I’ve always been told that in the third dimension only upright people were recruited. Good people, people skilled enough to capture other people who would do anything in order not to come back here.

Okay, I also know that it is likely that those who pass on the other side don’t come back here and, of course, most of them do not complete more than one or two missions. Nevertheless, the first thing I felt when I was told that I was assigned to the third dimension, was pride. At the age of sixteen I was already positioned in the Northern Area, can you believe it?

I’m cool.

Ok, my mother did not take it this well, but fortunately – for her – she did not have much time to see me grow up.
And luckily – for me – she didn’t manage to lay a hand on me after I was caught…

Light Novel - Service's code - Chapter 01

Light Novel – Service’s code – Chapter 01

The trip to Akrem, better known as the Southern Area, was pretty much like the one a cow undergoes on its way to the slaughter house: a wooden box with four crooked wheels and two tiny windows with rusty bars.

My claustrophobia was very thankful for that.

Why didn’t they just tie me behind the wagon?
The sealing cuffs on my wrists blocked my magical powers, so what was the need to squish me up into that box?

During the trip I pondered on the reasons why I had been condemned to such a severe penalty, in the end it was just theft, and most of the stolen goods had already been recovered. The only one who died was a friend of mine (even if they didn’t find the body and therefore they can not prove it) and I repeated over and over again that it was not my fault.

After all, I didn’t steal from the Gods.

I understood everything during the trial.

That is to say right now.

The Lord Chamberlain’s voice shouting all my faults at my face (since we are less than a foot away), chills my blood.
Probably, if I hadn’t been skilled enough to be shipped to the Northern Area, I would have been sentenced to death, and they would have organized a dance competition on my dead body.
****

It is in these moments that a good leader stays calm.

Mental clarity is everything.
You can not face a problem if you fear it, if your mind is clouded by the catastrophic consequences that this might entail.

No.

Mental clarity is the first step to the solution to the problem.
There were practically no chances that the Iantor could be subtracted, but ‘practically’ is different than just ‘no chances’. Panic, now, is the only thing that nobody can afford.

I calmly reassemble the pages of the botched report that I was presented with as a consequence of the above mentioned issue. In the meantime, my mind explores the various possibilities so as to avoid disaster. Random ones. Chances for success.
Losses.

There are always casualties in the missions that they give me. My job is not to avoid them. My job is to have as few losses as possible.
You have to be rational, and cold minded enough to understand that if you want to save one hundred people, someone must be sacrified. At least in my job.

Human loss is always included.

After putting the fountain pen back in my leather bag, I set my attention on those present at the special meeting. While they still argue terrified about the consequences of this theft, I fold my hands and talk, bringing silence to the room.
I never need to raise my voice to be listened to.

They know that if I speak, I do not blabber: I provide the solution to their problems.

****

Six months later

Since I got here I have understood three things very well.

I jump to the right, I throw myself on the ground and roll on my side until I shield myself behind the public park boundary wall. Shards of brick scatter on the ground close to my face. I reload my Glock and wait a couple of seconds.

The first thing is to never be out of ammo.

I take a deep breath and I jump to the left. I roll on the lawn, aim and shoot. I hit the target again, this time his leg.

The second thing is that we are on our own.
The Confederation considers us like pawns to be used, soulless and easily replaceable. It treats us for what we are: scums of society.

He staggers. The multiple empty ‘clicks’ make me realize that I have won. I jump up on the wall and throw myself against the target, now wounded and unarmed.

The third is that I am not a murderer.

I hit him with my pistol grip and the guy I was fighting against falls to the ground, unconscious.

I lean down and handcuff him.
I sigh, I stand up again, I twist the wrist watch that I was provided with (that only looks like a watch) and call the cleanup crew.
I light a cigarette and look at the dark evening sky. The weather is still warm, it’s mid-September.

I patiently wait for them to arrive, to assess that my mission has been successful and for them to give me my damned points. Once this is done, my work can be considered finished and they will take care of hiding all the possible traces of the struggle that I left in the surrounding area.

-I might say that this time it was an easy job-I whisper to the dark sky.

Maybe there’s a fourth thing I have understood.

I’m losing my mind. Honestly. Now it often happens that I talk to myself.
And when I talk to myself, it means that I’m tired of not having anyone to talk to.

Well, of course, I have made some friends, I’m an outgoing person, but I can not talk about who I am, where I come from, or what I do.
The friends I have here do not know who I am, they are ‘cover’ friends. People with whom one talks about the weather, rise in prices… stuff like that.

Allies can not communicate with other Allies.
They place us in such a way that we do not meet one another. The targets that the Confederation assigns us are always in different places and we rarely manage to cross paths.

