by Therin Knite
“Thanks for bringing it up?” I glance at Jin, who shakes his head. He didn’t tell anyone I was here.
“No problem, Agent.” The nurse spins around to exit the way he came. “Oh, by the way, you’re free to go as soon as you feel up to it. Discharge papers have been sent to your Ocom. And don’t forget to pick up your prescription; it’s some pain medication for the post-op tenderness. Have a good day.” He smiles at us and leaves the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
Jin absently fastens his forgotten shirt buttons. “Who the hell sent you flowers?”
“Let’s find out.” I wobble over to the nightstand and tap the little gift screen mounted on the front of the vase. Instead of a “get well soon” and a pretty cursive signature, a picture pops up, followed by a three-word request.
The request is Pentagon Square, 2:30.
The picture is an umbrella.
The call comes in as I’m walking through my front door. I fish my Ocom out of my pocket and glance at the screen, startled to find Director Brennian’s name. Motioning for Jin, who’s just behind me, to back off for a moment so I can have some privacy, I stride into my kitchen, steel myself, and then hit the answer button. “Adamend.”
“Adem, how are you, my boy?” the director says when his face appears on the screen.
“Oh, I’m fine, sir.” I discreetly set the flower vase on the counter and slide it out of camera range.
Jin snorts as he moves out of the living room and down the hall. He stops at a closet and leans inside, rummaging around for something.
“Are you sure?” Brennian leans closer to his Ocom’s camera. “You look a little tired.”
“I had a late night, is all.” I don’t smile that much to begin with, so I don’t bother trying to fake one now. “Got dragged out for happy hour. You know how it is.”
“Ah, with Connors, I assume?” Brennian chuckles. But there’s a certain element of strain in his facial muscles, like he’s stressed about something. Could be anything though. He spends a great deal of time flying around the world, coordinating the operations of various IBI branches in other districts. The sheer amount of political nuance, subtlety, and restraint could drive any lesser person over the edge in a couple of years. He’s been at this job for decades. “Don’t go overboard with the partying now,” he continues. “We need our CSI agents in tip-top shape.”
“Don’t worry, it was just a minor slip. We went to a new club. Bit of an ‘experience.’”
He raises a graying eyebrow. “Oh, really? What’s the name?”
“Club Valkyrie.”
The eyebrow twitches, an almost imperceptible motion.
“Have you heard of it, sir?” I add.
“Yes, I think so. Believe it was in the society pages a few times. I might’ve even stepped in there once or twice. But I lose track of these things.” He drops the eyebrow and smiles. “Anyway, I hope you had fun with your night out.”
“I did.” Not. Absolutely not.
“Good.” He strokes his chin, tracing his deep dimples. “Adem, regarding that matter you messaged me about yesterday. EDPA?”
I hold my expression steady. “Yes?”
“You did heed my warning, didn’t you? Not to look into them?”
Briefly, I consider coming clean. He surely means well, steering me away from pursuing a mystery that could jeopardize my career. But the speech Briggs gave me in his office, about the agents killed in action, resonates through my mind, fueling my curiosity. I can’t let it go, not after my encounter with umbrella girl and the dragon and the dream world last night. It’s too late to turn back. I have an invitation, and I intend to accept it.
“Of course, sir,” I reply smoothly. “I’ve already moved on to other cases. My deck is stacked full next week.”
“Good to hear.” He claps his hands. “I wouldn’t want you getting into trouble, traipsing around in territory beyond your clearance level. EDPA isn’t something you need to worry about anyway. They’re a specialty group. Wouldn’t be of interest to you.”
“Sure, sure.”
There’s a sudden ruckus down the hall, as a mountain of cleaning supplies tumbles out of my hallway closet. Jin swears loudly and bends over to pick through the pile.
I frown. “Uh, sir, I’ve got a bit of a mess to clean up, so…”
He raises his hand. “Say no more.” A muffled intercom announcement comes through his side of the line, and he pulls his Ocom back from his face, revealing his surroundings. He’s on his private plane. “Looks like I have to go as well. We’re about to descend.”
