Chương 103: Angel in the Empty Room (September 11th, Age 15)

It's hard for me to say exactly what I was feeling as the two of us walked home that afternoon. Part of me knew it would come to this, somehow—I wouldn't be involved if my role could've been played equally well by a magically-endowed bundle of oak logs. Obviously this would have something to do with me. Neville had more than enough power at his fingertips to not need any more—and me minus my power was just a little bundle of nerves and cauliflower brain tissue.

I didn't really know what was going on, but that might've just been the shock of what Neville was laying on my shoulders. To be honest, I'm not sure. I might've stared just as blankly even if I was those aforementioned logs. Neville dropped me off with a solemn goodbye at my door and I was left standing there again, still and silent, except this time I had my door key-card with me, and in theory I could let myself in.

Key-cards like that were always a touch embarrassing, since they were perfectly blank slices of plastic to me, but they'd only read in the machine in one specific way—so I only had a one-in-four chance of getting the orientation right. So, limp, I slipped the key into the slot once, twice, three times—rotating it accordingly each time until the lock made the right clicking noise and I was able to get inside.

I stepped into the room, gently closing the door behind me, and only when the door was good and shut did I spread droplets around to find out where Matthew was—and I found that Talia was there, too, and that both of them were facing me. Staring at me. I put the key in my pocket and walked, slowly, back to my easy-chair. We all sat there in silence for a moment waiting for someone to take the plunge. Matthew did the honors.

"Well?" he said.

"What did he say?"

"Before he left?" I asked.

"No. In—in general. What did you guys do, where did you go, all that." Both he and Talia sat there in near-identical poses—tense, waiting. Still.

"We went to the park," I said, slowly.

"And he told me that he's been thinking about what Talia said."

"What you told him I said," Talia said, slowly. Without turning to me.

"What you said," I corrected, taking a hard edge.

"To the letter. Exactly what you said."

"Whatever. Just—what did he say?"

"He told me that he considered your plan, and that he likes it."

"We already knew that," Talia snapped, but Matthew raised his hand and she stuffed whatever second half of her response she had ready to go. This was my big bargaining chip. I knew, walking home with him, standing alone in front of the door a few moments ago, that the thing that Neville had burdened me with had at least one upside: it put me in total control of the situation with Talia and Matthew for the next seven days. All their demands could fall on deaf ears. For all intents and purposes, I owned them.

So I savored the moment. Sometimes I have to let myself take a win. I was due for a few of those, right? I let my eyes wander between the two of them, building the second. And then I said, "He wants to go through with it, but only if I agree to help him." Talia slumped back in the couch.

"Savior Lord Jesus," she mumbled, "We are all gonna fucking die." Matthew sighed. He splayed his fingers over his face.

"Okay. So…what do we do with that?" I shrugged.

"You start listening to me is what we do with that."

"More than we already are? Not sure what your angle here is, kid. You already called my bluff. I think we're both on the same page when I say you correctly sniffed out that I'm not willing to put my life on a coinflip. Obviously we're all kind of looking for the same thing here. So whatever you're gonna demand, just do it." Something in a back corner of his mind changed and he let out a hard snort.

"Whatever. I don't give enough of a shit anymore, and I don't think Talia does, either. This might not be fun for you, but this is beyond life or death for us. I'm not sure there's any kind of stakes that could make you really understand the gravity of any situation, let alone this one, so let me lay some shit out for you so you understand our angle here. As I see it, here's the possible outcomes of this. One, you help Neville show magic to the world and millions of people die.

Two, you don't, and Neville shrugs and we kick the can down the road. Three, you help us kill Neville and put someone else in charge, Ivan or Talia or me or I don't fucking know, just anyone else, and then we have this conversation again later with someone who's a little more sane, and by that I mean you and Talia do, because I'll be in a fucking shed in the family compound until I rot. Do you see any glaring issues here?" My face did not change. It all rolled right off me.

