The Valkyrie Project

by Nels Wadycki

  The fire continued to follow them, not as much of a danger now that the sand served as a moat of protection.

  "Try not to get blood all over everything," Ana said as she tossed him into the passenger seat. She climbed in and lifted off. As they bolted up and away she saw the island below swallowed by the conflagration. She opened up a secure channel as soon as they'd cleared the Keys, and sent ahead for a medical team, hoping that Jrue's injury would still be treatable.

  --

  Ana would have preferred to drop Jrue off with the doctors and head straight home, but that would have broken a regulation on just about every page of the manual she'd received upon joining the Valkyrie Project.

  Besides that, there were also debriefings—not the kind she'd imagined on the flight back, though, with Jrue sitting right next to her. Even though blood drained rapidly from his body, she had kept an eye on the breath going through those luscious lips, through his wide, sculpted chest, and raising the diaphragm beneath his stone-flat stomach.

  He was put into a hover chair immediately upon their arrival, but she was able to sneak a kiss on his forehead. Thanks and good luck.

  He was whisked away to the med center, and she descended from the lobby of the old cement building to the sub-basement floor that housed the Valkyrie Project division.

  The actual debrief proceeded as smoothly as could be expected for a Valkyrie who'd killed someone they were supposed to recapture and came back with a pilot who would be lucky to walk again. Still, it wasn't the worst thing she'd ever had to go through.

  Several messages waited for her when Ana returned to her terminal. She'd almost decided to just head home, rest, and check on things in the morning, but what she saw stopped that and all the other thoughts that had been fighting for her attention.

  There were the usual video updates from Malcolm and Aerin, but at the bottom of the list was a simpletext message, no sender; she was the only recipient.

  Ana—Don't worry about me. Still good. Moze.

  She glanced around the office. Late enough that most of the lesser drones had packed it in for the day. She settled down quickly, her fingers already blazing over the sleek, black interface. Bastard had delivered it not just to her work ID, but straight through to her Valkyrie Project account. She was able to trace it back through those layers of security, as though she were going through floors back up on the lift to the lobby of the building. She traced it out to the pubnet, opening the doors under the upturned glass awning, a glass and steel sunflower reaching for the sun. Then, like a ray of that sun's light, it disappeared. Refracted through the glass into her sanctum, it could have come from anywhere. That was how she knew they were brother and sister; they were both smart as hell and had a penchant for defying authority.

  Moze.

  She couldn't remember anybody ever calling Memo "Moze". Guillermo, yes. Memo, of course. But Moze?

  Just like the manuals that came in new editions every once in a while, messages from Memo tended to pop up from out of nowhere, only with slightly less frequency. Always short. Never any information. So in that way, much better than the manuals.

  Each time one arrived, Ana wasn’t sure if she should be reassured or not. He'd been kidnapped fourteen years ago, and she was still not convinced that the messages weren't forced output.

  Ana banged her hand on the desk. Bastard. If he was out there on his own, if he'd escaped, she was sure he'd come to her when he was ready, when it was safe. But it didn’t diminish her concern or her desire to find him first.

  Ana passed up her opportunity to head home now and instead went to Murph's. They had a lot more alcohol there than she did in her little apartment.

  2.

  HANSEL

  Ana hated walking her little brother to school. It had only been two weeks, and it wasn't like it was all that onerous since they did go to the same school only half a mile straight down State. But for the previous three years, Ana had used those few minutes to let her mind wander, look at all the huge buildings around her, wonder what there would be for lunch, imagine what the other girls would be wearing, review what secrets she knew, and identify which of them she was ready to trade.

  Now, though, she practically had to hold his hand. It felt like Mom was spying on them, ready to reprimand her if Ana let Memo fall behind for even a second. As soon as she stepped through the door, Mom would be there. Ana was always wondering if at some point she'd pull out hard copy evidence, or review some secret video capture.

  Life had been good, Ana now knew, when Mom had taken him to school.

  It wasn't that she didn't like spending time with her brother. She certainly enjoyed hanging out with him more than most of her friends did with their brothers. They played around, laughed, worked on abstract mechanical art projects—Ana was the vision and Memo was great at piecing together random machine parts in a way that made them move like electric poetry. He would still come to her room after a bad dream if Dad had gone back to work after dinner and Mom was busy gabbing with the ladies.

  The time in the morning had been hers, though. One of the few times she really ever had to herself amid days of family breakfasts, crowded classrooms, theater practices, after-school study groups, family dinners, and extracurricular college application padding. It had been time to let her tightly wound sixteen-year-old mind unravel, a spool that she could kick down the street to school and let the thread of thoughts trail behind. It had been a time when she could disappear into the madding crowd and become part of the swirling rush of the huge world always waiting just outside their house.

  Now here she was, dragging him along just to get him there on time, knowing she'd be the one in trouble if he was late to his first class. Mom would know the instant his tardiness crossed the five-minute mark, but Ana would have to wait all day knowing that the questions would come only once she finally arrived home. After the inquisition at the dinner table, when they were alone upstairs, Memo would apologize, but it didn't settle her stomach during the day, upset with the anticipation of what she'd lose out on as a result of her brother's plodding.

