by Therin Knite
Ignoring Jin, I say carefully, “Is there anything in particular you want to talk about, sir?”
He cuts a piece out of his slice of vanilla ice cream cake. “You, of course. I know we chatted on the phone, but I was inter…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. He doesn’t have to. The uneven squint and the scowl say it all.
Jin throws me a puppy-dog pout, then turns around and walks back inside. He’s the last one in.
“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 the worst day of his life.
“You two make the oddest pair,” Brennian says. “When we first met, there were three or four agents I thought you’d bond with, and Connors was definitely not among them.” He scarfs down the rest of his cake in three bites, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a napkin between each one. When he’s finished, he pulls out his Ocom, locates our table’s order on the parlor’s app, and pays for everything, plus a generous tip. “Why do you like him anyway?”
“Jericho.” It slips through my filter before my reflexes can catch it.
Brennian’s mouth drops open. “Oh, I see. You met him at Jericho, during the bombing incident.” He smiles. “Same way you met me. Honestly, when they first told me a terrorist attack had been thwarted by an academy trainee, I couldn’t believe it. I just had to meet you myself, so I could figure out—”
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,” he mutters. “I have to take this. I’m sorry we didn’t have longer to chat. Can we schedule a dinner? For tonight, maybe? I might be able to extend my little detour by claiming I have to review some of the underperforming agents in person. Could buy me about twelve hours before I’m physically forced back onto the plane.”
“Oh, actually, I have plans tonight.”
I’m meeting with Dynara Chamberlain, which Brennian clearly knows nothing about. And he must not know about my hospitalization either. If he knew about my involvement with EDPA, he’d be reaming me out right now for breaking the rules and getting myself hurt and risking my future, and all those other criticisms parents like to heap on their wayward children.
In short, I’m in the clear.
Operation Manson Case is still a go, I think wryly.
“Oh?” Brennian says. “What’re you up to?”
“Clubbing,” I reply, “with a new acquaintance.”
“Ah, you’re making new friends? Good for you, son.” He glances at his ringing Ocom. “We’ll do dinner some other time then. I’ll text you my availability.”
“I’ll be on the lookout for it.” I lick my spoon clean, not really tasting the ice cream anymore. I feel a tad guilty, lying to Brennian so overtly. This is the guy who put me where I am in the world. Who put me ahead. And here I am running around behind his back so I can pursue an interesting murder case. So I can poke and prod the mysterious beast that is EDPA.
On some levels, I’m a terrible person.
“I appreciate you devoting time to me at all, sir, given your packed scheduled,” I say. “I should head back anyway. Don’t want to miss all the gossip about the inspection results.”
We shake hands and part ways. As I’m marching out the door, I glance back to see him holding his Ocom as close to his eyes as he can without hitting his nose.
Huh. Maybe he’s getting old.
Chapter Eight
Club Valkyrie looks like a gravestone between two booming bars. Six stories of silence and pitch-black windows sucking in the night. My first thought is that I’ve made a mistake. My second thought is that this is a trick. And since first impressions tend to be wrong, I go with the second idea and loiter outside the locked club doors for roughly five minutes. At which point, they glide open.
The assassin from the other night ushers me inside, and I trail behind him into a dim hallway lit with old-fashioned sconces. We emerge onto the main dance floor, the bonfire long extinguished.
Dynara lounges in the throne where heterochromia lady sat the other night, her boots defiling a thousand-dollar oak table. She’s playing the queen of secrets tonight, I see. A tingle in my chest suggests I should be surprised she shut down a bustling club so we could have a private meeting, but I’m more annoyed at this show of power than anything else. It’s the exact sort of spectacle I’d expect from an old-money heir who runs a megacorp. They don’t do anything by halves.
As I take the stage, she lights up a raspberry-flavored cigarette and sticks it between her lips. “You arrived fifty-eight seconds late, Agent Adamend.”
“And you were, what, thirty minutes early?”
“You’re either late or early. There’s no such thing as on time, not in my line of business.” She knocks three times on the high-backed chair to her right, and I claim it like the good little jester she wants me to play, so we can hold our “court.”
“What business would that be? Dreams or technology?”
“Both.” She inhales a thick drag, and her chin tilts up until the curl of purple smoke wafts toward the charred cherubs painted on the ceiling.
“Tobacco or marijuana?”
She exhales a violet smoke ring. “The former. My EDPA shift started at six. Nothing beyond aspirin allowed on the job. Messes up your Nexus connection. You’ve got to hold the recreational stuff for your vacations and holidays.”
“The Nexus is, what, some kind of computer that connects your brain to the echoes?”
“Correct.”
The assassin loiters in the shadows, giving Dynara an okay signal every two minutes.
“So is that guy your bodyguard or a buddy from EDPA?”
She rolls the cigarette to the opposite corner of her mouth, grinning. “Neither. He’s an old friend of mine in town for a job. I thought I’d contract him for a bit so we could catch up.”
“An old friend? So you used to be an assassin too?”
“I used to be a lot of things.”
“Should I take that to mean you’re a hell of a lot older than you look?”
She snorts. “Please, you figured that out the day you met me.”
