Episode 6 - Thunder Across a Blue Sky

  Chapter 54 - Just ‘Agent’

  I slip a black business card across the clerk's desk. It’s real paper too. Beautiful textured card with smooth gold embossing. No words either, just the single gold Aquila across the front surface with wings spread.

  “There should be tickets waiting for me?”

  The clerk picks up the card, a shimmer of silver passing over the card's surface as their symbiont reads the mark, a Oryctolagus perched on a low stool by the desk. With a frown of concentration, she types at her workstation.

  Pooka stands beneath my feet, curling his lip with displeasure as the crowds of the station pass us in both directions. Even in these obscene early-morning hours, train stations are always packed. I try to rub some of my sweat from my face with my sleeve while I wait.

  “Special Operative Dorrien-”

  “Just Agent is fine,” I interrupt.

  “Agent Dorrien, my apologies. We have your ticket in the system, leaving in fifteen minutes?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ll be just a moment. Platform A6, down the left corridor and then under the underpass. Car seven, cabin twelve,” she hands me the reusable plastic card used for Intertrain tickets. “Do you need any help with your luggage?”

  “No, am I sharing?”

  “Single traveller only.”

  “Ta.” I take the plastic card, re-centering my backpack with a conspicuous clink of glassware, then shuffle off to find my cabin. The train is already waiting as I arrive, and I swipe my way into the private cabin with no issues. As I slump into the synthetic white leather couches lined up by the window, I sigh, feeling the weight of this mission finally seem to dispel.

  Pooka pauses by the window, sitting and watching everyone pass us on the station platform. His tail flops once at his side, then his backside plants and he presses his wet nose against the glass.

  “We got a car when we get back?” I ask into the air of my empty cabin.

  “A car should be waiting. Security knows you will be passing through as well,” replies Adrian in my ear via the Vespa.

  “Do I get a break this time?”

  “Maybe. A few days. I’m trying to sleep.”

  “So, no?”

  “You know how it is.”

  And that I do. I brush my hair back over the top of my head, messy silver strands falling in front of my eyes between my fingers.

  I’m so tired lately.

  Compared to when I first started with Aquila, I’m no longer running on a constant cocktail of stress and adrenaline. Even some of the novel gleam of ‘fun puzzles’ that I felt when I worked in Control has begun to lose its shine. My position is more secure than it has ever been in the year I’ve worked here now, they even gave me that bloody promotion to ‘Special Operative’. I’m fairly certain I’ve even got a good start at paying back my debts to Aquila. For all manner of things, I should be happy with my progress.

  And yet, I feel emptier than I ever felt at Murasaki. I spend so much time alone these days. It was nice to have a few weeks with the same faces every day at Berlinger, even felt a little human for a bit. That said, I’m really looking forward to my bed again.

  As the train begins to pull out of the station, gliding smoothly on the magnetic track, I lean back in my armchair, arms wrapped around my backpack.

  Pooka looks across the cabin at me, his tail beating against the floor one time. How long?

  How long till what? Till we get back to Aquila?

  How long till you spark like lightning again?

  I sniff, rubbing my eyes, and I shift the backpack of goods in my lap. I can feel the glass jars inside roll around. I’m sure a few of the goods have shaken loose of their growth gels within, tumbled around within their jars. They’ll be fine. As long as they stay sealed and sterile.

  I don’t know, I reply to Pooka honestly. Can’t we be quiet and tired for a while? Didn’t you want us to grow strong roots?

  Pook looks over his shoulders at me, red eyes glowing. As we pass beneath the dome lock, shadows shift through the cabin around us. Then the urban landscape disappears entirely as we pass into the world beyond saturated in white mist. The glass windows are immediately coated in splattering, dancing water, crawling sideways along the train as it accelerates to full speed.

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  The shapes of shadows in the white fog pass so quickly they could be tricks on the eye, their lines distorted by the film of clear water on the windows. As Pooka watches me over his shoulder, the rain seems to grow heavier, knocking some of the oppressive white fog from the air. The sides of the train track fall away as we get further from the city, revealing a black and brown world beyond.

  Everything passes too fast to make out many details, shapes and colors blurring by. I stand, putting my backpack down behind me, and slowly walk to Pooka’s side. He turns his head to follow me and waits looking up at me as I press a hand against the glass. The surface is cool to the touch, and smooth without seams or texture. Between my fingers, I watch the raindrops travel, hypnotized by the way the world beyond distorts around the curled edges of the droplets.

  The water seems to be gathering on the ground, dark puddles growing on the earth before visibility drops off deeper into the fog. The puddles form jagged, branching shapes as if the ground is cracked like shattered glass, and water is pooling in the seams.

  What happened out there?

  I do not fully know how it came to its final days. She was sick. Then she was dead. I was asleep. But humans have been draining the mother for as long as I remember.

  Draining?

  Consuming more than they return. Diminishing her blood and flesh that gathers with the cycles.

  As they drain the hollow now?

  In a way. The hollow does not cycle.

