It was almost time for us to return to the academy. I could happily sneak away from the manor whenever I pleased thanks to Franklin and some of the other staff, but being tardy repeatedly would raise red flags, and my Father was keeping a closer eye on what I was doing after the incident with Veronica. I didn’t blame him. He was actually being very magnanimous by not asking too many questions about that whole ordeal.
The first thing that happened when I came back onto campus was that Samantha chased me down like a goddamn bloodhound.
“Maria! Maria!”
I turned back to face her with a smile, “Hello Samantha.”
A few months ago, running after me would cause her to double over to catch her breath. Not anymore.
“I didn’t expect to see you back at the academy so soon.”
“Why are you back early?” I asked.
“I decided to escape before my brothers threw more of their chores at me.”
Samantha seemed none the worse for wear. Despite having to work her fingers to the bone – she valued her family a lot. Getting to see them again for a week and a half put her in a better mood than when she left.
“Weren’t you worried about Dalia?”
“Talia?
“No, not Talia. The other one – Dalia. She was giving you grief before we left for the two-week break.”
Samantha stared at me as the gears in her head became unstuck and the memory of what was going on finally returned to her.
“Oh! That girl. Sorry, it completely slipped my mind! I was so busy taking care of things back home that I basically put all of this school stuff away and forgot about it.”
Wonderful. She wasn’t even worth remembering.
“It doesn’t matter. I should tell you that Adrian and Maxwell are not going to be here for the start of the term.”
She tilted her head, “Why not?”
“It’s not in the newspapers yet – but Max’s brother was injured in an incident where Adrian’s uncle died. They’re both at the hospital in the city as we speak. All of Max’s family are going there as soon as possible, and Adrian has to worry about managing his uncle’s estate and organising what to do with his body.”
“Wait, wait a minute. When did all of that happen?” Samantha begged of me.
“Yesterday. Adrian’s uncle got involved with some shady characters – and it seems that Muwah was in the room when they decided to go after him.”
There was a longer and more detailed explanation but I could only give her that in private. Saying it out loud in front of the school’s front courtyard was going to cause more trouble than it was worth.
“Goddess above,” she swore, “So all three of you were in the city?”
I hushed my voice and leaned in, “Adrian asked me for help with a problem caused by his uncle. We did some investigating of our own because he thought Cedric was trying to kill him.”
“Was he?”
“Probably, yes. Before we could resolve that he was killed by one of the men he was working with.”
“How did he feel about it?”
“Only the Goddess knows,” I replied.
I dragged Samantha inside and started to walk the usual route up towards the dorms. The academy was technically open for most of the period when the students were on break, though very few chose to remain on the grounds. Only those who lived far away and didn’t like going home would do that. It was early so there were few ears to listen in on our conversation.
I didn’t want to risk it. My room was the best place to hunker down and hash out the details. I left my luggage by the wardrobe and locked the door so that we could go through every incident that led to the shooting.
Samantha listened intently as I walked through the story. She was completely silent, allowing me to continue without interruption. Her reactions to some of the information were curious. Shock, horror, outrage. She had the worst poker face out of all of us.
“I go away for one week and this happens!”
Such developments were easy to have cascade when under the watchful eye of a god pulling the strings. Samantha was still a true believer, and positing that I was experiencing a fictional story from my past life designed and deployed by her specifically to recruit me, was a bridge too far even if she was willing to go along with what I said most of the time.
Durandia put me here because she used the Red Tree to see how events unfolded. It calculated all of the parameters and came up with an outcome that was preferable to letting this world take its natural course.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged, “You were busy at home. I was hardly going to send you an urgent missive demanding that you end your holiday early. Besides – at the time I only believed that we were trying to scare Cedric down the right path.”
Samantha pouted – upset over being left out of the ‘fun.’ She must have seen it as a betrayal of the trust we’d built over the past few months. I know that Durandia said she was the second part of the double act required to save the world, but plunging her headfirst into danger was not a sound strategy and I was trying to avoid doing so.
“And your Mother didn’t have anything to say about what happened at the fort?”
“Why would she?”
“I would have thought that beating your face into mush would have greater implications...”
I toyed with a strand of my hair, “She didn’t mean anything by it.”
Samantha stuttered, “What do you mean she didn’t mean anything by it? What kind of Mother does that to her own daughter? She clearly doesn’t care for you.”
“I disagree. She cares a little too much if I’m being honest. So much that she’s willing to sever all connection between me and her, and that’s why she went that far back at the fort. It was all a means to an end.”
“I don’t get it.”
