Chapter Text
“Agent B.”
The voice from her earpiece was a welcome rumble. It was slightly distorted by the distance between them, but she could easily make out the familiar words. “We have a new mission for you.”
“I’m listening, Gordito.” She jerked the steering wheel to the right with one hand in a practiced maneuver. The other hand was pressed to her earpiece. She swerved out of the way just as an oncoming car would have totaled her million-dollar ride.
“We’ve uncovered evidence that confirms rumors you may have heard floating around. The Federation is indeed brewing up big plans.” Headlights blinded her, but she followed her instincts and accelerated harder into oncoming traffic. She could barely make out the flash of silver accents on the car that was pursuing her through her rearview mirror. Her car roared faster, and with one hand on the wheel, she dodged cleanly through the discord of blaring horns and panicking bright lights.
“Smokestack will be in contact with specific mission instructions within the next 12 hours."
The squealing of brakes and Maxo’s voice in her ear did nothing to block out the deafening shriek of metal on metal as her pursuer finally succumbed to the chaos. The engine exploded with a blast of fire that sent chunks of flaming rubber and leather raining down on the freeway. The mushroom cloud illuminated her mirrors so brightly that it almost looked like the sun had finally risen.
“Noted.” She responded crisply. She flicked her turn signal on and drove off the freeway to merge smoothly back into the correct direction of traffic. The earpiece switched off without another sound.
She made it back to her hole in the wall apartment without any remaining tails and only the blaring of police and fire sirens wailing in the distance as any evidence of her presence. With a sigh, she pulled off her shiesty and slipped into an armchair, too exhausted to even take the rest of her clothes off.
She woke up the next morning in the same chair, sore and somehow even more tired than she had been the night before.
She groaned, cracked her neck, and stood up to stretch and maybe try to find some coffee. The chase last night had been the result of a foolish mistake. Those politicians were never even supposed to know that she had been the one to blackmail them into resigning, but the look on the mayor's face had been way too good not to laugh at. Though that had meant giving away her position and then having to sprint several miles to her car, evade her pursuers very not subtly, and not even being able to eat a good dinner.
There was a knock at the door. She cracked her back for the last time and smoothed her hair out before shuffling over to open it. Behind the door was an orange cat. It wore no collar and meowed softly at her with a twitch of its tail. She nodded and straightened out her suit. Her stomach rumbled, but she coughed loudly to cover it up and smiled at the cat when it gave her a look. “Lead the way.”
She undoubtedly looked like she had just woken up from sleeping in her clothes, all wrinkled and slightly sweaty and with a dirt stain on one of her knees, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
The cat sauntered down the hallway of her apartment building and disappeared down the stairs before she could catch up. She followed its path, but when she exited onto the street, the cat was gone. She sighed and checked her watch. “10:10”.
A boy on a bicycle drove by and threw a newspaper her way. She caught it instinctively and opened to the tenth page. On the tenth paragraph, the first word of every sentence reads “Ice, cream, east, bound, too, for, ate, to, booth.”
The maps of the cities that she had been forced to endlessly study flashed in her head. She took off on a light jog toward the address and tried not to think about what might be required of her next.
Sure enough, in a booth in the back of the ice cream parlor in the east quadrant of town, Smokestack sat with a cigar pinched between two fingers and with his other hand stroking the orange cat gently. The place was supposedly closed due to construction. The entire street had been blocked off, and not a single person would probably come within two hundred meters of them. It was probably overkill, but she had learned that you could never be too careful in this line of work.
“Hi Jambo!” She whispered in a little voice as she approached them. She tried to reach out and pet him as well, but received only a hiss in return. She didn’t like cats that much anyway. She slid into the seat across from them.
“You look like you just woke up,” Smokestack remarked with a smirk. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth.
“Yeah, I fucking did.”
“Don’t get cute with me. I’m not the one who messed up her fourth mission in a row.”
“Yeah, alright, alright…” She slumped back against the upholstered cushions.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, B.” Smokestack tapped his cigar ashes onto the linoleum floor and spread them out with his shoe. “You were one of our best. Now you’re making all these stupid mistakes.”
“I know.”
“You have got to stop letting these emotions get the best of you. Keep yourself under control.”
“I just-” She protested.
“Just what?”
