by Therin Knite
“I know.”
“Dead, Adem.” His cheek pulls free from the glass, skin kissed red cold. After a moment (of trying desperately not to cry on public transportation), he pivots around to face me. “You weren’t breathing when I found you. Your pulse was fading away. You were gone. Just like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What happened to you?”
“I can’t tell you.” I can, but I won’t. Not until I stop the Manson killer.
“Fine. But at least tell me this: is it going to happen again?”
Yes is my first option. No is a lie. Maybe is the answer I’m searching for but can’t bring myself to say. “I hope not. Getting stabbed isn’t quite as glorious as the movies claim it is.”
“Stop pretending this is all a joke.” His voice drops two octaves. “You know what I saw this morning, Adem? Jericho. Jericho, a thousand times over.”
“Jin, this is nothing like Jericho.”
“You’re right. It’s worse. At Jericho, I was scared of them. Now, I’m scared of you.”
“What? How am I scaring you?”
“Adem, you’re excited. That girl excites you. The Manson case excites you. Getting hurt excites you.” A trembling hand reaches out and grips my coat sleeve. “You’re never enthusiastic about anything. You never have that electric look that people get when they want something. Never until now. Never until you end up on the verge of a bloody death. And I’m terrified you’re going to run right off that ledge again. Like you did at Jericho. But because you want to this time and not because you think you have something to prove like you did then. Which is worse. Much, much worse.”
I mull over his words and seek out my reflection in the window. There’s nothing apparent in the color of my skin or the expression in my eyes or the shape of my lips to indicate a change in my nature. But if Jin can see it, then it must be there. Apart from the occasional joke-worthy “dumb moment,” Jin is damn perceptive. “Look, I’m sorry if you feel I’ve been reckless, but this is important to me, the Manson case. It’s something else. I want to tell you about it, Jin, and I will if I can…when I solve it. When it’s over. When it’s safe. Until then, it’s too dangerous for you. I will not have you getting hurt again, trying to protect me. I will not—”
Our Ocoms start buzzing like misguided mockingbirds, attracting the predatory attention of our train-car comrades. Piercing girl’s gum has become a potential projectile held between two silver-tipped fingernails. The twins’ grins suggest an eagerness—wrought by years of corporate espionage—to capture more knowledge of Jin’s unkempt emotions. They’re the spies of someone who also wears a suit during the day, and I flip them the finger when Jin isn’t looking. Stop following me, Chamberlain.
The man with the high collar, seated at the opposite end of the car, tries to sneak a peek at my subtle finger motion and gives himself away. It’s Ric Weiss in disguise. You too, Briggs.
Ignoring the entourage, Jin and I whip out our Ocoms in tandem, revealing the same office-wide message we get once a month: Surprise Director Inspection. On-call agents are required to attend. Time: 4:30.
“It’s three seventeen,” Jin says, despondency flattened into annoyance.
“Yep.”
“And we’re heading the opposite direction.”
“Yep.”
Resigned, he straightens his frayed coat and tie and offers me a hand. “Friends for now, Adamend. But rest assured. We’ll continue this breakup later.”
I give him a firm shake. “Fair enough, Connors.”
Chapter Seven
At four PM on Saturday, September fourteenth, 2712, a nuclear warhead detonates inside the Washington IBI office. Sort of. On our way inside the warzone, Jin and I pass, in sequence: a security scanner on the fritz after four agents tried to blast through it at the same time, a misplaced Ocom resting under a chair (and displaying someone’s personal bank account balance), an agent pileup in the middle of the hallway caused by Gloria’s careless cheetah sprint, and Briggs presiding over the chaos from the third-floor balcony.
“He is minutes from becoming the next big bang.” I hit the elevator button, somewhat wary of taking it while the entire building seems broken down. It arrives in one piece, however, Jin and me stepping out of the way of a herd of agents as they empty the motorized sardine tin.
Jin taps the close door command on the elevator’s screen before anyone else can flounder in. “Honestly, I’m amazed he hasn’t yet. The man gets so pissed off every inspection, it’s a wonder he hasn’t started using poor performers as shooting range dummies.”
