TITLE: The Village Worse Than Death
FIRST PUBLISHED: February 12, 2023
SUMMARY: Naomi Misora, former special agent (recently resigned) wakes up in the Village. (A retelling of "Arrival" with Naomi starring as Number Six).
oOo
Arrival
Former secret agent Naomi Misora was lying dazedly in bed in her apartment, having just woken up. She was wearing dark leather pants and a matching leather jacket, but it would be a mistake to assume she customarily slept in this outfit. The last thing she remembered had been sticking a brochure for a peaceful island retreat on top of her briefcase, and then—oh. The world had started turning in the wrong direction. Smoke flowing through the keyhole.
She’d had two thoughts at that moment: the first was that she would wake up strapped to a chair in a very dim, dark room with serious men standing in the shadows and a light pointed at her face; the second was that she wouldn’t wake up at all. This… whatever this was? Rattled her, but she tried not to show it. She tried to convince herself for one weak moment that perhaps she’d somehow merely forgotten that she hadn’t found out a secret of such significance, that she hadn’t resigned, that she hadn’t ridden back to her apartment as fast as she could, knowing they were tailing her, still driven by a reckless desire to not make it easy for them, and had had a completely ordinary day which she finished by… collapsing into bed without changing, and falling into an apparently deep sleep.
But when she got up and looked out the window, Misora realized the world hadn’t stopped turning upside-down quite yet. The view showed a small town, perhaps a holiday resort, with vibrant green lawns. All empty and quiet in an early dawn light. The bottom of her stomach swooped, a sick tension filling her whole body.
At that point, Misora lost all rational thought. Her mind, which was filled with a blazing static of panic, left her body on autopilot. Fortunately, she had very good autopilot. She’d been a very good agent, before she resigned.
She got up and walked as quickly as she could through what was obviously not her apartment, no matter how much it looked like it, toward the outer door.
From the outside the house looked nothing like hers. It was cozy, and had that air of well-tended fakeness that all planned communities have. From the nearby bell tower, which she ran up, feeling winded from more than the run, she saw nothing but beach and sea outside the span of this odd village. Then, as though to add to her disorientation, the bell began to ring above her head, a long, loud toll that seemed to shake its way through her skin, into her bones. She kept running. The town was waking up, it seemed. But no one she passed seemed helpful at all: finally directed to a phone booth, she picked up the oddly-shaped thing, stumped when the operator insisted she had to give her number to make a call. Misora didn’t have a number. She didn’t live here. The phone was useless. And then, as though she was being watched—that was a paranoid thought, but she hadn’t gotten where she had in her job without a certain degree of healthy paranoia—up drove some kind of golf-cart calling itself a taxi. With a woman inside who spoke to her in English, then—when she did nothing but stare blankly—in Japanese.
Where to, ma’am? Anywhere but here. Who were these people, dressed like they were on a show that had just discovered color TV? Misora could get nothing from her on the ride, and couldn’t even get out of the village. Only local service? I guess that makes sense, she thought, who would seriously try to ride from one town to another on a golf cart, even if it did say “taxi” on it in the same weirdly cheerful English font. There was a store at least, in the village, but when Misora asked for a map… both the normal and the larger map showed only this place. “Your village.” Whose village? What were her superiors up to? This place was insane. Unfortunately—a veneer of colorful silliness did nothing to hide the harsh text describing the boundaries of this artificial world. Mountains on three sides, ocean on another. They didn’t want her getting out. She needed to get out. She was done, she’d resigned.
She couldn’t hire a car, they only had taxis. The shopkeeper was no help. As she turned to leave he said—with a purposefulness that stopped her short for one long moment—“be seeing you.” He made a small gesture with his fingers by his head, like an eye. Watching.
Misora went back to the house she’d woken up in. “6” it said, on another sign under a striped awning. “Private.” The door swung open of its own accord as she drew near to it, and closed behind her. It could have been an automatic door, except… except she could tell it wasn’t. She hadn’t been standing close enough to it when it opened, and not directly in front of it. And it hadn’t opened earlier, when she’d stormed out. No: it was being opened electronically, but only when they wanted it to. She was being observed.
