Things then progressed exactly as Mark said. He kept his word. Said nothing to Jean, who described exactly how I was going to be discreetly ushered out the back door and once again scrubbed from the annals of history.

Just as I’d always wanted. It hardly seemed like protocol to me but I got the sense, now that I was slightly more awake and a bit more in control, that protocol meant very little in the first place nowadays.

It was all about to become mush anyway.

Even around the back of the building I could tell that something was going on nearby—there was a distant roar, on the other side of the block, that didn’t quite match what I’d become used to from the area. Mark had turned to it briefly when he heard it, and for a second we both stood there faced vaguely in the same direction, listening for the horns of war.

I wondered—and I distinctly remember considering this—if I’d ever see him again, just like with Matthew; but it was absurd to think so given where my life was likely headed from there and so I decided I would not and then it became true.

He pressed a dollar bill into my hand and said, “This is a fifty. It’s probably enough to get a bus to wherever you’re going.”

My wallet was gone—it was up in the room with Matthew still. I’d never see it again. I wondered for a second if Matthew was going to steal all my money, but it was absurd to think that, too. The Biiris had infinite money. Matthew had no use for my pittances.

I wondered if he was still there, half-waiting for me to return, or if he’d given up and gone back to Pittsfield. Maybe he ordered the attack on Cygnus. It couldn’t have been Talia, because she was gone, so it had to be some other high ranking official and not a lot of other names came to mind.

Regardless, it didn’t matter. I was never coming back here again. I showed up, destroyed everything, and left, just as I was supposed to—just as I was always supposed to.

Mission accomplished.

As he turned to leave I spread the droplets around the alley and realized—thankfully fast enough to stop him—that this required going somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d never explored, and since it was no longer the 1960s where everything was a sign with clip-in letters, I was going to have a hard time getting around on my own.

When was the last time I’d needed to do that? Had it actually ever happened? Someone had accompanied me though everything up to now, right? I scrolled back through my various travels and the only thing I could recall was the escort mission I’d needed to do when I was younger, back in the normal days at the Radiant—but I could see then. It didn’t count.

And, regardless, that one didn’t go particularly well.

“What?” Mark asked, turning, and I snapped out of it.

“I—” It took me a minute to find the words. I came at him so strongly a few moments ago that revealing this felt completely counteractive; it would essentially undo all the strong-arming I’d just done to get him to let me leave without any extra questions.

But the gap got wider and I had to say something or he was going to turn around again, so I said, “I can’t read signs.”

He blinked. “Huh?”

“Signs. Screens,” I said. “I can’t read anything on a screen, or—or anything that’s, like, laminated.”

“Oh.” The gears turned in his head. “I can see how that would be a tough problem.”

I took a breath. “Can you bring me to the bus stop? Once I get to—once I get to Canajoharie I should be okay.”

“Canajoharie? That’s—that’s pretty fuckin’ far. I thought you were from Albany.”

“I work in Canajoharie.”

I’m not sure why I drew on the present tense for that. What, exactly, was I going to do when I got there? It’s not like there was a team left.

I swallowed and cancelled the thought. Counting the windows in the buildings above us.

“Alright,” Mark said, slowly. “The bus terminal isn’t that far. I—if I take you to a connecting bus stop and tell you how to get there, will you remember it?”

I nodded. “I’m good at that.”

“Okay,” he said. And again he turned his attention back to the door, like someone was going to pop out of it and warn him against the inherent dangers of following strange people into the forest—but nobody came, not in the whole two seconds he stared back at it, and that was enough for him.

“Okay,” he repeated, and he started off into the street.

0 0 0

He led me to a place where the right bus would eventually arrive. It occurred to me that I had no way of knowing which bus was which but I didn’t mention it. I was just going to have to ask the driver when the door opened.

He explained that there was a bus that’d take me to the right train station, and there was a train I needed to get on from there—or I could go to the Greyhound terminal and leave from there, which would be a bit slower but cheaper.

“That was…the original plan, I think,” he mumbled after correcting himself. I nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me.

We both sat down on the bench underneath the glass overhang. He glanced around at the people walking around, up and down the street on their various dealings. I did not do that. My eyes were fixed somewhere forward and down, on nothing in particular. A sewer grate, I supposed, which occupied the bulk of my droplets’ attention now that there was nothing to be afraid of.

