So we walked the last tenth of a mile, the two of them sipping sodas in front and myself, with no drink, trailing behind. We no longer had a good angle to see the basketball game—it was blocked by a gate—so Yoru and Ava turned their attention to where we were going.

Forty-three, forty-four.

Yoru squinted into the sunlight ahead of him. “It’s just gonna be some condo, isn’t it.”

“Looks like it,” Ava said, swirling the soda in her bottle.

“Fuck,” he said. “Didn’t the old man check the building?”

“Wouldn’t have been him anyway. You got a problem, take it up with Dev.”

Dev was the head of intelligence; or, the head of Unit 2, which was the unit responsible for doing research into these kinds of things. Somehow, in all my time at the Radiant, I never ended up meeting him.

Maybe he just avoided me. He wouldn’t have been the only one.

Yoru wasn’t about to be stopped by something as flimsy as simple logic. “How does the old man expect me to be able to do anything in a tiny fucking condo?”

“He doesn’t, idiot.”

“How does he expect Erika to do anything?”

“Beats me, dude,” she said, “but Prochazka doesn’t fuck up routine stuff like this so I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Gonna be exposed pipes running across the ceiling or some shit,” Yoru said.

I was getting a little tired of being left out of the conversation, despite not having anything to say. I was lucky enough to have something relatively inoffensive and benign to say on hand and ready to go—it came to me in a flash—so I said it, just to speak: “That’d be nice.”

Ava glanced backward at me, like she’d forgotten I was there.

“Okay, this is it,” Yoru said. “Fifty-one.”

We stood in front of the right half of a duplex, three stories tall—although from the way the little balconies on each floor sagged, it wouldn’t be that way for long. At one point the building was probably a rich dark brown, and it still was, but enough of the paint had peeled where that could reasonably be doubted.

“It is attached,” Yoru said, shoving his hands in his pockets. He’d finished his soda at a miraculous pace and chucked it into someone else’s trash a few doors back. Ava still had hers. “God dammit.”

“Hey,” Ava said.

“We’re gonna have to do this quietly?” he continued. Then he paused for a moment, held up a finger, and walked a bit further down the street to check the driveway on the far side of the building. Where we were, the driveway next to 51, there were two cars, but as Yoru reported upon taking a look over there and returning, “No cars at 52. Might be vacant.”

“Yo,” Ava said. “Erika.”

I blinked. Realized she’d been trying to get my attention for a couple of seconds.

“Sorry,” I said, instinctively.

“Can you manipulate soda?” she asked.

“It’s mostly water, right?”

She nodded.

“Then I’ll be fine.”

Ava nodded, uncapped her bottle and passed it to me. “You can have the rest of this if you want.”

There was about a third of the bottle left in there, and once I took it I set to swirling it around like she was doing earlier—not as an explicit imitation but just as something to do with my hands. It was getting fairly warm, and frankly, I was sort of bored.

“Okay, are we good to go?” Yoru asked.

“Nobody over there?”

“Nope.”

“Alright, let’s do this. Who’s knocking?”

“I will.”

“Go for it.”

Ava looked at me. “You stand over there for a bit. I’ll gesture if we need you. Until this is over, I need you to follow what Yoru and I tell you to do extremely closely, okay?”

I turned red. “Am I not going in?”

Yoru shot Ava an odd look and picked up her train of thought. “No, of course you’re coming in. Don’t worry about it, just listen. Okay?”

I nodded, once, but the hot flush though my face did not dissipate. Yoru took another quick look at Ava—who was visibly confused—and knocked on the door. Her face snapped back to a vaguely disinterested, aloof look, and it was back to business again.

I forced myself not to think about it.

Yoru knocked again.

“What if nobody answers?” he mused.

“I can pick the lock,” I offered, from the sideline.

Yoru shrugged. “I’ll give this a minute, then knock yourself out.”

I set about making myself useful—as in, I started looking for a source of water I could use to make a key with. It was a little too hot and a little too dry to make getting water from the air viable—it had to be really humid, or I had to be really on top of my game, to get enough water to do anything meaningful with that anyway. So I left the two of them there, briefly, to look around the side of the duplex. There was a hose there, attached to a red-knob spigot poking out just above the foundation. The thing was covered in spiderwebs—I grimaced and swatted at them before grabbing the knob and twisting a couple of times. It was thoroughly dust-stuck, but after a moment I got it running. Once I untwisted the hose from the spigot, I was rewarded with a low hiss and trickle of water.

