The Agency I: The Pimp versus Russia

Those days I could not afford the luxury of eating out. In the past I could. But it was not wise to think of the past. For me it was best to be forgotten. Despite this forced way of thinking, I could not prevent myself from admitting I had taken care of myself well back then; I was not in want of much. I surely wasn’t in want of eating out. Now I was in want of eating out, of a car, of new clothing, of the simplest things that had not been problems before. Even so, I had made the right choice to become the person I now was. Or I wanted to believe this. And for all my self-admonishing to forget the past, I found myself standing in the kitchen thinking of it. Each task, each moment, each instance continued to replay itself over and over in my head.

Who was I fooling. I had made a mistake. But I had been wise to choose the lesser of two evils. Wasn’t it what the Humans always said, that it is best to choose the lesser of two evils?

Evils. I leaned over the stove, allowed my gaze to rest upon the yellow stalks of macaroni that shivered in the boiling water. The Humans did not know what evil was, as much as they believed they did. And perhaps neither did I. There were many things I had believed I had known and was able to understand more than any of my colleagues, and at the end it was I who had been the one to walk away. I could remember how my captain watched my departure from his office, his eyes knowing, his expression one of controlled disappointment. I could almost hear him say it: “You will be back”. It echoed in my chest now. I would be back one day. A year had passed since I had left Athena, but the gravity of what I had done was as intense as it had been that very hour.

They always said we would leave the agency the same day our souls left our bodies. And we had never joked about this. Some things could not be taken lightly. My gaze shifted to the fried chicken in the porcelain bowl on the counter, on the butter, the onions and other condiments and ingredients. Look at me; I don’t belong here. I frowned, shook my head, disappointed in myself. It had been my promise that I would not deny myself as I had done most of my life. I would not repress who I was to be accepted by the rest of the world. Yet I had ended up doing the exact same thing, all because I was too afraid to accept the truth. I should have been strong enough to withstand all the lies and the deceit that had made Athena their home, as surely as I had made that place my new life. Now I was living in fear. I folded my arms, feeling the growing heat that emanated from the stove. Someone had said a life lived in fear was a life half-lived. How true this was. Yet I was not alive now, and I laughed darkly at the thought. Having been trained to preserve my life and the lives of my targets, it was nothing short of ironic that I had taken my own life the day I gave over my guns. But I still kept the earring of profession in my left ear. I had been forbidden to remove it. Whether I was still employed or not, it could not be taken out, just as the identification earring in my right ear had to remain there.

I pinched the soft flesh in the crook of my arm to remind myself of who I was, and where I was. I was Sapphire Bright, and I was…well I had successfully pretended to be a Human for an entire year. And I would continue to pretend for many more. I would find my own way in the world, although I was now more lost than when I had discovered the stain that covered the agency and all who were in it.

I prepared my dinner and carried it to the sofa, the makeshift dining area. My drink was placed on a blue coaster on the small coffee table. VH1, MTV and Fuse were all showing reruns. At times my mind would wander to the past until I realized that the television had blurred, and the taste of the food was lost somewhere far away. Then, as always, continued the same old routine: I ate my dinner before I got tired of it. Then I washed the dishes, drank another tall glass of juice just for the sake of drinking it, and returned to the sofa again for half an hour before becoming royally annoyed with not doing anything. Then I would allow myself a slice of cheesecake that was always in the fridge. Only cheesecake, as if all others would be the equivalent of poison. Funny how the sight of one’s favorite food will cause one to rethink whether or not she truly should not extend her stomach anymore.

In the late evening I was sitting cross-legged on the cold narrow bed, using both the light from the half-shuttered window behind me and the yellow light of the lamp on the nightstand to illuminate the ads of the classifieds section of the newspaper. Locking myself inside my home was proving to be costly. I would have to find a job. No doubt whichever one I got in the future would be reported to the entire Athenian Escort Department, including my captain. It would be easier for them to monitor my actions when I was in the open. Over time they would reveal themselves to me, they would try to talk to me, to show me that I had become only a shell of who I had been. I would have to ignore them as much as I could. I smirked: I had considered it almost as if it had actually been an option. If they did not want to be ignored, then I could never hope to do so.

