And so with all that new information in mind, I was able to resume counting the days just as I’d done before. I found myself both surprised and underwhelmed by the amount of time that’d passed while I was in the dry room—it was somehow simultaneously more and less than I’d thought. Thankfully, the catatonia worked in my favor there, and I remembered surprisingly little of the experience at large—but at the same time, it was long enough to wholly split my life into a section of before and a section of after: just like my life split when Prochazka found me in the woods that day three and a half years ago.

Phase three—engine start, foot on the gas. Clench the wheel with white-knuckled fists—and off we go into the wild blue yonder.

Matthew Biiri proved to be a steadfast companion, even if that wasn’t really his choice, and it wasn’t really his interest to be that way. Outside of the initial barrage of questions, which I’d weathered well enough, he kept more or less to himself, sensing that I wasn’t particularly conversational. If it was up to him, I think, we would’ve talked a lot more.

That said, I’ve always been weak to my own curiosity, and after we’d eaten and some more time had gone by, a mixture of boredom and a craving for knowledge got to me and my shell cracked.

“How old are you?” I asked him, out of the blue, some two hours after lunch.

“Thirty-one,” he said, regarding me a touch more warily than he did before. “I’ve been around the block a bit.”

“Have you been here long?” I asked, turning towards him and pushing droplets into the corners of the room, trying to get a more complete picture of the space I was in. I’d already scoped out the entire place in depth, but I hadn’t yet tried to hold a full image of everything all at once—and at this point I was feeling a lot better. My headache was gone and I was no longer bone-achingly hungry.

It had taken just about all of my willpower to not inhale the entirety of my lunch all at once as soon as I smelled it—but Matthew had cautioned me against that and I knew he was right, so I did my best to take it slow, and overall that worked out.

I felt more or less normal again.

I focused the droplets on Matthew, carving his face out of the air as I’d done so many times before.

“You know that most people can feel when you do that, right?” he said.

I paled. “What?”

“Human skin is really sensitive,” he said. “When it’s super humid outside, you can probably get away with it, but…” He gestured to his face with both hands. “We’re inside, and it’s pretty dry in here anyway. I can feel it.”

“Oh,” I said, and I pulled the droplets away and let his visage drop out of my awareness. “Sorry.”

“I’m not saying you can’t do it,” he went on. “Just that you should know that other people can normally tell.”

That explained why Ava always seemed to know. Everyone else probably just kept their mouth shut—but Ava would’ve called me out on it, just because she was like that.

“Was”—the past tense; she was dead, too.

I grimaced and tried not to think too much about it. Even though her death, and the time of it, was probably the only thing in this entire venture that truly went just as we drew it up.

“I’ve been here for eleven years,” Matthew went on. “Bit of an old-head at this point. It’s recommended that Biiris find somewhere to be before they turn twenty-two or so.”

“So you were…twenty?”

“Yeah, but I knew I was headed here earlier than that. Twenty was just when I managed to land the job.”

He shrugged. “Say, you said Misha didn’t know anything, right?”

I nodded.

“I just keep thinking about that,” he said. “She was our combat leader, you know? She was in charge of pretty much all the missions. Like Benji was for you guys. I just find it—really hard to believe that she had no idea what the plan actually was.”

He fell silent for a moment. I didn’t have anything much to add, since I probably knew somehow even less than him about this whole thing, but after a moment he straightened up and said, “Oh, God, I figured it out. Holy shit.”

He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe they went for that. That’s insane.”

“What?”

Matthew regarded me briefly before shrugging. “Not like you can do shit about it now, so I’ll just tell you what I think it was. It didn’t have anything to do with you, really—it was a long-con play to bait you all into coming out here. Basically, Neville told Misha to trust him—which she did—and he let her get captured. All he told her was that she was getting captured on purpose, right?”

“She knew that, yeah.”

“Right. So—Misha gets captured and knows stuff about events that have already happened, but not anything actually useful. A backup head of missions had already been appointed—I think Talia got that job, uh, like two months ago or so. So all of Misha’s info is out of date. She baits you into coming out here, y’all get destroyed, and then after the war’s over, she can infect Neville with the Umbroids. Neville’s strong enough to overturn the hive-mind like Loybol did, or at least he probably thinks he is, so once he’s got the Umbroids set to a new home mind, he re-infects Misha and everything’s back to normal, except he now also has access to the same basically unbeatable system Loybol uses to keep her people in line.”

He breathed out, slowly. “Fuck, that’s good.”

“Loybol wouldn’t let Misha go out alone.”

“Might not have to,” Matthew said. “They’d just have to be separated for a bit.”

