As soon as I had exited the building, I heard the other Xarnon agent’s footsteps behind me. But that was expected. That was not what made me stop in my tracks. Officer Julia was responsible for that. When my gaze fell upon her face, the scene from earlier flashed in my mind. A gun pointed at me, a shot.

  I stood still, but the footsteps behind me did not step. After a few seconds, the sounds slowed, then stopped. Julia stopped walking, facing us. “What do you want?” She asked, a sharp hint of annoyance mixed within her tone.

  I shook my head. “Have you talked to Janet?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “No, why?”

  I shrugged. “She just seemed to think you were… in trouble, of some sort.”

  “The fuck is your game, boy?” She hissed, taking a step closer to me.

  I stepped up, not bothered by how she towered over me by six inches. I smiled sweetly. “Just checking in on you,” I said, honey in my voice.

  I promptly walked directly past her.

  Everyone followed, leaving Julia standing there, shocked and alone.

  ??

  We entered the main dorm building, no one stopping us. There was no one at the front desk, no one anywhere. For some reason, the CIA’s control had lessened on us. They weren’t always on us about something. From there, we made our way down the hallway in silence, stopping at our door. I hesitated, before twisting the knob and flinging the door open.

  I burst into the dorm, walking briskly toward the couch. “Vivian, I-”

  I stopped.

  Vivian was nowhere to be found.

  I frowned. “You sure she was really drunk?” Seph asked. “Because I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine getting off of a couch and moving three hours after fainting upon someone.”

  “Yeah, she was…” I trailed off. “At least, she seemed to be.”

  I took a few paces forward, examining the couch, as if Vivian might be hiding under it, or tucked within the mattress.

  She was not.

  I sighed, and walked toward Vivian’s room. I reached out, but my hand stiffened just a few inches short of the door knob. What the hell was I doing? I wasn’t about to just break into Vivian’s room if she isn’t in there.

  Or worse, if she was in there.

  I turned. “Well, that seems like a bad idea.”

  “Yes,” Les assented. “But is there an alternative? We have to check on her.”

  I sighed. “Fuck you and your actually logical decisions.”

  Turning around, I walked as close to the door as possible without touching it. Taking a little to long, I grasped the doorknob. A weight seemed to be building in my chest, pressing on my innards. I closed my eyes, and twisted the knob, pushing the door open just a crack to let me see inside.

  The sliver of a view I got was nothing special, just exactly the same as our rooms. My gaze was only able to land upon a wall, and a peek at what must’ve been a closet door. I cautiously opened it further; bit by bit revealing the interior. There was a carpet, then the full closet, then a lamp, then a bed.

  I slowly slipped within the bedroom, cursing every event in my life that had led me to do this. Thankfully, Vivian was not hiding behind the door, waiting to jump out and reprimand me for entering her room. I just felt stupid for checking, but I pushed that down. In this operation’s current state, stupid is far from the worst thing flying around.

  But something instantly caught my eye. A set of golden pistols on the desk, lying directly on Vivian’s laptop. Next to that, was a stack of paper that had to be a foot tall. Damn, I thought, what the hell would she need that many papers for?

  A bit of cold struck me, something strange from inside. A strange sense of dread, stirring in the pit of my stomach. I drew back, hesitant to explore further. I quickly closed the door, and turned to face everyone else.

  What would I tell them? ‘You know - I just pussied out and decided not to do this.’ No. I spoke simply and quickly, my decision was made. “Nothing, it’s just a plain-old room.”

  There was a collective sigh and some grumbling, but they seemed to be fine with it. After some complaint, everyone moved to do their own thing. Seph and Naomi sat at the couch, Les was on his computer, and Mel retreated to their room. Accepting defeat, I walked to my quarters as well, to waste away for the remainder of that day.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  ??

  Vivian did not show her face for three more days. Each day, we walked down, did a lesson with the cadets - who were thankfully acting normal again. We then went straight back to our dorm, with no news of war or Vivian or Torres or anyone. I spent my time working with every decrypter machine I knew, trying to make sense of the files.

  I scoured the web for the most obscure, powerful, and unique machines. But every day I would come up empty handed; no closer to solving any single character of the code than before.

  But, after the three days, when I had given up and sat down on the couch to watch TV with the rest of the Xarnon agents, who was to come in but Vivian - looking haggard and bloody - with scratches and bruises like dotting her skin. She stalked in, paying no heed to any of us. We, too, were silent.

  But when she reached the door of her room, Les spoke up. “Hey! You can’t just leave for three days after being drunk as hell, and then waltz in here all bloody and injured like that.”

  Vivian looked at him, tired. “I’m living a very full life right now.”

