Mission 001: End
Emery jumped when the door opened behind her, the library’s conference room no longer an empty space of just her and Karzon, who had tagged along in secret. “Took you long enough!” she chirped at her teammates, hands on the back of the head chair from the opposite end of the room. However, even to the most inexperienced liars it was easy to see that her smile was all teeth gnashing together the way her knuckles squeezed so hard they turned white.
“What am I s’pposed to say here? Congrats! You managed to figure it out, or maybe you didn’t and just followed the others. Either way, you did good. I’ll talk with Haze about more exciting tasks in the future. Thievery, cool spy shit, a bunch of stuff that I used to do solo.” She spread her hands at her sides with a little flourish, before moving on like a car without gas racing downhill; if she stopped, she might not start again.
“Unfortunately… we have to go back. Right now.” That tense grin pulled at her cheeks again as if she had no control over it. Leaning down, she plucked a sheet of paper previously hidden below the table. A classic missing person flyer, it turned out to be, of a healthy-looking, middle-aged man. In bold letters the information confessed the man to be Metállaxi, like some kind of warning. When she flipped it over, painted over the back was a digital zero in a bloody red. “This is bad news.”
There are a few names that stick out among the secret whispers of Metállaxi. One of which is Novum Aetas now that they let themselves be known.
Another belongs to just one man who is called Zero. Very little of his identity is known by the living, so he is named for the symbol he draws on the work attributed to him, a taunting game of cat and mouse: “Come find me,” he says as another item is taken, a person goes missing or drops dead with no witnesses.
Zero has always been a distant notion to keep in the back of their minds like a song stuck in one’s head. He has never come so close. Novum Aetas has some reconsidering to do.