She groaned. “I just can’t help it, I’ve been so stressed recently, I never get any time to relax, and I lose my grip.”
“Maybe this next mission will be what you need. It’s long-term. We need you to investigate the Federation’s leader. Our intel has stated that he is supposedly working with a new partner to create a bioweapon powerful enough to wipe out our entire nation. This is a matter of national security.”
She perked up. “Cucurucho is back in the game? Who’s he working with?”
Smokestack chuckled. “That’s what we need you to figure out. Since his return, he’s been exceptionally paranoid. Only members of his extended family and their significant others have been let in on any sort of confidential information about his partner and their plans.”
“Significant others? Please don’t tell me this is a honeypot.”
Smokestack burst out laughing so hard that it caught in his throat, and he doubled over coughing. Jambo crawled leisurely up onto his owner's shoulders while he hacked his lungs. The cat curled around Smokestack’s neck with his tail flicking like a metronome. With a final giggle, Smokestack righted himself and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m gonna be honest, B.”
“Yeah?”
“We don’t even consider you for those types of operations.”
“Wait, okay, that’s rude. I’m very sexy. People would be falling all over to be seduced by me.” She huffed, crossing her arms. “What the fuck.”
“The problem is that you only attract freaks of nature. And way too many of them.”
“...Okay, fair.”
“We have uncovered the location of Cucurucho’s bastard son. You will be raising and caring for him to gain his trust. And you will use him to gain access to his father and to discover the identity of their partner and their specific plans.”
She paused and ran the sentence through her head multiple times. “I’m… supposed to… manipulate a child?”
Smokestack took a drag of his cigar and breathed the smoke into her face. She coughed and swatted it away.
“You will adopt the child from the orphanage where it is currently held and find a husband to live with you in the commercial district to complete the illusion of a perfectly happy family. I will be in regular contact to ensure the success of this mission.”
He put out the cigar against the bottom of his shoe and tossed it across the room to land perfectly in a garbage can near the door. “Any questions?”
“Uh? Fucking yes?”
“Too bad, go bother Gordito with them,” He cackled. She groaned and slumped into her chair.
Smokestack slid out of the booth and held his arm out for Jambo to scramble down from his neck to be cradled like an infant. With his free hand, he pulled from his suit jacket pocket a slim manila folder with the name “Project Praying Mantis.” Gingerly, she pulled it from his grasp and tucked it under her arm. It felt suddenly heavier than a folder that size should ever be.
“Let this mission be a lesson for you. Emotions are the death of a spy. Ridding yourself of them is the only way you’ll succeed in this field.” With that, Smokestack and Jambo exited the abandoned ice cream shop and disappeared into the construction zone beyond. She was left sitting there with the folder burning a hot iron crease into her arm. Alone, in a dark and fog-shrouded ice cream parlor, shivering in her day-old clothes and feeling far, far too tired to be dealing with this, she took the folder, opened it, and read what was inside.
----
Sweat slithered down Multi’s neck like a snake, slick and venomous. He felt dangerously hot. Waves of heat swarmed him on all sides, pressing down on him like lead against his chest. They compressed his lungs until only the smallest gasps of air could be sucked from the gas mask pressed to his face.
Multi forced himself to keep moving. The swaying of his vision and the tremble in his fingers told him he was close to the breaking point. There was still too much to do. The strain on his body didn’t matter unless there were results to show for it. He had to keep going. The pencil in his hand shook enough to make his writing illegible. The numbers were clumsy and misshapen, but it would have to be enough.
He wiped his forehead with one of the sleeves of his white coat. It was stained with dust and dirt, and the slight greenish tinge of radiation exposure. The ventilation in this warehouse was awful, and the heat to distill the UF gas was escaping its containment in concerningly large plumes. His calculations for the construction of his equipment must have been off. Either that or Cucurucho’s workers had failed to follow his direction. Either way, he was too pissed off to think of anything other than how to fix it.
He hated being behind schedule. And he hated even more that this might be his fault. He just had to recheck his calculation one more time. to ensure that imperfections were eliminated. He reached back to his calculator and tried to force his hands to cooperate. Precision had long since slipped from his grasp. Slick, weak fingers slid against too small keys. The numbers swayed, and his head was pounding. Sweat dripped down his nose, and Mutli’s eyes followed as the drop landed squarely on the number 9. Or was it 6? Maybe 8. The table was suddenly approaching rapidly, and then his head exploded in pain, and everything went black.
