Chương 75: New Years' Aspect Sinister (1) [July 10th, Age 15]

Cygnus and I woke up two mornings later under the assumption that today had to be the day. If not now, when? The plan stated that we were supposed to be out there two days ago. In the interest of getting things rolling, we decided to step outside for a quick walk after breakfast, and it took about half a second of standing outside the hotel lobby, out from under the building's front overhang, to realize why we'd waited. One second in the ninety-degree, barely breathable, borderline liquid air.

I didn't even need to bounce droplets to be completely aware of every crevice in the whole wide world. There was not a single thing that escaped me. I knew Loybol and another figure were walking toward us from beyond the other end of the parking lot before they saw us standing outside. I knew, after a moment's thought, that the figure walking next to her—arms crossed behind her head, laughing at her own joke—wasn't Yoru or Ava or Bell, and Esther had gone home, so it had to be Eliza, brought in for backup.

Behind them, though, was a short male figure that could only have been one person: hands in his pockets, looking out at the road. Counting the cars as they went by to have something to do other than listen to Eliza. Without really intending to, I'd fully turned myself to face them, even though I wasn't really within their eyeshot yet—and again without fully intending to, I grabbed Cygnus's hand and pulled him out of his thoughts, walking to meet them. I was omniscient.

"It's time," I told his confusion, and because I said it, it was law. 0 0 0 It was, in fact, Eliza waiting there for us with Loybol. Of course it was. In that morning I couldn't possibly have been wrong. I found her from so far away that she didn't know to dry out the air around her to keep me in the dark yet—and by the time she thought to, her figure fading from my perception, she realized the jig was up and didn't bother. Cygnus gave the trio a limp wave with his free hand.

"Gang's all here, huh?" Eliza replied first.

"More or less. What's up?" She gave me a quick salute, one with lowered eyes. I did not return the gesture. I didn't even move—but after a moment I remembered I should at least say hello to the other two so I added, "Hi again, guys."

"Did you two have fun?" Eliza asked.

"Feeling nosy today, aren't we," Cygnus said, flatly.

"As nosy as always," she said, brightly. Just another day for Eliza. Another perfect summer morning, visiting her friends, doing her favorite job.

"Pleasantries aside," Loybol said, with emphasis on that first word, "I brought Eliza in for backup. I figured that we're walking into a fight without the element of surprise, so the least we can do is be prepared." That put all five of us on a single mission. By far the largest number I'd been a part of. Even back in the day, we'd never put that many on a single outing. It was widely considered bad form. This could only mean one thing, obviously.

"How ready do you think they are?" Loybol frowned.

"I mean this with all sincerity—they're probably treating our eventual assault on that building in White Plains as a proper last stand. Whoever's in there reports directly to the man up top. She will, for certain, know something. We're not going to stand around and try to dodge the issue. Erika and Yoru, you two are in charge of making sure nobody's waiting in a window when we get there. It's a city, so be thorough. You know the stakes, so I'll spare you the details. Cygnus, Eliza, you're with me.

I will be interrogating the target personally. You two are my guards. Those are the initial positions. Obviously, each of you will be wherever we end up needing you to be, but that's what we're starting with. Understood?" I nodded. The four others gave their various affirmations as well.

"If we play our cards right, this might be the last fight we have to do," Loybol went on. Her voice was iron—low, quiet, but unmistakably and completely unbreakable. A force like the movement of tectonic plates.

"It's unlikely, but a show of overwhelming force here can drive a stake into their hearts like nothing else. This is their last stand. Their last stand is our Tuesday-night bust. Tonight, we will walk out of there with a name, a face, an address, and a clear end in sight. Tomorrow, we will walk out of this city with that man's head on a stake." It hadn't occurred to me that this was Loybol's first crack at warfare until that moment.

