Breakpoint - Part Eleven (Patreon)

Part Eleven

Len

He very much wasn’t looking forward to the conversation he had to have with Mira, but he also knew that the longer he tried to avoid it, the more it was going to suck for him. Fundamentally, he knew that he had to try and talk her into getting off the island, but he knew exactly how she was going to react when he told her that it would have to be without him, and, more disturbingly, without her memories of him. That was the part he knew she was going to take big issue with, not that he blamed her. While he wanted her safe, and getting her off the island would do that, it would take them away from each other, from what little bit of happiness the two of them had been able to scrape together in their lonely business.

Len was near certain she wouldn’t even entertain the option, but the last thing he wanted to do was to be making decisions for her, so he tucked the paper into his pocket and then started unloading things from the water onto the back of the cart truck.

Package arrival day was the day when the most islanders would come out, letting Len take stock of everyone who was not in the day-to-day rotation of people they normally saw. All in all, there were a lot of islanders trying to lay low and not draw attention to themselves. He also knew many of them were in conflicting states of compromised memory, as he saw a number of people who should’ve been adversaries standing right next to each other with no sense of nervousness or fear apparent on their faces, so either they didn’t remember who the other person was, or they wanted to give the impression that they didn’t remember who the other person was when they actually did.

Causing memory problems for spies only complicated a thousand times further than they really needed to be, because it was much harder to spot someone lying when they might not even know if they were lying.

He wanted to try and categorize people in cliques or groups, and there was just no chance he was going to do that until he’d been around much longer. But being around longer had never been part of the game plan. The idea had been to get in, get Mira back, figure out where they were and who was running it and then get out.

The one thing he’d put on order, a copy of “Logan’s Run” by William F. Nolan, was indeed waiting for him, so he’d gone and picked that up, as well as a couple of different pieces of clothing that were around his size. Clothes were never sent to just one individual but were sent in bulk and whoever happened to pick them up could take them, but sometimes things that he’d sent to the wash hadn’t come back, but something else in the same size had. The laundry team, it seemed, had final say over who got to wear what, not that he really minded. When you couldn’t even lock your room, the idea of ‘possessions’ became to reduced to ‘whatever you have on you,’ and even that wasn’t all together that safe.

He also grabbed a couple of pieces of clothing for Mira, stuff that he thought she’d like. It wasn’t much, but maybe it would be more likely to help her say no the offer that the others were making, because as much as he would’ve liked her to stay with him, he had to admit the offer to escape would be tempting.

Len was a little surprised not to see her sifting through the boxes herself but wondered if maybe she had been in the middle of a work shift when the incoming plane siren had sounded, giving notice that pick up was required. For as much as the fact that they were all basically prisoners remained, everyone still maintained the facilities and worked with one another to provide amenities for all the other prisoners to enjoy, like cooked food and washed clothing.

So he headed over to the cantina and the attached kitchen area, finding her there, prepping a large vat of stew for the evening meal. The challenge was providing enough options for people that there was always something that people wanted to eat out of the available options, but Mira had told Len her stew was one of the perennial favorites, so they kept asking her to make larger and larger batches of it. Now she was making a batch so that nearly a quarter of the island could get a bowlful of it, as she’d been asked to do. “Hey babe,” she said, seeing him standing in the doorway. “What’s with that look on your face?”

“There was an incoming supply drop a little bit ago,” he said. “Picked you up some clothes. Didn’t see anything that had your name on it.”

“I asked for a Miles Davis album, but I imagine they’re having trouble tracking it down on vinyl,” she laughed. “It would be so much easier if they’d just give us tape decks or CD players or something like that.”

“They’re probably worried about us using some of the tech in those to try and contact the outside world,” he said.

“That the sort of thing you’re capable of?” she asked him, a wry grin on her face.

“Me?” he said, a dry laugh rolling from his throat. “No, although I bet Mick probably could. Rin too, most likely, although not Harry. If it’s not locking down a car, that boy has no interest in electronics.”

“Where’d you pick him up, anyway?”

