Chương 54: The Process [April 12th, Age 14]

We reported our findings to the team at large in the next meeting. One of our system's main weaknesses was the inherently telephone-like nature of it—every pair that had something to report had to rely on their news being transmitted correctly up to six times in order for everyone to hear about it. It had already happened at least once that a report we'd received turned out to only be eighty-percent true because of that, and I was certain it'd happen again.

Having phones to contact each other with would be really convenient, and we periodically revisited the idea because of how inefficient our current communication methods were, but in the end we figured having a vector to individually track us with was too dangerous. Plus, I couldn't use one anyway, unless I got one with Braille numbers or another low-sight feature.

Phones like that were tough to find in stores and shipping anything anywhere was a huge risk, given that we never stayed in one place for long enough to receive a package and we didn't know how deeply the New York gang infiltrated local businesses around here. I felt that it was safe to assume they had at least a few agents working in the postal service, and both Benji and Loybol agreed with that, so we all remained phoneless. That was just the price of doing business, we supposed.

Ava and I relayed what we'd learned to Yoru and Benji. He was very pleased with it—laid praises upon the two of us, but mostly Ava for doing the tough work. That was fair, and I didn't hold that against him since it was mostly her doing, but the idea that what she did was what it took to get an approving smile from Benji made me squirm a little. Lord only knew I'd done what she did to significantly less fanfare at least once.

We were sitting outside at a chain café along a well-lit main street in a town whose name I'd since forgotten. I couldn't have pointed to it on a map with a gun to my head. Ava knew where it was, I supposed. I couldn't imagine this place was more than thirty minutes from where I grew up, but I'd be damned if I knew anything about it. Benji and Yoru seemed healthy enough. They were both sitting up straight and nothing on them was shaped weirdly.

Benji didn't seem particularly happy to see me, although he rarely ever did. His head stayed mostly tilted toward the table, and his fingers wormed their way between themselves in his lap. Ava and Yoru as they normally were, although Benji kept them on opposite sides of the table to keep at least some kind of professionalism about our meeting. As far as I knew, none of us had even gotten injured yet, let alone had our lives threatened in any meaningful manner.

We weren't getting anywhere in the grand scheme of things, really, but eventually the New York gang would run out of people and we could just march in there, unopposed, and take their kings' head if things kept up at this pace. That was the end-game, assuming we couldn't cobble together anything better any sooner. In the meantime, what we were doing seemed to be plenty. This whole war thing was turning out to be pretty easy in those days.

"This is the best news I've heard all week," Benji said.

"And by that I mean it's literally the only news I've heard all week."

"Sometimes it's like that," Ava said, shrugging.

"Are we losing?" I asked him. It didn't feel like we were losing to me, anyway, but it didn't much feel like we were winning, either.

"Well—" Benji paused, bracing his elbow on the café table and scratching the back of his neck.

"We don't know much about their plans outside of what you guys just told us and a little tidbit I'll share in a bit, but nobody's died, we've taken out at least a hundred grunts, flushed about twenty-five actual holes. Overall I'd say we're doing fine, even if it's mostly just a holding pattern." The number rolled off me.

"Okay."

"The tidbit—" he went on, glancing at Yoru—"was something Yoru talked about with Bell a while back, and we started looking for some evidence to support it and we finally found some yesterday."

"I'll just tell this," Yoru said.

"If you don't mind."

"Go ahead." Ava leaned in a bit, and I did the same a moment later.

"Alright." Yoru leaned back, cracked his knuckles like he was going to fight the story instead of tell it.

"So I was on a mission with Bell not too long ago, and we were discussing what we thought the enemy's plans were. Because there's got to be some kind of an end-game here. Well, we decided that the point of the holes were an attempt to surveil the populace and-or track our movements, which probably isn't working all that well. And Bell brought up another really good point, which was about the time in which the New York gang started this war. Why February?

It's not like they're just a pot that chose to boil over on two-ten, right? There's got to be a reason. And we were thinking about it after a mission one night, and we came to the conclusion that all of the enemy's time-related plans are centered around you." Yoru finished his speech and faced me. It took just a could seconds longer than it should have to realize he was talking about me and not Ava.

"What?"

"Yeah. Think about it. This past winter was one of the driest winters on record. We got, like, six inches of snow all season. Long-term forecasts didn't have us getting any snow after—guess when?" I tried to remember when it last snowed.

"Um…"

"The night of February 6 th. The next day wasn't anything special, but the eighth and ninth were scorchers at close to sixty each. Which meant that all the snow would be gone just in time for the tenth, when they led their first attack."

"So they structured this to have as many snowless days they could get," I said.

"Exactly," Yoru replied, bridging his fingers. He leaned in just a touch.