  Still, life would be incomplete without him. No one else would hang on every word of her mundane high-school stories, no one else would share in her insanely detailed imaginings, no one else would come to comfort her loneliness without her calling. If he wasn't there…

  She looked around.

  He wasn't there.

  Ana tried to pause the busy world swirling around her. It kept moving at its dizzying pace, and there was no sign of Memo. She spun, and spun again.

  "Ana!"

  She spun again, homing in on the location of his voice.

  There he was. Flailing. In the arms of two men in black, their backs to her. Dragging him into a van hovering nearby.

  "Memo!" Her voice this time. Her legs were moving. There was no way she was going to make it—the van was already lifting into the swarming cloud of rush-hour insects above them. She didn't stop until she reached the point of departure, trying to keep an eye on the vehicle, but it was soon lost. Memo was lost.

  She pulled out her comm, hesitating—Mom or the police? "Police," she said. Then, "Emergency."

  "Ana Callif?" A woman's voice. Ana wasn't sure it was actually a question, and the woman continued without waiting for an answer. "Citizenship number, please."

  Ana rattled off the string of letters and numbers as fast as she could get the syllables out, hoping that her mouth wouldn't go numb before she did. Her lips were dry, and the feeling was spreading quickly through her mouth and down her throat, leaving nothing but a desert of dust in its wake.

  "What is the problem, Ms. Callif?"

  "My brother! My little brother!" She almost choked, then conjured some saliva and forced it down her throat. "Someone took him! Just now! They took him and flew away!"

  "Okay, Ms. Callif, stay calm. Stay where you are. There are several officers in the area who will be there to assist you shortly."

  "Oh God…" She trailed off. Who
would be to blame for this one?

  --

  Ana woke up, her sweat-soaked shirt acting as an adhesive between her back and the equally sweat-soaked sheets. The police alarm that had been searching for her brother morphed grotesquely into her comm alert. She pawed for the device on the floor beside her mattress.

  "Hello?" Her voice was a scratchy growl.

  Malcolm's equally scratchy growl answered an octave below hers. "We have an urgent call. Brief as soon as you're here."

  "No time for a shower?" Ana was covered in sweat, not the way she wanted to go into a new assignment.

  "How bad do you smell?"

  --

  Ana had narrowed down her apartment choices based on locations that were served twenty-four hours a day by the train. That meant that she could catch a train to HQ and be there in a matter of minutes. At three in the morning, it would have been faster to catch a cab, but Malcolm's call had come at nine, so traffic was sure to be stuck together like half-cooked spaghetti. Ana hopped the train that stopped right outside her door, and slid through the town like the olive oil that would have been great on that spaghetti had it been a batch of fully cooked rotini. Since Malcolm had said it was urgent, she'd hadn't taken time to eat.

  The train only stopped twice between her front door and the large concrete building that, even with its glass and steel touches of flair, was a stern monument to the boredom that was government. She arrived at the briefing room and then had to wait for Marisol, the uncomfortable sweat of her dream stuck on her skin like an extra layer of clothing.

  "You know, I probably could have showered and still beaten her here."

  "I called her first, Ana. She's a little slower than usual."

  "Yeah, maybe 'cause traffic sucks and she just has to live in the one neighborhood that is unreachable by skytrain?"

  Malcolm heaved a sigh as though he were pushing a Sisyphean boulder. "I called her first—"

  "Maybe she had to evacuate someone from her apartment for security reasons." Justin chimed in with that comment, making air quotes around 'evacuate someone' and 'security reasons.'

  "Justin, do you have some intel that you're not sharing?" Ana's voice was painfully sweet, dutifully melodramatic, and, if she did say so herself, artfully sarcastic.

  Since Justin frequently volunteered to work the night shifts, he often did have intel that the rest of them didn't. As the first male Valkyrie at the Project, he was eager to gain acceptance, even though he was every bit as qualified as the rest of them. His battery of monitors usually tracked three or four of the other Valkyries, just in case. It was easy to tease him about keeping such a close eye on his female co-workers, but Ana was comforted knowing that he was looking out for them. And it wasn't like tapping into the local police department's video surveillance to keep tabs was any more a violation of privacy than when the police used it.

  Marisol strode in, humble but confident.

  "I apologize for taking so long."

  "You were a little slower than usual," Ana said in a low voice, trying to get to the register that was Malcolm's default. "You really should inform the Project when you intend to have overnight guests."

  Marisol responded with an equally low tone of authority. "It had not initially been my intention to have an overnight guest, sir." Then she melted. "But I'm a sucker for a romantic. Especially a super-hot romantic."

  "If you two are done," Malcolm interrupted their little sketch comedy.

  Marisol winked at Ana and took her seat at the table.

  "I'll make this as quick as possible, since you've certainly figured out that time is an important factor here." Malcolm looked Ana and Marisol in the eyes. They both nodded. "The son of one of our Senators has been kidnapped." A jolt of electric energy shot through Ana. She jumped slightly forward in her chair as the shock of recalling her dream made her muscles tense. "It appears to be a professional snatch-and-grab," Malcolm continued. "Not that it was that difficult. The victim was—excuse me, is—a three-year-old."

