He didn't look up when Roman entered, just kept staring at his glass. “There aren't any more glasses,” said Julius. “But you can use this one if you like, and I'll drink from the bottle. The water's still shut off, or I'd wash it for you. Also, there isn't any ice.”
Julius was tall and thin and muscular, with skin as black as the night sky. He wore his hair in thin braids that fell just past his shoulders and was wearing a ragged T-shirt, a blue vest full of pockets and a pair of ripped jeans. The incident in the swamp had taken its toll on him – taking his right leg above the knee as well as his right arm at the elbow. Julius may not have survived if Roman hadn't gotten to him when he did. There were deep scars running down the right side of his face, and he'd had several broken bones which his body had healed within a week. His arm and leg, however, wouldn't be healing up like the rest of him. Julius laughed, but his eyes held so much hatred in them. “No more glasses. Just one filthy chipped one. It can hardly be defined as a glass anymore.”
“I don't need a drink. How are you?”
Julius shook his head. “I am the last glass. There are no more after me.”
Roman pulled up a chair and sat down. “You're drunk. It's been four months, and it's time to come out of this. I can't keep running the Agency by myself.” The last part was a lie, but it was something that Roman thought a human would like to hear. It wasn't like Julius was all human, but at the moment he was most definitely catering to the human side of himself.
“There is no Agency. It's over.”
Roman reached out and grabbed a bottle that had some whiskey left and took a swig. “Do you really expect me to react to that? You aren't so drunk that you don't know who you're talking to, are you?”
Julius grabbed his glass and finished it off, then set it in front of Roman while staring at the table in front of him.
“Look me in the eyes,” said Roman, “and I'll pour you some more.”
A whispering growl crawled out from deep within Julius' throat and he looked up at Roman. His golden eyes were wild and tired and a little bloodshot.
Roman poured more whiskey into the glass. “The city needs us. It needs you and me and a working group of Agents.”
Julius took a long drink. “I mean it when I say I'm the last glass.” He licked the whiskey from his lips. “As long as I've been on this land, I could look beside myself and see all my past and future incarnations, all lined up like dominoes. All of my selves.” He raised the one hand he had left, looking at it as he flexed it open and closed. “And this one – Julius Marcos – is the end of the line. For some reason I didn't see it before, but this is my last incarnation. When I die, that's it. No more Agency for me, no more New Orleans.” He looked down at the end of his other arm. “And I'm only half myself. Half a life left.”
“Have you been to the swamp? Have you talked to Bes?”
Julius shook his head. “I've gone to the swamp, but I haven't had it in me to call on Bes.”
“I think you should. We all need guidance from time to time.”
Julius nodded and took another sip. “Maybe.”
Roman took another long swig from the bottle. “I'm conducting interviews in the next week. The Function and Scape have brought a couple of candidates to my attention.”
“I like The Function – you know I do – but we don't need their help.”
“We? For the last several months the Agency has been I, not we. I don't mind the help and I like their recruits. Especially Mars. You know I've always thought she should join us.”
“He's letting Mars out of the nest, is he? That's unexpected.”
“I plan on picking her up before he changes his mind.”
“Who's the other?”
Roman poured some more whiskey into Julius' glass. “The one we've been waiting for. The memory reader named Edith Downs.”
Julius looked away, flexing his hand around the dirty glass of whiskey. “Fuck.”
Roman nodded. “That is an appropriate response.”
Julius chuckled. “Ha, so The Function brought her to us. It's set then. I'd... forgotten. Or maybe I've just been distracted.” He looked at Roman. “Does The Function know her part in everything?”
Roman shook his head. “No.”
“I suppose he doesn't need to. Have people begun to fall through the rip in time?”
“I don't believe so, we would have heard about it. I also haven't told The Function that his actions have caused the time rip that we technically don't know about yet. The rip may take a number of days to manifest, but I'm sure that we'll hear about it as soon as it does.”
“How did he manage to create it?”
“A complicated plot involving Edith Downs and Mars disguised as bank robbers and robbing The Wellington Bank. The Wellington was in on it all, of course. During the robbery Edith was channeling Dean Smith – she'd brought him out of his gun and into herself. Then The Function, being their getaway driver, drove them into a warehouse where Scape and I had set up one of my machines which extracted Dean out of Edith.”
“Wait, fucking Dean Smith is walking around now?”
“Yes. Think about it – there was so much momentum and energy built up around the event where he got shoved into the gun, so what if all that momentum got shoved into the gun with him? Then when The Function has him pulled out it's like pulling the cork from a shaken bottle of champagne – hence time rips apart.”
“The other end of the time rip was 1934, right?”
“Yes.”
“Right around when Dean got shoved into the gun.”
“Exactly.”
Julius set his glass on the table. “That's all fine, we can deal with this. I'll go and speak to Bes and then we'll begin to get ready for what lies ahead. But there won't be another memory reader in the Agency. Edith Downs is not joining us.”
“Well I'm glad you're an active participant again. Perhaps you'd like to conduct the interviews with me. I'll let you sober up first, and shower, and then we can go over the details in a couple of days when you get back from the swamp.”