The doorbell chimed. My head tilted to one side, waiting to hear another sound like it to be sure that I hadn’t imagined it as I had countless times before. It chimed a second time.

My feet pattered down the stairs towards the door. I did not relish the feel of the carpet’s threads beneath my bare toes. I could have used telekinesis to float toward the door—it was how I functioned inside my home—but I assumed that whoever was on the other side was Human, and that Human was perhaps absently listening for footsteps. So I descended like a Human. I opened the white inside door, and gasped silently.

The one who stood on the doorstep did not belong there.

For a moment I did not know what it was that I was supposed to say. He was part of my past, a past I was trying to forget. I had been trying, hadn’t I? And it was right to forget, wasn’t it? The sudden paralysis did not stop my heart from freezing and sizzling. He always had that effect, and I had made sure he was none the wiser.

Orion was leaning on the doorframe, and was about to insinuate himself past the threshold. I was in danger of gazing at those eyes; I flicked my own on his dark blue shirt over which grey and black patterns crawled, a shirt that did not fail to hint at the tight muscles resting beneath. This was not helping. I looked further south. Dark blue jeans covered his long legs. Damn. Black sneakers. Always one to be trendy. I opened my mouth to speak, but Orion managed to beat me to it.

“What the—have you gained weight?” he asked.

“Wh—have I gained weight?”

A smile played at his mouth. “Or are you pregnant? Boy, you really made use of the year that got away.”

I recovered from the shock. “Am I pregnant? What the hell, Orion!”

He was already brushing his toned chest against mine, not as a gesture of love but to propel himself into my house. The nerve. His scent was the undertone within his cologne. It filled my senses. So much that I found myself trying to find the right thing to say and coming up with nothing.

Orion raised an eyebrow, looked above and around us. “I doubt I have to say this, but is anyone else here?”

“No.” I opened my mouth again, thought better of it, and said nothing.

He nodded and floated above the ground, up the stairs, and into my living room-cum-dining area. As he did so I could feel the adrenaline traveling through my blood like millions of sharp needles. This feeling was a premonition, the sensation that emerged only when something out of the ordinary was about to happen. Suddenly the air was charged and sharp, and what had been a cloak of depression was now an atmosphere of fire. Still, I maintained a calm composure. But it was quite taxing when all he did was land at my fridge and will the door to open. How could he be thinking of his stomach when we had not seen each other in over a year?

He pulled out the container that I had poured the surplus cheese sauce in and peered at it as if it were a jar that contained a fetus with two heads—or an alien. “This looks like vomit.”

“It’s cheese sauce. What are you doing here.”

“And here’s the desiccated macaroni. How long’s it been since you’ve eaten some of this?”

“Why?”

“I’d give you twenty four hours to fall like a fly from poisoning.”
“Haven’t even eaten it an hour ago.”

“ Yeah? Let’s see how you hold up in twenty four hours, then. I’ll take you to a hospital if you start sprouting gills or something. Ooh…strawberry yoghurt.”

“Ri, what are you doing here? Ri!” I said again while he made himself comfortable in my sofa. My eyes struggled to absorb the sight of his long legs crossing themselves comfortably, but I wouldn’t let them win this battle. He had a purpose here, and I wanted to know what it was. He couldn’t just waltz right back into my life like that, and eat my costly make-you-lose-weight-yoghurt on top of everything.

“How’s the year been treating you, pregnant and all?” he said. “Heard you’re unemployed.”

I sat on the arm of the sofa opposite him and rubbed my hands together. “Um-hmm.”

He watched me for a moment. The geniality was there no longer, and in its place were disappointment and annoyance. Then they were gone as suddenly as they had appeared, and he was focusing all his attention on willing his power to open the adhesive lid.

“I came here to take you back to the agency, so you can pack up your things and come with me.”