“MI-6. Like pretty much everyone in Scarab, they’d written him off as a loss, and I didn’t agree with that assessment,” he chuckled. “We’re like the Island of Misfit Toys but for spies. That’s why I was trying to get you to sign on with us. You kept trying to tell me the Mossad was different, but we both knew better. You were just holding out that if they let you down, you wouldn’t live to know about it, and I get that. That’s true for most people in our line of work.”

“How’d you vet them?”

“Same way I vet anyone – do the work,” he said. “You gather all the intel you can on them from their allies, your allies, your enemies, their enemies, competitors and just people who gather intel for a living without ever really picking a side. The information’s out there, but you just have to figure out which parts of it you can trust and which parts of it are there to fool you into trusting it.”

She focused her gaze upon him and frowned. He’d never been very good at hiding things from her, so he wondered what she saw written upon his face. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

“Island Management has an offer for you.”

“Then I don’t want it,” she said, looking back at her stew as he closed the distance across the kitchen until he was standing below her, peering up at her on the ladder.

“You haven’t even heard what the offer is yet.”

“It’s from Them,” she said, disdain in her voice so sharp it could cut through brisket. “That means it’s a bad offer and I don’t want it.”

“You should at least hear it.”

“Why? So I can indulge them with whatever ridiculous mindgames they’re playing in an effort to try and cause problems? I don’t know that that would benefit anyone.”

“There’s definitely a benefit on offer.”

“Is it that we can all leave the island and go back to our lives if we just forget about this place? Because that I might take them up on.”

“It does involve leaving the island,” Len said.

Mira scowled down at him. “Fine. Tell me, so I can make an educated dismissal of the matter and we can go on to enjoying each other’s company again. What is it?”

“They’ve offered to let you leave the island, alone, safe and unharmed, as long as you agree to forget me forever. I assume they feel confident they can just remove the portion of your memory.”

“That’s rubbish,” she said, rolling her eyes, looking back to her stew. “Why the fuck would I ever agree to something so crap?”

“Because you could go home again, Mira,” he said, his hand reaching up to touch her thigh. “You could get away from all of this nonsense and see your family again.”

“My family…” Her voice trailed off, but not in the way he’d expected it to. “We never really talked about how we got into this business did we? Bits and pieces of it have come back lately, enough that I’m almost certain I was all alone in the world before we met up. I… I remember my mother and father dying in a missile strike when I was barely more than a girl. My uncle, Abraham, he decided to use the anger and sadness I felt and to channel it into public service, which was how I found my time in the army being used as training for the intelligence forces. But my country failed to see me as a person, John. They didn’t see the young girl who needed help, who needed comfort to console her that her parents were gone and that she was running on empty. I just went further and further into my hole, and lost sight of whatever dreams I’d carried with me when I young.”

Len was running his hand along her hip as she kept slowly stirring that heavy stew with a spoon that might have been a shovel instead. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mira.”

She turned to look down at him, and her smile was genuine, but it was also cut with a hint of her trying to stomach back a lifetime of people trying to tell her they understood what she was going through, but Len knew well enough that loss was a personal demon that people could appreciate and relate to, but nobody ever truly knew another person’s flavor of pain. “Mmm. I got lost in trying to make a country love me in place of a parent, trying to prove something to someone who was never going to give me the familial approval I was so desperate to receive, not that they would ever give me such a thing. The answer remains what it was before, John. I will not leave this island without the man I love, and they can take their offer and shove it up their asses.”

He pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to her. “Well, I don’t want be accused of hiding anything from you,” he said.

She took the paper from his hand, glanced at it for a moment, then held it up in the air, so any of the cameras watching could see it, then lowered it down to the open flame of the burner just below the pot, letting go of the paper as it caught fire and quickly burned to cinders. “Of all the things I struggled to hold onto when they were attempting to take my memories, John, you were the thing I clung to the hardest, that I refused to let them rip from my mind. Having fought to keep even the kernel of you nestled inside of me, a seed of who I used to be tangled up in my memories of the time we spent together? They can take it from me by putting a bullet in my skull and no other method.”

