V A L T I E L

The conversation began to tread familiar land. Uneven, jagged and–in her experience…ultimately barren. Amber’s eyes had practically rolled themselves, and her back found the cushioned couch. “I suppose I’d have to find something new to want out of life. I longed nothing other than a healthy Taiwan for as long as I could want anything.” Reaching for that day in the future, as theoretical as it had become, was still a mental sore. Worse still, it became boring. Better to put the books, manuals, and lessons she poured into her brain to good use rather than worry about a sinking island.

Exist now, she told herself. Make a name. And when the time comes, jump ship.  But never think that you could ever fix anything. 

“If you could actually do more than break your hand while swinging at the mainland, by all means, I’m your murderess. I’ll do whatever you say do. But I’m your murderess, anyway. No need to squander that by swimming against the tide.”

She shook her head, glaring into space while her brain races along with the endless pages of research  If only she had a dime for each time Delun’s name emerged. Or Annalis’e’s. They were combined figures that took Empress Kwok An’s shape in the public eye. 

“I’ve been down this road before,” Amber concluded. “It ends with Taiwan getting smaller, and the mainland giggling while they hold the power of the Union in their hands. A Union we weren’t even invited to.” She suddenly took to her feet, seething, pacing down whatever stretch of the empty floor would allow her room. “We could no more get them to recognize our existence, let alone make them realize that their negligence is killing people. And the sea…? The sea will take what it wants.”

Amber stopped, peering out the window in stark silence. Her gaze turned to Val, her face a painful twist of defeat, sorry and anger. “Feel free to prove me wrong. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for preserving and enriching me. Hell, someone has to love me. No one else on this selfish, miserable pebble called Earth is going to.”

Valtiel watched Amber pacing. It was the most emotionally demonstrative she had seen the young hacker be since meeting her. It was interesting to see her so visibly angry. She of course seethed with an unseen rage that clouded her aura most of the time, but until now her body language had been held largely in careful check.

      “As you wish, we shall focus on enriching you for the time being.” Val replied smoothly, and pulling out the drawer in the coffee table produced a slim paper folder. “This is all the details you will need for your next target, it will be a bit more of a challenge than your first, but I feel confident you will succeed. In fact your first mission was rather below your pay grade all things considered.”

She did not place it down yet, it remained in her grasp.

We have an agreement, so says the woman across from her. Somehow the agreement did nothing to settle Amber’s nerves at the moment. But she only needed time to adjust. She had already begun to detect a subtle pattern: a repetition of an invitation for company. 

The moment shifted, changing shape: Amber had found her solid ground, small and floating in the middle of the sea of things unknown that expanded endlessly in every direction. But it was enough to offer solid footing upon which she could comfortably stand. Maybe it was temporary, maybe it was a false sense of security, but she found her willpower. Preparedness slew skepticism. It was all she needed to begin.

“My desire to maintain my well being wedges out my need for company.”  She repeated herself, word for word, from the night prior. “As a matter of fact, it all but encompasses my need for literally anything else. So, unless you and your employer’s endless influence can stop this island of mine from sinking and can somehow hold responsible the mainlanders watching us drown…there’s nothing more you or your employer can offer me that I’d want. Just the job. The whens, wheres, and whats of the job. Once I know that, I can begin, and my own needs will be met in time.”

Amber sat forward, propping up her chin in her palm. “But, don’t think for a second that your invitation here, your sly attempt at brevity, went unnoticed. It didn’t. Nor did the fact that your meeting to discuss terms happens to also be here. For someone who claims to be a stranger in a strange land, this place is rather…ornately decorated. This took time. You might not be Taiwanese, but you are no fish out of water.”

A playful smile crawled across her lips. “Surely a woman of your presence, stature, and influence couldn’t possibly be lonely enough to invite the company of a worth-nothing street urchin. No matter if it is for a job.” 

Sharp as a tack. Val was pleased really. Often people simply fell under her thrall, she had that sort of presence without really trying. Humans fell easily into her orbit when she ventured near them. But here was someone who not only remained cool to the touch, but resisted actively. 

That and she had noted their immediate environs. But she was only half right on that claim, which was still twice as well as most people did.

The creature picked the glass up with a slight smile and swirled the liquid around thoughtfully, she bit her lip for a moment before speaking.

      “Alright, you’re clearly far too observant to buy the entirety of my cover story. So, yes.” She gestured around. “I have made myself a nest of sorts, and I’ve been here longer than I might have implied. I’ve learned the customs, the language. I am far from a fish out of water but all the same it is not home to me. which brings me to something else you just said...”

She appraised the liquid in the glass and she thought of the ocean rising to swallow the land.

      “...What if we could hold those mainlanders responsible? What if together we could twist and push and pull in just the right places, send a few more people like dear Mendoza to their graves in order to achieve that? And just maybe if we achieved that, we could take on the sea itself.”

Val instantly raised a finger and a wry smile as if parrying the expected scepticism. 

