{July 14}

I was doing my best to fit in, and Jan Prochazka knew that. He saved his one-on-one with me for the morning after the mission, and on top of that he was kind enough to give me a few hours to recover, too.

I was only mildly hungover when I came into his office.

He invited me to sit down, so I did, stepping carefully as to not give him the impression that I thought the room was spinning.

“How was yesterday?” Prochazka asked me.

Jan was a tall black man with a soft voice and a strong Czech accent, which threw a lot of people unfamiliar with him for a loop. He was the sort of person who was twenty-seven in the shadow of their hundredth birthday. Lots of older key holders were like that—they might not have aged much physically, but they were most definitely still aging. Even though I didn’t know much about him at the time, I remember thinking that there couldn’t have been a job in the world Prochazka hadn’t done by the time he came to lead the Radiant. I had yet to ask him a question he lacked an immediate answer for, and in our short time together I had asked him a lot of questions.

I had known him for a month, and I trusted him with my life.

“It was fine,” I said. “We got everyone, I think.”

“You double-checked?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

I’m sure Prochazka disapproved strongly of my night-time habits. He was a staunchly sober man; I’m not sure he’d had a drink in seventy years. I was told by Yoru and Ava that he took one taste of the swill that passed for vodka in the United States when he came here after the war, and he quit drinking on the spot. I wasn’t about to doubt the authenticity of that story—it certainly sounded like something Prochazka would do—but telling tall tales about the man was a favorite past-time of Unit 6, so there was a good chance it was nothing.

Prochazka’s sobriety was well-known, though. And facts were secondary to the explanations.

I knew he didn’t like me drinking, either, but he swallowed his distaste for it upon the realization that me being a sober pariah in Unit 6 was probably more damaging than me having a beer or two at night. I wanted to fit in. That required certain things. I was willing to swallow those requirements and therefore he was too.

It was okay. He came from a culture that was laxer about those things. The booze itself was never the concern—it was always about the habit with him. It was one of his core tenets that he expected us all to just absorb via osmosis at some point.

I’m sure that Prochazka never had an issue with me having a beer or two on special nights; but I’m sure he always kept the idea of an excess in the back of his mind.

Prochazka had been having these conversations with me in the mid-mornings after missions for a while now, and he always seemed to just want to chat. I’d never seen him do that with anyone else, although I suppose there’s no way I would have if those chats were always in his office, behind a closed door.

I don’t blame him for not knowing what to say. It’s hard to blame anyone for that, really.

“You said their leader was at 51 High Street. Right in town,” Prochazka said. His voice was too neutral for me to get any information on how he was feeling from it.

Prochazka looked me dead in the eyes, surely trying to determine how hungover I was. He had to already know. I walked into that room under the assumption that Prochazka could absorb our voices from the walls. Nothing happened under his roof that he didn’t know about—that was what Yoru told me, and I believed him. I didn’t have a reason not to. It meshed with what I’d seen and therefore, automatically, it became true.

The attention made me squirm.

I nodded. The answer was “somewhat”—not enough to be non-verbal, but enough to be minimally so, because my own voice would echo through my head if I spoke too loudly or for too long.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to wrap this up as soon as possible. We don’t know how many people they’re holding in there—unless you asked the hostage?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t think to.”

“Cygnus didn’t?”

Shook my head again.

Prochazka frowned. “Of course not.”

He shifted a little and continued. “It’s not really your role to remember that kind of nuance. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’m muscle,” I said. That was my formal job description—muscle, bruiser, enforcer, whatever.

He nodded. “As of now, yes. Later, maybe more. But we’ve got to get you there first.”

I had not yet been on any solo missions because of that. I was Prochazka’s personal project—that much I knew, but there was something he wanted to make out of me that I was not quite aware of. Something more than a bruiser, I figured, but we had to start somewhere, and there was no place for dead weight at the Radiant.

He usually put me with Cygnus, as we were the two youngest people in Unit 6—in the Radiant as a whole, actually—and Cygnus was reasonably experienced despite being in the unit for only a few months longer than me.

We were usually only put on missions where we were supposed to shoot first and ask questions later, and where there was no limit on destruction. When there was more finesse required, I was usually third wheel to Yoru and Ava, who were the most senior non-managing members of Unit 6. On those, I was usually only supposed to speak when spoken to and keep myself out of sight for as long as possible. On those missions, I was the threat. I was the fury of the Radiant that Yoru and Ava would claim to have leashed, temporarily, lest their demands go unheeded and they slack that chain for just a moment.

