by Adam Thielen
“Patriotism,” he continued, “is fire, pure and bright. And few can wield it without getting burned. But we gather here today to celebrate a man whose only purpose for the fire of patriotism was to light our way forward and out of a dark era of corporatism. No man is innocent, no person is perfect, but Charles Wu was a good man.”
Taq’s thoughts drifted as the man spoke. Was Wu really this great man being sold to the world today? He doubted it, though he had to admit to himself that he’d had few interactions with the former warden. Jones thought of Tamra, the warden who had protected him in his youth and had sacrificed herself to stop a dangerous vampire mage. Thoughts of Wu had not moved him, but thinking of her turned his eyes glassy.
Over the next hour, several speakers took the stage, including Wu’s daughter and other immediate family. Taq continued to pretend to look interested. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the import of the moment, but the death of the founding father highlighted Taq’s own age and mortality, and it wasn’t a pleasant thing to consider. He was so far from where he wanted to be, separated now, by almost two decades, from the love of his life. How do I get back? he wondered.
After the speakers had been exhausted, a choir of school children led by their teacher began to sing the anthem of the New Republic. An elaborate holo display created ghostly images above the stage, rendering photos of Wu in midair. The three-dimensional slideshow continued as attendees formed a line to take the stage and say farewell to the former CEO.
Next to the casket, Taq looked down at Charles’s face. It wore an expression of serenity bestowed by a well-paid mortician. Jones frowned as he realized that Wu looked younger than he. Charles was seventy-seven, but he didn’t look it. Taq turned away, remembering the last time they spoke…
“I’m fine right here,” Taq told him. “Busy even.”
“I’m not concerned about you,” said Wu, following with a grin.
“Sure you are,” said Taq. “Once a warden, always a warden. Mage security must be devoting half of their man-hours to worrying about me. Every day, someone from the government pays me a visit.”
“You really aren’t that special,” said Wu. “But you will always be dangerous. They just want to find a better use for you than wasting away in an empty compound.”
Taq shook his head. “Such illogical fear,” he had said to Wu. “We mages are puppies next to vampires and augs, not to mention the newer corp mechs. Where are the regulations for them?”
“We have ways of dealing with cybernetics—”
“Sometimes.”
“And the council has domain over the nocturnals,” finished Wu.
Jones sighed. “I will not be a prisoner again.”
“I know,” said Wu. “And I wouldn’t allow it. But the university needs you. You are the oldest in the region.”
“Quite an honor,” replied Taq sarcastically. “And I’m sure everyone would love to know my secret.”
Charles laughed. “Someone out there might, but the school board just wants your knowledge...”
The woman behind Taq cleared her throat. The elder mage blinked, looked down at Wu’s face one last time, then continued past the casket and down a short ramp on the other end of the stage. After the goodbyes were finished, the casket was carried off the field, with the closest family following behind.
As the inner crowd thinned, Taq looked over his shoulder and saw Tsenka brush past slower VIPs, moving to catch up with him. He stopped and turned, forcing those following behind him to furrow their brows and step around him. The nocturnal pulled a thick white cloth from her pocket and masked her nose and mouth, tying it behind her head.
“Hello, Taq.”
“Ms. Cho,” nodded Jones.
“Good to see you,” said Cho, moving beside him. The mage turned and the two continued walking after the throng.
“Yes. Same to you,” he replied.
“How is Kate?” asked Cho, facing forward.
Taq exhaled. “The same,” he said. “She’s frozen. That’s… how it works.” He spoke with enough levity to assure Cho that she had not actually irritated him.
“I suppose it does,” she replied. “Have they figured anything out?”
“Nothing lately,” informed Taq. “A few years ago, they were able to confirm the presence of some sort of Ethereal corruption; something I had suspected since the beginning.”
“That’s something,” Cho encouraged. “Magic is still relatively young. They’ll figure it out.”
“Perhaps,” nodded Taq.
They took a few steps in silence. “Do you have time to get lunch with me? I’d like to talk.”
“I would love to, but I’ve got a lot of assignments to look over,” said Taq. “Maybe we can get together later in the week.”
“I’m sure you have a lot going on,” said Tsenka. “But it’s important.”
“What is?” asked Taq.
“It will take some explaining,” insisted Cho. “I need help, your help.”
Taq stopped moving. “No one needs my help, Tsenka.”
“Oh, I know you better than that,” argued Cho, placing her hand on the side of Taq’s shoulder and staring into his eyes.
“Things change,” he said as they started walking again. “People get old.”
Tsenka looked down to the ground, then back up, managing as far as his short gray beard. “Trevor’s on thirty-second ave,” she said. “It’s a nice little cafe. Please meet me there.”
“Very well, Agent Cho,” said Taq. He then stepped into the passenger side of his car as it pulled up to the entrance to meet him.
The first thing that stuck out about the cafe on the corner of thirty-second and Marshall was the darkly tinted windows facing the outside world. Jones smiled. He thought back to the few times he spent with Tsenka. After Kate’s freezing, he had become more active in planar intelligence, much of which Cho would be assigned to investigate.