"It's bad, Matthew. Obviously I know it's bad. Obviously I know you're not happy with it. You know what I'd rather have? I'd like to be back with my friends at the Radiant. I could be watching cartoons with Cygnus right now, and you all could sort this for yourselves, because all I'm ever supposed to do is be a big gun for Prochazka to shoot and I was okay with that. I don't make these decisions because I don't care, Matthew. I don't know what the fuck it means. I've spent a very long time telling myself that.

This," I waved my hands around me, "might not look like it, but most of it is curated to filter out things I don't want to think about because I'm bad at it and it confuses and scares me. This is one of those things." I let it draw out.

"So, to answer your question, I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about it because I don't want to. Because this is not my job, not my problem, and not my interest. You said it yourself. I'm going to be fine. Someone's gonna want me for something. But you two, near as I can tell, are way more replaceable. So when Neville says he's leaving the fate of the world in my hands, he knows he's leaving it. You know what I want to do right now? I want to go home. That's all I want to do.

I want to take Bell and Cygnus and go the hell home and pick up the pieces of my life and try and figure out something else to do, because I think I've learned my lesson now, whatever lesson that was, and I'm done. This place, as far as I can tell, was pretty clearly in the process of imploding even without me being here.

So, maybe you can shove your perspective up your ass and think about my perspective, because I'm getting really sick of this back-and-forth, and all I'm really thinking about now is which outcome gets me home the fastest." Matthew may have been somewhat cowed, but Talia jumped to her feet, finger extended hard at me, teeth gritted.

"You don't have a home," she snapped.

"You don't have shit. Prochazka doesn't give enough of a fuck about your well-being to do the right thing and you know it. You're gonna walk back into the Radiant and he's gonna give you a donut and seven dollars and call it square." It bounced right off me. I simply did not care.

"Maybe you're right," I said.

"Who knows? But what I do know is that Neville's being awfully nice to me for no reason and I'm at least a little interested in seeing that play out. I know what he wants me for, now, but he's given me a week to think about it and we're going to see each other at least a few more times between now and then. The point here," I slowed down, taking a breath, "is that Neville wants me to help him and you two don't. The pivot point is me." I tapped my sternum with my index finger.

"My choice. My show. You two are making a case to me, for the next week. You prove to me that Neville's insane, and Neville's got to prove to me that he means it. And me? I'm crazy! I'm zany! I'm off-the-fucking-wall! Who knows what I'll do next?" Waving my hands in the air.

"Crazy old fucking Erika, at it again!" At some point during that, I'd gotten up to match Talia, and I'd managed to wither her back down to the couch, slumped much like before, staring out at a spot above the TV on the wall across from the couch. Slowly, sensing that this was all over, I eased myself back down. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. The silence persisted far longer than I thought it would.

It sagged into the shapes of the room like a damp tarp and it eventually ate at me enough to craft a response.

"Obviously we're all very stressed out," I said, in a monotone.

"And I'm about as thrilled to have to make this choice as you all are about it being my choice to make. If it was up to me, I wouldn't be deciding anything, but that's not where we are. The bottom line is... I don't know what I'm going to say to him on the eighteenth. I think the odds are just as good as any that I'm not gonna know right up until the moment an answer leaves my mouth. It might just be random. I don't know nearly enough about the state of the world to know which outcome is best for everyone.

I've spent my life ignoring consequences because I don't want to understand them, and... honestly, I'm not sure if I think it's too late to change that now, or if it's just straight-up beyond me."

"Then let us make it for you," Talia said. And I shook my head.

"Honestly... I don't think you can do it, either. I don't think anyone can." 0 0 0 The three of us rapidly found that beyond that development, we didn't have much to say to each other. The world sat limp in my hands and neither Talia nor Matthew were allowed to touch it. And, to an extent, neither was I. Hold but don't manipulate—just hold, only hold. I had a week to make a decision, anyway. That much kept Talia and Matthew from completely blowing their tops. A lot could happen in a week.

