"You have no idea what I can believe."
April 3rd, 1994
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The first time Jae-Seong killed a man was entirely unlike all the other times, save for one aspect: there were mountains of bureaucracy waiting for him at the end.
The interrogation room felt more cramped than it probably was, all concrete and glaring fluorescents with a steel table secured to its center. A large mirror — one-way, no doubt — took up most of the wall to his left. A genial, boxy-looking Frenchwoman that called herself Senior Agent Clarimonde was asking him: "Can I get you anything? A meal, some coffee, perhaps? You look like you could use it."
Silence.
"No? Nothing?" Clarimonde continued. "You'll need to be speaking if you want something."
Jae-Seong fixed his gaze on a point in space a meter above the agent's head, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He had nothing worth saying.
"Very well, then," Clarimonde sighed and slapped a manila folder on to the table. "Your file can do the talking for you. Let's see…" The agent made a show of flipping through pages, tutting loudly. "Jae-Seong Maxwell. Born in London, grew up in Los Angeles, second year of university on a sports scholarship, no criminal record of any kind… All in all, a normal, law-abiding young man." Clarimonde slid the folder across the table. Jae-Seong's mugshot stared up at him accusatorily.
"Which is why it is so strange that you vanished last February while on a trip to an art gallery with your girlfriend, only to reappear on the other side of the world months later, having murdered an assistant curator at the Stedelijk in front of several witnesses. Rather brutally, I am told. Were you having a grudge with the modern art?"
Another silence lengthened, wrapping around Jae-Seong's throbbing head like a venomous snake and biting quiet agony into his left eye socket. God, he needed a smoke.
"You'd never believe me if I told you," he rasped.
"I wouldn't? Look at the mirror for me."
Such was the abruptness of the command, so out of place it bordered on non sequitur, that he obeyed without thought. He turned, looked — and there he was. Jae-Seong appeared as pale and unfed as a hungry corpse, a poorly made wax model of his former self. His clothes were stained with browning blood and the left side of his face was a mess of poorly-applied gauze. It ached terribly.
It had been a long time since he'd last looked at his own reflection without feeling some dull pang of fear. Nearly as long since he'd looked at anything with two functioning eyes. His gaze continued to slide across the glass's surface and he saw — nothing. In the mirror of Clarimonde's seat, nobody was there. She didn't have a reflection. He turned back to the real table where the agent still sat, canines glinting in her slight smile.
"You have no idea what I can believe," she said, not unkindly. "Tell me what happened."
Jae-Seong did. And when he was done, Senior Agent Clarimonde offered him a job.
December 2nd, 1997
Berlin, Germany
They were sitting in a midgrade hotel room, passing around a cheap bottle of wine that Senior Agent Ivanov smuggled in when Agent Sitko said:
"This is shit, right?"
Jae-Seong sipped at the bottle and eyed it consideringly. "It's not so bad."
"I wasn't talking about that— the wine is fucking terrible, though, you just can't tell because you are American and don't have any taste."
"I take it you don't want more?"
"I never said that." Sitko made grabby hands at the bottle, as if she were four years old instead of thirty-four. "Give it here."
Ivanov said, "You were in the middle of complaining about something."
Sitko took a swig and, gesturing theatrically with the bottle, said, "Yes. I was complaining about— what was it —about work. Work has been shit."
"Shit how?" Ivanov asked.
"Ignore her," said Jae-Seong. "She's just pissy she didn't get to do much this time."
"I don't get to do much every time!" Sitko exploded. "Neither of us do!"
"I wish I could say the same," Ivanov chuckled, "considering the demands this job has made of me."
"You don't count," Sitko grumbled. "You're a senior agent, nearly every job you do is a kill mission. Nearly every job we get is to make scary faces at Greens until they promise to be good little girls and stop making reality their toy." She slumped back, boneless. "This was the first real action I've seen in five months."
Ivanov raised an eyebrow, mild and full of judgement. "You wish we spared fewer Greens? Most civilians under the veil already think killing is the only trick the Coalition knows."