“It’s weird,” he said, eventually. “I—I remember thinking to myself, a few weeks ago, that it had to be something like this.”

“Something like what?”

It took a moment for him to respond. The word, I guessed, tasted bad. “Magic,” he managed. “The crimes I’ve seen. It couldn’t have been anything else. I—I saw someone, a few days ago. I guess it used to be someone. A body, now. Very severe burns around her mouth and throat. They—she—was really weirdly discolored. More than corpses normally are, I mean.”

“I’m familiar,” I said, and he glanced briefly at me for a second, confused, and then it all clicked and he realized that I had been completely serious with him about my occupation, depending on the situations’ need, and therefore I presumably had a body count behind me.

At some point during that he decided it didn’t matter, or that there was nothing he could do about it, and kept going. “We all thought it was kind of odd. And when the crew tried to move her, she was really heavy. This woman was…probably one-twenty, one-thirty, pretty normal sized person, and corpses are kind of tough to move anyway, but this was extra bad. She weighed a hundred fifty-five. And…well, everyone in the lab thought that was kind of odd, so we did a whole body-scan to see if she’d been, I don’t know, maybe smuggling something inside of her, that happens sometimes, and when we did the x-ray, we found that there was metallic copper in her veins. Solid metallic copper. Not…not all the way through, but Lam said that maybe a third or so of her blood had been replaced with copper.

“And I just remember standing there, and I guess it didn’t really process or anything because my first thought was just, like, how is that even possible? Mechanically, physically, how do you get solid copper to spiderweb through someone’s veins like that?”

I did my best to not look surprised, but even for me, that was fairly extreme. “You’d have to be a pretty powerful metal-key for that,” I said. “I don’t think Cygnus could do it. He had that kind of magic, but…he was the weakest of the six of us. There were six of us on that—on my—team. I could probably do that if I had a metal-key.”

“Would you?” Mark asked me.

I turned to him, briefly, and looked away again when I spoke. “Yeah, probably.”

He blinked. “Are—are you fucking with me, or…”

“No, not really. There were a couple times where the boss needed me to set an example.”

I wasn’t sure how deep into that I really wanted to go, but I felt like I needed to make up for the weakness I’d just shown by not being able to read signs, so I elaborated before he could find a new train of thought.

“I pulled all the water out of a couple of people. It usually came out through their mouth in these big wet clouds. I could see them pretty vividly, or…or I guess just feel them, but to everyone else it must’ve just looked like they were choking and shriveling. That copper thing sounds like it involves a lot of setup. You’d have to get an entry hole and a bunch of copper prepared and you’d probably have to drain a lot of the blood first, and then get it in there. It must’ve been an execution of some kind.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “I—I guess.”

“Normally we’re supposed to take care of that sort of thing before it ends up on your desk, but…the guy here, his name was Neville, he was…he wasn’t in a good headspace. Not for a while. It’s not really a surprise to me that he was letting his day job go in favor of…I don’t know.”

I did know. I knew exactly—but I didn’t say it.

Instead I found something else to talk about. I found talking to Mark surprisingly easy. Now that I’d proven to him that I was someone worthy of respect, now that he was a bit cowed, the words flowed faster. “It’s funny. I—”

“I don’t see how any of this is funny,” he said, cutting me off.

I paused. “It’s an expression.”

He frowned, shaking his head. “I—I’m sorry. I know.”

I pursed my lips. Briefly I turned to him and I caught him shy back ever so slightly. Just the direction of my eyes was enough to push him off-balance.

Was this what it meant to be strong? It always felt that way to me—when I finally snapped Matthew in half over my knee, when I drained the people in the basement in White Plains—when I caught the assassin with Cygnus a few years back. That rush, that flow: knowing that just this once, I was superior and everything else was beneath me.

The seizure of control, for just a moment. When the world was mine.

I found it again with him. Despite the slow collapse of my world’s glaciers around me—the cracks of thunder, engines burning, as ice and dust kicked up and a mechanism beyond human fathoming set forth destruction—I found a little bit of control. A little bit of God in my hands.

For a moment again, I got it.

