“You know, your birthday’s coming up,” Cygnus said to me.

I hadn’t thought about my birthday in so long—not since the last one, anyway. Sometime in the last year I had become an ageless being, who did not iterate the years one by one but just let them roll over her in one continuous stream. I was as old as anyone said I was.

Now, though—

“What day is it today?” I asked.

“The twenty-first,” Cygnus replied. “Of May.”

I frowned. “It’s—what, three weeks?”

“Something like that.”

We were returning to our camp. Our intel regarding the most recent hole was bad. I personally hadn’t flushed a hole with actual enemy combatants in it in two or three weeks, which amounted to twelve duds in a row.

Most of us were in that boat. It was starting to seem like the number of actual holes was tapering off—or the enemy was changing their strategy.

We weren’t sure yet.

“I don’t think I’m going to do anything,” I said. “It’s not like it’s a big milestone or anything.”

“No Quinceanera?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Cygnus said, crossing his arms behind his head and stretching. “Still, fifteen’s something, at least. It’s a step.”

Sometime in the past week, the leaves had come in on the trees. I couldn’t say exactly when it happened, but the world went from barren and spikey to soft and rounded and full of life in the span of a couple days. With the way I was now, that period was even more striking: trees in winter felt like the skeletons of giants, rough and hard and jagged in every direction, but in late May, the droplets could weave between the fresh, moist leaves and pass along and almost through them like fur—like the skeletons had put on coats. I felt like I missed that transition-window every year—one week, it’s dead, the next, it’s alive, although I suppose I had more of an excuse to miss it now.

It hadn’t been cold in a while, not since April. To an outsider, it would look like things were trending up—but we were squarely out of range of a freak snowfall giving us a chance to break the war wide open. Rumors I’d heard—from eavesdropping on other peoples’ small-talk and from the news—seemed to point to this being a dry summer. I could make do, of course, but I couldn’t help but read that as an omen—not strictly bad, but a distinctly lukewarm one. It didn’t make me any more hopeful, for sure.

Cygnus and I had been assigned to flush a hole in Harriman, which was some fifty miles away from New York City. There wasn’t all that much there and both of us knew it, so neither of us were surprised when the intel was bad and we’d wasted a whole day.

“That’s twelve,” I said to him, afterward.

“Twelve whats?” he asked.

“Dud holes.”

“Geez,” he said. “I’m at…” Cygnus paused, counting the days on his fingers. “One in ten? It’s only been three in a row for me but it was six in a row before that.”

“Hopefully Loybol’s got a plan,” I said.

“She should.”

We continued out walk toward the meeting point, which was a small ice cream stand on the main street. It was set off a bit from the road, but it had outdoor seating and I had a couple dollars in my pocket for a treat, so I couldn’t complain. A little bit of ice cream went a long way toward turning a medium-to-bad day into a medium-to-good one.

When you don’t get to stay in any particular place for longer than a day or so, you gain a larger appreciation for the small things.

As we walked up to the stand—a house-like building up on a small hill with a deck that wrapped around the left side—I found Loybol and someone whose shape I didn’t recognize sitting next to her, another woman of around the same size. She was wearing a tank-top even though it was only sixty degrees and had hair that was a little longer than Loybol’s, and that was as far as I got before her image suddenly blanked out of my perception, and Loybol’s head turned to face roughly where I was.

I was so startled I physically stopped walking. We were far out of earshot, and Loybol hadn’t seen us walk up yet. We’d barely entered the ice cream stand’s parking lot, and the corner of the building—I think—blocked us from view for at least another step or two. Loybol couldn’t actually see me, although Cygnus had kept walking for a few steps and he had definitely crossed the sight-line as I visualized it.

Loybol made some gesture to the woman she was sitting with and stood up, walking around the corner and down the steps to meet us. She waved, and after a bit of hesitation I did too.

I tried to put more droplets around the woman she was with, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get a solid picture of her. She might’ve just been a chair for all I knew.

The only conclusion I could draw from that was that she knew I was trying to find her, could feel the droplets, and was intentionally scrambling them to mess with me.

Loybol pointed at Cygnus and then stuck a thumb behind herself; Cygnus nodded and jogged up toward the steps to meet the mystery woman, which left me alone with the approaching Loybol in the parking lot.

Once she was close enough to speak to me at a normal volume, she said, “Hello again.”

“Hi.”

“How’s it going out there?”

“Not all that well.”

I craned my neck around her to try and get a better vantage toward the mystery woman even though it didn’t make a difference—but Loybol said my name and stopped me. Around where I had spotted her was an egg-shaped area of absolutely zero humidity. Any droplet that went near that zone instantly disappeared.

