{June 11}

June 11th was my thirteenth birthday, but I didn’t get to celebrate it during the day because I had a mission to do.

Oh well. It happens. It happened to Cygnus on his sixteenth, it happened to Yoru on his twentieth, apparently. It was almost like a curse, like Prochazka planned it that way. Just a few times too many to be nothing but coincidence. He told me at the briefing that he didn’t do it on purpose—he swore he didn’t, so I believed him because he had no reason to lie to me, and I trusted Prochazka completely.

My birthday that year was one of those perfect days that makes you want to sit cross-legged in the grass and watch the ants crawl over your feet. The Radiant’s factory home had a wildly overgrown area off to the right of the abandoned staff parking lot’s cracked pavement, but I wasn’t allowed to leave the factory because I had to be easily reachable.

So I had to settle for looking out the windows, watching the way the sunlight glinted off distant glass in far-off buildings.

We weren’t supposed to just go walking around the premises outside, because the highway ran right along the back of the factory, and this place was supposed to be abandoned—god forbid some nosy driver puttering along I-90 saw a person or two loitering near the factory like they owned the place. Walking around town was just fine, though, so I went to do that. Cygnus and I had a mission, but the briefing let us know that we could carry it out any time before sundown—after dark they’d be expecting trouble. Before then, though, we had the day to ourselves.

I asked him if he wanted to walk around town and he said that sounded like a swell idea, since it was so gorgeous out and everyone in Unit 6 (even Bell, presumably) was doing something similar.

So we went out. He left his newest pipe-sword at home; said he’d make another on the premises.

Outside of the factory, there was a dedicated path we were supposed to take to get into town. According to some unit or another, it was the path that made us hardest to see from the highway—but that always seemed like a waste of time, especially since we weren’t all that secret anyway. By that time I knew there were a few people that recognized Cygnus and I, and there were definitely more than that that knew Yoru and Ava since they both had a habit of making small-talk with store staff.

Only Bell probably went undetected.

Cygnus and I followed the designated path—not quite the paved one, as that one snaked into view of the highway for a moment—until we reached the street the factory could be accessed from. After that, it was only about a quarter-mile’s walk into town.

“It’s so nice out,” I said, as the first words we’d exchanged since we left.

“Sure is,” Cygnus said.

“It’s my birthday,” I said, after that. “I can’t remember the last time I had great weather on my birthday. It’s usually okay, but it’s never been—you know, seventy-three and sunny.”

“Wish my birthday had nice weather,” Cygnus replied, sticking his hands in his pockets. “March birthdays fucking blow.”

“I bet,” I said, recalling this past March, where it never got above fifty and it rained almost every day.

Cygnus took his hands out of his pockets and folded them in front of him as he walked. “Yeah,” he said. “One time it was so bad that it hailed. Quarter-size hail. It dented my dad’s car and cracked his windshield, and he couldn’t afford to fix it.”

He went on about the hail that day, and how they couldn’t go out and get a birthday cake because it was dangerous to go outside, and I just about couldn’t imagine weather like that. Lawrence must be a different world, where hailstones are so big and fly so fast that they knock people unconscious.

Or he was just making it up as he went along. I didn’t really care. I hung on his every word, and it passed the time.

Once he was done, he said, with the fervor of someone triumphant: “You know—we’ve got time. Let’s get some coffee.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

0 0 0

Two hours disappeared in the coffee shop, mostly of Cygnus telling me various stories I couldn’t sort the truth from.

But I found I didn’t really care if what he was telling me was true or not. It was all anecdotes from his childhood, stuff he did behind his dad’s back on weekday nights. Antics and hijinks with his friends.

It would’ve been like Cygnus to hold back all of that, because it would remind me of the fact that I didn’t have any friends growing up, or that I was always too meek to do anything behind my dad’s back, and that I’d never quite crawled out from under the shame of both of those things.

But he just went on and I found that none of it bothered me.

His dad reminded me of my dad; his family reminded me of my family. Two people, nothing more, in a rowhouse in a run-down corner of a city. Two people struggling to get by in an apathetic world.

I said to him, “I had a single dad, too.”

