The Agency VI: Time: “Players, Remove Your Masks”

It has been a few months since my last entry, and for good reason, as many events have happened during this time, many things that caused us all to fall away from the ever-turning wheel of our usual lives. I say ‘our’ because this part of history in which I have been placed is not centered around me—not entirely. It contains many people, people whom I have taken a habit of calling the players, as all these events and discoveries seem to be both a game and a story. Each person is a player in this extraordinary story, as in my eyes everyone has a distinctive character with unique traits, habits, reactions and so forth, and each character has a different purpose, almost as if this attribution of purpose is deliberate, just as an author deliberately gives a unique purpose to each character in order for his story to be able to move forward until it reaches the end and is finished. It seems surreal, this story, surreal and frightening, frightening despite the love and the joy it holds because there is sadness weaved into it, along with hate, greed, malice, anger and destructive pride. With the good comes the bad, people say. I see that this is true. With the good does come the evil. And what a story of good and evil this has been, one that in my mind will never be forgotten because I am a part of it, and because although the days are now less violent, in my heart I do not believe that the story is over. Considering that I now know the answers to all the questions that had tormented me several months in the past, I believe that I could very well be one of the players with the power to end the story, a belief that is devoid of pride or vanity. I remember wondering many times whether my purpose was to be good or evil, because of actions I had taken to bring myself closer to the truth. The idea of being good and being evil I find is founded on opinion more than on anything else. Therefore half of the world may think that I am evil, and another half may think that I am good. Even the actions I am about to record will not give a definite answer. It might not sound sensible at first to say that one is both evil and good, but I probably am, and perhaps when our story is over I will be on one side instead of two.

This piece of history is remindful of a game. All these players (most of whom I had not known of until some months ago) have presented themselves with the passage of time and the hand of Fate. We have made ourselves known and have been made to realize the rules of survival. These rules are some of them simple, others more complex. Yet what matters is that one must know the rules in order to survive. At times I believe that our Sovereign made us without designing our end so that we would be the ones to design it ourselves by our actions and our choices, the very concept of a game. We defend ourselves, we search for and fight to obtain the advantage so that we can emerge victorious, or at least alive when the game is finished. Will more than one of us come out of it alive, and if so, will we belong to the good, or to the evil? Or will there be survivors from both sides? I do not know. And if it is only one of us who comes out of this alive, who will it be? None of us knows.

In the past I wondered the part I had been given to play where Orion Night was concerned. I now know that there are several answers to this question, some of which have already been made known to me by others, and by a different part of myself.

I suppose this sounds cryptic. My impatience tells me that I do not know where to start. But it is always best to start at the beginning. All the previous events have been divided into five parts, because there are five collections of events that have contributed to where we are now—where I am now. In all these events I have been made to realize the Sovereign’s involvement, as he was never absent, and his participation, though subtle, has caused many great things to come into existence. Had it not been for the hand of Fate, the one who works as the Sovereign would have her to work, then many of the things that have happened would never have taken place. In fact, were it not for her then I would have never been discovered by Athena. Consequently I would have never been sent to Taurus, I would never have met Orion Night, and none of the things that my presence has set into motion would ever have occurred. If Fate had not been instructed to intervene, then a whole world might have been destroyed. Yet at the same time, now that I have become involved I just might be the one to destroy that world. Who knows the Sovereign’s plan? We cannot; we are only the players.

But, as I said, it is best to start at the beginning.

I had taken a picture of Orion’s ring, yet even then I struggled with my conscience as to whether or not I should act upon it. On the one hand there was the matter of loyalty where our false friendship was concerned, as I was still his friend, and if he had been slightly evasive about the purpose of his ring then it was expected that his privacy should be respected. On the other hand he was always slightly evasive about the purpose of his ring; therefore it had to have something to do with who he was. And seeing as how I believed that I also had something to do with who he was, be it good or bad, I was in a remote way connected to that ring. If this was true then its secret concerned me as well. Both reasons were flawed, yet I held on to them, and for weeks this inward battle was what stayed my hand against taking action with the knowledge I already held. But I was not wholly consumed by the thought of the secret Orion was hiding, because there were other aspects of my life that forced me to give them my attention. One of them was Sparche Lucas, the woman who had all but forced herself into the life that Tristan and I shared.

