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Dr. Loid Forger, a quite difficult man to catch off-guard, very nearly had a heart attack. There in the mailbox for 128 Park Avenue, nestled between some direct mail from the National Unity Party and a flier for an overpriced restaurant, was a large, hand-made envelope bearing a single word in bold letters: “TWILIGHT.”
Don’t panic, he thought to himself. Part of a spy’s job is being able to adapt when things go wrong. If he’s been made, finally, and it meant the end of his current assignment, it would still be the crowning achievement in the most storied career in the history of espionage. Well, not “storied,” per se, because part of his job was that there not be stories about him doing his job, but if he were worse at that part of the job, then there would be stories about him being good at the rest of the job. For ten years, he’d played the part of the good doctor, loving family man, and pillar of the community, all the while worming his way into the upper echelons of the Ostanian halls of power, feeding invaluable intel to the West. If this meant the end, so be it. Even with all the ties he’d made in his role, extractions were such second nature to him he was confident he could be back in Westalis before midnight, even if the entire SSS was chasing him down.
It would mean abandoning his family. His “family,” he reminded himself. As someone who lies constantly and occasionally kills people professionally, he had a rather solid handle on his conscience, and had little trouble silencing it, should the cause of world peace demand dirty work, yet this thought twisted in his heart like shrapnel. He was the only father Anya had ever known. It was clear she loved her adopted parents with all her little heart. Even now, in her aloof, bratty teenage years. She would still have her mother, of course. Yor Forger, neé Briar. Her “mother,” he reminded himself. Surely she wouldn’t simply abandon her...as he was. No. If he faked his death, as a widow she would still enjoy the same status as a married woman, immune to the suspicions leveled at the unmarried, but she would have to stay with Anya to maintain the ruse, right? And besides, she seemed to genuinely enjoy the role. She was genuinely affectionate and fiercely protective of their young charge, for which he was deeply grateful. Their fake family fulfilled their roles so well.
That was the first second’s worth of thoughts that passed through the trained mind of Agent Twilight when he saw a letter in his mailbox addressed to his codename. In the second second of our story, he organized his thoughts somewhat better. First, this cannot be from his superiors - communications from WISE always took the form of encrypted messages hidden physically in something unobtrusive; under no circumstances would they present him with a missive advertising him as the spy most wanted by Eastern counterintelligence. This had to be from someone else. Franky, maybe? No. Franky could be eccentric and self-serving, but as an informant his professional code was second to none. He’d gripe and moan and generally be a handful, but he’d never in a million years risk burning one of his contacts in the intelligence community, foreign or domestic.
That meant someone knew his identity and he didn’t know who. The State Security Service was the next obvious culprit, but he could be reasonably certain it wasn’t them, not least because he wasn’t already arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or dead. His brother-in-law Yuri worked for the SSS as a spy hunter, a fact that cost Twilight a great deal of peace-of-mind, until Agent Nightfall, whose civilian identity worked alongside his, was arranged to be Yuri’s wife - in so doing, becoming the West’s foremost source on Eastern counterintelligence. Fiona Briar, neé Frost, was the point of a spear that pierced the heart of the East’s spyhunting apparatus; if anyone in the SSS was close to discovering any Western assets, they could be reasonably confident they’d know about it. That left...fuck all, basically. Twilight mentally cataloged a few dozen previous contacts who’d have reason to hold a grudge, as his long career in espionage had left a harrowing trail of dead men and broken hearts. We don’t need to detail them all at this juncture; instead, let’s move on to the story’s third second, first.
He resolved to examine the letter personally before submitting it to headquarters for further analysis. With a sequence of motions no observer could have noticed, Twilight ceased to be a man peering into his mailbox and was instead a virtually identical man who happened to be wearing gloves while doing so. Through a similar act of legerdemain, the offending document found itself between two larger items of mail addressed to Dr. Forger specifically. As he trudged up the stairs to the Forgers' apartment, he considered what information he had already gleaned from it. He didn’t detect the smell of any explosive, toxin, or nerve agent, and the acid tests woven into his shirt cuff further indicated the absence of chemicals beyond the power of his trained nose to sniff out. Of course, if someone wanted to poison him through the mail, they could add it to mail that didn’t advertise that he’d blown his cover. The envelope was handmade, using the brand of typewriter paper used by the hospital where he worked, until they switched brands three years ago. Noticable discoloration and foxing indicated the paper was around six years old. The letters were hand-stenciled using a common brand of black marker.
Stepping back into the apartment, he distributed the mail amongst his family. Loid, Yor, and Anya were very different people in some ways, but they shared the quality of being dorks who get a little bit excited when the mail comes. Anya in particular was getting to be the kind of person who orders a lot of crap delivered just for the fun of getting to open packages. Plenty of stereotypically girly stuff, along with materials for her studies of course, and occasional novelty items reflecting her ongoing love of spy fiction. He was happy to indulge her; he could afford a fairly constant stream of knickknacks on a clinical psychiatrist’s salary, though in point of fact any gift he got her was ultimately paid for by Western taxpayers.
He made an excuse to retreat to his personal bedchamber, mentally chiding himself that mentioning doing so was rather more obvious than merely doing so without saying anything. Was he rattled, or getting sloppy after so many years on the same assignment? It was true the job had been much easier these past few years than it had ever been. To all the world a loyal and steadfast but otherwise throughly unremarkable member of the Unity Party leadership’s close-knit circle of esteemed supporters, he had been able to furnish the West with more intel on the party leadership than they had staff to fully analyze; what’s more, the occasions when he was called upon to thwart some circle of terrorists or gunrunners on top of his other duties were becoming fewer and fewer between. Other than presenting Handler with a weekly dossier and expense reports (this week, Anya wanted the new black sequin purse from Victor Bruce, a brand her bourgeois boon companion Becky had recommended, as well as an Apache Revolver; she got the purse and settled for a new knuckle duster - she had a collection) he really was just as he appeared: a good doctor, a family man, a pillar of the community.
After donning some more robust PPE, he laid the envelope on a velvet watchmakers’ cloth on his writing desk, and propped a pyrex magnifying glass over it. He took his bomb-diffusing kit out from the false bottom of his desk drawer and got to work: slowly disecting the envelope with wire cutter and tweezers, looking for any sign of anything untoward. He failed to discover anthrax powder or any concealed electronics. What he did find was a letter; the message used a code unlike any employed by WISE, but fairly simple to decipher. It read as follows:
“My Dear Twilight,
First, let me say you have no cause for alarm (”It’s a little fucking late for that,” Twilight thought, loud enough it gave Anya a start two rooms over) - you have my assurance that I and my organization wish no harm to you, your family, or your mission. Quite the opposite, in fact. Your secrets have not been divulged to any parties who do not have your best interests at heart. Be reassured, furthermore, that my knowledge of your identity is not due to any failure or professional negligence on your part. I simply have access to ways of knowing things against which you had no way of knowing how to counter.
Obviously, I understand such reassurances from an anonymous writer amount to little, but as evidence for their veracity I am able to point to the long period of time during which I’ve known of your activities - the time is not yet come for me to reveal exactly how long I’ve known, but in all the years I’ve followed your career I’ve never once allowed your secrets to be revealed outside my own inner circle. Indeed, as you shall see, I’ve been providing assistance all this time, and asking nothing from you, in your capacity as a spy. Until now, that is.
I write to you now because I believe it is time we became better acquainted, both so that I can be of further help in your mission and so that you can help me with my own goals. I know you’ve heard the talk of bringing Operation: Strix to a close, as some believe you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns in terms of the intelligence you can provide - you’ve already done so much, the thinking goes, there’s little more to discover, and your considerable talents would be better-used elsewhere. You and I both disagree with this sentiment. However, to satisfy those who feel your current assignment has run its course in terms of the value it provides, I can provide you with further intelligence via my own organization. I believe we have much to offer a man in your position. For one thing, I would be happy to see your mission continue indefinitely, as I have a great fondness for the family you have built, even if you continue to see them as an instrument of your mission, and I have no desire to see your career come between the Forgers.
