The BETA Agency

by Maxwell Coffie

  “That’s my name,” she said, her delivery as smooth as fresh cream. “And it’s ‘Po’ to you. Call me by my first name and I’ll rip your tongue out.”

  “Wow, did I misread you,” I mumbled.

  “Ey, the name’s Kay Witti,” the Hiti said, his voice surprisingly tenor. “Call me Kay. You soak tunes?” He sounded so mellow, sleepy even. He also sounded young.

  “You mean: do I listen to music? Yes. Some,” I said. “Mostly blue matter, but I dabble in other genres.”

  “Cosmic,” he said, grinning placidly. “I’m chill with that, sweet.”

  Urban lingo. It had originated from Hiti kids, but it was cross-dimensional youth culture now. I wondered how young he was.

  I turned to the Sprite. He just stared at me for a moment. I could hear him breathing—it was unsettling. Finally, he muttered, “Imp.”

  “Imp.” I nodded. “Um, okay.”

  “Good,” the girl said. “Now that you’re familiar with them, we can…”

  “Wait,” I said. “You still haven’t told me your name.”

  The girl blinked. “You can call me Director.”

  “Director?”

  “Director.”

  I looked out the window again. “Where’s Sol King?” I asked.

  “Out doing some field work,” the Director said. “He won’t be back for a few days.”

  I eyed Sta—I mean, Po. “I thought you said he was refusing to take cases.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It makes sense that he would put saving the five worlds on halt just because you weren’t here.”

  “So you lied to get me here. I’m sensing a pattern.”

  “Miss Everglade, we obviously need to talk alone,” the Director said. “Everybody, out.”

  The chairs were noiseless against the thick carpet, as Po, Imp, and Kay stood up, and left the room.

  “I liked it better when she was Dr. Starr,” I grumbled.

  “Before I begin, I assume I don’t need to tell you that this meeting is completely classified.”

  “And yet, you mention it.”

  “Should you so much as mention to anyone that you were here, you would be committing treason, and we would be forced to…quieten you.”

  I hesitated, then mumbled, “The real question is: would anyone believe me?”

  “Miss Everglade—may I call you Arra?”

  “You dumped me in a bunker full of blaster wielding machines,” I said. “I think it’s the logical next step in our relationship, don’t you?”

  “It is understandable that you are angry…”

  “I could’ve been killed!”

  “You would not have been killed,” she said, calmly. “The droids were programmed to incapacitate you. If you had failed to provide a satisfactory show of talent, you would have been transferred back to your apartment, categorically not dead.”

  I frowned, still indignant. “You’re the one who invited me. That how you always treat your guests?”

  “You must understand; without definitive evidence that you were crowning, I could not bring you in here.”

  “Crowning?”

  The windows tinted black, and a video popped up on the widest one. It was surveillance of me in the concrete bunker, right after the giant bot had made its untimely arrival. I didn’t remember seeing any cameras in there.

  As the video played, I stiffened. That was me?

  I was moving so fast, even the frequent camera switches could not keep up with me. In the bunker, it had been exhilarating, certainly. But now that I was watching myself, I could not understand how that person was me. There was only one word for what I was seeing: unnatural. I squinted at the footage. Were those flames I could see rising from my shoulders?

  “When we found you, there was fabric melded into your skin,” the Director said. “Do not be alarmed though. Po is a brilliant medic. You will not even see the scars.”

  I watched myself, barely touching the ground as I moved, practically flying around the bunker. “That’s crowning?” I asked, terrified.

  “All betas experience it.”

  Beta. Like Pappy, she called us ‘beta’ too.

  “It is a beta’s first true manifestation of power; mana levels skyrocket, and in the case of Rubies, strength, speed and reflexes improve dramatically. Most betas experience their crowning young: when they’re seven, maybe eight. Your power was dormant, building up. Our little underground exercise broke the flood gates.”

  “My power was dormant?” I said. “Why? How?”

