So I burned my bridge with Cygnus, and I burned what was left of my bridge with Ava, and I burned my bridge with Prochazka a few weeks ago before the mission in White Plains, and my bridge with Bell was apparently purely fantasy.

Which meant I had exactly one bridge left.

And so I dragged my stupid limp skull up to Loybol’s makeshift office in the factory and I threw my useless fist at her door until she opened it and stood there, regarding my wilting frame with the pitiful look of an old orphanage master.

A dumb lost kid who didn’t know any better—nothing more, nothing less.

A dumb lost kid who throws everything good away.

“I’m scared,” I told her, holding back tears. “I—”

I wanted to elaborate, but there was nothing to say.

Loybol stretched her head out past me, glancing up and down the hall, and then she stepped out and took my hand and pulled me away from her office.

“Let’s go outside,” she said, without any possibility of challenge.

I swallowed and nodded and let myself be led out of the building. Loybol took a back route I hadn’t used in many years—one that led to a side-door that I think only the maintenance team ever saw. That door opened off into the big field next to the factory, far out of eyeshot of the front door, and from there she led me through the field to the edge of the factory’s property. A rock-wall outlined the border, separating our soft quarantine from the rest of society.

She gestured to the ground to indicate that we’d arrived. The rock wall was just a bit too high to get to without hopping, but she did so anyway, even though she could’ve just as easily carved a throne into the stone.

It wouldn’t have cost her anything to do so.

I sat down in the grass and looked up to the spot where she was, droplets clenched around her head like a fist, warmed in the sunset’s glow.

A halo—didn’t I once say that?

“I assumed you didn’t want anyone around for this,” Loybol said.

I nodded. Alone was better.

“Figured,” she said, trailing off. She looked away from me, back toward the factory. Lips pursed. Thinking.

“You’d rather I told you the truth, wouldn’t you,” she said. It wasn’t exactly directed at me—she didn’t face me when she said it—but there wasn’t anyone else around. That said, I couldn’t help but think she was half-saying it just to herself.

I answered it anyway. “Yeah.”

Loybol nodded, slowly. “Of course.”

She crossed her legs, taking another moment—and then she started talking, before any plan she’d had was fully gestated. “Once upon a time, I lived like you do. I was never a mercenary, but I was close enough. I got my key in 1987, in Hinterland. Hinterland is my home town, for what it’s worth. I grew up in Nast River. Born to a single mother who worked as a hotel maid in a casino there. Hinterland was the only place in Massachusetts allowed to have casinos at the time, so they attracted all sorts of unscrupulous trash. My mom worked some seventy, eighty hours a week just to put food on the table and pay rent, so I spent a lot of my time alone. I saw her maybe an hour a day, two if I was lucky, and all day on Sunday. She tried her hardest for me, but…with the amount of time we spent in our own circles, any chance at a close relationship was dead on arrival. One day a week just isn’t enough to be a parent. And, well, I’ll spare you most of my life story, but when I was fourteen years old my mom developed a nasty bout of chest pain. She’d come home aching every day, wracked by coughing fits. We didn’t have health insurance or anything, so she liked to pretend nothing was going on. It wasn’t until one night when I was watching TV with her before bed—some nighttime football game, I think—and she hit a cough so hard it splattered blood past her elbow onto the carpet. I escorted her to the emergency room after that, and even then I had to practically drag her out of the house. My mom came from nothing, had nothing, wanted for nothing, and relied on nothing. She’d be a perfect Zen master if not for the way she died.”

Loybol smirked. “Sorry to spoil the ending for you.”

“I figured,” I said. Quietly, and not quite to her face. “You wouldn’t be telling it if she was still alive.”

“Nobody really talks about their living parents this way,” Loybol said. “That’s true.”

She shifted a bit on the rock wall, crossed her legs the other way. “This was…nineteen eighty-four? Something like that. Maybe eighty-five. It was winter and I was fourteen, so it could’ve been either one. It turned out that my mom’s first job, the one she had before I was born, was at a factory that made stage curtains in Yugoslavia. And apparently—this was news to me at the time and I bet this is news to you—stage curtains have a ton of asbestos in them. Or at least they did back then. And, well, my mom said that while she was at the doctor’s. I remembered her saying that in the consultation. And the doctor just ignored her. Get this—apparently, his father and brother owned a big asbestos mining operation overseas, and contracts for asbestos mining were almost completely dried up at that point, so he and a bunch of other Hinterland-area doctors were receiving bribes from his family business to under-report and under-treat mesothelioma victims. Sweep it under the rug, basically. Not that it would make a difference in the grand scheme of things, but that was what was going on. In short, he gave her the run-around while knowing full well she was choking to death on stage-three mesothelioma, and by the time he finally approved her for emergency surgery, it was just to cover his ass. He knew full well that she was terminal.”

