Chương 51: On The Ultimate End (1) [April 11th, Age 14]

I wasn't afraid to die. None of us were. We'd all had it drilled in our heads that we could die at any minute. Every second of every day was a blessing. Every time we walked out of a fight with our brains attached to our spines was a time we should be thankful for. I knew I was going to die here. That fact was buried deep in my bones. I didn't want to die anywhere else. At least here I could be certain that the cause I was dying for would be right and just, and that over my grave would leap the riders of liberty.

Or something like that, anyway. I have always had a simple outlook on life. In fact, I've always scorned complex ones. Any life-view that can't be explained to a child in two sentences is likely as reliable and watertight as a sieve. People who can't sum themselves up succinctly are trying to hide something from you. In my years with the Radiant, I'd accomplished everything I'd ever wanted from life. I've only ever asked for a simple list of things: some friends, some recognition. Some comfort and some direction.

I never wanted to be an astronaut. I never wanted to shoot for the stars. But after two and a half years of training, of crawling hand and foot over my own weaknesses, I was ready for something a little more. What was there beyond this? What was I supposed to do when I turned thirty? Nothing. I didn't need to think about it. It was too far ahead of me; plans for that far ahead just don't matter when you lived like I did. Even a week ahead was a stretch. Who knew if I'd be there by then? Who knew if you would?

When I was fourteen and a half, I was given an opportunity to save the world. Who wouldn't take that chance? Who would let that go to waste? The truth: my outlook on life was very simple back then. 0 0 0 Cygnus and I had stopped to pick up some pizza from a late-night place on our way back to the rendezvous point—after that, we spent an hour or so idly watching—or in my case, just listening to—TV before we went to bed.

Rendezvous points were almost always random motels, although Prochazka would occasionally mix in a nicer venue to keep the scent trail clear. One time, the order was simply to camp in the woods, which normally wouldn't have been too bad except for the fact that it was the first weekend of April when it happened and a freak heat wave had turned all the dirt in the woods to mush. Mixing things up was the only real tool we had against the New York forces.

Since things escalated between us back in February, we'd been out in the field trying to do our best guerilla warfare impression. Making our plans hard to guess was by far our best strategy, since anything else was hindered significantly by the fact that we had only eight actual attacking operatives. The story went, from the briefings I'd received on the matter, that one of Loybol's prisons was attacked on February 10 th.

That let loose a couple of New-York-based operatives that Loybol's organization in central and western Massachusetts had been slowly teasing information out of. That kind of brazen assault didn't fall on deaf ears in Hinterland, and within a few hours Loybol had conferenced with Prochazka and the pair decided together that the magical oversight organization in New York had crossed a line no half-hearted apology could bring them back over.

They sent in a formal declaration of war—a literal letter in the mail—and the rest was our present. New York had been treading on our toes for a while, and ever since the incident in Utica last year we'd all known in upstate that this was coming sooner rather than later. Prochazka had been preparing for it for even a while before that. The man knew his way around a pseudo-war, and said on numerous occasions that the signs couldn't have been any clearer.

I remember asking him, at one point, what those signs were, and he didn't tell me—but it was only a couple months before the prison break, so I guess he was right, and it didn't really matter. This would all be fine if not for the fact that the New York forces vastly, hilariously outnumbered us.

For all the preparation Prochazka had been doing, the New York team had been poaching magical people for their own army out of his territory for ages, and so their forces were packed to the gills with medium-power magical people while we had exactly six.

Allying with Loybol alleviated that somewhat, since she had significant forces of her own and didn't have to worry much about New York coming up through Connecticut to get at her own operation, but it still only upped our number of actual, useful offensive units to eight people. And that was only because Loybol herself—and her main enforcer—volunteered to help us take care of this problem themselves.

Most of Loybol's army would be dedicated to keeping Prochazka and the rest of the Radiant's non-magical people alive while Prochakza and Loybol combined their knowledge of war tactics and ground experience to put together some kind of a plan that would allow the eight of us—Unit 6, Loybol, and Eliza—to somehow get inside the New York leadership's compounds and gut them before they could amass too much momentum. It was uphill, certainly, but I never felt like we were particularly behind in those days.

All the platoons I'd ambushed—paired alongside any of the other seven with the exception of Eliza, who I simply hadn't interacted with yet—had fallen apart pretty quickly before our vastly superior individual firepower. Two months in, and everything seemed like it was going okay. Both Loybol and Prochazka had deep pockets, so we didn't go hungry or anything, and we were able to change up our clothes to evade lookouts frequently enough. And so we went to war, just like I'd always been told we would.

0 0 0 Cygnus and I caught a bus to Delmar, where we'd be meeting up with two of the others at the library for a teammate swap. Prochazka's plans generally had us in pairs, targeting specific areas he suspected to be compounds for the New York forces.