At the same time, I believe you are in a position to assist me with some endeavors of a personal nature. If you are amicable to this arrangement, you can reply to me by depositing your answer in the waste receptacle at the south end of your block around 5:15 in the afternoon, and I will be in further contact with you shortly.
You are free of course to share this message with your superiors, I cannot stop you from doing so. There are two major reasons, however, you may wish not to do so. First, if you show it to Handler, and knowledge of this security breach propagates up the command structure, it will cause an utterly un-justified lack of faith in you, in her, in Operation: Strix and WISE in general. There will be a fruitless molehunt that will at best waste precious time and resources, at worst result in someone innocent taking the blame. Again, let me reiterate: my knowledge of your identity and your organization’s operation is not due to any professional failure on your part. Handler, if you’re reading this, please be kind to Dr. Forger. Second: once I’ve fully explained the situation to you, you may wish to keep the matter private, and not needlessly alarm the higher-ups.
Apologies for the abruptness of this message,
Yours,
Ketchup Bomb
“’Ketchup Bomb?’” Handler asked, amused in spite of herself.
“That’s the part that’s most alarming,” Twilight said.
“Do you recognize the name from somewhere?”
“It was the first year of Operation: Strix. Remember the incident where student radicals attempted to assassinate the ambassador with bombs strapped to trained dogs?”
“That’s right. You kept one, as I recall?”
“Bond served our operation with distinction for almost nine years, yes. There was one detail of the incident that was glossed over somewhat in the reports.”
“Go on.”
“As we were pursuing the students, we encountered a room that had been rigged to explode. I and another agent would almost certainly have died, had we not received a warning. Someone had left an extremely crude drawing of a bomb on the door to the room, using ketchup.”
Handler sat up straight. “That’s right, I remember we didn’t know what to make of it. I think we assumed at the time one of the students must have had cold feet about the bombings, and tried to help us without exposing themselves.”
“Yes. The obvious interpretation here is that Ketchup Bomb is taking credit for that. Even if that’s not true, it means they’re privvy to highly classified and very obscure details of our operations going back to the very beginning of Operation: Strix; and if they are indeed telling the truth - someone was there without our knowledge, who knew who we were, it essentially means we’ve been penetrated this entire time: they’ve been operating under our noses and we had no idea. Our worst-case scenario: they know everything about us, and we know nothing about them.”
Handler leaned back. “It may not be quite so dire as you say. They know some things about us, definitely, but they may be trying to socially engineer us, leveraging what they do know to appear to know more than they actually do, in hopes of getting us to spill more information to them. Furthermore, the fact that they’re reaching out like this indicates they’re not all-powerful. For all their knowledge and reach, there’s something they want from us they can’t get on their own.”
“How do you want to proceed?”
“How do you want to proceed? You’ve more than earned a measure of latitude on the operation, and I trust your judgement.”
Twilight closed his eyes. “We should play along for the moment. And for now, I’d prefer if you could sit on this information. I don’t know why they suggested I might want to keep it from you, but there’s a plausible scenario where this is some sick prank by a disgruntled colleague, and when we find out who it is we may want to give them a brutal scolding but not let their career be destroyed and ours along with it. I think Ketchup Bomb is right about the molehunt being a waste of time; I don’t think we want to make a lot of waves right now. I would also like to request additional security for my apartment.”
“Done. Keep me appraised, and good luck.”
Thus, at 5:20 PM the next day, Dr. Loid Forger almost had his second heart attack. Having deposited a perfunctory reply in the affirmative as instructed, he arrived back at his apartment only to discover an envelope had already been taped to the front door - an envelope sealed with a cute sticker of a ketchup bottle.
He snatched the envelope and dashed back outdoors like the end of The Usual Suspects, looking about wildly for whoever the fuck could have placed it there.
“Has anyone been in or out of the building?” he screamed into his shirt collar.
“Not in the last half-hour,” a fellow on the rooftop across the street replied, into one of the pigeons to which he tended.
“Did anyone touch the garbage?” Twilight asked.
“Not since we started observing,” said a homeless gentleman down the street into a dented can of beer.
With somewhat less caution than shown to the previous missive, Twilight tore open the envelope like a bag of chips. The note inside read simply “Check the bottom of the trash.” He dug through the mass of paper cups and fruit peels before encountering a fireproof bag with a simple luggage lock on the zipper.
“Papa you look like shit,” Anya observed as Dr. Forger trudged through the door to the apartment, then went back to polishing her brass knuckles.
“Did you have a rough day at the hospital?” his fake wife asked with genuine concern. “I can cook tonight if you’re tired.” This elicited a “Noooo” from Anya.
“I just had to run a bit to catch the cable car. I am a bit tired though, how about I take us out for dinner tonight?” This elicited a “Yaaay” from Anya. “Just let me take care of some notes from work and take a shower.”
In the privacy of his room, he picked the padlock. Inside was, again, no anthrax, but a manilla folder containing a stack of documents an inch thick. His eyes widened slightly. The documents were psychological profiles of prominent Ostanians, starting with Donovan Desmond, the former head of the National Unity Party and primary espionage target of Operation: Strix, as well as members of his family, household staff, and other prominent figures in business and politics and their families, etc. Almost a hundred in all.
He took a second to flip through the pages, memorizing them as he did so, then began analyzing what he’d read. Each figure was profiled intimately; the writing style was informal, not formatted in the manner a WISE analyst would present the information, nor any intelligence agency with which he was familiar. Some of what he read was corroborated by data gathered by WISE, including facts he’d ascertained personally; some of it was impossible to confirm: the author wrote confidently and extensively on their subjects’ innermost thoughts and feelings, secrets and habits of mind. While it was entirely possible they could be making those parts up, what he read was convincing. There were several details that no one at WISE had suspected, but in retrospect made perfect sense, such as Donovan’s wife having extremely mixed feelings towards her youngest son, Anya’s classmate Damien. She had been previously noted as having certainly erratic behaviors, and the story the profile told about how those feelings came to develop jived perfectly with what WISE had thus far known. The author was either a mind-reader or the best liar in the entire world, and either one could be unthinkably dangerous.
He turned the folder over and his blood...well, he was already about as cold-blooded as a man could be, but his blood ran a smidge colder. A simple message was written in black marker: “Underside of Post Office Box at north end of block - cipher is answer to next week’s Anyagram.” He spoke again into his lapel “Am I clear to jump out the window?” “Have at,” replied the long-suffering pigeon-fancier. Making a three-point landing fifteen feet below, he winced slightly in response to the mean things his knees had to say, and bolted north at a dead sprint. “I don’t suppose there’s been any suspicious activity?” “Still nothing,” came the reply from his colleague pissing in a nearby alleyway; he was getting into character.
Sure enough, on the rusty underside of an iron postage box at the end of the block was another envelope sealed with a sticker. He trotted back to the apartment; before the sequence of hops and free climbing that would put him back through his bedroom window, he caught his breath passing the previous parcel to the pisser for further analysis at WISE. At Handler’s suggestion, valueable intelligence Ketchup Bomb had promised to provide would be initially reported as coming from a classified “outside source” for the time being. Before he could decode the latest letter, he needed to talk to Anya.
Anya Forger’s academic career was, in some ways, a testament to the power of pathologically overbearing parenting.