“What?” But I knew perfectly well what he meant. Athena wanted me back. Athena was a Gifted agency; its employees were people who had powers, all of whom had been discovered from almost every conceivable area of the globe by the agency’s recruiters one way or another. They had found me in Jamaica when I was sixteen and terrified of what I was. I had worked for them ever since, in the Escort Department, which was, as far as we were all concerned, basically heavy duty bodyguard work. After the fear of realizing what it took to survive in the business had subsided, I almost grew to love my job, I must admit, but a time came when I needed to get away from it all—the lies, the deceit, the deaths. And Orion—I had wanted to get away from the memory of him. Despite the fact that we had been employed by different agencies, he and his partner as well as my partner and myself had been paired to complete a task that had required more expertise and deception than usual. His presence on that last mission had been the deciding factor. I had to get away from him…I was feeling things that I would rather not feel for him. Seeing him now in my living room was sparking a hope that I fought to quell. I wondered at his task, because things didn’t sound right. He was not Athenian. He was an agent from Taurus, Athena’s nemesis of sorts. The two agencies did not see eye-to-eye, and it was only because the extremity of the situation that we had been made to work together on my last run. From what I had heard the higher-ups of Taurus and Athena were into some shady activities that had forced them to work together, and they had not wanted any interference from the other three American Gifted spy agencies. The details of the activities were on a need-to-know basis, also known as an if –we-tell-you-we’ll-have-to-kill-you-right-away basis.

Orion glanced at me. “Oh …you’re a little slow. Sapphire, it’s time to get back to work.”

“You are from a different agency. How is it that I concern you?”

He shifted in his seat with his trademark genial grin. “Glad you asked that. The agency that you’ll be working for won’t be Athena. It will be Taurus.”

Someone might as well have thrown a rock in my face.

“Captain White showed me your file—”

“My file? How could he get his hands on an Athenian file?”

“Don’t get your bra in a knot, Phire, give me the freedom to explain. The fact that we even have your file should be proof enough that they sold you to us. Rumor is Athena wanted something of ours, and we wanted something of theirs—you. I don’t know your value to us, or what you have to do with anything, but there it is. You’re ours now.”

He pulled out a pair of guns from the waist of his jeans, both Taurean, the fiery bull crest engraved in their handles, and handed them to me. Despite myself I took them. It must have been that fear that something would happen if I refused them, as if somehow the agency was watching us. I looked at him scraping the last of the yoghurt from its container as if everything was alright when it was not.

“They want you to come in tomorrow. Which means you have an hour to decide before we ride off into the sunset in my car—Aston Martin, by the way. Man, I love her.”

“They can’t do this to me.” The alarm was rising steadily. The weight of the guns seemed to increase along with my fear. “They can’t do this to me—can they? I left Athena; they don’t have the right to give me—to sell me to someone else.”

“No one really leaves an agency. Except through death.”

“Then they should check our damn contract. This isn’t a slave trade.”

“They get to transfer us to wherever they please. We are spies; it’s part of the job description.” Here he skipped a beat, looking at me almost searchingly. He concealed his thoughts. “So they can send you to Taurus if they see fit. Read the fine print.”

“What does Taurus want from me?”

“I don’t know. This is just a retrieval mission, and I found my target.”

“Come on, Ri…I—I have my own life now. Spy work is behind me.”

“Well it never really is, whether you want to keep that in your head of rainbows or not. Besides, you are Gifted. It’s your purpose from day one to help the less fortunate, to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Save the world, or whatever.” He rolled his eyes. Gifted agents hardly had the right to brag about honor and patriotism. His sarcasm almost caused me to roll my own eyes at the thought. “This kind of work doesn’t end for people like you and me. And even if you manage to hide away from Taurus the self-imprisonment you will impose on yourself would still eat at you and destroy you. And you’re a good agent, not like the overnight superstars that are getting admitted into the agency these days.”

“I don’t want this. I want my life back.”

But what was life? Who I am now, this is less than life. This is dying.

“That’s why I saved the best for last.” He leaned forward until I could see the light glinting in his violet eyes. His wide smile resurfaced. “Wonder of wonders, Phire, I’m your new partner! Isn’t this a dream come true for you? So many women are going to send you hate mail once they find out who my new partner is. It’s going to be like Flavor of Love.”

I stared at the guns in my hands.