“So she passed away about two days after the surgery, essentially from complications of the surgery which he’d also done a shit job of. That left me, a fourteen-year-old, orphaned.”

I didn’t really know what to say. “I’m sorry,” was all I managed.

“I appreciate it, but I’m telling you this for a reason. I’m not trying to steal the spotlight. After that, a reporter who’d been investigating some threads on this got in contact with me, asked me about the doctor I’d seen, and she offered to put me in touch with a lawyer she was teaming up with to try and blow the lid on the whole thing. There were some ten doctors involved in it, she’d told me, it was the medical malpractice scoop of the decade. She—and this lawyer—were going to get justice for all the people who’d been cast aside, and she figured that I, as a young innocent girl who was just orphaned by this bribery net, was the perfect face for the suit.

“And I was alone and about to be homeless in a bad part of town—really, all parts of Hinterland were bad parts of town at that point—and the idea of getting an under-the-table job somewhere in the Red Quarter so I could pay for a prison-cell apartment didn’t exactly appeal to me, so I accepted. This was…maybe three hours after her funeral, when they contacted me. I had all of three hours to sit alone in my apartment without my mom, knowing she’d never come home, before I had to get up and dust off my pants and fight again.”

She sighed. “I met with the lawyer the next day, and he convinced me that this was a fight worth having. I don’t think he knew it at the time, but what he was actually doing—what the pair of them did, together—was talk me off the edge. I spent most of that three hours coming up with a couple different ways to kill myself. Trying to decide which one would be the easiest, but would also allow someone to find my body before it rotted too much. Something that didn’t draw too much attention. I was a solitary kid, for what it’s worth, so that was important to me. I didn’t want anyone to know I was gone. I just wanted to cease existing. Take all my things and all my words with me.”

Loybol shrugged. “I’m hoping this all sounds familiar. Stop me if it doesn’t.”

“It does,” I said, too fast.

She nodded, terse. “I thought so. Anyway, the trial took four months, and it went for the necks of a lot of very powerful people. It turned out that even the hospital management was in on it, and a couple people in the city government who were being bribed to obstruct efforts to remove asbestos from buildings. All they needed me to do was sit there and be a pretty face and cry for the cameras, really, and talk about how much I missed my mommy who I basically never saw. I ended up being the face of the case even though I didn’t have all that much to do with the actual workings of it. God, did that trial drag on. I had to talk about my mother’s dying moments so many times that the words themselves started to lose their meaning. It made me suspicious of language in general—the amount of times my words were used against me, and the words of my allies were nitpicked to death, and how little anything I said seemed to mean anything in the face of what I was up against. By the time the four months were up, I couldn’t cry anymore. I couldn’t even smile when the surgeon who did these things went to prison for fifteen years. They threw the book at the guy. My act, apparently, broke one of his friends, after three months. They got him to spill the beans, and that ended this on the spot. Which, for what it’s worth, only further proved to fourteen-year-old me that nobody cared what I thought, nobody paid any attention to what I said. I was a doll designed to cry in front of some cameras, and that was all I was good for.”

She looked down at the grass. I couldn’t imagine a young Loybol. I tried—drawing on what I only vaguely remembered of her true physical form, colors and all—but I couldn’t do it. She was always the woman I knew: five-seven, muted, silent, distant, burning.

Dead, somehow, but more alive than I’d ever be.

“The hospital had to pay out some twenty-five million dollars to the victims. It came out to about five hundred thousand a head. I got seven hundred thousand, mostly for my starring role in the trial. Make no mistake, Erika, they dragged me through the mud. People—tabloid magazines, who’d picked this story up given a relative lack of meaningful celebrity drama at the time—wrote shit about me and my mother that I couldn’t believe. Character assassinations that’d make your head spin. We were poor, which was of course our fault, and this was a conniving plot by the lawyer, reporter, and I to steal millions of dollars from an innocent hospital trying to save lives. Kicking these doctors while they were down with this high-flying conspiracy about asbestos.”

She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “In hindsight it all seems so silly, doesn’t it? People got so uptight over rocks. Millions of dollars and some thirty people dead over rocks. Over the right to mine rocks. It’s enough to make you wonder what the point of it all is. Anyway—I went back to school after that. The trial was, essentially, my summer vacation. I walked out of the courtroom and went right back into the classroom. The last day of the trial was right up against my first day of school. Somehow, among my peers, I ended up with a reputation for being good at keeping secrets. Maybe it was because of how dead inside I looked. I could hardly muster an emotional response one way or another at that point, and I lived alone, so people assumed, basically, that anything they told me was never getting out. Who was I going to tell? My mom? My dad?”