“I’ve got seniority over you,” I said. “I’ve been at this for three years. You’ve been a cop for…one?”

“One,” he said, quietly.

“It’s gonna get a lot worse,” I told him. The words came straight up my throat with no filter. They were my words. No filter was required.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He nodded, silently, because he knew that was true.

“Neville wanted to use me to show off magic to the world,” I told him. “We were going to do a big water-show in Central Park sometime in October. It was all gonna be over. Now that he’s dead, we can’t do that, but…someone else is going to. Somewhere, somehow, someone will. It just can’t be controlled any longer. And…I know his plan. I could just go do it myself. I don’t think…I don’t think I could handle what came after but I’ve always been good about stepping up to the plate. Things happen to me and I deal with it. I could set this thing in motion, and then…it doesn’t matter. What happens to me or anyone else.”

“People will go nuts,” Mark said. “It’ll break everything we know about the world. I…I don’t even know what I’m going to do. I have to go home to my wife and just pretend I never heard any of this. Forever.”

I shook my head. “No, you’ll only have to do it for a few months, probably. Then someone will take care of it for you.”

“It’ll destroy the world,” Mark said.

“Millions of people will die,” I confirmed. “That’s true.”

“It’ll be on your head if you do it,” he replied. I didn’t need to see to know his face was knotted up. Eyes wide and wet.

“Do you know how many people I’ve killed?” I said to him.

And he silently shook his head.

“Neither do I,” I said. “And if I’m not keeping track, then what difference does it make?”

All he could manage, after a few seconds of silence, was a plea: “Please, Erika. Don’t.”

I felt his plea and I turned to him again and again he shied away from me and I took all of that, every bit of that sequence, and locked it deep away in my heart forever.

Mine, mine. It is mine.

I have always fed on the fear of others. To an extent, I crave it. Without the fear, I feel lesser. With my vantage here in the future I know that if people aren’t afraid of me, they feel pity instead, and the pity is so much worse.

With this vantage I can say safely that this never changes. I find other ways to get by, yes—my flirting with sobriety during this chapter of my life concludes fairly soon after this—but the fear—that remains my true vice.

Better than any drug I’ve ever tried. I need it. And I get it. Easily. Effortlessly. It costs me nothing and it gives me everything.

It’s the easiest thing in the world for me.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. The words are simple. I express my thoughts as clearly as I ever have. “In a lot of ways, it’s the right thing to do, but if I wait, I can make it someone else’s problem, and then I don’t get blamed for it. Neville called it the skull-peeler. We’re all just standing around letting God take a little slice off the top until he hits gray matter and we die. Every time something like that woman with the copper blood gets found by someone like you—that’s a slice. A weird video of a geyser in an otherwise quiet pond—that’s a slice, too. One of us could take the fall—snatch the knife and—” I made a clicking noise and a slicing gesture across my throat—“but we’re all too weak to save everyone else. All it takes is one, and we can’t even get that. But eventually the martyr will be chosen for us, and then we’ll just have to deal with it. And everything’s always been chosen for me. So…maybe this is, too.”

“It’s not if you decide not to do it,” he said.

“It is if it was what I was always meant to do,” I replied.

0 0 0

I want to be clear about something: what I said to Mark there was far from the truth. I made it sound to him like my mind was already seventy-percent made up on this, but that was not the case. The truth is that I had no thoughts about it at all. The words that came through my mouth had no backing. I was just talking for the sake of talking. The cleanest pipeline between my heart and mouth.

Even when the bus came a few minutes later, and he made that clear to me with a few limp words, I still did not actually bother to consider the ramifications of what I’d just told him. It felt kind of like it did when Matthew showed me around the lobby where Ava was killed. I could go through the motions and point to the locations and nothing made it through the screen. These were places, those were actions, these are words, those are nothing.

I was on the bus with my instructions in hand and it was all over and I didn’t need to think about it anymore.

Of course, that only works for so long, even for me. I’m not really sure why I’m so good at not thinking about things, but it’s always been something I’ve excelled at. I can change the subject on a dime. Maybe I’ve just had to bury too many thoughts in my time and as such I’ve gotten very good at avoiding them when they sprout again—tiptoeing through the garden—weaving through the shoots even as they grow higher and higher.