It felt an awful lot like whack-a-mole to me—since there were only people inside those places about half the time—but it was progress in terms of weeding out their raw numbers, and it slowly inched us closer to New York in a way that the officers over there probably found difficult to track.

While our progression was technically approaching the city in the long term, there wasn't much rhyme or reason to the actual order of the places we hit, and I suspected that Prochazka occasionally sent us to places he knew no-one would be just to mess with anyone trying to track our movements. It doubled as a way to obfuscate our meeting points, but since they were usually in public locations with lots of civilians, we didn't really have to worry about being attacked there.

We arrived at the library after a fifteen-minute walk at around noon. Despite the time, a low morning mist still crouched heavy and damp over the town—that was just the way the day was going to be, a fifty-one degree cool fog across every hour, and I would not have had it any other way. Days like that were fairly rare, but being outside on them did more for me than any stimulant could have.

With a fog like that, and a humidity that high, I could feel every inch of every blade of grass for half a mile around—the steps of every pedestrian, every car on the road. It was all right there, right in front of me—plotted on a chart that mapped the entirety of a half-mile circles' existence. On those days, I was omniscient.

Cygnus and I went up the steps and inside the library and set about looking for a familiar face—and we found it sitting at a table near the children's section, reading a book she'd apparently gotten halfway through already. Loybol glanced up at us and back down to her book, lightly drumming on the table—three taps. At a different table, taking bites of a cinnamon roll I sort of doubted she was allowed to have in there was Ava.

I hadn't pinned her as a literature type, but her book was bigger than Loybol's, so maybe all that time I'd spent gently avoiding her would've been better used getting to know literally anything specific about her whatsoever. She closed her book, scooped up the paper her cinnamon roll was on and went over to Loybol's table along with the two of us. Cygnus sat down first and broke the silence.

"How long have y'all been here?""'Bout an hour," Ava said.

"Nice to see you too."

"Thanks," Cygnus said.

"Hello, Loybol."

"Hello," she said. Cygnus had gone through the phases of meeting Loybol faster than most. On their first interaction—that day in February where we found out how we'd be spending the rest of our lives—he barely spoke to her. That was pretty normal, given the tall tales we'd all heard about her organization and the even taller ones about the woman herself.

She was the sort of person who commanded control of a room without speaking—all she had to do to get everyone to shut up and listen to her was just do a quick sweep of everyone present and make just the slightest eye contact. Her track record on stuff like this was impeccable, and Cygnus came to trust her as much as I did within a few minutes.

Then he hit phase three of interacting with Loybol, in which she comes to be one of your most respected people, and then he hit phase four, in which you interact with her like she's a close business partner—casual, but gently reserved—and I wasn't quite there yet. Either way, Loybol was the closest thing to a captain we had. While Benji was still our unit leader, that didn't mean as much out here.

We all answered to Prochazka and Loybol, and Loybol was in the field while Prochazka wasn't, and therefore that made Loybol our closest commanding officer, and as such her word was law more than Benji's was. Normally I'd have expected him to be a little bitter about that, but he knew the drill. Bitterness on that sort of thing was a waste of valuable emotional capital, and in times like these you had to pick and choose your opportunities to spend that very carefully.

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"Glad to see we're all in one piece," Cygnus said.

"So what's up?"

"No casualties yet," Loybol said, crossing her arms over her book.

"As far as I know." One of the more frustrating things about replacing sight with droplet echolocation—as admittedly cool as it can be—is that I can't read anything that's laminated. While I can read actual, printed documents—very, very slowly, with a lot of effort, and even then only if the pages are thick enough for the ink to make a meaningful indent in the page—anything with a sheet of plastic over it might as well be wood for all I can tell.

It makes for an awkward dynamic with printed books, where I can slowly work my way through one but won't ever be able to tell what the title is unless it's printed at the top of each page. Sometimes the title is slightly raised up out of the cover, which is tougher but still possible to discern, but most of the time, I'm totally in the dark. To be honest, the speed at which the process goes makes trying to read printed books not all that useful, but it makes for good fine-control practice for my magic.

"That's good," Cygnus said. He angled his head slightly down, and Loybol shifted her arms a bit.

"We—uh, do you mind?" Ava asked.

"Go ahead," Loybol said. Ava cleared her throat.

"We found a hideout about three miles west of here. Flushed it out. I managed to nab one of them alive, but he didn't say anything particularly useful. I'm not sure where NY is finding these guys, but they're pretty good under pressure. They don't crack."

"That's been our experience, too," Cygnus said. I nodded in solidarity.

"I'm considering trying to assimilate a few of them," Loybol said.