The crux of Operation: Strix was that then-party chair Desmond was a notorious recluse, and only socialized at occasional, highly-exclusive events for elite students and family at the prestigious Eden College elevator school, a select cadre the school somewhat grandly referred to as Imperial Scholars, a cadre that included his eldest son. In order to ingratiate himself into that circle, Twilight needed to be father to a child enrolled within said school and elevated to said rank. To that end, he acquired Anya at the alleged age of six from an orphanage with shoddy records. In order for her to be admitted to Eden, they would need to appear to be a respectable family, which, social norms being as they were, meant they would need someone to pose as the mother in the family. They had a stroke of luck in encountering Yor Briar, a lovely young woman who worked at City Hall, who wished to be spared the suspicions society, particularly the SSS, leveled at unattached women, particularly those in government work.
With a “family” thus arranged, all that remained was for Anya to distinguish herself sufficiently to bring Dr. Forger within striking distance of his target. This was an uphill battle, but a valiant one. Initially, Anya’s academic aptitude lagged somewhat behind her peers, scions of wealthy families who could afford tutors and so forth. Anya, meanwhile, had been neglected; wherever she came from, by the time she was in Twilight’s care, she barely knew how to hold a pencil. At the same time, she had occasional signs of brilliance, solving some puzzle or intuiting someone’s viewpoint and response. She could, for example, easily tell how important her academic career was to her adopted father. Within the temperamental limitations of a small child, she applied herself as if she knew the cause of world peace was dependent on her success.
And succeed she eventually did. While she struggled with every topic initially, slowly the relentless studying began to have an effect: she got better at her most difficult topics, while discovering she had a knack for others. Within a couple years, her grades were above average, on average, as some classes came with difficulty still but her occasional flashes of brilliance had begun to coagulate into areas of consistent excellence, particularly languages, psychology, and, partly stemming from her longtime interest in fictional spycraft, cryptography. To that end, she had begun publishing a weekly feature in the school paper that included musings on codes and ciphers along with riddles and puzzles. [I should note here that, while all fiction by its nature contains certain inevitable departures from reality, that I will be referring to someone who writes a puzzle column in their school newspaper as being popular and well-liked by their classmates is perhaps the least-realistic thing I’ve ever committed to paper; if the sheer absurdity induces some form of cerebral hemorrhage, the publisher is liable for all medical expenses, this is legally binding no takebacks]
Her athletic career took a similar trajectory; initially she tended to lag behind her peers, apparently underdeveloped relative to her cohort. Here again, however, she applied herself with tenacity, and slowly her efforts began to bear fruit. In elementary, despite struggling to keep up with her teammates (who teased her about her short legs) she showed a knack for soccer, instinctively knowing the best place to be before anyone else. As a goaltender, she had a particular knack for knowing when not to dive: it is a statistical truth that while most goalies tend to opt to dive one way or the other to intercept a goal kick, it’s more often better to stand one’s ground in the middle. Goalies know this, but still generally opt to dive because even if they’re diving the wrong way, it looks better than standing still while the ball whistles past. Tiny Anya would stubbornly stand her ground when the moment called for it, diving only when necessary - her success rate was the highest in the league...occasionally. Right when it got large enough people started to privately suspect some level of collusion, she missed a few easy ones and her rating dropped into non-suspicious territory.
Still, she managed to lead the team to regional victory by 3rd grade; by then she had developed a reputation for calling plays, with some comparing her to the hockey great...well, Wayne Gretzky doesn’t exist in this setting, so let’s call him, oh, Dwayne Jetski. This earned her her sixth Stella and a role coaching the younger grades’ teams, which earned her her eighth a couple years later, after the team she coached went to the championship two years running (her seventh was acquired by winning the Girls’ Featherweight Kickboxing tournament on her second year qualifying, to the total amazement of everyone who was unfamiliar with the number of times she found occasion to brutally whollop someone in her time at school).
Ten years after being admitted to the school as a weird kid with few friends, difficulty in every subject, and bad habits of telling outrageous stories and punching people, she found herself at the center of school life, someone admired by underclassmen and relied-upon by faculty. The trio consisting of her, her close friend and rumored paramour Damien Desmond (the top student academically and no slouch on athletics, either) and her close friend Becky Blackbell, also rumoured paramour (excellent student, decent athlete, Prima Donna of the drama club) and heiress to the Blackbell Heavy Industries fortune, had become the nexus of the school’s social order, which Anya had in some ways remade in her image. The Imperial Scholars were a notoriously sober-minded conclave of workaholics when she joined their ranks; when she did so, she immediately set several new records for the order: first, she had the lowest average grades of any Imperial Scholar to date, owing to the fact that relatively few of the Stella she’d earned to be there were academic; she had her sports accolades, and more than one had been awarded for personal heroism outside schoolwork. She was the youngest girl ever admitted to their ranks - the record for youngest overall had been set by Damian the year before. And she was the first and only student made an Imperial Scholar with seven Dentritis Bolts, demerits she had earned largely via punching people.
Once she was in, things changed rapidly. The social gatherings, the attendance to which of Donovan Desmond was the entire basis for Operation: Strix, gradually became more frequent, and the liquor they didn’t serve if anyone asks got stronger. Anya personally micromanaged a baffling series of modifications to the party planning (serving more kippers, playing Yrondheim’s 28th concerto, jellybeans everywhere, this time, the theme is National Resilience) that, as a major stroke of luck for the success of Twilight’s mission, happened to be a huge hit with the then-party leader. This lubricated Twilight’s path into Desmond’s inner circle; the Forgers found themselves in the rare company who saw the Desmond family in any other occasion.
Yor frequently took tea with Mrs. Desmond, initially by coincidence, as she was at the time somewhat estranged from her husband and son; as the years went on, the Forgers’ collective influence on Donovan, a man with the personality of a pillbox, led him to unclench his sphincter somewhat, which in turn had a positive effect on his relationship with his wife and their relationships with their sons. Damien, who had spent his formative childhood years seeking his father’s praise and approval, had it, and was forced to refocus his energies towards not having his troubled upbringing at the hands of his fucked-up family damage him forever. It had, but that’s fine.
Dr. Forger finished his broccoli. Yor was in her own world, enraptured by the wagyu tartare and wasabi flan. He glanced at his daughter, who was still playing with her peanut curry noodles and tofu (she’d tried going vegetarian a few times before, and now it seemed like it might stick) and periodically smiling at him, saying something along the lines of “you’re making a weird face” or “why are staring at the broccoli so intently.”
“How’s everything going with school?” or “Hey, you’re still doing that puzzle column, right?” were the kinds of things he might say if he were an entirely different kind of dad and wanted to broach the topic on his mind. Unfortunately, while he had lightened up his direct involvement in her studies as she began to prove capable of managing on her own, it was still outside the realm of plausibility to suggest there might be some aspect of her schoolwork of which he was unaware. In point of fact, he was actually a fan of her puzzles, parental bias notwithstanding. He leaned in to that angle. “Your puzzles have been really excellent lately,” he said, steepling his fingers. “Do you have this week’s Anyagram figured out yet? I can’t wait to see it.” The Anyagram was a word puzzle included at the end of every one of her columns: four riddles, jokes, or trivia questions whose answers were anagrams of each other, and of a common phrase that was the answer to the puzzle.
“They’re scheduled two weeks in advance, so this week’s was done two weeks ago. You know that!” He did know that, but part of parenting is pretending to not know things so your kid can explain them to you. “Let’s see,” Anya posed chin in hand in an exaggerated display of cogitation; any semblance of sagacity in her countenance was ruined by her trademark smug grin. “This week’s is a good one. Mama, you’re in it again.”
“What? Oh no, it’s not something silly again, is it?” Yor Forger asked in an adorably worried tone. There are certain words and proper names that are truly providential to constructors of word puzzles, good at using up the letters left over by other words. A’a, emu, epeé, qi; “Yor” had recently joined their ranks thanks to Anya occasionally leaning on it to fob off a Y.