Sparche Lucas was what people called ‘the perfect idea of a bad girl’. From birth the rebellious strain had been recognized in her actions; her tendency to shout or scream when she did not have her way with her parents, in the small things such as throwing her food on the floor when there was no reason to except for that of obtaining her parents’ attention, saying ‘no’ to whatever her parents told her to do and throw tantrums when she was forced to do it, stealing from other children at school without apology, killing insects and small animals whenever she saw them, bullying her schoolmates, threatening and carrying out the threats when other aggressive children would have been content to make threats because the smaller children would always comply. Sparche carried out whatever threats she made, which resulted in her transferal to three different prep schools, two different middle schools and two high schools. By then she had had several misdemeanors written on her record for small thefts and several assault cases, as well as felonies, all of which the police had never known because she had been smart enough to assume the guises of several other men and women while committing her crimes. Throughout her childhood the Humans who knew her wondered how it was that a child so small and who possessed such angelic features could be so troubled. Her parents, who were Gifted memory erasers, wondered this as well. The last state they had moved to was Nebraska , where Tristan lived with his family, and by then Sparche was only a few crimes away from being forced into a juvenile detention center, the equivalent of a prison. Of course the very idea posed a problem for her parents, as they were not Humans, and it would not have been long before the Humans at the detention center found out their daughter’s secret. Gifteds had such centers for troubled children, but the Humans already knew of Sparche and her bad behavior and if she were suddenly handed over to the Gifteds, queries into her disappearance would have been raised by the Humans. The parents themselves were not sure that Sparche could be handled in a Gifted facility but they knew they had to act. It was when they finally admitted the fact that she was more troubled than a troubled child at her age should have been that they forced her to be diagnosed by a doctor, one who they believed could tell them the answer they so desperately needed. The doctor believed that her genes each contained an extra Y chromosome, and this was responsible for her aggression towards everyone and everything else. There were some medical practitioners and psychologists who believed that serial killers possessed the capacity to kill with a more than average amount of ease because of the presence of this extra Y chromosome. Others called the presence of that chromosome nothing more than a foolish excuse for wrongful behavior. Sparche’s parents were not so sure about it being foolish. The father, William Sparche, had had a brother who had been as hostile and as destructive at her age as she was. He died close to his twenty-fifth birthday, beaten to death by other Gifteds whom he had picked a fight with, or so the witnesses said. They believed that their daughter was violent for a reason, the extra Y chromosome being that reason. By her fifteenth birthday Sparche had repressed some of her hostility, and this caused the parents to discard the choice to at least send her to a juvenile correctional facility, although it had never escaped their attention that she was now part of a gang of delinquent teens, herself being the only one who still attended school regularly. She sold drugs to an unwavering supply of students yet never took any of them herself, and the money was shared among herself, the leader of her gang and the drug lord that ruled the area. By the age of sixteen she was the gang’s new leader, then broke away from them to form another crew called Blood Thorns, a gang which consisted of and would only accept girls. It was at that age that she met Tristan Scott, and despite the sheer contrast in their behaviors and mannerisms, they fell in love, or so he told me when I forced him to tell me about her. Perhaps they were in love. I did not care to find out. Not then. She was soft and docile only when she was with him, and during the many times that Tristan tried to leave her, she had made it hell for him until he consented to be hers again. Her parents encouraged their friendship, as it seemed that he was the one who was keeping her tame, and he had many times helped her out of tight situations, most of which, had he not involved himself, would have ended with her death. Yet she never stopped, I had thought, and he had never stopped saving her. Tristan had told me once that she was misunderstood, that Sparche Lucas was a good person who had a tendency to make the wrong choices. One of those wrong choices, I then concluded, was that at after graduating from high school, she had chosen to be recruited into Durga, an assassin agency in Florida . Her parents were against the idea, but she had not cared for their opinion. It was only been a few days before graduation that Tristan had finally ended their relationship, because for all his belief that she was a good person who made the wrong choices, even he could not allow himself to be dragged down into the pit that she had been digging for herself, a pit of mistakes and bad choices. Tristan instead joined Taurus, wanting to find a different environment and one that was far away from Sparche Lucas.

She went willingly into her studies on techniques of assassination, and her trainers found no fault with her. There was no denying that she enjoyed killing and saw her missions as game-like challenges which she always wanted to win. The lives of Durga’s victims meant nothing to her, just as the lives of the animals and insects she had murdered in her childhood meant nothing to her, as they were all pathetic and meaningless, and each expelled life gave her a rush of exhilaration as if she was able to feel the passage of the souls as they flew away. Tristan remembered her telling him that things became surreal whenever she killed. Something deep within her was satisfied, if only for a short time. For her, assassination was the ideal career choice. She could kill, and she enjoyed killing. She did not understand her inclination towards death and murder, yet she did not hate herself for it, because she had been made this way; her childhood actions bore evidence enough. She cared nothing for morals and right and wrong. She cared for herself and for what her spirit needed. That was the simple truth. She became one of the most efficient assassins, and lasted much longer than many of her co-workers, because unlike them, her good conscience was as evil as the bad one.

