Avanti was holding her breath. When she realized that it was beginning to hurt, her body forced her to gasp, and only then did her lungs deflate, slowly, so she could inhale again. The timer had been at exactly 00:38 when Katya's last transmission had come through. It was now 00:51. Soon it would be fifteen minutes with no audio or visual relay, and at 00:53, she would have to press the little red button that every Operator had been trained to dread.
---
Even as a child, Avanti had always imagined herself working at the Agency, although she did not know it at the time since the Agency, itself, was never named or publicly acknowledged. It wasn't until after she had been one day, surreptitiously, recruited; after she had passed at the top of her class, a star candidate, with the best combined field and analytical score of her year -- it wasn't until her first day, after casually arriving at the remote pickup site and getting into a car driven by a thin, polite, raven-haired girl who she thought was to be her secretary -- it wasn't until then that she found out that the Agency wasn't even called the Agency at all. Instead, her paperwork showed her employer to be the officially but dully named General Intelligence Service. And yet, everyone simply called it the Agency because that's what they learned when they had been recruited, herself included, said the girl, her short boyish cut flapping and waving in the chilly morning air that blew in from the window of the car. Her name was Katya, she had said, and this would be their first assignment together.
It had taken Avanti a while to come to grips with the fact that she wouldn't be out in the field. At first, she wondered if she didn't resent her partner, but quickly she realized that Katya was someone special, even by Agency standards. In due time, Avanti began to realize that the things that Katya could do -- the intensity at which she could operate and the discipline with which she was able to transition from one challenging assignment to another -- were beyond even her own prodigious abilities. And then there was the instinct. Katya hated admitting to trusting in something so seemingly irrational, yet Avanti saw the value in the decisions and leaps in judgment which she and the armada of computational power at her fingertips eventually got around to agreeing with, but were, for Katya, simply obvious and intuitive.
Being self-aware, Avanti knew she was capable of doing the things that Katya did, but, she also recognized that she would never be able to do them consistently, on demand, and under pressure the way that her Agent did on a regular basis. It was the difference between the best human swimmer and the lowliest cetacean whale -- she might be able to swim and survive for days, or even weeks, out in the open ocean, but it would be impossible for her to ever live in it, to thrive in it.
Still, it didn't take long for Avanti to realize the other side of the coin either. As great an Agent as Katya was, it required an equally as great Operator to not just keep up, but to stay ahead and provide the air cover and support that she would need. And she knew that in these aspects, she was the best. In fact, in the eyes of some superiors, it was Katya's ability to fully utilize Avanti's tremendous breadth of talents and insights that truly made her stand out as a potential leader in this generation of Agents.
Whatever the case, the two had not only become trusting professional partners, but in the siloed environment of the modern G.I.S., where the identities of all Agent-Operators were kept secret, even from other Agency members, they had had to become personal friends as well. This was not surprising given the intimacy of the work. It wasn't unheard of for Operators who had -- in some way or another -- lost their Agent, to never again pick up their headsets, no matter who they were asked to pair with next. Oftentimes they would trade in for a more traditional "desk job", a less direct support role with responsibilities that did not have to so often feel so explicit or visceral, but could still make use of their uncommon mixture of creativity and analytical reasoning. The research and development group, for instance, was said to be filled with ex-Operators. In other cases, they would choose to leave the Agency entirely, even preferring the change of identity that was mandatory procedure when leaving the G.I.S., than to have to rebuild the emotional ties that came with their line of work, and then again risk the possibility of having them forcefully severed.
Stolen novel; please report.
For the Operator was the Agent's sixth sense, or as they joked in the Academy, the Agent's sixth, seventh, eighth, and so on and so forth. What the Agent experienced, the Operator experienced too, but where an Agent experienced it deeply and from within her single, individual perspective, the Operator experienced it broadly and holistically. The headset, so often made fun of for its clunky, helmet-like appearance, could only be appreciated when worn and connected. For within it, all that an Agent said or heard, felt or touched, smelled or tasted, could be translated into a stream of data that would immediately convey to the Operator the same information, only to be processed numerically and rationally as opposed to sensationally and emotionally.
And so when Katya coughed in the basement of the sheriff's office in Warrentown, her standard-issue omni-device -- reattached to her wrist once she had separated from her trusting police escort -- transmitted the same data to Avanti, and unconsciously, Avanti, too, felt her throat tickle and reached for a glass of water. But it had been nearly fifteen minutes now. And the last thing she had heard was that half-broken statement: "I found something...."
Since then, there had only been static.
Avanti had often wondered at how placid Katya was able to stay under what would generally be considered extraordinary duress. And yet for Katya, as the rhythmic silence of her neurological waves showed, it was literally effortless. As the seconds wound down, however, to the fifteen-minute mark of comms silence that would force Avanti to signal for escalation, and would pull Revner out of whatever meeting he was in to come observe and make the final call -- in that moment, Avanti couldn't help but second-guess her earlier sangfroid, and wondered if something might have happened to her Agent.
Suddenly, Avanti saw a spike. Everything, every panel on her monitor was abruptly alive again. Vitals were ok; heartbeat at 190 bpm though! Brain electrochemistry also inordinately active. What was going on?
"Katya, Katya!" Avanti shouted.
Through the line, she heard a deep sucking sound. And then a loud gasp as the bright, cold air shocked Katya's lungs.
"Katya, Katya are you ok?" Avanti asked, furiously checking the monitor to make sure there were no further instabilities in the signal.
Finally out in the open again, her Agent coughed as her body violently tried to expel the sinister atmosphere that had permeated into her lungs.
"I'm ok," she managed. "I'm here," she choked out.
As Katya confirmed what the monitor was already telling her, Avanti's attention turned to focus on something else entirely.
"Katya, listen up, there's another heat signature -- it's large, at least eight-feet long. Thirty yards east. It's moving away from you, south-southeast. Fifty yards now. I've never seen anything move this rapidly before."
Katya was catching her breath now. She had been bent over, her hands on her knees, but now she straightened up and reoriented herself with the hazy sun poking through the western sky. She turned and began to run down the path from which she had entered into the town.
"Avanti, where did it go? Do you still read it?"
"No, it's off the screen now. Your omni-device isn't powerful enough off the grid to detect anything past sixty or seventy yards."
As she heard Avanti's last transmission, Katya, ever mindful about every detail, pulled her sleeve down to make sure her omni-device was covered. She knew its outline would be visible to someone looking for it, but she had no time to take it off now. She was running, now past the bodies, now past the man, his wife and their daughter, now past the welcome sign, and now over the curve of the hill, where she found the broken body of Nathaniel Whittaker slumped against the back tire of his truck.