She wasn't old enough to have fought in Vietnam or anything like that, and I couldn't ever see her as a standard infantryman like Prochazka and Benji both were, back in simpler days. But as a captain—a general—someone who'd take the eyes of those infantrymen skyward to their higher purpose— I'd follow Loybol to the ends of the earth. Having Eliza next to her made Eliza's earlier pass at my good graces even more infuriating.

I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, gesturing wildly at Loybol—idiot, this is what you're supposed to do, this is the kind of thing I blindly follow—but aside from the simple fact that I'd never be that forward about it, the fear of Eliza simply agreeing and changing course made me pause. I didn't really want to know what Eliza was capable of, in any respect. 0 0 0 We filed into two cars, back in the Home Depot's parking lot.

To switch things up, Yoru and I were together, while Loybol, Eliza, and Cygnus took Loybol's car. While Loybol had switched out the car she used at least once during this whole war effort, Yoru hadn't, which meant it was the same car I'd had a breakdown in about a year earlier, when I'd let a little girl explode under my watch. Just being in the presence of that car again was enough to make me pause.

My memory of it was in color, an actual image, not just a set of points along curvatures with textures overlaid, but the second I'd made the connection—it was the same car, it had to be—the plug on the bottom of my brain was pulled and the memory of how badly I'd screwed that mission up swirled around and drained deep into my stomach. But Yoru didn't notice anything was wrong, and I didn't want him to worry, so I swallowed and did my best to plug the hole again.

It was about an hours' drive to White Plains from where we were. We'd be parking about a mile outside of the building and taking a route on foot, all five of us together, which had its risks but was better than splitting up again. I didn't quite want to admit it, but I was worried.

The weather was as perfect as it could've been for this short of an actual downpour, and we had our orders lined up, and we had a good idea of the geography of the area and where snipers could be hiding and such, but I couldn't shake a nagging feeling in the back of my throat that we just weren't quite ready. After the events at Sal's house, I didn't feel as invincible as I used to. Yoru was feeling the same way, I was sure. He held the steering wheel so tight that he was basically sculpted around it.

He did not speak to me for almost the entire ride there. We just sat in silence—him staring out the front window at the other cars and the buildings and such outside and me trapped alone in a completely opaque coffin hurtling down a highway with nothing but my own thoughts and his shallow breathing for company. I used to like car rides. We had exactly one exchange on that trip. When we were around ten minutes away, Yoru finally spoke. Sparing me from what I was surely about to do myself.

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"I used to be on the fence about this whole thing, you know," he said, to nobody in particular. Facing forward, like I wasn't there. His eyes didn't flick to me, not even for a second. To the singer on the radio's song, maybe.

"The war?" I asked. He nodded.

"I used to worry about all the people we were mowing down who didn't really seem like they knew anything." I wondered if anyone told him.

"It's means to an end," I said, similarly to nobody.

"I said I used to," he replied.

"Now, well…" He swallowed. Shifted his grip on the steering wheel for the first time. Let himself lean back, took a hand off the wheel. Relax, relax. The stress theater isn't fooling anyone. Now—say what you feel.

"It's not any different than before, really," he went on.

"I've choked out twice as many people for just about the same. In three years, when people find out about magic, the body count's gonna dwarf what we're doing here by so many orders of magnitude it'll be like… it'll make this look like bug squashing. Like a fly-swatter. At the end of the day… it's the same old shit. Keep down the people who're making noise.

This is just one long, extended old-style mission, with a couple of extra parties involved, and—I'm not gonna act like I always spared the extras on the old missions. Hell. You've seen it. We don't give a shit." I wanted to say I did—but he'd seen it, too. He knew. I swallowed. I was a bit worried I'd have to play this role again when I got into the car with him, but if he felt comfortable venting around me, then the least I could do was be receptive. I didn't have enough time to interject before he went on.

"I mean—I'd never say this around Loybol, obviously, but I really don't feel like this matters all that much. It's all theater, right? It's doing something just to say we did."

