{July 13}

I liked being a mercenary—don’t think that I didn’t. All my life, I’d been struggling to find a place where I made sense and I really, honestly believed that that was it.

If it were up to me, I’d still be a mercenary. The work suited me. In a lot of ways, I think it’s all I’m truly capable of doing. I suppose I could be a garbage woman, if those exist, or a drawbridge operator. Something that wouldn’t require me to talk to people very often. Maybe if I knew how to code, I could be a programmer, but I don’t think I would handle the frustration all that well. I had some skills, but nothing that lined up into anything marketable. I was good with a task and I could be trusted with the execution. Beyond that was beyond me.

I was a slow-motion human cascade—I was falling apart, a train-wreck at quarter-speed, stumbling through the days and shoving through the faceless crowds, and all I could do was watch through the one-side mirror and pray for anyone that got in my way.

When I was a stone of eleven, it wouldn’t have mattered. I would disappear and the world would be none the wiser.

When I was twelve, it was a little different.

* * *

Cygnus held a piece of copper pipe about a foot and a half long. As I watched, it stretched and thinned into something refined and gently curved—a two-and-a-half-foot rapier with an edge that vanished into the air.

He hefted it a bit, checking the weight.

Should be a good enough replacement,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, instinctively. It was my fault that he’d lost his old one—it was probably washed up somewhere in the fields behind the mansion by now. I’d flushed the place out as best I could, and that “best” was pretty good, if I’m allowed to say so. Anything not bolted down was either shattered or washed away.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” he replied, turning slightly away from me and giving the pipe-sword a few test swings with one hand. “It doesn’t matter, all of my weapons are trash. I’m not gonna throw a fit over it.”

I let it go. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was make an enemy in my first month here.

“Great work out there, by the way,” he said, putting the blade flat-side down over his shoulder.

The sword was just barely short of poking him when he walked. That didn’t stop me from worrying about it, though, and every time I felt the concern bubble up, I forced it back down. I didn’t know how sharp a reasonably powerful metallurgic could make a piece of copper pipe, and I didn’t want to find out.

I had neither the time nor brainpower to worry about that now.

He went on: “You’re gonna have a reputation in no time.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted one. My previous experience with a reputation was hardly something I wanted to repeat.

“Thanks,” I said.

Cygnus glanced around him—looking over the holes in the drywall, the mangled pipes and exposed wires in the wreckage of the walls, the puddles of water and drenched fabrics, the cracked skulls and cloudy-red pools of blood on the tables. “I don’t think there’s any survivors,” he said.

“I left one.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You rascal.”

I took that as an invitation to continue. “He’s upstairs. I don’t know if he’s still conscious or not.”

“Well, let’s go find out, shall we?” Cygnus said, starting toward the staircase behind us.

We came to this mansion with a relatively simple order—this group was irredeemable; there was not a soul worth saving among them. You don’t need to know their names. Do whatever you want; but ensure they don’t get up to any hijinks again.

That was “mission accomplished” as far as I was concerned.

Cygnus stepped into the darkness of the stairwell ahead of me—as he went up to the crack of light formed by the ajar door at the top, he faded away; the glint of his new sword and the flash of his smile were all that separated him from the wavering darkness.

And, for half a second, I was alone again, in the ruins of a place I destroyed, with only a smile and a weapon to guide me. The reasons why slipped backward, out of my fingers. They didn’t matter as much as the result. I did this, and rust-red water was as much who I was as any other part of me.

What did people say to captives? I hadn’t needed to interrogate anyone yet. Yoru and Ava usually took the hostages when the situation called for it. They always swore by the information they could give—but they were far more skilled in the art of persuasion than I was. I wasn’t hired to speak softly—just to carry the big stick.

What do you say to someone whose legs are both shattered and frozen to the floor in a mound of ice that covered them to the stomach? What are they supposed to say to you when they know their words don’t matter at all?

There was never any chance that guy I left upstairs wasn’t going to die. I just split the act into two parts. Whether I killed him, or Cygnus stabbed him, or he bled out and froze, it didn’t matter. The conclusion was forgone. Everything else was just semantics.

I was willing to bet the last survivor wasn’t even conscious anymore. There’s an upper limit to how long someone can stay awake when the entire lower half of their body is iced. Five minutes was probably pushing it—but if there’s one thing water-keys are bad at, it’s incapacitating people in non-lethal ways.

Cygnus prodded the door with the hilt of his pipe-sword and it swung open uninhibited, which was a bit of a surprise to me given the carnage downstairs.

In that room were a few games—some arcade cabinets in the back and a blue-felt pool table in the center. Some black leather couches sat curled around a coffee table near the stairwell we emerged from. Small items were a bit unnaturally shifted from the racket we’d made, but outside of that most of the room was in order, except for the man I’d frozen to one of the legs of the pool table.

In his hands he clutched a cue he could just barely reach from where he was—he held it like a lance, white-knuckled, eyes wide and breathing heavy, but he was slowly turning blue from the cold and I knew he could swing that cue about as hard as a squirrel could.

Cygnus said nothing; he walked up to the man with soft, careful steps, just barely staying out of cue-striking range, and in a flash his hand leapt out and he snagged the end of it and tugged—and the cue slipped out of the frozen man’s limp hand. Cygnus took a step back away from him and held the cue out to me. I took it, standing it up next to me like a legionnaire of old.

It was only a couple of inches shorter than I was.

