CHAPTER 15

Melody Anne Ritter stared at her computer screen, and at the image displayed upon it.

After she had done that for minute, she put her hands to her mouth and continued to stare at it.

After she had done that for an additional minute, she sat back in her chair and stared at it, and then leaned forward and stared at it.

“Captured on police body camera,” the article said. In a police raid, in another country, thousands of miles away, yet there it was, larger than life and twice as scary. Watching the video had made her feel physically nauseous, so vividly had it brought back to her memories of her two encounters with it. And it had killed that poor police officer. But a part of Melody was glad, glad to know that she no longer had to bear the memory alone, the only sane person in a world gone crazy. It was real, and her memories had not been warped by childish fantasy.

The Special Forces soldier, Rob, had warned her that her memories of her attack would likely remain vivid—indeed, hyper-detailed—forever. The counselor to whom the female Special Agent had referred her had said the same thing. She might experience one of these extremely vivid flashbacks in a dream (Melody was pretty sure she would call that a nightmare), or even in her waking life if a particular smell, sound, or sight triggered it. Constantine’s explanation stuck with her, and she clung to it: that this was a normal thing for her mind to do, a process of recording in greatest detail an experience it had deemed of greatest importance to her survival. God willing, she would never encounter such a monster again, but the experience had taught her valuable lessons about her world, she had realized, lessons worth remembering. Now the rest of the world would be learning some of those same lessons.

She opened her Tor browser, navigated to her various message boards, and logged in under her various innocuous usernames. To each of her previous messages she posted a new addendum containing a link to the news stories showing the video. She also opened up a private message window and sent the link to Frell.

Over the course of that day she kept tabs on the site, and she was waiting when he—or she, though Melody had spent many years interacting online anonymously, and she believed this “Frell” was male—replied.

“Do you believe what they are saying?” Frell asked.

Melody checked his status. Online. She clicked the Reply button to open a new message, and then she paused, steepling her fingers at her lips. What were they saying? She switched to the news story and skimmed it again. Then she ran a few searches. The major news outlets were reporting an unknown assailant who had attacked the local police during the raid. The video made that case well. It captured the moment the female officer had been sent flying—horrifically—through the air, doubled up like a crash test dummy. The blogs were more various, though not exactly charitable, ranging from “What is it?” to “We must kill it.”

Finally, she wrote her message: “Are you saying it didn’t really kill that police woman? Are they lying?”

A minute later, a new message had arrived: “That is truth. The death of Special Agent Raines is a tragedy.”

Melody took a sharp breath. She scrambled for her purse, and inside that her phone, and on her phone, in her contacts, the entry she had made for the female Special Agent who had given Melody her business card only a few months—had it been so long?—ago. She covered her mouth, looking from her phone to the computer screen. Her memory had not deceived her. But how? The news had said it was a local police officer. How could…

There was a way to answer this. She called Raines’s number.

It rang, and then a man answered. “This is Special Agent Charles Ward. Is this Melody Ritter?” Melody felt a lump in her throat. “Yes. I’m calling for Miss—for Special Agent Raines.”

“I’m very sorry to tell you, Miss Ritter, that Special Agent Raines was killed in the line of duty.”

“No…” said Melody. It just came out.

“I’m very sorry, Miss Ritter. I want you to know that I’ve taken over some of her caseload, and that includes your case. Anything you need, you can call this number and get me.”

“Can I ask… how she died?”

“I’m afraid that’s part of an ongoing investigation, so I can’t say.”

“Okay.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Ritter?”

“N-no…” she said. “No, I’m okay.”

“I understand. You were calling to talk to Special Agent Raines; you weren’t expecting to hear this. Believe me, we’re all mourning her loss. But again, if you want to talk, or you need anything, you can still use this number. I’ll do whatever I can for you.”

“Thank you,” said Melody.

“Please have a good day, Miss Ritter.”

“Thank you,” she said again. She terminated the call and set her phone down. For a long time she stared at the blank text box on her computer monitor. Finally, she typed, “Who are you?” and sent it.

Frell replied in time: “Enemies of your enemies.”

It took Melody several tries before she had framed her next message to her satisfaction. “Are you connected to the thing in the video? The thing I saw?”

Frell replied with the single word, “Yes.”

Melody’s hands clenched into fists on her lap. “What is it?”

