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Julia could normally prepare herself to tackle any situation. If she were investigating a lead at a party in a dance hall, she would wear the ACME-issued high-fidelity earplugs. If there were to be bright lights, she would wear her prescription sunglasses. She heavily researched any new area before traveling and, in general, she tried to take many moments of darkness and peace alone before facing any high-stakes, stressful situation (as many of her missions with Devinaeux turned into.) This gave her the strength and fortitude necessary to complete her job to the best of her ability. But sometimes, she couldn’t be prepared for everything. She certainly wasn’t prepared for this.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What’s the matter, Argent? Are you not a fan of Spanish pop music?” Devineaux clearly was, as he was moving his shoulders to the rhythm of the live music projecting all the way to the parking lot.
“It’s loud,” she complained, cupping her hands over her ears. The earplugs only reduced volumes by five decibels, and were not enough to completely tone down the cacophony. Bright multicolored lights strobed from the stage and hit her right in her eyes every few seconds. She winced and looked away. It was too dark to wear her sunglasses. “I wish you had told me the meeting place was at a large live music festival.” If Julia had been plugged into Europe’s music scene, she imagined she could have foreseen this. It must have been highly advertised, because the crowd was enormous, a writhing mass of bodies leaping up and down under the sea of noise. It nauseated her to just imagine herself amongst the throng. Unfortunately, that was exactly what Devineaux proposed next.
“We’ve got to be on the lookout for any potential VILE members,” Chase said, like it wasn’t already obvious. “Our intel says that the exchange will take place somewhere here on the festival grounds.”
“Again, you really could have told me the exchange was happening at a music festival.”
“But if I told you, you wouldn’t have come,” Chase pointed out as he surged toward the entrance. Julia struggled to keep up with his long strides. A young woman was standing by the fence, vomiting.
She ground her teeth together. “No, I wouldn’t have.” She was torn between being flattered that Devineaux wanted her with him and being annoyed that he knew she would be miserable and took her along anyway. “I don’t appreciate vomiting from strangers nor bursting my eardrums nor LED lights scorching my retinas.”
“Ah, relax. This is fun!”
Fun for you, maybe, Julia thought. They showed their badges to the booth attendants and then they were within the fence’s borders. Trapped. “Why meet here anyway?” She had to shout to be heard over the din.
“Perhaps they are fans of J Balvin,” Devineaux postulated, looking over his shoulder at Julia so she could half read his lips. She shook her head. She didn't know who that was, but supposed it was the current singer. Julia appreciated the anthropological value in all kinds of music, even pop, but that didn't mean she had to enjoy being bombarded by it.
VILE agents weren't particularly well-known for their capability at blending in, but here at the festival, their garish costumes would hardly seem out of place. There were strings of beads, scanty clothing, and body paint galore. Julia didn’t know how they could hope to find them in all of this chaos. The two agents stuck out like sore thumbs themselves, though Chase had at least had the decency to inform Julia to dress in plainclothes. She would be mad as hell at him if she had to wear a suit on top of this mess.
“I’m beginning to think you just made up this ‘intel’ so you could come to a concert for free,” Julia shouted at Chase as she watched him dance his way through the crowd. A young guy bumped into Julia and spilled half his cup of beer on her. She yelped and jumped back, but it was too late. Her shirt was soaked through.
A soft hand touched her arm, and she whipped around, expecting to see a girl apologizing for her boyfriend’s drunken behavior. Instead, she saw a very familiar auburn-haired girl, who pressed a finger to her lips. Jules let herself be pulled through the crowd, away from Chase. The beer was slowly getting sticky where it’d gotten on her arm. She scrubbed at it with her other hand while they walked. Finally, they got to an emptier pocket where they could have a hope of a conversation.
Julia tried to keep her voice even, like she wasn’t both incredibly surprised and delighted at the thief’s presence. Carmen had her hair in a high ponytail, and was wearing a red tank top that showed a lot more cleavage than Julia could handle. The agent made very sure to keep her gaze trained on the woman’s grey eyes instead. “I don’t suppose you’re here to simply enjoy the music festival, are you?”
“I may have been a bit bored lately. I’ve been stalking one of my old classmates-” Carmen stopped and laughed at herself, though she didn’t do it in the same high-pitched embarrassed way that Julia despised about herself. “Stalking. Heh. Anyway, I saw she bought a ticket to this music festival, and my interest was piqued. I think she may be intercepting some stolen goods here.”