“She doesn’t hate me. She’s trying to maintain a level of distance between us, because the biggest threat to my wellbeing is WISA finding out that she gave birth to me, at least that’s what she assumes.”
Samantha’s quirked brow and thinned lips said that she did not agree with my assessment of the situation. She must have grown up with a mother who lavished her with care and attention and never laid a finger on her. Veronica had an extreme personality – and that was why she resembled me.
The problem now was that the threat was larger than even what Hoffman and his followers were capable of manifesting. Veronica would be eager to sort that out because her primary concern was creating a safe Walser in which my father and I could live. That brief time she spent with him must have made a serious impression on her to go that far.
How could I convince her that we had the same aims and that combining our abilities would be for the best? She would refuse to go along with any plan that endangered me unless I had leverage over her. It was unlikely that a situation like that would arise again, and she might even choose to take a risk instead of submitting to what I wanted.
“So, Max is staying at the hospital until his brother is in the clear?”
I nodded, “That’s correct. They’re sparing no expense in trying to heal him, so the likelihood of the injuries being fatal is lower than it would be otherwise. Once they have stabilized his condition, Max will be coming back here.”
Samantha stared at me while I sat on the edge of my bed and unpacked some of my belongings. The gears were turning again. She had plenty of previous incidents to go on when it came to judging what I was planning on doing.
“You aren’t going to get involved in trying to find him, are you?”
Now that was a frankly absurd proposition. Why would an innocent noble girl like myself go to all that effort?
Samantha stood up and pointed my way, “And don’t give me that bloody look again. It doesn’t matter how hard you flutter your eyelashes at me!”
“The Goddess said it to both of us. There is no avoiding the fact that you and I are the chosen ones. She expects us to save not just Walser, but the entire world at that.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean we have to meddle in the business of those foolish people in the city. Why are you so convinced that this has something to do with what the Goddess said?”
“Because those foolish people have been doing foolish things! They have a collection of magically empowered lunatics blasting their way through the city and killing anyone they come across. If that doesn’t scream ‘potential disaster in the making’ then I don’t know what does.”
Samantha groaned and threw her hands up in the air.
“That isn’t what I’m trying to say. You’re only one person. You can’t be solely responsible for running from coast to coast, taking out bad guys and cracking skulls like one of those novel detectives that Claude loves.”
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“I don’t need to go anywhere. You’ve noticed this already – but trouble seems to have a terrible habit of finding us first. I will not be caught flat-footed after getting this far.”
“And for what? You’re risking your life for no good reason.”
“If I wasn’t doing this – then you, and Max, and Claude, and Adrian, you’d all be dead by now. You’re important.”
Important. Important to the future of this world.
“Important?” Samantha repeated. She chewed on my choice of words for several seconds without replying. When she did, it was obvious that she took it as a more soft-hearted idea than what I had in mind; “I didn’t realize you saw us all that way. You’re usually so cold, especially to the boys...”
It was not a misinterpretation worth dispelling. It was helpful if Samantha saw me as selfless. That was a personality trait she valued highly when assessing other people. She liked honest, forthright, upstanding and kind folk the most. Her family had espoused the positive benefit of all of those attitudes. She was the perfect underdog heroine. Nothing like me at all.
Yin and yang, light and dark, restoration and nihility...
“If you’re going to sneak out and try to be the hero again, then I’m coming with you.”
“Why?”
She struck at me with her most dazzling smile, “Because we’re friends, right?”
The jury was still out on that one.
----------------------------------------
Interior Minister Arnold Blatt had decided to grace the WISA head office with his presence. It did not take long for Veronica to get a picture of where the conversation had gone while she was away questioning Marco Fisichella about what he knew. She hung by the door to Frankfort’s office – where the debate was so loud that it could be clearly heard through the walls.
Frankfort was red in the face.
“You don’t get to give me orders, Mister Blatt.”
“All I’m saying is that arresting Sir Welt is in itself a step that compromises Walser’s national security! He has a tremendous amount of support in parliament, and what will the public think if this gets out?”
“It’s not my job to coddle the wider public. WISA is here with a mission statement that discriminates against no man! I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand the need to evenly apply the law.”
There was another problem. Blatt wasn’t supposed to know about the arrest warrant.
“When I first heard rumblings about what was going on, I believed it was too insane to entertain! You can’t march in and arrest a sitting MP without a very good justification.”
“I have eyewitness testimony from two active duty officers, documents, and statements from people involved, all of which provide ample probable cause to apprehend and question Mister Welt.”
To belabour the point Frankfort pulled those documents from the folder and spread them across the desk with a flick of her wrist. Veronica could hear them hitting the table.