She snorted. It was a far more bitter, violent sound than I expected it to be, and for half a second something rose in the back of my throat—the old fear I’d forgotten I had before she started talking. “High-schoolers are so fucking dumb. Anyway, then, when I was seventeen, some more really horrible shit happened to me, but by now I’ve made my point.”

I didn’t quite follow, and Loybol noticed that without me saying anything. “The point is,” she said, examining her fingernails, “that we’re not so different, you and I.”

She snickered again, putting her hands behind her. Leaning back to face up toward the sun. “Sorry—I’ve always wanted to break that one out. But, seriously, that’s what I’m getting at. I understand where you are because I’ve been where you are. I went from a normal, if somewhat solitary kid, to the face of a national court sensation, to an ostracized, feared entity in the one public place I could go, to a true pariah once I got my key. There were no breaks. There was no cool-down. Each fight began within twenty-four hours of the previous one ending. And…when I got my key, well, I was too scared of it to really do what you wanted to do, and justice had already been served in my case, but I can understand why you would’ve wanted to do it.”

I blinked. Flushed. I’d never told Loybol about that. “How did you—”

She made a grim smile. “Benji told Prochazka, Prochazka alluded to it one day when we were talking about you.”

I took a deep breath and frowned. That was not a part of my life I liked to think about anymore. I’d changed since then, hadn’t I? Was I not stronger than I was back then?

I didn’t need such petty things as revenge. I’d long since risen above that. The people that made my life hell when I was that young were high-schoolers now, teenagers who probably didn’t even remember my name. What was the point in devoting brainpower to dreams of revenge?

No—I had all the power I needed. That was revenge enough in itself.

But it didn’t stop me from saying to Loybol, “Are you going to tell me that I did the right thing, too?”

Loybol shook her head. “I’m not going to patronize you, no. I have no opinion about that. It’s water under the bridge. It doesn’t matter now.”

I didn’t quite expect that, and it through my plans for what to say afterward out of sync.

She picked up my slack. “I’m off-topic. The point is that I understand, Erika. I know what you’re going through. I understand it more than Prochazka or Bell ever could because I’ve lived this. Maybe the ages were a bit different—I was a little older when it started—but it’s essentially the same. Every day’s a fight. Every day’s a struggle.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now,” Loybol said, solemn.

I had no response. I just waited.

“Erika, I twisted everything I was to pursue justice. To try and shape, at the very least, the city I grew up in into a place where people with keys couldn’t hurt anyone like I was hurt. I wanted what happened to me when I was seventeen to be a singular event, a catalyst, that bloomed into a peaceful universe. The last act of war, forever into infinity. I ripped the old mafia that ran the Red Quarter apart from the inside and re-worked it into the organization that I run now, and we’ve got one of the lowest magical incident rates in the country. I accepted the umbroids for that. I knew I was strong enough to overtake the hive-mind because I had already proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I was completely and totally unbreakable.”

She was tensed. Fists clenched over the stone.

I watched, enthralled.

“It took me fourteen years, but I did it. I began the day I was freed. I walked back to my apartment, took a cold shower, breathed slowly on my bed for three hours, and got back to work.”

Her tone became hard. “I pried this existence from dead twisted hands and so can you. But, Erika, I want you to know this. None of this ever gets easier. If you’re looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t one. I don’t want to lie to you. God only knows people have done that enough. Don’t look for a light at the end of the tunnel—look for the rubble behind you. Look for the scratches and the scars in your wake. Look for the cities you built. The tunnel is endless. You and I, we’re going to live longer than regular people. People with keys are immortal barring cancer. As cancer treatments improve, our lifespans increase. I think we’re projected to live until two hundred or so now. Looking for a light means you’re waiting to die. Look back if you want to see the light. That’s what I want to tell you. The light is behind you. What’s in front of you is unshaped. It’s unwritten. Your task, always and forever, is to create something to look back on.”

“I hate what I’ve done,” I whispered. “I—I don’t want to…”

“That’s okay,” Loybol said. She stood from the rock wall and came to my side, sitting cross-legged in the grass next to me. “I hate some things I’ve done, too. But there’s always more clay to shape. There’s always more time to build something new.”

She fell quiet for a moment. “Erika, do you believe in God?”

“No,” I said. “My father did, but—I think he stopped when I was born.”