“Well, it isn’t his fault, Jin. The agents in this office may be good at their jobs, but only the Communications team and media liaisons understand how to deal with outside authority. Very few agents encounter Directors in less formal situations than inspection. All they know is that if their workspaces aren’t clean, their records aren’t organized, or they don’t act ‘properly’ in front of the inspecting Director, they have a high chance of getting a reprimand, demoted, or worse.”
We part in the fifth-floor open lounge, Jin heading to Cyber Sec world while I take a slow stroll to my little closet office across from this level’s boiler room. As he makes a hard right two hallways down, my eyes spot the signs of dangerous resolve in his face. The term (coined the day Jin and I met) can best be explained to mean wanting to do something good by way of doing something bad. The “good” part being far more subjective than the “bad.”
All it took was a thirty-minute cab ride for Jin’s anger to dissolve into misplaced guilt. Now he’s going to do something stupid in order to apologize for starting an argument with me. A deserved argument. Damn it, Jin.
“This day is never going to end.”
“Glad to know your feelings aren’t entirely inhuman, Adamend.”
The hair on the back of my neck bristles at the sound of a long-lost recurring nightmare materializing before me. Briggs leans against my office door, scrutinizing my every twitch. In order to have gotten here from the third-floor balcony in less time than it took me, he would have had to run. Fast. Which means his hardline pose and stiff “collected” frown are the result of a deliberate attempt to look as intimidating as possible. It’s the method he uses to scare people before he chastises them for acting against orders. It’s also the method he uses to fire people.
“I’ve been known to produce human responses at times, sir.”
He doesn’t even blink. “Walk with me, Adamend.”
“Through Maintenance, sir?”
“Yes. It’s quiet.” And isolated.
I try to space myself a few feet behind him, but he adjusts his speed until we’re side by side. “Inspection starts in twenty, sir.”
“I’m aware.” He pretends to evaluate the pipes and terminals and closed Maintenance doors, the way the inspection team will when they arrive and lock down the building. Nothing is imperfect in this corner of the office though. Maintenance is that one ghost community in a downtown urban area that everyone with a lick of sense avoids because it has no pulse. It is empty. It is hollow. No one leans against these walls and knocks a panel out of place. No one plays hallway golf on slow weekend shifts and breaks a key pad. Maintenance looks the same way it has since it was built eighty-two years ago.
Briggs pauses in front of a wide window that overlooks the abandoned back parking lot of the office. A fifteen-story parking garage constructed two blocks down the street rendered the lot useless a decade before I started working here. It’s inhabited once a year, during the annual office cookout.
“You ended up in the hospital last night,” Briggs says, drumming on the window with a knuckle. “Want to tell me why?”
“I had a run-in with something I couldn’t handle.” A bold admission for an arrogant boy.
Briggs’ skepticism is apparent in his wide-eyed reflection. “And that was?”
“I’d rather not say yet. It’ll be in my report on the Manson case, once I solve it.” I b
ackpedal a couple feet. The silence in this area of the building is unnerving, much like in Briggs’ soundproofed office. The Commander knows I work best surrounded by interesting stimuli. By stripping them from my environment, he makes it more difficult for me to function at full capacity. Eight months ago, fresh out of the Academy, this would have been an effective strategy. But the Agent Adamend standing before him now has been at countless dead and silent crime scenes. The Agent Adamend of today has been inside an echo.
“I’m taking you off that case.”
“With all due respect, sir, it was never an official case to begin with. You were taken off it by order of EDPA. Unless you’d like to threaten me with substantial charges for pursuing the case, I plan to continue my work.”
He cracks all his knuckles, one by one, and turns around to stare me down. “You know what EDPA does. And they know you know.”
“And you know that I know and that they know I know because you sent Weiss to spy on me after you received notice of my hospitalization, thanks to office insurance procedures. You should also know that they probably know about Weiss, given that there were EDPA-related spies watching me on the train.” I shuffle another foot backward.