He shook his head, continuing. “God. If Neville was willing to pull a long-con gambit like that, he must have been so certain he’d win that the risk just…didn’t mean anything to him. God. No wonder he never really felt like he was all that worried.”

Then he looked at me. “Did you guys seriously think you were going to win this?”

I tilted my head down, away from him—my eyes pointed vaguely at my feet. “Yeah. We did.”

“God,” he said. “I’m sorry. You got played.”

“It’s fine,” I said, mostly by reflex.

“There’s no way in hell it’s fine, but I’ll just take you at your word,” Matthew replied. “Not that it matters much now, anyway.”

“There’s still a chance,” I said, quietly. “We’re not all dead.”

“Well, you’re out,” Matthew said, holding up three fingers with his left hand and pointing to one with his right. He moved to the next finger and added, “Cygnus isn’t very strong, and Bell’s not going to fight this shit alone. The two of them are stranded in our territory without a way to contact home and without anyone who can scan stuff like Yoru or you could. They’re so unbelievably boned.”

I didn’t respond.

“And they don’t even have phones!” he said, throwing his hands in the air and suppressing a snort. “We’re not the US government, we’re like three hundred dudes in skyscraper. We’re not the goddamn FBI. How the hell would we have tracked a cell phone without, I don’t know, owning a few cell towers?”

He rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Prochazka was so confident. Fuck that guy. Honestly. He sent eight people to their deaths against a whole-ass organization and he didn’t even have a good plan. That’s what you get for following two guys who fought in ‘Nam, I guess.”

“He saved my life,” I said, quietly.

“Did he?” Matthew said. “Or did he just trick you into signing it over?”

Matthew took a deep breath and got up out of his chair. “Well, we’ve been sitting here long enough, I think. Everyone’s got a high-level order not to hurt you, and you’re going to be monitored by a telepath twenty-four hours a day, so there’s not much risk on either end here. I might as well take you outside now.”

“Outside?”

“Out of this room,” he said. “You can meet the team and all that.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked my feet.

“Well, the only possible explanation I’ve got for your capture is that this ends in us recruiting you somehow,” Matthew said, shrugging. “Anything else is just ridiculous. And he could’ve ordered me to kill you at any time in the last month and he didn’t, so obviously he’s got something for you that you need to be alive for, so it’s probably not a surprise heart transplant. Might as well say hello and show folks you’re not all that bad, huh?”

I couldn’t even begin to think of what I thought of that. The entire concept of it blew past me so hard and fast that it barely even registered.

But I found myself nodding, because I’m nothing if not agreeable.

“Perfect,” he said. “Up you go. Let’s stretch those legs a bit.”

0 0 0

The second I tried to slip off the bed and put weight on my legs, I collapsed. They were wholly unprepared for anything vaguely resembling real work, and so for a moment I sat there dazed and sprawled on the floor as if I’d fallen out of a wheelchair. Matthew Biiri looked down at me, vaguely expressionless as always, before saying, “Well, that makes sense, I guess. You’ve basically been bedridden for a month, so it’ll probably take some time before you can properly walk again.”

He turned away, looking around the room. “Maybe I can get you a cane or something?”

“I’m not an invalid,” I muttered. “I can walk.”

“You probably literally can’t,” he said. “Atrophy or something. I don’t know how much there’d be after just a month, but you’ll probably need some support.”

“Just get me some more water,” I said, through tight lips. Face flushed hot. “Please.”

“Sure,” he replied. He opened the door and said to one of the guards out there, “Get us a big jug.”

“Of—of water?” the guard replied.

“No, of pizza sauce. Obviously of fucking water, Michael.”

I didn’t need to be a telepath to know how the guard—Michael, apparently—was feeling. “Right. Sorry. I’ll—I’ll be right back.”

Matthew turned away from the door, pushing it gently closed, mumbling, “These guys, Erika. Man.”

I reached up for the side of the bed and pulled myself up—which in itself was harder than I thought it’d be—shifting my weight until I was sitting on the side of the mattress with my legs hanging off the side. Then, gripping the edge for support, I slid forward, off the bed, and leaned out, my arms reaching toward the wall and letting my knees lock, pivoting hard forward on my ankles until I was upright and braced against the wall, my weight half down on the floor and half against the wall.

I just stood there for a moment while Matthew watched me, bemused.

“How’s that working out for you?” he asked me, arms crossed and slightly smiling.

“Fine,” I said, to the floor—but I didn’t take my hand off the wall.

Let my breath go in and out, slowly.

“Well,” he went on. “If you need a shoulder, I’m here.”

