The next day at noon, I was in Benji’s beige sedan again, acutely aware of what I’d felt the last time I was there and doing my best to ignore the sickening tinge in the corners of my eyes and the back of my throat.

Halfway through the trip—which was two and a half hours—Benji finally decided to speak to me.

“You read all the stuff I sent you, right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

It wasn’t clear to me how I should have proceeded from there. Did he want me to ask questions, or just do what I was told? What would make him hate me less? Would questioning the mission make me look capable and inquisitive, or would it just annoy him? I had my fair share of questions about this whole ordeal—mostly surrounding the fact that Rochester was barely in our jurisdiction—but whether or not any questions were valid in Benji’s mind was a question I could not answer.

Before I came to a decision on it, he changed the subject. “You know, Jan just wants me to throw you at all my problems.”

“Does he?” I asked, but it was mostly rhetorical. I figured Benji had been resisting having me help him for a while. I had more time off than anyone else in Unit 6, and I figured those were all days where Benji went out of his way to avoid including me in anything he was doing.

Not that I could really blame him. As much as it hurt me, I’d do the same if I was him and confronted with me.

I wouldn’t trust me, either.

“Yep,” he said, tapping the steering wheel more-or-less on beat with the song playing low on the radio. He took a hand off the wheel and started poking around through the center console, feeling around for something. “Where did I—”

I opened the slot above the glove compartment and took out a pair of sunglasses. “These?”

“Yeah, those,” he said. “But, um, don’t poke around my car.”

I couldn’t imagine what he was keeping in here that he’d need to keep so secret, but that was a line I wasn’t going to cross now. If this was Cygnus’s car, or maybe Yoru’s car, I could ask something like that, but right now I was laser-focused on getting Benji to like me again.

Don’t stir the pot, Erika.

He plucked the sunglasses from my hand and put them on. “What was I saying?”

“Something about Prochazka,” I said.

“You can call him Jan, too,” he replied. “He’s not here, not like he’ll know.”

I turned a bit red. “I—I don’t want to.”

“What’s he gonna do? Talk to you sternly?”

“Yes,” I said, meekly.

Benji shrugged. “Well, I guess if that matters to you.”

He went back to focusing on the road.

I’ve found that a good way to get people to like you is to invite them to talk about themselves at great length while you just sit there and don’t interrupt them. For whatever reason, that makes people more inclined to talk to you in the future. It’s a good way to score brownie points.

Don’t ask me why that works. I’ve got no idea. I hate talking about myself, for the most part—but everyone else seems to enjoy it just fine.

So I asked Benji an open-ended, benign question that I figured couldn’t possibly make him angry. It was a slam-dunk easy thirty-to-forty minute time-killer.

I asked him: “You and Prochazka fought on opposite sides in Vietnam, right?”

Benji smirked. “Yup.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“See him? I mean, you didn’t really ever see anyone in ‘Nam,” Benji said. “Barely saw my own company, let alone anyone else.”

He chuckled a bit. “You know what’s fucking useless? Being a fire-key in a rainforest. I was pretty weak for the first year or so I was there, so I could barely light a match with my key, let alone do anything actually useful for the military. I was fucked up beyond all repair before the military got to me, so being in Vietnam didn’t really do all that much for me. Satisfied some curiosities, I guess.”

My plan was working, because he didn’t give me a chance to cut in. “I mean, to answer your question—yeah, I saw him once, but nobody believed me. Finding out he existed for real after the war, and he was living in the country he hated, was both the funniest and most cathartic shit I’d ever seen. I caught so much shit from my friends for believing in that legend. Anyway, every company had some variation on a story about Prochazka. Very few of them were flattering. People who respected him called him the Black Hurricane, people who didn’t called him googer or nouk.”

I didn’t really know what those were, but I figured it was worth an explanation. “Googer?” I asked.

“Don’t—don’t repeat that,” he said, chuckling. “And one-thousand-percent don’t let Prochazka hear you say that, or the other one. It’s the only thing someone could say that would make that man roll up his sleeves and beat the shit out of someone.”

I swallowed. “Noted.”

“Black Hurricane’s probably okay if you’re feeling saucy,” he added. “I call him that occasionally. Never quite sure if he liked it or not, but at least it’s not the other two.”

“I—no thanks,” I said.

“Fair,” he said. “Anyway, uh…yeah, everybody had their own version of a story about that fucker. People said he was a defected American, a defective American, a shaman from the Congo the Vietnamese hired to do voodoo magic on Americans, you know, dumb shit like that. I mean, the real story about him was almost as weird, right? I mean—saying he was a black Czech guy who was born in like 1906 or some shit, looked not a day over twenty-five, and could blast people around with air like they were fuckin’ leaves, and was an actual supporter of actual-factual communism would probably have blown as many gaskets as that last story. But like, half my company were good ol’ boys, so they weren’t too keen on me either, especially the older ones who’d seen a bit of Korea and didn’t have a good eye for the differences, so telling wacky varyingly-racist stories about Prochazka was pretty much the only thing that kept us from tearing out each others’ throats when it was ninety-five and wet enough to drink the air. We said that Prochazka had done right about everything—mostly shit that we wished we could do. He could throw a tank a hundred yards into the air. He could dismember a man with a sneer. He could teleport, he could outrun Superman, he could go sixteen weeks without food or water, he could fly, he could burst men like soap bubbles, he could walk on water, he was immune to landmines, he left no footsteps, he was a ghost, he was a demon, he was an angel sent to punish us for our sins—shit like that, you know? We were schoolyard boys talking about this guy. He could do anything in our imaginations. He was the face of the enemy—someone so unknowably powerful that he could do anything, someone so unseeable that he didn’t exist, someone so anti-American that he must have been a tool of Satan himself. I think one of the papers published a story, a sort of on-the-ground slice-of-life story about us, and they talked about the communist Superman we all talked about. God—if they found out he was real…”

Benji shook his head, lost in the thought for a second.

