It took four months before I was finally assigned to a mission with Bell.

Every single time I’d come to a meeting point with whoever else I was with, I’d pray that this would be the time Loybol or Benji or Prochazka or whoever it was that planned these things would allow me to see Bell again. I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to say to her at the time, but as the days went by, I slowly accumulated a list of things to ask.

But mostly, I just wanted to be with her again. I wanted to show her how I’d been—that I was getting along just fine. That I’d overcome my weakness and I’d become invincible again, like she’d said I could be.

As the days rolled by, though, I became more and more discouraged, and the knowledge that the teams were just designed to appear random didn’t help. For whatever reason, the powers that be decided that Bell and I were dangerous to have on the same team as each other, and I started to wonder if I’d ever see her again. Every day, the odds of one of us being randomly picked off went up. Yoru had already survived a close call with a water-key assassin firing icicles at him from a tree, and I remembered thinking after I heard that that for all her unknowable, unfathomable power, even Bell would still just die if a sufficiently large bullet plowed into her skull from a distance.

It turned out that “a gun” still matched up pretty well against non-metallurgic keys, and it was something we all had to keep in mind.

But on my fifteenth birthday, I arrived at the bus stop we were supposed to meet at with Benji in tow, and there on the bench under the glass enclosure was Ava, and behind her—Bell. It had to be. Nobody else was shaped like her. There wasn’t an equivalent to Bell in the whole wide world, not in any way, shape, or form. In no disguise but the one I knew her for: six and a half feet tall, a shambling wire-frame humanoid creature in a skinsuit. Pale to the point of looking almost yellowed, like old paper. Glassed-over dead gray eyes.

She was not alive—she’d gone beyond such petty distinctions.

There was, and could only ever be, one.

And I felt the corner of her mouth rise, just a little.

I went into that area and I didn’t even acknowledge that Ava was there—I felt Bell rise from the bench as I approached and she crouched down to my level and we embraced, for a while. She was still there, all of her, and I was alive and she was alive and as long as that stayed true, no matter what happened in this war around us, we would eventually win.

From the bottom of my heart, I believed that.

I had only heard rumors of Bell’s war exploits. Tales of their great and terrible expanse. While I had been relatively unlucky in that I hadn’t gotten to do anything particularly impressive yet, Bell had been out rolling heads and taking names.

I wanted to hear all about it. Every last thing she’d done.

“I think they’ve been keeping me away from you,” I whispered to her, right in her ear.

“I think they have,” she whispered back to me.

0 0 0

“Are you done?” Ava asked.

I blinked. Benji was doing his best to not acknowledge what he’d just seen, and all at once the idea of the two of them hearing our little exchange just about fried my brain. My cheeks flushed warm and I took a little scoot-step away from Bell, who didn’t move or react to the situation at all. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t have.

Benji grimaced. “Okay. Now that that’s settled, let’s come clean. It was my decision to keep the two of you apart. I don’t think it’ll take all that much brainpower to figure out why. That said, we need someone to go interrogate Sal, and we need to get the info out of him by any means necessary, and, well, Bell’s the best person for that job, aside from Esther who we can’t spare, and she needs someone to keep an eye on the joint while she does that, so here we are.”

I wasn’t expecting Bell to take issue with any of that, but she did. “Am I not allowed to have my own interests?” she said.

“No, not really,” Benji replied. “That’s kind of the point.”

“Are we torturing someone again?” I asked. I didn’t have much of a plan for my question when I asked it—it just slipped between my lips. The sentiment in my head I wasn’t supposed to share in a slick little wrapper.

“Gotta play to our strengths, you know,” he said. “We’re not exactly the most sympathetic group of people. I mean, who knows. Maybe Sal will be like Pete and just spill the beans out of the goodness of his heart, but somehow I doubt it. And If Pete’s word is good, then Sal lives alone and doesn’t trust anyone, and so there’s not really anyone Bell could turn into that he’d talk freely with. So…I don’t know. I’m not gonna think about it. Do whatever you’ve got to do and take however long you need. Whoever the next team is will meet you guys here every day until you’re done. Pretty much everything hinges on this, so we’re all in a holding pattern trying to run distractions until you guys figure out how to wring this out of him, and—well, if I had to pick anyone to wring something out of someone by any means necessary, I’d most certainly be picking the two of you.”

Bell pursed her lips. She was somewhere else. “Understood.”

“Erika?”

“Got it,” I replied, automatically.

0 0 0

And so we set off to find somewhere private where we could figure out what to do with the information we had. Unit 2 had gone ahead and found that pizza place Pete mentioned—it was a little hole-in-the-wall in Slingerlands. It turned out, somehow, that Bell had been there before. I couldn’t imagine Bell eating pizza—or anything, really—but she said she’d told me about the time she was there way back when and I believed her. She said she’d brought it up in one of our first conversations—and then I remembered: it was the day Ava had given me that little stuffed frog as an apology for being herself.

God, that was two years prior. It feels like eons ago now.

That, I think, was the day when I knew I’d follow her to the ends of the earth—and here we were.

“Didn’t think that place would still be around,” she said. “Someone must’ve bought it. After—well, you know.”