“I know,” Cygnus said. “I assumed so from that time when we all played blackjack.”

I blinked; I’d forgotten just how much of my life I’d spilled right then. To date, it was the only time all six of us had sat down for a game, so it was exceptionally easy to refer to by simple, vague terms like that time.

I turned bright red.

“It’s fine,” he replied. “I mean, my papa did his damnedest to not be single, but he was such a relational fuckup it’s a miracle he got any woman to stay with him long enough to get pregnant, let alone marry him for three years.”

“Divorce?” I asked.

“Yeah. By my dad’s account, anyway, they hated each other.”

Cygnus took a bite out of a croissant he’d went back up to the counter to get before this conversation. “Good practice, by the way,” he added, “to buy something for every hour-and-a-half you occupy a chair in a small café. I always feel like a freeloader if I don’t.”

He continued after another bite: “Yeah, they hated each other. Rumor had it—because really, that’s all I counted what my papa said about this stuff as—that they were both in their late-twenties and desperate to not be alone anymore, so they rushed into marriage, had me to stay together, and then they got over themselves and split up. Papa had the better income at the time, and honestly, given what I’ve heard about her since she left, he had his head screwed on slightly straighter, so he got custody. She didn’t want a kid anyway. Last I heard she was working her way up the ladder at some tech company in management.” He punctuated the statement with a shrug. “So maybe if my papa could’ve swallowed his pride and stuck it out, I wouldn’t have been poor. And maybe I wouldn’t have had to avenge him, and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a key.”

Cygnus frowned. “Didn’t mean to make that get sappy,” he said. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Your mom,” he said. “I mean, I know she wasn’t there, but—divorce, wedlock, what’s the deal?”

I blinked. That was an extremely personal question, and just the mere sight of it made me lock up tight.

My eyes turned down to his croissant and I said nothing. Tensed.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” he said, picking up the croissant that I was staring at. It rose through my field of vision and disappeared. I did not follow it.

“Dead,” I said, monotone.

“Oh,” he replied. “Um…I’m sorry. When—”

“In birth,” I said. “I never knew her.”

Cygnus took a moment to himself. He really, honestly, did some self-reflection. And that’s really something rare in people. Most of the time, when people say they’re thinking, I have a suspicion that they’re actually just staring blankly at something and hoping that the time they put between two objects will somehow make one of them change.

But maybe that’s just me.

“Man,” he said, looking me in the eyes, “I’m asking you this shit on your birthday. Jesus. I’m sorry. I got carried away, I guess.”

I waited for the pang of shame at being pitied, and it arrived like clockwork. The one thing I could always count on: the paradoxical state I occupied of wanting pity and hating every second of receiving it.

Oh well. One more mystery for me to never solve.

“It’s okay,” I said, even though it really wasn’t, but not for the reasons he was aware of.

“We should get going,” he said. “Wacko isn’t gonna kill herself.”

“Maybe she will,” I replied.

“Sure would be convenient,” Cygnus replied back.

0 0 0

I forgave him.

I always forgave him.

The offences were so minor compared to the boons. I had to overlook them—even if I had to force myself to, because they stuck out like red lumps in my memory, warm and sore. That wasn’t unique to Cygnus—the offences always did. They were always what I remembered people by, and I hated that it was a struggle to remember the good things.

I had to consciously recall that he got me a real Christmas gift, not a peace offering like Ava did: a model of one of the big robots from the show we watched together. It required some fine assembly work, but I was more than willing to put in the time. I had to consciously recall that out of the entirety of Unit 6, Cygnus was the one most interested in making sure that I felt welcome. Everyone else did it when it was convenient to do so, but he went out of his way to include me.

In all my days I’d never thought I’d end up friends with someone like Cygnus. He came from a similar place as me, but the way he rose out of it was so alien, so remote from my own experience, that it was nearly unfathomable.

He was the kind of person I would’ve been afraid of in school, if I didn’t know him. He was so cool—so collected. So on top of his game.

The stone of ten couldn’t even begin to think about talking to someone like that.

The truth was that I needed this a lot more than he did.

So I would always forgive him.