0 0 0

After a minute or two, I worked up the courage to rock back on my heels and stand under my own power, which worked out—more or less—well enough. With my knees locked, I wasn’t at much risk for buckling over, and Matthew hovered close being me. He offered to give me and hand but I pushed him away. Couldn’t accept his pity.

And so, slowly, I hobbled to the door and out of the room.

My earlier suspicions about this being a proper hospital were only half-right. This floor of the building was, anyway. Most of the wards—thirteen of the sixteen excluding the one I’d left, by the droplets’ count—were empty, doors ajar, but two of them were closed, and the handful of droplets I slipped under the doors there showed two bodies on the beds there. I didn’t have time to properly resolve the shapes of the injured before Matthew spoke to me and I had to split my attention elsewhere.

“These are the wards,” Matthew said. “As I’m sure you’ve gathered.”

The structure of the walls made me think there was a wall of windows behind me, opposite the sixteen wards, but we were high enough up where they didn’t have any opening mechanisms.

“Where is this?” I asked, glancing towards where I figured the windows were.

He chuckled. “Not the building you guys attacked, that’s for sure.”

“Then...”

“Oh, that was where we were based out of,” he said. “But I don’t think Neville was actually there at the time. He might be there now, I’m not really sure.”

I let a breath go in and out, slowly. No need to panic. No need to feel much of anything at all, really.

What could I possibly have been feeling that would help me in that moment?

“So we never really had a chance, then,” I said.

Matthew shook his head, grim. “Yeah. Not really. We had our bases covered. Honestly, if you guys just pulled up guns blazing way earlier, somehow, we probably would’ve been in more trouble. I’m talking, like, all in on abductions and mind-reading. Just brute force your way through this. Bust a hole, strip everyone there of anything vaguely resembling a conscious thought, move on. Esther’s stronger than the three of us individually—Johan, Jessie, and me—and while Johan’s pretty tricky I don’t think any of us would’ve been able to set up a psychic trap she couldn’t have handled. Plus, Loybol more or less passes for a telepath in that situation, since she can just assimilate folks. Then Esther and Loybol just go around as the two attackers while the other six play their bodyguards. That was the plan we were worried about, but Loybol and Prochazka decided to take it slow because they underestimated their own firepower, and that was perfectly okay with us. Every second that ticked by was a second we got to set up more lines of defense.”

“I was worried about that, in the beginning,” I said. “I didn’t really—um—didn't really understand why we weren’t just rushing in here when we had me and Bell.”

“Well, your heart was in the right place, even if it wasn’t you or Bell we were really worried about.”

“Loybol’s still alive,” I said, suddenly energized. “She’s—she’s still out there.”

“Loybol’s not gonna march in here alone,” Matthew replied. “Let’s go downstairs.”

He started off, but I didn’t move. “She swore she’d protect me,” I said.

Matthew didn’t look at me—he was still focused on the staircase at the end of the hall—but he still cracked a smile. One I was perfectly capable of feeling, even if it was faced away from me.

One upside of the droplets, I suppose.

“And how well is that working out for you?” he asked me, again.

0 0 0

The building, Matthew said, was fifteen stories tall. The wards, where I’d been staying, were on the third floor—we took the stairs down to the second, which was a mostly open-air office space. There were living accommodations on the sixth floor, Matthew told me, and I’d be moved into one of those once they’d confirmed that everything was okay with me, any risks were neutralized, and they could prepare to return to normalcy.

Not that I had any idea what that was.

Walking was slow, but possible. Every step made me a touch more confident in my legs. The muscle memory, just like everything else, slowly returned to me, and by the time Matthew was ready to tell me what I was seeing with the droplets on that floor, I could stand up mostly straight and mostly steady.

“This is our main hub,” he said. “Follow me for a second, okay?”

He stepped away from the staircase and waved me forward—and after a brief moment of disorientation, I followed him.

Nobody seemed to notice I was there—or if they did, they made a point of not staring. From my vantage, this floor didn’t appear to be meaningfully different from any other new-age open-concept office space. People lounged around on beanbags and at various mobile desks with laptops and phones and I had no idea what any of them were supposed to be doing.

I also, honestly, didn’t really care. It was different than the Radiant, and that was all I really gathered from the scene.

Matthew led me to the back-right corner of the floor, where there was a small cubicle nestled in with a sliding ribbed plexiglass door. He took a bit of a winding path to get there, taking a wide berth around a group of people who didn’t bother to look up at the person going around them. And given that I was already so adept at making myself small, the odds were good that they didn’t even see me at all. Maybe Matthew had a second shadow; but given what he’d said about the Biiris, it wouldn’t surprise me if people already thought that about him.

