Chương 77: New Years' Aspect Sinister (3) [July 10th, Age 15]

Upstairs was quiet. I relayed Loybol's statement to Yoru and Eliza, but neither seemed particularly surprised by it.

"I mean, of course this is a trap," Eliza said.

"They've had like three weeks to plan this out and they didn't just vacate the building. Clearly they're going to try and pull something." Yoru was examining his nails.

"Yeah." I stood there.

"Are—are neither of you worried about this?"

"What?"

"We're—they could be anywhere," I said.

"I mean, if this is a trap and we don't know how, then…"

"If we knew how it was a trap, it wouldn't be a trap anymore," Yoru said.

"That's just a situation. A trap implies trickery." Eliza nodded, like that was some kind of sage advice. I paused, still hung up on the earlier thought.

"So we're—""Both of us will know if anything moves outside," Eliza said.

"Trust me. Nothing's twitching out there without getting approved. Go explore. See if there's anything else in the building. We only got a really cursory glance at that back area, so maybe take a trip back there and see what's up." I didn't move.

"Are you just telling me to go away, or—""No, it's legitimate advice," Eliza said. From Yoru, maybe, but from Eliza…

"I don't believe you," I said. Yoru sighed, put his forehead in the palm of his hand. Looking more at the floor than at me, he said, "I get this is stressful, but can you tone it down just a little bit for one second?"

"Tone what down?" He ignored that.

"I'm serious. It was my idea anyway, we were talking about it while you were downstairs. Even Cygnus agreed. It's worth a shot. Nobody's gonna be able to ambush you no matter what, so go take a look back there and make double-sure. Okay?" That was enough, even if I still thought this was just a ploy to make me leave them alone.

"Sure, fine," I said. Putting my hands up in surrender.

"I'm going."

"Okay," Yoru said, expressionless. Halfway to the hall I heard them starting to talk again. Yoru had turned to Eliza and said, "Do you think—" But I tuned it out. It wasn't for me, anyway. 0 0 0 In the back area there were two office-like spaces and a staircase that went up. The office area upstairs was dead empty. Nothing alive at all up there, and I didn't even need to go up the steps personally to know that. The first office was empty, too.

The second, I thought, was empty as well, until I stood still for a little bit and let my breath out and felt the area for all it was. I figured this was a lawyer's place down here and Sal's aforementioned plumber friend was upstairs.

Since I hadn't seen him yet, I thought that he'd evacuated previously and that I didn't need to think about it anymore—but in that office there was a tall metal cabinet, and inside that tall metal cabinet, through the metal slits in its surface and between the cracks in the doors' joints, I could feel someone breathing heavily. Breathing scared. I paused. It was probably the plumber—that, or someone stashed away in there, one of the few remaining members of that theoretical strike team Bell mentioned.

No, not theoretical—real, very real. They did exist, and they did already get one of us. I frowned. Re-centered myself. It was wise to speak before doing anything else. Measure twice, cut once, or something like that.

"I know you're in there," I said, speaking slowly to give myself time to plan out the next line. Keeping my voice low enough to where Yoru and Eliza wouldn't hear. Just to be safer on that end I backed up and gently pushed the door closed—not all the way to the latch, but closed enough. Yoru and Eliza were probably more focused on each other and outside to be paying much attention to me, so I figured I was probably in the clear. I said: "If you're the plumber, knock once on the inside of that door."

There was a pause, and then a hollow metallic clang. It occurred to me that they'd knock there no matter who they were if they thought it'd get me to let my guard down, so I added another question.

"About—um—four weeks ago, a month ago, you got coffee on a Tuesday with a guy from out of town. Who was he?" Again, a pause, and then there was an older man's voice.

"Are you talking about Sal?" He sounded too old to have a key. Somewhat of a smokers' voice. That was all the evidence I needed to decide that he was hiding in there because he was scared and harmless and not because he was trying to ambush me. Nobody who sounded like that had access to magic—keys kept people too young. Even the ones who felt old, like Loybol, still didn't look or sound much older than thirty, if at all. Maybe, in hindsight, I was being too trusting.

I took one of the rolling office chairs from across the room, pushed it into the center, and sat down. I'd been standing all day, practically, and my legs were getting tired. Plus, I was still a touch woozy from the antics I'd pulled in the basement. That's all. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Sat down. Crossed my legs, like I owned the place.

"You can come out. I'm not going to hurt you." Again there was a metallic scrabbling noise as he undid the latch from the inside, and after a moment—slowly—the metal door shifted open, and an older man stepped out. One foot out of the cabinet, eyes swinging around the room and coming to rest on me, and then other foot, like the floor was lava. He thought about coming closer, but decided against it, opening the cabinet's other door instead and sitting down on the bottom shelf.

The cabinet didn't have any interior shelves in it—they'd all been removed to make room for him, the panels leaning against the wall to the right of the unit. I didn't really know what those things could've been before—I think I filed them away as sheets of foamboard, like the kind kids use for posters in school, even though in hindsight I can't think of a reason why a grown adult man would need that kind of thing. Lawyers don't need to make posters.

Once I felt him sit down in the cabinet's expanded cavity, though, I got it.

"What do you want from me?" he asked. Every word measured and even. No breath wasted.

"Nothing," I said.

"Then—""Sal told me to spare you." He blinked.

"Really?"