“Why did you meet with that EDPA woman earlier? If they wanted to stop you from pursuing the Manson case, they would have simply sent a cease and desist notice or filed a complaint. But they didn’t. Which implies she met with you under some other pretense.”
“She did, indeed.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Are they trying to poach you, Adamend?”
Emphatically. “To a degree. I told them no, if that makes you feel better, sir. I’m not planning on leaving the IBI.”
“They can be persuasive.”
Another piece of Briggs’ EDPA-obsessed puzzle slips into place.
“They’ve taken agents from you before, haven’t they, sir?”
“Yes, and a third of them have ended up dead within their first year there. What do they do, Adamend? What is EDPA’s purpose?’
“I intend to tell you, sir. After I solve the Manson case.”
His composure warps under the intense anger boiling beneath the surface of his stern face, and the muscles in his neck and shoulders tighten. Most of it isn’t directed at me, but since I’m the only object of irritation in the vicinity, I calculate a fifty-fifty chance that he’ll either lunge and punch me square in the jaw for daring to defy him or change the subject in order to calm himself down and suppress the anger temporarily. He (mercifully) chooses the latter, if only because he reminds himself I was in the hospital a few hours ago. That anger will reemerge during an evening sparring match with Weiss or late-night shooting practice he doesn’t need.
“Get back to your office. Brennian is the inspecting Director today. He’ll want to see you.” His arms cross, hands tucking themselves somewhere they can’t be used without permission.
“Brennian? I thought he was in Moscow until the end of the month.”
“He left early.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Ask him—”
The lights go out. With a ten-second delay, the emergency beacons switch on, a dim, red glow bouncing off the Maintenance piping and creating eerie shadows in every nook and cranny of the corridor. A shrieking siren with an instructional voiceover starts blaring through hidden wall speakers: “This is a test of the fire alarm system. Please locate your designated fire escape route and exit the building immediately.” After the first repetition, the beacons begin blinking on and off at such a disorienting pace that whoever designed this emergency system deserves to be sued to bankruptcy for reckless endangerment of everyone subjected to it.
Then again, it may not have been designed to work this way.
There’s a reason Brennian’s nickname is Director Kill-us-all.
Briggs screws his eyes shut and rubs at his temples. “Looks like inspection has begun.”
“Yes, sir. It does.”
* * *
“I’m not sure this is appropriate, Director.” I flip the spoon over and press the ice cream scoop against my tongue, grinning ear to ear as sweetness spreads through my mouth. Across the street, a mob of IBI agents loosely corralled together by Brennian’s lackeys huff and puff but can’t blow the café down. Instead, they resort to crossing their arms and shooting me death glares against the backdrop of a still-blinking IBI building. When that fire alarm went off ten minutes ago, every ounce of flimsy office composure was elbowed out the window by the mindless alarm tune: a blend of dying whale and jammed car horn.
Brennian has a way with inspections, and that way is cruel yet hilarious. Rumor has it that a few years back he hijacked the Main Deck’s satellite feeds to display incoming nukes. The entire office devolved into a sea of blubbering Special Forces agents and hysterical Homicide veterans in minutes. Then Brennian showed up and gave half of the five hundred plus agents reprimands for losing their cool under pressure. Compared to that, a wacky fire alarm is pretty tame.
“Inappropriate? No. I think you deserve a treat every now and then, Adem.” Brennian never calls me any combination of Agent and Adamend, and the way his voice lingers on the A in Adem gives off the impression of a long-standing mentorship only half based in reality. Three weeks of petitioning the Board to let me skip Junior agent status earned him a permanent claim to nepotism. “Plus, I haven’t seen you in ages. The bastard Board has me on ambassador rotation, so I have to fly out to a different district’s IBI office every other week. I just got back from the District of Russia two days ago. Managed to finagle my way out of an extended stay. Family emergency, I said. Going to have to decline another week of potato pancakes and borscht.”