“My mother’s brain cell worked. We asked the gym teacher why he pointed his gun at us. We asked a pirate how to ambush a galleon. A sexworker at the hospital asked if we wanted her clothes to stay on. Thirteen letters.”
“Well? Don’t keep me in suspense,” Handler said.
Twilight cleared his throat. “YOR USED NEURON. SO YOU NERDS RUN. YE SURROUND ONE. YO, NURSE OR NUDE?”
Handler smiled. “And the...Anyagram answer?”
Twilight looked her in the eye.
“UNDER YOUR NOSE.”
She folded her arms and leaned back. “Do you think it’s a threat?”
“It certainly seems like whoever Ketchup Bomb is, they want me to know that they know intimate details of our lives - that they have total access to my neighborhood, undetected, and now the school as well.” A school paper’s files generally wouldn’t be that hard to access, but Eden’s security was fairly substantial, being a gathering place for children of influential families and a not-infrequent target of terror attacks.
“What did he have to say this time?” Handler asked, glancing down at the coded letter on her desk, which Twilight had brought to the subterranean offices of WISE. Twilight summarized the contents, which were as follows:
“My Dear Dr. Forger, or rather Twilight,
I am delighted to see you are amicable to furthering our partnership. I can now reveal some information about myself and the task with which your assistance would be helpful. You have, I know, heard rumors about an organization of Ostanian assassins called the Garden. You believe the rumors are merely that, nothing more. While you are correct that many of the outsized legends regarding their supposed capabilities are old wives’ tales, the group itself is very real. As it happens, I am in a position to observe their activities, much as I am with your organization. The basic organization is quite simple: it consists of several operatives who have civilian identities as a cover. They recieve orders by various means, depending on the agent, from an office in Berlint run by a figure known as the Shopkeeper, who in turn recieves his missions from a secret council of various figures within the Ostanian corridors of power. They are tasked with identifying and eliminating traitors outside the normal judicial or national security processes.
There is one operative of theirs with whom I have a peculiar concern, with which I believe you may prove useful in addressing. This particular operative has been under my gaze almost as long as you, Dr. Forger, and my affection for them is equal to that which I hold for you. In the years since coming across their path, I’ve managed to ingratiate myself with their organization’s leadership without permitting them to become aware of my activities, such that we may continue to interact in our ostensible identities as usual. There is a ticking time bomb in our mutual circles, however - a metaphorical bomb, but potentially deadly nevertheless. Much like yourself, this operative - a professional killer, perhaps the deadliest in the world - has a nondescript civilian identity. Much like yourself, in that civilian identity, they have a family, one which is aware of the artificial nature of their familial bonds, but is completely unaware of the operative’s true profession. And, while you may dismiss this as idle speculation based on long observation, I believe that both you and they have a great affection for your family that is perhaps more genuine than either of you yet realize.
What further complicates their case is this: the person to whom they are married is a foreign intelligence asset. If The Garden were aware of said asset’s identity, their life would be forfeit. They might even order the assassin in question to slay their partner. Would they follow through on those orders? I cannot say. They either destroy their own family, or their family would be forced to fight an unwinnable war against the deadliest killers I know - and the damage incurred by Garden in the meantime, hobbling one of Ostania’s key levers of internal control, could lead to a rippling effect of instability throughout the East.
Meanwhile, if the asset’s superiors discovered their spouse’s identity and connection to Garden, they may try to press them for information, potentially leading to the unfortunate scenarios outlined above. If the asset tried to protect their partner’s identity, they would appear disloyal to their superiors, endangering both their mission and their career. You can see why I would like the matter resolved as delicately as possible: information needs to be presented in a specific order to specific people to avoid, at best, the complete disruption of multiple nations’ intelligence communities and at worst a bloodbath. I would like to have you speak to this person, and explain the situation as best you can - I am confident that with your background and improvisational skills, you will be able to say the words that need to be said. If you choose to accept this mission, be at the front steps of the Hotel Forsyth, 496 Ludlum Avenue, at 4:44 this Friday, alone.
Hope to see you there!
Yours,
Ketchup Bomb
Goat-Head of Chimera
Handler’s eyes widened at several points during the summary, and by the time Twilight had finished, she was rather pale, but maintained her composure.
“Do we think this is accurate?” Twilight asked. “Do we believe The Garden is real? What about Chimera? I’ve heard rumors about them recently as well - Franky tells me there’s a new force in the knowledge-broker business, strategically leaking intel it should have been impossible to obtain, but no one knows a thing about them. If that’s really who this is, that jives with how much information they seem to have about us, though we still don’t know how they’re obtaining it. But on top of that...Garden? They were just a legend, right?”
“Garden is real, I can tell you that much. WISE was able to confirm their existence a few years back, though that knowledge has been deemed above your paygrade until it became relevant just now. Also...I had an encounter with them, once. Almost twenty years ago, I was on an assignment to retrieve one of our moles, a long-term, deep-cover agent like yourself. After seven years working as an Ostanian oligarch, he was returning to the West with a briefcase full of secrets and a full security detail in tow. We were to meet up at the Forsyth’s Imperial Suite, where I would confirm the contents of the case, before taking cars to a private airstrip.
Shortly before the appointed hour I heard screams coming from outside the suite. Before I could move to the entrance, one of the thick oaken doors was pushed in off its frame. Our mole, a burly, athletic man of forty-five, burst into the room, covered in blood, eyes wider than you can even imagine. In the antechamber outside the suite were the remains of his security detail, dead, not just dead but hamburger, and a little girl.
She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, skinny. Her arms looked like they shouldn’t have been able to even lift the big knives she carried. And so polite. She called the mole ‘Mr. Traitor,’ and asked if she could have the honor of taking his life. But first, she said this to me: ‘Ah! You must be the agent of Western Intelligence I was told would be here. I do not have orders to kill you. As long as you don’t try to stop me, I think that means you get to live. Isn’t that wonderful?’ Her voice was so kind, but her motions were precise, like finely-tuned machinery. And her eyes, her eyes were beautiful, red, like a hungry demon.
Our mole clung to me as she walked towards us. He begged me to save him. He said things I will remember until the day I die. I simply looked at him, then looked at the bodies of his security team, most of whom had died before even getting their guns drawn; none had managed to fire a shot. I stood there and watched her butcher him like a pig. She left, and I told headquarters as much as I could. As much as they might believe, as much as I could and avoid looking complicit. So yes, they’re real. No, not every rumor about them is true, but tales of their deadliness don’t do them justice.”
Handler leaned back, shaking off the memory. “As for Chimera, we cannot as of yet confirm their existence, but we have heard the same rumors as you, and our analysts consider them plausible.” Twilight nodded. This meant some in the WISE hierarchy were already fully aware of this rogue agency, but the information was not being shared - possibly another branch was already in contact with them as a source.
“Chimera, data brokers. And The Gardens’ assassins. If what you say is true, The Garden and Chimera could be dangerous. Do you think the specific claims here are plausible? Who do we think this unnamed asset could be working for?”
“The thing you want to know,” Handler replied with more characteristic self-assuredness, “is whether or not we have an agent unwittingly married to an assassin. It’s not impossible, but it seems unlikely. The vetting process for all of our agent’s spouses, genuine or otherwise, is quite thorough, as you can attest first-hand. That being said, records were somewhat spotty until quite recently due to the war. It is possible we missed something; there’s always more layers of Ostanian secrecy to unravel, like how me may never know the full details of Project: Apple. If this were the case, that would explain why Ketchup Bomb suggested discretion in his first message. Suppose, for instance, the couple in question was the Briars. Even with all the data Agent Nightfall has given us about the SSS’s internal workings, there’s still plenty of opacity there to cover periodic extrajudicial killings - his work with the SSS could cover for assassination, the way my work at the embassy allows me to do this business. I’m not saying that’s the case, but if it were, hypothetically, I know you are very protective of Agent Nightfall and wouldn’t want her to come to harm or suffer professionally. At the same time, you know your wife loves her brother dearly, heel though he may be. You wouldn’t want anything to make her sad. If Ketchup Bomb is telling the truth, I can understand why he chose you to help resolve the situation; you are in a unique position to sympathize with them.”