  “Drugs. Prolonged exposure to a mana dissipater. Defective gene,” she suggested. “There are a variety of possibilities.”

  Drugs. I thought of my last conversation with Pappy. Damn gummy pills.

  “Your mana levels will remain sky high for a few weeks—high enough to make you a passable Beta agent. That gives us a very small window of opportunity; which brings me to why you are here.”

  The video on the window blinked away, and a new display appeared. It was a logo of an electric blue handprint, with the word BETA beneath it. The logo shrunk, retreated to the corner of the window, and a picture of a Ruby with cropped silver hair, and bright gold eyes appeared: Sol King. Then, next to his picture, a shot of a woman appeared. I recognized the woman too—but for entirely different, utterly unsettling reason.

  The woman was me. Or rather, I thought she was. This woman was blond, and her hair fell in a short bob beneath her ears. Her neck was a little longer than mine: more elegant. Her eyes were a lot more piercing than mine: brilliant gold. The brim of her lip was crisper, her brows thinner, her skin clearer. She looked like a much prettier version of me.

  “Fey Watters,” the Director said. “She was a member of the team, and King’s closest companion.”

  “But she left the team,” I said. “That’s why King and Po kept asking me to come back.”

  “King is in a fragile state after his years in psychiatric lockup. At the psyche facility, he took one look at you, and believed Fey had returned to free him. We need him to keep believing that.”

  “Wait, you want me to impersonate his closest friend?” I was incredulous.

  “We need the best possible version of Sol King if we’re going to track down the man taking faces.” The Director clasped her hands together. “Watters brought out the best in him.”

  “Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through just to help one guy get his act together,” I said, frowning. “The team can’t handle the assignment without him? You can’t appoint another agent to head the team?”

  King and Watters’ pictures faded off the screen. Another picture appeared. This one was less focused, taken from an awkward angle. It was a picture of a man in dark glasses, wearing a trench coat. His skin was striped black and white, so I knew he was K’har. He was bald, with scars along his cranium so thick they looked like braids of hair. A body of information appeared next to his face.

  “You know him as the Ripper,” said the Director. “His official alias in our Beta database is the Puppeteer.”

  “Boy,” I said. “You lot get creative with the nicknames, don’t you? Why do you call him the Puppeteer?”

  “You will understand in a moment.”

  The Puppeteer’s picture contracted slightly, and five more pictures appeared beneath his. There were two Lilliths—one man, and one woman, a Ruby man, one Bark male, and one Phyllian. All of them were wearing dark blue uniforms with silver handprints on their left breasts.

  “In the past five years of King’s lockup, five experienced agents have taken over the Puppeteer assignment.” The Director looked grim. “Not one of them survived over a year.”

  “Why has he only killed leaders of the team?”

  “We are not certain. The working theory is that he enjoys the chase. Wiping out the entire unit does not serve that end.”

  “Well, yes, but eliminating team leaders hardly serves that end either. In fact, by repeatedly taking out team leaders, he’s risking having the ent
ire unit disbanded.”

  The Director looked mildly amused. So, she could display emotion? Not so much like Kattie after all.

  “That is correct, Detective,” she said. “That occurred to us as well. The truth is that we do not know why he has only killed leaders of the team. What we do know, however, is that the only agent who has come close to taking him down is King. And we need to take him down.” Her voice turned dark. “We found the last agent we appointed on Floris, at the bottom of the Munn River. His face was gone. Beneath the skin on his abdomen, there was a disk wrapped in plastic.”

  I listened, horrified.

  “On the disk, there was a video of our agent,” the Director continued. “He was in a cell alone. He was digging into his face with a surgeon’s blade.”

  My stomach churned “What?”

  “We listened to his screams as he took his own face off; watched him bleed to death on the cell floor.”

  “Bloody muckin’ Light,” I whispered. I wanted to be sick.