There was a vase of flowers, like a welcoming gift, that hadn’t been there before. And a wara ningyo with a card on top of it. “Welcome to your home from home.” A protection or a threat? Both, hand in hand. See what we can do to you, if you don’t obey. Like the fragile straw doll was a reflection of her own body.
She threw the card to the side. Her corded phone had a number 6 in the middle of it, and when she picked it up—without even touching any buttons—there was a voice on the other end. Intimidation tactics. Misora could feel her shock, her despair, giving way to anger. It burned inside her, a good clean rage. What did they think they were playing at?
“Join me for breakfast. Number Two. The green dome.” It wasn’t a request.
More self-opening doors, and she was lead through an ordinary entrance hall into the inner room, a steel-lined dome room, yes, glowing with low purple lighting, harsh and eerie, while a round black chair, like the pupil of an eye, slowly revolved toward her. There was only one path to take, a ramp leading down toward that setup in the center of the room: chair and dashboard covered in buttons, a screen on one wall covered in an eerie rotating screensaver, lights above set up as though part of an alien abduction. A man with a striped scarf and a colorful umbrella. A lava lamp: why? And an old pennyfarthing bicycle, standing in the background like some kind of odd modern art statue. The other chair appeared from under a covered circle in the floor, rising from its hidden compartment at the touch of that umbrella. They had everything she would have chosen to eat, before she even spoke.
She didn’t eat. She wanted answers.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”
Misora looked at the chair. She had always been a good agent. She followed orders, no matter how hard the assignment. No matter how much it might interact with what remained of a… common sense she’d been born with. She’d never had a conscience; she didn’t think any secret agent did. They wouldn’t be able to do their job otherwise. Still, some had ideals. She’d just gotten into it because she was good at it.
Special Agent Misora wouldn’t refuse the seat. But she wasn’t Special Agent Misora anymore. She’d resigned. She was Naomi now. The thoughts passed through her mind in the blink on an eye, the smallest few heartbeats as she looked at that chair. She was Naomi now, and Naomi was pissed. The intimidation tactics? This inability to accept her resignation gracefully? She’d served enough, hadn’t she? She’d never shown a shred of evidence that she was untrustworthy, that she’d sold out, but here she was, accosted, toyed with, and now she was just supposed to sit down so this man with a striped tie and umbrella and a pin with a pennyfarthing bicycle and a 2 on it could tell her what was happening.
Without a word, she walked past the chair. Stood, pointedly, behind the bicycle, and waited to see the reaction.
He was unruffled.
“It’s a question of your resignation.”
“Go on,” Naomi said shortly.
“The information in your head is priceless. You don’t realize you’re a valuable property. You’re worth a great deal.”
“Who brought me here?” Naomi demanded, in a soft, even tone.
“I know how you feel. They’ve taken quite a liberty.”
“Who are ‘they’?” She thought they were her own superiors. She was almost certain of it. But ‘almost’ was not quite enough.
“A lot of people are curious about your resignation. You had a brilliant career, an impeccable record. They want to know why you left.”
“What people,” Naomi insisted.
“Personally,” the man steamrollered over her, with a condescending smile, “I believe you, that it was a matter of principle. But what I think doesn’t count. One has to be sure about things.”
“So you poke your nose into my business,” Naomi said.
“I have to check your motive.”
“I’ve been checked!”
“When an agent knows as much as you, a double check does no harm.”
“I don’t know who you are…” Naomi said, her quiet fury pushed to the breaking point, “or who you work for,” she added meaningfully, “but I’m leaving.” She turned to go, and of course, the thick metal doors stayed pointedly shut.
“Haven’t you realized there’s no way out?”
She’d not realized any such thing. All she’d realized was that she could, in fact, become more disgusted with her own side (if it was her own side). She hadn’t thought it was possible.