Sitko scrubbed her face with her hand. "No, just… I'm a soldier, not a social worker."
"Yeah," Jae-Seong sighed. His head felt like it was full of dark, sloshing water — through it, the truth flowed too easily. "This isn't exactly what I signed up for."
"Oh?" Ivanov placed the empty wine bottle on the floor with a thunk as weighty as his placid gaze. "And what did you sign up for, Agent Maxwell?"
October 11th, 1999
Albanel, Canada
Jae-Seong sprinted through the fairyland as it disintegrated around him. Clouds raced through a cotton candy sky like a time-lapse wound up to its fastest speed, whirling about a pair of emerald suns that flickered intermittently like faulty light bulbs. On the ground around him, flowers were retracting into themselves, regressing into green shoots, then seeds, then nothing at all. There was a great and quiet howling, the drawn-out dying gasp of an exsanguinating dream.
Streaked through it all, gilding the borders of the horizon and running along the angles of things, were little cracks. Flaws. Minute fissures in the boundary between this world and reality. They'd been there well before this ongoing collapse, leaking ontological waste into the surrounding environment and alerting the Coalition to the handiwork of a rogue Type Green.
Something grabbed hold of Jae-Seong's foot, nearly sending him tumbling. He looked down and saw that it was the dissipating grasses — what little that remained had reached up in a sudden burst of growth to clutch him.
"Help us," whispered the grass, the sky, the entire damned pocket dimension. "Our dreamer is killed. Our walls crumble. We are unmade." A little crystalline tesseract was forming at Jae-Seong's feet, gossamer-delicate, radiant. "Please. This is the most enduring piece of ourselves. Take it. Hide it. Protect it. Let something, anything good come from this. Please. Please."
Jae-Seong inhaled sharply, hesitating, stomach coiling. The tesseract was beautiful — but he was well-acquainted the sort of horror that could be hidden beneath such beauty, shrouded by light. Ancient pain swelled and bubbled in the space behind his false eye.
"Please," the fairyland moaned.
Jae-Seong twisted his boot free and brought it down hard.
February 23rd, 2001
Eurtec
After a few blissful moments of nonexistence, a voice came to Jae-Seong and said, "You look awful, Maxwell."
Jae-Seong remembered he was a person and looked up. Senior Agent Clarimonde gazed back at him, impassive; she hadn't aged even a minute since the day she'd recruited him. For a moment, the past seven years felt like some hazy dream, as though he were still in that 1994 interrogation room. All he had to do was reach out and this would all turn to colored smoke and float away.
The hospital room was stuffy with the scent of antiseptic, the low drone of monitoring equipment. In the bed, Ilyana Sitko was small and pale and shattered. With the blood cleaned up, she seemed an empty eggshell of a woman. Everything else had been scraped away.
"What are her chances?" Clarimonde asked.
"She's not going to die," Jae-Seong said heavily, slumping back down. "But we don't know the full extent of the damage, yet. She'll never be a field agent again."
"It could be worse."
"Yeah." She could be dead like the rest.
Silence reigned, save for the murmur of activity beyond the door.
"Agent." Clarimonde's voice was utterly dispassionate. "The thing about our line of work is that it's exceedingly difficult to teach. At best, we can educate you to neutralize Type Greens before they start bending reality. When you put someone in a space where the definitions of "up" and "down" are constantly changing, training becomes largely irrelevant — you simply are able to adapt in time or you aren't. And sadly, most people belong to the latter category."
Jae-Seong ducked his head, hands knuckling white around the edges of his chair. "I can't tell if you're here to console me," he bit out. "Or if you came to tell me that nearly a dozen of my colleagues died because they didn't have my— my aptitude."
"Maxwell. Jae-Seong. Look at me." He looked; she was as lovely and remote as the stars in the sky. "I'm not here to make you feel better. I don't have that right. I can only be honest with you."
"Then why are you here?"
"To inform you of your new duties. You've been promoted, you see." Clarimonde smiled mirthlessly and extended her hand to shake. "Congratulations, Senior Agent."
April 5th, 2005
Cleveland, United States
Morning light filtered through the piecemeal roof of the bombed-out house.