"They're trying to get data on our movements to see if they can track you and assassinate you before winter rolls around again, because as soon as there's snow on the ground, they're fucked."

"So…if I just went home and stayed there until December and came out then, we could have this wrapped up in a few weeks, right?" Yoru shrugged.

"Not necessarily. See—and Bell talked about this with Loybol a while back—one of the issues is that the actual Radiant compound is pretty hard to defend. There's a decent-sized town very close by that we don't have agents in, so the enemy can just set up shop in an attic somewhere and take potshots at people as they go in and out of the factory and we'd never which window they're sniping from.

Hell—they could probably set up inside the factory and we wouldn't be able to find them before they could do some serious damage. Add the fact that all eight of us have to be out here trying to attack if we want to get anywhere seeing as we're vastly outnumbered and turtling in the factory is a great way to get stuck in a siege and starved, and you end up with a sticky situation." I was glazing over a little bit at his description, which sat like a cannonball in the back of my head.

"Why does everyone get to go on a mission with Bell except me?" Benji cut in.

"That's intentional, actually," he said.

"We try not to put you, Loybol, or Bell together in pairs all that often because of how bad it would be if two of the three got assassinated at once. We still do it occasionally, but less often than pure chance." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Oh," I said. I hadn't seen Bell in two months. Everyone had a story about interacting with her except me, and while I knew that it wasn't anything personal, it still stung like it was.

"Go on," I said to Yoru.

"So after a week or so the New York gang would notice that you're not showing up anywhere, put two and two together, and set all their forces on breaking into the factory, which they would very easily be able to do. Since Prochazka allied with Loybol, and Loybol is in the field with us, capturing Prochazka only takes out half the leadership, and—frankly—the less important half, too.

Loybol's probably an equal, maybe slightly worse strategist, but she's also an active combatant they have to worry about and Prochazka's not. Benji's also with us, and he can take over if Prochazka gets axed. The factory is a low-priority target, since it's unclear how much it would actually put a wrench in our plans, and none of the active agents killing the New York gang's people ever go there. If we lose Prochazka, it's bad but it's not the end of the war. If we lose you and Prochazka, we're boned."

"We'd still have Bell and Loybol," I said.

"We wouldn't just lose."

"It would be pretty bad," Yoru said.

"Figure of speech, whatever." Ava stayed quiet. I suppose she'd picked up on the idea that this meeting wasn't about her and made a point of not interfering. Benji nodded.

"Prochazka's much more powerful than I think any of you guys realize. He's been around the block. Having him as an active combatant is more of a backup plan than anything else. It's an option we break out if things get bad, but I know I'd rather not have to do that." I often wondered about how strong Prochazka actually was.

I'd heard a few of his war stories, and Benji would occasionally repeat stories other GIs had told him from way back when, but I had never personally seen him in action beyond little trinket things, like turning pages of a book with a wisp of wind. But if the stories were true—and if his old war nickname was justified—the man could throw hurricanes at people and laugh while he was doing it.

"So…what should I do?" I asked.

"I'm getting to that," Yoru said.

"The bottom line is that the enemy doesn't think they can win a winter war with us. It's putting us in an awkward situation. I'm not sure we could withstand an all-out assault if they found out you weren't here—I mean, Bell can only be in so many places at once as far as I know—but having you in the field is also, explicitly, a risk. We think they're basically just going for the head.

Luckily, our scramble-strategy with the small groups is keeping them from meaningfully tracking any individual one of us, so basically they're just hoping they get lucky. We think. We don't really know, honestly, and we're so hilariously outnumbered that there's not a ton we can really do about it." Benji took that as his cue to jump in.

"This is a lot to take in, but not a lot of it is all that important to you, personally. All you need to know is that they're gunning for you harder than they're gunning for anyone else. But I think you knew that already, right?" It certainly hadn't felt that way. I hadn't felt like anyone was being targeted in particular. But, looking back on it in that moment, it seemed like a valid strategy.

"I think so," I said. Benji pursed his lips. He paused for a moment, letting the words roll around his skull before he spoke.

"Here's the catch. We don't know what the enemy's internal forces look like. We know Loybol's got a bunch of telepaths on her payroll that she uses to keep track of things in Hinterland, and I think it's safe to assume that the New York gang has something similar. Most magical policing forces in major metro areas have similar local setups. This means that—that you getting captured represents a far bigger blow to us than you getting shot."

"Because—""Because you're extremely easy to mind-control," Benji said.

"Oh." To be fair to myself, that hadn't ever been tested. No telepath had explicitly tried to get into my head—Esther tried to, very briefly, when she visited the factory way back when, but Bell told her to knock it off and she did. I wasn't in any actual danger then, despite what we might've thought at the time. What I did know was that Esther found it very easy to find me whenever we needed to be remotely briefed on something, and that—by her own admission—it was really easy to get into my head.

