We arrived at the house at around four, after stopping at a convenience store so I could pick up a water bottle. No one seemed to be home didn’t appear to be anyone except the target, her car parked haphazardly in the driveway.

The house itself was a squat, tiny ranch on a little hill with fairly-well manicured grass. It was set off enough from the other houses on that street that I wasn’t concerned about attracting unwanted attention, but I was a little concerned about the walk home, which was close to two and a half miles.

Cygnus told me he’d pay my bus fare if we were too tired to go home, so that banished that worry.

Prochazka had laid it out very clearly: the woman was a key-user, type unknown but not a telepath (he’d stressed that), so we weren’t supposed to waste any time: walk in, kill her, walk out.

He said that this woman had crossed a line she most definitely knew about, and even if she didn’t it would have been simple to assume there’d be consequences for her actions.

He didn’t say what she did, though. Not that it mattered much to me. I trusted Prochazka.

Cygnus and I looked at each other, nodded once. Ready.

We walked up to the door. I did my thing to pick the lock, and we were inside in under ten seconds.

I opened the door slowly and stepped inside into a living room, with a fireplace and two easy chairs off to the left, a hallway going down to a bedroom, and a kitchen with a side entrance open to that hallway and an entrance into the living room. To the right of us was a little dining set for four.

It seemed like an old person lived there.

The second Cygnus stepped over the threshold, though, something from the mantle over the fireplace shot towards us, bullet-speed, and before I even knew what was happening, water from my bottle leapt out and collided with the rock in mid-air, shoving it off-course and forcing it into the doorway just behind Cygnus.

It slammed the wood doorframe hard enough to embed itself inside.

Cygnus looked back at the rock for half a second, then at me—still holding the misshapen water-snake I’d used to smack the rock out of the air—and said, “Fuck.”

I blinked, breathed, and recoiled the water into two rings around my hands, where I usually kept it.

“How the fuck did you do that?” he whispered.

I didn’t answer—creeping toward the ajar door across from the hallway’s kitchen entrance.

I knew she was there. I knew she was there because of the adrenaline coursing through me—I could feel the moisture in her breath; her heavy breathing as it dawned on her that her trap didn’t work.

I could feel her re-evaluating her plan through the fear in her breath—the heaviness of it, the labored air sucked through clenched teeth.

It was, honestly, kind of cool.

Cygnus tiptoed alongside me. He kept his mouth shut.

Part of me wanted to reveal our presence—to shout something about us being here, being alive, and being invincible. I knew that it was a terrible idea to do that—but that last concept stuck in my brain.

That ambush would’ve worked on anyone else. If Cygnus went at this alone, it probably would’ve killed him.

But I was untouchable.

I stopped creeping quietly.

I walked.

The rock, embedded in the doorframe, launched itself again, and I felt it all along the way. I knew it was there because of how it displaced the moisture left in the air by my earlier frantic block.

I was hyper-aware. Nothing escaped me.

I was invincible.

I could not be destroyed.

Without conscious thought, I lifted the last of the water from the bottle and smacked the rock out of the air again.

I felt the woman in the room hold her breath.

By that time I was close enough to the room to know that it was a bathroom, and all of the fixtures were ever so slightly leaky—and leaky fixtures are big game for water keys.

I grabbed hold of the tiny droplets forming at the mouths of both the sink and bathtub faucets and forced the water inside through them—turning them on, full blast.

Cygnus shot me a quick look, left my side, and went into the kitchen. He plucked a knife out of a holder, tested it for weight, and waited.

The woman knew she was dead if she stayed in that room—so she, slowly, opened the door, and looked down the hall at me.

I waved. Watched her eyes go wide. She took a step back.

She barely had the time to look before Cygnus’s knife slammed into her temple and bolted her to the wall.

The bismuth-inlaid key around her neck dissolved into the air.

With the two streams of running water covering the sound of her faint gurgling, I grabbed hold of some of the water from each, froze it into a claw-shape, and used them to turn off both faucets.

And then the house was silent. I melted the claws back to water and floated it out of the room to at least attempt to clean Cygnus’s fingerprints off the knife, which he’d removed from the woman’s temple after checking her pulse.

As though there was any chance of her being left alive.

As I was doing so—running the water over the knife’s blade in a swirling motion—he turned to me and said, “You saved my life.”