“My sources say the same,” Julia told her. “Though Agent Devineaux failed to mention we were going to end up at a music festival.”
Carmen must have noted the disdain in her features. “Not a fan?”
Julia felt herself flush, but maybe that was because she was much too warm from the body heat of the crowd. “I prefer a quieter Friday night.”
“Thick book, lamplight, and a cup of tea?” Carmen asked with a knowing smile.
“Am I that obvious?” Julia crossed her arms over her chest.
“Let me guess, your favorite animal is a cat?”
Before Julia could refute this statement, she was distracted by a flash of near-white hair in the crowd. The girl turned her head and some very familiar pale blue eyes widened at the two women before she slipped away.
They immediately gave chase, but Julia quickly lost Carmen in the crowd. She scanned fruitlessly for the characteristic red she wore, but all she could see were strangers. She suddenly felt disoriented and wasn’t sure which direction she had even run from. All of the people looked the same to her. Did the music just get louder? She was sweating profusely, so much that she couldn’t feel where the beer had been spilled. The hoppy smell remained, however, permeating her nostrils along with the rest of the alcoholic stench of the dancing crowd. A pink light flashed in her eyes and she winced and staggered backwards, but ran into a drunk girl who was standing with her friends.
“Hey, watch it!” the girl yapped.
“Sorry, sorry.” Jules stumbled away from her, but then just bumped into someone else. These people were closing in on her. She tried to keep threading her way in a random direction, hoping it was where Carmen had gone. Or, hell, she would be happy to see Devineaux too.
She kept her hands clapped over her ears as she trudged on. Someone blew a plume of smoke into her face right when she passed by, and her nose stinged and she started to cough and walked faster, but this meant she was making more accidental contact with sweaty bare skin and eliciting angry sounds from the strangers the skin belonged to. Too much. It was too much. She saw the fence in the distance between a few people’s shoulders as they danced. She made a panicked beeline. It was emptier back here, further from the stage. Julia grabbed at the fence to keep herself upright when she made it, but needed that hand to cover her other ear. She slid into a crouching position and tucked her face into her knees to try to block out her other senses as well as she could. Hopefully Devineaux or Carmen could manage without her, because she wasn’t moving for the next minute at least. She needed to stay right here, sound muffled by her own palms, eyes closed, nose breathing in the familiar smell of her fabric softener from her pants. But then her shirt was too damp, too much, too smelly, it was making her insides itch, so she said fuck it and peeled it right off and threw it onto the grass. She was wearing a sports bra, and everyone here was shirtless anyway. As soon as possible, after she calmed down enough to brave the crowd, she was going to find the exit. She just needed everything to stop for a little bit. She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t prepared.
After some time had passed, a gentle hand on the back of her bare shoulder startled her, and she uncurled herself to see Carmen’s familiar face, warped with concern. She had kneeled next to her on the ground. Julia still hadn’t taken her hands away from her ears, but she could see the other woman’s lips moving. Are you okay?
Julia’s immediate instinct was to wave her off, to say she was just fine, but it was very clear that she was not, so she just shook her head. Carmen took her by the elbow and they rose up together. Carmen jerked her head in a direction that Julia assumed was the exit, and again she let herself be led away, trusting in the other woman completely even though she knew she shouldn’t, given their respective roles.
Finally, somehow, they emerged into the night, free from the pen of the chain-link fence. In the relative quiet of the parking lot, underneath a dim streetlight on the gravel lot, Julia drew her hands away from her ears. Her cheeks burned as her mind stopped racing and she realized what a fool she had made of herself in her panic. What the hell did she do with her shirt?
“Did you find that VILE operative?”
Carmen shook her head. “As soon as I realized that I had lost you, I backtracked.”
Julia rubbed her hands across her forearms. Away from the crowd, it was much cooler. “You shouldn’t have done that. She spotted us. She probably warned the other agent and they got away.”
Carmen was frowning. “I’ll get her next time. More importantly, are you okay?”
More importantly? How was her little panic attack more important than catching a bunch of criminals exchanging stolen goods? This was all her fault.
Jules was suddenly very aware that she was basically shirtless in front of Carmen, and crossed her arms over her chest, flushing. “I’m sorry,” she started to stammer. “I just got very overwhelmed.”