I couldn't ever speak back to her because I had no idea how to interface with a telepath. It might sound like it's easy to converse with an alien voice in your own head—just speak to it like you'd talk to yourself—but it's not that simple. You don't know where the voice is coming from. You don't know where to direct the words to.

There's a partitioning system that naturally occurs in people's heads, apparently, and I have no idea how to access any parts of it, or what's stored where, or how to hide anything, or how to show anything specific. I panicked as soon as Esther's voice hit me, every time. That's why she had to preface anything she said with re-assurance. I couldn't even begin to say how I'd defend against that kind of thing. The wording of being "weak to telepaths" is a coded phrase, I knew. I wasn't stupid.

I might have been easy to read, and easy to rattle, but I'm not an unintelligent human being. I know enough to know that being "weak to telepaths" is just a nice way of saying I'm mentally unstable. It would be nice to say that it's not a weakness, it's just a difference—but the fact that Esther always chose to brief me instead of whoever I was with because I was easier to enter from a safe distance is hard to construe as anything other than a weakness. I wasn't even sure how I would go about repairing that hole.

Was there a drug I could take that would make me less prone to being prodded? Could I go to a doctor and get a prescription? Is that what Adderall or Ritalin or whatever would do for me? I didn't know, and I never got the opportunity to find out. Maybe Ava could help, but I sincerely doubted she'd know where to start, and I wouldn't know where to start explaining to problem to her, and—at the end of the day—I just didn't think she cared enough about me to risk making it worse.

I have too many unmarked buttons in my head to have someone start pushing them at random. I did not envy our leadership. Having to plan a war around me sounded like a nightmare. Benji cleared his throat.

"To be clear," he said, "this isn't a problem with the way you're wired. I think this might be something you can fix with time, help, and maybe a drug or two. But we don't really have the resources to make that happen now, so we just have to plan around it."

"What is there to plan around?" I asked him, quietly. I clasped my hands together over my lap and lost my ability to make eye contact with either of them. I tried—believe me—but my willpower had drained down out of my throat sometime in the last few words, dissolved in my stomach, and could not be retrieved again. A few people walked around us, either leaving a table or going to one. I didn't know.

Since Benji started speaking, I realized I'd stopped paying attention to my surroundings, and for a second I became aware of myself in the center of an endless, bottomless pit. Not falling, not rising, not moving anywhere in any direction—no matter how hard I tried to swim or walk or jump. There was no solid ground to put my feet on. No liquid to push through. There were no chains around me—I was perfectly free to attempt to move in any direction I chose. A suspension in pitch darkness.

"Erika," Benji said, and I blinked and breathed and forced the droplets out again, and found objects—a fence, a table, a few people—and slowly I put the world back together, piece by piece. Colorless forms in an empty world. Objects revealed by shape and texture alone. Metal chairs with rusted, peeled paint bits on their bottoms.

Strangers sitting around tables, talking, their mouths opening and closing, contorting for words, the moisture in and around them flashing hard and angry, like strobe-lights, in my perception. Living people in a world without color. I closed my mouth tight. It was too late to mourn what I'd lost. I had my window for that and it was gone now.

There would never again be another chance, because I knew deep down in the core of my soul that still burned with fragments of colors that I was going to die here, in the service of saving the world, and that was okay. It was the contract I signed by letting Prochazka save me. It was the ultimate end I marched toward. This, surely, was simply a part of the process. It would happen and roll off me. Time would go on and I would march. I knew I would. I had already done this once before.

"Erika," Benji said, again. His hand lay open on the table and I took it, instinctively, and let the warmth from it color him in what I remembered of red. Of red like the base of a fire. Like dawn.

"Erika, you're not going to like this, but if it comes down to it, it might be the only thing that saves the world." I didn't respond. All I did was angle my face toward him, so he knew I was trying to look him in the eyes—but he knew that wasn't something I could actually do anymore. In my head I'd conceptualized this movement as the same as making eye contact, but—like writing with a pen that has no ink—it was a symbolic gesture and nothing more. I'd always wanted it to mean something that it never quite could.

A bare facsimile of the real motion. He looked me in the eyes and nothing stared back at him. It was blank. Devoid of life, devoid of meaning. Pupils inside irises over corneas. Attached by a bundle of nerves to a brain that couldn't make sense of it all. Nothing, nothing. Benji said to me, "Erika, if the enemy ever captures you, if you can't fight your way out—I need you to kill yourself." 0 0 0 I did what I do best. I chose not to think about it.