“You know, sometimes I think about what it’d have been like if we had you while they had him,” he said, suddenly, shifting a bit in his seat. “Imagine the CIA shows up in 1970, and we’re getting our shit kicked in, mind you, and they tell us they’ve been genetically-engineering this kid for the expressed purpose of rolling heads in ‘Nam, and they roll a big crate off a truck and pop the lid and out climbs—well, a thirteen-year-old girl who can drown people while they’re standing still. CIA tells us to say nothing about whatever they see you do, or their loved ones will find out all about how they committed suicide via two gunshot wounds to the head. And then the war basically just comes down to you against him, and—well—I don’t know if we win that version of the war, I don’t know if I want to win that version of the war, to be honest. I don’t know if I want to be in a version of the war where the only reason we win is because a thirteen-year-old girl with water powers bails out the United States military, and I don’t know if I want to be in a version of the war where I have to watch another thirteen-year-old girl get shot in the head.”

He paused for half a second, then went on: “Well, I got out in 1973, and I went around doing random shit for a few years, turned into something of an anti-war hippie about four years too late for any kind of notoriety for being one, settled around Albany for a while. Kept my key real secret. See—I know now it doesn’t seem like it, but for three years around the turn of the decade back then, knowledge of magic right about got out. It was pretty well known among folks on the ground in Vietnam that the CIA was doing something funky to help us get ahead, since it sure didn’t seem like we were doing shit, and what little intelligence we had told us that the VC were doing something similar. It was all they could do to keep the war reporters from blowing the lid of the damn thing. And, well—sometimes I kind of wish we did expose magic to the world back then, because I think if we did and we ended up winning the war, well, that was our only shot at having the public know about magic and all of us not getting rounded up and shot.”

He frowned. “Uh, right. I did see Prochazka once. I got separated from my company during an ambush, and since I figured I was alone I was all-clear to go full self-preservation mode, if you get my drift, so I dropped my gun and set both my hands on fire and I was ready to burn down the whole fucking forest if I had to, and through I clearing I saw him—this black guy in VC camo, and there was a whirlwind of leaves and sticks and shit around him. And I knew the legend so I knew that was the guy, and we just sort of stared at each other for a second. And—swear to God—he shot a gust of wind at me so fast and so pinpoint that all it did was extinguish my hands. Barely fluttered my shirt. No idea how he did it, but it was sobering, let me tell you. I thought I was hot shit because I could make a fireball, and here was this guy making me look like an amateur. This was, uh, maybe June of 1969, or something like that. And we just stood there, him looking at me with this little smile, you know the one, it’s basically Bell’s default face. And I was just standing there stunned, and then—get this—he goddamn saluted me and disappeared. I blinked and he was just gone. I think right then, yeah, right then was when I knew we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at winning the war. They had that guy. And that guy was real, and all the US army had for magical people was a sorry excuse for a fire key like myself. I just remember blinking, seeing him disappear, and thinking to myself, Lord help us—we’ve got no outs.

“I knew we were gonna lose, but I gave making myself stronger every bit of effort I had so I could kill that guy if I saw him again. I wanted to burn that stupid smirk off his face so bad that I fought him in my dreams, and I knew I was so hopelessly outclassed that most of the time, even in my dreams, I’d still lose.”

He fell quiet again, switched lanes to get around an old person driving the speed limit. “So after the war I was living in Albany, trying to pretend like none of that ever happened. Lots of folks like me out there, pretending nothing happened. See, we all believed in magic in 1969, all of us. All the folks in the war knew that there was magic at work making that shit unwinnable, and all the folks back here knew there was magic at work making their fellow man into bloodthirsty animals, and they knew there had to be magic in the air to make the world make sense again. And well, I guess that went on until Reagan, or something, and then everyone stopped believing in magic again. But for maybe fifteen years there, from the mid-sixties until, I don’t know, late seventies or so—we were all dead sure that there were forces beyond our control swinging the planet this way and that, and we all just agreed to never talk about it. And, God, I wish we did. I wish we shouted it from the rooftops, because the world is too damn small now for magic to stay hidden for much longer, and all it takes is for one wackjob to make a video on Twitter and have it be convincing enough and stay up long enough to go viral to break the façade. It takes one lunatic with a flesh key to walk into a crowd and slaughter a thousand people to ruin it for the rest of us. Back then was the closest we ever got to the world accepting magic, because it would’ve just been another item on the list of bullshit, and we all kind of wanted it, anyway. And I guess I just don’t know enough about folks your age to know if they’re craving that same thing we craved. If y’all feel like you need magic to make your lives make sense.”

“I did,” I said, quietly.

“And does it? Now?” he asked me. There was no accusing tone. He just wanted to know. “Does all this shit make sense to you now?”

And I said, “No.”