  The hollow is the only name I have ever heard Pooka use for the place where symbionts originate, and where they seem to sleep between their times spent with hosts. I cannot tell if it is a real place? Or if I could go there? Or if it is more like a dream world and that the time between life for them is just a strange kind of sleep?

  Is she dead forever?

  Pook twitches his whiskers, turning to look out the window with me and leaning against my side. I tangle my fingers in the long, plush fur that bristles around his neck and down the spine of his back. He does not dissipate from my touch. I do not know.

  Do I disappoint you? I ask.

  Pooka's thoughts drift from mine, and I let him go from my touch. I’m scared for a moment that he might entirely disconnect from me to hide his thoughts. But, after a moment of wavering uncertainty, he returns to me. I feel his age, and a weariness that I cannot even comprehend at how long he has existed, at the weight of time that has passed for him. He wears it like a heavy blanket on his being.

  The snow never lasts forever. But it smoothers like any other chain. You have grown strong roots. It is time to feel the spring, and the fire of summer.

  I blink. I cannot fathom the falling rain we watch freezing and drifting down from the sky. I can’t imagine a sun that would be warm enough to wake me from the daze I feel like I walk through. I’m no better than all the people I once despised.

  I fall asleep in my chair. I might as well get a decent rest while waiting for the return to Aquila.

  I lean on the window of the hired car that picked me up at the station, glumly watching the flash of passing buildings and glossy storefronts.

  Apex City is a gleaming silver metropolis. The streets are clean, storefronts gleam with glass and shining chrome. Their logo is simple, black and white, and features minimally on the architecture. Aquila Operations rents its operational headquarters in the business district just outside Cap Plaza, the primary shopping district. Here, the streets are wide, accommodating both pedestrians and vehicles. I know deeper in the city, where the streets become tighter and apartments shade the distant sun, that it isn’t as shiny. The sterile chrome giving way to concrete and steel. I’d rather feel the texture of concrete beneath my fingers than the slippery stainless surfaces here.

  Beneath it all, there is dark water between the buildings, and solid ground somewhere far below the surface.

  The water is not clear like it was as it fell from the sky out the window of the train. It is dark, a shade that is somewhere between dirty blue and rotting brown. Organic scum forms a murky foam that is gently churned up by the shifting waves of the water beneath the foundation of the city. It builds up on the base of the buildings as they plunge into the depths, encrusting the concrete and steel pylons with a foul slime. I catch glimpses of it as my car passes through the city.

  I exit in front of the public entrances of the Aquila building, unmarked glass doorways leading to the lobby with Mia sitting within view of the street. She has her head down, but I can always tell it’s her by the bright green of today’s headscarf. I exit, slinging my backpack over my shoulder. Pooka is already long gone, flying restlessly over the city. I catch glimpses of his vision if I let my mind drift that way, looking down upon cars and buildings. He’ll probably come back sometime in the evening to guard as I sleep.

  “Exactly on time,” says Mia as I enter and march through the lobby, getting to her feet and turning to a side room behind her desk. I follow her, watching her tap her palm to a biometrics scanner. A door built into the wall clicks open, and she opens it, revealing a safe that she repeats her palm scan for. “Welcome back, Special Operative.”

  “Ta. And I don’t want to hear those stupid titles. Who’s in at the moment?”

  “Few folks, it’s quiet at the moment. Regina is in the building, though. Why?” Mia’s bangled hands clink and she leans into the safe.

  “Nothing, just curious. What’s she doing?”

  Mia withdraws my tablet with my security credentials from the safe and hands it to me. “She’s between meetings with Apex clients. We expect her here for the next week or so.”

  “Ta cob,” I mutter, spinning it in my hands to turn it on for the first time in weeks. A notification pops into the corner of the screen as it updates my missed messages and emails. “Where do you want this?” I ask while hunching my shoulders to indicate my backpack.

  “Leave it with me. Blake’s gonna make the drop for the client later today. By the way, Adrian wants to see you?”

  “I’m in Control. Come up when you’re ready.”

  “Let me stop by my room and shower first,” I reply aloud. Mia doesn’t even blink at my odd behavior, used to us all having conversations half aloud. I sling the backpack off my shoulder and hand it to Mia, who takes the straps in both hands as we pass back out into the lobby.

  “We put you on the chore roster for the next five days,” says Mia before I get too distracted reading all my missed messages.

  I lift my head and look up at her. “Five days?”

  “You deserve a break. It was a long one.”

  “I guess. Is Nessa in?” I sniff as my inbox updates, over four hundred missed messages. It’ll take hours to work through.

  “Field active until tomorrow.”

  “Crisp. Thanks Mia.”

  I scan the corner of my tablet to let myself back into the private areas of the building and head for the elevators.

  by D. N. Newyn

  All Severa Montreal ever wanted was to become the greatest dungeoneer alive. Instead, she got to manage other dungeoneers.

  a bit of a spoiled brat. How dare she demand respect when she was only the youngest prodigy in the history of the Synod of Thaumaturgic Studies and the youngest ever to solo a Tier II dungeon?

  other dungeoneers as well. Complete, moronic beginners. She would have to face her worst enemy: socializing. But if tolerating other people was what it would take to become the best dungeoneer manager, so be it.