by Therin Knite
And if no one comes to save her, she may have to rescue herself in the one way she can be sure will prevent him from dragging her into the convoluted fray again.
“I don’t know who this bastard is,” says Murrough, “but I hate him already.”
Chapter Eighteen
Briggs and I collide as two trains would if they saw each other in the nick of time and screeched to identical deafening stops two inches too late to prevent themselves from bumping heads. We’re on opposite sides of the same door, him in his IBI dress uniform, me in a shabby set of street clothes I pulled from my cesspool closet this morning. Our escorts give each other confused looks; they didn’t know the other was bringing a visitor, and they don’t know why two federal agencies are interested in the same silly rich woman. Briggs’ clipped-on digital pass reads IBI Commander. Mine says Civilian Visitor Approved by EDPA.
My old superior observes me coldly for several long seconds, mulling over a mess of conflicting negative emotions. Anger. Confusion. Disappointment. Mistrust. “I received your resignation letter this morning, Adamend.”
“Good. I was afraid it’d get lost in your mail.”
“Don’t get smart with me. Just because I can’t reprimand you now doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways for me to damage your standing.” The loss of respect fumes out of every orifice. He knows my (original) motivations for joining the IBI, and he believes I’ve cast them aside for the promise of better pay and benefits. For the promise of a new start away from an old sore usually addressed as Director.
“You think pretty low of me,” I say.
“Oh, did it take your extra-special intelligence to figure that out?”
“Ouch.”
“You had promise, Adamend.”
“I still have it. And now I have it where it needs to be.”
Briggs swallows his next retort, the pieces beginning to click together in his brain. The Commander, like Jin and many others from the IBI half of the joint task force at the airfield, was offered a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for obtaining certain key details about EDPA’s operations. Acute suspicion simmers in his face now, and he analyzes every inch of my shoddy appearance before allowing himself to come to some essence of a correct conclusion. “I see.” His voice carries the barest hint of despondency. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
His ambiguity is appreciated, but I’ll never tell him that.
Perplexed by our conversation, the guards escort us into the cell block together. The women’s wing of Columbia’s lone medium security prison is a sight for sore eyes. It needs a new coat of paint, a good floor polish, and a strong odor-absorber to rid the air of the stench of sweat and other things I’d rather not think about. But it serves its function: it houses the women accused and convicted of Class C and D crimes and prevents them from harming the general public any further. Some of the inmates stare silently as we pass by, others mutter swears, a few make lewd propositions, and one proclaims I didn’t do it, I swear because she mistakes Briggs and me for a pair of lawyers.
Somehow.
Cell two-nine-one is our destination, and low sounds emerge from it as we stop in front of the bars. She’s a shocking clash of colors garbed in the dull yellow prison uniform, and the tangled two feet of pink hair obscuring her face creates the impression of a woman who lost her mind decades ago. She sits at a small table installed temporarily in the cell so she can discuss her case with those in need of answers. The outcome for one charge was made clear when she pled guilty during her first court appearance: two years for withholding knowledge about a murderer from the proper authorities. An accomplice’s sentence.
Conspiracy to kill a federal agent under the stress of pure idiocy, however, will likely carry a heftier punishment. On one hand, I pity this woman. Her upbringing taught her divorce is sacrilege to someone in her social class, so she stuck with Lionel Rampart until he cracked under pressure of adultery and almost killed her. But from the point of view of someone who was almost the warm, fleshy resting place of an assassin’s bullet, I can’t, with a clear conscience, excuse Regina Williams’ behavior.
Not only did this woman hire a piss-poor assassin to kill me, but she also spent months as Whitford Brennian’s lover, knowing full well that he was in league with someone who could spell disaster for untold numbers of people.
She fidgets in her rickety fold-up chair and answers a question I arrived too late to hear. “Sometimes, Whitford would get calls from a restricted profile, but they wouldn’t show up in his history or anything. I don’t know how the man did it.”
The interrogator, an EDPA guy, nods and moves to the next question. “Did you ever see this man’s face?”
“No, only heard his voice. He never used video.” Regina’s position reminds me of her conduct on Brennian’s dream couch, knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. She wants to curl in on herself until she fades away to nothing. Not out of remorse for her actions. But because she’s embarrassed. Her mistakes, in her eyes, were examples of uncouth behavior that will forever damage her reputation with her upper-class peers. Remorse isn’t anywhere on her radar.
With a sigh, she peeks out from her ball of humiliation and spots me standing not ten feet from her. The shock sends her tumbling out of her chair, elbows smacking the hard stone floor. “By the old gods!”
Her interrogator gives me an inquisitive glance before returning to his list of questions.