"That was—" I paused. It wasn't really his dying wish, but it might as well have been. It was the last thing he said to Bell before he went unconscious. At the time I hadn't really considered it, but looking back now, the odds of Sal waking up again after that had to be barely better than a coin-flip. I'd never seen Bell that angry, and she wasn't someone I expected to have a single merciful bone in her body. Although I suppose she had at least one, depending on how you looked at it.

"It was the last thing he said to me," I said, which was about as much truth as I could wring out of that ordeal on the spot. The man paused, frowned. Eyes shifted down toward his work boots for a moment.

"I'm not going to waste your time with stupid questions. Not many of them, anyway."

"There's only so many I could answer," I said.

"But you don't have anything to do with this. There's no reason for you to die for it."

"They were right, then," he went on, without changing his floor-stare.

"You were told to just kill everyone in here."

"Not really. The people with keys, yeah. The leader down there Loybol wanted alive." He shrugged.

"Is that your boss?" I thought "no," but what I said was, "I'd like her to be."

"Are you not a part of—whatever you guys are called?"

"The Radiant?"

"Yeah."

"No, I am," I replied, letting the chair swing back and forth a little.

"It's—it's complicated. I don't want to talk about it."

"I'm sure," he replied, distant, and I was suddenly aware of how unbelievably pointless all of this must have sounded to him. So aware that I apologized for it.

"What are you apologizing for?" he asked me, and I wasn't prepared to have a follow up to that, so it took me longer to answer than it should have. In the end I went with the truth, or close enough to it, only because it was the sentence I could reach out and throw the fastest.

"None of this has anything to do with you," I said.

"You shouldn't even be here."

"They told me to hide in the cabinet and that I'd be okay if I did that. I don't know why they didn't just tell me to leave." I shrugged.

"Beats me." We stopped talking for a second, and then he asked me: "Outside of—of, you know, this…what do you guys actually do?"

"Like…day to day?"

"Yeah." I thought that over, adjusting the way I was sitting in the chair so I was cross-legged with my palm in my chin, elbow pressed into my thigh.

"We stop other people with keys from bothering people like you. Usually."

"Oh," he said.

"Like cops?" I'd never really thought of myself as a cop, but it was close enough.

"I guess you could say that."

"Who—who were the people downstairs then?"

"They…they wanted to bother people like you with their keys. We think. It's…this is kind of a pre-emptive thing."

"A sting?"

"I guess." He shrugged. The plumber was being remarkably calm about all of this. I guess the gravity of the situation hadn't really hit him. That happens sometimes, with people in his spot: they find a little ounce of courage because they're stuck in the eye of the storm, and from their vantage—looking down at their own shoes—the winds are calm and nobody is screaming. As soon as they look up and look around, though, that tends to change.

I wasn't about to pick his chin up and show him the world, so I added, "The people who work downstairs are pretty bad. We're here to stop them."

"So does—does that make you the good guys?" I started to answer, but the strangled gargling of the people I'd drained downstairs stopped me. Their twisted forms like skeletal trees etched into my memory. I did that to them—those people who didn't do much of anything at all. Who, even with all the propaganda in the world, couldn't possibly have been prepared for the fate that walked up to them.

Was there anything that could've been said to them that would have made them ready to face Loybol and I coming down those steps? No. I didn't think so, anyway. In their position, I think, I would've acted the same way. Surprised—shocked silent—even though I'd been told exactly what was coming, to the letter and sound. I could have seen the whole thing on tape like a movie premonition and it still would have been a surprise to me.

It's one thing to be told about an impending disaster and another entirely to actually experience it. Surely those people, who're dead now for sure thanks to Loybol making quick work of what was left, knew that. I wanted to say that they signed up for this war just like we did—but no, they didn't. The pretense was different. That old adage that we all used for ourselves didn't apply here like I wanted it to.

For us, "dying here" was a matter of being bowled over by a horde of enemies too numerous to contain and expiring in a blaze of glory—a brilliant flash for the future generations to tell stories of. For them, it was being flash-dried by forces beyond comprehension in the empty basement of a squat office building just outside of White Plains. Nobody will ever see their bodies. Nobody will ever remember their names. Dying here, for us, was a badge of valor. For them, it was a workplace hazard.

I wanted to say that all of this amounted to me feeling bad for them, but it wasn't that simple. Feeling bad for them, in turn, would require me to feel something negative toward the source of their pain, and that was me, so I couldn't feel bad. I did this. I wasn't allowed to feel bad. It was my fault that they were like that. This wasn't a force beyond recognition—for them it was, but for me, it was me. I recognize me. It was my fault.

I was not allowed to pity them, even if they were functionally innocent—the alternative, then, would be to admit what I was doing was wrong. And again we circle back to the same old point in the same old place: I carried out that act without a second thought. It didn't bother me then, so why was I allowing it to bother me now? Did I care, or did I just want to look like I cared? If it was the former, then I was being untrue. If it was the latter, then I had to lie to the plumber if I wanted to answer his question.

Stupid. You should've just kicked him out of the building when you had the chance. Or better yet—you should have made this conversation far, far shorter. Get up, coward, and do your fucking job.

"I don't know," I told him, after far too long, with far too much honesty.

"I just work here." It was about five seconds after I said that, four seconds after his solemn nod, three seconds after I rose from my chair, two from when I turned to the door and waved him forward, and one from my hand on the knob, that I realized my mistake.