Several minutes passed before Frell sent another message. “An enemy of your enemy,” was his cryptic answer. Melody frowned.

“Why did it kill Agent Raines?” she asked.

That earned a faster reply. “Self-defense. Special Agent Raines attacked. Rules of engagement permit self-defense in all cases. We honor Special Agent Raines.”

“Why did you come after me?” she asked.

“Your protection,” Frell wrote back.

“Why? Who was after me? Why was I in danger?” She wrote the questions, and sent them, even though they were dumb questions to which she already knew the answers.

Melody took a breath and revised her self-condemnation: she knew why she had been, and probably was still, in danger. The answer to that was simple: she and her classmates had stumbled upon something that someone wanted kept secret. But who was that someone? And why did that someone’s enemies, this mysterious Frell and his cohort, see fit to protect her?

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“Your work compromised the enemy. You could not anticipate their threat. We did not wish for you to be killed. You are still in danger if you pursue this matter. I cannot guarantee your safety.”

It was Frell’s longest message to date, and after reading it, Melody sat back in her chair. She pulled one knee up, resting her chin on it, and hugged her leg while she turned first one way and then the other in her swiveling chair. Swiveling was her habit when she needed to think. This was Frell’s longest message and the first in which he had referred to himself as an individual. His first use of the first-person singular.

Whoever he was—whoever they were, they had considerable knowledge. They had known of the threat to Melody before she had—

“Would they have attacked me at my parents’ house?” she asked, and then hugged her leg again and swiveled a bit more while waiting for a response. Her mind whirled. They had known of the threat to her. They had known Special Agent Raines’s identity. They were clearly powerful, and they had that thing—or that thing was one of them. Could it be human? If not, then what could it be? With what manner of being were Frell and his people allied?

Could Frell be lying to her? Was this all a ploy, a big fake? What if they had staged everything to scare her? Did that make sense?

If their intent had been to scare her into not revealing her work to the authorities, they had failed.

If their intent had been to scare her into revealing her work to the authorities, weren’t there a million easier ways? And why would they have killed Cookie? It was too much. The simplest explanation was his, taken at face value: that she had run afoul of whoever had made the AI, and Frell and his demon-like friend had saved her.

Melody refreshed the page and found Frell’s reply. “Yes,” it said simply.

That notion caused Melody’s gut to turn, the idea of an assassin like the one who shot her coming into her parents’ home, the idea that her mother and father might have been killed as well. If this was true—The other thought that occurred to Melody was that Frell “sounded” genuine. If he had been trying to trick her, why would he be so honest about Special Agent Raines? Why would he admit that his side had killed her, when Melody had not even known it was SA Raines who had died? Was it really realistic to imagine that someone would try to win her trust by admitting to something that would certainly undermine her trust? Who really worked that way, except someone who was truly honest? And the way he wrote was too blunt, too… unsmooth. If they were trying to trick her, wouldn’t they have used someone more smooth? More… charming? Or, once again, perhaps that was just what they wanted her to think. In the end, Melody had to admit that she had no idea how someone would really go about deceiving another person in a situation like this. She had neither the worldliness nor the guile to judge his character from such a conversation.

“What do you want?” she sent.

It took a minute for the reply to come: “Our current objective is to defeat the enemy. All other objectives are secondary. We may be too late, but we will fight.”

“Why do you care what happens to me?”

Another delay, and then: “I want you to survive, but the mission is first. I cannot protect you.”

“If you care about me, then you shouldn’t hide yourself,” she wrote. “If there’s something going on, and you’re the good guys, and you want people to know what’s going on and help people, you should show yourselves instead of hiding in the shadows. If this…” It took her a moment to come up with the right word, and she settled on the one the government agents had used. “…entity works for you, or with you, then it should show itself instead of creeping around scaring people and killing people! You have to be honest! If you don’t want the world to think of you as monsters, then you have to show them who you really are!”

Several minutes passed as she wrote it, read it back to herself, equivocated as to whether she really wanted to send it—it was rather more confrontational and impassioned than her norm—and finally decided that she did want to send it. When she finally clicked the Send button, that transmitted her message but also caused the message board page to refresh, revealing that she already had another message from Frell in her inbox. She clicked on it and read:

“You will not receive more messages from me. Be careful. War is coming. Become strong and survive.”