Briefly, I thought about watering our little corner of the garden plot my father’s home had in the tiny green area between it and the fence of the house behind us. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. Just barely—because the sun was in my eyes—I could remember him smiling; or maybe not, I wasn’t sure. The corners of his mouth were drawn tight. I knew that much for certain.

I blinked and the image was gone.

I didn’t want to use what I had in the soda bottle unless I absolutely needed it; and then it occurred to me that I should fill up the bottle anyway so I had more in case of an emergency.

So I held the bottle up to the spigot and realized I just ruined perfectly good soda. Ava had taken a few steps away from the door to peek at what I was doing, and she watched me fill the soda bottle without a word.

Should’ve just drank the soda first. Stupid.

I focused on holding the bottle steady. She wasn’t behind me. Wasn’t watching me. I wasn’t turning red. It was perfectly natural to do this on a warm July day.

“Man,” Ava said to Yoru, who was out of my eyesight but presumably still loitering by the door, waiting for someone to show up, “if I’d known she was going to do that I would’ve finished my damn soda.”

0 0 0

Nobody ever answered the door. Yoru tried knocking a few more times to no avail; and there was no doorbell, so that was out.

Then again, I can’t blame them. If you were running an illicit trafficking ring out of a duplex, would you answer the door for a bunch of strangers knocking at one o’clock in the afternoon?

Seems like bad practice.

So Yoru shrugged and gave up. “Go ahead with the key thing,” he said to me, so I did.

I let a little bit of water out of the bottle—drawing it out of the top without tipping it—and once I had a ball about the width of a dime I stopped. Gently, I pushed the ball through the keyhole and inside it—then I flash-froze that ball, which was harder than I was expecting it to be with the keyhole sitting in the July sun baking all day.

This kind of exercise was deceptively tough for water-keys. I’d had practice at it already, so I rarely ever messed it up, but there was a lot of moving parts to it. It was easy to screw up. That said, I was determined—I wanted Ava to see I was good for something.

I’d felt like enough of a third wheel today. This was my time.

I got the key frozen and formed, and then I grabbed the swollen end poking out of the hole and—focusing a bit to keep it from breaking—I twisted it in the lock and turned the doorknob.

Before opening it, I glanced back at Yoru—and he nodded in approval—so I pushed the door open.

There didn’t appear to be anyone in there, but not in a way that suggested that nobody ever was. Evidently whoever owned this place liked to keep things clean—maybe it was easier to keep track of the prisoners if there weren’t any chip bags on the floor or dust on the tables. All of the glass was clean; the coffee table in the center of the living room we’d walked in on was bare but unscratched, with a basket of magazines underneath.

You could’ve told me that anyone lived here; which, I supposed, was the point.

“Go time,” Ava whispered. “Let’s stick together. One floor up at a time, then to the basement.”

Yoru and I nodded.

We took a few steps into that unlit room, visible only through the filtered blue light coming in through the window shades. The three of us crept along, with Yoru and Ava sticking to the walls where they could—but I walked more or less down the middle of the room.

What need did I have for subtlety?

Feet appeared at the top of the staircase on the far side of the room—one in front of the other they padded downstairs with rhythmic thumps and along with them came words: “Who the fuck are you people?”

And the lower half of the body, where I could only see legs and hands, reached for a black object clipped to the back of the person’s pants—

From the bottle I still clutched in my left hand I drew a snake of water about a foot long and half an inch thick, and I did something I developed over a few days when I arrived—I popped half-inch sections of the snake off the end and semi-froze them, letting them supercool into ice shaped by the force of them shooting through the air—ice darts, I supposed—and fired them off, one after another, right at the pants’ knees. They slammed into the person’s kneecaps and smashed them, and they crumpled.

And as soon as I saw the body fall, and the head enter the frame, I took the rest of the snake and hardened it into a spear, and shot it dead-center for his temple.

It caught the man in the cheek and slammed his head into the wall, exploding his jaw into a meteor shower of red and bone.

The body twitched for a moment and stopped moving. For good measure, I put a second ice-dart square in his forehead, now that he wasn’t going anywhere. Just to be sure.

Ava regarded my handiwork, rubbing her forehead. “God. I guess we’re just killing everyone, then,” she said.

I wanted to say something about the gun I saw him reaching for, but I figured everyone must have seen that and I didn’t want to say something redundant.

So I kept my mouth shut.

Yoru stepped up to the staircase and took a peek at the wreckage. “That was quick,” he said, examining the body. “How about that.”

“I have good aim,” I said. That was all I had to say about that. The rest of it, I figured, explained itself.

“You sure do,” Yoru replied, and I’m sure he felt the same way.