Len wasn’t surprised when he felt Mira’s lips connecting with his, although he did find the choice of venue a little humorous. Normally when she was cooking, she liked to be left to it, not distracted or bothered by someone else’s presence. He suspected she wanted to reestablish the point to whoever was watching, but then he felt her hand sliding down to grapple with his ass, and he almost squeaked a little into her mouth.

“Here?” he found himself saying.

“You didn’t have to tell me about the offer, John,” she purred at him. “It’s kinda hot that you care enough about me to be willing to send me away to keep me safe. Stupid, lunkheaded and oblivious to my own feelings on the matter, but still kinda hot and sweet, in a Cro-Magnon sort of way.” Her hands on his back started tugging up his shirt. “Here’s just like anywhere else on the island – someone could walk in at any minute. No locks on the doors, remember?”

“Sure, but this is the kitchen, Mira,” he laughed. “Maybe we should step into someplace more private?”

“Oh alright,” she giggled in return, pulling him over towards one of the pantries. “The doors on these open inward, so as long as I’ve got my hands on my back on it, we should be good to go.” He could see she was right as they pushed the door inward into the slightly cooler room, not quite cold, but definitely not the sort of heavy jungle ambiance he’d gotten used to. As soon as they were inside the room, she spun around and pushed the door closed quickly with both hands. “How do you want me?”

“Any way I can get you,” Len said, watching her tug her shirt up over her head, tossing it onto a nearby shelf atop some bags of flour. She wore a very workaday kind of bra – nothing fancy or elaborate – but Len didn’t give a damn. The wrapping was much less important than what lay beneath. She shoved her pants down and unveiled a pair of sea foam green panties beneath. Neither was long for her body, as she unfastened the bra, slipping it off her shoulders, tossing it atop her shirt before pushing her panties down to her ankles, stepping out of them with one foot, leaving them wrapped around the other. “Goddamn, you’re beautiful.”

“Flattery will get you into my pants.”

“You’ve already taken them off,” he said, unbuttoning his belt.

“So I have,” she giggled, leaning her back against the door. “Silly me.”

He fished out his cock as he grabbed one of her legs and brought it up to his waistline as he rubbed the tip of his shaft against her slit, finding she was already wet and eager for him. They lined each other up and he pushed inside of her pussy with one long, deliberate thrust, as she grabbed his head by the back and pulled him in to kiss him as they shared a feverish moan.

Whatever else they’d gone through, they knew each other, and they knew how to keep each other happy. Any doubts about how much she remembered of him were constantly erased each time his flesh touched hers, especially as intimately as this. Her small breasts lodged up against his t-shirt, her tongue wrapped around his as his hips dipped down and back then pushed up and forward, each of them feeling the other’s heart thumping in tune with their own.

His hips railed into her, making her ass smack against the door like a drumbeat, and he wondered for a moment if there was anyone else on the other side, but in the end, he didn’t really give a fuck, too happy to be reconnected to Mira in this long moment, savoring his body and hers together.

The sounds from her throat were excited, giddy, and before either of them knew it, he was orgasming inside of her, her heel digging into the small of his back, keeping his body wedged up against hers, pinning her to the door until both of their breathing started to ease off and relax back to normal, an almost dopey giggle escaping her lips into his before she pulled back.

“And you thought you were going to get rid of me,” she teased.

“Never in a million years would I want to.”

Rin

Krieger’s appearance on the island couldn’t be a coincidence, Rin had decided, and the more she thought about it, the unhappier she was. Originally, he’d been just another Eastern European spy on the island that she didn’t recognize who might’ve had information, and so she’d gone through her bag of tricks and pulled out the obvious one that was the best approach for the job – the seduction one.

Despite everything, Krieger was a very good-looking man, and he had plenty of charm to spare, so when they’d shared an intimate moment in the jungle, Rin had thought she was doing a good thing, gaining his trust and developing an ally she could count on.