  A picture of the child appeared on a large screen behind Malcolm. There was something very familiar about him. It didn't take Ana long to nail down the origin of the feeling—he looked like he might have more than a few genes in common with her brother. Was it possible that her brother had fathered that child? At twenty-five he was more than old enough to have a child. But Malcolm had said he was the son of a Senator. Ana would know if her lost brother had become a Senator. She had been looking for him for fourteen years.

  Could the Senator have stolen the kid from her brother, and now Memo had taken his child back? Was her brother capable of what Malcolm termed a "professional snatch-and-grab"? Her mind had turned into a helicopter with half a rotor and started spinning out of control. Of course, all of it was ridiculous. It was her dream. She'd just dreamt about him, and now her mind was trying to make associations that weren't there.

  Ana pushed the clinging thoughts of her brother to the back of her mind and focused on the picture of the child in front them. Malcolm was still talking, and while usually Ana was able to half-focus on his briefings and still absorb a hundred percent of the information, this time, her focus had been completely diverted, and she realized she had retained nothing.

  He ended with, "Your hovercar is prepped and waiting."

  Ana, Marisol, and Justin stood, and filed out. When they were well clear of the briefing room, Ana whispered, "Can you guys fill me in en route? I missed the info."

  "You missed the info?" Marisol was shocked. "I thought you were just doing your half-paying-attention thing, and was just glad that Malcolm has given up calling you out when you do that."

  "I know. I just"—she hesitated—"I got distracted by the picture of the kid."

  "No problem, Ana," Marisol said. "It's just a bit of a follow-up for now. Unfortunately for the good and honorable Senator, I don't think anyone is going to find his kid unless the 'nappers want them to. Even us."

  This time Ana was the one taken aback.

  "What did I miss in there?"

  "Not much. That's my point, I guess. There's not a lot to go on. Aerin is running all kinds of analysis, but he hasn't had a lot of time yet."

  Justin chipped in. "Kid was taken straight off the playground at his school and disappeared in a black van. The teacher didn't notice he was gone until the other kids started yelling. By then, too late."

  Ana imagined the rippling wave of fear and surprise, of worry and wonder, all of which would crest into a tidal wave that crashed on the poor boy's teacher. She could relate all too well to the panic that teacher must have felt. And getting pulled into a black van. It was too similar, too familiar.

  "So where are we headed first?"

  "School. Check with the kids and the teacher to see if we can get any details."

  "So, are we detectives or babysitters?"

  "Come on, we play detective half the time here anyway." Justin's tone was playful, but there was a definite edge of anger. Ana wondered for a moment if he was mad with her for not paying attention, or with the Agency for sending them on a task of such apparently little importance. She knew which bothered her more.

  "But usually it's undercover detective to dig into the seedy underworld of assassination plots and global conspiracies. The last time I interviewed anyone who hadn't yet been through puberty it was because he'd witnessed a murder. It was like pulling teeth to get the kid to even acknowledge my existence."

  Marisol let a terse laugh rip through her vocal cords. "Ana, you are evil. You were interviewing a little kid who'd just seen someone killed right in front of them. How are they supposed to react after that?"

  "Well, hopefully these kids will be more cooperative."

  --

  The three of them managed to get to the school quickly despite traffic that stuck together like half-cooked noodles. Ana had only had time to grab a protein bar before leaving.

  When they arrived, the head of the small private institution was about to send the rest of the kids home.
Something about being traumatized, or maybe all the calls from the parents finally swallowed up the sinking ship. Whatever the case, the Valkyries managed to stop her before the kids who had been with the Senator's son at the time of his kidnapping were released. Ana felt a little bad about trapping them in their classroom, but mostly because she could remember what it would have been like to be told you got to go home early only to have that most precious of gifts snatched back. There were a lot of children of wealthy parents packed into the tiny classroom, but they couldn't let them out for an extra recess until they knew if any of the other kids would be targets.

  The headmistress kept an eye on the children while the Valkyries talked to the teacher who had been in charge of the students when the Senator's son was taken.

  "They were just playing outside. I usually watch the perimeter, but they added some new toys to the playground this year that are—I would say—too close to the edge. He was over there. There were other kids with him. They came running to me as soon as he'd been taken."

  She was composed for someone who'd just lost a child for whom they were responsible, but her voice wavered and quaked near the end of longer sentences, resulting in a fairly staccato description of the event. Ana guessed her regular speaking voice was normally a few notes lower, and that her eyes weren't usually so watery. But she managed to get the story out, including the few details she could remember. There were other details, of course—an infinite number really—that the Valkyries would have noticed had they been present. But most people didn't notice a lot of available details. How the mind loved to simplify through abstraction and generalization. Even if the teacher had more information stored in her brain somewhere, she probably wouldn't recall it until after the shock subsided.

  Marisol spoke in a low, compassionate voice. "It's okay. It could have happened to anyone," she reassured her. "If they wanted to get him, it would have happened soon or later."