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The young woman outside the room takes a deep breath, listening, and lets it out slowly. She opens the nondescript door.
What greets her is exactly what she expected - a man who looks like no one she has ever seen before, a middle-aged schoolteacher-type man with a sharp chin, who raises his head and gives her a look of practiced surprise. “Can I help you?”
The voice is different - deeper, more gruff, older and roughened with use. But the eyes, slate blue and glittering with cool intelligence-
The eyes are the same.
For a moment, she feels all of four years old again.
“Miss?” the man says, and she snaps back to herself in an instant.
“Good afternoon, or perhaps good evening, Agent Twilight,” she greets.
In an instant, his expression transforms into one of wary appraisal. “Do I know you?”
Yes, she thinks, and no, and that is why I am here. But it’s not really what he’s asking, so she dips her head slightly in a show of respect. “They call me Agent Chimera, sir.”
“Chimera,” he repeats, and thinks for a half-second about a child holding a stuffed animal close to her chest. Her heart squeezes. He immediately tosses the thought aside and begins a mental recitation of the alphabet: A, B, C, D- “What can I do for you?”
“I become a full-fledged WISE agent as of tomorrow,” she says.
“Congratulations, I suppose. What does that have to do with me?”
“You know of WISE’s traditions, of course,” she says. “On the eve of graduation, recruits have the ability to request an interview with any high-ranking WISE faculty.”
He blinks. “And you chose me? Why?”
“You’re Twilight,” she says, as if that alone is a justification. It is, to her. In any case, It’s why I applied would have raised more questions than answers. “You’re the greatest spy in Westalis.”
“Once,” he says. H, I, J- “I haven’t deserved that title for fifteen years.”
“Why?” she asks, startling him.
“What?”
“Why is that?” she clarifies. “What happened?”
He looks away. He thinks, momentarily, of opening the door to an empty house. Of his hands shaking on a gun. Of restless nights, of dazed mornings, of anguished days. And then he remembers: N, O, P- “I lost focus.”
“Why?”
He remembers himself falling apart in front of Sylvia Sherwood, lingers on it, enough for her to hear his echo scream, They weren’t just a mission, Handler! Then he shuts out that voice, breathing deeply. “Is it true you can read minds, Chimera?”
It’s eerie to hear it said out loud after nearly two decades of only hiding the truth. But she informed the higher-ups in WISE of her power a few months ago, and she hasn’t yet regretted it. It’ll make this conversation easier, at least. “You know it is, Twilight.”
His shoulders draw back at her frankness. “And what have you learned from mine?”
“Nothing I didn’t already know,” she says truthfully. And then, to reassure him: “It really is only surface thoughts I see, and it generally requires some effort. If you keep going through the alphabet like that, you’re more than safe.”
He does not seem reassured, by her words or her smile. “You’re here for a reason, Chimera. What do you want to know?”
She leans forward, gaze intent and fingers steepled. “I want to know about the Forgers.”
He freezes for an imperceptible second - imperceptible, that is, for anyone untrained in the art of detecting tells. For the two spies in the room, the motion is as obvious as if Twilight had leaned back in his chair, drawn a gun from his desk, and shot through the nearby window. His mental alphabet recitation staggers, stops. “I don’t talk about them.”
“But I-”
“I don’t,” he says, eyes glittering, and she remembers how dangerous this man once was. How dangerous he still is. “I don’t even think about them.”
She ignores the obvious lie. “They were a fake family, weren’t they?”
He swallows. “Don’t.”
“For the mission. Yor and Anya Forger. Wife and child.”
“If you know it already,” he says, his voice cracking, “why ask?”
“Because you left them,” she says, and for the first time allows some anger to leak into her voice. “You left them, after five years of pretending. Anya was only nine years old.”
“You don’t know anything,” Twilight snaps, though his voice cracks. “She was eleven.”
No, she wasn’t. But that’s besides the point. “Why did you leave?”
“It- The mission ended,” he says, not meeting her eyes. “I was assigned somewhere else. That’s it.”
“No, it’s not. You loved them,” she presses, and because she’s not in the mood for his lies, she reminds him, “I can read your mind. I know you did.”
