The Word Is - Part 2

around, trying to make me spin, but it wasn't going to work, not yet anyway. “Your friends call you Trip. You are 34 years old, and have been single for four months now since your last girlfriend, Tabitha, moved cross-country to take a new job. She offered to try and make it work long distance, but you told her...”

“I told her long distance was too much distance,” I interrupted. “And that it wouldn't work.”

He cocked his head, both of them pausing in their steps. “That's correct.” It seemed they were expecting me to be more off-balance by their level of information than I was, but this is the kind of thing they prepare you for in my line of work. “She was broken up by it...”

“...but not surprised,” I finished.

“Well,” Apathe offered with a smile, “perhaps she just knew what kind of man you are. Or perhaps it wasn't working before the move.”

“It wasn't,” I said, glancing around. “Any chance I could get a chair or something? I realize I'm not actually here, but I have a feeling standing around might get awfully boring.”

Janus snapped his fingers, and when I looked behind me, there was a nice, plush comforter, as if there had always been one there. I knew how these games worked, and asking for something would make them push a little less firmly at the start. “Now you need to give me something in return,” he said, his voice calm as still water.

I cocked my head to one side, then nodded a little as I sat down. “Fair enough. It's not the typical five word cypher you're looking for. It's thirteen words.” The chair was comfortable as a daydream, easy to slip into and I relaxed just a little bit, leaning back against it, the pain between my temples starting to pass. I knew it wouldn't last, so I decided to savor it while I had it. “I know, bitch isn't it? What can I say – some of us take our security very, very seriously.”

Janus stopped his circling standing before me and Apathe continued until she was standing beside him. He turned to look at her, having to peer down because of the height difference. “Well we're going to be here a while, it seems.”

“Isn't there an easier...” she started.

“You know that if there was, we would have already tried it.”

She sighed with a slight slump, then turned to look at me. “You're going to be a real pain in the ass, aren't you?” she said, sticking her tongue out at me in a cute pout.

“We each have our parts to play,” I replied, “and neither of us gets to pick those. You knew what you were getting into when you took this job.”

“I believe in what I'm doing,” she said, that pout deepening.

“Honey, don't we all?” I laughed back.

“Enough,” Janus said. “I think we're synched enough for the first probe.” He turned to offer her one of his massive hands, and she slipped her small fingers into it as he closed those ebony hooks around her hand.

“What's the word?” she said, that phrase carrying with it the power of invocation, and my fingers closed on the armrests of the chair, bracing for what I knew was coming.

Janus closed his eyes, then opened them again, this time filled with a golden fire that burned and erupted from him like two headlights that focused on me like a pair of agonizing suns. I could feel the heat and pressure coming from them, and when he spoke again, his voice boomed with reverb and echo, thundering down on me like an earthquake. “The word is 'faith.'”

I moved nowhere and still accelerated to a thousand miles a second, my sight of the two forms blurring into a mishmash of colors and streaks until suddenly everything snapped back into focus, and suddenly the chair I was sitting in was resting on the corner outside of my college apartment of over a dozen years ago. It was snowing, although the snowflakes just passed through me, and I didn't feel any cold at all. In my head, I had known this was coming, but knowing something is coming and experiencing it are two entirely different things. The training had covered this, but it was still another thing entirely to be enveloped in it. I was taken aback by how accurate it was until I remembered that this was pulled from my own memories, so it was only as accurate as I remembered it to be, and anything I might have glorified or misremembered would be represented exactly.

“One down, twelve to go,” Janus said, stepping back into my field of vision. He was dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, looking very much the part of a football player out on his morning job. “I told you, Trip; everyone breaks in the end.”

“Yeah, well, it only gets harder each step you take,” I told him, looking down to see my own attire was now more akin to the kind of thing I wore in college – a t-shirt with some obscure band on it, that bulky tan canvas jacket I wore everywhere, and a pair of jeans that had certainly seen better days, but weren't so shredded that I couldn't endure the cold in them.

“Then we'll just have to keep taking those steps together,” Apathe said as she also stepped back into my line of sight. She was also dressed in sweats, but her hoodie had the name of the college – Northwestern – on it. Chicago in the winter was bitter cold, and I was glad we couldn't feel it. There were some advantages of being in a memory. “Funny, I read your file and while it said you graduated near the top of your class, I had a