"If it looks like they would know something. It's not completely foolproof, and it takes a lot out of me, but if we find ourselves strapped for info, it's an avenue to explore." A memory flashed by of Wyatt, in the Utica building, sitting slumped over in the chair—completely emptied—drooling black slime. Just the faintest glimmer of motion in his eyes. I had to physically blink it out of my head.

"It's a brutal way to die," I said. I expected her to say she didn't care, but what she actually did was agree with me.

"We might just have to swallow that," Ava said. Loybol shrugged.

"We have plenty more holes to flush. One of these people'll be weak-minded at some point."

"Holes" was the term we used for the tiny outposts the New York people used to keep tabs on their territory. They could be anything from basements to storefronts to actual, literal holes in the woods—bomb shelters, basically. Each was staffed with between three to five people of varying magical ability, and by Prochakza's estimates there were hundreds of them radiating out of the city in a fifty-mile radius.

Poking them out one by one was slow going, and that wasn't even accounting for new ones popping up in their midst. We'd already had to flush the same hole twice on one occasion and I was certain we'd have to do it again. Our Unit 2, and representatives from Loybol's organization, we were working around the clock analyzing security footage, traffic heatmaps, and area architecture trying to pinpoint where these things were.

That kind of work sounded like my personal hell, so I made sure to tell Esther to pass along my thanks to them whenever she met up with us to pass along the latest news from the factory. At the end of the day, it was all we really had for a lead until someone cracked, but I'd be lying if I said it in any way resembled efficient warfare. The work was easy, though, and it gave me ample opportunity to practice some heavy magical lifting, so I wasn't complaining.

"Is it really not worth bringing Esther in?" Cygnus asked.

"It's not," she said.

"Esther's too important for spreading Prochazka's orders. We can't put her on the actual front lines." I wondered if Esther ever imagined she'd be actually working with us, after Bell pulled that stupid stunt when she visited a few years back. God, that was so long ago. It might as well have been a different lifetime. How the time flies.

"So we don't really have a plan yet," Cygnus said.

"We do have a plan," Loybol replied, even-toned.

"It's what we're doing. We're nowhere near giving up on it yet. Even if we don't find anyone, we're still making progress. There's only so many magical people on their side. Every one we take out is one less we'll have to deal with later." But she pursed her lips as she finished, and it didn't take a psychic to figure out how she actually felt about that.

"Who have you all met with?" Ava asked.

"Yoru's doing fine," Cygnus said.

"I saw him three days ago."

"Thanks," Ava replied.

"So unless something's happened to him since then—" She did not find that amusing, and neither did Loybol or I, so he didn't bother finishing the statement.

"He's fine," he said, instead. Loybol turned her attention to me, and it was all I could do to not immediately wither under her eyes.

"How about you, Erika?" Despite the obvious implication that all of us were going to have to share what our last mission was, I still wasn't ready to speak. I hadn't prepared anything.

"I—I was with Benji before," I said, slowly, "But, um, we didn't find anything. The spot we visited was empty. Cygnus and I—uh—we flushed out a hole and cornered one of the people there behind a K-mart, but she wasn't magic and didn't tell us anything." Maybe she would have, if we waited longer. If I held my tongue and let her burn herself out, and then let Cygnus do whatever it was he was going to do. Maybe we could've broken her. But I didn't want to get caught up in hypotheticals.

There was too little time in the day for that kind of thing, and not enough time in the future. Cygnus nodded.

"That's about right." He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms behind his head. In the time that I'd known him, I'd never seen him without a weapon. He always had some kind of metal object he'd sharpened into a blade, but right now he was short one. We hadn't had time to pick up anything and I think it was making him skittish. He stretched, straightening up in his chair, and just a touch, his head angled down toward the book under Loybol's arms.

She shifted a bit and he let his breath out and sagged back to normal.

"Tell me more about Benji," Loybol said to me.

"I—" Force of habit tilted my eyes to the tabletop even though it didn't matter. Even though Loybol was just a shape in my perception, I still couldn't quite look at her. After a few moments I found words again: "We didn't find much. He was—um—wasn't happy about being stuck with me. We didn't talk much. We still don't really get along." Loybol shrugged.

"Figures. Thanks." I nodded, but didn't look up again. I wondered if Loybol knew what had happened to me just a few days after we first met. Surely she knew. There was no way Prochazka would've withheld that information from her, even though he generally supported me. Did she trust me like Benji trusted me? Only within earshot and eyeshot? Only with things other people could verify? It had been a long time since I'd seen him, but lately I'd been thinking of him a lot.

Somehow, despite either of our intentions, we always seemed to end every extended encounter with lower opinions of each other than we started. Something always went wrong at the very end that wasn't strictly either of our faults, but we ate the blame for it anyway.

