Repeat Rewind: Tales of Time Travel

Mirror, Mirror: Part 1

"You don't know what real fear is until you come home, open the door... and find yourself sitting at the kitchen table."

Agent Angelica Cortez's voice filled the small, hot interrogation room, even though she spoke softly as if afraid of disturbing someone's sleep. Monotonously, as if what she'd said had no weight to her at all. Gently, almost, like she'd already given up on whatever cause had made her speak.

Across the narrow metal desk, Agent Roxanne Craig sat up very straight. "What did you say?"

Cortez looked up from her own gloved hands and smiled. A touch of some unidentifiable feeling was trembling on her full lips. "You heard me, Agent Craig." Then the smile shifted, became edged with mockery. "Should I start from the beginning?"

Roxanne scowled. She'd been told earlier that she was supposed to play the role of the friendly, obliging colleague, but the mask was slipping. It was hard to stay detached, with what she knew about the reason why Agent Cortez was being detained in this room.

Their eyes met above the impersonal gray desktop in the impersonal gray space. Cortez was on the wrong side of forty and could still plausibly deny a decade, with long, straight tresses of silky black hair, mahogany eyes, and the face of an angel. Roxanne was two years older and showed all of her age: a handsome woman in an ethereal, Pre-Raphaelite muse kind of way, but past her prime. Her blonde bob cut was a bird's nest, her face pale and drawn, long-lashed hazel eyes underlined by huge dark circles. The stress lines in the corners of her mouth looked like they'd been carved there.

Cortez looked away first. "Well?"

Roxanne let out a slow, measured exhale. "Yes, Agent Cortez. I think you'd better."

***

The phone call had come in the middle of another night of chasing sleep, just shy of the 1 AM mark on the clock. Roxanne had thought about ignoring it, then groped the bedside lamp on at the seventh insistent ring, and looked at the caller ID. It had simply said Nina. So she'd heaved a great, gusty sigh, and picked it up. Not many colleagues would have phoned at this hour; none of them would do it without a reason. Especially not this one.

"Please tell me you're calling because I'm getting a raise," she'd quipped anyway, the words still sleep-thick in her mouth.

Instead of that overdue news or even a hello... Roxanne had heard something else, and it had chilled her bare flesh under the thick blanket.

"We found Cortez. She only wants to speak to you. No one else."

"I'm on my way," Roxanne had said, and ended the call.

***

That had been two hours ago. It was an hour's drive to the headquarters of the Tenebris Foundation, hidden in an old downtown building with ugly pink stucco on a crumbling facade. Half an hour spent getting a full folder's worth of clearances and waivers from Internal Management, all of them needed to talk to an agent suspected of murder. Roxanne was a field operative, not an Inspector, and Nina's authority only went so far.

Then... this.

"Are you sure you want to do it?" Nina Kristoff of the Internal Inspection unit asked her, once they had finally come to stand behind the two-way mirror, peering at the lone figure inside the room it concealed. Cortez had been sitting in there, waiting, for close to an hour with only the cameras keeping her company. She was still wearing a black pantsuit and dark suede gloves, looking almost as if she'd been preparing for a mission, or coming back from one. Tenebris had nothing at all to do with the government... but dressing sharp and official could do wonders when an agent was in a hurry to get somewhere. Cortez's clothes were wrinkled to hell, though, stained with sweat and something darker. That rather ruined the effect.