The power play continued. They had pictures of her taken without her knowledge spanning years, from her childhood to her time as an agent—those were more detailed, no longer family photos and school shots but pictures taken from hidden cameras. As soon as she began to work for the nation the eye of the government had been on her, and as striped scarf said, jovially, “one likes to know everything.”
She’d known she was giving up the right to a private life, given her choices, but the baldfaced disregard still disturbed her. She hadn’t been aware of many of these photographs. Of course. Since they wanted to intimidate her into… what?
“Let’s make a deal,” striped scarf said. “Co-operate and this can be a nice place. You may get a position of authority.”
Naomi almost laughed. “I won’t make deals with you. I’ve resigned.” But she wasn’t amused. She made herself clear. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.”
“Is it?”
They took a little tour. Up in a helicopter. The village looked just as picture-perfect as it did on the map, perhaps even more so. Impassable on every side. Meanwhile striped scarf told her all the amenities. Everything that made the village self-sustainable, from a democratically elected council to a graveyard. Then back in the central square, striped scarf speaking at her through a loudspeaker, extolling the village’s virtues.
And as though budding from the water, bubbled some sort of huge self-powered weather balloon, accompanied by an eerie wail. The one man who didn’t stand still at striped scarve’s command ran, and the balloon—the thing—came after him, as though under its own power. It bounced, floated, drifted… pushed itself onto him and smothered him under a film of sheet-white. He screamed, and no one moved. Not even her. Then it drifted off and, like an exhale, everyone and everything moved again. Even the fountain, which had stopped.
The tour continued. In the labor exchange, decorated by such lovely signs as “a still tongue makes a happy life” and “questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself” in bright and easy to read designs, past the comfortable front room and into another empty, echoed back room designed only for intimidation. The aptitude test. She picked up the round green peg, put it into the square hole, and the square hole turned into a round hole. Trapping it. Striped scarf laughed. The man who had been waiting inside the room, behind an architectural colorless tinkertoy, gave her the questionnaire, spinning one fan after another. “Just fill in your race, religion, hobbies, what you like to read, what you like to eat, what you were, what you want to be, any family illnesses…” there was a pointed pause; “any politics.”
They wanted to know if she had defected. They wanted her to fill it out on a dang questionnaire. That endlessly spinning childish toy made her rage flare up. Naomi liked to think she was a reasonable person. When she’d signed up for the life of a secret agent, she’d known very well she might someday be captured and tortured, or shot down, and no one but her fiancée would ever even hear about it. She hadn’t been counting on grown men acting like children. It hurt her pride. She felt offended.
She knocked the entire freaking thing into a pile and walked away.
There was nowhere to go, of course. Naomi went back to the house she’d woken up in because it at least looked like her apartment inside, and she could pretend she wasn’t being watched.
Only there was a maid inside, from the labor exchange. Oh yes; because she would be more likely to let something slip if they sent her another woman to talk to, someone young, slightly younger than her, and of her own ethnicity. Probably they expected some sort of feminine display of emotions. Maybe a heart to heart. Unfortunately, Naomi had never been prone to feminine displays of emotions. It was probably why she’d gotten along as well as she did in a field where most everyone else was a man. She wasn’t soft. She couldn’t be if she tried, and she had tried to be, for Raye. Half the time it even worked. But it was a persona, just like any she might put on in the course of her work. And now, to be faced with the fact that they thought she would be so easily taken down?
Naomi looked back at her “personal maid”, unmoved.
“That’s another mistake they made,” she said. And then, raising her voice, “get out!”
She just needed to be alone. To pretend to be alone. Of course the minute the maid left one of the walls of her apartment rose up like it was the curtain on a performance. On the table, the card was back on the wara ningyo, still proclaiming “Welcome to your home from home.” The brick of a speaker sitting on the far shelf began to play a lulling tune. Someone had put an orange lava lamp in her bedroom. Her closet was entirely empty. We can rearrange your life. The message was clear.
My life is my own, she’d said. Is it? Striped scarf had replied. She felt sick. She felt trapped. She felt like she needed to scream. There was a teal lava lamp outside her bathroom. She didn’t even like lava lamps. The bubbles in them seemed eerily like the fountain had, earlier that morning, when the weather balloon had grown from it like an underwater fungus.