“So I have your approval to proceed? You don’t think this may be some horrible, horrible trap?”
“I think if it is a horrible, horrible trap, you can generally think on your feet well enough to wriggle out somehow, and moreover if they wanted to do something horrible to you, they clearly could have already.”
Thus, at the appointed hour, Agent Twilight was standing outside the Forsyth, near the broad marble front steps, which were undergoing renovation. He’d arrived well ahead of time, reconnoitering the vicinity in conjunction with several nearby vagrants and performance artists via radio. Five minutes before the specified time, he planted himself by the stairs, trying not to be annoyed by the sounds of sandblasting and some truly dreadful pop music coming from the worksite.
The sandblasting reached a lull at the same time the song on the radio wrapped up. The DJ, to Dr. Forger’s astonishment and vexation, crackled over the airways: “And that was ‘Hide and Seek’ by Tomorrow’s Youth. Up next, we have an unusual dedication: Long-time listener, first-time caller Ketchup Bomb has one going out to a Dr. Forger with the message ‘Get on the trolley that’s about to pass you,” it’s the Teenage Killers with ‘Go Go Right Now!’”
There was indeed a trolley passing, which someone had graffitied with the words “This one right here, Dummy!” along with an arrow pointing to the rear exterior compartment. Gritting his teeth, Twilight lept aboard, a move that was less a cool spy stunt and more a thing people did from time to time, usually youths and anyone broke. This led to the passengers in the main compartment giving him pitying, “why’s that respectable-looking gentleman doing bum shit” looks. His presence did not go unnoticed by the trolley’s conductor, who fortunately did not have the kind of government job where you give a shit extensively.
“I’m on the East/West Express Route,” Twilight muttered through his shirt collar to a living statue that had been failing to collect change from hotel guests. Berlint had two major tourist areas on opposite extremities, Riverside in the West and the historic Old Town in the East. The trolley he was on served to bring passengers from one to the other with only one stop in between, Downtown. It started at Riverside West, not far from the hotel, crossed the river to Riverside East, the respectable, upper-middle-class neighborhood with lots of parks were the Forgers lived. The Downtown stop was in a busy area, a few blocks from both City Hall where Mrs. Forger worked and the hospital where Dr. Forger had his psychiatric practice. About half the passengers got off there, but enough remained that the new batch that got on could see the dirty looks he was getting from the remainers, and in Ostanian fashion, they also gave him dirty looks. They mostly assumed he’d farted.
The one exception was an elderly gentleman in the uniform of a professional courier service, who asked if there was a Dr. Forger aboard, placed an envelope sealed with a sticker of a goat into his raised hand, then jutted his hand out in anticipation of a tip. Twilight memorized the ID number from the uniform, handed him a few bills, and, in response to the old lady who saw the thick wad in his wallet and asked why he couldn’t be bothered to pay his damn fare like the rest of us, instantly thought of a response that would be charming and de-escalate the situation, then decided to say “Because fuck you” instead.
He tore open the envelope, and, following the instructions written uncoded inside, lept off a bridge. Specifically, the letter told him to jump from the trolley as it crossed an overpass and onto a double-decker bus that was passing below. He said something charming to the alarmed tourists on the open upper level that de-escalated the situation and descended the stairs, getting off at the next stop, in front of the Battery.
Towards the end of the period where cannons were invented, but you could still be safe from them if you built walls thick enough and slanted just so, the Battery was built to defend what was then the main portion of the city. Had the city been attacked by soldiers with cannons of leather and brass, the Battery would have been extremely useful in repelling them. Unfortunately, when an attack finally came, it came via air raids. Built like a brick shithouse (in fact, it had several actual brick shithouses), its ample vaults were stocked with luxury goods and sheltered the families of VIPs during the war, which had turned it into an unpopular symbol of elite privilege thereafter, at a time when Ostanian leadership was trying to emphasize the humble and hearty man of the East in contrast to the opulence and decadence of the West.
After the war, in what was either a brilliant PR move or tasteless blunder depending on who you ask, it was repurposed as a shopping mall, the largest in all Berlint. Twenty blocks south of the sprawling Eden campus, surrounded by palatial estates of fashionable captains of industry (the Blackbells' city home took up a city block half a mile away) the Battery was a Mecca for the scions of noveau riche and old money alike. It was one of the few places in town you could find, alongside more staid and severe Ostanian fashion firms (the high-end Victor Bruce, the aristocratic Berlint Gun Club, the ex-chancellor’s favorite Motte and Bailey) the latest ‘opulent’ and ‘decadent’ western brands, like the hot new boutique Opulence and Decadence (a patriot of Westalis to the bone, Twilight had to admit that one was a little on the nose).
He’d attempted to update the agents following him on his position via his lapel radio, but by the time he was told where he was headed, he was out of range. Damn, this guy’s work would be a lot easier if cell phones existed. Dr. Forger placed a call from a pay phone, like some sort of cave person, to his office at the hospital. Fiona Briar picked up.
“Hey listen, I thought I’d swing by the Battery on my way home from work, see if I see anything fun for Anya or the wife. I always get a little lost in there, so I’m not sure how long I’ll be. Maybe I’ll stop at the concierge this time and ask for directions. Let folks know if they call, alright?” was the sequence of words Dr. Forger said.
“I’m about to enter a building with three-meter thick brick walls that is also stuffed with electronics, I will be out of radio communication and my tracker will disappear. If you need to find me, start by asking the concierge” was the message Agent Twilight conveyed. He also timed his “ums” and “ers” in a coded pattern, that translated to: “Investigate Mercury Courier, Badge #496.”
“Of course,” came the reply from his colleague, in both contexts.
The Battery looked like this * from above, with several courtyards (five or six depending on your word processor) surrounded by thick walls, converted into covered atria, surrounding a massive panopticon-style tower that was now the food court.
Twilight, following the final instruction on the message from the courier, approached the information booth in the center of the atrium. The receptionist seemed delighted to see him, in the way it’s fun to see a weird animal in the wild. She had another envelope ready for him when he handed her the one he’d brought with him.
“You really came!” she said. “That’s amazing.”
Twilight held the new envelope, puzzled. Like the first one he’d found in the mail, it showed signs of age. “Do you mind telling me what’s going on? Do you have any idea? Can you tell me about the person who set this up?”
She shook her head, smiling. “That envelope has been in our lock box since before I started working here two years ago, with instructions to hand it to the person who comes with a similar envelope on this specific day at this specific hour. My supervisor said someone before his time paid a truly weird amount of money to someone in the main office to keep it here, but we don’t know who - just that we get a nice bonus on successfully handing it over to you, unopened and undamaged.”
“That doesn’t strike you as suspicious? Like, something you should report?”
“Maybe someone did at first and nothing came of it? Would you like me to report it?”
“Yes. We should have the SSS all over this, examining every inch of this place and interviewing all the staff and customers. Please make it happen,” Twilight said, correctly intuiting she wanted precisely none of that shit.
“I absolutely will,” she lied, to his relief.