Julius' eyes peered at Roman as he took a long slow drink of whiskey. “You can be such a fucking prick.”
“I can be anything that the job requires.” He downed the last of the whiskey and set the empty bottle down on the table.
Julius looked at the empty bottle and his eyes widened. “That was low. I can't believe you just finished that off. You don't even like Jack Daniels.”
“You should go to the Spanish Plaza headquarters. It has water and you really need some. Both to drink and to shower with.”
“I'll do that.”
“Good. I'm going to get back to work.” Roman went to leave.
“Thanks.”
Roman turned and looked at him, sitting there surrounded by the empty bottles.
“You're the only friend I have left,” he said to Roman.
Roman smiled a half smile. “Let me know how the swamp goes. I'll have things ready by the time you get back.” Then he turned and left the common area.
He wandered the metal underground tunnels, and eventually came to one of the laboratories that he used to work in. He entered a complex series of numbers onto the keypad and the door slid open. Roman flipped on the dim emergency lighting, walked past the bookshelves and glass cases and lab equipment. It all smelled and felt horribly like Rachel. They had spent a lot of time together, but the lab represented the one time that they were a creative team. It was where they worked on various projects. Sometimes they would work on their personal projects at the same time, and sometimes they would collaborate on experiments and devices. Rachel was not the scientist that Roman was, just as Roman was nothing compared to his old mentor, The Scientist. But Rachel had inspired him in so many ways in which he'd never been inspired before. She was so human, so beautifully human.
Roman felt his eyes begin to tear up, and didn't care so much since he was alone. He'd probably had about four shots of whiskey, and that had to have somet
hing to do with it. There on a shelf was the metal glove that he'd come into the room for – long and clunky with thin rubber tubes and glass vials of liquid screwed into the sides of it.
The Extraction Glove – one of the projects he'd worked on with Rachel. It was designed to amplify a memory reader's abilities, while also protecting them from any harmful side effects. It basically acted as a buffer to keep a reader from being overwhelmed by the emotions and memories they were extracting from a person. With it, in theory, a memory reader should be able to sort through the memories of a mind, and “extract” specific ones.
Rachel had never been able to fully utilize the glove, always blaming herself for not being powerful enough. Roman had seen this self-blame as so very human of her, and hadn't sympathized with her at all. He had specific powers himself, and had explored their limits. To Roman, the idea of disliking your own limits was purely absurd. He was constantly seeking to improve himself, but only within the confines of possibility. Anything more was just stress without any positive outcome.
He found a duffel bag and placed the glove inside it, then scanned the lab for anything else that may be useful. He knew there were other things he should bring, but nostalgia was painted so heavily over everything that his mind just wouldn't judge correctly. Roman turned off the light and left.
Walking silently by the door to the kitchen on his way out, he heard Julius sighing and whispering to himself. Roman passed by without being seen by his friend, trying and failing not to hear what the man was saying. Julius was listing off all the names of his past lives.
In some ways it was a dark time for the Agents. But to Roman the path out of the darkness didn't look quite as dire as it had a few times in the past. Maybe it was just experience and faith (though he would never admit to clinging onto anything so amorphous as faith), but he didn't have a single worry about the Agents returning and becoming strong once more.
File 14 :: [Edith Downs]
Growing up hours away from any sort of city, and half an hour outside a scattering of restaurants and gas stations that had a lot of work to do before being considered a real town, Edith led a very solitary childhood. She had no siblings and it just so happened that the neighbors were not inclined to child bearing (neither were her parents, really, but things happen). Most people who live out in the middle of nowhere have animals, vegetation, or both. Edith's parents had neither. They had several acres, which were inhabited by a few trees and wild plants and, on occasion, by cows that wandered over from a neighbor's property.
Her father was a scientist who wrote books on biochemistry and spent most of his time in his office at his typewriter, having long since given up any kind of field research which Edith would have most likely found fascinating. Her mother was a part time real estate agent, selling houses in the middle of nowhere to people who thought they might want to live in such places. She was selling a dream, Edith later realized, that both her mother and father used to believe in themselves. They were not “nowhere” people and she, being of their blood, was also not a “nowhere” person. They were city people who accidentally happened upon a dream that didn't belong to them and, for some reason unbeknownst to Edith, never decided to give up their mild unhappiness and move back to the city.