“But you’re not modded to look younger than you actually are.”
“Nope.”
“Is your hair a mod?”
“Nope.”
“So EDPA has more secrets than just the capability to enter dreams?”
“Indeed.” She taps the Ocom resting in her lap, and a sharp synth chord resounds throughout the room. A soprano singer follows with lines about lost loves and teen angst, and Dynara bobs her head in time with the bass beats. “Want to dance?”
“In a dark, deserted club?”
“The best place for it.” She plucks the smoldering cigarette from her lips and grinds it out on the table, leaving a noticeable violet smudge.
“I don’t dance.”
“Don’t or can’t?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Yes, there is.”
She drags me onto the abandoned dance floor before I can protest further, and proceeds to spin us around and around, the shadows blending together into a veil of impenetrable black. There’s her. There’s me. We’re the last survivors in a world of nothing but secrets, and I want out, out, out, but am afraid I’ll be swallowed by ignorance if I dare pull away from her.
Blue light engulfs us—the assassin switched on a spotlight. It tracks us as we shuffle across the floor, crossing in and out of the empty metal ring where the bonfire used to stand tall. My fingers clamp around her tiny hands, but hers still seem the stronger pair. I have the vague notion that beneath the expensive jacket and jeans
is a powerful body ready to snap my neck at any moment.
“You’re mighty quiet,” she says. “You look a bit stunned.”
“What can I say? Dancing kills brain cells.”
“Yours, perhaps.”
The song morphs seamlessly into another, and Dynara adjusts our pace to match. “So, what other questions do you have for me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about ‘Why do I have a superpower?’ That seems like a good place to start.”
“Why does anyone get superpowers these days? A military experiment gone wrong, of course.”
“The military was trying to infiltrate dreams?” I cut off her clockwise spin, but she doesn’t miss a step. Her movements are flawless. Like her assassin “friend,” she is hyper-aware of every move she makes. She’s been a lot of things indeed, and all of them were deadly. “That sounds like a movie cliché.”
“Clichés are a factor of fiction, and all fiction is based on reality.”
“True. But a cliché doesn’t explain how I have magic powers.”
“No magic necessary,” she sings in beat with the music. “All you need is science. Or, more specifically, Somnexolene.”
“A chemical gave people superpowers?”
“Yep. It was designed to allow the army’s black ops agents to enter the dreams of high-profile terrorists, influence their behavior, discover their secrets, etc. The usual spiel. In the initial trial, however, it didn’t give the test subjects any of those abilities. At first, they thought it did squat. Then one of the subjects’ dreams came to life. Oops. And not long after that royal fuckup, disaster struck.”
The song ends with a sharp, melancholy note, and Dynara brings us to a stop. “Tell me,” she says, “you ever heard of the Impala bombing?”
“In history class. June 2667. A prominent terrorist group planted a bomb on a military cargo plane, codenamed Impala. It detonated at sixty thousand feet, killing everyone on board.”
“And releasing seventeen hundred tons of aerosolized Somnexolene into the atmosphere.”
“Which the winds gradually spread around the planet, exposing everyone?”
“And, over the next few decades, caused about one-point-seven percent of the world population to develop ‘magic powers.’”
“Unbelievable…”
“And the most fascinating thing you’ve ever heard?”
“Without a doubt.”
Her smile deepens, but her eyes darken, shattering every false layer of youth between her appearance and her mind. “I’m glad to hear it. Now duck before you get shot in the back.”
She grabs my coat and hurls me to the floor a second before a bullet breaks the air. It zips over us, hitting a far-off wall. Dynara’s boot nails me in the side—move out of the light—and I roll away into the sea of shadows. Then she whips a gun from a holster hidden underneath her clothing that I somehow didn’t notice, and fires three quick rounds into the darkness.
A man cries out in pain. A second later, a stage exit door flies open, and a dark-clothed someone sprints outside. Dynara reaches into her pocket and hits an Ocom command. The dance floor lights flare on.
“Up,” she orders, and I obey because you don’t defy someone who can and will shoot you from fifty feet away in a pitch-black room. “Follow me. And stay alert. There may be more.”
“Where’s your assassin friend?” He must’ve left sometime during our dance, and I get the feeling he didn’t meet the most pleasant fate afterward.
“We’ll find out soon enough.” She speeds across the room, out the open door, into a cloudless night. The assailant is rushing down the sidewalk toward a getaway car. Dynara bends down and tugs a clip from her boot, exchanging it with the one already in her magazine. With the new ammo loaded, she takes aim.
“He’s almost two hundred feet away,” I say as I catch up to her. “You can’t hit him with a handgun.”
“I don’t need to.” She fires, and the bullet misses by fifteen-odd feet. Which I know because it’s the epicenter of an electric explosion. A field of blue sparks bites into the assailant’s right side, and he collapses into an unconscious heap of muscle spasms a few feet in front of his ride.
VERA bullets.
Produced and patented by Chamberlain Corporation.
“I’m not sure this is legal,” I say.