"Is he dead?"
"Uh, yeah," Agent Krupin toed the smoke-charred, blasted corpse, grinning wryly. "I think it's dead."
"I've seen Greens shrug off injuries worse than this," Jae-Seong snapped. "'I think' won't cut it in this line of work. Get a Hume reading."
Ignoring Krupin's stammered apology, Jae-Seong watched the corpse intently. When one could wrap the fabric of the reality around their little finger, death sometimes was more of a suggestion than a rule. This Green had been a particular pain in his ass, a twitchy bastard with a talent for rapid regeneration of organic tissue. Recovering from the effects of twenty-five kilos of explosive, hopefully, had been beyond even his considerable abilities.
Krupin's Hume detector went blarp and Jae-Seong drummed his fingers against his holster impatiently as the agent struggled to make sense of the readout. Why did he always get saddled with the rookies?
"Humes are stable and at baseline levels. We have confirmation that the target has been neutralized, sir," said Agent Krupin, who had evidently remembered his place in the chain of command.
"Brilliant." Feeling tension ebb out of his back and shoulders, Jae-Seong lit a cigarette and took a long drag. The smell of smoke intermingled with the greasy stench of cooked flesh; Krupin looked faintly ill.
"What next, sir?"
Jae-Seong took another lengthy drag, exhaling bulbous rings. He could already see the rest of the day stretch out before him like cobblestones in a well-worn path: transporting the body, debriefing, paperwork, secondary debriefing with Krupin, more paperwork… Then they'd tell him about the next sorry motherfucker he had to kill and he'd start the whole thing over again.
"Sir?"
He needed a vacation. Or a lobotomy. Or a job that didn't make him feel quite so much like shit.
Bleedle-eedle-eet! Bleedle-eedle-eet!
Suppressing the urge to sigh, Jae-Seong pulled out his mobile phone and checked the display. Someone was calling on a high-security Coalition line, but it didn't say who.
"Agent Maxwell speaking."
The voice on the other end of the line was toneless, almost robotic.
"Identification code please."
"Sure, uh—" Jae-Seong glanced at Krupin, who definitely didn't have the clearance to hear it. "One second." Gesturing at Krupin to stay put, Jae-Seong quickly made his way out of the ruined house and into his sedan in the driveway — the most secure space he could find on such short notice. "My code is California-Thule-Bradley-Zero-Five-Nimrod-Sannikov-Seven-Seven."
"Confirmed. Transferring you now." There was a pause, a low tone, then a nearly imperceptible click.
"Hello, Agent." The voice was calm, precise, and impeccably British. He'd heard it several times before, but only in passing and never directed at himself. "My name is Coda. Do you have a moment to speak?"
Yes, Jae-Seong knew this voice, this name. Coda was the title for the GOC's head dispatcher and quartermaster, right hand to D.C. al Fine herself. Jae-Seong knew this — and now he knew the sensation of cold sweat beading on the back of his neck. People like Coda didn't contact individual agents for no reason.
"Yes sir, I can speak," said Jae-Seong. Was "sir" the right word? Coda's voice had a certain androgynous quality about it, making it difficult to discern its source's gender over the phone.
"Lovely. First, I need to confirm something: is it true that you have experience in dealing with anomalous artwork?"
"Yes sir. The circumstances of my recruitment involved a notable anart case, so I tend to get picked when Type Greens act out in that field."
"Are you confident in your ability to contend with anomalous art?"
"As much as anyone can. Anart is extremely unpredictable."
"Quite right. I expect you're in your vehicle? Start moving towards the airport."
"Yes sir," Jae-Seong said and put the car into drive. "Who will I be neutralizing?"
"That," Coda sighed, "is precisely the crux of the matter. Neutralizing your target isn't the issue, Agent. We know how to get him dying just fine."
"I don't understand."
"The problem is," said Coda, "he won't stop dying. And when he dies, countless lives are at risk of going with him."
Jae-Seong's lungs were heavy with smoke and resignation. He breathed it out and said, "What do you need me to do?"
