On June 8th, we finally found what we’d been looking for—someone, anyone, who was willing to surrender.

It went like this:

Yoru and I went and found a hole that actually had people in it, and we killed one, then two, and walked into the next room—an icicle held in a reverse grip in my right hand mostly because I thought it looked cool—we found a third there kneeling on top of his desk, head down, hands in the air, saying the magic words.

And Yoru and I just paused, looked at each other. Nobody had ever surrendered to us before. We weren’t really sure what to do. Honestly—I remember thinking it had to be a trap or something; nobody would ever willingly surrender to the Radiant. Surely there was a process for these things back in New York—there must have been a particularly juicy bit of propaganda they fed these people that incentivized them to choose death over telling us a single thing about their operation. There couldn’t have been that many die-hards for their cause. It had to be something else.

His name was Pete, he didn’t give us any more than that, and I suspected it was a fake name, anyway. He was taller than Yoru by a decent amount—not like that was much of an accomplishment—and he was bald, with glasses. I pinned his age at around forty. He didn’t have a key and didn’t have access to any magic.

He looked up at us when we walked in and said, clearly and slowly, “I surrender. Don’t kill me.”

“You what?” Yoru asked.

“Surrender,” Pete repeated. Same tone.

I tugged on Yoru’s sleeve a bit and we backed a bit out of the room.

“Do we—do we take prisoners?” I asked him, aside.

“I don’t know,” Yoru replied. “Do we?”

“Maybe?”

“Can we?”

“I—I don’t see why not,” I said. “I mean, we can just keep him here, right? This is hidden enough.”

“And we’ll just have one of us go and meet with the team after. It’s Benji and Loybol. One of them’s got to know something.”

“Right.”

“You go,” he said. “I’ll stay with him. I’m a bit more personable. You know.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say. As in, um, I go and you stay.”

“Awesome. It’s a plan.”

We walked back into the room and Yoru took point. “Yeah. We accept the surrender.”

“You—you do?” Pete asked. His face creased up, like he was more confused than relieved.

He clearly didn’t expect to get this far.

“Sure, why not,” Yoru said, shrugging. “You’re literally the first person to actually surrender to anyone here. We didn’t actually have a plan for this, but we’re about to meet up with—with some people who can answer that question in a little more depth, so we might as well accept the surrender until something changes the terms. Right?”

“Right,” Pete said, slowly.

“Cool. So—what’s your name, where’re you from, all that.”

“Well—I’m Pete,” he said, biting his lip. Looking at Yoru and me in sequence. His voice was still and measured—he’d rehearsed this, many times. This was pre-meditated, and I only knew that because he sounded exactly the same way I did when I answered those kinds of questions. “I’m thirty-nine years old. I don’t have any magic. I just do data analysis for these guys. I—really don’t like this job much, and I’m dead no matter what I do, so I figured the absolute least I can do is burn something to the ground on my way out, right?”

That was a good enough answer for me, and Yoru shared the sentiment. “That’s the spirit,” he said, with half a smile. “Erika, can you frisk him?”

I nodded and sent a bunch of droplets toward him all at once, just to feel the outlines of his body to see if there was anything weird there, or if he was armed or whatever. The chill from the droplets made him shiver once or twice but he was clean, and the whole process took maybe ten seconds.

“He’s unarmed,” I said, “and he doesn’t have a key.”

“Awesome. You’re pretty much harmless, so you can stand up or something if you want.”

Pete’s hands slowly sank to his sides, and he eased himself off the desk. Again, his eyes—which were a little more moist than normal, so they glowed for me—jumped between the two of us again.

“Can I—can I speak freely, for a second?” he asked.

“You can speak freely all the time,” Yoru said. “I don’t care.”

I offered a shrug too. He seemed harmless enough.

“How many kids work for you guys?” he asked.

Yoru scratched his neck, looked at me. “Is Cygnus eighteen yet?”

“As of last week, yeah,” I said.

“Just one,” Yoru answered.

“One?” he asked. “Then—”

Yoru’s shoulders sank. “Dude, I’m twenty-three. Fuck’s sake, don’t rub it in. We’re being nice to you, here. Like, uncommonly so.”

“Oh—um, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Whatever. It’s not important.” Yoru added something mumbled under his breath that I didn’t catch.

“We’re just going to stay here with you until we would meet up with the next group normally, and then we’ll—um, just send one representative and have them come back here and question you. Okay?” I told Pete. “That’ll be at…what, eleven o’clock tomorrow?”

Yoru nodded as a confirmation.

“Okay,” Pete said.

“Relax,” Yoru told him. “You’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure,” he said back, but he didn’t mean it.

0 0 0

Yoru went out to the store to get some food later and left me alone with Pete.