"We could lose the land," I said.

"It's not ours, anyway," he replied.

"It's Prochazka's. I know you're actually from around here, but…Ava and I are from Chicago. This isn't exactly our ancestral homeland, you know? I don't have that angle." He sighed.

"And—God, at the end of the day, I just don't give as much of a shit about human life as I think I should. Ava doesn't, either. We just—I don't know. As long as I get to delete some shitters from the world, I guess I'm happy."

"Flushing the people out of the holes didn't bother you at all?" I ground my teeth the second that sentence left them. Stupid.

"Did it bother you?" he asked me. Honesty, I supposed, was better than trying to lie. I'd dug myself this hole already, the least I could do was pat down the sides and make it comfortable.

"A little," I said.

"You don't have to lie to me," Yoru said.

"I just told you I don't give a shit."

"I'm serious." He shook his head. Disappointed, somehow.

"Don't give me that shit, Erika, I know you don't give a fuck about those people."

"I think about it a lot."

"No, you don't."

"I do," I said.

"I've talked to Bell about this already."

"And I'm sure she had so much to say," he replied, absently.

"I don't suppose you talked to anyone other than your enabler, did you?"

"I talked to Loybol and Prochazka about it too. And Bell's not enabling me." Yoru, finally, took his eyes off the road for a second to look at me. We were stopped at a red-light somewhere, and he used that couple of seconds to really take in everything there was to see about the girl trapped in a car next to him. It turned out there wasn't all that much.

"It's a good thing this war's about you," he said.

"We've all sipped the Kool-Aid to some extent, but you grabbed the jug and chugged it."

"Benji died for it," I said.

"You think he didn't believe in this?"

"I think he died because I fucked up and he got picked off when he wasn't expecting it. That's not dying for a cause. That's like saying you're a self-made millionaire when all you did was buy a lottery ticket. You didn't do shit. Benji never got a chance to choose. Given that choice, maybe he would've.

I know what the man's thoughts were on the upcoming end of the world, and I think if someone put a gun to his head and told him to renounce all this so he could live another day, he'd wrench the gun from their hand and put a bullet between his eyes himself. But you know what else I think?" I fell quiet for a moment. I didn't have a response. Sitting in cars hadn't been working out for me very much lately.

You'd think I'd be more mentally prepared for talks like this by now, but every time I'd managed to convince myself things would be different. It turns out I'm very good at that.

"I think that might've been the only two things you two had in common," he finished.

"It's part of the job description," I said.

"We've all gotta be prepared to die here. It's for the good of the world." He shook his head again.

"God, Erika, I know you're not this stupid. Think for yourself for half a goddamn second. You can't possibly believe that, in the current year, we can keep magic under wraps for much longer. All of this—it's just theater. Like I said. It's a dance. It's performative warfare. We fight these people because it makes the people who're directing feel like they've got control over something. We've got NYC so hopelessly outgunned. Do you realize that?

Do you realize just how completely, totally outmatched they are between you, Bell, Eliza, and Loybol? Hell, throw Prochazka himself in there. He's in your league. You five could crack your knuckles and walk into the city at your leisure and put a stop to this, but you're not. Why? Because secretly Loybol and Prochazka both know that this doesn't actually matter. This is something they can control, so they're gonna control it for as long as they can, because you know what they can't control?

Some wackjob with an earth key dropping a skyscraper and doing 9-11 two, electric boogaloo. There's a period of time where someone who's sufficiently mentally ill gets a key and nobody's found out yet. They're not on any list, they're not held accountable for anything. For just a little bit of time, nobody knows they exist, and if they wake up that morning and choose violence, we're all fucked.

We've been able to mask a few of those times as terrorist attacks or freak accidents or whatever, but something's gotta give eventually. Someone's gonna get someone on video at some point and it'll go viral on Twitter and then we're all fucked. So we stop NYC from going lebensraum on all our asses and we put an ice-dart in the Fuhrer's head. We buy ourselves some time. For what?