-
Multi woke up an indeterminate amount of time later. He was laid on a couch with his neck raised by an ice pack. A fan blew in his face. Multi didn’t even need to open his eyes to know that he was in his office. The faint smells of vinegar, bleach and iodine marked his territory clearly. He sat up slowly and blinked against the harsh industrial fluorescents. The pockmarked paneling of his ceilings were an unwelcome sight. Multi glared at the open door.
The sweat had mostly dried on his skin into a slick crust, and he picked up the ice pack to press against his forehead and the insides of his elbows. He had been so fucking close. Only to be interrupted once again.
Footsteps clicked down the hallway in approach. Multi averted his gaze and focused on cooling down the largest veins in his body. Ewron’s boots stepped into his frame of sight.
“You’re awake.” He said with an obvious grin in his voice. “I’m glad.”
“Why,” Multi scoffed, looking up to meet Ewron’s eyes. “So you can see my reaction when you yell at me?”
Ewron’s eyes sparkled with a mischievous glee, and his grin stretched even wider. “Of course.”
“Just leave.”
“Make me.”
Multi rolled his eyes and stood on shaky legs to shove Ewron out of his way. He stumbled over to his desk and swept loose papers aside to peer at the blueprints of the processing pasted to the wood. He was so close.
Ewron slapped a hand down onto the blueprints. “Listen to me, please. It seems I’m the only one left that has any of my brain cells remaining, which is surprising considering that you’re the one with several PhDs. You’re killing yourself, and it's pathetic. I’m sick of cleaning up after your disgustingly sweaty ass every few hours. It’s absolutely terrible. I refuse to continue like this. I think it might actually kill me.”
“You’re so fucking dramatic,” Multi hissed, shoving Ewron back with his shoulder. “Shut up and be useless somewhere else.”
“Oh, if anyone is being fucking useless, it's not me. I swear I will not leave you alone until you fix your workaholism and at least find a girlfriend or a boyfriend or something else besides this fucking reactor. You’re ridiculous.”
“Asshole…” Multi tried to sit, but Ewron had pulled his chair out from under him, and he crashed to the floor with a pathetic whoomp. His tailbone ached as it collided with the floor awkwardly, and Multi groaned. He rolled onto his stomach. “I hate you so much.”
“I actually don’t give a fuck, you know that, right. I’m done picking up after you. Especially if I’m not even going to get paid for it.”
“You’re my friend,” Multi grumbled. “I don’t have to pay you anything.”
“It’s not going to stay that way for long if you keep this up. Go on a date, and I’ll think about not reporting you to Cucurucho.”
At those words, Multi peaked his head up from the floor. “You wouldn’t.”
Ewron gave him a cold smile, “You don’t know what I would do.”
Multi dropped his head and sighed deeply into the concrete. He hated this fucking cockroach so much sometimes. But if there was anything he could guarantee from Ewron, it was to lie and cheat and to be as unpredictable as possible. That was one of the reasons Multi enjoyed his company so much. It gave him a sick sense of thrill knowing that he had the only uncontrollable person he’d ever met under his thumb. Now he was beginning to see that his affections were leading him places that he was beginning to regret. Ewron wasn’t lying this time; he had actually saved Multi’s life, or at least kept him from getting majorly sick and incapacitated more than once now. He owed his friend for that. As much as he despised Ewron on the principle of him being Ewron, he still held respect for the only person besides Nexe to be able to crawl his way between the cracks in Multi‘s walls.
So as Ewron made his way out of Multi’s office with the sharp clicking of his heeled boots stepping over the scientist’s prone form, Multi found himself called out.
“Wait,” He coughed and pushed himself up to sitting. Ewron turned back with an eyebrow raised. “I’ll do it. I’ll find a distraction."
“A partner?”
Multi scowled. “I didn’t say that.”
“You need someone else to take care of you.” Ewron’s voice had softened around the edges. He gazed down at Multi with something almost close to kindness in his eyes. But it might have just been the light. “I can’t be here all of the time.”
He turned and walked out of the door, leaving Multi to sit on the concrete, clammy and alone, to contemplate.
—