For a time, they were friends. But as the years passed and no hope was found for Kate’s condition, he became withdrawn, eventually retiring from the agency’s service for a second time. It didn’t help that the strain of Ethereal travel had become more than he could handle for the long, demanding missions.
But even when he suffered his darkest periods, believing Kate to be as good as dead and his life without meaning, Tsenka was among a handful who reached out regularly to check on him. The conversations were often perfunctory and brief, but even so, she had made an effort to convince him that his existence was appreciated on some level.
Two minutes after finding a booth, Cho entered the cafe and sat across from him. She took off her mask and pocketed it. Her eye shield retracted, and her face lightened slightly. Texture treatments on her skin had removed some of the artificial sheen, and without her eye covered, Tsenka looked just as she had almost twenty years ago before the injuries that necessitated her augments and synthetic exterior.
“I just remembered what you like to eat,” said Taq. “You aren’t going to make me witness that today, are you?”
“I am very thirsty,” replied Cho, grinning. “You could make a donation instead.”
“Never been one’s meal before,” he claimed.
Tsenka’s nose wrinkled in thought. “Never?”
“Well, there was the one time,” he admitted.
“There always is.”
“Not like that,” dismissed Taq. “I was unconscious—”
“Oh, really?”
“My biter was actually our old friend Matthias.”
“Nooo,” she sung.
“I guess we have that in common.”
“I guess we do,” she said. “Why was he biting you, though?”
“Your favorite story, or so I’m told,” hinted Jones.
“The airship?” asked Tsenka with eager eyes.
Taq placed his hand next to his mouth as if shielding it from prying ears. “I was up there with him,” he whispered.
“You… were up there? Why have I nev
er heard this?”
“Mhm.” Taq nodded and took a sip from his water. He lowered it to the table while Tsenka stared at him in stunned silence. He ignored her and began swiping through the table’s menu system. He looked up at her and noticed her expression of disbelief. “I’m surprised Matthias didn’t tell you. Sometimes it irks me that I get no credit, but I suppose it would only make my life more difficult.”
“Why…” considered Tsenka, gears turning. “Because he didn’t take a drone up there, did he?”
“Speaking of which,” said Taq, “where is Matthias these days?”
“Hold on,” ordered Cho. “Are you saying you helped him board the ship?”
“Did I slip us through the Ether to get up there?” said Taq. “Maybe.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It was a long time ago. I can barely peer in there today.”
“He didn’t tell me hardly anything,” pouted Cho. She looked down at the menu, scrolled to the pictures of steaks, highlighted the ribeye, and selected the ‘rare’ sub-option. “I don’t know where he is.”
“Not at all?” questioned Taq.
“We stopped talking a while back,” said Cho. “I tried to go see him six months ago and his house looked abandoned. The furniture was all still there, but dust and dirt and weeds indicated that he hadn’t been there for a long time. His com ID wouldn’t connect either. I did some looking and found traces of him using crypto to buy bus fare to the lone star region. He did a good job covering his tracks from there.”
Taq confirmed his order of a club sandwich, then looked back to Tsenka. “I tried to call him a couple times earlier this year, but I didn’t think much of it. Why would he run off?”
“Wish I knew.”
Taq pulled out his com and Tsenka smirked at the old technology. Almost everyone had adopted the micro-com implants over the last decade. She watched him thumb it on and project a screen into his eyes. Cho decided to check her messages and feeds while they waited.
When an automated cart brought their dishes, Taq stared at Cho’s bloody steak with some disdain. “Well, at least it isn’t like last time,” he remarked.
“It was fine last time,” she argued.
“It was still alive.”
“Pfft, enjoy your club sandwich,” she derided, cutting into her beef in dramatic fashion, prompting blood to spill from the wound and pool in the plate.
Taq shook his head, closed his eyes, and bit into his sandwich. He finished first and tried to ignore Cho as she devoured the rest of her meat. The cart returned to collect their plates and the screens on the table flashed an advertisement for desserts. Both swiped it away immediately.
Taq leaned back into the soft cushion of the booth’s seat. “So how can I help Agent Cho?”
“I’m going to India, and I want you to come with me,” she stated.
“What would I be doing there?” humored Taq.
“Helping me find Desre,” she answered, placing her arms on the table.
“Who’s that?”
“You know, Desre Somer.”
“Was that the sister of that guy in Beijing?” asked Taq.
“That’s right,” affirmed Cho.
Taq’s lips parted as he shook his head. “I am confused. Why her again, and why me?”
“Okay,” began Tsenka. “Desre had been working with the New Republic Intelligence for several years, unofficially. She lived in Norway when she wasn’t traveling, so when she went missing two years ago, no one really thought much of it. Not at first. But she has never gone off the radar for more than a few months in all the time I’ve known her.”
Tsenka sipped at her water and looked around the cafe, her paranoia getting the better of her. “I took my concerns to my superiors,” she continued. “But no one wanted to devote resources or time to it. I… finessed some funding and time between assignments to start tracking her down. For months I chased my own tail. Then I get tipped off that she was taken to northern Africa. I follow the trail to Libya. I’m there for less than a day when I’m ambushed and interrogated about none other than Desre.”