Sometimes on the news I can guess that close to where I was there was a similar fight, but only because it is my field. Human beings of this world know nothing about us and continue to live peacefully thanks to the Confederacy’s clean up and coverage work.

****

-If things… had gone differently… –

He raises his head slightly, smiling in his weird way, insane, and melancholy. He stares me in the eyes. His hands, from my neck, slowly slide down onto my chest.
And I can not move. I am immobilized by something I can not see.

My SPAS 12 is lying on the ground near my feet, and I can not reach it. The air around me has thickened to a level that I can barely breathe, and my limbs do not answer to my commands.

There is a stabbing pain in my chest.
Gasping for breath, I lose my strength in a moment, my vision becomes blurry…
My mouth tastes like iron and a warm stream of blood flows down my chin, from my lips that can not scream.
Click!
I can barely see his hands folded on my chest, while they slowly move away. And I see the deep wound on my abdomen.

He suddenly frees me, and I instantly find myself on the ground, first sitting and then lying on my back, my hands clutching at my wound in a desperate attempt to repress an undescribable pain.

He looks at me. He looks at me on the ground, with those white eyes.
Then, slowly, he kneels by my side.
I feel my teeth gnash, gritting because of the pain. I’m lying on a side, my head down, in the dust of the unpaved parking lot.

As his hand brushes my hair from my forehead, I jerk my head up.
-DON’T TOUCH ME! – I scream with all the voice I have and with all the hatred that I feel.

He remains with his hand a few inches from my forehead, still looking at me.
-All this pains you as much as it pains me – he murmurs.

-Screw you! – is my answer.

He shakes his head-You do not understand me … you never have … – And then he disappears. And I remain here.

I remain in deep shit.

****

-Is it safe? Right here? – The guy seems to hesitate.

Yes, I want it right there, on my face, beneath my eye, is there something wrong with that? After all, once I go back to the other side the points I gained here will vanish, so what’s the problem if I decide to have one put right below my right eye? It matches the other one below my left eye. I look so good with them…

Every now and then I think and speak as if I were gay, but I can assure you that I’m not.

-As you like, it is your face -he tells me. And finally he puts the mark on my right cheek and gives me my point for this mission.

Points are nothing more than tattoos, you can not forge, delete or move them. You have them on your skin and they remain there, until you collect all of the points that you must earn. At that point they remove them and kick you back to the second dimension.
I heard that my Hero remained here, but I think he is the only one who asked for it and I suppose they made an exception for him.

Who is my Hero?

He’s the greatest Ally that the Confederation has ever had.
He had to earn a whole lot of points (I don’t know what he did to deserve them) he collected them all and then decided to live here.
He occasionally helps out the Confederation, but he is a free man, and he is paid as a mercenary.

If you find yourself before the Eirdar and you are a refugee, you have no way out.

I ignore the vague confabulation of the Confederation agents behind me as they clean up the whole area. I bend down to look at my face reflected in the window of a C3 car parked nearby. The small black crescent tattoo stands out clear under my right eye. It’s swell, I can assure you that.

This is my thirtieth point.
I have to collect eight hundred and twenty-three

A record.

Especially if you think that it is for a theft.
Taking into account that for murder they make you collect five hundred points.
Of course not just anybody could steal the Iantor and give it to the worst enemy of the Confederation. Only I could have done it. And without even knowing it, just think how smart I am.

****

Light Novel - Service's code The tapping of my leather shoes on the basement concrete is deafening.

A clear tapping, marked, regular and lonely in the deep night.
Someone’s breaks screech in the distance. Tapping of leather and clinking of car keys in my hands.

In an instant I feel it and I whirl around.

The edge of my hand stops an inch from his throat, faster than the time my leather bag takes to touch the ground. He smiles, hands in pockets, dirty and battered. Dried blood on his face, a huge bruise on his forehead. He’s biting the cigarette filter he’s clenching between his teeth.

-How on earth did you manage to pass the surveillance Eirdar? –

He grins.
-If I wanted to kill, you’d be dead, you know –

The instinct of any living thing would have been to grab him.
I shift.
And he falls onto the door of the Mercedes parked behind me. He slides to the ground, and sits.

-Has anybody ever told you that you are an asshole? – That’s the last thing he says before passing out.

I stare at him a moment, then I grab the cell phone in my pocket, I open the faceplate with a mechanical gesture and make the default call for medical emergencies.

****

This point has been under my eye for at least half an hour, but the team is still forbidding me to leave. And I am sleepy.

I’m lying on the grass in this public park and staring at the dark night sky.
The stars in this dimension are much more opaque. Veiled. Smog, or light pollution, I do not know.