We’d located a secluded park bench off near a substantial bit of woods. There was a memorial plaque on it, dedicating it to a World War II veteran. The bench itself faced the woods instead of the street, and I found that sort of odd. It was the kind of thing that couldn’t possibly have been done by mistake, but still seemed like one anyway. I hadn’t really bothered to give her a full once-over since we met, but once we sat down, I did, and I did so just in time to notice that she had a tote bag with her, filled with various fabrics (clothes, almost definitely) that I didn’t bother to poke around too much in.

“Do we have a plan?” I asked her, because I sure didn’t.

“Well…” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Kind of. We don’t know where Sal lives, and we don’t really have a way to find out. If someone had a phone book, we could—use that, I guess, but who the hell has one of those these days, and if Sal is as paranoid as it’s said he is, then he probably wouldn’t have a land-line anyway. I’m going to go and replace one of the workers in the shop. He’s gotta call in eventually, right? If he orders that pizza often enough to get it named after him.”

“Yeah,” I muttered.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t do it. Not yet.

Instead, I asked: “Where is it?”

She gestured off to the left, over me. “About half a mile that way. I was thinking we could go and stop in there, just as patrons. Have a look around, maybe catch up a little.”

My heart caught.

“Yes,” I said, trying not to trip over myself. “I’d like that.”

She regarded me, and I turned myself up at her as well: her little smile that looked like anything else.

But I knew better.

“Why don’t we head over now?” Bell said.

I couldn’t possibly agree fast enough.

0 0 0

I told her everything I knew to say. All the hits I’d been on that turned out to mean something and a number of the ones that didn’t. What I saw Ava do to the man in that basement with the black mold. What Benji told me to do if I ever got caught. Who Eliza was, and how she seemed so bent on getting me to worship her like I did with Loybol.

What Loybol did to Pete, who did everything right and still lost.

And Bell listened quietly, nodding occasionally, and when I was done she asked me: “Are you scared?”

“No,” I said, far too quickly to make it convincing.

Bell, to her credit, either ignored the speed that I said that, or simply disregarded it. “Then what’s the matter?”

“I—”

I swallowed. Properly explaining this would make me look weak in front of Bell and that was a line I could not, under any circumstance, cross again.

Never mind the fact that last time I did, everything more or less turned out okay. I couldn’t do it again. It was not even a possibility. Not even an option. The semantics, the little things—those distinctions were where this whole thing broke down. Keep it broad, keep it over-arching, and nobody had to know.

“It’s the process,” I said, simply. “I don’t trust the process.”

That got a shrug out of her. “That checks out.”

I sort of thought she was going to leave it at that—and maybe so did she, for a moment—but then she found a follow-up. “It’s not always pleasant, but I’ve learned to swallow it and just…trust that people know what they’re doing. Usually that person is me, and I just have to trust myself, but since I’m not the one calling all of the shots here I’ve got to put that faith in Loybol and Prochazka instead.”

“And you trust them?”

“Yeah,” she said. Perfectly timed to make me believe it—any sooner and I’d have thought she was rushing, any later and I’d have thought she needed to decide. “I know Prochazka, and I think I know his plan, and I think this is going to work out, one way or another. You probably know his plan too, don’t you?”

I was supposed to—but I didn’t. I had no idea.

But if Bell thought I did, I had an illusion to keep. So I nodded and hoped she wouldn’t pry, and she did not. She looked at me for half a second and then turned her attention back to some indistinct point in the woods. “You’re still worried about something, right?”

I pursed my lips. “I’m fine.”

“I won’t think less of you if you’ve got something you need to take off your mind,” she said, quietly. “Nobody else’ll know. What am I gonna do, gossip?”

I frowned. Didn’t respond. She went on, adding: “I’ve literally told everyone in the unit a different version of my backstory. None of you even know how old I am. If something about this whole war thing is bothering you and you need an ear, your secret would only be safer with a literal rock.”

The sentiment fell dead between us. I couldn’t accept it. Even though she had no reason to lie—even though she’d proven time and time again she’d go to bat for me when nobody else would—I could not take it for what it was.

It was a trap. There was no indication of it at all but I’d already decided that it had to be and that was that. It was ironclad. Somehow this would be used against me—it had before, enough times to form a pattern, and I had no faith that this would be the pattern-breaker.

Hadn’t Eliza done just this, when she wanted me to regard her with the same stars in my eyes I had for Bell and Loybol? Didn’t Loybol do more or less this when she took over that man in the basement of the Utica facility, back in the normal days?

Is that what people thought of me?

But Bell wouldn’t do that. I had the data for it—the truth, going back to the moments where it mattered above all else. Bell cared. Bell might’ve been the only one—the single person who didn’t see me, deep down somewhere they wouldn’t admit, as a gullible power-hungry slave who could be pointed at a problem with a single command and slotted right back into the drawer when they were done.

Wind up the key stuck in her back and watch her go.

Bell sighed. “If you don’t want to, whatever. I’m not going to pry it out of you. But your job is hard enough as it is, and I can’t imagine any concern or worry you might have about this whole endeavor at large is making it any easier. God forbid it trips you up in a moment where it matters.”

“Stop.”

My fists were clenched. I did not move to sit up or make a scene—just a single tensed word slipping through my lips. The purest possible sentiment in its shortest form.

Bell regarded me again. She paused, for longer than anyone does without thinking anything over, and then she said, “Okay. That’s fine. You don’t have to say anything. It’s fine.”

I took a breath and let it out. “I’ll tell you later. Okay?”

And Bell nodded. “Okay.”