Nothing in the bathroom. A to-do list in her desk, with notes they’d written for her. “Don’t forget to send thank you note for flowers at earliest” and “Arrived today. Made very welcome.” They even bothered to forge her own handwriting. She blinked at it.
The notes were still there. It still looked like she had written them. But she hadn’t. She thought she might be shaking. Autopilot took over again. She opened the other drawer. The map of the village she’d “bought” (intended to buy, really, since she’d paid nothing and hadn’t taken it from the store) was folded up in its booklet. “Map of your village,” it said, on the cover. She opened it. The same map. Mountains on three sides, ocean on the other. Nothing else. She folded it shut again, perfectly—she had neat habits, trained into her from years of knowing never to leave evidence behind. But her movements were fast, too fast, and everything else seemed slow and fast at the same time, and the damn music wouldn’t stop playing.
In the cupboards, all the cans said “village foods” on it. It looked infantile. It looked like fake food. But it sounded like food when she shook it. She was stuck in a dollhouse. Naomi had never liked dollhouses. They were too perfect. They were full of quiet families where nothing was ever wrong. Just like hers. No wonder she had left at the first opportunity. No wonder, when that constricting sense of being watched…
Only to throw herself into a career where they were just as punitive for any mishap. Perhaps it was the only way she knew how to live. Only to engage herself to a man who wanted the picture perfect wife, never mind that he knew she was an agent, that she was only pretending for his sake, and not even well. But she’d resigned. She’d resigned and she was going to go on holiday and… the walls were not moving, but they seemed to be closing in on her nonetheless. Her steps traced a frantic circle through the living room and kitchenette. The music was growing louder. It wasn’t even bad music. It was nice. It was being piped in by the people who were watching her. She couldn’t stand it. She picked it up, threw it on the ground: no wires? Smashed it. Smashed it under the heels of her shoes, wishing she could get on her motorcycle and just drive, drive all night if she had to. There was something inside the box of the fake speaker, but it didn’t look like it made any sort of circuit, and the music kept on playing. The announcement system asked for an electrician at Number 6.
The maid was back. Standing in the doorway. “I forgot…” she said, lamely. Probably hadn’t even made up what it was supposed to be she forgot. All right. Any source of information. Naomi could work with this. But it was all I don’t knows. Who controls this, any of it, all of it, who was she, how long had she been here—her whole life? Don’t think of it. Has anyone escaped? The answer was not promising. Those who’d managed it had been brought back, not always alive. And now the girl was telling her everything. That she’d been offered freedom in exchange for getting information. Of course she had.
Naomi sighed. “You really believe with that knowledge they’d let you go?”
The girl, sitting on her chair, sniffling and looking crushed, said in a small voice, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“…Obviously.” Not too bright? Or just brainwashed. Naomi made it clear that she didn’t need to come back again. That was one spy out the door. “Don’t forget what you came back for,” she added drily. The girl left empty-handed.
The electrician replaced one speaker with another. While Naomi watched him pick up the pieces of what was obviously not a working speaker system, she made small talk. Asked them why they would drive those things. How slow they were.
“In an emergency, we walk,” the electrician said. It was funny, but she didn’t think he was joking. Naomi had known it was possible to smile through terror, but she’d never before felt the mixture of pure amusement and heady despair as she felt now. “I feel like a bit of a walk myself,” she said, and the door swung open courteously at her words. She needed to run. She needed to get away and she needed to do it now.
The part of Naomi that was a trained agent told her that there was no way any escape attempt sought out of animal terror with no plan would be successful. But the voice of reason was small. It had been drowned out with the need to get away. She felt hunted and unreal. At that very moment, she didn’t even care if her actions got her killed. She just needed to move.
