Chương 67: These Heartless Creatures (1) [June 15th, Age 15]

They ended up sending me back to the Radiant home base for a little while. Loybol noticed something was off with me right after she told me the news. Once I'd explained what went down—with Bell filling in the parts where my memory was spotty—Loybol nodded all sage-like and told me I probably had a concussion and that I shouldn't be on any missions for a little while.

I was a concerned that we'd have a weak front without me, but she waved me off and said it was better for me to get some rest and get back to normal in a safe environment than give my forty-percent on the front lines. The worst case had me go up to bat in an ambush, and while concussed-Erika was probably still a step above a fair fight against any of the New York gang's keys, it simply wasn't worth the risk. Sure, okay. I could buy it. And I was lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to a bit of rest.

With all of that done, Bell volunteered to drive me back to the factory. In the car—and slightly carsick—I asked her: "How long do you think this'll take?"

"We're only twenty minutes away now," she replied, eyes facing the road.

"No, I mean—I mean the concussion," I said.

"How long until I can go back?"

"Spoken like a true soldier," Bell replied.

"It's different for everyone. When I was a kid, I got a concussion from a bad fall in a softball game and I didn't feel normal again for four weeks, but I think that's pretty close to the nightmare scenario. You'll probably be cleared for combat in two."

"Two whole weeks," I said, distant. God, that was so long—even though, given the general pace of the war up to this point, it really wasn't. Four months had gone by since we started and we'd barely accomplished anything of note. That fight with Sal and the agent was the closest we'd ever had to a meaningful lead. We finally had a path forward and I wasn't allowed to be a part of it.

"I don't think we'll move on anything until you get back," Bell said.

"It's not worth it. We could go in on Sal's boss's place, but I think that'll end up being a job for two of me, you, or Loybol. Probably you and Loybol. She'll likely have me do something else."

"How do you know?"

"I don't," she said, running her fingers through her hair, pushing it back.

"Just a guess." We stopped talking for a little while. In that time my thoughts turned to Benji's death. Loybol explained what she knew: he was out with Yoru, got distracted by something in the woods. The two separated for a second, and once Yoru's attention was elsewhere, Benji got a bullet between his eyes. No real firefight. No blaze of glory. Just— pop, drop. She'd said Yoru wasn't taking it very well. He was on a scouting mission with Ava now, and hopefully they were talking it out.

Loybol probably meant that to be optimistic, but it certainly didn't feel that way. It only became real to me that he was gone once she explained how he died. Before that, it was just like it always was—he wasn't there before, he isn't there now. Nothing changed. Now, though… That was how I was going to die, I figured. It was the only real chance anyone had. That, or being psychically strangled, I guess, if that was possible.

"I'm really glad Sal and the agent actually told us stuff," I said, just to take my mind off that.

"It was definitely nice not having to squeeze it out of them," Bell said.

"I mean, we had to a little bit, but not a lot." My voice got quiet.

"Yeah." There was a pause.

"The torture's got you down. That was it," she said.

"The thing you were worried about." I pursed my lips and didn't respond. I didn't plan to have this talk with Bell. For as good as our relationship was, I'd marked this as an issue for me alone. Maybe for Cygnus, if we had a minute. But if she just guessed it out of the blue, I didn't have the heart to lie.

"Nod if I'm right," Bell said. Slowly—unsure—I nodded.

"Look at you, developing a conscience all of a sudden," Bell said, with a little chuckle.

"How swell."

"I—I feel like I shouldn't be this worried about it," I started.

"I mean, I've…I've done so many horrible things to so many people and never really felt anything. I can say that, now. It didn't matter to me then and it…it shouldn't matter to me now, but it—it does. Maybe it's because these people don't matter."

"It only hurts when they're not important," Bell said.

"Yeah, I guess I can understand that. There's a lot more chaff now than there used to be."

"It's not just chaff," I said—and I thought I had a follow-up, but I didn't. Instead, the whole case dropped out from under me and I found my worries had nothing to stand on at all. Just a vague distaste. A distrust for the process.

"Maybe I'll feel better when I talk to Prochazka," I said, slowly. Mostly to myself.

"That should be good," Bell said.

"He's better about these sorts of things than I am."

"Yeah," I said, distant. The thread was gone. There wasn't anything more to say. We were silent until we got back to the factory. 0 0 0 The factory is as the factory was. Still crumbling, still there. Nothing, really, had changed. Walking around outside were a handful of people I didn't recognize. Loybol's troops, I supposed: regular-seeming people in regular-seeming clothes that gave me brief passing glances as I went up to the front door and nothing more.