I nodded. Focused on the cleaning.

“How the fuck did you move that fast?” he said. “I—God, I thought I had good reaction time, but that—that was insane.”

“I felt it,” I said, mostly satisfied with the cleaning. I let the water drop—not like the extra moisture was going to matter. It soaked into the carpet.

“You felt it,” he repeated.

“The water in the air,” I said. “I—I didn’t know I could do that.”

“I didn’t either,” he said, quietly.

It was beginning to dawn on him, I think, that he almost died.

Cygnus was breathless.

He said, “I owe you.”

I pursed my lips. Turned bright red again.

“I—I guess you do.”

0 0 0

There’s really no such thing as a fight between people with keys. That was one of the first things Prochazka taught me. With two sufficiently powerful key users, there’s no back-and-forth: there’s a back, and if the back doesn’t work, there’s a forth, and it rarely goes past that.

Only the strongest keys can actually have a fight, where they parry and counter and really go at it. For everyone else, the strength of the first attack is usually more than enough to take someone’s head off, and if they’re lucky and the person misses, then the person who missed usually dies on the retaliation.

It doesn’t make for very good TV.

Prochazka told me that a lot of folks end up feeling disappointed by that, but he said it always brought him some amount of comfort. One way or another, unless you really screw up, key fights end in quick deaths. They have a tendency to be anti-climactic.

So ambush tactics like the one that woman tried to use on Cygnus almost always work.

But I am invincible—so it failed.

0 0 0

Cygnus was quiet on the way back, at least, until he’d finished processing what had happened to him.

I was elated. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt that happy.

I was powerful. I was in charge. My destiny was mine and I could shape it however I wanted. Nothing and no-one could stop me. The world was my canvas.

I could not be killed, I could not be ended, I could not be destroyed.

I was, surely, the most powerful water-key in the world. I stopped not one but two ambushes, and I did so effortlessly. I wasn’t even tired as we walked back. Not an ounce of fatigue in me.

I was invincible.

When Cygnus finally spoke to me, he said, “Man, that was so cool.”

For something like the fifth time that day, I blushed.

“I wish I could do stuff like that,” he continued. “Metallurgy is pretty limited, all things considered. It’s just like—like extra-limited telekinesis. I’ve heard rumors about metallurgics that can mess with computer systems, but—I’m no engineer, I don’t know shit about that. It’s gotta be nice having all this stuff just come to you.”

I couldn’t tell if there was any spite in that. I didn’t care. What did it matter? What did it matter what anyone thought of me? I was invincible. I was immune to opinions.

“Yeah,” I said. “It kind of is.”

“I guess that’s why you’re here,” Cygnus said. “You’re already head-and-shoulders over the old water-key that used to be here, from what I’ve heard. And once Prochazka hears about this, he’s gonna lose his mind. He might even smile.”

“Maybe he’ll laugh,” I added.

“Maybe he’ll even say congrats.”

Neither of us found that funny, but it was enough to make both of us smile.

We walked home, and the weather never stopped being beautiful.

0 0 0

It’s a little frustrating that so much of my mental health is predicated on if I’m succeeding at something. When I was young, I never succeeded, so I never felt like a human being—but walking home from that mission, I felt so good, so on top of the world, that I forgot where I came from and who I had left and I simply became a person I could admire.

And I don’t think I’d ever done that before.

Aside from the killing—ignoring that entirely, as something completely irrelevant—for ten minutes I was in charge, I was confident, I made decisions and followed through with them, and I was in touch enough with my team to have understandings that needed no words to explain them.

Everything I ever wanted, I had.

As I walked I felt so good that I wondered about love, and if I could ever be worthy of it—and I decided that if I could do again what I did today, if I could do that more than once, then yes, yes I was.

My dad and I shared a hollow sort of love, where he would alternate between loving me so fully, so apologetically, that it would make me forget the times where I did not exist and I ate my meals and went about my time alone. So my understanding was twisted, and I had never experienced real love as I’d been told it could be before, but on that walk home the world was my plaything, and I was the superior above all living things—so if I wanted to learn, I could, and I would learn because I was invincible.

I looked at Cygnus.

And so the whole way home I had a warm bloom in my chest, and I walked lightly, and I smiled and laughed by God I meant it.

That, I think, was my best birthday ever.