Hell, it'd only been just over a week since I woke up from the dry room, and look at how much had happened then. Things just go by so fast sometimes. I meant what I said—I did not have any idea what I was actually going to do. I wasn't sure that making a plan sometime in the next seven days would change that. Put on the spot, with the world hanging in the balance, an answer would escape my lips, one that I'd be bound to for eternity, and there was no actual guarantee that it would be whatever we'd pre-decided.

There are some things you can put me on the spot for, and some things I can reliably quick-draw—but the right words are not one of them. I didn't know how the world worked. I'm not sure anyone really does, but that's beside the point. I only knew things as they related back to me or what I'd been told to do. Everything else I intentionally ignored.

I had assumed that this would never come back to bite me, because if I just plugged my ears and sang loudly enough nothing I did would ever have any meaningful consequences. All of a sudden, I understood the skull-peeler. Every time I did something that couldn't be undone—taking a life, busting a crime, destroying a place—I took a little off the top, and I was betting on the fact that I was so stupid, so irredeemably thick-headed and empty-minded that God's knife would never hit gray matter.

I was playing it all up. Yoru was right, Ava was right, Benji was right—I wasn't that stupid. I was just playing a stupid person on TV so people would think I didn't know any better, and would pass any consequences I created as a result of my actions on to the person up the chain. Whoever pointed the gun was to blame. The gun, if left alone, would just sit there. And yet Neville deemed it worth his while to disassemble a gun and scatter the parts like scrying bones to find his answer.

Maybe Matthew and Talia had it right from the get-go—maybe Neville really was insane. I guess it wasn't really my call to make. How was I supposed to know what an insane person looked like? What frame of reference was I supposed to use? Yoru? Ava? Cygnus? My father? I didn't know any normal people. From here in the future, I'm comfortable saying that I don't think normal people actually exist. There's no standard by which to measure these things.

It's an inherently meaningless statement that people hang way too much of their hat on. It was in all of our best interests to try and wrangle this fifty-fifty I'd be sitting on in a week and push it one way or another, but I'd be damned if I knew a good way to go about doing that. I asked Talia and Matthew if they knew anything about Cygnus and Bell, and they told me that they were alive at the very least, although their exact location wasn't super clear. Neville had each told them different things.

They'd discussed the matter before I'd returned. Neville must have suspected that something was up. I told them then that Neville told me it was okay to discuss this matter with Matthew, and that sealed the deal that Neville had sniffed out our little rebel sect. Talia sank back in her chair.

"Okay," she said, at that news.

"Okay. So Neville thinks something might be up. Which means that…if you say you're not going to help him, he's going to assume that we coerced you into doing that somehow." I shrugged.

"I don't know," I said.

"So if you say no," she went on. Slashing a finger across her throat.

"We're dead." Again. I shrugged.

"Okay."

"Right, you're not a person. Almost forgot."

"Talia, all I know about you is that I'm your worst enemy and you want me dead. You can't blame me for not caring what happens to you." It was her turn to shrug, now.

"Okay, that's fair." Matthew finally found something to say.

"Well, I guess I'm going to ask this. What do you think Neville's going to do in the next week?"

"Probably keep taking me to various restaurants and things around the city."

"Just…being nice to you."

"Yeah."

"Do you like it when he does that?" Matthew asked me. I paused. My mind went blank.

"I—I don't know. I don't think I'm supposed to."

"So you do like it, guilt aside." I frowned.

"Half the time he doesn't even ask me for anything. We don't even talk about anything of consequence. We just…talk about stuff. Unrelated stuff. I…only Cygnus ever did that with me. I know, obviously, that he wants something from me—I know because he told me—but he's…um…doing a really good job of…I don't know, couching it. Hiding it. Making it…making it seem like he doesn't."

"But you like it." Pursed my lips. Nodded.