“Where are you today, sir?”
“District of Russia. Have some structural reorganization work to do, part of the growth plan for next year. Visiting a bunch of satellite offices in quick succession. Massive chore, really. I was supposed to start yesterday, but some bureaucratic nonsense came up overnight, and I had to fly all the way back home from Moscow to deal with the problem. Now I have to cram more visits into less time.” He groans and adjusts the position of his seatbelt. “Anyway, I’ll talk to you again soon, okay? Just keep your head down, keep doing your good work, and hopefully by the end of the year, I can convince Briggs to give you a bigger office.”
I genuinely laugh at that. “Fat chance.”
“We’ll see.” He winks. “Goodbye then.”
“Bye, sir. Have a good day.”
“You too.” He ends the call, and my Ocom screen defaults back to the home block.
Dropping my shoulders, I sigh deeply, hoping Brennian didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with my body language. He’s more the administrative type than the keen-eyed field agent, but he’s spent decades in politics, sizing up the competition, so he’s not lacking in the profiling department. Oh gods, if he finds out what happened last night…
Well, I can worry about that when it comes to pass.
Right now, I have more urgent things to do.
Leaving my Ocom on the kitchen island, I cross the living area and pause at my partially closed bedroom door. I can smell the disaster already, but I still need to see it. So, with a deep breath, I push the door open.
My bedroom is a crime scene.
Blood has soaked into my bed sheets, my carpet, and several pieces of clothing I was too lazy to pick up the night before. There are streaks in the carpet shaped like legs; they match the stains on Jin’s pants. Every visible surface is coated with specks of dry brown that resemble the remnants of a science class volcano project gone wrong. A discarded autosyringe pokes out from underneath the bed, where a medic must’ve dropped it during the rush to save my life.
Despite my reluctance, I can’t prevent myself from cataloguing the evidence like I do with a normal crime scene. Once my brain identifies all the bits and pieces, it organizes them chronologically and starts a mental replay. I watch myself come a hairsbreadth from dying.
At three twenty-six this morning, I’m lying on my stomach, seemingly dozing. My brain is off in the dragon dream, unaware of the impending attack. It happens. My injured foot refuses to function, and my body meets those four deadly spikes.
In the real world, four wounds burst open on my back with so much force the blood spray hits the ceiling. Then I wake up—I remember this moment as a brief spike of pain and darkness—and roll off my bed with an agonized scream, trying and failing to staunch multiple hemorrhages. I pass out seconds later.
Jin bounds in. He’s unsteady, still reeling from the alcohol. He puts pressure on the wound in my lower abdomen before realizing there are three more. With slippery, blood-coated fingers, he manages to free his Ocom from his pocket and hit the emergency button. When a crisis aide answers the call, Jin gives them his IBI personnel code and demands an air evac. It arrives in five minutes. By that point, I’m dead.
The medics revive me on the way to the hospital, and I code three times before they get me through the front door. Jin rides along with them, watching me step off the cliff to oblivion again and again. It’s a mir
acle I don’t have brain damage, given the amount of time I went without oxygen. Given the number of times my heart stopped. Given the sheer extent of the damage—
“That’s not healthy,” Jin says from the doorway. In his hands is my mop bot. He activates it and drops it on the floor, where it scans for stains to clean and gives out an expected duration to finish. Seven hours, thirty-two minutes. “You shouldn’t relive a near-death experience. It’s not good for you.”
“I’m a bystander this time, not a participant. It’s the same thing I do at regular crime scenes.” That’s a lie. I may be watching from a distance, but I remember the pain well enough, and the play-by-play of my blood shooting out from my torso and covering almost everything I own makes me queasy. I have no emotional connection to the average murder victim. But in defiance of the assertions of my peers and past acquaintances, I do have some strained emotional connection to myself.
“I don’t care, Adem. Nobody likes watching themselves get butchered in three dimensions. You’re just doing it as punishment.”