“Son of a bitch!” she shouted, slapping her desk with her hands. It was extremely unfair for him just to quit the conversation like that, after giving her so many cryptic hints. It was like… it was like disconnecting from an online match to avoid a loss. “Son of a bitch,” she said again. She took hold of her monitor, growled at it, and shook it a little.

Once that proved futile, Melody sat back in her chair and hugged now both of her knees while she worked her way through her frustration. That process consisted mostly of her sitting thus and fuming for a while, and then giving her desk a shove so that she spun about slowly in her swiveling seat. Once that was done, she sighed and clicked the refresh button on her browser, just on the vain hope that he might not have signed off after all.

As it so happened, there was another message waiting for her from Frell. It read, “It’s okay to be a monster.” Frell’s status showed now as Offline.

She closed that browser window and stared at the one that remained, still displaying a news article about the terrible attack by the entity on the police—in the hide-out of a criminal enterprise, no less. As if this thing, this incredible apparition, had been involved in trafficking of methamphetamines. That, at the very least, was patently absurd. Whatever this thing was, whoever Frell and his people might be, they certainly were not petty drug-dealers.

Melody also had a suspicion that if that thing had truly intended to battle the police, the police would have come away far worse. In movies and TV shows, when the very strong supervillain fought the good guys, he would throw them about or strike them so that they went flying. How many times had she watched the scene wherein that villain held a protagonist aloft by the throat just long enough to deliver a bit of monologue before again tossing him or her across the room? Perhaps it made for good cinema, with heroes bouncing off of walls and crashing through windows, but in truth they portrayed it that way in order to keep the hero alive. It would not play out that way in reality. An attacker with that kind of overwhelming strength, who had managed to catch hold of his prey, would not throw them away but pin them down and tear them limb from limb. He would kill them one after another as quickly as he could lay hands on them. He would break their necks, crush them, or smash them into other hard objects until they died. Melody had always thought as much, had always considered that trope of cinema transparently stupid, but now she knew it for a fact. She had witnessed it. The thing, the entity, had not picked up her assassin and thrown him across the parking lot, but had smashed his head and then shot him for good measure. It had not let him go until it had ensured his death. That was combat in a world of monsters.

In the video, the woman—Special Agent Raines, apparently, and that thought made Melody sick again. It was one thing to watch a person die, quite another to watch die someone she knew. Special Agent Raines had been sent flying. It was horrifying to watch, and it had proven deadly, but then that same monster, supposedly bent on the murder of policemen in defense of a drug lab, had rushed past two more armed officers without harming them and had fled. In her heart of hearts, Melody did not believe it. It was not, in that video, trying to kill, but trying to escape. Of that she was certain. But what did that mean?

It certainly did not mean the entity was friendly, nor that its associates, such as “Frell,” were friendly. Whoever they were, their mission was not to make friends. Frell had said it himself, several times, in various ways. “The mission comes first.” “Rules of engagement.” And, of course, “It’s okay to be a monster.” He had implied that he did not desire loss of life, or at least unnecessary loss of life, but he had made it clear that his organization was perfectly willing to kill. Kill whom, though? Who was their supposed common enemy, whose defeat was the sole objective of Frell’s organization? That would be whoever had created the AI. Why? Who had created the AI, and why did Frell’s organization think it worthwhile to go to war with them? Melody realized she was at a dead end. She had not enough information to answer that question. Mr. Sing might know, but everything was classified, so ultra-super-top-secret that they could probably imprison her for talking about it in her sleep. Alone.

The government had the full picture, or more of the picture, but they weren’t sharing, and the news had so little of the picture that they were constructing the wrong picture, and they didn’t even know what questions to ask. Melody, meanwhile, had the questions, but she could not legally ask them. What an atrociously tangled situation, it seemed to her.

All that day it bothered her, and the next, and the next. It distracted her from her schoolwork and kept her lying awake at night. At breakfast, she sat staring into space until her cereal turned soggy, and at dinner she was forced to reheat her food, which grew cold while she fiddled at it with her fork. As she pumped away on a stationary bicycle, her mind was absorbed with it, and as she fiddled with her new quadrotor she could barely keep her thoughts focused on the task. On the third morning, though, she awoke knowing what she needed to do.