The aged envelope contained uncoded instructions leading him to a garbage can in the food court, where he found another envelope, this one with relatively fresh paper, which brought him to the Spy Wars pinball machine in the arcade, where he similarly found another letter directing him to a changing room at Gürli, the latest East/West fusion fashion boutique for rich weirdos. Behind the changing room door was a document written in what appeared to be a complex code, but was in fact gibberish; its purpose was to get Twilight to pause in the privacy of the booth long enough that its hidden pneumatic joints could push him into the gaping hole that appeared when the mirror retracted.
Twilight fell about 7 meters into a three-point landing, and would have added something like “I’m getting too old for this” or “This is getting hard on my knees,” but the surface he landed on was actually fairly shock-absorbent: it was a padded room. A very nice padded room; it could almost be the VIP room at a discotheque. The walls had thick pads of artificial leather in a pleasantly garish color; the floor and ceiling had thick shag carpeting, over some kind of matting. Walls, floor, and ceiling were studded with small holes containing alternately bright floodlighs and what Twilight correctly assumed was some combination of closed-circuit TV cameras and emplacements for cliché bad-guy shit like dart guns or vents for knockout gas. At one end was an overstuffed sofa, and at the other was a modest buffet with soft cheeses and fruits, midrange-sandwiches and non-alcoholic beverages.
“Welcome, my dear Dr. Forger,” came a voice over an intercom, using what sounded like a novelty voice-distorter. “I do hope you haven’t had too much trouble getting here. Take a minute to recombobulate yourself. We will get to the meat of the matter, the reason I asked you to come here, in due time. First, I have someone here for you to talk to.”
In one corner, a section of wall folded back into a space that was thankfully a bathroom stall (incorporated sink, shower head, and floor drain, in the style of a submarine or one of the city’s more affordable apartments) and alarmingly contained his wife.
“Loid? What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“That’s a damn good question,” he said, turning his gaze slightly upward towards where he guessed their captor might be lurking. “What’s the meaning of this? Why is Yor here? I was already willing to help you, I did what you asked, why would you think you would need to kidnap her?” The empty space he was shouting at did not reply.
“I wasn’t kidnapped; work told me to come here?” Yor replied nervously as she explored the space; her footsteps were pensive as she walked about, but her motions were firm and precice. She tested the firmness of the walls and floor, and, with a few sequential jumps from the walls at the corner, the ceiling as well, landing with a slightly put-out expression.
“There’s fairly thick stone walls behind the upholstery, almost all around us; there’s a handful of hidden doors, but they seem to be reinforced metal. I don’t think we could bust through from this side without some tools,” she reported, matter-of-factly. Twilight, not for the first time, thought about what a blessing it was to have for a partner someone so adaptable to trying circumstances. And bouncy.
“The condition of the materials used, the smell of PVC sawdust and new wiring, suggest the room was constructed less than six months ago,” he observed, partly to himself. “The Battery is controlled by a public-private partnership between the Berlint city government’s Commercial Office, the Ostanian tourist ministry, and a privately-held corporation owned by the Donovans, Herzografs, and the Wellhields. At that time, the botique I was at was owned by a consortium called Lionhead, which...”
“Loid.” His wife interrupted his train of thought.
“?” he asked.
“Why are you here?”
In much the same way as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (or their equivalent in this world, Edward Tillery and Tenpin Norway) refused to divulge which of them was actually the first atop Mt. Everest (Mt. Nevertheless here) out of mutual respect, I will elide slightly the next sequence of events. First, Dr. Forger began making up a reasonably plausible lie about one of his psychiatric patients. Then the two of them said “Oh” six times.
The first was one of them figuring it out. The second was the other, hearing the first “Oh,” realizing there was something to be realized, and realizing it. “Oh”s three and four were both of them realizing the other had made the same realization, and five and six were the horrible, horrible implications crashing down on them.
“I guess that makes...a lot of sense in retrospect,” Twilight said. The two sat down on the couch, both lost in thought.
“Before we, um...get into it, maybe we should start with introductions?” Yor suggested.
“Would you like me to start?”
“By all means.” She gave him a “the floor is yours” gesture.
Twilight... there’s not really language for the emotion he felt: no amount of torture or truth serum could have compelled him to reveal a mission secret. For close to thirty years, since his early teens, he had been following orders, executing them well and largely without question. Now he mentally prepared himself to begin revealing details of his mission to a known agent of a hostile rival nation. He felt...ways about that.
“The name I was given at birth no longer exists. My home in Westalis was destroyed in the war when I was a boy. I spent several of my teenage years fighting on the frontline before eventually being recruited by Western Intelligence to work as a spy, which I have done ever since, under the codename Twilight. My current mission, in its tenth year, is to investigate the intentions of the reclusive former chancellor Donovan Desmond. In order to do so, I assumed the name Dr. Loid Forger, and entered a child into Eden College in the hopes of encountering the former chancellor, then-party chairman, at the soirées for Imperial Scholars that were the only social gatherings he was known to attend.” Possible impending doom notwithstanding, he did relax a little having that out in the open. Yor smiled.
“You’re Twilight? I think I’ve heard about you before! It’s a little exciting to think I’m married to a famous spy.” She turned her gaze away slightly as she began her story: “I believe I told you when Yuri and I were younger, we lived alone, near the border. I told you I would take whatever work I could find to provide for Yuri, so that the hardships of the war never touched our home and never got in the way of his studies. Well. As it happens, the work that was available to me was murder. I don’t know who the first people were who used me as an assassin; I don’t think they were very good people. They used children for contract killing partly because we were beneath suspicion and mostly because we were disposable. Some of us would die and the ones who survived got better at it. After a couple years I was the only survivor my age, and I was very good at it. I think at that point, my employers had started to fear me; they made some deal with an organized crime ring operating closer to the capitol and I started working for them instead.”
She turned back towards Twilight, now telling the story less wistfully and more matter-of-factly. “That happened a few times before I wound up working for my current employers, and I’m very satisfied with them. When I started this work, I was doing it for Yuri, for survival. I don’t know who my targets back then were or why they were marked to death. Maybe some were bad people, I don’t know. Now, I don’t have to kill to survive anymore. I do it because I believe in my mission. The people I kill now are dangerous. Corrupt. Arms dealers, spies, sex criminals; operating with impunity from positions of privilege. I kill them because it’s the only way they’ll face justice for threatening the future we want to build for our children.” She smiled. “Maybe that sounds corny; I know I don’t seem like the true believer type, but I care about building a better future. So I want to ask: why do you do what you do? What’s your purpose for spying?”
“World peace,” Twlight replied without a thought. Yor suppressed a giggle.
“It sounds super cheesy when you say it with that serious tone,” she said.
“I am serious. I told you the war took my home; my whole village, in fact. I saw whole regions torn apart by air raids, countless orphans left to starve. I saw what people do to each other when the only law is survival - and I swore I would do anything to keep it from happening again.”
They passed a moment in companionable silence.
“Your brother works for the SSS, by the way. I’m not sure where we go from here, but if we decide we need to try to kill each other, I thought you should know.”
“What are you talking about? No he doesn’t.”
“I pegged him as secret police almost immediately based on some verbiage he used that came right out of an Ostanian counterintelligence manual. I’ve since seen him operating in the field, making arrests, sometimes in uniform, sometimes plainclothes.”
“That...little fucker,” Yor said, cursing for only the sixth time of which Twilight was aware. “Yes, I suppose that tracks, actually. He probably didn’t tell me because he didn’t want me to worry.” Yor smiled. “How is he? As an agent, in your professional opinion?”
“Very good, actually. He’s as intelligent as you always say he is, he has a lot of integrity and the respect of his coworkers; probably his biggest strength is his tenacity; he’s incredibly dogged in pursuit of his targets - I’ve seen him keep fighting with injuries from which any other man would pass out.” He saw her worried look. “Those incidents were few and far between, of course. These days he rarely leaves his desk. If uh, if you don’t end up killing me here, could you please not let him know I told you? He was instantly and correctly suspicious of me from the very start and it’s been difficult getting him off my back.”