I hadn’t been on a mission with Benji or Bell yet, but I figured that was in the pipeline.

A few seconds too long of silence went by. “You’re dismissed,” Prochazka said. “You should be free for the rest of the day.”

“I’m not going to High Street?” I asked.

“I haven’t decided who I’m sending yet,” he said. “I’m still waiting on some intelligence from Unit 2. I might send you with Yoru and Ava if we think they have anything salvageable; if not, I’ll put Cygnus on it.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t go anywhere. There were aches in parts of me I didn’t know had nerve endings. Prochazka raised an eyebrow and repeated, “Dismissed, Erika. And drink some more water. It’ll help.”

I blinked, stood up, and hurried out of the room.

0 0 0

“He might never do it,” Cygnus said to me. “You’ve gotta be prepared for that.”

We sat in the cafeteria of the old factory the Radiant had moved into. Benji and Prochazka both liked to call it the “mess hall,” but they were both long-time veterans, and nobody else referred to it that way.

I was over my headache by that time, partially thanks to Prochazka’s advice. I was feeling pretty good about myself over a job well done, so I was okay with being in public for a while. The sidelong, questioning glances from non-Unit 6 people weren’t going to bother me that much.

One of the units was in charge of maintaining the facilities and whatnot—I couldn’t remember which one—and they’d done some renovations in there to update the place; banishing the mold with whatever arcane ritual you have to do to keep it from just coming back again, replacing the old cracked linoleum with fresher, intact linoleum—things like that. They had a shoestring budget for everything they did, but it was all good enough work.

I don’t think many of them had keys, if any. Good, hard, honest workers, unlike us.

The cafeteria was essentially just a school lunchroom—a wide counter along the back wall and a couple rows of circle-seat tables. Like a school, most of the units kept to themselves, with some amount of intermingling—except for Unit 6, which was almost completely insulated. Our only spigot for information from the outside world was Ava, and occasionally Yoru.

Even among Unit 6 there was separation. Yoru and Ava sat at one end of the long table, talking between themselves. At the other end was Cygnus, Bell, and I.

Benji took his meals in his office.

Bell’s name was short for something, but she wouldn’t tell us what. She was a quiet, wiry sort of woman, and I could not for the life of me figure out what she did for Unit 6, and I was too nervous to ask.

She was extremely tall. Had to be a bit over six feet.

I was told she had a key, but I didn’t know what it was, even after two weeks and a handful of words. I felt that simply asking about it was some kind of taboo that I wasn’t willing to violate, like asking about a salary or something, so her nature remained a mystery.

I hadn’t yet shaken the feeling that she held quiet disdain for me. I always made an effort to be polite and civil with her, lest anyone decide they didn’t like me—but every time I was near her, she’d look at me with a slightly downturned mouth and she’d move with quick, precise shifts to minimize the amount of time we were in eyeshot of each other. It was all I could do to not be a stranger to someone so strange, and yet she was always so curt, and I had no idea what I possibly could have done to offend her aside from simply existing.

It was beyond me. I couldn’t figure it out.

The cafeteria reminded me a lot of the one at my old middle school; not that I spent all that much time in there. It looked about the same and it was divided in a similar way. If I zoned out for too long, I could almost imagine myself there again—alone and powerless with no understanding and no way out. At the bottom of an endless hole.

I blinked.

“I mean, look at me,” Cygnus said. “I’ve been here for months and all he does is throw me at random idiots.”

“You’re fifteen,” Bell said. “I wouldn’t expect much.”

Cygnus had that pipe-sword he’d made in our last mission in a homemade sheath slung over his back. He did that because he said it looked cool.

I mean, he was right, but still.

“I don’t want to be a bruiser forever,” I said, mostly to the table.

“You’re good at it,” Bell said. “Unit 6 works best when there’s two bruisers, three schemers, and a flex slot.”

Which, I supposed, made Bell the flex slot—which still gave me zero indication as to what she actually did.

“What do you do around here?” I asked her. The question skipped right over my filter, and I turned bright red as soon as I said it. Immediately I wanted to take it back, but it was just words, and now they were floating through the air like dust and it was too late.

Bell blinked. “Whatever needs to be done.”

“She’s a torturer,” Cygnus said.