I faced the last one—someone who was standing in front of the door.

"Welcome back, Miss Hanover," he said, tipping his head down. His eyes flicked toward Bell as well, but to her he only said, "Welcome back, Bell." And he opened the door for us. Inside—back in that cracked-tile foyer, cavernous and empty, the stairs that started the path up to our old hideout surely just as dusty and mud-stained as they were before—Bell said to me, "How come you got an honorific and I didn't?" I shrugged. Didn't know.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Bell looked around her for a moment.

"As much as I'd love to say hello to Prochazka and catch up a bit, I have a mission to attend to. Can't really stick around." She turned and faced me, crouched down.

"You'll be fine in a week or so. Don't let this get to you. It's minor."

"I'm fine," I said—and I meant it. It was what it was. I'd survive. A concussion wasn't exactly a career-ending injury.

"I know," Bell said, but—if I'm honest—it didn't really sound like she did.

"Either way… I'll see you around, I guess. Glad we could catch up." She reached out and I obliged the embrace. We held each other for just a bit longer than I expected to, and when she finally pulled back, she left her hands on my shoulders and said, "Just because the others haven't seen in you what I have doesn't mean they won't. At the end of the day, this is your show, and when the moment comes, I trust you. When we make it to the winter, this shit's over. The war's done.

We just have to hold out until the first major snowfall and then it's easy. Until then—we do what we can, when we can. Stay healthy, and I mean that in all possible ways. We can't do this without you. Okay?"

"Okay," I said—facing her eyes as best I could. It was starting to occur to me that my eyes probably looked quite a bit like hers now—odd and unfocused, washed out. A blank stare that defied my movements. Was it as unnerving looking at me as it was looking at Bell? Did my own dead-fish void stare set everyone else on edge, too? Wasn't that exactly what I always wanted? To be feared? Feared, or… We faced each other and the two of us saw, I'm sure, nothing at all.

I did not see Bell—I saw an outline of a person I could always pick out of a crowd, who had my back when nobody else would because she knew what I had inside me. Bell did not see me—she saw the future that I powered. The thing I could become—the thing that, in some ways, I already was. No—wasn't that what I always wanted? And then Bell turned around. Saluted me. Said, "See you, then," and walked back out the door.

For a moment I stood alone in the great foyer again, the sound of the door hitting its stops echoing through the hall and twice again through my ears. Every one of the room's imperfections filled in with glowing red in my memory, a fizzing substitute that mimicked that echoing sound. For a moment I stood alone. Then I went up the stairs to find Prochazka. 0 0 0 That little escapade cost me.

As soon as I hit the top of the stairs, I was struck by a dizzy spell and nearly tripped just trying to get to the wall for support. That kind of hyper-awareness, caught up in the moment, was a bit beyond what I could muster through the concussion. Accompanied by a sudden-onset earsplitting headache, I sank to the floor and took a moment to myself. This would pass. It wasn't that big of a deal. People got concussions all the time. Nothing to worry about.

The headache, though— When I figured I could support myself, I got back to my feet and went to the steps again, taking them down slowly with the rail for support. Once I was down on the ground floor, I headed down one of the halls that branched off the back of the room looking for the infirmary. I didn't know if Sophia was going to be there or not, but I figured she probably was. I was sort of hoping she wasn't, though.

If I remembered correctly—and she hadn't reorganized anything—the medicine cabinet in her office was the right-hand door under the mason jar she kept that medical pinhole-light thing in. That was the plan, anyway, until I got to her door and realized I wouldn't be able to read the labels on the bottles, and I'd have to ask her to get it for me anyway. In shame, I knocked on her door and waited for the reply. I hadn't even considered that, given the headache. It was hard enough to walk straight.

You'd think that after eight months of being like this, I wouldn't forget little things like that anymore, but there's always a relapse. It hurts a little bit less every time, but it still does. This one stung a bit more than usual, though. One on top of another. I rubbed my forehead, hoping that would somehow make the throbbing pain in my temples subside, which it did not. Focusing on that made me forget to put droplets in front of the door, so Sophia's voice came straight out of nowhere.

"Erika?" she asked. I sucked in a hard breath and snapped to attention.