I could not fool myself. I wanted to get back into the agency. I didn’t want to rest anymore. I didn’t want to hide away anymore. I hated being less than what I truly was. And who was I kidding? I didn’t want a Human job. I wanted the life I had felt at Athena in the midst of all the corruption, the sense of purpose, being involved in something that was more than myself, the adventure, the thrill of being the one to survive when others did not, all of it.

My heart knew the truth; during those last few months I had been stretched thin with all the jobs I had been given to undertake. There had not been enough strength and resolve to control my paranoia, my constant distrust of every Athenian agent, especially our administrators, people whom we worked for but had never seen before. My weakness had increased at a time when the administrators were allowing more agents to be killed to cover up something they had done, something that most of us could not discover, no matter how deceitful we had been to our employers and how hard we had tried to steal information behind their backs while trying to give them no cause to believe we were trying to find out their deeds.

It was our need to be seen as innocent before the ones who could take our lives that had caused to us to throw the heat on our colleagues; there were agents who had gone too far to know the truth, and to save themselves they had caused others to be placed in the line of fire. Each week agents were killed, always on a job, always for brittle reasons when the rest of us who heard were never doubtful of the thought that Athena had sent out agents to kill the ones who knew too much. And those who had narrowly escaped their deaths never allowed themselves to be seen by any of their pursuers, because if they were sighted, they were as good as dead.

I had heard fragments and had seen questionable actions both inside Athena and outside, while doing runs, and I had been making my own investigations with extreme discretion. Obviously I had not been discreet enough, because there were agents from both the Escort Department and elsewhere who watched me more than was necessary during those last few months. Then there was that last run, when I had been assigned to the other two Taureans along with my partner, Amethyst. I had not doubted that Athena had wanted to be rid of us before my investigations became a real problem. The fact that Amethyst and I had barely escaped with our lives at the end had been proof enough that I was right. Yet after a few days’ rest I could have dealt with Athena and her corruption as surely as I had dealt with all my enemies. If, after I was rested, agents had been sent to monitor my whereabouts and cause an accident that would result in the loss of my life, I would have fought against them. I would have done my best to murder them before they murdered me, and I would have done this without a second thought. Athena had taught me well in doing things without a second thought. I would have been an outlaw then, an agent worthy of death because I had killed my own without authorization. But I would not have cared.

The real reason I ran away from the agency was sitting right there in my living room. During my time of weakness, Orion was, I suppose, the straw that broke the camel’s back. He had proven himself to be the one I wanted, the one who had been in front of me yet could not be touched. He slid his tongue over the inside of the spoon with a victorious grin on his face, knowing I had already made my decision. Perhaps my growing anger was flaring through my eyes, anger at being the one to hide away with my tail between my legs for so long.

I would join Taurus. For a time I would be protected by Taurus, and I would be able to kill Athenians without being hunted by them because I was no longer Athena’s problem. Perhaps they would give up the chase because I did not know enough to give Taurus the sword to hold over their heads. These thoughts were full of black revenge, and although I was surprised by my own venom, I did not repress them, because the truth was that I despised fear, and I hated those who were able to instill it within me. For a year I had hated them, for a year I had desired revenge. But uncontrolled revenge had led to the downfall of many others. I would not let it be my own.

I looked away, took a breath and closed my eyes. “This isn’t Playgirl, Orion,” I grumbled. “You can put the spoon away.”

“This means you’ve accepted it then,” he replied.

I nodded. “But I don’t know for how long. If I can get out of this, I’ll do it.”

He leaned backward. His tiredness became apparent. Orion ran a hand through the glossy locks of his raven hair. “Lovely. I’ll show you our workspace and we can paint our nails and tell each other ghost stories and prank call our crushes.”

I smiled, snorted softly. “Of course.”

“Phire, you’ll be fine.” He yawned. “Stop being such a girl. Give me an hour to sleep, because I’ll be driving all those hours to base.”

I rose, headed for the bedroom to begin packing. “I guess you don’t want me to touch your car.”

“No way. You’ll never get to touch my wife.”

After he closed his eyes, I could not help but shake my head. Here we go again.