  Les narrowed his eyes, “Vanishing on your friends and randomly returning looking like you went through a laundromat drying machine with a nail as your partner?”

  Vivian rolled her eyes. “Minding my own goddamn business,” she snapped, before entering her room and slamming the door.

  I buried my head in my hands. “Fucking hell,” I muttered.

  Seph stared at me. “We’ll get through to her eventually.” Les gave him a glance. “Eventually,” he repeated.

  After a few second’s pause, I stood. Naomi watched. “What are you doing?” Xe asked.

  “Just… looking into something,” I said, before entering my chambers once more. It had been almost four days since I had gotten my hands on this data file, and yet I had still not gotten a single bit closer to discovering its secrets.

  Or discovering anything.

  I opened up the encrypted files, and got to work. I could no longer approach this normally by using decryption software from the web. I would have to get a bit more… creative.

  My first idea was to do it by hand, but I dismissed that almost instantly. There is no way in hell I could decrypt something done by a CIA-level software by hand in less than a thousand years.

  An alternative would be to create my own decryption software. I had done similar things before, but only by having the encrypter right in front of me. Guessing the key might be some code that would take way too long to write, and maybe even longer to run.

  I slumped back. Why did I think I could do this? So far, every method would just be a waste of time or effort.

  An idea struck me: a stupid idea. An idea that would most likely get me killed or punished in some other way. But it was something. If I got the encryption key, I could easily decrypt it. But to do that, I would need to sneak around once more, but this time I would need to actually hack something. No more stealing devices then experimenting on them in the middle of the night.

  This time, the only thing I could do was to operate on whatever computer they’d hooked this USB up to. And I could not steal that without people noticing. So I would have to figure out where the computer was, break into that room, give myself enough time to successfully get into it, grab the encryption key, put it on a USB, then get out.

  It was suicide.

  But it was the best thing I had. I put a pin in that idea, sticking it in the back of my head, and pulled out my phone, settling onto my matress.

  As soon is I saw the home screen, something soared within my chest, a bright hope, an idea.

  I opened my notes app.

  Just as quickly as the feeling had come, it was gone, vanished in the ever-swirling winds of my mind. Of course I wouldn’t have written anything down about my client on something so easily accessible by external seekers.

  I got the strange sense of being stranded, alone. I was with people, but not really. Everything seemed to have some sort of goal, something to hide.

  Vivian gets invited to CIA get-togethers and goes away for a few days, coming back bloody and bruised.

  Janet pulls a gun on me after Julia is out of her sight for no longer than an hour.

  Torres is gone.

  And Whiteford…

  I didn’t know about her. She knew everything here, but I got the sense that everything she didn’t tell us was big. Important.

  But who was I to judge that?

  I didn’t know a single thing.

  ??

  The next day, after a particularly slow-moving schedule, Whiteford came over some sort of speaker system:

  “Attention all technology units. In light of recent events regrading the war, all technology-based lectures and lessons are henceforth cancelled. Only authorized personnel will be allowed to leave their current dorm building. I repeat, only authorized personnel will be allowed to leave their current dorm building.”

  I was in my room, wasting away in bed when the announcement came.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  At about the same time, I heard Seph yell “SHIT!” from the other room.

  I smiled sideways, and emerged from my room. Vivian, was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Seph was playing some sort of card game with Seph and Mel, while Naomi was looking at something on Xyr phone.

  “Well,” I said, making everyone’s heads turn in my direction. “That was something.”

  “That was bullshit,” Les corrected, before saying “go fish.”

  Well, I thought. You’d have to be an idiot not to realize what game they’re playing. Then, with an internal chuckle, I added: So you’d have to be fifty percent of the population.

  That just made me think of rotting wounds and shooting people, a memory I did not want to bring up.

  But up it came. I sort of stumble-walked to the couch, and collapsed onto the fabric. I felt that pain in my chest, the same I had felt when thinking about every death I had ever had on my hands. And probably the many more that I had indirectly caused: people going broke and being forced into miserable lives.

  At my hands.

  I did that.

  Fuck.

  But somehow, being in this room, surrounded by people who I called friends… it made it a little less bad. Somehow, making myself happy could get rid of the pain and suffering I had caused in the past. And that was bad, awful. I got to enjoy life while my victims did it.

  Victims.

  What a way to put it.

  But I had to accept it: I had victims. People hated me. Some would reel and curse the government for even thinking of working with me. That though spiraled out into a thousand different worryings. I shoved that to the back of my brain so I couldn’t go down that path any further.

  Now that would be dangerous.

  As soon as the game of ‘Go Fish’ has finished up, I joined them for whatever card game would come next.

  That way, I could fight off the weight of the world.

  For now.