One of the Confederation soldiers comes up to me, he’s talking to the control unit via the headset and that microphone which barely sticks out of his right ear. He just nods at me and says-Reach the Alpha section headquarters. Chief General SHELV wants to confer with you-

That name makes my new points look even darker.
That’s because I turn pale.

****

I can’t move a single muscle, actually, I can barely perceive my whole body, but I swear that as soon as I manage to find that thing that keeps on beeping I’ll smash it by throwing it down from the top floor of whatever building I am in right now.
I don’t even know where I am, I don’t know if I’m really alive, but this is my first thought.

In addition to this loud beeping I also perceive some voices, and I decide not to open my eyes.
There are two people at my side.

Ok, I got it. I am in a Confederacy hospital room.
In the end Shelv, that asshole, called a doctor and did not let me die on the concrete floor of his garage.

He needs me.
I grin in my mind.

Judging by the voices and the topic I’d say that these are two of his flunkies.
-Stable conditions. He will make it this time too-

This must be the boss of the two

-He’s the Eirdar after all. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve patched him up, you know? This time he must have run into a refugee with guts… –

The Probie.

-It wasn’t a refugee-

-Then who the hell could have battered him up so? –

Someone snorts.
-This is not information that I can divulge- I hear something being put on the table by my side -I’m getting a coffee, you keep an eye on him-

Steps. Door. Steps. The door again.

He’s gone.

For a while I don’t hear anything.
Then the sound of a chair being dragged near me and someone who sits down.
That someone remains silent, but I perceive that he’s nervous.
Noise near my ears, sheets of paper. A whispered curse.

-And so the little brother … –
I clench the sheet with my right hand. He is on my left and doesn’t see it.
-Damn … He’s a loose cannon … –
He whispers. He counts, and reads the names of places and people.
Noises from the hallway. The noise of papers being shuffled and set back on the nightstand.
The door. Steps.

I try to sleep. For the moment.

****

He’s sitting right in front of me.

I am standing in front of him.

The desk divides us but I would rather it was a wall at least twenty centimeters thick and a mile away from me.

And in the other dimension.

He is Nakiri Shelv, Chief General of the Confederation. The best strategist existing on the planet.
My planet. It doesn’t matter about the other one. He is the best. His name is legend, together with that of Tears Eirdar. They are only playing on two different fields.
One in that of the brain, and the other in the physical field.

And I’m here in front of him ready to shit in my pants.

It’s also been a quarter of an hour that I’ve been here, ready to shit in my pants in front of him… Obviously his manners aren’t equal to his war strategy abilities, because he hasn’t even asked me to sit down.
As soon as they mentioned him all of my weariness disappeared, but my bones and muscles are starting to feel the fatigue. I know that, because of all this tension, when I’m finally able to relax, I won’t be able to get up for a whole week.

I wait.

If Nakiri Shelv decides that I have to be shot down, I believe that it would take about two seconds, maybe only one, before he passes from theory to practice.
So I wait and I don’t complain.
But I’m curious and I can’t help looking around.

His office is huge. One could easily fit in three or four of those studios that the Confederacy gives its Allies. The desk he is sitting at is made up of so much glass and metal that one could build a fairly big greenhouse out of it.
Everything is in perfect order. The few ornaments and even the papers on his desk and pens in the pen holder are all in right angles, perfectly aligned and in order.

It’s almost morbid.

I don’t realize it when he puts the fountain pen on the glass desk surface, and that’s because I’m looking at the enormous bookcase on my right.
It takes up the whole wall, this means that there should be something like a million books …

I realize that he’s expecting my attention when he closes the leather folder in which he was writing. I look at him and he stares at me.

Grey Eyes, hot as ice and set in a perfect mulatto face.
I stand at attention and do not even know if he perceives it as a joke. He stares at me for a moment, then he interlaces his fingers and talks.
His voice is low and smooth. Hypnotic. But firm and sure.
I have a feeling that if he told me to cut my throat with that paper knife there, in front of him, with that tone, I would do it. And I would even thank him for the excellent idea he had given me.

– Number 156459 b, you were summoned with no previous notification for a very specific reason. The field agent that we sent to recover what you yourself had stolen, has had some difficulty in completing his mission. –

Number 156459 b.

I heard it only once, when I was cataloged as an Ally, at the Confederation base in the second dimension, down in Akrem.

I know I have it imprinted on the small hard drive in the fake watch that I was equipped with and that I have it tattooed on my neck along with a little bar code, but I’ve never been called like that.

I have a name. My mom gave it to me, do you know that?
But I don’t say it. So that I can preserve the second thing that my mother gave me: life.