"Oh—um, hi. I'm—I'm back." She was, more or less, right as I'd left her. A little more stressed, somehow, but otherwise the same. Key holders don't tend to age all that much, and it hadn't exactly been an eon. I felt—just from standing there under her eyes—that she was more surprised about my unchanging existence than the other way around. I suppose the bandage over the wound I'd sustained was new.

"You are," she said. Confused.

"Are you okay?"

"I—I got a concussion," I said. Despite everything—the time, how I'd changed, the distance between me and the event I still couldn't separate her from—I still found Sophia hard to talk to.

"Um. In a mission yesterday. I'm just looking for some aspirin so I can—um, so I can go talk to Prochazka."

"A concussion? What happened?" Sophia stepped aside and beckoned for me to come in. Once I was inside, she gestured to the medical bed, and I just went along with it. I didn't have a whole lot of autonomy with a headache that bad.

"Please don't talk so loud," I said.

"I went—um—my headache's really bad right now."

"Sorry. Could you—do you remember what happened?"

"My memory's okay, I think. I was out on a mission with Bell and we got ambushed. I jumped out of my chair and pulled her down to avoid getting shot, and the bullet was—it bounced off the wall, or something, and I hit my head really hard on the table leg. Or the floor, or—or something. I think the bullet grazed me but I'm okay."

"Jesus," she said, and for once—honestly—she sounded legitimately scared. Or relieved that I was alive. It was hard to tell—again, I chalked that one up to the headache.

"You got lucky."

"I've heard." Having a scapegoat that simple and clear was, honestly, pretty nice. I should've tried having earsplitting headaches more often. She grabbed a small paper cup from a stack of them next to the sink, filled it with water (which I left alone, despite an urge to do otherwise) and then delved into the cabinet below the medical light and plucked a little pill-bottle off a shelf down there. Sophia handed me the cup and the pill and said, "That'll help the headache.

Not a lot I can do about the concussion, I'm afraid. Not touching your brain with a ten-foot pole. No offense."

"I get it," I said.

"It's fine." I took the pill and just sat there for a moment. Sophia watched me swallow it, and a couple seconds after I was done, she said, "Can I be honest with you for a bit?" That was always better than the alternative.

"Yeah."

"I didn't think you'd get this far," she said, sitting down on the stool. It was an old leather one, fake leather—green, if I remembered correctly. I tried to visualize it and couldn't quite make the pattern come together.

"I—when you had the accident last year, I kind of thought that was it. I thought you'd try to make it work for a little while and then you wouldn't. Then the war started up in February and… and I really lost a lot of hope. I thought we were dead for sure. Even with Loybol backing us up, I didn't think it'd be enough. I don't know if you've seen any of her people around here, but they're all fucking weird. She's brainwashing them somehow. And…

I mean, Prochazka trusts her, and she's threatened by New York just as much as we are, but if I was calling the shots, I wouldn't be leaving her alone with Unit 6 people like he's doing. Have you been on a mission alone with her yet?"

"Once or twice," I said.

"And she's been fine?"

"Always," I replied.

"I—I like her, honestly. I always feel like she listens to me. I trust her." Sophia crossed her arms and tilted her head down.

"That's good, I guess. I don't know. Maybe I'm just paranoid. Wouldn't be the first time I've been accused of it. All I know is that if I was a betting woman, and I'm not, but if I was—I would've bet against you." While we were being honest—"Am I supposed to find that encouraging?" I said, flat.

"I'm not done. You cut me off."

"You sounded done."

"I wasn't," she said, raising a finger.

"I would've bet against you and I would've lost it all. You made this shit work, and I didn't think you had it in you, but you did. So—so I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been so hard on you." I wasn't expecting an apology—but then again, I wasn't really expecting to ever see Sophia again. Part of me didn't expect her to be in here, as if she had anywhere else in the world to be. She wasn't on our front lines, she wasn't a part of any of the plans. She was just the medic, stuck here at home while the kids got to play.

But just like us, I expected her to vanish in a short breeze. I thought I was going to open that door and have only a distant memory for company. Fumble through the cabinet with only a ghost-flash of auburn to guide me to the right container. No, no. She wasn't one of us, and I'd have done well to remember that.

"Thanks, I think," I said.

"I'm—still not really sure if that was a compliment or not."

"It was," she said back. Facing me straight-on.

"I mean it. I didn't think you'd get this far and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It means you're stronger than I thought you were in ways outside of the key." She turned away, back to the medical instruments.

"You'll make a good soldier yet, Erika."