There were always cars on the roads. There was a sculpture garden in the trees, and they turned to follow her as she passed, their eyes winking with a camera’s flare. The weather balloon was roving along the path. Where could she go? Every space she fled to was only more of the village. She was in good shape, but she’d never done well at long distance running and she felt as though her side was burning, but every time she paused and looked around she saw only the futility of escape. They were already announcing a yellow alert. Sending people after her. She hadn’t even gotten away yet. She hadn’t gotten anywhere.
She ran toward the beach.
Open sand and open sky. It offered the illusion of freedom. As though she could run forever into the blue, into that flat line of horizon and be swallowed up. There was a gold cart after her, two men dispatched to take her down. She considered her options, and stopped running, meeting their attack, swinging out her legs, dodging their blows. Adrenaline sang in her veins. It made the burning pain of the stitch in her side non-existent; her shortness of breath could have belonged to another person entirely. There were only limbs, moving as they would, instinct, and a fighting dance without any music but the pounding of her own heart.
She took them down. Got in the golf cart and drove toward the sky, pink with oncoming sunset. Drove, the wind in her hair, whipping it free around her shoulders. Maybe it would have been faster to walk. But the sea breeze seemed to cut through everything, merging with the sound of the motor. In her leather pants and jacket, she was protected from the bite of wind that scoured her knuckles, she was adrift: nothing and no one could touch her.
And then it appeared. The… thing. With a sound like the wind being tortured. It bounced forward, encroaching on the cart, and she half-fell from it, unsure whether to fight or flee. Still, it was no contest. She wasn’t made for fleeing. Not when there was something to kick.
So she kicked it.
And it was on her.
And it… was on her. Smothering her. The sound was louder. It drilled through her ears. From far away, she heard her own screams.
She barely noticed when she was dragged away.
She woke up in the hospital, with some sinisterly kind old lady watching her from a rocking chair. When the old lady left her alone for a moment to inform the doctor she’d woken up, Naomi pushed herself out of bed. She’d been put in hospital scrubs. Her throat felt sore, her heart racing, but everything in her head was remarkably clear. In the aftermath of terror, Naomi felt Special Agent Misora wake up and gratefully surrendered her the reins. She was just on another mission. This one harder than most, to be sure… and with no backup… but just another mission. She had no personal stake in this. She had to tell herself that, even if it was a lie.
Of course, then she saw an old coworker in the hospital bed beside her.
The story, as far as she could press it from him, was one she could have guessed. They wanted information. He thought he hadn’t told them. He seemed distracted… more than that; overturned. Cracked open along the seams. They’d done something to him. If they were still agents she would have recommended he be retired. And when an agent who knows too much retires, you send them somewhere nice and quiet and peaceful, under guard, until everything they know is no longer current information.
Misora was quite aware of that. They’d done it to colleagues of hers in the past, and now they were doing it to her. It was perhaps hypocritical to protest now, when she’d known this was the way things worked. Still, she’d heard about houses in the country, with a few people around for security. This village? This was something else. It reminded her eerily of something she’d once seen on the other side, in a place they called Colony Three, only that—if this village was related—had been only a prototype. Nothing close to the surreal abandon of this carefully crafted torture. Had she ended up in the hands of the enemy, after all? Cobb’s story seemed to hint toward that possibility. After all, he’d been on a mission when he was abducted. But she’d been in her apartment, in London. Of course, the truth was, none of it meant anything. Not really. The only thing Misora could do was speculate.
It she hadn’t ended up in the hands of the enemy. If this really was her own side’s creation… had she somehow had an inadvertent hand in this village? Had her report on Colony Three all those years ago inspired some madman high up in the ranks to try their own experiment?
She put her thoughts to the side as the doctor returned, insisting on giving her a checkup before she could be released. At least he gave her a dressing gown. As they made their way down the corridor, she saw, from a room with a round porthole window, a neon pink light. Inside, men and women, tied up in straightjackets, were lined against the walls, blindfolds over their eyes and what Misora guessed must be sound-cancelling headphones over their ears. The doctor called it group therapy. Two men walked by as she and the doctor continued on their way. One had a terrified thousand-yard stare, and sticky notes on his head. The doctor didn’t explain, and Misora didn’t ask. But she gave a long look back at that unlabelled room with the pink light emanating from it before she stepped into the examination room.