“Would you like to argue against the evidence, Minister? If we don’t take action and nip this problem in the bud – then I fear that the consequences could be much worse than unsettling the public.”
“But-”
“Why are you so eager to empower those who use illicit means to attack you? Welt isn’t a concerned citizen, he’s an experienced lobbyist and agitator, who has now dipped his toes into the realm of criminal conspiracy. He’d be more than happy to take your head.”
“This is about moderation, Frankfort. Moderation is everything that we do – toeing that fine line between the two sides of the aisle. We are not establishing a precedent where the government can abuse WISA’s authority to arrest its opponents.”
“Then you can take it up with the judge who approved the arrest, not me.”
That was her final word on the situation. Blatt was frustrated, so he stormed out of the room and allowed her to have that small victory, but they both agreed that it was only the first round of what would become a long and arduous debate. Veronica stepped in to fill the gap.
“Trouble with the politicians again?”
“Honestly – they’re willing to dig their own graves!”
As Veronica assumed from outside the door, Frankfort looked flustered about the whole affair. She never sported this frustrated expression when dealing with her own agents but politicians had a special ability to rub her the wrong way. She counted her blessings that they so rarely visited the head office in person.
Due to the unique circumstances around WISA’s formation and history as the monarchy’s secret police, there was no singular person who held authority over their actions. There was a government oversight committee headed by the Interior Minister - but part of the Compromise treaty demanded that the newly formed WISA remain an apolitical operation with a consensus selection for their leadership.
Amazingly it was one of the few consensus mechanisms that didn’t produce endless gridlock in parliament. The parties would often stipulate their choices and hold an uncontested vote. Some Interior Ministers saw things differently. Blatt was one of those types, who acted under the tenuous legal theory that the Interior Minister was the one responsible for keeping them in line, even if their responsibilities in law didn’t name WISA as under their purview.
“Marco said that he investigated the matter on his own. He must have found evidence connecting Welt directly to the assassins.”
“He isn’t going to be forthcoming with it, though.”
“Maybe if you dangle a slight sentence reduction in front of him – he’ll bite. He seems like the type to do whatever it takes to get off easy. Not one of those two-bit gangsters who sell each other stories about undying loyalty...”
“We have to move quickly and arrest him soon. If Blatt found out about it then the press won’t be far behind.”
“What’s the risk of people becoming agitated?”
“At the moment it’s low, but Welt and his friends are more than capable of engineering circumstances to rile them up. It may be prudent for the police to release a statement instead of allowing those vultures at the newspapers to speculate on why he’s being pursued...”
This was all above Veronica’s pay grade.
“What about the other handlers?”
“They’re leaving us to it, and no, we haven’t had any luck finding our missing agent either.”
“I never knew Jones was so good at hiding. He was always the first to open that big mouth of his when someone became antagonistic.”
Bernard Jones. The name hovered at the back of her mind like a spectre. Where the hell was he even hiding? Every WISA agent had already been put on notice about his actions at the morgue. It was rare for compromised agents to last this long without being caught and hauled back to HQ for a friendly chat.
“His lawyers are probably knocking at the door of the judge right now,” Veronica said, looking through the window and onto the building across the road.
“They’re not going to have the warrant rescinded after the police’s testimony. They would be better off advising him to surrender at his earliest convenience.”
“As if an entitled fellow like him is going to do that. The entire point of this scheme is to defy the authorities. There must be an anti-government angle to this entire thing. Welt has always been interested in restoring the monarchy, that’s why he’s in the Restoration Party.”
“Do you believe that a handful of enhanced men and women could overthrow the government? It sounds unlikely to me.”
Veronica sighed, “You always say that I take the most pessimistic position – but I feel there’s a strong chance that it could cause major instability in Walser. The only blessing we can count on is that tensions between us and our neighbours are at a historic low.”
“That would quickly change if they felt there was a benefit to fighting with us. They’re like a pack of vultures circling above us.”
The monarchist parties hated stability. The recent periods where they found themselves out of government and on the opposition benches were not the profound disasters that they proclaimed during the run-up to the elections, and many citizens saw the fearmongering as undue. In their zeal to win – they had created conditions that were not favourable to them.
The longer this went on the less reason people had to fear voting for the democratic parties. They were demonstrating that they were no worse than the monarchists, and in most cases, they didn’t revel in their own corruption quite as much. Attitudes were being cemented as they wasted away on the wrong side of the parliament chamber.
Anything could happen in politics, and it often did, but it would take a serious shift in public opinion to reassert them as the dominant force in national government. The longer they waited the worse the situation became. Younger voters were inclined to vote for democratic parties, and two-plus decades post-compromise they were starting to become politically active.