Edith was six when her mother asked her where she would like to go for her birthday and, rather than the pizza parlor or the park in the small “town,” she said she wanted to go to an estate sale. Her mother was taken aback, of course. She'd taken Edith to estate sales in the past, and Edith would have an interest in one or two things – a paper fan or a tarnished lantern – and her mother would buy them for her as long as the price wasn't too steep. Edith had always cherished these items, taking them out frequently to look at them, but her mother couldn't quite imagine that Edith liked going to the estate sales. It might have occurred to her then that she really didn't know what Edith liked to do, or much about her daughter's mind at all really – but the truth was that it didn't occur to her. Thoughts of that nature had once visited her mother's mind quite frequently, but, due to being utterly ignored, had stopped showing up. Nevertheless, something gnawed at the back of her mother's head as she took her daughter to a couple of estate sales on the Saturday following her birthday, driving quite a distance to get to them. She bought her little girl anything she asked for at the sales, which only amounted to six items (which, though Edith didn't tell her mother, was completely planned out – six things for her six years). The items seemed completely random, though all of them were a bit old – a square green pillow with triangles sewn onto it, a bowler hat, a quill pen that had seen better days, a copper phoenix candle holder, a rolling pin, and a blue apron with yellow flowers on it. Her mother followed her around the sale, watching closely, and it was perhaps the most attention either her mother or father ever did or would pay to her. Unfortunate it was that little Edith was so wrapped up in the objects that she didn't notice her mother's uncommonly sparked interest. Edith had always been a rather self-sufficient child, though, and one might wonder what she would have done with her parents' attentions if she'd had them. Perhaps she'd have ended up exactly the same.
Her mother watched as Edith seemed to talk to the objects. She'd always thought of Edith as rather imaginative, and it sparked something inside her mother – a memory, perhaps, of a time when she herself used imagination, or had dreams. Her mother was, of course, completely wrong – for starters, Edith wasn't imagining anything. She was talking to the little blue creatures that came out of the objects to greet her with their strange whispers and hazy images. Edith was actually more like her mother than her mother realized. She was not very imaginative at all, but was actually incredibly logical for a child her age. She knew she had no friends and that she wouldn't have any friends in the near future, and she found that she could cultivate relationships with certain objects and the memories that they contained. It was a combination of a need for companionship and a distant knowledge that she'd be messed up in the future if she didn't maintain some kind of contact with intelligent beings.
Most of the memory-items that she collected were fractured and incomplete – she could have conversations about certain things with them, but they could not comprehend other things. For instance, they might have a vast knowledge about the political climate of the United States in the years 1890 to 1898, but had no idea what she meant when she asked them about Egypt or asked them if they were married. They taught her things, though – she learned calligraphy and snippets of art history, she learned the concepts of the Catholic church, which her parents had done their best to shield her from, and when she placed her stuffed animals around a table for a tea party, the purpose was to practice her newly acquired knowledge of etiquette rather than to play.
* * *
After the bank robbery, the warehouse and the long night of drinking with Mars, Edith slept through most of the next day. It ended up being one of those overcast, drizzling days, and with the curtains drawn it felt like dusk rather than early afternoon. She might have slept even longer had Maurice not gotten tired of his favorite pastime (sleeping) and wanted to indulge in his second favorite pastime (eating). Eventually he managed to rouse Edith, along with the headache that was lying dormant behind her eye, just waiting for her to move so that it could pounce on her. She poured a bunch of food into his bowl and then drank glass after glass of water, trying to fight off bouts of nausea.
Her whole body was sore – again. But this time she couldn't blame it on some body-altering-chemical-suit that had dug its way into her skin. She was hung the hell over. Edith drank pretty regularly, but it was very rare that she got flat out drunk. Ever since she'd moved to New Orleans her alcohol tolerance had been substantially higher. In bars she'd run into many people who had found themselves in the same predicament, and there were several theories floating around as to why:
1. The Biological/Geographical Theory: Alcohol affects the human body to a lesser degree in New Orleans because the city is below sea level.
2. The Burn-Off Theory: Since there are bars all over the place, a culture has developed of walking from bar to bar rather than staying in one place while drinking, and thus the drinker burns off the alcohol as they travel (Edith liked this theory, but didn't go bar hopping often enough for this to apply to her).
3. The No-Curfew Theory: Because you can drink in the street and there's no drinking curfew, there's much less of a taboo against drinking in New Orleans than in other cities. Whereas in most U.S. cities you go out at ten or eleven and the last call is at one in the morning, New Orleans has no last call – there are twenty-four hour bars all over, and most bars that aren't twenty-four hours have hours like “Open 5pm – Til,” meaning they're open until there aren't people there buying alcohol. Because of the freedom of drinking, theory number three concludes, people aren't as likely to consume as much as fast, and they savor their drinks and their social interactions more, so that even though they may be drinking for many hours, the amount they drink per hour is less than one would consume in the average city.
4. The Spirit Theory: This theory purports that New Orleans, having been populated originally by the criminals of France (think of what Australia was for England), then later having a rather significant pirate population, has historically, among other things, been a drinking city – so alcohol runs through the very memories and veins of the city[9]. Edith wasn't sure if she believed in ghosts – but if there were such creatures roaming the city, at least half of them would have a drink in one hand as they waved the other in the air and made “oooh” noises. And so, theory number four states, since alcohol runs through the city's soul, as it were, the people who drink there tap into that energy and their alcohol tolerance is raised up a few notches. This was obviously the most romantic of the theories that Edith liked, and since she'd seen memories come to life in objects, why couldn't a city's memories do the same?
The Axeboy's Blues (The Agents Of Book 1) Page 10