“Alright. Let’s talk about that for a bit. For my part, I haven’t received any orders to take your life. I can’t guarantee if my employers found out, they wouldn’t ask me to, though. I wouldn’t want that. But maybe they already do? They were the ones that asked me to come here, maybe they know already.”
“I may be able to shed light on your situation by explaining mine: I was sent here by an anonymous would-be informant, who left us a series of coded messages I followed right into this trap. He mentioned Garden, which I didn’t think existed, and said that a member of Garden was married to a western spy, and wanted me to speak to them to help resolve it. In their messages, they claimed to have penetrated Garden, and if they were able to have your superiors direct you here, that lends credence to their claim. It seems like what they really wanted was for us to have this conversation.”
Yor nodded. “If they wanted one or both of us dead, they would have easier and more direct ways of accomplishing it. I suppose,” she smiled, “it is healthy for a husband and wife to have these little talks about their careers and goals and who-kills-who from time to time.”
Loid took off his hat, fanned himself briefly, then held it between his legs as he spoke. “Would it be alright...I have approval from my superiors to resolve the situation as I see fit, and my immediate handler won’t press me for details if I decide to keep it quiet; I’ve earned a wide latitude on this assignment so far. If you’d like, if you think your organization would be amicable, and it sounds like someone in it wants exactly this, we can simply continue on as we have been, only now that we know, we can be honest with each other.”
“I would like that a lot, actually. I appreciate our mysterious benefactor arranging this little chat. Unless they just wanted us to be honest with each other before they gas us both to death or something. The traps in the walls make me a little nervous.”
“They’re probably just a precaution in case things get too rowdy in here. The chemical agents I can smell are all paralytics, and I don’t think they’re set up to deliver a lethal dose. Moreover, the communiques claimed, and their verifiable claims have been accurate thus far, that they’ve been actively assiting both of us for a decade now. Remember ten years ago when student terrorists tried to kill the Westalian ambassador with bombs strapped to trained dogs?”
“Oh yes! One of them was bothering Anya and I kicked him so hard he later died from internal bleeding.”
“Cool. Anyway, my coworkers and I were attempting to track some of them down, and very nearly died: a room in the tower we were searching had been rigged to explode if someone touched the door, but someone else had scrawled a warning, a picture of a cartoon bomb drawn in ketchup. We always assumed it was one of the students having second thoughts. Well, the letters we’ve recieved setting this up have been signed ‘Ketchup Bomb;’ it seems they’re claiming that was them.”
“‘Ketchup Bomb?’” Yor giggled. “That sounds like the kind of silly name Anya would come up with.” She straightened up. “What are we going to do about Anya?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we just going to leave her in the dark forever? If we can be honest with each other, can’t we be honest with her, too? Wouldn’t that be simpler, rather than keeping our full lives from her?”
Twilight considered this. The idea of living with people who knew who he was was essentially unexplored mental territory for him, but he was also a very fast considerer.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “I think if Anya knew the truth, she would understand - and may even appreciate being part of it. The trappings of our professions have always been a keen interest of hers, and she often talks about how important the causes we fight for clandestinely are to her; I think we have every reason to believe she would be supportive.”
Yor began to reply but was cut off by the distorted voice over the intercom.
“So may I take it then that you have resolved to reveal the nature of your secret lives to your child, then?”
The two stood up as one. Yor gripped her husband’s shoulders as they addressed a random corner of the ceiling.
“Yes, we will tell her.”
“Promise me one thing: that you will tell her immediately, the next time you see her.”
“We promise,” said Twilight, who had a sudden sensation not unlike being in an elevator whose cables have been cut but hasn’t yet begun its freefall.
“Very well, then you can tell her now,” the voice cut off, and another hidden door opened, revealing a very confused-looking Anya Forger.
“Mama? Papa? What’s going on?”
Twilight once again resolved that if whoever was behind this had harmed a hair on his daughter’s (his “daughter,” he reminded himself) head, he would visit such horrors upon them as to make the whole history of human warfare look like a pillow fight. Nevertheless, they seemed to be in control, and he had to play along for now. Besides, a promise is a promise.
He crouched slightly to be at eye level. “Come here, we will explain everything in just a bit. You’re safe now, we won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Anya cautiously walked towards them, eyes taking in the room suspiciously. “Seriously, what’s going on?”
Yor held out her hands. “There’s something we need to tell you, that we’ve been keeping from you for a long time.”
“Is it that you’ve been secretly banging? Because I already knew that. Like, everyone knows that.”
The couple flushed and grit their teeth. “No, and we’re not...anyways,” Dr. Forger composed himself, “it’s about what we do for a living. Anya, I am a spy.”
“And I’m an assassin,” added his wife.
“What.” said Anya.
“I secretly work for an organization that carries out assassinations for the good of Ostania, targeting traitors, criminals, and corrupt officials who would otherwise escape justice. I started working as a professional killer when I was twelve years old, and since then I’ve personally taken close to five hundred human lives.”
Before Anya could react to this admission, Dr. Forger picked up where his wife had left off. “For almost thirty years, since I was your age, I have lived under a variety of assumed names and identities while gathering intelligence for the west. I’ve lied, stolen, and, when the mission demanded it, killed people as well - often people I’ve decieved into trusting, even loving me.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” Anya asked.
“We wanted you to know the truth, we think you’re ready. To understand both the reasons we do the work we do, and why we kept it from you. Your father and I both work to build a better future for you than the past we grew up in. We both experienced the kind of hardship as children we hope you never have to face, and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.” She placed her hand over Loid’s on her shoulder, and squeezed. They smiled at each other and then back at Anya, who smiled back at them.
“Well,” Anya said, “as far as admissions go, that was pretty good.” She produced a novelty voice distorter that had been wired to transmit to the loudspeaker. “But wait ‘til you hear this one.” [At this juncture, the baller move would be to let the distorter drop to the ground or toss it casually over her shoulder, but she was reasonably fastidious about her gizmos, so instead she carefully put it back in her new handbag.]
“?” thought Twilight, along with “!” and “...” and “the fuck.” His mind was generally exceptionally well-organized and he thought fast; his thought processes usually hummed along like a slaughterhouse operating at maximum throughput, with a constant flow of information being efficiently taken apart and functionally organized by utility. The past moment’s events disrupted his mental function like a congress of starving baboons setting upon his mental killing floor. He had yet to formulate a thought that could be expressed in words when Anya was upon them.
Closing the remaining distance with a front flip, Anya attempted to catch both her parents in the head with an inverted double roundhouse. Twilight instinctively dodged backwards, and the Thorn Princess simply took the blow; the effect was akin to a Teddy Bear punching a bag of gravel. Anya simply used the force of pushing off her mother’s torso to attempt to spring at her father with a switchblade held in a reverse grip. Twilight dodged his daughter’s tackle and blocked a sequence of headstand kicks before noticing his ankle was snared by a yoyo his daughter was using as a bolas.
She didn’t have time to use this to her advantage, however, as the thread was severed by a blade her mother threw as Yor lept over her father’s head to land where Anya had been a second before. Anya attempted to counterattack, but Yor intercepted Anya’s hands, prized her fingers off the blade, corrected her grip, and closed her fingers around it again.
“Your arms aren’t really long enough for a reverse grip,” she advised. “You should be focusing on forehand technique and throwing to extend your reach.” Encircling Anya from behind, she guided her hand through the motion of gutting a human being like a lake trout.
“I feel like I get more leverage with the murderers’ grip though,” Anya protested. “Like I get more oomph with a strike, more strength behind it.”