I step over the mop bot, now chugging away at the browning edge of the stain closest to the door, and survey Jin. We stopped at his apartment first on our trip from the hospital, but he refused to let me go home without “support.” In less than ten minutes, he managed to change his ruined clothes, rub on some anti-shave, fix his hair, and apparently exchange his personality with one of the other twelve hidden in his closet. The caretaker has come out to play, and the depressed friend has been put away.
“Punishment for what?”
“For failure,” he says. “You have that distant look in your eyes, the one you get when your perfect plans crumble around you. You did something, related to the Manson case, I’d wager, and it backfired. Or you thought you were onto something, but you were wrong. Failure. Although it seems you suffered a more…catastrophic failure than usual.”
“That’s one way to put it.” I maneuver around him and open a dresser drawer, pulling out a change of clothes and a towel. The hospital was nice enough to let me take a pair of scrubs home, seeing as I came in with nothing but my underwear. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Are you hungry? I can cook you lunch.”
“I’d love that. Except I don’t have anything to eat. I would’ve gone to the grocery store last night, but someone took me clubbing instead.” I elbow him as I pass by, heading for the bathroom.
He mutters something that sounds like, “Screw you too, party pooper.” Then he raises his voice. “Fine. I’ll go get takeout from that Italian place you like.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Adem.”
I peek around the bathroom door. “Yeah?”
“While I’m gone,” he says, wringing his hands, “don’t get mortally wounded. Please?”
“As you wish.”
“I mean it, Firecracker.” He backs toward the foyer, passing the kitchen, and his gaze flicks to the flower vase on the counter. For a second, a wave of passionate fury engulfs him, and I expect him to storm over, grab the vase, and smash it into a million fragments of expensive crystal. But he doesn’t. He stifles the overpowering emotion, turns around, and heads for the door.
The significance of the episode doesn’t elude me. Jin doesn’t know what EDPA does. Jin doesn’t care what EDPA does. But Jin knows that EDPA’s so-called umbrella girl sent me flowers, despite my hospitalization being kept under wraps. So Jin believes EDPA is responsible for my almost-death (and I can’t convince him otherwise without telling him the truth about echoes).
Therefore, Jin hates EDPA.
Chapter Six
“You didn’t have to come with me.” I limp along the edge of the Pentagon Park sidewalk, the weakness in my right foot cutting my usual pace in half. There are few people here post-lunch hour. Sprawled out on a bench is a single scruffy-faced man who whispers something unintelligible as we walk by. In the grass lot across from us, children are playing tee ball, their parents live-streaming the excitement to their social media accounts.
“I’m not in any danger, Jin.” I assume. I’m confident at this point that umbrella girl isn’t out to kill me, but whether or not she’ll get me killed is another matter.
Jin slurps his soda through an over-bitten straw. Every word I say goes in one ear and out the other, all requests to back off rebuffed. The moment I told him I’d be going to this meeting, he ripped off that caretaker façade and put the overprotective friend in its place. “There’s no way in hell,” he said, “I’m letting you talk to that EDPA bitch alone.”
As we approach the Square, my body coils like a nervous spring. In less than a day, I’ve come to associate umbrella girl with pain and death. No wonder EDPA tries to pluck talent from other federal agencies. If my first foray into dream crime was in any way a typical EDPA experience, they must have one hell of a turnover rate.
Umbrella girl sits on a bench across from the World Union Fountain, reading a book with the holoscreen function on her Ocom. Every time she turns a page, she reaches into a tin of bird seed and tosses a handful at a pair of ducks lounging in front of the fountain’s pool. An odd choice of recreation for a person her age.
“Wait here, Jin.” I throw up a hand to stop his advance, but his glare alone is enough to send a young mother with stroller-bound twins veering out of our way. “I shouldn’t be long.”
“Is she the reason you got hurt?”
“No. Not at all. I’m the reason I got hurt.”
