There’s a door with a single keyhole- it will open regardless of what key you use to unlock it. All keys will open this door. What’s on the other side, however, depends on the key.
“What key would you use?” I ask her, through a mouthful of pasta, a copper key hanging around my neck. It’s one my mother gave me, I don’t know why. In the background the tv is on, bringing in the latest news about one terrorist organization or another.
“I don’t know.” Maggie’s brown eyes are downcast, staring at the full plate in front of her. She was conscripted yesterday. I don’t mention it again.
That night I watch her as she sits on the couch, staring at the tv. The body count is rising every day. We both know that soon she’s just going to be another name on that list. Five hundred sent to the western front. ten returned.
The next day the bus comes and she climbs on, a piece of my newly shorn hair locked away in the locket around her neck. I touch my own locket with the scrap of her dirty blonde hair tucked neatly inside. I get to work.
There’s plenty of jobs for people like me. I get put in resources. Endless lines of statistics and fractions, calculating the death toll. It doesn’t affect me as much as the others.
Yesterday one of the new boys, an eighteen year old refugee from the west and assigned to the cubicle next to mine, broke down crying, holding a scrap of paper to his chest. His sister, he explains. Dead to the war. I walk him home and make sure he has plenty of food and good books and some money from my savings. I return to work.
I get letters from Maggie sometimes. I send her some cookies. They never arrive.
I’m reassigned to managing conscription. To a lot of people it’s even worse than resources. I don’t really mind. I make sure to put the new kids in non-combat situations and send veterans from the last war to look after them. I get a lot of thanks from tearful parents.
Maggie comes home on leave for a week. We go out for ice cream and she stays at my house. She doesn’t talk much, her hair growing back choppy and messy. I brush it for her as she cries about the horrors of the front lines.
“Then they have to discharge you.” I tell her as she sobs about the leader of the enemy who just won’t die, and the children he sends to fight them. I don’t tell her we do the same. “And once they do we can go make your pasta and sell it for fifty cents a can.”
She smiles “what would we do with all that money?”
“We could buy a plot of land and start a farm.”
She laughs. She always wanted a farm.
She is promoted to captain.
She leaves two days too early. Her eyes are glassy as she boards the bus back to the front.
I’m told that all non essential workers are to be evacuated from the city. I stay anyways, cooking food for the other people in my office. They thank me with weary smiles.
Then it’s Christmas and everyone except me is home for the night. I sit at my desk, looking over the list of conscripted children and fingering the key my mother gave to me. That had been the last time I had seen her. She had left and the next day I got news of a massacre in the east pass. None had survived and I had become an orphan in a war torn world.
I get back to work.
It’s nearly three in the morning when a girl stumbles into my office. She’s scared and hurting and didn’t know where else to go. She says she’s only fifteen and introduces herself as Liz.
I clean her up and cut her hair and give her civilian clothes and tell her that her name is Liz Masson and that she is my niece. I burn her golden armband. We go home. It’s Christmas after all.
“I never wanted to hurt anyone.” She tells me one night over a dinner of pasta. Maggie’s favorite.
I believe her.
The next day there is an air strike. There is no warning.
A piece of broken building falls on a woman carrying her son. She shields him with her body. Liz gets a little brother.
Five days later I am called into my boss’s office. She looks at me for a long time before assigning me to the veteran program. Not an essential part of the job, but I’m not leaving and they needed somewhere to put me.
I got one last letter from Maggie. It was written in black ink and the corner was red. I wrote a letter back but I never sent it. She told me she was never coming home. And that she could never face me if she did. I put up her picture next to my bed.
When I arrive at the office the others are gathered around the tv. Someone from higher up has turned. I leave before I see her face. My boss gives me the day off. I go on a walk. I get ice cream from our favorite spot. I go back to work.
One of my coworkers tries to steal money from private accounts. She cries when I catch her. There is never enough money these days. I give her a check for three thousand dollars. Her son survives the operation. They invite me over for dinner. Her son and my nephew play together. She adopts him officially.
Now it’s just me and Liz again and I work long hours. I bring my boss a casserole I had made. She is slumped at her desk, her eyes puffy and red. A letter is crumpled in her hand. Her wife was killed in action yesterday. I drive her home.
The next day she retires.
I am promoted. I’m in charge of everything that comes through our office. I pull in favors. I get kids away from the war front, I bring others home. I reunite families, parents and children, partners, siblings.