“So,” Cygnus said, drawing his sword and pointing the tip of it at the man’s chin. “You’re the lucky winner. Congrats.”

The frozen man said nothing. His mouth quivered a bit. I couldn’t tell if he was about to cry or if he was simply losing control of his facial muscles.

“I doubt you’ve got much left in there, so I’ll keep this short,” Cygnus continued. “We represent Jan Prochazka of the Radiant. It’s not that it matters all that much, because frankly, I don’t care, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of where he is anyway, but if you’d like to tell us who you guys work for, I’m sure that’s redeemable for a few credits in Heaven.”

“Children,” the man gasped. That was all he could squeeze between blue lips.

He was staring at me.

“Hey,” Cygnus said, nudging the soft part under the man’s chin with the pipe-sword’s tip. “Eyes up here.”

“Who—”

“I’m Cygnus,” Cygnus said. He gestured vaguely at me with his free hand. “This is Erika. If you’re not going to tell us who you work for, let me know so I can put you out of your misery, because—I’m gonna be real, man—that doesn’t look comfortable.”

The ice on the man’s left side was a bit cracked—he’d been trying to use the pool cue to chip himself out, but it didn’t seem like he’d gotten very far. It didn’t look like he had a key, either, so we had little to fear on that front, too.

I suppose that was the price of doing business with those who have keys—there’s always a slim chance, every day, that you get bowled over by powers you can neither fathom nor understand.

Oh well. As they say—that’s showbiz, baby.

“Jim,” the man wheezed. “51 High Street. In town.”

I wasn’t able to stifle the little giggle before it came out. I don’t think people expect traffickers to have basic, white-bread names like Jim or Bob, but it stands to reason that any given name could be anywhere. The evildoers of the world don’t necessarily need to have evil-sounding names.

In that second I saw this mythical figure, sitting on a throne of cracked skulls under a bleeding sky, in a castle guarded by the souls of the damned—and our intrepid heroes, a certain Cygnus and a certain Erika Hanover, who fought tooth and nail just to catch a glimpse of the dark lord’s eye, arrive. We have crossed the universe to get here, through trials of every element, through tests of faith that would make even the most pious bishop turn to sin. We have seen every aspect of humanity play out in our journey three times over, and we have judged it all worth saving—we have judged it all worth our lives in sacrifice. We are broken, we are ripped open and spilling out like chew-toys, but we still have the strength to raise our swords one last time, to smite the source of all wretchedness from this earth, because without this cause, we have nothing—without this cause there is nothing—and without this one person who is the source of all suffering, the world is whole. We ask him, with chipped words because we are spent and hurting, for his true name, so that we may lay curses upon him in the ancient tongue. We ask him this because we know his hubris will make him tell us, because he’s certain he will win, because the forces of good haven’t been able to stop him yet, and he doesn’t know how they could possibly stop him now. We ask this evil from before the first words were spoken for his name, and he says his name is Bob Jones.

Cygnus ignored me, but he did smile. “Thanks. I’m sure that’s good for something up there.” Then he looked at me and said, “Erika, take his head off. He keeps staring at you. Obviously, he wants you to do it.”

The mention of my name put me back in my own shoes. Nothing we did would ever be that grand, and honestly, I liked it that way. This was so much easier. I could only imagine that if the world had to unite against an evil that obvious and threatening, they would nominate people more qualified than us to fight it.

What did we know about any of that?

“Children,” the man gasped, again.

“I don’t see your point,” Cygnus said. He gestured at me and I set to work.

A piece of ice broke itself off from the ground near the man’s twisted legs and leapt into my hand where it instantly liquified, the ball of water hanging in the air around my hand. I reformed it into a tight disc and took aim—and in one fluid motion I slung it into the man’s neck. It sliced right through him like a knife through a carrot, embedding itself in the wood of the pool table leg behind him.

He coughed blood, once—the red against the trapped white refracted light in the ice—and that was it for him.

“You know, you should really work on some one-liners,” Cygnus said, admiring my handiwork. “They’re really good for stuff like this.”

I walked over to the body and lay the cue down next to his knees. Maybe, somewhere out there, there was a cop dumb enough to rule this a suicide.

“I’m not sure I could pull it off,” I said.

“You’ll never know until you try, right?” he replied.

Cygnus pulled out his phone and sent a text to the cleanup line. “Let’s get out of here.”

I nodded, and we headed for the steps. As we walked, I mumbled to myself, somewhat involuntarily—“Children.”

“It’s all anyone cares about, isn’t it?” Cygnus said. “And all they do is stare at you. I’m not sure if I should be proud of you or annoyed that people seem to just assume this is something I’d do.”

He clapped me on the shoulder—I snapped to attention, startled out of my skin.

“You’re the star of the show, Erika,” he said. “It’s just the Erika show, every day, all the time.”

There was a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs. It was bigger than it was when we went up.

0 0 0

I think about that day a lot. Not that it was particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but because it was simple. I had a thing to do, and I did it. That was it. But if I could go back, I don’t know if I would. I know better now, I think, and I’m not sure I could stand in the shoes of twelve-year-old Erika Hanover and move my hands with hers. By the time I became old enough to wish I could go back to those days, it was too late to ever bring them back, even by imitation, and I was too different to fit back into the skin of the person I was.

Even if I had a time machine, it wouldn’t matter. It could never be the same again.

If there’s one thing I learned in my days at the Radiant, it’s that the act of yearning ruins the illusion.