CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Recollection
PART ONE…He, Who Knows What She Wants …
The loft floor was solid, rough stone and had no windows upon its walls – only skylights. Its entire ceiling was a skylight, and every inch of wall was painted with imagery. But at the moment the moon was out and the images slept.
Slowly, lowlights rose, warming and waking the images from the bottom up. The rows of tiny lights were mounted at the corners of the walls and flooring, spotlighting in places to create an eerily realistic depth on flat walls. Faces and scenes seemed to writhe as the light gradually reached its goal.
After the door slid closed behind her, she bolted five old-fashioned metal locks and tossed off her boots. Vanessa pulled off her socks and sighed as her toes met the cold, harsh floor. She tossed her clothes into a bin by the door and strolled to the center of the room nearly nude. Staring up into the starry night from her low bed, she fancied that someone could be watching her. But her home was too high for common peepers and satellites were secretly programmed not to notice her home. Perhaps on some distant star or planet?
Her lifestyle granted her the benefit of choice. A chauffeur took her to and from work daily, many miles away in the heart of the city. This sanctuary was over an hour's commute from there, in a mountainous part of North America where few humans cared to venture. She could view the sky without pollution and hear no sounds from the outside (there were plenty of animals and insects to be heard around her compound, but such were so unlike her homeland that she preferred to block them out at will). Like her cave on Gunsmoke, here she was safe from humans, as they were safe from her.
Who had more to fear from whom? she often wondered. Clearly, all the humans had multiple sources for anxiety – their government, every other government, criminals, diseases, poverty, and whatever else they could find in media. She was their least worry.
Humanity believed that Agent Peace could at any moment snap and attempt world domination. Considering how little information the public knew - the extensive damage that she, in her code name, could create - this was a logical fear. But all she wanted was to be left alone…most of the time. Surely, her solitude and art brought relief and some pleasure. If only she could figure out what was causing the nagging feelings during the remainder of her time.
The wall facing east bore a painting of Vash; Knives was painted upon the one facing west. Their faces were blurry but certain details were picked out more clearly, as memory permitted. The two brothers faced outward – not at one another. Vash was staring straight out and slightly to the side, as if watching a passing crowd. Knives looked more serious, facing up at the heavens. When the floor lights were off, the sun illuminated the room symbolically as it moved across the sky.
Vanessa rose, having caught her breath after walking up the four flights of steps to her front door. She yawned and walked across the room to her small kitchen to heat up dinner. When she reached for a glass from an eye-level shelf, she missed on the first try.
Grabbing for it again, she pursed her lips. She'd become accustomed to being blind in her left eye, and was happy that the tissue they'd transplanted from it into the right eye left her with perfect vision in the one. But having such crappy depth perception could be kind of annoying.
That milky eye left was just another lovely mutilation, like the scars. She kept no mirrors but had no shame for her appearance towards others. Let them see their own evils upon my skin, she felt. Like her missions, showing her scars off-duty was another attempt to inspire compassion in people.
There'd be another mission tomorrow, her first this year. Most of the cases reviewed at the Agency were simple matters that ground troops or negotiation could settle. A fraction of remaining cases were miscommunications or outright lies. Only the most select, delicate cases became Agent Peace's missions. Tomorrow afternoon she'd be carefully transported to a remote location in central Africa. The thick armor she would wear was not for protection, but for anonymity. She would walk slowly towards the enemy complex – this time, the collection of tents where a rebel faction and its oligarchy of corrupt drug lords were planning a raid on a nearby village. Before this sea of human anger, Vanessa would spread wide her artificially-maintained angel arm. Meanwhile, loudspeakers behind her would list the demands in native tongues – that the criminal drug lords step forward for arrest, and the others surrender their weaponry and go home. As probability would have it, they would most likely obey. The great percentage of her missions ended that way.
Rarely did the enemy resist. When they did, they typically would attack her. The angel arm protected her (at a great loss of strength, but through the armor this was never apparent) from every backlash she'd encountered. After that display, enemies tended to surrender.
But as probability and human nature allowed, some had been killed. Two times, enemies had committed mass suicide. On four missions, enemies had managed to kill and injure the troops behind her. Rarely – just seven times – Vanessa had shown her destructive abilities to difficult enemies, laying waste to warehouses or expanses of land in demonstration. It was only that one mission when she'd killed anyone. And she'd killed many.
She was convinced that those days were behind her. After all, most of the cases when things got out of hand occurred very early in her career, before Agent Peace's legend was solidly established. The Agency was making real leeway these days, and there hadn't been any large-scale wars, conflicts, terrorism, or genocides in the past sixty years. Her role was symbolic, but she was still treated with the greatest respect and privacy, still handled by the few insiders who knew her true identity as if she had the power to wipe out half the planet.
She wondered if she had that much power.
Tomorrow would be a long day, so she crawled into bed early. The lights were off and, resting on her side, she gazed lazily at the plant brother on the facing wall until she dozed off peacefully.