It was her murky conscience that allowed her to kill Danica Dane-Lang, wife of Joshua Lang, a drug lord famous in Miami-Dade’s underworld. She was given the mission when her bosses had been hired by another drug lord called Eduardo Chavez who felt that his business was being threatened by Joshua Lang’s growing enterprise, as Lang was catching the attention of his regular clients while giving the police information on his actions for Chavez to be flushed out. Chavez wanted Lang to fear him, to cease his assaults and to leave Miami-Dade forever so that his market would have to go to Chavez alone. Killing Lang’s wife was the first step to making this happen, or so Chavez believed. Being a Shapeshifter, it was not difficult for Sparche to discover and identify a sequence in the wife’s weekly routine in matters outside of her home. She then obtained and created a replica of the woman’s car key. The crime boss’ desired style of execution was specific, therefore during the afternoon of the last day of Danica Dane-Lang’s life Sparche hid herself in the back of the woman’s car and waited for her to leave her local gym. When Mrs. Lang entered her car and shut the door, Sparche did not wait for her to start the engine. She shot her in the back of the head with a silencer and left a note addressed to her husband in the front seat. Then she left the car, a perfect replica of Danica Dane-Lang to confound the security cameras that were attached to the building. The deed was done, and Sparche received her pay at the end of the month.

However, Sparche had not known that Lang was a Gifted, therefore she had not known that her son, who was also Joshua Lang’s son, was also a Gifted. He was a Jumper, as his mother had been a Jumper. The man, Connor Lang, heard of his mother’s death when the rest of the state had heard of his mother’s death, while he was in his first year of training at Seti, an assassin agency in Alabama . Unlike Gifted spy agencies, Gifted assassin agencies will hire out their employees to murder other Gifteds, as they have no concerns about the destruction of Gifted lives. Still, the woman and her son had kept their true identities a secret, even from Joshua Lang, and the mother had chosen to live as a Human, a somewhat unwise choice. Sparche did not know that she had killed a Gifted assassin’s mother. Even if she had back then, it would not have mattered. Connor Lang knew it had to have been a Shapeshifter who had killed her once he had obtained footage from the security cameras of his mother walking out of the car when the autopsy reports said she had been killed around that time, as his mother could not have died then revived herself and gotten out of the car while somehow leaving her corpse behind in the driver’s seat. Although assassin agencies killed both Humans and Gifteds they did not allow agents to kill their employees or known family members of their employees, thus did Lang conclude that it was not a Setian who had killed his mother. When he found out that the one who had hired the assassin was Eduardo Chavez Lang paid him a visit and tortured him until he told him the name of the agency whose employee he had hired. Chavez was found dead that same night in a hotel room with a bullet in the back of his head, and the representatives of that hotel declared that he had never checked in and they had never seen him enter the building. Neither Joshua Lang nor Connor Lang was ever convicted, because, although they had probable motive, there were no incriminating fingerprints belonging to them on Chavez’ body. But Lang was not done yet. Through means unknown he secured information on the agent that had been assigned the murder of Danica Lane-Lang. He then found all he could on Sparche Isabel Lucas. When this was done he applied for and received leave from work, enough time to hunt her down.

Sparche was an exceptional assassin, yet it could be said that she found her equal in Connor Lang, a man who was just as bloodthirsty as she. Many times had he gotten close to killing her, finding her all over the world no matter where she went, and had even almost planted a tracking device on her clothing which, in every assassin’s eyes, would have spelt inevitable death. Yet through all this she had not known his identity and had never seen his face—until recently. During another close-shave combat with Lang she had drawn blood with a long needle she had used to try to pierce his heart, and when she had escaped she used the blood sample to find his DNA’s label. After killing a Setian, removing the skin of the woman’s palm, extracting her eyeball and placing it into a container of preserving solution she went into Seti in the guise of the murdered agent. Sparche used the artificial skin (that had been modeled from the skin of the agent’s palm) as well as the dead eyeball which she had placed into the socket of her right eye to pass through identification. Her true eyeball had been absorbed into her body, and would emerge once she had rid herself of the foreign one. She behaved as all the other agents in the department behaved, and was not suspected by anyone. She accessed the employee files, matched the DNA’s label to Connor Joshua Lang, and recorded all of his information. Having all she needed, she left the agency, then disposed of the eyeball in the same fashion that the body had been destroyed, by fire.