Now we've got a whole city that nobody's paying any attention to, and someone's gotta keep an eye on the place or the aforementioned sequel to everyone's favorite American disaster happens." He let out a long breath and it felt like half his soul slipped out between his lips.

"Nobody's got a plan, Erika. There's no plan. Nobody told you what it is because it doesn't exist. We don't know what we're supposed to do if we win. We don't even know what we're supposed to do if we lose. Can we surrender? Does it matter if we throw our hands in the air and give up instead of choosing to die?

Maybe it'll matter now, but in a year when the world's burning down because Joe Sample found out there's a subset of humans with a little piece of silver jewelry that makes them strictly superior to him, I don't think history'll look back on us morons dancing around beforehand all that kindly." I finally found something to say.

"Are you afraid to die?"

"Jesus Christ," he snapped.

"Erika, this isn't a fucking death cult, it's a job. It's a goddamn nine-to-five for psychopaths. That's it. Obviously I don't want to die. Obviously I'm not interested in dying for something that's gonna be made irrelevant by some idiot in six months.

And maybe I didn't realize that before when we were invincible and the jobs were small and the perps were stupid, but since Loybol and Prochazka insist on dragging this out for as long as fucking possible on the one-percent chance that you on a humid day isn't enough to maul their entire army single-handedly, I'm starting to have a few doubts. Okay?" He paused. I thought he was done, but then he found something else.

"And it's not like we're even all on the same page about this. You're pretty clearly more than thrilled to leap headfirst into the furnace to borrow a couple more months for your masters, but I'm not, and Ava's certainly not, and Bell's sure as fuck not, too."

"Why does everyone keep saying that?" I asked.

"Because it's true, Erika," he said.

"We've all known Bell for longer than you have. We know what she's like."

"I know Bell," I said, again. Insistent.

"No, you don't," he said.

"Bell knows you. You don't know shit about Bell. Has Bell told you literally anything about herself? Anything at all?" My silence was the only answer he needed.

"Exactly," he said, after a bit too long.

"Bell doesn't give a shit about us. She's made that abundantly clear. She cares about two things: herself, and the salary Prochazka's giving her to keep fighting for us. Bell's just standing around waiting for knowledge of magic to blow up so she can carve out a slice of country for herself and become a dictator. That's it. She probably actively wants us to lose this war. That, or at least she's complicit in making it take as long as possible."

I wanted to dispute the dictator part, but I found I couldn't quite do it. It sounded right. It sounded like something Bell would do. And I couldn't dispute that I knew nothing about her, either. It'd been thrown in my face before. But I did have one thing, at least.

"She saved my life," I said, slowly.

"And if she was going to try and take over the world or something, she wouldn't have saved me."

"Because you'd fight her?"

"If it came to that."

"You wouldn't dare," he said.

"That'd involve standing up to one of your idols, and we all know you just don't have it in you. All that power wasted on someone with a fuckin' fear of authority. God." And after a moment, after the car had eased to a stop: "You really are just a broken kid, aren't you. Maybe you really just don't know any better." I didn't have an answer to that, either. The ambient road-noise kept my thoughts away—the wind down the road, the distant sound of car horns. City sounds in all their banality.

But the radio was gone, and that was the first line of defense. Yoru looked around for a moment, then unbuckled his seat belt.

"Well, chin up," he said.

"We're here. Get your tap-dance shoes on. It's showtime." He pulled down the sun-visor and opened the mirror's cover, looking at himself for a second. With the way I was now, I couldn't know what he was seeing in there. Just eyes staring at eyes. He said nothing for a good ten seconds, just watching the minute movements of his own face in that tiny strip of reflection. I couldn't know what he was seeing in there, but I certainly could guess.

Then he slapped himself twice on the sides of his head, muttered, "Showtime, idiot," under his breath, and opened the car door.