“I—”

“Just trust me on this one,” Cygnus said. “Be in a room with her for fifteen minutes alone and you tell me if you feel tortured or not.”

Bell shot him a side-eye look but didn’t say anything else.

“See? No defense,” Cygnus said.

He went to lean back, realized he was in a circle chair with no back, and regained his balance just slowly enough for Bell and I to notice.

Bell didn’t have lunch, or maybe she’d already eaten lunch, or maybe she was a ghost and consumed souls and other ephemera for sustenance. Each of those options was equally likely as far as I was concerned. She already didn’t look much like a real person—too tall, too gaunt, too stretched over hollow bones. I would’ve believed basically any explanation for the way she was.

In the corner of my vision I could see people from other units shooting looks in our—my—direction. Two weeks and I was still a strange newcomer, some weird little girl who was apparently a high-end bruiser.

It was only recently that I’d learned that Benji was taking lunch in his office to avoid those looks.

One part of me didn’t care—I had a key, so I was invincible—so it didn’t matter what they thought. I could not be destroyed. I could not be stopped—and if push came to shove and I had to make them put up, well, I was fairly confident that none of them would be able to. I could drown the world and they could do nothing.

But on the other, I came here to escape the school cafeteria, and now I was in a cafeteria again.

Cygnus said, “You good?”

I realized it had been a few moments since I’d spoken, and some aspect of my face must’ve sunken below the acceptable emotional range.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“They’ll get used to you,” Cygnus said. “They got used to me.”

Bell nodded, quietly, in agreement.

He continued: “I’m fifteen, and for a while I was the youngest person here, and it was weird in the same way. But I guess I don’t have the same experience you’ve got, so…”

I’d heard that sort of language before. I knew well enough what it hid—but that was just talk, and I was in a place with people like me now. I didn’t have to put so much stock into what was said. I didn’t have to peel apart every word for the little nut of sentiment in there. These people knew what I was, and to them it was okay, and therefore it was okay to me, too.

“It’s okay,” I said again. “I’m okay.”

The table was a very good listener.

“Good bruisers are hard to come by,” Bell said. “It took us…what, five months to fill your position? Something like that.”

Cygnus nodded. He pushed his plate to the side and put his elbows up on the table, bracing his chin in his hands and looking at me. “Look, Erika,” he said. “There’s only one way I know how to beat this kind of thing.”

I waited for his answer. I did my best to look him in the eyes.

And in Cygnus’s eyes there was a glimmer. “Complete, uncompromising, overwhelming force.”

I looked at Bell, and in her eyes, there was a dull glass-dead nothing.

She nodded.

0 0 0

At night, Cygnus liked to watch these animated shows that had a bunch of people around our age piloting huge robots. I originally just watched them because they were colorful and it was something to do, but after a while I started following them along with him. They weren’t in English—Cygnus claimed to be able to understand some of it without reading the subtitles, but I didn’t believe him.

That was one of the things we did on nights when we were all around and there wasn’t a celebration of some sort. Periodically Bell or Yoru would sit in on an episode or two, but only Cygnus and I watched all of them. We only had one TV in the common room everyone in Unit 6 shared, and Cygnus regularly commandeered it to hook his “work-issued” laptop up to it and stream the episodes. I don’t know where he found them, but he always assured me it was legal.

At first, I watched them because I wanted something I could share with someone else in Unit 6; I wanted to be a part of something. But once I started, I didn’t want to stop.

I was expecting to find a character to relate to, but instead I realized that I wasn’t any of the pilots—I was one of the giant robots.

0 0 0

Through the week after I often wondered if Cygnus was telling a joke or not about Bell—if she really was a torturer. Everyone once in a while I’d pause and consider both sides of the situation, but I realized that I had next to no information on it outside of Cygnus’s word, so sitting around and “thinking” about it wasn’t going to do me any good. There just wasn’t anything to process.

So when she would silently get up in the middle of the night, take her long dark coat off the hook by the door, slide into her shoes—sometimes sneakers, sometimes heels—and slip out the door, I would think about where she was going, what she was doing. And each time I happened to be awake for it—which was three times, since I still found it tough to sleep through the night in that room—I would wonder if that was going to be the time I’d work up the courage to sit up in my bed and ask her, point-blank: who are you? Where are you going?

But I never did. The mystery remained.

I had only myself to blame for my sloth.