“It’s okay, Julia. Hang on a second, okay? Stay right here.”
Carmen slipped back off toward the entrance, and in an amount of time that was suspiciously too short, she emerged back with a t-shirt. It was brand new with tags and had some band name on it. “I didn’t see what size it was, sorry.”
Julia pulled it over her head. It nearly came to her knees hanging off of her meager frame, but it was still better than before. “Thank you.” She couldn’t even look up at her. Her phone was ringing. It was probably Devineaux. It must have been ringing before, but she didn’t even notice.
“Is there anything else that you need? Water?”
Julia didn’t want to start crying, because this was mortifying enough. Unfortunately, her body had other plans. “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out between ugly sobs. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Julia. Do you want me to hug you?”
Julia shook her head. As much as she had embarrassingly daydreamed about such physical contact from the thief in the past, if she experienced any more touching right now, she would combust. She shook her wrists out and looked down at the gravel. When she was a kid, she could be entertained by gravel for hours. She loved to sit and pick out each dusty rock, looking for ones with fossil imprints. It spurned an early and intense obsession with Cambrian-period aquatic invertebrates, much to the bewilderment of her neurotypical parents.
She held the back of her neck and only snuck occasional glances at Carmen. “My favorite animal is not a cat. When I was a kid, my favorite animal was the Australohalkieria superstes. It was a halkieriid, an animal that was part of the Cambrian Explosion and was featured prominently in small shelly fossils of phosphatic limestone. The halkieriids were thought to be early progenitors of molluscs. They had spiny sclerites on them that often led them to be described as ‘cacti-like.’ It was thought that the Australohalkieria superstes specifically were covered with a thin organic skin. Despite being one of the most abundant of the halkieriids, it wasn’t named as a species until 2004. Oh, and another favorite of mine from the Cambrian period were the very first reef-building animals, a taxon of sponges called Archaeocyatha… well. I won’t bore you.
Carmen blinked at her slowly as she spoke, like a cat might. Julia stopped talking immediately and blushed when she felt the gravity of Carmen’s stare.
“Sorry, that was-”
“-amazing,” Carmen finished for her, a wide smile splitting her face. “If you weren’t touch-averse right now, I could kiss you.”
Julia was sure she’d misheard the other woman. “After I just ruined our chances to intercept VILE?”
Carmen shook her head. “Your safety is more important to me than some stolen diamonds. How are you feeling now, by the way?”
Julia shrugged and tried not to dwindle on Carmen’s statement too much, though it would certainly run through her head on a loop before she went to sleep. “Better. I should call Devineaux back.”
“I should get out of here, then, so he doesn’t have an aneurysm.” Carmen moved to touch Julia’s shoulder but stopped herself. “I’m serious, Julia. You’re amazing, okay? Be gentle with yourself.” And then she was gone.
Devineaux found her in the parking lot, and to her surprise, he was holding a small navy fabric pouch. He was panting and had a large bruise forming on the side of his temple.
“I managed to accost one of the VILE operatives and finagled this pouch from them!” he declared in triumph, not even registering that Julia was wearing a new band merch shirt as a nightgown. “I may have just recovered thousands in stolen diamonds.” He pulled apart the drawstrings and peered inside. His shoulders slumped.
“Well?” Julia prompted, already bemused.
“It’s marijuana. I got kicked in the face for a pouch of the devil’s lettuce.”
Julia patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s go home, Devineaux.”
---
Three days later, after arriving back at her apartment in England, Julia found a small gift-wrapped box addressed to her on her doorstep. When she pulled apart the ribbon and lifted the lid, she found inside, cushioned on a bed of foam, a fist-sized chunk of limestone with a perfectly preserved brachiopod shell fossilized in it. There was a small note, written in neat cursive.
Jules. It’s not a halkieriid, but I thought you might still like it. I liberated it from the personal collection of an individual who did not deserve it. You can do with it as you please. I loved hearing about your interests. I hope to learn more from you.
Julia stood there for a long time, reading and rereading the note to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. Never before had anyone asked her to speak more about the topics she was passionate about. Even Chase called them “boring things.” But Carmen Sandiego seemed to be genuinely interested in what she had to say, even after she saw Julia at her lowest, most embarrassing point.
She set the fossil on her bedside table so that she would see it every morning before heading off to work. Maybe it would serve as a reminder to herself. You’re amazing, okay? Be gentle with yourself.