We cross the street. The bus stop is right there, exactly as I left it. Somewhere behind the glass enclosure, down a little slope, was a small creek I could use to defend myself if anything happened.

So I let myself be relieved. I let myself sigh. We were done. It was over now.

We sat down on the bench under the white light inside the enclosure. I looked over at the big sign with all the arrival times and found that there was a bus coming between now and the 1:12 from Buffalo—a 1:07 to Albany I could take home. A little digital display told me, in blaring red numbers, that it was 1:02.

“I’m gonna get on the 1:07 bus,” I said to Bella. “Then it’s just five minutes until your parents get you. Is that okay?”

She made a small affirmatory noise.

I looked at her again—she was looking down at the ground, swinging her legs over the edge of the bench just like I was doing an hour before, except she didn’t have to tuck her feet up to have them clear the ground.

“You’re doing great,” I said to her.

She didn’t reply, so I reached over and took her hand. Said her name and waited for her to look me in the eyes.

And when she did—

“We’re almost done,” I said to her, forcing the eye contact. “Just ten more minutes.”

She met my eyes for half a second, then turned away again—but her grip on my hand was more than enough words.

I turned away, back to watching the street.

The world came to a halt, and then the world shattered.

Instinct shut my eyes as glass flew into the air and something heavy slammed into my side, and once I grabbed hold of myself and opened them again, the entire right-side pane of glass in the bus stops’ enclosure was gone and replaced by a pile of scattered sharp snow across the concrete. The thing against my side was warm but I was on my feet and searching for the source of the commotion before I could truly process what it was—with a dull thwack it slumped and hit the metal bench where I was sitting.

And then I looked back—

Sprawled face-down on the metal bench, a steady drip—a pour—of red, a waterfall off the side, clinging to the rusted metal until gravity took it to the earth.

It was—

I whipped around, facing the new hole in the enclosure, and I reached out and found the creek off to the side—and the moisture in the air led my mind down a straight shot to a man standing some thirty-five feet away in the shadow of a street sign, holding a gun, pointed in my general direction—taking aim—

I closed my eyes and sucked in a breath and grabbed hold of the creek with everything I had, and the water shot out of the sleepy stream it was in and reared up like a sea monster from an ancient myth, and it drew the assailant’s attention for just long enough to make him hesitate on the trigger—and in that split second I froze the tip of the stream I’d grabbed from and shot it straight out, a bullet from the sky pulling the full force of the stream behind it, and it caught the man under his chin and burst his head and chest open like so many watermelons, like so many water balloons, and everything he was was cast across the road and the broad sidewalk and everything from his ribcage down was knocked over like a simple domino and dragged a good ten feet from the impact spot by the sheer force of which I erased him from existence.

And then I looked back again—

And I saw the body there, still, the dark red waterfall off the side of the bench as strong as ever, and I wondered if it had always been there—it had been an entire eternity since I’d last sat with her, since I took her hand and said that everything would just alright again as soon as 1:12 rolled around, as soon as the 1:12 bus pulled up with its doors open and its fluorescent lights shining down those steps, those up to heaven. Steps to a place where this would be a past beyond memory.

But instead—

I took her shoulder and rolled her over. Heavier than I ever could have imagined.

And I met her eyes again, one pointed straight up at the ceiling, the other one wilted, not pointing anywhere much at all, since that side of her face crumpled under the impact, peppered with glass shards she’d mostly shielded me from.

I shook her and said her name.

I grabbed both her shoulders and with-knuckled fists and shook her and screamed her name—

0 0 0

The next thing I remember is being somewhere far from the bus stop, calling every one of my Unit 6 contacts in sequence, in alphabetical order, Ava to Bell to Benji to Cygnus to Prochazka to Yoru and back to the start again until someone picked up.

I hit a real voice on Yoru.

“Erika?”

My voice wasn’t my own. It was the voice of someone who clutched the phone with both hands so tightly she thought her thumbs would break the glass, who’d forgotten to hold the phone up to her ear, who was lucky she could remember how to use a phone, let alone speak English to someone through it.

“I need help. I messed up. I—I need—”

I couldn’t manage more than that. Everything after it was gibberish.

“Okay. Erika—okay. I’m here. Listen—where are you?”

“I need help—I—”

“I got that part. Where are you?”

My location. He wanted my location. I could give that. I knew—

“Syracuse,” I managed.

“Where in Syracuse?”

I looked up, scanned the surroundings. All the buildings curved inward, glaring down at me through empty windows; the street signs twisted away so I couldn’t use them, the convenience store turned their lights up so bright that I couldn’t read its name. The pavement so black it became an abyss to fall into—the concrete sidewalk a thin gray skin over a yawning chasm in which I would fall forever.

My arms shook. It was all I could do not to drop the phone.

I squinted across the street at one of the businesses with their lights on, but I couldn’t discern any of the products. They shifted rapidly from one thing to the next, shapeless forms that could’ve been anything, but the name was—

In bright red letters over the windows, the name was—

The name—

0 0 0

The next thing I remember is being in the passenger seat of the old beige sedan, arms locked together, staring down at the dark gray rubber floor mat because it was the least busy thing my eyes could rest on.

Closing them was so, so much worse.

“What happened out there?” Yoru asked me. It had been around an hour and fifteen minutes since I called him. To date, I’m not sure how I made it that long.

I don’t know what I did in that hour-fifteen. I don’t know if anyone saw me. I don’t know if anyone called for help. I don’t know if anyone tried to. If anyone did, I don’t know if I let them. I don’t know if I didn’t.

I don’t know, I don’t know.

I couldn’t even begin to conjure the words to describe what I had just done. Yoru may as well have been asking me to describe the entirety of the universe.

I just hugged myself a little tighter and kept staring down at the mat. Counting the hexagons to put a voice in my head with a neutral tone.

“Did you mess up a mission?” Yoru asked me.

Slowly—I nodded.

He shrugged. “It happens. It sucks, but you can’t win them all. Sometimes you’re just a bit too late, you know? Sometimes the intel is bad. Lots of things can go wrong that aren’t necessarily your fault. And, like, sometimes it is your fault. We’re not all perfect. Ava and I have each others’ backs all the time and sometimes we still fuck it up. None of us have a perfect success rate, not even Bell. Nobody’s expecting you to be perfect, and ninety percent is still an A. Don’t beat yourself up over it too much.”

His voice was a distant fog over the car. No different that the ambient road noise. I processed it the same way—a dull, ungraspable humming with no meaning whatsoever.

Her eyes—

“It’s fine,” Yoru said, holding the wheel with one hand, scratching his cheek with the other. “We all fuck up sometimes.”

If I didn’t get in the glass enclosure—

“You can’t blame yourself for everything.”

If I didn’t let my guard down—

He looked over at me. Saw that I wasn’t moving. Saw that I wasn’t listening.

He knew that the entirety of his vocabulary was falling on deaf ears.

We arrived back at the dark factory in silence.