It was shortly after this that she called Tristan to ask for his help. Sparche knew that it would probably require divine intervention to kill Lang; with every day that passed he was proving himself to be a very formidable foe. He knew all her tricks, and seemed to expect most of them before she had even thought of them. Months had passed since Mrs. Dane-Lang’s death, yet her son’s need for revenge had not dissipated, as others’ would have. It had somewhat intensified, and Sparche was growing more than worried. She did not want to die. In fact, it was because Death now stalked her that she now understood the preciousness of one’s life. Now she understood why people appreciated it. They appreciated life because it could be taken away just as easily as it had been made. Sparche knew that if she died she would not return, neither did she know where her soul would go after death. If the Christians’ doctrine were to be believed, she was already damned and was living on borrowed time. This was what she had told Tristan when he had left me that night to hear what she had to say. She also told him of the plan she had been working on, one that she needed his help with. Once it hit home that she might not be able to kill Connor Lang on her own, she knew someone else would have to be hired to do it. She did not expect Tristan to kill him, as she already suspected that he would himself be killed if he dared to try. Besides, she did not believe that she wanted to kill him, as killing was now a hateful thing to her, a monstrous thing that was surely worthy of terrible consequences. But if she was left with no other option she would try to kill him.

Sparche knew of a black collar memory erasing agency called Colchus, one which would erase the memory of Gifteds as well as Humans. After the idea of memory erasing was first birthed by desperate Gifteds, it was then used in the following centuries upon the Humans and on them alone. It was never seen as right to erase the memory of a Gifted; that was never what memory erasing was for and using it on our own races was always seen as a type of corruption. Even the most savage of agencies, to retain their various ideas of honor and prestige, refrained from such conduct. Yet these were modern days and things had changed; more and more Gifteds cared nothing for prestige or honor. They cared only for the money that fell into their hands if they carried out their clients’ wishes. It was because of the growing lack of caution among the Gifteds that caused many of us to worry that soon the Humans would discover us like they did before, and they would in the future try to rid themselves of the Gifteds as they had done over one thousand years ago. Most of us already believed this would happen, and when it did, we would have to find another way to erase the Humans’ memories again. Sparche wanted to hire an agent to erase Lang’s memories of her so that he would not hunt for her anymore. The name of Colchus’ CEO was Corey Price, and unlike the legitimate memory erasing agencies around the world, he answered to no one and had a brittle if not nonexistent relationship with the heads of the Gifted agencies who knew him. If he did not have dealings with them, he avoided them. As for the assassins that several members of different agencies had sent to take care of him, none of them had done their jobs, therefore only some of those assassins had left him with their breaths still inside their bodies. Sparche was considering hiring Colchus’ services because they did not interview their clients as other agencies did, but worked under a no-questions-asked policy. However their cost per person was much steeper than that of a normal agency, and Sparche needed Tristan’s help to come up with the money in time to save her life.

I was furious when Tristan had said that he was considering giving her some of his savings to hire the Colchan erasers, and more so when he mentioned that she wanted him to accompany her there so if things became unfavorable he would jump her to safety. He did not need to do any of this, I told him, as she should be able to take care of the mess that she had thrown herself in. Like he said, in the past she had been digging a pit for herself and had been dragging him down into it. What, then, was different about the current situation? If he followed her he would get himself killed. Of course he did not want to see things in this light. She was still his friend, he told me, and he till cared for her. He did not hate her and had no reason to. When he had ended their relationship, he had done so as her friend, not as her enemy. Now she needed his help, and he was not about to abandon her on the grounds that his girlfriend hated her. Besides, he said to me then, my reasoning was both immoral and unfair, immoral because I was behaving as if he should see Sparche as something beneath him, as some sort of monster who could never change and could never be forgiven for what she had done. Everyone, he said, had the right to be forgiven, and no amount of condescension and personal hatred on my part was ever going to change that. My reasoning was unfair because I had murdered countless people myself, and spoke nothing of them afterwards because I had hardened myself against sympathy, therefore if I wanted to damn Sparche Lucas, I had better know that I would burn in hell along with her. And if Orion Night was in Sparche’s situation, he went on to argue, if he had been as heartless an assassin as she was, Tristan knew that I would have tried to save him without a second thought, and the idea that everyone deserved to be forgiven would not have escaped my reasoning. Her career was murder for money, I retorted, and my career was protection for money—there was a difference. Whatever killing I did was out of self defense or to protect my client. She enjoyed killing, she said so herself. There had to be a consequence for that. There was a reason that assassins had shorter shelf lives than spies…But the truth was that I understood every word he had put forward in her defense, because in my heart I agreed with some of them. Everyone, if they were truly repentant, deserved forgiveness, whatever their crimes had been, and as her friend, it would have been wrong of him not to help her, because despite how tough she acted in my presence Sparche Lucas was afraid that she did not have long to live, that although she now wanted to change she was out of time and would still be condemned because the powers that be would not consent to consider her small moments of regret but would remember her years of violence instead. My anger stemmed from the fact that he could be killed because he was trying to help her, and it came from other things as well: that that woman’s behavior reminded me of myself in an eerie way, a fact which caused me to wonder if his other ex-girlfriends possessed some or most of my traits. Did we share similar behaviors and similar-sounding voices, did we roll our eyes or look at people or pout or laugh or cry in the same way? Many times I wondered if he still loved her, because the look in his eyes, the softening of his features and the sudden despair in his eyes indicated that he did. Was she the one he truly loved, and was I only a replacement, a clone of the person he really wanted? I had thought that he was as close to perfect as a man would ever be. His actions were now proving otherwise. I ended the growing argument by warning him to leave Orion out of it because he was in no way connected to his and Sparche’s problem, that he had better reconsider his choice or risk my wrath, because my anger could only increase from that point onward. He did not mention Sparche for a very long time after that, and I never uttered her name during that time, as I wanted to hear nothing of it, of them.