That, unfortunately, never changes for me, too. It’s weird to classify something I’m good at as a negative, but I now believe that it is: by never confronting these things, I hurt myself in the long-term, and now I have to do it all at once, and I don’t think I can.

Too many sprouts, too overgrown. At some point I think it may be best to simply have these things pruned from me. Maybe there’s a telepath out there who offers a service like that. I think I’d take them up on it—some fee to have all of these memories cleanly snipped from my conscious.

The only question then, of course, would be of what’s left; and the only answer that I can pull is that I can’t imagine it’s much.

But maybe it’d be worth finding out. I’ve never been able to see what’s under there for longer than a few hours at a stretch. I used to be able to pull it out with alcohol, but by then it had been a year or so since I’d had a drink and I didn’t know if it’d still work—and here in the future I can say, since I’ve tried, that it doesn’t anymore. That’s not to say that things aren’t better by default, because they definitely are, but a few drinks no longer gets me under the scabs.

Instead, it’s just scabs all the way down.

0 0 0

See Erika run. Run, Erika, run!

Where was I going? What was the point?

The thought slipped cleanly into my skull like the first cut into a birthday cake—took big slice out with it. What, exactly, was I going home to?

Bell took survey of the world around her and decided that this was not worth dying for. Wholeheartedly, with the wisdom of hindsight, I agree with that—it wasn’t, knowing what I know now, with the world we have. It was abundantly clear to anyone paying attention, now that we’d reached the end, that this whole endeavor was a true and total waste of time. Every single party would have been better served by simply not participating. The only winning move, really, was not to play.

Bell, ageless in her wisdom as she was, knew this clearly, and simply followed the line to her personal limit, and then she left. I can only assume she got bored. These stakes were too low for someone like her. Surely she had better things to do than play-fight with pawns.

Didn’t I have the same situation? On the second bus going up to Canajoharie I realized that Bell and I were really not so different, and that maybe I should have taken her path as a guide instead of simply doing what I was told to do. Bell wasn’t quite like me—she had more life behind her eyes, even if it wasn’t really visible—but she still correctly identified that, as the strongest flesh-key in the world, it was everyone else that owed their time to her and not the other way around. There was no substitute for Bell. No others.

There was no substitute for me, either. Not a single person could do the things that I did. Someone, somewhere, was always going to have a use for me—which meant that no; I did not need to keel to the first request made of my time. I could be choosy. I could reject!

Reject for what, exactly, I didn’t know. But the idea—the concept of rejection—struck me then. I didn’t have to do this. There was no other water-key waiting in the wings to replace me. No backup plan for Prochazka.

I was all there was. And without me, there was nothing.

Of course, there was only nothing because everyone was dead—but I cancelled that thought, clenching the droplets around the stitching of the seat in front of me, counting every little hill all the way around.

Bell was gone, Cygnus was dead, Ava’s plants left to wither.

There was nothing left for me at the Radiant—but the bus still took me ever closer.

I cancelled the thought and waited.

0 0 0

Of course, there was something to be said for him, who scavenged me from the slop and shaped me up into something salvageable. Something useful, at least, if only halfway. The parts that needed to work worked just fine. The rest of it, well, who’s to say.

And I could not say if he acted from fear or fairness or charity or duty or what-have-you, choose any emotion you like, I’d considered it at length and drawn a blank for each one. I was there, and he found me, and he made the most of what he had; and he was there, and I found him, and I made the most of what I was given.

I could not say if it was the person I was that brought him there or if he simply recognized the teeter-dance I led and drew me along, thread around my neck, wherever it was I needed to be.

I could not say if I was built or destroyed. That, I think, is my major lasting question.

Who would I be if I was never found?

Left to my own devices to wither as I pleased—or, better, to thrive. I had always made the most of what I had. Who was to say what I could make if I had it all?

No thread around my neck, no shackles, no leash—no orders, no backup voice. I had never once had the opportunity to try.

He owed me. He owed me everything. It would be silly to begin to wish for a normal life, I could never, but any chance I may have had of burying that little runaway episode in the yard out back and never speaking of it again were squashed when he found me. My silly little yearnings enabled forever.

Had I been led astray?

I could not say what I would have been but I could say what I was now.

What I had to be.

