The primrose-pink and buttercup-gold on the cover of the book in Ari’s hands looked out of place against the bare, grey room decorated only with three men in black suits. She, too, had swapped Becky’s coral cardigan for her trusty black leather jacket and her favourite Trojan Threnody t-shirt.
‘Agent Lee,’ said the Chief. He sat at the foot of a fold-up hospital bed, where a mass of tubes and machinery overwhelmed the outlines of a small, fragile figure hidden under a clinical, white sheet. His suit was clean-pressed, and hair unruffled. Some of the tension in her shoulders melted away. This couldn’t have been that much of an emergency.
‘Sir!’ she replied, stepping through the doors. They slid shut behind her with a quiet swoosh. She scanned the room instinctively for other exits, and spotted a hint of a hidden door behind where an unknown Agent stood. Connor took his place next to the other Agent.
‘Do you remember my daughter?’ said the Chief, waving at the withering husk lying next to him.
Not like that.
‘We had only met once. She used to be a very lively child.’ Had it been ten years?
The Chief never let them meet his real family, but somehow that day, perhaps due to an argument with his ex-wife, the girl had been placed in Ari’s care. She’d begged for a proper soft ice from an ice-cream van, and as there were only sugar-free jellies at the HQ, Ari had broken into their system, searched for the nearest home address of an ice-cream man, acquired a qualified Agent’s vehicle, and made the child’s wish come true: a giant swirl in a waffle cone with two extra flakes on top, followed by one of the most painful meetings she’d had with the Chief, because there’d been a police report from a motorist who’d witnessed a young teen driving a five-year-old on the motorway.
Oh, she’s not really a teen. She just doesn’t look her age! That’d been the official response, which was technically true, as Ari had been eleven or twelve – children who were found didn’t have birthdays in the same way as people who were born into families who wanted to hold them close.
Knowing the outside world as she did now, she should have just walked to the nearest village centre and queued up with some stolen cash at an ice-cream van that was in service, like a normal child.
‘I hope this goes better than last time,’ said the Chief.
She wasn’t sure if he meant the ice-cream trip or her last official mission.
‘Did someone do this to her?’ asked Ari. She waited for the Chief to hand her the information on her next target.
Instead, he said, ‘What did you think?’
‘Of…?’
‘That!’ He jabbed at the book with disgust. ‘“Rosalind by Any Other Name”. You have read it like you’re supposed to?’
‘Yes, Sir.’ Luckily the book had fewer words than most of her favourite books such as ‘The Eastern Origins of Gunpowder’ and ‘The Evolution of Bladed Weaponry’, so she’d been able to skim it on the drive and flight to this briefing session. Was it the key to a code from a terrorist organisation? Was there another crazed killer out there, like the Red Raven, but killing according to the plot of a fantasy romance?
‘Thoughts? Favourite plot points? Favourite characters? Why do you love it so much? Why?’
If anyone in this room were to love it so much, Ari would have put the money on Connor. Years ago, he used to glue the covers of ‘A Complete History of Great Britain, Volume 3’ onto the pages of ‘Lady Loves a Knave: The Strings of Fate’. And now? He stood examining his shoes, silent still.
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‘I… I liked Galan, I guess.’
‘Who?’
‘Galan. He’s the healer. Appeared in chapter thirty-something, in the final battle scene. He went around healing people because… well… He’s a healer.’
‘…Right… Not… either of these?’ He whipped out a copy of the same book and pointed at Leolin, the male lead, then at Tristram, the second male lead.
Ari shrugged, and the Chief shook his head.
‘Miri, who was, is, a normal girl, became… obsessed with this book, obsessed with Tristram – I managed to find this out from a friend of hers who is also obsessed with this paper-thin Tristram character. Apparently, a group of them had discovered a rumour that it was sometimes possible to travel into this book.’
Ari raised an eyebrow despite her usual self-control in front of the Chief.
‘You don’t believe me,’ he said.
‘Well… It’s a book, Sir, not Buckingham Palace.’
‘No, but that’s where she is now,’ he said, casting a look of distain at the beeping machines around the husk of a girl. ‘We have since discovered a more sure-fire way to send people into the book than whatever method Miri and her friend had used. Agent Temple went through six months ago. We then waited three months with little to show for it, and sent Agent Thomas after her.’
Slow breathing. Slow breathing. She softened her instinctive sharp breath. Natty Thomas had planned to use her twelve fake passports, secret stashes of survival kits and unmarked rolls of Benjamins that she’d slowly siphoned away to erase the title of Agent from her name. Ari hadn’t believed in the possibility of success, but there was no joy in being proved right.
‘This has been the only update from her,’ said the Chief, pointing to a short message below the dedications in the same print as the rest of the book, so that the page now read,
‘For the Devourer
For you, always
Agent Thomas reporting for duty, Sir. I am sending through my thoughts in the hopes that you will be able to see it in the book. I have safely arrived at somewhere tropical and plan to investigate the’
Ari flicked open her version of the book. There was no message from Natty.
‘That’s because mine is the first edition,’ said the Chief. ‘Only first editions work.’
‘Ah,’ said Ari. There were many things that she wanted to say, but there was only one thing that really mattered. ‘Please don’t send me on a protect and rescue mission, Sir. If anything, this is more of a search and find, isn’t it? What you need is a Blue, not a Red. You must have seen from my last mission that I just can’t… I can’t protect and rescue. Just send me in for wetwork. You know you can trust me to liquidate–’
‘And you know that you are here to follow my orders,’ said the Chief, giving her the look. Suddenly, she was a child again, facing the doors of the Cube.
‘Agent Lee, go and find my daughter. I’m not going to wait another three months. I’m not even going to wait another one month. I want her back with her family. Now. Agent Hart and Agent Becker, please send her on her way and wish her the best.’
With a thunk, the secret door she’d spotted before opened. Before the man who must have been Agent Becker could place a hand on her shoulder, she kicked him on the shin, glared at Connor on her way past and walked through the door herself.
‘I should ask for more information about the subject I’m setting out to secure,’ she said to the Chief as the door slowly lumbered shut again, ‘but I doubt you know Miri any better than I do.’
Still, words meant nothing. Still, she was going to follow his orders. Still, she would follow his orders until the day she joined Max in the land of the dead.
It was all one inevitable mistake.
Cold white lights blinded her from every wall, but not enough to make her miss the marks around the insides of the door. There were finger marks and the odd handprints in a familiar blackening red, clustered around the edges where the door met the wall. She wondered if it was the desperate scratching of Hannah Temple or Natty Thomas. Scratching, prying, praying for the door to reopen, until her fingers bled, but the bleeding must have been insignificant compared to the future that awaited her in the small, metal coffin of a room.
The smell of charred meat lingered despite the overwhelming stench of sanitisation.
Click.
Someone pressed a button and turned on hell. Strange dark marks appeared on the walls, then the whole world became flame and pain. Was this what it’d felt like, being devoured by molten fire?
She looked up, waiting for the mission to appear, but there was nothing: no guidance, no items, no map marking a route of escape.
Ari fumbled at her left earring: a parting gift from Max; a secret between the two of them.
Perhaps she’d managed to bite down on it. Perhaps she hadn’t.
All turned to… fresh linen.