He twitches, disconcerted. “No. Stop.”
“And you still left.”
“Chimera-”
“They were your family,” she snaps. “You loved them. And after all that, after all those years, you suddenly decided that you loved the mission more?”
“Please-”
“After all that they’d made you a better husband, a better father, a better person, you just left-”
He slams a hand down on the table. She startles back. Twilight’s eyes are shining with tears.
“They died because of me,” he snaps, voice breaking. “Is that what you want to hear? It was my fault.”
She is taken aback. This, she had not expected. “What?”
“They needed me,” his voice shakes, “and I wasn’t there. It’s my fault. Their blood is on my hands.”
“You- You thought they were dead?” Chimera whispers.
Twilight laughs bitterly. “No. I refused to believe it without a body. But none of my informants could find anything, I couldn’t find anything. All we saw was the obvious: their apartment trashed, the two of them disappearing off the face of the earth, right when I wasn’t there to save them. When I was sent on missions afterwards, I’d get distracted by women with black hair, by children I’d see on the street- I nearly got myself killed over it. I nearly got other agents killed over it. I was removed from active duty when it was clear I’d never be able to pull myself together.”
She stares at him. “But- but you left them. I heard- Operation Strix was over, wasn’t it? You were leaving for good.”
“I was supposed to,” he says, half-hysterically. “I- I didn’t want to, I never wanted to leave them, I hadn’t for years-"
“I know,” she whispers, “I know-”
“It was a day before I broke. A day, and I ran back with a dozen lies about overnight shifts and kidnapping and blacking out drinking and- and anything, anything, it didn’t matter, I might even have told the truth if given half a chance, if they’d only take me back-”
“And the apartment was empty,” Chimera finishes.
His mind flashes to images of bloody carnage. Anya’s hair caught in the hinge of the door, ripped from the roots. An arm from her favorite stuffed animal, lying abandoned on her bedroom floor. The couch they’d watched Spy Wars on top of, now soaked with Yor’s blood - he’d tested it, again and again - and their kitchen knives all gone as if snatched up by an opportunistic killer, and worst of all, in Yor’s room, lying beneath the bed, two thin stilettos.
Chimera sees them, floating in his mind like phantoms. On his orders, WISE had run every test on them, asked every informant- they’d been wiped of fingerprints, bleached of blood, perfectly immaculate in an apartment and world turned upside down- but everyone knew whose weapons they were.
“The Thorn Princess,” he says, swallowing. “The most feared assassin in all of Ostania.”
Chimera’s eyes are shining. She looks at him as if he’s both the smartest and the most stupid man she’s ever known. He wonders why her expression looks vaguely familiar. “You think she killed your family.”
“I know she did,” he says wearily. “She’s a true professional - doesn’t leave a trace, never gets caught. No matter how many times I tried. And getting to her wouldn’t prove anything - she’s a contract killer under the Garden, and I wanted to know who hired her. But I- I could never figure it out.”
He laughs, bitter. “And you called me the best spy in Westalis.”
“I did,” Chimera says softly.
Twilight wipes his tears and steels his expression. In seconds, he transforms from a grieving husband and father into the agent WISE knows him as today. His mental monologue starts up again, exactly from where it had stopped. T, U, V-
“I don’t know what you wanted to hear, Chimera, from my lips or my head. But I hope you’ve had your fill of my pain. I have a civilian meeting in five minutes, so if you could clear out of my office, that’d give me time to get ready for it.”
“You don’t have a meeting,” she says, having detected the lie the moment it occurred to Twilight to tell it to her. “It’s for the best. You would have had to cancel anyway.”
“Why?” he says, eyes narrowing. Y, Z, A-
“You’ll have other things to think about in a minute,” she says, smiling. “What if I told you where your wife and child were?”
Twilight thinks of strangling her, of throwing himself from the window, of bursting into tears. He purses his lips instead. B, C, D- “It’s been fifteen years. I don’t need to see what’s left of their corpses.”
“Who said anything about corpses?” she says lightly. “They’re alive and well.”
He doesn’t fall for it. E, F, G- “Proof?”
Look at me, she doesn’t say. She reaches into her wallet, pulls out a creased photo. She puts it face down on the table.