  “You see, the danger the Puppeteer poses does not lie in his preference to take his victims’ faces off,” the Director said, folding her arms and sitting back. “It lies in his ability to command a man’s body.”

  There was a sombre silence, as I processed the sheer horrendousness of what she had just said.

  “Just so we’re clear,” I finally stuttered, “you want me, a rank amateur at…whatever this is, to join a borderline illegal team of quirky agents that I have only just met, in chasing down a man who can make people take up a scalpel and cut off their own faces?”

  “Yes,” the Director said without blinking.

  I should have been afraid. I should have said no muckin’ way, and high-tailed it out of that room. But all I felt was a fiery roiling at the pit of my stomach. I knew this feeling.

  Excitement.

  “There is the matter of payment,” the Director continued. “For the duration of your time with us, you will be paid for every day you spend here or out in the field. Does five thousand credits sound fair?”

  I stared, stunned. “Wait, I’m sorry, I thought you just offered me five thousand credits a day.”

  “Fine. Seventy-five hundred credits then.”

  I nearly choked on my saliva. “What?”

  “Ten thousand credits. But I am not authorized to go any higher. That is my final offer.”

  I was speechless.

  She sighed. “Go home, think about it. Take all the time you need.”

  “O-okay.”

  “You have twenty four hours.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I arrived home at around the twenty-first hour. I found Kattie asleep in front of the living room screen, still dressed in her corvus outfit of the day. When I sat next to her, she awoke.

  “Hey,” I greeted.

  “Good evening,” she said, staring sleepily back at me. “Where were you? I called your cell many times.”

  “I think I left it behind.”

  “You did. I heard it ringing in your bedroom”

  “I’m sorry. I wanted to cook dinner for you,” I said. “I went out to buy groceries.”

  Kattie glanced down at my empty hands.

  “I…sort of…lost them,” I explained.

  “You lost the groceries?”

  I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  She considered my responses for a moment. Then she admitted, “I already had dinner.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s okay. You can cook for me tomorrow.”

  I smiled. “I’d like that.”

  After I’d seen her to bed, I took a bath, slipped under my bed covers and began what I already knew was a futile attempt at sleep.

  I could not stop thinking about the things the Director had told me. Suddenly, I knew how it was possible for Agent Q to kill a man we thought was ‘the Ripper’, only for another victim to pop up. If the things the Director had told me were true, it was entirely possible that Agent Q had killed an innocent man in the station.

  The realization made me sick.

  Still, I wondered how the Puppeteer did it: control people. Casting? Spelling? Could casting and spelling really be used to control a man’s body? I couldn’t see how.

  Also, I couldn’t help wondering why the Puppeteer had only targeted leaders of the team. If his style was slaughtering team leaders, then why was King the one who had survived this long? Was King simply that good? Was he lucky? Or was the Puppeteer playing some other game? If he was, I wondered if I really wanted to get in the middle of that.

  It took several hours, but I eventually drifted off to sleep.

  I dreamt that I was running down a narrow corridor with Agent Q. Familiar dream. We reached the cell door at the end of the corridor, and I opened it. But this time, instead of a man hunched over with a blade, there was a redheaded woman in a chair. I knew the woman was me, even before she lifted her head. She stared helplessly at me, as her hand reached over the table next to her, and picked up a scalpel.

  Then, I watched me peel my face off.

  The dream degenerated into a blur of colours, and when the world around me sharpened into focus again, I was standing on the street outside the old enforcer building.

  Alone.

  And I watched for the umpteenth time, as the building collapsed into dust, dragging my best friend into the ground with it.

  The devastating dream repeated itself. Again. And again. And again. And…

  When I woke up, I wasn’t shaken, wasn’t scared. I was angry.

  Evon was standing at my window, staring out at the city. Even a figment of my imagination, she was silhouetted by the bright building lights outside. She looked over her shoulder, her face shrouded in darkness. “You want to join them, don’t you? The Beta agency?”