"It's new for me," I said, slowly.

"It…reminds of the time when my dad taught me how to mix drinks and deal card games. I know he just wanted someone else to do those things for him, but I liked…not being ignored. I liked the attention." We all fell quiet for a second.

"I like attention," I repeated, slowly, sounding a bit more defeated than I meant to.

"You're what, fifteen?" Matthew said.

"That checks out."

"I guess." He paused again, and then he said, "I'm going to change the scope of the question."

"Okay." Matthew grimaced. Turned away from me a bit.

"We've already established that Neville wants you to help him reveal magic to the world. But what we haven't done…" he trailed off, choosing his words.

"What we haven't done is establish what you want from him." I did my best to remain expressionless.

"What does that mean?" I offered, as flatly as I could.

"It means that you obviously want something from him," Matthew said.

"Or we wouldn't still be sitting here. We've already established that me versus you is a quick-draw coinflip of whoever strikes first, and you're willing to stake your life on that while I'm not." He exhaled, slowly.

"And we've also established that Neville is willing to give you a pretty long leash. It stands to reason that if you really wanted to fuck off, you could, and the odds of that working out, thanks to Neville's truly stellar planning, are in your favor. But you're still here."

"Because I want to see how this goes," I said.

"No, I don't think that's it. I don't think you give a shit how this ends. We could all link arms and sing Kumbaya or get executed one-by-one via firing squad and it'd mean exactly the same to you, wouldn't it?"

"I want to go home," I replied. Still, even.

"Whatever gets me home the fastest is what I want to do."

"What gets you home the fastest is putting an ice-bullet in both of our heads and getting on the first Greyhound to Albany," Matthew said.

"So that's not true."

"I'd have to get Cygnus and Bell first."

"That seems trivial and you know it." I pursed my lips.

"Why don't you just go ahead and tell me what I think, since you seem to know so much about it."

"Absolutely," Matthew said, without skipping a beat.

"Let's take this a step back. You want something from Neville. Maybe you don't know what that thing is yet, but it's been made clear to you that Neville is trying to navigate this to a position where he can offer you something, and you can't make a hard call one way or another until you find out what it is. I don't necessarily think asking you to help him reveal magic to the world is it, because he didn't even know that was an option on the table until we invented it. I think y ou don't want to go home, Erika.

You want an excuse to not have to see Prochazka again because you know, deep down, that he's used you, and that he probably doesn't care if you live or die."

"We've been over this already," I said, a touch more quietly than I intended.

"We can both be right, Erika," he said, matching me.

"It's not about one or the other. You're waiting. You don't know what you're waiting for but you'll know it when you hear it. It's something that'll make this all make sense, I'm sure. And maybe it exists and maybe it doesn't, but that's not the important part. The point is that you're waiting for something."

"Waiting for what?" I asked him. He pursed his lips. Face tensed up. Beyond a simple snapping—this was the first time I felt that he well and truly hated me. Beyond confusion or simple fascination—he'd moved past that. He was shifting, slowly, to Talia's point of view—that whatever was going on in here, whatever I was buying time for, whatever this holding pattern was supposed to be about: it wasn't worth the effort to understand. Fuck it, whatever, it doesn't matter.

Matthew, I think, came to understand me right then, and he found exactly what Talia found: an empty chest with a little dust bunny and a curled-up spider husk.

"I don't know, Erika," Matthew said, shrugging. The vitriol seeping through his teeth like predators' drool.

"Why don't you try looking deep within?" 0 0 0 In hindsight I can say that I really did intentionally avoid the only possible conclusion I could draw from all of this for as long as possible. Once I was told what it was I was looking for, it all came perfectly clear. Of course this was the one thing—it couldn't have been anything else. The sheer clarity of it made me feel so perfectly stupid once it was revealed to me. Of course, stupid girl, what else could you possibly have wanted?

What was the one little thing you could still ask for?