I hover in the corner while Dynara finishes her masterpiece: one would-be killer tied up nice and tight in a chair in the middle of an empty room. The man grunts and groans, slowly recovering from the VERA knockout. Dynara brushes her hands together like she’s congratulating herself for a job well done and positions herself like a sentry in front of the door to the sixth-floor lounge. Beyond the doorway, the club is dark and silent, but my on-edge senses pick up every faint creak and shudder. Another hired gun could be anywhere in the expanse of the dead Valkyrie, waiting for me to step into the perfect position to have my heart blown out through my chest.
“Legality is irrelevant at this time.” There’s a thick sense in the air that she’s said such things before in similar rooms in similar situations. “Now get to work, Adamend.” She fingers the gun tucked into her belt. The VERA clip is still loaded.
“Me? What do you want me to do? I’m not an interrogator.”
“Read him, of course. That’s your thing, isn’t it? It’s what you do for a living. You go to crime scenes and pick them apart and reconstruct the events leading up to them. You sneak a peek into the lives of the victims and the criminals, the way no other person can.” She nods to the groggy shooter. “Go on. Do your thing. It’s that, or I interrogate him the old-fashioned way.”
“Why can’t we call EDPA or the IBI? Why do we have to do this here?”
“Think it through, genius. We haven’t ruled out a traitor inside either organization as the Manson killer. And since you failed to notice, I suppose I’ll point this out to you.” From her coat pocket emerges the gun the hitman tried to mow me down with. “Notice anything familiar?”
I observe the gun for a moment, and find nothing out of the ordinary. Then I realize that’s the point. Around the barrel of the gun is a painted crimson band, a marker given to all weapons produced for government use. It’s the type of gun all IBI field agents carry. Including me.
Dynara tosses the gun onto a nearby leather couch and glowers at me. “Don’t forget what types of clients Manson served, Adem. People with connections. People from the IBI and EDPA and the presidents’ cabinets and half a dozen security agencies and the military and who knows how many other high-profile denizens. If we take this bastard in officially, we may very well warn the killer we’re onto them.”
“But this is all wrong.”
“What’s all wrong? The morality of an off-the-books interrogation? Don’t tell me your moral horizon is that high.”
“No, not that. I mean, this guy, he’s all wrong.”
A sharp crack resounds through the room—the assailant abruptly coming to and jerking on his bonds. My heart rate picks up, and I feel lightheaded. Not out of fear of this pitiful excuse for a hitman, but of dread for what he represents. A potential conspiracy.
“What the fuck?” He struggles to break his ties with brute force and succeeds in popping something out of place. He howls in pain, stomping his feet on the floor.
“Gee, I’ve never interrogated someone who tortures himself,” Dynara drawls.
The mask of a killer slips back over the man’s face, and his cold eyes land on Dynara. “And what do kids know about torture?”
She strolls toward him like she’s walking a dog on a sunny Sunday in July. Somehow, the resemblance makes her more terrifying. “If your employer had told you anything, you would know I’m not a child.” Her hands land on his restrained forearms, nails digging into a matching set of faded star tattoos. Symbol of the Under Leaguers, a defunct eco-terrorist group. “The better question is ‘What do naughty kids like you know about pain?’”
“Oh, I’ve had my fair share, hon—”
&n
bsp; She unties his arm in two seconds flat and bends it backward until it snaps. The man’s rasping shriek reverberates through the dark sixth-floor hallway. “Fuck you, you stupid little cunt! I will break your fucking neck! I will—”
Dynara backhands him. “Don’t speak unless spoken to and prompted for an answer. Your voice is grating.” And I am pissed, she leaves out. Pissed because we didn’t find her assassin buddy. Because this ant of a hitman dared to shoot at her prized prospect (me). Because no one interrupts Dynara Chamberlain and gets off scot-free. “Now be a good boy and let the kid you tried to kill do his work.” She pats him on the head before flicking his injured shoulder.
He hisses as a gush of blood spills from the gaping hole where Dynara’s bullet ate a chunk of flesh. Then his attention lands on me. He sizes me up, concludes I am not a threat, and telegraphs a clear thought my way: Oh, how I wish that bullet tore through your heart and ended your pointless life.
I claim Dynara’s position a few feet in front of him, while Dynara retreats to the doorway again. The man wants to spit insults at me, but he keeps quiet per Dynara’s orders. At least he’s smart enough to avoid two broken arms. Though that’s where his intelligence ends.
He’s a follower, this man, not a leader. Never was this would-be killer anything important in his days as an ineffective terrorist. His eyes scream ambition left unfulfilled. And the way he sets his jaw is the indicator of someone who spends a significant amount of time pretending to be more than he has the potential to be.
The hitman is not rich. The hitman is not special. The hitman is not neat or meticulous. The hitman’s résumé could not say much more than “adequate shot,” and adequate is not the marker of the Manson killer. “You weren’t contracted by the same person who killed Victor Manson, were you?”
He doesn’t respond.
“No, it was someone else. There’s more than one person involved in this case. Someone killed Manson, and someone else knows their identity. Someone else out there knows what’s going on, and that someone called you today and put a hit out on me. So it’s someone who considers me a threat, which means it’s likely someone I’ve seen before.”