There was a blue lava lamp in the examination room, along with all the standard equipment. Of course there was. The doctor found nothing wrong with her, and proclaimed quite genially that she’d be released tomorrow. He also said she’d get new clothes.
“And my old ones?” Misora said.
“Burnt.” Just that. No explanation.
“Why?!”
No explanation. She left the room in a daze. Her leather jacket had been burnt. They’d burned her jacket, and for no reason at all. They were probably going to make her wear candy stripes. She felt like she wanted to cry. At least the emotion was far away, as though it had been told to wait in line behind a glass partition.
Now, behind the same door with the pink light inside it, was only one man standing beside a podium that hadn’t been there before. A small silver orb hovered in front of his face. He laughed and seemed to speak in a mishmashed tone that was not language, and Naomi was not sure whether he was unaware of the orb or speaking to it. She didn’t know how they had moved everyone from group therapy so quickly, when her checkup had hardly taken ten minutes. “Coming along nicely,” the doctor commented.
An alarm sounded.
The doctor rushed away and Naomi followed.
Cobb, it turned out, was dead. He’d jumped from the window.
The next day Naomi was released with too many cards verifying her identity, a hat she didn’t like, a striped umbrella, and the number 6 pinned to her lapel. Her suit jacket was at least black, but for a strip of white piping around the edges, but it didn’t begin to replace her leather jacket. She threw the umbrella and hat into the backseat, and then the pin after it, with controlled fury, and got in the “taxi” to be taken away. Halfway through the ride, she jumped out, heading for Number 2, the Green Dome, and found to her satisfaction that the doors swung open at her entrance. She didn’t know what she was going to say to striped scarf, but she was going to say something.
But striped scarf wasn’t there. Some man dressed in a jacket to match hers was sitting in the round seat, smirking.
“Get him,” Naomi hissed, walking up to the dashboard.
“I’ve taken his place,” the man replied. “I am the new Number Two.” Sure enough, he had a pin saying “2” on it.
She went straight to the point. “Cobb.”
“What we do here has to be done,” the new Number Two said. “It’s the law of survival, it’s either them or us.”
“You imprison people,” Naomi said. “Steal their minds—destroy them!”
The new Number Two shrugged. “Depends whose side you’re on, doesn’t it.”
It was like talking to a tree. Worse than that. At least a tree wouldn’t smirk at you. “I’m on our side,” Naomi said.
“We have to find out where your sympathies lie,” Number Two said with a shrug, picking up her file and opening it casually.
“You know where they lie!” But she certainly wasn’t going to be telling. Not if it was the enemy after all. But she didn’t think so.
“Subject has enthusiasm for her work,” Number Two read out. “She is utterly devoted and loyal. Is this an agent who suddenly walks out?”
Naomi leaned back, her fury cooling to wariness. “I didn’t walk out,” she said carefully. The anger came rushing back, as though pulled on the end of a rubber band. “I resigned!”
“People change, exactly,” Number Two said. “So do loyalties.”
She spoke back with quiet resoluteness. “Not mine.”
“All very commendable. But let’s be practical. I’m interested in facts. Your only chance to get out of here is to give them to me. If you don’t give them… I’ll take them. It’s up to you. Think about it.”
Naomi just turned and walked toward the door.
“Good day, Number Six.”
Naomi stopped short, and turned. “…Number what?”
“For official purposes, everyone has a number here,” Number Two said. “Yours is Number Six.”
Naomi looked at him. She felt a deathly silence, a singularity of purpose. The tide on her rage had drawn out again. “I am not a number,” she said. “I am a person.”
“Six of one, a half dozen of another!” Number Two said. “Good day!”