Her father knelt down and put a hand on her shoulder. “Knife fighting isn’t about strength, it’s about all the little places on a human body where a small cut can fatally bleed out. Remember: ‘Can Silly Anya Break Up Ribs?’”
“Carotid, subclavian, axillary, brachial, ulnar, radial. I know, I know. I thought my big reveal was going to be enough of a surprise to catch you guys off guard for once.” Anya was pouting but also smiling. Her father patted her head.
“Maybe you can tell us what’s going on?”
“I have so much I wanted to tell you. But I didn’t want to tell you I knew. At least, not before you had a chance to tell me. If I told you guys I knew, I’d be robbing you of the power to tell me voluntarily. And you would need to know how I knew, and I couldn’t tell you how I knew without taking away your chance to ever tell me. So I waited, I did everything I could to be the daughter you wanted and to help out your missions when I could. And for a time, that was enough. Remember I once gave you guys 100/100 as parents? If there was one complaint I have, if I said it was 99/100, it’s that you thought you needed to keep it from me. I understand why you didn’t tell me, and I understand you couldn’t tell each other. I couldn’t have had the happy childhood I did if Mama knew Papa was delivering classified information to WISE every week.”
She began pacing back and forth. “But if WISE decides to end your mission, what happens to us? What happens to the Forgers, to the people I love? I knew I could keep helping you with Operation: Strix, but I before I could do that, I would have to explain THAT I knew, which would require explaining how I knew, which, as I said, would mean you never got to come clean to me, or each other. So I engineered this whole situation to allow you two to safely come clean to each other, and then to me, so I can now come clean to you.” She took a deep breath. “Papa, ask me how long I’ve known.”
“How long hav
“I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN! From the very first second! I knew you were a spy the second you set foot in the orphanage. I’m a telepath. My earliest memories are of cages and lab experiments. I don’t know what exactly they did, but as long as I can remember I’ve been able to hear all your thoughts. Neither of you ever had a secret from me. And everything you tried to keep hidden was part of you I loved. I thought having a spy papa and an assassin mama would be cool and I was right! That’s why I did everything I could to make sure I was the orphan you picked, that’s why I acted that way that day at the tailors when we first met Mama. I’ve always known what you wanted and done everything I could to make it happen.” She sat down, running her fingers through the shag.
No one said anything for a moment. Yor broke the silence.
“You’re adopted?” Anya and her father gave her, then each other a blank stare.
“We... didn’t mention that?” Dr. Forger asked.
Anya looked flummoxed for a moment. “Actually, yeah, I think we never got around to mentioning that. But we could have - like, that’s not a super secret reveal, people are adopted sometimes and it’s fine.”
“But you two seem so much alike! You’re really not related?” Anya and her father gave Yor identical expressions of confused concern. “See that? Right there! You’re the spitting image of each other. So you and your late wife adopted Anya?” Anya pinched the bridge of her nose as her father tried to explain.
“No no, I adopted Anya when I began my mission here and started using the ‘Loid Forger’ identity - this was just a few days before we met you. You’ve known Anya pretty much exactly as long as I ha
A blow that would have killed a lesser man landed on Twilight’s left cheek; he rolled enough to avoid his head collapsing on itself like a watermelon in a machine press, and was able to catch enough of what his wife was saying:
“All this time [obtrusive ringing] never was another mother? [white noise] have been comparing myself to another woman who didn’t even exist? You could have told me I didn’t need to feel insecure, that I didn’t need to compare...” Loid put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, partly to steady himself.
“There’s never been anyone else.” Cupping her face, he told her “you’ve always been perfect.”
“Can you two flirt later?”
“We’re not flirting!” they lied, in umbrage. Twilight cleared his throat.
“At any rate, if what you say is true, it would explain a lot. Still, the idea of telepathy is hard to believe.”
“Your real name is Everard Digby. At age nineteen you killed a man in Roanapur behind a bar, in anger, and never told a soul. You just thought ‘If she can really read minds, does she know I have thirteen
“OK!” Everard Digby interrupted her. “I believe you. It sounds like you may have been a product of
“...Project: Apple,” Anya finished his thought, and withdrew two folders from her handbag. She handed them to her parents. “This is all the information on the project we could find. The thicker dossier is for the two of your information - it includes my personal recollections and individually identifiable data, and the redacted file WISE can have for their records. I meant what I said about helping you out. Once I found out everything there was to find out, I had Garden eliminate everyone involved.”
The significance of this hit her parents after a second. “You what,” Dr. Forger asked.
“Using my influence with the leadership of the Garden, I was able to request hits on every scientist and lab technician involved in the project be executed.”
“Ooh! I think I got one of those guys!” her mother piped up brightly. “Dr. Viviseck, right? Worked at an SSS labor camp’s prison hospital. Always surprising when the chubby ones make a good run.”
“Why would you do that?” Twilight asked his daughter. She began paging through the file she’d just handed to him.
“Would it not be a good enough reason to make sure their research never gets repeated? Knowing how close they came, in fact how successful they really were without realizing it? That if someone picks up where they left off, it could lead to catastrophic consequences? A nation with an army of telepaths, every other countries’ security, scientific, trade secrets laid open, a complete upturning of the balance of power? No one ever having the luxury of a private thought again? No, you’re right, that’s not a good enough reason. I did it because they hurt my dog.” She pointed to the the page to which she had turned. It contained a photo of canine test subjects and described conditions unfit to print. In the background, a big fluffy outline was recognizable, despite chains and malnutrition.
“Bond!” he parents spoke in unison.
Anya turned her head as she spoke. “Papa, you knew, or suspected, Bond was also a test subject for Project: Apple. As you correctly guessed, once the scientists realized their funding was going to be cut and the project terminated, they started selling off assets to line their pockets and cooking up MDMA to sell to fund their retirement. Bond wound up in the hands of those students before we rescued him. What neither you nor those radicals nor even the scientists knew or even suspected was that Bond was the project’s only other success.”
“Bond could...read minds?” Twilight asked, no longer a skeptic but still dubious.
“No, he could see the future. Visions of what would happen, sometimes crystal clear, other times nebulous, but concrete and detailed and actionable - certain outcomes could be avoided if you took the right steps. He could see the clock tower exploding, and Mama and I mourning. And what he saw, I could see. It was thanks to him I knew that room was rigged to explode, and thanks to him I was able to save you. We owe him everything.”
Twilight was processing this information. “That would explain the time with the fire, and his erratic behavior at other times, if he was trying to...” he noticed his daughter was crying, and put his hand on her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I miss my fucking dog. We had a, well, bond. I could see what he could see, and he could see how I would react to me seeing what he saw, and I could see that...it created an endless feedback loop; it helped both of us refine our abilities, and together, we were even more powerful - we were unstoppable, after a while. Any challenge I faced I’d already seen every possible outcome, days in advance. Then weeks. That’s how I was able to set all this up - I could see every step I needed to secure the outcome I wanted. Until I couldn’t anymore. By the end of his life, we could see a full year into the future: right up until today. That’s why I had to do this; up until now, I could see every detail, and I knew we would stay together. Until today. Now, I don’t know what the future holds, and it’s been years since I’ve felt that. I’m so scared and frustrated and all I want is for us to be a family. A family as real to you as it always has been to me.”
The family exchanged a series of loving reassurances so sickeningly saccharine that merely committing them to paper would send a ripple of glycemic shock through a five-township radius; there’s not enough insulin in circulation to publish it. [They love each other, you get it.]
“That being said,” Loid asked, “even with those abilities, it’s astounding what you were able to do. Were you really able to see how it would play out in that level of granular detail?”
By way of answer, she withdrew one more document from her bag. Printed on yellowed paper was, [a handful of parentheticals aside] the manuscript you have just now finished reading.