There was a staunch effort of Val’s part to be plain and candid, to put Amber at ease. While she appreciated the effort, it was only a mild success. The written account of Mendoza’s autopsy played and replayed in the back of her head like a warped wax record under a broken needle. There was nothing normal about it, and it was the only reason Amber even began to consider “mysticism” having an air of truth.

But if it was true, what was Amber doing there? Surely the mystic and the world of ones and zeroes had nothing to do with one another.

Val offered a drink, to which Amber responded with a polite shake of the head. Her thoughts spun, but her eyes stayed glued to her sneakers. Eventually, she found the gall to look up. “Heh, ‘macabre.’ It was my idea to poke him with a bunch of holes and have him bleed out of all of them,” Amber chuckled.  “I may exercise caution, but I am not squeamish. Not in the slightest. What gives me pause are things I cannot explain. My entire life is built around adjusting to things I couldn’t understand, and my approach has always been to learn. That’s how I picked up my skillset. I didn’t come out of my mom’s womb with the skill of an assassin, thief and hacker. I had to learn. And if there is any truth to this, to your employer’s eccentricities, I’ll learn them too. And I’ll learn them quickly, and I’ll be all the better at the job.”

Amber crossed her arms, and her eyes finally found Val’s. “There are two sides to the truth: your truth, and the truth. I will work with either, without question or pause, as long as I’m given clarity and a chance to learn. Let the truth be strange, mystic, or unsightly. I will adapt, I always do. I just ask that you never keep the truth from me. Because if I learn the whole truth without you, that results in loss of trust that doesn’t benefit either of us.”

Almost as good as a signature in blood. The elder flower cordial splashed into the glass, and in Valtiel’s eyes the world slowed to a crawl, the fluid sloshing from the glass neck of the bottle became a slow motion waterfall.

A glow with the redness of sunlight passing through secret internal membranes illuminated the church like windows of the apartment and flooded into the house, bathing it in a bloody glow. And turning she saw that it touched Amber too, frozen in time for a moment. 

And for just that moment the girl had a dark halo.

The demon blinked, and nothing had changed. Nothing was out of place. She screwed the top back onto the bottle and put it back in the fridge before returning to sit opposite the hacker.

      “In that case you demonstrate a very special adaptability. Most of us, even the most open minded are at least somewhat closed down to the things we do not understand. Maybe it is your bloody minded tenacity, or the voracious autodidact within you that drives you, either way, it serves you well.”

The creature sipped the sweet liquid. 

      “Well alright.” Val smiled and some of the seriousness dropped away from her. She became easier, more human. “It seems like we have an agreement. And as I said before I would be very glad of the company in this place that is so strange to me...But one more thing...”

Val set the glass down on the coffee table and laced her bone pale fingers together.

Amber’s head cocked to its side, her face scrunching with a hint of sarcasm layered over a significant skepticism. “’A surprise?’ Do people not respond to job offers where you’re from?”

She hadn’t been offered entry, but she stepped inside all the same. As far as abodes went, anything was better than Amber’s hole in the wall. But Val’s apartment was anything but humble. It was plucked from a curated catalog and pasted flawlessly onto empty space, pristine and carefully maintained. And overall slightly nauseating with its broadcasted perfection. Perhaps Amber had simply got used to home sinking and falling apart.

“It’s nothing,” Amber replied, curiously scanning the room. “You gave me a job to do, I did it. After that, there was nothing keeping you there. The company was nice though. And so was dinner: thanks for that. But you’ll never find that you’ll never need to babysit me. You’re busy, and that’s fine.”

Amber was almost cautious in sitting her laptop bag on the floor. In fact, she had grown weary of even standing in the space, beginning to regret having taken steps inside. “So this job of yours. Does it require turning blind eyes? Because if it does, I’m going to have to adjust my method: I get curious from time to time and it’s a little hard to ignore the records of Mendoza’s corpse having a wound the size of a snowglobe in it. I certainly didn’t do that.”

So she really was a curious one. It figured when Valtiel thought about it, so far Amber had demonstrated nothing less than an impeccable attention to detail. The demon nodded thoughtfully, paused for a second before she smiled.

      “Please, come in and sit yourself down. I will try to explain everything.”

Valtiel shut the door, as the latch closed the creature made especially sure to ensure a continuation between the space her house currently occupied and the hall outside. She had been known to forget in the past, much to the confusion of her mortal acquaintances.

She sat down opposite the agent and leaned forward, elbows rested on her knees, long fingers laced together. She took a moment to form the words carefully in her mind before she spoke.

      “I do not expect you to turn a blind eye. In fact, I suspect that you are not especially capable of selective blindness. It’s part of what makes you excellent at what you do.” She paused, fingers unlacing and then curling back together.

      “I told you that my employer has an unusual relationship with...Mysticism, indeed the relic you returned to us has special significance for that reason. And more than that...My employer has a less than pedestrian approach to vengeance.” She smiled. “I understand it may seem especially macabre. But we all do strange things in pursuit of our own beliefs, our own traditions, no?”