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16 – The Intent to Achieve More
Grief and sleep were old bedfellows. Ryan opened his eyes. The quality of the light coming in through the wall of windows at the far end of his office told him it was mid-afternoon, something his HUD was kind enough to confirm as he sat up and felt himself speed back up to full function. As he usually did, he stood, stretched, and refreshed his skin and clothes with requirements. To the outside world, he was sure he looked like a perfectly ordinary agent, not one who had barely escaped the worst tragedies it was possible to befall a man. Or had hopefully escaped. Stef was safe for now. But…
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12 – Kindness
There was a knock at the door. Ryan ignored it. There was another knock. Ryan poured himself another drink. His warped reflection stared back at him from the cut crystal of the glass that had been his only companion for the past couple of hours. Jones had made it clear he could come back to the lab whenever he wanted. Still, there had been things he’d needed to do, things he’d needed to organise, and weeping by Stef’s bed was not going to ensure a tidy end to his life. He could run. There was one last piece of mirror remaining, enough for a fresh start, enough to undo the…
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09 – Come Crashing Down
Curt wasn’t even sure he was breathing as he sprinted down the hall. It was easy to ignore the looks his fellow recruits gave him as he ran – they were always giving him weird looks for one reason or another. Well. One reason. The defining reason. The only thing about him that mattered anymore. Solstice. Ex-Solstice. Monster. The same kind of monsters likely responsible for Newbie being MIA. He pounded his fist against the door of Ryan’s office – this wasn’t the polite and cautious knock of “Recruit Curt”. This wasn’t the knock he gave when he secretly hoped that Ryan wouldn’t open the door. His phone buzzed, but…
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06 – Last Requests
Every tiny detail seemed blown out of proportion. The sensation of his own breath. The brightness of the lab lights. The touch of fabric against his skin. Every pinpoint of information that was never otherwise considered. Ryan wiped his cheeks, aware of every line on his palm touching the skin. Every unnoticed detail of hands he’d had for over a century. Hands he’d always feared shared too many details with Rhys. So much – too much – of his early life had been in the shadow of a man simultaneously gone and not gone – as was probably the way with other templated agents. Other templates though, he knew, were…
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05 – A Step Towards an Ending
No news, it was said, was good news. Central was taking their time to respond to his request. He’d spent a long hour in his office, alone and waiting for judgement, before deciding that if these were his last moments alive, he didn’t want to spend them alone. Ryan had walked through the halls of his Agency, making what might be his last memories, before joining Jones and his comatose recruit in a hurriedly-assembled lab on level four. Four was primarily unused, except for a bit of secondary storage, and some supplies for “end of the world” scenarios. It was the right choice – a safer option than having a…
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02 – Ripples
Ryan stared at the drone, each second as slow as eternity. Between each eternity, he felt like he could still see like Death. Could still see all the possibilities and consequences as part of him tried to calculate which was the best way to go. And he knew, that in a hundred other worlds, other Ryans were just as frozen, just as overwhelmed by the decision. With each breath, a new reality was born. Doppelgangers who ran for Faerie. Men who snatched up another shard of mirror to wish their way out of it. Agents who were frozen by the gaze of the drone. Reynolds had always described him as…
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01 – Everything Lost, Everything to Lose
There was an innate stillness to corpses that always set Ryan at unease. All the small motions of life extinguished, the spark gone, nothing but the husk remaining. Stef’s dead eyes stared out into the night, and he blinked back tears. He closed his eyes, holding the image of Stef alive, happy, questioning everything and exploring magic – tried to hold onto the precious few things he knew about her – then took another breath. With a shaking hand, he touched the jagged, misshapen piece of mirror that jutted out from her chest, and made a wish. He could feel the magic flowing in the mirror, static and overwhelming, so…
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46 – Joy and Sorrow
Ryan stared at himself, at his double, and knew what the grief meant. Even as his Stef gently hugged him, smearing his blood onto her uniform, the man standing across from him had only loneliness and a burial in his future. ‘Take her home,’ his double said, the words evident, even without sound. ‘You-’ he took a step forward, fading as the dimensional cracks continued to heal themselves. It had been…too much. An indulgence that he should have ignored – this type of operation was too far outside of her current skills as a recruit, but she had asked, and- He put a hand on her head, and brushed away…
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45 – Incremental Changes
The owner of the rather impressive scream was still fighting against whoever was causing him pain when they reintegrated. Curiously, Ryan hadn’t shifted them directly into the fray – instead, they were a few metres back from two fighting men, hidden from view by a couple of industrial bins. Stef looked down to her hand as Ryan pressed something small and hard into it – a headset, which she dutifully slipped into her ear. ‘On a night like tonight,’ he said, the sound only coming through her headset, rather than from his voicebox and mouth. ‘It never hurts to be careful. Too many would take advantage of a recruit’s –…
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44 – Mirrorfall
There was change from without and change from within. Both were valid, and both expressed themselves in different ways. Both meshed in an infinite feedback loop. One causing the other which rolled and twisted and- She still recognised the person in the mirror. Stef splashed her face again, dried off with a required towel, then required a fresh uniform. On her first morning in the Agency, she’d hidden in the bathroom. She’d been unable and unwilling to face how things were supposed to go – but Ryan had adjusted for her, simply throwing her at Curt instead of insisting that she meet an overwhelming number of new people all at…