She was, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

“Who is that?” I asked her. Forcing my voice even to the point of a monotone—to the point where it was more of a statement than a question.

“That’s why I came over here to meet you,” she said. “And why I sent Cygnus ahead as a distraction. That’s Eliza. She’s my general enforcer that I brought along to help us out with the war effort.”

Loybol turned back for a second and glanced at the egg-shaped void in the air, which—I guessed—was now talking to Cygnus. “If I was in charge of making team composition here, and we weren’t forced to make these random, I wouldn’t have put the two of you together. but anything loosely resembling a pattern can and will be used against us and that includes the fact that the two of you haven’t been on a team together yet. I don’t think you two are a good fit for each other. In fact, I think you might be the worst fit we could possibly make—”

I was only half-listening. Sometime during her talk, I decided with renewed vigor to try and figure out what this person looked like at any cost, if only to show off that I wasn’t afraid of her, lest that be used against me, too.

There was a spot of cold moisture in front of the egg-shaped void that I assumed was a bowl of ice cream. I was about to ruin her cup to make a point when Loybol said, “Erika. Pay attention.”

I blinked and snapped back to my spot. “Sorry.”

“Her name is Eliza. Don’t speak to her unless it’s business-related. Okay?”

I swallowed hard. Blood drained from my face—and again, for the fourth time, I felt the contours of that oval hole in space that the entity called Eliza inhabited. That she’d put herself in, surely, just to screw with me.

The initial reaction I had was just a gut thing. A bit of my primordial lizard-brain panicking. But the second one was sustained. It didn’t stop when I acknowledged it.

I was just scared. Nobody had ever done that before—and this was the second time in a month or so I’d been called out for trying to see someone. It was enough to make me worry backwards through every single time I’d ever tried to read a facial expression.

I’ve always tried to be discrete, but…

“This probably isn’t going to be fun for you,” Loybol said, “but if we don’t do this at least once in a while, it’s ammo for them to reverse-engineer our team structures, and then they can target the weaker groups and start picking us off. So just tolerate this for one day. Okay?”

And again I tried to get in there. Tried to crack the shell.

And, again, I could not.

Then I gave up.

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled.

0 0 0

I tried not to look terrified as I sat down across from her at the table, but I have no idea how well I accomplished that.

Eliza’s first words to me were, “Cheer up, Erika, I’m not that dangerous.”

Cygnus licked his cone. “Like fuck you aren’t.”

I had no idea what’d been said between the two in the handful of seconds during Loybol’s talk with me, but its results were obvious enough.

Eliza gave Cygnus a side-glance and a halfhearted shrug. “Not that it matters much now,” she said.

Loybol pulled out her chair and took a seat across from Cygnus, to my left. She had her own cone, although it was upside-down in a cup, which for some reason I found just as surprising as the books she liked.

I’m not sure why it came as such a shock to me that Loybol was a person, too. What was it about her that made me decide she was something else—something more like Bell; something more like a force of nature than a person? Like an earthquake or a hurricane—something with power but without desire.

The umbroids, maybe, but I’d seen time and time again how little they shaped her. Being with her now, I’d never know that she was further from human than anyone I’d ever known.

She picked up the cone, took a few licks, and I wondered.

“What flavor is that?” I asked her.

Loybol glanced down at it—the moisture over her eyeballs moved downward—and back at me. “Strawberry,” she said.

“That sounds nice,” I said.

I’d done a cursory feel-over at the stand’s front to see if there was anything I could read, but all I found were blank slabs. The flavors must have been printed flush with the material they were on. I could have asked the cashier what the flavors were, but I never seriously entertained that as an option.

It was there, I knew, but it also wasn’t.

Cygnus caught me turning. Force of habit still had me looking at things, even though it didn’t do anything to turn my perception. “Do you want something?”

“Um—”

“I’ll read you the flavors,” he said.

Loybol grimaced, put her cone down. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Do you have a go-to?”

“A what?”

“A flavor you always get.” She had money in her hand now, and it was only then that I bothered to look underneath her chair to find that she was carrying a purse. How long had she had that?

Purses seemed wildly impractical to me. Nobody I knew had one.

“Cookies and cream?” I tried.

“Sure,” she said, and she got up and went to the window to get one for me.

We fell into silence. Loybol told me not to talk to Eliza and I wasn’t about to disobey a direct order, especially when she was already doing something for me.

“Small?” Loybol called, poking her head from around the corner.

“Small,” I said back to her.

She gave a thumbs-up and went back to the window.