Aside from our two missions together during my time in the factory, we'd been on two missions together since the war started, and one put us on a frustrating wild-goose chase that ended in nothing and the other involved me getting spooked by a noise while we were flushing a hole that caused me to spear our prisoner with an icicle. The sound was just a printer falling off a desk, but it was enough to make me do something I regretted. I knew that, to him, I'd never be anything more than Prochazka's charity case.

There wasn't any doubt about it. He barely spoke to me on that second mission, and when I ruined it, he just shook his head, slowly. I could only imagine the look on his face—and I did, vividly, and many times. He passed me back to Yoru the next day with a few terse words and nothing else.

"Has anyone seen Bell?" I blurted.

"I was with her before Ava," Loybol said.

"She's doing just fine. She's more used to this sort of thing than we are. We flushed out two holes in one day, which I'm sure the people in those holes thought was hilariously overkill." I briefly imagined being a no-name schmuck doing surveillance for the New York gang and being set upon by two of the most terrifying, dizzyingly powerful people I'd ever had the privilege to meet for—quite frankly—no reason, and I quickly decided to stop imagining that. Cygnus was on the same page as me.

"Those are rough beats. Jesus."

"You're telling me," Loybol said, with half a sigh.

"I almost feel bad for them." Ava ran the edges of the pages of her book through her fingers, as a loose nervous tick. If I had a book I'd be doing the same thing.

"What's Bell been up to?"

"Well—" Loybol paused.

"The first hole we flushed out, we did the standard stuff. You know the drill. The second one, well—" She trailed off for a moment.

"It was yesterday at around seven o'clock, I think. The hole was the basement of a pizza parlor, so we got some food while we tried to figure out where the entrance was. Once we got it, headed down to the basement and found, ah, a scene. Or a scene in progress, anyway. There were five of them in there, and four of them had these big wooden boughs drilled through their chests—and the last one was a nature key holding a gun in his throat. Couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger.

He saw me come down the steps, and he loosened his grip on the gun a bit. Looked up at me like he was staring at God—but I didn't read the situation fast enough and Bell followed behind me, and once he saw Bell come down the steps his whole face flashed gray and he put a bullet in his skull without another thought." Loybol shrugged.

"I think that might've been our best shot. People tend to think they'll get mercy from me, and people tend to think they won't from Bell. I understand that keeping the teams mixed up makes us hard to track, but putting Bell and I together tends not to work out." Ava nodded in agreement. I assumed she'd heard this one already. Loybol finished, "Bell came down the steps, and she could barely stand up straight down there.

So she was just there, sort of hunched over, looking out at all the bodies and she just shrugged and said, "That was easy."" Loybol turned back to me, specifically.

"Does that answer your question?"

"I think so," I said.

"Mmm." Loybol looked at the civilians around us, picking through the bookshelves.

"I can't help but feel a little responsible. I think I would've been able to get something out of that guy if Bell's reputation didn't precede her so much. If I told her to stop and shut up—" The mere thought of ordering Bell to shut up made me viscerally uncomfortable. As if you could order a hurricane to disperse, or the rain not to fall.

"Whatever. It's not important now," Loybol said.

"I'm going with Cygnus. Erika, you're with Ava. Esther'll catch up with you and brief you two about your next target. I'll tell Cygnus about what we're doing once we're out of here. Okay?" Cygnus and I nodded. Ava gave a thumbs-up.

I focused more effort than I'm willing to admit in polite company trying to discern how Ava felt about being stuck with me from her expression, which required clustering a lot of droplets along the contours of her eyes and mouth—searching for tightness in the corners of her lips, measuring the space between her eyelids.

We hadn't spoken much since the war broke out, and in the one mission we'd had together prior to this we'd been civil—but "civil" had described the extent of our relationship ever since we'd made up two years ago. Out of everyone, I picked Ava's words apart the most. Every sentence, surely, was hiding some kind of pent-up resentment. I picked them apart but I was never all that good at analyzing the pieces. It was a lot of work for very little tangible payoff.

Ava licked her lips—slowly, all the way around—and asked me, "Is that better?" I zapped to attention.

"I'm so sorry." Ava made an absent grunting noise and turned to Loybol.

"Are we good here?" My whole perception lurched back and for a moment, I lost everything. My face flushed red and I was smacked by the sensation of jerking backward—in terms of everything I'd tried to build with these people or otherwise, I couldn't tell—but it required me to close my eyes and breathe cleanly for a few moments to re-center myself. I came back and everything was okay. It was all fine.

"I'm sorry," I said to Ava, again.

"I shouldn't have done that."

"It's fine," she said tersely, waving me off.

"I'm not mad." I swallowed the thought and forced myself to think about anything else.

"We're good," Loybol said.

"Good luck, everyone. Stay safe."