Before the door had even opened in front of her, Number Two had picked up a red phone sitting by his chair, and said in a carrying voice, “report on Number Six. Normal classification. On arrival, subject showed shock symptoms, followed by accepted behaviour pattern. Has since been uncooperative and distinctly aggressive…”
She didn’t hear the rest, but Number Two’s report continued. “Attempted to escape. Subject proved exceptionally difficult. But in view of her importance, no extreme measures to be used yet…”
The funeral for Cobb was accompanied by a marching band. As the procession moved on toward the beach, Naomi darted out after it, toward the one figure who was trailing behind, a woman wearing a striped parachute-style cape and a red fedora. She had a number 9 pinned to her cloak. When Naomi got there, the woman turned to leave, but Naomi caught her arm. “You knew him,” she said.
“No,” red fedora replied.
“You’re crying,” Naomi countered.
“Funerals make me emotional,” red fedora tried.
“Even for people you don’t know?” Naomi said sarcastically.
“Yes,” red fedora answered. They stared at each other for a moment. Naomi realized she wasn’t going to get anything else like this, so she gave a little information of her own. “I knew Cobb,” she said. “I’d like to help.”
“He’s dead,” red fedora whispered, brokenly.
“He was a friend of mine,” Naomi said quietly. “We met… some time ago.” But she couldn’t think about that now. She couldn’t think about the last time she’d seen him, lying in his bed, alive but destroyed. I want to sleep, he’d said. And then when he was unobserved he’d…
Naomi might have cried then. But the tears she almost wished for refused to arrive. Somehow, she envied red fedora—she envied this woman, this grieving woman in the middle of a village created to house only paranoia and fear. If there were any space in her anger, she might have cracked, easily, and stitched herself together afterward, where no one could see. Instead she continued hurtling forward, driven by only one thought: she would get out of this. And she would tell someone. So that what happened to Cobb wouldn’t keep happening. So that whatever smarmy Number Two was sitting in the round seat, they wouldn’t be able to speak so cavalierly on doing the right thing.
“How do I know I can trust you?” red fedora said, gazing at Naomi with wary hope, or perhaps the sort of numb despair where she didn’t care anymore.
“How do I know I can trust you?” Naomi returned, gently.
“Do you know how he died?” red fedora asked.
“He jumped,” Naomi said harshly. “From a window.” It wasn’t like the Cobb she’d known. But the truth of humanity was that anyone could be broken down that far. Only fools kidded themselves otherwise. Any human being is capable of taking their own life.
Red fedora looked away.
“Sorry,” Naomi said quietly. Ashamed of the biting nature of her own tone.
“…Had you known him long?” Naomi asked.
Red fedora glanced back at her, and finally smiled a strange, brave smile, proud and whole. “No,” she said softly. “Just a short while.”
At that moment, Naomi realized that this woman had loved Cobb. What a strange and fragile connection to span the distance between two people, in the bushes overlooking a marching-band funeral. The kind of caring that secret agents had to be on their guard against because every hint of humanity introduced weakness. Right now, Naomi didn’t care. She clung to that smile as though it would be the proof that she would escape.
She had to.
“Where did you meet?” Naomi asked. Then pressed forward. “Here?”
“Yes,” red fedora admitted, looking fearful again. “Yes.”
“Cobb was a good man,” Naomi said firmly.
The clock began to chime ten. Red fedora darted past. “Get back, quickly,” she said. The funeral had gone silent below them.
“When can we talk again,” Naomi said, stepping in front of her.
“We’d better not,” red fedora said.
“We must,” Naomi replied, implacable.
Visibly worried, and glancing toward the green dome, red fedora said, “12:00. At the concert.” Then she ran.
Naomi was almost convinced she’d never see red fedora again, and felt a real surge of warmth when the woman sat next to her. Having a co-conspirator in the village felt like having a life raft in the middle of an endless ocean. Hardly enough to put faith in, and yet… enough to cling onto. Still, somehow. Enough.
While they pretended to laugh and smile and enjoy the concert, they spoke under their breath of the escape attempt red fedora and Cobb had planned. They’d come too soon for Cobb, but he and red fedora had meant to get on a helicopter. There was one coming soon, but it wouldn’t stay long. Red fedora had an electro-pass that would disable the alarms around it, which she’d gotten from the previous pilot. How she’d gotten it she wouldn’t say, leaving it at a quiet, “…I knew the last pilot.” She looked away, abashed.