He raises an eyebrow, not moving. She sighs, grins, and flips it over.
YOR, he screams mentally, not bothering to conceal his desperation as he snatches the photograph and drinks up the sight of the woman pictured like it’s water in an endless desert. “Oh my- oh.”
His chest heaves, and he staggers to his feet. His chair clatters to the ground. “Yor,” he whispers, fingers ghosting the picture.
It’s not really even a good one, which is what makes this so pathetic. Chimera had taken it the day she graduated two years ago on nothing but instinct, catching her mother mid-laugh with a pot of peanut curry in her hands - she’d finally learned to cook, after years of trial and error manifesting in more than a few instances of food poisoning - and the lighting was terrible, the composition was poor, and the angle was hideous. But she kept it in her pocket anyway, because- well, because her mother at her worst had always been more than enough for her anyway. And it was nice to see her smiling.
Twilight rips his gaze from the picture with what looks like physical effort. “How?” he gasps. “Is it a fake? Chimera, I swear, if this isn’t real-”
“It’s real,” she says. “She goes by a different name now. She’s a gardener. In, well, more ways than one.”
Twilight clenches the side of the desk as if it’s the only reason he’s standing. “Wh- What?”
“You left them, and-”
“Don’t change the subject-”
“You left them,” Chimera says, but gently, because now she knows why. Twilight had always been a bit of an idiot. “And Anya knew you were gone forever.”
“No,” he says vaguely. His eyes are back on the picture, combing it for identifying marks. “No, I didn’t tell them. I said- I said it was work.”
“Anya knew,” she says, voice light and casual, and he blinks up at her. “She told Yor Forger that you were a spy- and, what’s more, that you had left for good.”
“What? How could she possibly have known-”
“Yor was never upset that you were a spy,” Chimera says, rushing forward before he could interrupt her again. “She had secrets of her own, after all. She knew you were hiding something by that point and that was one of the better options she’d worried about. But you leaving- she couldn’t bear that. She called the Garden for an extraction and the two of them fled, living under the radar for years before resurfacing under different identities.”
It had been efficient, the extraction, but it hadn’t been pretty. Yor had cut herself gathering all the kitchen knives and accidentally torn Anya’s stuffed chimera in her rush to get out the door. It didn’t matter to Anya, not then and not later- she’d spent so long fighting the urge to cry at the overwhelming fear and sadness flooding her mother’s mind.
“She called… the Garden?” Twilight whispers.
“The Thorn Princess never leaves a trace, you said it yourself,” Chimera says, shrugging. “The only reason she left her weapons behind was because she was panicking.”
Twilight’s eyes blow wide. “Are you saying-”
“Yup. You’re kind of slow sometimes,” she says, grinning. “But I guess none of WISE could figure it out, could they? Makes me wonder why I joined.”
“Why- why did you join?”
“To see you again, obviously,” she says. “It’s been a while.”
Twilight’s gaze rakes over her - over her black hair, brown eyes, freckles, crooked nose. “No. We’ve never met. I’d remember it.” His voice is becoming increasingly desperate. “I never forget a face.”
“You’re not the only one that can disguise yourself, Twilight,” she says, fingering at the edge of a mask she’s worn for the better part of her two-year training.
He catches it and flinches. “What- How-”
“My father taught me everything he knew,” she says with a laugh. “Though he didn’t exactly know it at the time.”
His eyes widen. “Wh- Wait-”
She rips off the mask, shaking her constrained curls and grinning brightly at him. “And I learned from the best, after all.”
She barely blinks before Twilight’s vaulted over his desk to grip her cheek, run a hand through her hair, and crush her in a hug fierce enough to rival her mother’s, which is no small feat. She informs him of this, breathless, and he laughs into her shoulder.
“Anya,” he breathes, and kisses her forehead and cheeks before drawing her back into his arms, arms so tight she half-believes he’ll never let go. “I can’t believe- is it you? You’re here? You’re alive?”
Chimera - Anya - smiles, her eyes suddenly wet. Her father’s mind is so full of love. “Hi, Papa,” she whispers, muffled in his warmth. “I missed you.”