Spotting my approach, umbrella girl exits her book and stuffs the seed tin into a nearby briefcase. She’s dressed like a civilian today. An incredibly rich civilian. The briefcase is high-grade leather. The jeans are hand-stitched denim. The blouse is a popular flower-patterned piece that debuted at last month’s New York Fashion Week. And the coat is from one of those overpriced boutiques on Adams Avenue. I wonder if she dresses so conspicuously rich all the time, or if she does so only on certain occasions to intimidate certain people. Me, for instance.
“Afternoon, Agent Adamend.” She examines me with a sleepy gaze and a stifled yawn. “Nice sunglasses.”
I adjust the designer shades. “I thought they’d be appropriate, considering the circumstances.”
Her own pair rest on the top of her head, and she flicks them in acknowledgment. “I concur.” She pats the empty spot next to her on the bench. “Sit. We have a lot to talk about, and not all of it is pleasant. There’s no reason to exacerbate your wounds.”
“No wounds left, actually.” But I sit anyway. “Med-four is good for that sort of thing.”
“Ouch. Must’ve cost a pretty penny.”
“Wouldn’t know. It was charged to my work insurance.”
“Oh. Your commander will love that.”
“Fifty-fifty chance I’ll be fired on Monday.”
A message lights up her Ocom but goes unanswered. “Good thing you have another job lined up then.”
“You’re still on about that? After I got impaled?” I check on Jin. He’s hovering around the fountain, scowling at the ducks. Judging by the tension in his neck, he’s straining to hear us, but the splashing water is too loud.
“What’s a few stab wounds to a lifetime of adventure, excitement, and puzzles only someone of your caliber can solve?”
“A short lifetime.”
Another message pops up, but she doesn’t answer this one either. “The pay is better. The bad guys are cooler. You get to call your work ‘top secret.’ What’s not to like?”
“The part where I get injured in gruesome fashions.”
“That can and does happen to IBI agents.”
“Most of them don’t get attacked by dragons, last time I checked.”
“So you won’t join because you’re scared of getting hurt?”
“I’m not scared of anything. I won’t join because I’m a member of the IBI for a reason.”
“I have better reasons for you to join EDPA.” She taps her Ocom against her knee. “For one, you’ll get a boss
who respects you. A great boss. Unlike your hard-ass, demeaning Commander Briggs who can’t see outside the box, Dynara Chamberlain is smart, witty, friendly, and never leaves a case unsolved. You’ll learn a lot from her.”
Brief silence.
“That’s you, isn’t it?”
“My, how ever did you guess?”
I take a sharp left turn to avoid the sass. “Chamberlain? As in Chamberlain Corporation?”
“Indeed.”
A few hundred feet behind us, across the street from Pentagon Park and on the edge of the Business Sector, is Chamberlain Corp’s global headquarters. It’s the tallest building in the city of Washington by almost fifty stories. This time of day, the World Union Fountain sits directly in its massive shadow.
“Well,” I say, “you didn’t have far to walk to get here, did you?”
“Nope.” She tucks her Ocom into a coat pocket. “I had a lunch meeting with the board. Figured the park would be convenient for a chat.”
“So you’re a businesswoman who moonlights as a dream-hunting federal agent?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you get more interesting by the minute, don’t you?”
She grins. “But that’s what you like about me, right? I’m interesting.”
“I’m not sure ‘like’ is the right word. Your misinformation did almost get me killed last night, after all.”
“Oh, yeah. I meant to apologize for that. I underestimated the maker’s abilities by a small margin. They were clever enough to alter the echo in a way that didn’t immediately destabilize it but allowed them to get the drop on us. They’re smart. Smarter than the average crook anyway. That’s bothersome, but we’ll get them in the…” She pauses. “You know, I’m willing to share all my secrets with you, given that I’m actively trying to recruit you. Your good friend, on the other hand…”
Taking a roundabout path, Jin has been creeping a few inches closer to us every time the teeny boppers pitch a ball, like he believes he can “blend in” with the background activity of the park.
“I apologize for him,” I say. “He tries.”