Loybol nodded. “I’m the opposite. I didn’t believe in God when I was young, but I do now. I don’t believe in God in a Judeo-Christian way, though. Maybe this is too metaphysical for this conversation, but I’ll say it while we’re already sharing. I believe in God as in eminent malevolent entity that we call entropy. It exists in all things solely to destroy. To break apart and make still. Energy lost to the system is energy stolen by God. Our job, as humans, is to fight that. Every day, we fight against entropy in all its forms. It destroys, so we have to build. It makes things still, so we have to make things move. It is silent so we have to speak. If entropy is a fundamental property of the universe—of energy, I mean, and if God is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent, then doesn’t that mean God can simply be entropy?”

Loybol shrugged. “I’m not trying to convert you or anything. I’ve never told anyone that before. But, personally, I find it helpful to put a face on my enemy. You might find it helpful, too.”

It made some sense to me. Fight against the inevitable. Life is, in itself, a war against entropy—so why not put a face on it and call it God?

Was that not all we did? Wage petty war against the inevitable?

“We’re going to lose,” I said to her, in half-choked words.

“We have to try,” Loybol replied.

“Someone’ll find out about magic,” I went on. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I wanted—God, how I wanted to—but I couldn’t. “And all of this will be for nothing.”

“One day, you’ll die,” Loybol said, “And then everything will be for nothing either way. You can’t think of it that way. But this way, we can at least try. We have to try—or entropy wins. This is a war fought by battles. We win days. The war will go on as long as there’s a human to rail against it, so there’s no point in thinking about it in grand terms. Stay small. Think within, Erika. What did you do to fight today? What will you do to fight tomorrow?”

Loybol took a deep breath. “It’s hard. I won’t lie to you. It’s so, so hard. There are days where it’s almost too hard, and all I can do to fight is keep myself going, and that’s okay. Sometimes that’s how it is.”

Another pause. She continued. “Lives saved, lives lost—you can’t think of it in those terms. You’ll lose yourself in the scope of the war. Think of it as battles won and battles lost. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Look backward for your monuments. Look to tomorrow for your plans, and don’t do anything more. Today, your battle is this. What we’re doing right now. You have to decide—will you win, or will you lose? Because tomorrow there’s another, and the day after that there’ll be another. But if you win today, tomorrow gives you something special. It gives you today as a monument to look back on. It gives you a sign that you have strength. And you do, Erika. You may feel weak now but we all feel weak sometimes. God knows I do, too. Erika, no water key has ever survived what you’ve survived. You may not realize it, but you bent the universe to your will in a fight to stay alive last October. You fought a battle that had odds stacked overwhelmingly against you. Compared to that? This is nothing. Never forget what you’ve done, Erika. Never forget what you’ve come from. Never forget how you arrived to talk to me today. It might feel bleak now, but it always does in the moment. Tomorrow, you will look back on today. Whether you want to or not, you will. It’s human nature to look back. It’s impossible to not be the sum of our parts.”

Loybol reached out, slowly—giving me more than enough time to brace—and she put a hand on my shoulder. “And tomorrow,” she said, slowly, “you will ask yourself: did I do good yesterday? Did I fight?”

I sniffled. Sometime during that I’d started crying—or maybe I was simply trying to stifle it. “I don’t think I can do this alone,” I said.

The breeze shifted from warm to cool. The sun sinking behind the tree-line. The grass around us still and gently blue as all living plants were—and before me there was Loybol: warm and outlined in red. Alive, here—all I knew in my entire whole wide world.

And Loybol smiled at me. “I never said you had to.”

0 0 0

We went back to the factory a few moments after that. We spoke again, briefly, but I mostly needed time alone.

I went upstairs to the Unit 6 barracks, but Bell was there, so I turned away as soon as I saw her. I didn’t want to talk to Bell. I wanted to be alone.

The only other truly solitary place I knew was Ava’s secret room, but Ava was probably there. That only left one: near Ava’s secret room, there was a staircase that went right up to the ceiling, and in the ceiling there was a trap-door that opened onto the roof.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody had ever gone up there. I didn’t know if it was locked or not, but that wasn’t an issue for me. I’d find a way.

So I went there, tiptoeing outside of Ava’s room just in case, and I went to the end of the hall where the staircase was, and I climbed it as much as I could and I reached up to the metal mechanism that held it in place and I undid it.

Pushed the cover open and climbed out into the world again.

I closed the door behind me, took a few steps out away from it, and sat down, cross-legged in the center of the rooftop.

A never-ending war, Loybol’d said. Did that not make me a soldier?

