still—let her experience the pain she inflicted on so many others.

That seemed right. That seemed fair.

But I’ve learned that one’s vantage in a moment is rarely ever enough to really tell what’s being done behind the scenes. It’s only later that you learn why anything is truly done—and sitting there on the hospital bed, I could not possibly have understood the mechanism by which I was going to be saved.

All that matters, I guess, is that I made the right call in the moment. I arrived at the correct answer even if I didn’t know why.

“We’re good,” I said to Matthew. “It’s fine.”

And he smiled. “That’s wonderful, Erika.”