And so I could completely disappear.

“Hey, Talia,” Matthew said, knocking once on the plexiglass. “You busy?”

Talia was sitting in a high-backed office chair, facing away from us—I put droplets over the door to get a head-start on trying to see her. She had a pair of over-ear headphones on, but took them off as soon as she heard Matthew’s knock, so I assumed she wasn’t really listening to anything.

Maybe she just had them on to dampen outside noise. I’d definitely done that before, back at the Radiant.

She turned around, spinning the top of the chair by kicking at the base, and leaned in to open the door. “What’s—oh.”

Talia caught sight of me and froze. “Jesus, Matthew, she’s not your service dog, you can’t just bring her wherever you want.”

“Folks better start getting used to it,” he said, shrugging. “Certainly seems like that’s the direction things are going, anyway.”

She scratched her forehead, leaning in. Her hair was tied up in a relatively dense, neat bun, and she was wearing a suit-like top with a long skirt—all of this is to say she was exceedingly normal-looking, kind of like Loybol.

I’m not sure why I consistently expect people in Talia’s position to look strange. Maybe she had lime-green hair or pink eyes or something, I wouldn’t have known, but I have to admit that it was a bit deflating to meet a new person who was a higher-up in an organization like this, expect a full-fledged demon with bat wings and fangs and all, and get a very standard office-worker lady instead.

At least Ava looked distinctive, even if the rest of her was nothing to write home about—and then I remembered she was dead, again, and I flushed red.

“Is it?” Talia asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Talia frowned. “You’re the butler. Don’t you know?”

“Wasn’t this whole thing your doing?”

“No, I most definitely did not order the team to capture the enemy’s nuke so we could let her wander around our facility with an servant like she owned the place. Neville made me do it. If it were up to me…” Talia turned to me with a dismissive gesture, “You’d have been in a casket a long time ago.”

I decided I was better off keeping my mouth shut.

Matthew, for the first time since I’d met him, scrunched up his eyes and looked away from Talia, unable to maintain his standard quiet disenchantment. And I will admit—seeing him get knocked down a peg made me crack a smile. “So…is it just Ivan and Neville who know why the fuck we did this?”

“I’d be floored if Ivan knows,” she said. “He’s just the head of HR, right? I don’t know if capturing Erika falls under “human resources.””

“I mean—she’s a human and theoretically a resource, right?”

“I think both of those are debatable.”

Silence wasn’t doing me any favors anymore. “I’m right here,” I protested. “I’m not deaf.”

“I know, and I don’t care,” Talia replied. “What the hell are we supposed to use her for, Biiri?”

“I don’t know. Murder?”

“We’ve got loads of people for that already.”

“But are they as efficient as Erika?”

“Yes!” she said, half-yelling—and then she paused, mouth pulled tight. Looked at me, briefly, before continuing in a lower voice. “All our strike teams are great. We’re a bit strapped for numbers, now, but I really do not think adding—you know—our number one enemy to them is going to make things all hunky-dory.”

“Our number-one enemy is Prochazka.”

“Yours, maybe,” Talia said. Pointing at me. “But mine is definitely this idiot.”

“Me?”

“Well,” Talia held up a few fingers. “Let’s count the ways, shall we? One, I lost my mentor to Neville’s fucking scheme, God only knows what he’s planning for her—”

“I think I figured it out, by the way,” Matthew said. “I’ll—”

“Can it, Biiri,” Talia snapped. “Tell me later.”

He frowned and didn’t add anything. Talia cleared her throat and continued. “Moving on,” she said, “you’ve killed like seven of our top guys, including Weston, who we really really still needed. I don’t know how the hell you got him from that far out, but—”

“You’re not the only one,” I said, quietly. “Yoru told me—”

“Shut up, Erika, I’m not done. Why does everyone keep interrupting me?”

I pursed my lips. Matthew glanced down at me, briefly—a look I can only imagine was vaguely sympathetic—and Talia picked up her train of thought again. “I’m not normally this frustrated, but in case you can’t tell, our well oiled machine is a chaffing a bit right now because Neville has decided that something about you is just so important that we need to hemorrhage resources and employee goodwill to bring you on board alive. God only fucking knows why. So we lost our top sniper, I lost my mentor, we’re down like forty percent of our keys—for what? You? Why? I don’t know, because Neville won’t tell me shit, and—God, seeing you just standing there makes my fucking blood boil.”

She shook her head. “Why can’t you have the decency to look intimidating?”

“What?”

“You’re so normal looking,” she said.

“I was going to say the same thing about you, actually,” I replied—more nervously than I meant to sound, but—in hindsight—probably suitably so.

