Knight Syndrome

Ameena

"Did you see the top post on our college board? It's viral."

Ameena shook her head, indulging Rida in a gossip conversation.

"The celebrity blogger EmpressNotes has made a post. Some top shot named Thyme is in town and he was spotted on campus."

Sara made a face, "You said that about some heiress last time who turned out to be a scammer. What was her name? Habriel? You should stop following gossip pages."

"Didn't you wait two hours in a queue to see her through a glass window?" Ameena recalled.

Rida looked disgruntled but she nodded anyway.

"Be careful, this time it might be more than just your time" Sara warned her.

"This time I'm going to be right and y'all are going to regret teasing me" She picked up her backpack and walked out scrolling through the posts.

Ameena watched them banter, participating just enough to seem present. This was how she existed here, friendly and available but never truly open. They didn't know about her second phone, her notebooks, the life she lived in the margins.

Thanks to Rida's obsession with the message board, Ameena knew where she had to be: away from the center of attention. Away from Thyme. Away from the assignment that was becoming too real, too quickly.

Why on earth is a library built like a labyrinth?

She spent a whole ten minutes studying the floor plan of the library. It always made her feel dazed and confused.

Catalogue landing, take the stone staircase, first floor, and walk to the south gallery.

Ameena repeated it three times to make sure the information didn't evaporate midway.

Starstruck by the rows upon rows of wooden shelves matching the color of the books in them, Ameena climbed a tall ladder checking her balance every few steps.

Slowly caressing her fingers across a series of titles beginning with "AY" she pulled out a thick book with one hand and blew the dust off. The ladder shook.

She stifled a scream. Taking a deep breath, she tried not to look at the scary journey down.

She settled into a desk bordering a cozy corner right under a huge CCTV eye.

Ayuthya and Chola Empire, she clicked a picture of the official seal of the last king inscribed on the cover. The pages were thick and woven from natural fibers.

I should have become a librarian she would tell herself often.

While the event management degree worked as her cover for the job, she really was interested in archives. Old books, rare texts, something that scholars would drool over.

Her phone storage was full of photographs she clicked whenever she chanced upon scripts in a museum tour or special auctions that she had a chance to observe while waiting for guests outside the door.

Registering the book against her name she stood by the large doors. She could hear some people shouting in front of the building, but she could not see them through the thick wall of raindrops that had been dancing across for hours now. She wanted to dance too. Ameena was feeling a little silly.

She felt the cold drops of water on her skin and breathed in the scent of fresh rain.

A world full of adventure.

The thought came unbidden, dangerous. This was the feeling normal people got to have. People who didn't live double lives. People who could afford to be reckless. She let herself hold it for just a moment before tucking it away.

It reminded her of the night she held a torch under her blanket trying to figure out what the code message meant.

She had thought it was some kind of joke. She had been so wrong.

Mirage had found her six months before that night, midway through organizing a cultural event on campus. A woman had approached her afterward, quiet and precise, and explained that her firm handled sensitive investigations for corporate clients. Private. Discreet. Nothing that ever made the news. Ameena had said yes before the woman finished her sentence.

What she had not expected was a desk. Or the ledgers. Or the two men on either side of her who had been doing this long enough to have developed firm opinions about the correct way to cross-reference tax filings. The Desk Group, they were called unofficially, a team that existed to go through the financial records of target accounts and surface what should not be there. She had been recruited, she was told, because she went to college and knew how to organize things, unlike the usual candidates her age who were too impulsive for desk work. She had smiled at that.

It was not fieldwork. It was not what she had pictured when she said yes. But it was a beginning...

In the second stage of the assignment, one is assigned a contact person, someone who is not fully associated with Mirage, a ghost that appears and disappears on his own. The contact person will relay information between the assignee and the company.

Her hand found the second phone in her bag. The weight of it felt heavier today. This was real now. Not training, not simulation. Real people. Real consequences.

If Ameena succeeds in contacting Thyme, the message has to be relayed.

She thought of Ren's face in class, the way he'd looked at her in the café. And now Thyme; his friend, her target.

But she was good at this. Good at compartmentalizing, at keeping worlds separate. She had to be. The thought came anyway: You're not. You're just good at pretending until it blows up. She shut it down.