Regina grips the excess yellow fabric on her chest and twists it, gaze seeking out every mundane thing in the hallway but me. “I-I’m so sorry,” she says. “For everything. For hiring Ingram. Covering for Whitford. I’m so, so sorry. And I owe you.” She manages to locate her seat again, but she looks ready to burrow through the cell walls if I take a step toward her. (I’m tempted to try it.) “Thank you. For saving me, I mean. I didn’t deserve it.”
“No, you didn’t,” I reply, earning a harsh glare from Briggs. “But it was the right thing to do. Not that you’d know much about that.”
She shrinks into her ball of hyper-modded body parts again. “I thought you knew about Victor. When I saw you at Valkyrie, I remembered you—Whitford told me about you. Not your name or anything, but he showed me pictures of you. Called you his protégé. Said you were a genius IBI agent. And then I saw you sitting there, watching me, and thought you’d found out everything. I thought you were after me, you know?”
“And to think, if you’d just fessed up and told the truth about Brennian from the get-go, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
“I was going to tell you! The dragon thing interrupted us.”
“I gave you ample time to tell. You waited until the last second. That’s not my fault.” The mockery is cold, even for me, but I’m not in the mood right now to attempt niceties. “You’re looking at twenty to thirty for your antics, you know?”
Her forehead falls to her knees, and she sniffles. “I don’t see why they can’t execute me instead.”
Disgust claws up my throat, burning the back of my tongue. This pathetic woman would rather go out in a haze of drugs, where she can pretend until the last possible second that she’s a deserving high-class goddess wronged by society than face the reality of her crimes, her shortcomings, and her miserable life. I reach out and pat Briggs hard on the shoulder. “Good luck with your favorite kind of criminal, sir.”
The no-longer-honorable Lady Svipul knows nothing and is nothing in terms of the man behind Whitford Brennian, the man out to get me, the man out to wreak havoc on a world convinced dreams are still the harmless fantasies of children and the unfulfilled desires of adults. Heterochromia lady, in the end, is but another shiny bauble designed to disrupt my attention to the more important details. “See you around, Commander.”
I turn to bolt for the cell block door, but a half-hearted shoulder grab interrupts my exit. “I hope I see you around, Adamend. I know I’ve told you this before, but the more secretive a federal agency, the more dangerous it tends to
be, especially when its adversaries exhibit an equal level of secrecy.” His eyes remain transfixed on Regina, but he taps with two fingers the exact spot where he shot me the night of that dreadful alleyway chase. Sorry, he doesn’t say. “Be careful, Adamend,” he does.
It’s not until the door clanks shut behind me that I mutter, amused, “Yes, sir.”
* * *
All evidence of Victor Manson’s death by dragon is scrubbed off the landscape of Pennimore Street by Wednesday morning. Another single upper-class worker—a young female business baron in training—bought his house the minute the listing went up, got approval from the city to destroy what remained of the evidence from Manson’s murder, and called two companies to better the property: one to put in a swimming pool and one to tear down the rest of his god-awful fence. She’s busy moving in her belongings when I stroll by in the early morning hours less than a week after all hell broke loose in my life. I pass by her moving truck as she directs a team of men and women to put that box here, and that box there, and be careful because that one’s fragile! We share a short wave—she thinks I’m a neighbor—and I keep walking.
My journey doesn’t end until I reach Larry’s. The coffee-selling convenience store doesn’t open until eight, so I park myself near the door and watch. I watch residents still shaken from the death of an insufferable lawyer get in their cars and drive to work for another six to nine hours at the desk. I watch children yawn as they wait at the end of their driveways for the school bus to ship them off to boring math and science classes for the day. I watch Pennimore Street come to life as if a dragon never tore through it and burned its tranquility to a crisp. I watch it remain in one serene piece and not disintegrate under the strain of a failing dream.
I watch Dynara Chamberlain cross the road from the corner I’ve come to know so well and situate herself beside me, black umbrella in hand. “Long way to come for coffee.”
“Not too long.”
“You get the closure you needed?”
“Who said I needed closure?”
“Everyone needs closure,” says the girl with the umbrella under the sun. “Even me. It’s how we prepare ourselves to move on to the next phase of our lives.”
A blue OPEN sign comes to life in the store’s window, and a young man at the register beckons for us to enter.
“I guess the next phase of my life is working for EDPA.”
“If that’s what you want,” she says, twirling her umbrella.
“You know it’s what I want,” I say, opening the convenience store door. I let her in ahead of me, cast one last look at Pennimore Street, and step inside. “So, when do I start?”
The Story Continues!
If you enjoyed Echoes, check out the sequel:
Epitaphs (Echoes #2)
Now available!
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