As if sensing my thoughts, he reopens the leather folder he was working on earlier and stands up. He walks while speaking to me and reading from the folder containing my record.

-Zendaru from Samirien. Age 17. Small burglary precedents. Public nuisance and – he pauses, imperceptibly flickers an eyebrow-Indecent exposure in public places? –

I cough.
I would like to say that it’s a long story, but I swallow my thoughts and I choose to remain silent.
And it is certainly more decorous than explaining what happened that time.

The General lets it go and continues, glancing occasionally at the folder.- Did you at least realize what you did in your last crime? – He asks me.

I answer -Yes, sir. And I’m very sorry. I never thought that that object was really the Iantor, ok, it was guarded, but not like I thought it would have been, I thought that-

He interrupts me raising a hand.
I freeze as if that gesture cut my throat.
It’s just that when I start talking I…

He stares at me in silence and I would much rather be anywhere else, even in the flames of hell, but not there. Then he finally says.

-As I was saying, the Ally sent to clean up your mistake, 156459 b… –

Zendaru. Thank you.

– … has some difficulty in completing his mission. Your theft accomplice is a former ally, who had been deposed and stripped of his powers through the Sirmh seal. Now, thanks to your contribution, not only has he got all his powers back by bypassing the seal and using the Iantor directly, but he has managed to cross the area controlled by the Shield, come back here with the Iantor, leaving our world, Passing Zone excluded, without magic … –

Yeah I know, I screwed up.

Yes I know, I’m a jerk.

How many times must they tell me that I created one of the greatest damages in the history of this and the other world?

This guy, as far as I know, or rather, as they explained to me afterwards, and I stress the word afterwards, was here to collect points.

Then he freaked out, and turned against the Confederacy. My Hero grabbed him by the hair and sent him back home to the other world.
He was tried and sealed in Akrem, so that he could not get access to the Iantor like we have always done in order to use magic. So he ran out of magic and got pissed off. And found nothing better to do than to make fun of me and commission me with that theft.

Once in possession of the Iantor, the seal put on him by the Confederation becomes useless, because he can take his dose of magic directly from the Iantor, by simply touching it.

And fuck the Sirmh seal.

However, to make everything worse, the above mentioned gentleman decided to play the refugee role and passed to this dimension. Being too far away from our world, the Iantor became unusable for my people, and magic is no longer working in the second world without its catalyst.

Final result: I steal a fucking tacky object and the whole world stops using magic.

And not only that. There is also the risk that this world realizes, with our catalyst in their house, that there IS magic, and they start using it in our place, using up the last reserves of magical energy we have left.

Which, as a matter of fact, resides in their world, even if they do not know it.

Throughout this summary the rest of us look bad.
Yes, we stole their magical energy. But in short, their world was full of it and they didn’t even know they had it, and we were running out of it…

Meanwhile, the General proceeds.
-Now: taking into account that you have been here for six months and have completed your thirtieth mission in such a short amount of time and, above all, that you are the cause of the damage that we are trying to fix, I have a deal for you. – He sits and stares at me with a look of, “either you accept it or I will make your life a living hell and only because there is too much bureaucratic paperwork to do to give you directly to rabid dogs.”- the remaining seven hundred and ninety-three points you need to collect in order to be a free man again, will be nullified if you complete a single mission: help the above mentioned Ally. Once you retrieve the Iantor and eliminate the man who now holds it, you will be able to return to your world as a free citizen. –

Sure, if I can go back.

He has the Iantor now. And from what I have heard he was very powerful, and now that he has his powers back, without the restrictions of the bracelet that all Allies need to carry here, he is at least three times stronger than me. Not to mention that he was here to collect a ton of points for some multiple murder …

He’s only condemning me to a more twisted death.
He stares at me in silence and understands that I’m not stupid, even if my record confirms the opposite.

-Think about it, collecting seven hundred and ninety-three points, even if it means dealing with simpler enemies, is still a gamble. Just a simple distraction and the less powerful enemy will be able to kill you. Here you would only have one chance of being killed, not nearly eight hundred. –

He is trying to stun me with statistics, but I will resist.

-Not to mention that you would not be alone. Yours will be a support job, you will have to co-operate with a much more experienced agent than you. Tears Eirdar is_-

– I accept-

I spoke the words before thinking. Like that, in one go.
The General was surprised too. But only for a moment. He smiles and sits down.

-So you accept? –

-Yes, sir. –

The Eirdar.

For the love of God.

I’d give up a hand just to be able to say that I tied one of his shoes, imagine having the chance to fight at his side.

Ok, I’m still shitting in my pants, but if I must die, fuck, I’ll do it alongside my Hero.