Talia rolled her eyes, the moisture swirling in her sockets. “Okay, fine, that’s fair. But…if you were like…I don’t know, if you had some piercings or some bloodstains on you or something I could at least feel better about hating you. Fuck, I’d settle for a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt, honestly, just like…something that implies violence, you know? Something that makes you not just look like my teenage cousin.”

I shrugged. “I’m…sorry? I think?”

Talia sighed. “God, I just want to punt you over a fucking fence. I hate that we’re supposed to be nice to you so much.”

Something inside of her headphones made a noise that caught Talia’s attention. “Listen, I’ve got a meeting now and Ivan’s gonna be there so I’ll just pull him aside and ask him if he knows anything then. You two just…I don’t know. Shoo. I’ll go find you later.”

“We’re either in ward 10 or room 608,” Matthew said.

“Got it,” she replied, and then she turned back toward her computer and grabbed her headphones from the desk. “Close the door, okay?”

Matthew silently complied, and for a second we just stood there staring at the closed door before Matthew started off back towards the stairs.

I paused for a bit too long and had to jog a second to catch up. “Where are you going?” I asked him.

“Out.”

“…Outside?” I asked.

He sucked in his lower lip. “Right, that’s hard for you, isn’t it?”

“It’s…not great,” I said, “But…I can manage. It’s not the first time.”

“Manhattan sucks, I know,” he replied. “Just suck it up.”

“I…okay.”

I didn’t exactly have bargaining power here, and Matthew knew that. “I’m taking “be nice to you” pretty liberally,” he said. “I’m just overall not a very mean person.”

“I guess.”

The stairs we took to get down here continued down to the ground floor, and we started on that staircase down to the lobby.

“And Talia’s not normally like that,” he said. “She’s just frustrated by this whole thing. I get it. It’s—not really our plan A, you know?”

I was used to this sort of thing by now. Talking about me like I wasn’t there—like it wasn’t my life in the balance. I was properly half-dissociated anyway. None of this, really, was real to me. It still felt like a semi-dream, some kind of drugged-out mid-conscious state where I waded through Jell-O and nothing I said had consequences. I still expected to wake up at some point, but the thing that caught me from buying fully into that fantasy was the fact that I wasn’t quite sure where I’d be waking up.

The events in the elevator shaft, and in the lobby of that building, were just a little too real to be a dream—and to be completely honest, I distinctly remember going down those steps to the lobby and thinking that I had yet to see concrete evidence that I was still alive.

Crossing the big perfectly-smooth tiles to the double-doors that led out into the eternal tempest of a Manhattan street and wondering if this was purgatory, Hell, or the afterlife of some tiny long-forgotten tribal religion that had it right all along. The odds seemed equally good to me in any direction.

Above all else—above all our mutual confusion, above the ghosts of the rest of the Radiant I’d left behind, above the scrabbling shells of Cygnus and Bell somewhere out there fighting for their lives without me, fighting for a cause neither of them surely believed in, I remember feeling well and truly blind.

The droplets simply were not good enough. Even real sight wouldn’t have been good enough to not make me feel like I was emptily feeling my way through pitch darkness.

Matthew opened the door out into the street and I walked out behind him, still waiting for the other shoe to drop, still wondering when I would come to, strapped into an intricate torture machine built for me alone—or maybe, still in the dry room, in which everything I’d seen to this point was a conjured illusion designed to keep some tiny shred of my consciousness running just in case I ever escaped and had to rebuild myself: scavenge up scraps of a personality from pieces of TV and books I remembered, memories I’d saved that were soft and inoffensive. Just enough information to do a recovery in the unlikely event that one day some shining knight would knock down the door, unplug the dehumidifier, and breathe life back into my bones.

I think that, in hindsight, I clung to the idea that I might be dead for far longer than any sane person normally would have. Not that comparing me to the average sane person was particularly fruitful, but to most, I think, breathing in the fresh air (well, stale city air, but air that wasn’t recycled and air-conditioned, at least) and tasting food and feeling water on my tongue would be enough to prove life—but no, that wasn’t good enough for little Erika Hanover, who wanted more, who needed more—who was just so fucking needy all the time.

I still, even now, even holding all these events in my hands and poring over them with the extra years behind my eyes, can’t decide if I held onto the idea that I could have been dead for that long because I wanted it to be true, or if it was because I was afraid it was. If I was dead, then this was my eternity—but if I wasn’t, then that meant that despite everything, Erika Hanover was still ticking, still marching, just like she always knew she’d be, and I couldn’t say then and I still can’t say now which outcome was scarier to me.

I felt blind then, and I still feel blind now.