Welt’s disdain for people having the power to steer the direction of Walser was not secret. He was often one of the most frequent contributors to that school of thought. He could be found slamming lecterns and giving speeches from podiums across the East Coast, all of which drilled down onto a specific set of themes.
Walser wasn’t what it used to be.
Of course, it was easy to assert that when you refused to grapple with what Walser used to be like before the Compromise was signed. According to Welt, it was a nation of gold-paved streets and endless opportunity. Whether he really believed that earnestly was up for debate. He would benefit monetarily and in terms of influence if the democratic reforms were rolled back.
Frankfort shuffled her papers around, “Lots to do and no time to do it in. We’re trying to stem the supply of ferdinol from reaching his affiliated businesses, which should hopefully keep them from conditioning and deploying their soldiers for the moment.”
“We’re still missing the bigger picture here, but I haven’t found any evidence that hints at what they’re trying to do. It may be an attempt to restore the Van Walser family, but what form will that goal take? Those demon-infused killers are tough, but still not large enough in number to fight the police, WISA and the military.”
“We are asking a lot of questions to the appropriate people. I’ll update you if we find testimony of note.”
Veronica turned to leave and continue with her own inquiries, but Frankfort called out and stopped her before she stepped through the door.
“Gladwell, I hope that you don’t harbour any positions that may compromise our working relationship.”
Veronica kept her eyes forward, “We’ve been working together for a very long time now. You know me better than anyone else. My only concern is creating a safer Walser, no matter where it leads me or what enemies I make. That’s all.”
But the question was not unprompted. Frankfort was extremely deliberate with her words.
“Even if those enemies were once your allies?”
“I mean what I said,” Veronica persisted, “If WISA stops acting in the interest of protecting Walser - then my loyalty may change.”
Veronica continued staring out of the door, unwilling to face Frankfort and expose any weakness in her answers. How was she reacting to what she said? The silence stretched on and on until she finally spoke once more.
“Even when Walser abused you? Trained you? Used you? You were one of those lost children. It would be natural to harbour resentment for society with that background. The other lost children do.”
“Is this leading to a point?”
“What would drive a woman like yourself, with those kinds of pure intentions, if you’ve already dedicated your life to service in our care? What did you see that was so worth protecting?”
“I’m afraid that it’s a secret, although I suspect that you already have the answer.”
Frankfort, for the first time in almost two decades, laughed at her response. It was subdued and dignified, but unmistakably her laughter.
“You know – it was reassuring in a way.”
“How so?”
“You were always an enigma to me. The perfect agent. Cold and efficient, and without any moral qualms. You executed every order I gave you without asking any more than what was needed. I couldn’t comprehend it. But now...”
“Now?”
“Now I can see that there’s more than just a ‘weapon’ beneath that outer shell. Perhaps another handler would be outraged at the deception, but I’m not them. Now I’m certain that you will follow through on what you’ve promised because you have a good reason to. Not for self-interest, or prestige, or a medal from the top brass.”
Veronica faced her again and kept her arms tucked into her lap.
“Do you remember? How did it feel?”
“How could I forget? It changed my life.”
Frankfort nodded, “Then I will not say any more. Let’s keep it between us. I do feel very foolish for not noticing it earlier.”
“You say I’m good at following orders, killing, torturing – but that? That was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, and I pray that it remains that way. And now it’s why I keep marching on.”
“For her.”
“For Walser and for her.”
“You could go and see them. I won’t tell.”
“The day I go crawling back there is the day I turn in my badge - if I even survive that long.”
“Stubborn to the end.”
“I’ve been keeping this up for thirteen years. I’m not going to change course now.”
Veronica left, her heart pounding at the inside of her chest like a hammer. She had made a grave error of judgement. She always strived to ensure that not a single living soul knew about Maria, but now Frankfort had figured her out. The studies she was doing in the archives, the way she reacted to her name being brought up, a perceptive shrew like Frankfort could put the pieces together, including the mysterious six-month sabbatical she took.
Frankfort was a career government servant. She joined WISA long after the rules and regulations were changed. She didn’t understand the sheer terror that the previous leaders utilised to keep their ducks in a row. The potential for information to leak out or for their loyalties to be compromised was unconscionable. They aggressively stamped out any such occurrences with lethal force.
It wasn’t only the agent who served the death penalty for such indiscretion.
A little voice in the back of her mind told her to solve the problem, to go back into that office and kill her before she could share it with anyone else, but her rational side won out in the end. There’d be a time and a place for tying up loose ends – but this was not it.
She kept her eyes forward and moved on to her next task.