  “Would it be so wrong?” I said. “They’ll have more expertise and resources than I could have ever had at the Enforcement Bureau.”

  Evon said nothing.

  “They’re offering me the opportunity to save lives, Evon,” I argued, essentially with myself. “Nobody else has to lose someone, the way I lost you.”

  Still Evon said nothing.

  “It beats sitting here all day missing you,” I murmured.

  “If you’re going to join them,” she finally said, “just make sure it’s for the right reasons.”

  “Which of the reasons I’ve given are the wrong ones?” I said.

  “I mean,” she said, “make sure that it’s not for revenge.”

  Now, it was my turn to be silent. Eventually, I got out of bed, and found my red scarf. Then, I went to my balcony, and tied it to the railing.

  PART II

  Hurting

  CHAPTER 31

  There were three of them. I could hear the whirring of their motors, and the stomps of their metallic feet, even in the rain. But I could barely see them, what with the heavy mist and dense forest trees.

  Muck, I was going to get killed.

  I tightened my grip on the hilt of my blade, and kept running. At one point, a beam of light cut through the air and I knew the bots were drawing closer. I tried to move faster; to feel the furious rush of power I had experienced a week ago in the concrete bunker. But the pace of my sprint remained frustratingly ordinary—pit pat, pit pat, pit-crunch-pat through puddles and grass.

  A guidance laser flashed above me, and…

  Boom!

  A tree beside me blew apart, the force of the blast tossing me into a gnarly trunk. I spat out some wood chips and stumbled back to my feet, giddy. My cheek was smarting; I was certain I was bleeding.

  I tried again to run from the sweeping beams. I tripped, and tumbled down a muddy slope, stopping in a pile of moist mulch at the bottom.

  “What am I doing here?” I whispered to myself.

  Putting on a bloody embarrassing show, is what I’d say, Po’s voice said, over my radio earpiece. What are you doing? I’ve seen fowl put up better fights than you.

  “Nothing is happening,” I said, a
ngry. “My…powers, or whatever, are not responding.”

  They’re not going to respond if you keep running around like a frightened wuss. Attack.

  “How?” I spat. “You took my blasters. I have a damn knife in my hand.”

  Knife? Now, she sounded angry. That’s a standard issue 11-unit combat blade.

  “It’s a knife.”

  Call it that one more time and I will leave you there to die. That weapon is bio-mana responsive.

  I looked at the weapon, at the hundreds of tiny rubriq instructions coded into its surface. I’d heard of blasters that responded to their users’ bio-mana. But a bio-mana blade?

  Fuel it with heavy quantities of bio-mana, and there’s little it cannot cut, Po continued. But you’re not going to be able to cut lily muck if you don’t feel some resolve. So attack, you big baby!

  A light fell on me, and I looked up.

  “Looks like I’m not going to have a choice,” I said.

  The bot lowered its weapon at me. I rolled out of the way, just as it fired. I weaved through the trees, trying to escape the rain of mana fire falling down from higher ground. I circled around, and ran up an earthy incline. The bot was still firing randomly into the bushes below.

  This was my chance.

  Mustering as much courage as I could, I charged at the machine, and brought the blade down on its back.

  There were sparks, a resounding clang. My bones juddered from the recoil, and I collapsed to the ground. The bot? Not a scratch.

  It whirred around to face me, its helmet lights damn near blinding me.

  “Take that,” I stammered.

  The bot aimed its blaster at my face.

  Just then, something whipped past me, and a crescent of crimson light flashed through the bot’s arm. There was a loud, metallic rasp, as the machine’s limb slid clean off at the elbow. More crimson streaks. The bot groaned, as it crumbled to the ground in neat pieces. Imp stood behind the pile of metal chunks, hands glowing with red mana.

  Another figure rushed past me—a larger figure. I turned just in time to see Kay charge through rapid mana blasts, wrap his arms around another bot, and back drop it into the ground. The bot’s lights winked out immediately.