Except that in the moment of her climax, she had a moment of clarity, and some of her memories surged back into her brain, and she was horrified at what she’d done. Krieger had a reputation in their business of being one of the ‘dark operators,’ people who were always willing, if not eager, to add bodies to the floor over the course of their operations. Krieger enjoyed killing people who got in his way, even just a little bit, and it had gained him a certain reputation of being a man who would always get results, but not always as cleanly as some clients would like. His exact background was a bit unknown – he might have been formerly Stasi or KGB, but no one was entirely certain. He’d been private sector since the late 80s or early 90s, but he certainly didn’t look his age.

She hadn’t been anywhere near Krieger since she’d realized who she was. As adept as she was at trying to obscure her motives and conceal her intentions, when her memory had come flooding back to her, it had been nearly impossible to hide that fact. Even the brief momentary lapse of composure had been enough for Krieger to recognize that she knew something about him that he didn’t know in return about her, and that had put up a wall between them immediately.

Still, whatever skills Krieger had before he’d gotten to the island, he’d found maybe some of them were slipping, because he wasn’t keeping tabs for tails anywhere near as much as he used to. So Rin had taken to following the man around when she had spare time, and she hadn’t liked anything she’d seen.

Most of the time, he was keeping to what was expected of him – exploring the island, putting in time at the vegetable gardens, fishing out on the boat – but there were large chunks of time where he seemed to be tailing a woman named Elise that Rin knew next to nothing about, other than she was Swiss. She wasn’t an operator that Rin had had any run ins with, but the intelligence world was full of all sorts of people.

And it was Krieger’s tailing of Elise that had Rin worried.

Because Krieger was carrying a knife with him most days.

It was early in the evening after the supply drop that Rin found Krieger was in total pursuit of Elise, and Elise was on some kind of mission that involved traversing the borders of the village. Based on the way she was walking and how she was stopping and making notes, it seemed likely she was making some sort of map, although Rin herself knew the semi-futility of doing such a thing. Perhaps she would have more luck, or perhaps she was using a different methodology, maybe trying to keep track of which buildings were next to which on any given day. While most of the internal layout of the village remained consistent, from time to time, pairs of residential buildings were known to swap places in the middle of the night, without warning or even any of the residents noticing until they woke up in the morning.

Elise didn’t seem like she was doing much to keep tabs for anyone pursuing her, out of lack of caring or simply because she didn’t think she was being threatened, but in either case, it wasn’t a smart move for the woman to make.

The village itself wasn’t all that large, so the process of mapping the layout on foot wasn’t a project that would take very long, and it looked like Elise must have been on her second or third data gathering expedition, because she was comparing one set of notes against another, as if she wanted to be sure she hadn’t filed her notes in the wrong place instead of the numbers just being somewhat different on each and every pass, which was what Rin expected them to be.

Elise was a short, thin waft of a woman, long blonde hair braided into a heavy interlaced tail that hung down to her waist. She wore large, baggy clothes, something that immediately gave Rin a bit of suspicion that the woman was carrying a blade of some kind squirreled about on her person, not that Rin would’ve blamed her one bit. She didn’t seem to take counsel with anyone else on the island, which isn’t to say that she was unfriendly, only that she hadn’t seemed to make any reliable friends since her arrival a few months ago, only a few weeks after Rin’s. It wasn’t that uncommon – people on the island either developed a clique within a matter of weeks or seemed unlikely to ever develop much of a rapport with any of the others, and Elise had just fallen into the latter.

For a bit, Rin had even considered the option that Elise might have been a member of management, but she seemed too insatiably curious for that to be likely, always trying to discover some new aspect of the island that she could figure out. The notebook she carried with her everywhere looked to be filled with endless amounts of scrawled thoughts, computations, layouts and God only knows what else.

In fact, the more she thought about it, the more Rin had to admit that Elise seemed much more like a scientist than a spy. That didn’t make Rin feel any better, the thought that some of the people trapped on the island weren’t intelligence workers at all, but just civilians caught up in some complicated spy game being run by… somebody…

Instead of heading back into camp, it seemed Elise was walking down one of the few marked pathways leading out of the village, this one leading up towards the only locked door on the island, the giant metal gate against the side of the volcano, the only door with completely unknown things behind it and no possible way to open it.