As for Orion Night, he still did not know about the vampire that I had killed, and whenever I saw him (which was often) my mind would picture a scene in which the vampires find the vampire’s corpse and stand towering over it speaking among themselves, wondering who it was that could have done this to him in such a short space of time and how it could be that the unknown vampire had not revealed himself to them, because anyone who had killed their enemy had to have been their friend. Orion knew that I was not behaving as I normally would, that I was becoming someone he was not familiar with. He told me as much on his unexpected visit to my home. He had all but barged inside the house before demanding to know what it was that was wrong with me. Of course I told him there was nothing wrong, to which he responded by flinging his arm at our environment, at the lights in the ceiling that were shining on our heads, at the lamps that were on, lights that lit empty rooms when there was no reason for them to be on. He pointed at the radio whose volume had been turned up as loud as I could stand and at the television that was on and had been amplified to a level that equaled that of the radio. Why were they on, he wanted to know. Why was I wasting electricity for no apparent reason? Why was I behaving so distant at work? What was wrong with me? With a good amount of indignation I snapped that there was something wrong with him if he thought he could just barge into my home whenever he felt like it. He yelled that I had given him no choice because I wasn’t telling him anything. It was as if I had chosen to not be his friend anymore. In the spirit of telling him something, I told him that being in such a large house by myself was making me feel acutely alone. Orion pointed out that this had not been a problem before, during the several months that I was living there, and there was Tristan Scott to keep me company, wasn’t there? I couldn’t expect him to be there for me every time I needed him, I replied, that would have been selfish of me. Orion did not seem to have registered those words. Instead he was looking at me carefully. He knew without a doubt that I was lying. Who was I afraid of, he asked me then. When I didn’t answer he repeated it, now sure that this was the problem. I shook my head when an immediate answer did not present itself, then said that I wasn’t afraid of anyone. He was insulted that I would lie to him. I almost erupted into tirades of how he did not have the right to say that when he was keeping a walk-in closet full of secrets from me, but said nothing; that would have gotten me nowhere. He said he would spend the weekend with me then, so I wouldn’t feel so alone. He said the word with such a change in tone it was clear he wanted me to see that he didn’t believe the lie I had told him. He didn’t have to, I said, in fact he shouldn’t. He argued that he would and would I like us to fight over this because he was already in a dark mood. And what, I threatened, would Kathlyn say? It was here that he stopped and seated himself in my couch. He said that Kathlyn still asked about me from time to time. She wanted to know if he had ever met my family, if he knew the things I liked to eat, or wear; if he knew what games I liked to play, or the things that made me laugh, or the things that made me cry. He was not stupid, he knew that Kathlyn harbored some type of jealousy towards me, because I was his partner, one who was young enough, beautiful enough and compatible enough to take him away from her. Or so she believed. Even after quarreling and deciding not to mention it anymore Kathlyn would still release a sentence or two indicating that she had not buried the problem, and it was beginning to irritate him, but not too much, because a woman had the right to wonder about his friendship with his partner. It was the sensible, precautionary thing to do. But understanding this did not mean that he was about to put up with it. He told her that if she continued, her insecurity would cost them their relationship. Kathlyn did not like being told that she was insecure and said that she would prove she wasn’t if she ever had the opportunity to spend some time around me. And I was not about to try to spend any mount of time around Kathlyn Pierce. Not now, not ever.