About twenty minutes ago he’d gone into the other room—with my permission—and took a desk lamp from a table out there. We’d moved the bodies into the last room, dehydrated them, shut the door and barricaded it, since we were going to be in here for a while and none of us were interested in getting used to corpse-smell, but when he went to get that lamp he walked out of the room in such a way where he didn’t even face that closed door, let alone look at it. There was some force-field keeping him away from it, keeping him from even perceiving it.

He’d located a pen and a piece of paper and was writing out something that I was trying to read as he went, but the droplets kept smudging the fresh ink. I was standing over his shoulder while he wrote and he was trying to act like I wasn’t there. His grip on the pen kept getting tighter, so even though he didn’t say anything, I figured my attempted eavesdropping was frustrating him.

So I pulled away from the page and just asked him, point blank, “What’re you writing?”

“You really are blind,” he said, with soft disbelief. “I thought they were making that up, but…”

I pursed my lips and didn’t think about it. My response was just as measured as his was, and equally rehearsed and edited. “Blind is a strong word.”

“I suppose,” he said. “I was hoping they were wrong, I guess.”

“Why’s that?”

He paused for quite a while. I thought he was ignoring me on purpose, but he eventually found a handful of words. “I don’t know. I thought the truth would make me feel better just because it was the truth, but that’s not really how it’s working out. I’m not sure why I thought it would in the first place. Does it make a difference if the enemy’s strongest attack dog is a blind little girl or a regular one? Not—not really, I guess. In the grand scheme of things. But I thought you not being blind was better, and now—now I’m just wondering why I felt like I had to make a distinction.”

He went back to writing, after a moment.

He didn’t answer my question, though, so I repeated it and this time he answered.

“A letter,” he said. “To my family.”

I blinked. “You have a family?”

“A wife and two daughters,” he said. “The older one’s about your age, I think. You’re…”

“Fourteen,” I said. “My birthday’s in three days, though.”

“Congrats,” he said, absently. Still writing.

“I guess I—I didn’t expect any of you guys to have families.”

“Most of us do,” Pete said. “This is a day job. It’s just a really dangerous one that pays a ludicrous amount of money. The two out there didn’t have families, to be fair—you’re encouraged by the brass not to—but I had one anyway, so there wasn’t much they could do. And it’s not like people are lining up to take my place.”

“We don’t really have any family,” I said. “I don’t think any of us do. I have a dad, I guess, but we weren’t ever really on good terms and I haven’t seen him in years. And I don’t really want to.”

“So that bit was true, too,” Pete said, rubbing some sweat from his forehead. “Man, I’m starting to wonder—you know, they give us all this nonsense about you guys, all this propaganda in these mandatory sessions, and some of the guys eat it up, but a lot of us just tune it out. I always assumed everything was made up and that you guys were regular folks like us, but…man, maybe I was wrong.”

We didn’t speak for a bit. I could tell he was writing—and with effort I could probably follow his pen-tip and translate the letters, but that was a lot of work for what was ostensibly a private matter. I wanted to know, but only because I always want to know.

I swear, Ava made me so nosy. I wasn’t always like this.

“What’s the letter about?” I asked him, just to see if he’d answer.

He did, to my slight surprise. “I’m explaining what’s happened to me,” he said. Everything he’d said was in the same paused, halting monotone. Like every word was passing through six layers of bureaucracy before it went between his teeth. “And what’s about to happen.”

“What do you think is about to happen?” I asked, mildly. I personally didn’t know what he was going to say, but I had a couple of good guesses.

“You’re going to kill me,” he said. “You in the general sense. Not necessarily you, Erika. Just—one of you is going to.”

“We don’t have to do that,” I said. “We’ve got territory up through Buffalo. We could give you safe passage to Canada.”

But Pete shook his head. “No, that’s not going to be necessary.”

“But you could take your family with you. We’ve got money.”

He waved it off, like I was offering him a drink. “No, it’s fine.”

That frustrated me. “We’re not going to kill you,” I said. “You’re a prisoner. This isn’t death row.”

Pete sighed. Put the pen down. Splayed his hands over the page he labored on. His fingers were soft, and his eyes—wet as they were—glowed. The trails of tears down his cheeks like bioluminescence. He turned and looked at me and it was as though he was painted in some arcane ritual. A sacrifice to a god he didn’t worship and didn’t understand.

He was marked for death, and he would never be one of us.

“I’m going to tell you everything I know,” he said, “which I admit isn’t all that much, but it’s better than nothing. And when I’m done, I’m going ask you to deliver this letter to my family. Their address is on the envelope already.” He gestured to a small envelope I didn’t notice earlier.

“And then,” Pete said, “I’m going to ask you to kill me.”

I asked him why, but he wouldn’t say.

I asked him some other things, too, but he wouldn’t speak to me anymore. He’d run out of words and that was that.