Naomi didn’t think she would ever have the wherewithal for seduction. It wasn’t in her nature. She was too blunt, too uninterested, and incapable of playing it otherwise. It had been the only complaint she’d ever gotten on her record.
“You did this for Cobb?” Naomi said quietly. The reminder seemed to bolster the other woman, and when she looked back, it was with quiet strength again.
If it had been in any other circumstance, Naomi would have enjoyed working with red fedora as an agent. Perhaps they could even have been good friends. If red fedora was not, in fact, on the other side. Perhaps even if she was they might have been good friends, but then it was really betrayal. And it hurt. She’d experienced it twice, and twice was two times too often.
And red fedora seemed committed to making it three. At two in the afternoon, Naomi saw her leaving the Green Dome as she sat waiting, playing chess outdoors with the old admiral.
In the concrete boat built into the sand, Naomi hissed out her accusations.
“I was assigned to Cobb too,” Red fedora explained.
“And you’ll betray me in the same way,” Naomi said, disgusted.
“I haven’t betrayed either of you!” Red fedora said. “We were trying to get out before it was too late.”
And the truth was, what could Naomi do? She had to take a chance. Red fedora was assigned to her, and had been to Cobb before her. But Naomi thought there might still be a possibility. That red fedora refused to come along with her lowered the odds, but she had truly loved Cobb, she might be telling the truth—that she’d never intended to escape without him. When red fedora left, Naomi didn’t go after her. Why are you throwing away your chance? she thought. If it is a chance, and you aren’t lying to me.
She walked away, the watch that was the electro-pass in her hand. Slowly, calmly… as though she was doing anything but trying to escape. She felt a stirring of fear only when she got close to the helicopter parked on the lawn, with the white balloon creature sitting lazily beside it. She remembered the way it had flowed over her, and pressed down with a plastic insistence: she remembered that rush of noise and the pain that seemed to emanate from it like a shock of static. But it didn’t move, docile and uninterested in Naomi’s movements. The watch in her hand was slick with sweat, and she felt light-headed. But she walked quite calmly to the door, and opened it, and when she had closed the door behind her felt a rush of relief. But it wasn’t until she at last got the helicopter off the ground that she finally allowed herself to fully hope.
I made it, she thought, and smiled; a quirk of a smile. They didn’t call her Misora Massacre for nothing. She got the job done. She always got the job done. She could celebrate this last adventure when she was far away, when she’d gotten back to London, when she had made the report about the horrible place and it was put behind her for good.
And then—without her quite believing it, the helicopter was turning around. Back toward the village. The stick was turning in her hand, with a mechanical force far stronger than anything she could muster against it. Until at last she could do nothing but let go, but stare at the helicopter piloting itself back toward the place it had come from. Over the sea and over the beach. Over the veranda where red fedora, Number 9, was sitting beside the old admiral, and watching, casting her hopes to the wind’s kindness.
“Game of chess, m’dear?” the admiral asked.
“I don’t play,” Number 9 admitted, turning back to answer him.
“You should learn,” the admiral said easily. So she walked over and sat across the board, and when he spoke next, she realized exactly what he meant.
“We’re all pawns, m’dear. Your move.” And she saw, over the top of the crowd, the helicopter’s blades cut through the sky, homing in, and knew her time had run out.
And from inside the control room, the eye that sees all, Cobb, was wasn’t and had never been dead, who had never thrown himself out the window (there are always new bodies to get rid of) said of the woman who loved him, “don’t be too hard on the girl. She was most upset at my funeral.”
“Don’t worry,” Number Two said. “She’ll be well taken care of.”
“Yes,” Cobb said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” He did not sound very afraid.
“Well, I’d better be going. I’ve a long journey. Don’t want to keep my new masters waiting.” He’d tested it well. There were no loopholes. Not in this village. As for Misora? He had the feeling she’d be a tough nut to crack.
But humans are weak by nature; they can’t stand against an overwhelming force.
Even if they want to.