The jet lag is taking its toll on him. His straight-laced posture sags against the back of the booth, and each blink lands heavily atop dark bags. I dig another spoonful out from my strawberry and chocolate concoction and watch it begin to melt on the warmed metal. “You should consider some nano-supplements. Businesspeople use them when traveling. They tend to have bad crashes if you use too many in a row, but they won’t leave you any worse off than you look now.”
“I’ve considered that option.” He stifles a yawn with a large chunk of cake. “But you know me: far too stubborn to admit I’m getting old.” A finger pops up and flicks a strand of graying hair.
“I’m sure I’d be just as lagged as you if I was plane-hopping every few weeks. It’s got nothing to do with your age, Director.” Someone tries to flag my attention from the edge of the IBI throng. It’s Jin, of course, mouth watering at the sight of my ice cream. Behind him, Brennian’s staff has begun to drive everyone inside, one of their own slipping in every fifth agent to make sure no one dares to clean up whatever alarm-induced mess was left behind.
“Nice attempt at encouragement. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, or…is that Connors out there?” Brennian sticks his fork in the middle of his cake and gives Jin a little wave before pointing behind him. Jin checks over his shoulder to see an annoyed inspection agent tapping his foot. The man doesn’t say anything out loud, but his uneven squint and hard-pressed frown speak volumes. Everyone back inside, as I’ve been saying for five minutes. You are part of everyone, dumbass. Jin throws me a pathetic puppy pout before complying. He’s the last one inside.
“Oh, yeah. That’s Jin, all right.”
Jericho hammers against my skull the second the insult leaves my tongue, and I bite the inside of my cheek. I shouldn’t be making fun of Jin right now, not after forcing him to recall that. I should have known better, should have realized that any substantial injury to myself would reopen a chapter of post-traumatic stress we’d both be better off forgetting but never will. He’s owed a far better apology than sorry.
“You two make the oddest pair. When we first met, there were three or four people at the office I knew you would bond with, and Connors definitely was not one of them.” He scarfs down the rest of his cake in three bites, dabbing at the corners of his mou
th with a napkin between each one. When finished, he pulls out his Ocom, locates our table’s order on the café app, and pays for everything (plus a generous tip). “Why do you like him anyway?”
“Jericho.” It slips through the filter before my guilt-bogged reflexes can catch it. A blush creeps up my neck (three times in two days, goddammit).
Brennian’s mouth forms a wide O. “The Jericho bombing. The reason we met. We only stopped it because of an Academy trainee, sir, they told me. And I knew I had to meet you. But what role did Connors play? I don’t remem—” His Ocom rings, playing a new wave rock hit from this month’s top ten chart. It’s a video call from someone named Regina. “Damn, I have to take this. I’m sorry we didn’t have longer to talk. Can you do dinner tonight?”
“Oh, actually, I have plans tonight.” I’m meeting with EDPA’s Dynara Chamberlain. EDPA, which Brennian, with his Level Six clearance, knows all about. But he’s consistently refused to tell Briggs anything about it, and if I reveal to him that I’m now involved in Briggs’ fanatical attempt to discover to the truth, he’ll shut me down. If he finds out I was hospitalized last night due to my involvement with the dream-hunting agency, I’ll likely find myself trapped in a sanitized bubble for the next ten years with people feeding me pre-checked food to make sure I’m not poisoned by any uncouth “ideas.” Not to mention Brennian will crush Briggs with his godlike left hand if he finds out the Commander let his beloved protégé get hurt by embroiling him in EDPA affairs. “Clubbing with a new acquaintance.”
“Ah. Tomorrow, then?”
“Absolutely, sir.” I lick my spoon clean, tasteless metal wiping out the pleasure from the past thirty minutes. First, I refuse to tell Jin the sort of things I’ve always told him. Now, I’m lying to the man who put me where I am in the world. Who put me ahead. All because I want to solve the Manson case. All because I find EDPA interesting. On some levels, I’m a terrible person. “I appreciate you devoting any time to me at all, given your schedule. I should head back anyway. Don’t want to miss my closet office inspection.”