Of course I was. I fought, didn’t I? What did it matter what the weapons were: guns or spears or clubs or magic. What did it matter what the purpose of the war was? We weren’t conquerors, we were barely even protectors. We fought against the inevitable. We won battles for a war that, given infinite time, we would always, always lose.

But I couldn’t allow myself to think about that. I still don’t. The future is what the future will be. There’s really just no point in planning for it. You can’t possibly account for all the variables.

This whole endeavor is one of my monuments. It’s one I can’t quite definite as won or lost. I’m trying to, by telling this. I hope that I can figure it out one day. Loybol made it all sound so easy, back there in the grass. As if everything in the world could be boiled down to good or evil, right or wrong, won or lost.

It’s not that simple, I know, but it doesn’t have to be. The world-view that gets Loybol through the day doesn’t have to be mine. I’m allowed to think for myself.

I try to, anyway, but it’s hard, and a lot of the time it doesn’t really feel like it’s worth it. I often do wonder if I’d be better off not. I could ask Loybol to take those things away from me, and I think if I asked, she’d do it. I saw the standees around the factory a lot, and they usually had a smile, and “usually having a smile” was, at that point in my life, anyway, good enough for me.

What more could I really ask for than to just be happy?

Would it really have been so bad to let everything be slowly pried away, my limp fingers yielding to the forces of God—let Ava die, let Cygnus forget, let Bell drift away, and let myself sink slowly into the mire? I never needed to be seen again. Who needed to?

But the world would go on. Even if I wanted everything to stop. Even if I wanted the earth to spin down, slowly, until it came to a halt and every last piece of life halted with it. Not frozen in ice, necessarily, but stilled—like a photograph. As if that one picture of the six of us together and happy extended out to the whole world.

Birds left with their mouths open in endless silent song. Waves forever threatening to crash.

I couldn’t stop the world—only God could. It wasn’t our role to do that—in fact, it was evil to do so.

Sitting there on the roof of the factory, though, I thought about it again.

I didn’t want everything to stop. That was an impulse. A fear-reaction—a message from a malevolent God that saw me as a threat. That’s what Loybol would say, I thought—and that thought lingered.

Hadn’t I beaten this once before?

Couldn’t I beat this again?

I closed my eyes, even though it made no difference, and I gathered as much of the moisture condensed on the glass flats of the handful of solar panels I was surrounded by and I scattered it—not up like I used to, but far and wide. I let them gather more droplets as they flew, until I controlled so much water that I felt as though I were in a thunderstorm.

The world was silent. There was no rain. The storm that’d threatened to come earlier in the day had fallen apart, or passed us by. The threat fell on deaf ears.

Instead, there was only me, and my substitute rain. Rain that I sent sideways, until it hit the trees and the tops of the buildings in town.

And in my mind, outlined in blue—I saw, once again, the town’s skyline. The shapes of the people we towered over. Their offerings to our shrine.

I had beaten this once before. Entropy threatened to claim me once and I stopped it. I could stop it again—I had to stop it again. I was the only person capable of stopping it again—but I didn’t have to do it alone.

We would fight. We needed to.

That thought I’d had earlier made much more sense now. It’s not the God only answers the convenient prayers—they don’t answer any. They are extremely unresponsive by definition.

God doesn’t want to hear your prayers. God wants to destroy your prayers.

And I would not allow myself to be defied. Wasn’t I invincible? Didn’t I used to say that?

I could say it again. And I did—alone, to myself on that rooftop, I whispered it under my breath. Only I had to hear it.

I was invincible.

I look back on my days at the Radiant and I can’t say for sure if this battle, overall, was won or lost. I was one person when I arrived and I was a different one when I left. For all the good Loybol’s view of the world did me in the moment, I can’t truly subscribe to it. I’ve seen too much now. Loybol has seen more than me, obviously, because she’s older—but I get the sense, with the wisdom of hindsight, that her world-view was a coping mechanism more than anything else.

And now, really, I understand it more than I ever did back then. Loybol needed her view of God just like I needed her.

Now I need for nothing.

This, of course, is by design.

I stood. I walked to the door set into the roof.

I opened it, and I climbed back down.

And at nine o’clock sharp, I met Bell, Ava, and Cygnus in front of the building just like Prochazka told us to.

And the four of us met the four of them—Prochazka, Esther, Eliza, and Loybol—standing in a row across from us. Cygnus across from Prochazka, Bell before Esther, Ava with Eliza, and me with Loybol. The evening breeze and the gentle smell of grass carried between us—the distant whistle of cars down the highway.

Ambient sounds of existence. Sounds of life.

Loybol regarded me there, before Prochazka spoke—and I smiled at her.

I am invincible.