0 0 0

It was close to sundown by the time the bus arrived in Canajoharie. Light aside I knew it by the little wind that swept down the street; it carried the twilight through the empty streets. It wasn’t a place where people went and it still was not one now that I was there.

I turned back toward the bus and put a cage around it so I could feel it go—gently, heaving, out and back towards I-90. Part of me wondered if I’d be able to feel it again as it circled back around; the highway ran right along behind the factory like a river and I remember clearly spending minutes—hours—back in the day sitting near an open window with droplets sent out, poking at cars. When it was raining, I could feel every last one of them, the voids left unpenetrated, careening. They came from nothing and ceased to exist in five miles. They contained nothing. They were empty.

For a second I stood there again and waited. The bus was gone. I did not move. I’m not sure I even knew where I was. I was thinking about the cars, reaching out for the cars—the droplets over the highway again. I was stronger now than I was then, having been forged in the fires of war and so on, and now I could make out badges, sometimes, if I caught the car in the right spot.

In the days before I lost it all, I remember looking out the window and seeing the lights at night, an endless river of searing stars, onward and outward forever and ever.

I was older now. But I didn’t feel any wiser. I didn’t feel learned.

I felt much the same. I felt alone.

I was alone.

The breeze took my attention away. Cold. I was walking toward the place I knew. I don’t quite remember starting—my feet began before my brain—but once the path was set I knew it straight through to my bones.

It was as it always was.

The cracks in the concrete and the scraggly little overgrown grasses along the sidewalk and the gently sagging rooftops—and past them, past the town, past the main roads, was the big old abandoned factory in which I learned how to be.

It was, again, abandoned. No life in those bones. No warmth in those halls.

I knew what I was going to say to him but in that moment my conviction wavered and I wondered, somewhat, if I was going to do it. If I’d have then what I had now.

Seconds ticked with steps and the thought lazily drifted away. It didn't matter. I only had those words. I’d forgotten everything else.

With each step I forgot another thing. I forgot New York. I forgot the gunshot. I forgot what was left of Yoru, half-blasted corpse wreckage lost to time. I forgot the mission. I forgot the war.

It all drained out of my fingers, dripping down my arm, out of my eyes, out of my chest.

It left me and I forgot. It ceased, and I breathed.

I clasped my hand around the handle and I opened the door.

And there he was.

He was there. He stood, waiting, as the door eased shut on its hydraulics behind me.

We were silent.

In one second everything was gone. I was a nameless entity comprised entirely of hate like I’d always wanted to be. There was nothing required of me to be this way—it was, at the bottom, the way I always was.

It was what I was always destined to be.

He regarded me then, whatever it was that was there, and he said my name.

And then, I remembered.

0 0 0

It was a voiceless terror with which I collapsed into his arms, the force of it easily overtaking me, the sound erupting from my throat by bursting straight through the skin, too anxious to wait for its proper passage, too shameful to wait its turn.

He held me and waited, crouched low as me, pressing me into his shoulder, my fingers clasped on his shirt white-knuckled.

It was over. That was all.

Over and out.

0 0 0

Sometime during the re-writing of every ounce of my brain, when I had no more sound to give, no more tears, no more pain to bear, she arrived.

From somewhere upstairs she approached, slowly coming towards the two of us, and eventually she sat down there and waited for me to relearn.

The breath came first. In short choking bursts I sucked in air and my fingers opened and closed and it came back to me, eventually, how to live. How to speak. How to be. The force of it snapped my spine and I didn’t know if I would ever again have the strength to sit up—if this was just how I was, now, forever.

But eventually, I did. I always do.

I don’t know how long it took. I don’t want to know.

But when I finally had the strength, I pushed the droplets and found them. Prochazka and Loybol. As they always were. When I brushed them over Prochazka in thick waves, no regard for their ability to feel it, I found a few droplets already on him; his eyes clear red in my perception, with their little trails down the sides.

When I finally sat up, he spoke before me, and his voice was small and shaken, forced still and solemn. He said, “I am an evil man, Erika, and I should never have done this to you.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said, with my small voice, pushed through the same holes. “I can’t.”

He shook his head. “I won’t ask you to.”

“I quit,” I whispered—my intention, finally, cleared.

“I understand,” he replied.