“By who?” asked Taq.
“That’s the worst part,” said Cho. “They, at least the two I heard talking, spoke with east coast accents.”
“New Republic?”
“They’ve spent some time here, at the least,” asserted Cho. “But I don’t know who they are with. There’s no organizations or corps that fit the profile and would be considered hostile to the NRI.”
“What does the agency think?”
“They think it could be any number of counter-intel units,” said Cho. “They just aren’t taking it seriously.”
“Maybe it’s not that serious,” suggested Taq.
“She contacted me, told me to meet her in Mumbai, then managed to help me get out of there,” Tsenka told him.
“Doesn’t sound like she’s captive,” Taq assessed.
Tsenka sighed, her shoulders slumping forward. “I don’t know. It was all very strange. She was strange.”
“Maybe she… wasn’t she.”
“Right,” Tsenka said, nodding. “But I have to find out what happened to her now.”
A prompt for payment flashed on the table-screen. Taq pressed his thumb to it. “I don’t think I can be much help, and if it were me, I wouldn’t go chasing after her.”
“Yes you would,” refuted Cho. “And so would Kate.”
Taq raised his right hand from the table, his fingers extended toward the vampire. “Don’t do that. You don’t know what she’d do and neither do I.”
“Desre was a valuable asset,” Tsenka continued unabated. “We can’t just abandon her. She wouldn’t. I know that much.”
Taq’s fingertips fell to the table. He stared at Cho, knowing the anger he felt had little to do with her invocation, and more to do with the pain he buried every time he rose to another day without his wife. He focused on his breathing until his heart slowed.
“What would I be doing in Mumbai… to help you?” he asked.
Tsenka leaned forward. “What you do best, of course.”
Taq shook his head. “I’m not the best anymore,” he assured. “I’m not even considered good. Don’t you have some mages at the agency? Is Klemmet still there?”
“I can’t go through the agency,” said Cho, straightening. “Before Kate went under, she was sure there was a mole. She didn’t have time to set the traps necessary to catch them, though.”
“That would have been over seventeen years ago,” said Taq. “How many of the same people are still there?”
“It’s not a high-turnover job,” said Tsenka. “Most of the analysts and executives are committed for life. I’ve been trying to narrow the list of potentials based on access to information, longevity with the agency, and a few haphazard assumptions. Even with the latter, I still have six suspects, five of whom will know if I take an agency mage to Mumbai.”
“And you think the mole gives fucks about a seer asset in India?” challenged Jones.
“It would explain how they ambushed me in a bogus location,” reasoned Cho. “And why no leads have ever panned out. But if you come with me, no one has to know. You can track her through the Ether. Maybe watch my back, too.”
“I’m just not what I used to be,” insisted Taq. “Am I really your only option?”
“I trust you,” said Tsenka. “I just need a little help and to completely upend your life.”
“Oh,” Jones chortled. “Is that all?”
“That’s all!”
Taq rose from the booth and placed his hand on Tsenka’s shoulder. “I need to think. Can you wait until tomorrow afternoon for an answer?”
“Doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice,” said Tsenka, raising her eyes to the mage.
Taq tightened his grip, then released it and made for the door. The air in the restaurant had become heavy.
* * *
“I wouldn’t w-want to live as a vegetable, why would I want to live as a p-popsicle?” said Kate
, her light brown face reddening and her normally monotone voice becoming loud. Her chocolate-colored hair fell over her cheek and rested unevenly on the collar of a loose pajama top.
If she hadn’t felt so drained, she would be pacing about the room with her hands flailing at the absurd arguments of her longtime husband. She made up for the lack of body motion with an increasingly exasperated expression upon her face. Her eyes widened enough to see all of her silver irises and much of the white surrounding them.
“It’s—it’s not the same thing,” Taq replied, trying his best to remain calm in the face of his greatest fears. “Veggies can’t come back.”
“N-neither c-can I!” yelled Kate, reaching her boiling point.
“You don’t know that,” urged Taq. “At least give yourself a chance.”
Kate went from angry to glowering. “For how long, dear? A year? Two? F-five?”
Taq moved to the bed and sat at the edge. He rested his palm on the top of her foot. “As long as it takes. We have enough money to give you all the time you need.”
“That’s n-not my point,” she breathed. “I don’t want to be f-frozen somewhere while you cling to a far-fetched hope f-for the rest of your life. And I don’t want to wake up cured just to f-find you gone, not ever.”
“Fine,” sighed Taq. “What if we put a limit? I die, and they immediately revive you to put me to rest. Shortly after, you join me and we’re buried together. Everyone’s happy. Eh?”
“I… I’ll think about it,” relented Kate.
“Good,” said Taq, exhaling. He had, at the least, won another opportunity to convince her. “You’ll see,” he said with a grin. “Someday you’ll wake up and know I was right.”
“Great,” snarked Kate. “Y-you can say. ‘I told you so’.”
* * *
The next morning, Taq again rose at the sound of his alarm. After a long weekend, he had to return to the university. As his car chauffeured him to the campus, he considered Tsenka’s plea. She doesn’t know how useless I am, he decided.