Liz contacts some of her friends. They sneak into the city and I get them new homes and new jobs and I burn their golden armbands. Liz thanks me tearfully and goes to live with them. I’m alone again. I get to work.
The city is bombed. I’m in the hospital for three weeks and I continue to work. I call in favors from old friends, from all people I’ve helped over the years. The war moves closer. I email Maggie’s superior officer. He doesn’t respond.
I start dressing in blouses and skirts. I shave my hair again and wear makeup. My former boss gives me a few of her wife’s dresses because I still go over for dinner every once in a while, just to check in. I keep working.
I find a kid in an alley. His golden armband clutched in his hands. I take him home and patch him up, washing the blood from his hair and I burn the armband, like I do with all the others, then I send him over to Liz’s, with a key from my collection to replace the one she had used bringing her sister home.
My former boss introduces me to her superiors. They watch me for a long time.
“She’s one of the best.” Alice assures them
I am given a management position outside the company. They give me intel from the war and tell me to do something with it. I bake Alice a cake. I miss maggie. She was always good at this sort of thing.
I file the intel and bring in some of Liz’s tech friends to make an algorithm. We manage to predict the next attack and somehow we win.
And then we get news of a weapon.
The war grows even closer to home and this time it’s led by a living bomb code name Magpie. I do research and try to find a way to help her. We lose three more battles.
I still have dinners with Liz once a week.
“They never wanted to hurt anyone.” she says across the table.
I take her hand, staring at the picture of Maggie on the wall. And I believe her.
The Magpie leads her armies closer. I get back to work.
I tell everyone to get far far away. They go silently, giving me reassuring pats on the shoulder. I tell Liz to take her friends and leave as well. She wants to stay but I don’t let her. I have a friend in command and I tell him to evacuate all the scattered workers and families still in the city. We get buses sent and they all manage to escape before the army comes.
The streets are burning and people are shouting. I destroy the papers in my office telling where all the kids i helped had found a home. Then I leave.
I lock the door and walk down the street. No one tried to stop me. Most of the people I passed had a relative or a friend I had helped. I walked to that ice cream shop by the bay, the one Maggie and I used to always go to.
She’s sitting on a bench, her head in her hands. I set the cup of lavender gelato down beside her and started eating my chocolate cone.
“I never wanted to hurt anyone.” she whispers, staring down at the flame dancing through her veins. “I want it all to end. I just want to go home.”
I reach over and untie the golden armband tied tightly around her bicep and toss it into a nearby patch of fire. I believe her.
“I have a present for you.”
She looked over at me as I pulled the key off the chain around its neck. I handed it to her.
She stared at me.
“This was your mother’s.”
I shrugged
“So was my apartment. And this ring I’m wearing. And me, technically.”
She smiles.
We walked side by side to the doorway at the edge of town. Her hands were shaking so I used the key. It opened into a small cabin, built on a cliff overlooking a forest and waterfall.
“It’s where I grew up.” I explained “it’s a beautiful place.”
I am praised for killing her. I’m the only one to attend the funeral so I don’t have to hide my tears. How a simple office worker killed the magpie, the world will never know. Stories spread. They say I lost my hand in the fight. But no, that happened a long time ago. When I was just a kid in a gold armband fighting a war I never should have had a part in.
I wear black. A black dress with a veil over my face. I pay for a plot and a gravestone and I write Magpie on it. I leave white roses. I go home.
The next day I quit my job. The others smile and thank me and pay me three years wages so I can get started somewhere else.
I give away my car and my apartment and my mother’s ring and I buy a pickup truck. I buy some chickens from a man whose farm was destroyed by the war and pay him a little more than I should have. I buy a goat from my neighbor and a box of vegetable seeds. And then I leave.
I drive past towns completely leveled and farms with smoking fields. I drive up a road into the mountains. It’s a beautiful place.
Maggie, just dear old Maggie, welcomes me. She serves pasta for dinner and shows me all she’s done to the place. We build a coop for the chickens and the goat lives in the house. We plant peas and carrots and potatoes and cabbage around the house and in the evenings we sit out on the porch watching the sun set over a world reborn. Finally we are home.
There’s a door with a single keyhole- it will open regardless of what key you use to unlock it. All keys will open this door. What’s on the other side, however, depends on the key. And now I finally know why my mother gave me the key.