Krieger followed Elise and Rin followed Krieger, as the three of them moved out of the village and into the more open air area, as rain started to fall down on them once more, Rin thankful for the weather providing some coverage that made it easier for her to move stealthily in the relatively open and exposed area. She tried to keep her body near the safety of foliage, but even that was hit and miss and at some points, she was nearly completely exposed, if either Elise or Krieger had turned back, but instead, neither of them even so much as glanced over their shoulders back, too intent on their own thing to be bothered for operational awareness.

Whatever Rin had expected from the rest of her night, what followed was about as far from it as possible. Elise moved up towards the giant metal door, glanced behind her in her first real attempt to spot a tail, but missed seeing either Krieger or Rin, then turned back and gestured up towards one of the cameras stationed high above the metal gate, her hands doing a complicated series of motions seemingly to no avail.

Except that a few seconds later, the gate started to open.

It was such an unexpected thing that Rin almost stood up and revealed her position.

Almost, but not quite.

The solid sheet of thick steel lifted up a few feet and a pair of men in dark red overalls walked out from the darkened tunnel behind it. One of the men was holding a large flashlight, which was immediately pointed at Elise, who lifted one of her arms to shield her face.

“Get that fucking thing out of my face,” she shouted at the man. “Does it make you feel impressive blasting it in my eyes? Feel like you’ve got a real big cock?”

“I’d be happy to show you, Doctor, if it would make you feel any better,” the man on the left said, the blonde one. The one to the right of him was brunette, so Rin decided to think of them as Light Goon and Dark Goon.

“I’d take you up on that offer, but I forgot my microscope,” she said. “Where is Charlotte?”

“She’s busy with other things,” Dark Goon answered. “She sent us to take in your progress report. What have you learned about the village layout?”

“It seems like there’s only five basic variations, and none of them change any of the footprint of the structures, just where individual structures are located,” she said, looking down at her notebook. “That said, the pneumatic tubes always seem to be routed to the correct location, so it seems like whoever built the tube system also built in some kind of router redirect somewhere underground that we haven’t been able to locate yet. Whoever it was that built the village here before we found it, they clearly understood some of the temporal and spatial anomalies far better than we did.”

“Any sign of the previous residents yet?”

“Negative,” Elise sighed. “I keep telling you, either they took off and left nothing behind, or whatever took them made sure not to leave anything in their wake. In either case, they’re all fucking gone, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them.”

“A hundred people don’t just fucking vanish, Elise,” Light Goon said.

“Yeah, well, these fucking hundred people did.”

“Whatever,” Dark Goon said, taking a fresh notebook out of his pocket, tossing it to her as she tossed the very full one she’d been carrying back to him. “Stay low, keep your cover down and FUCK!”

Krieger had broken from his cover and was charging towards the three of them with his knife drawn, but the distance was too far for the man’s own good, as Light Goon reached to his pocket, grabbed his pistol and shot Krieger in the chest, just in time for Elise to shout, “NO!”

As the bullet ripped through the air, it left a prismatic spray of color in its wake that burst into flames before imbedding itself in Krieger’s chest. And then the man’s body began to erupt with streaks of color beneath his skin until he exploded in a mass of ropy flesh.

“God fucking dammit, you morons!” Elise shouted. “Not above ground! You’ve been told and told and fucking told! No! Fucking! Guns! You’re only making things fucking worse!”

“Nobody said why we shouldn’t shoot above ground, Elise, so forgive us for not knowing it was going to fucking break reality, or whatever the fuck that was!”

“That was a temporal and spatial rift that you fuckers just caused! Now who the fuck knows when that’s going to come back and haunt us! Grab the fucking body and drag it into the tunnel. We can’t fucking leave it up here for the others to find.”

Light Goon tossed the flashlight to Elise before he and Dark Goon moved over to grab the ankles of what remained of Krieger’s corpse, dragging his remnants into the tunnel as Elise moved in after them, the steel shutter dropping down as soon as they were inside.

Whatever the fuck she’d just seen, Rin knew for absolute certain…

…She didn’t understand any of it.