SHE'S GOT A MIGRAINE

Fen awoke the next morning feeling like her head was being split open, like a coconut. As if some stupid monkey was bashing her head open with a rock. She wandered to the kitchen, but could barely make it to the countertop without feeling like she was going to collapse. Last night's nightmare burned in the back of her brain, and her chest felt heavy, with what, she didn't know. Actually, her entire body felt heavy, with guilt, or rather sadness she reckoned, but she still couldn't remember anything noteworthy about the people who'd called out to her in her dreams. Unable to find the aspirin, Fen situated herself on a barstool, and hoped Yue would wake soon. She held her throbbing head in her hands, and closed her eyes for just a split-second. When she opened them again, she was no longer in Yue's kitchen. The walls all around her were grey, and not the shiny kind of grey, the grungy, metallic warehouse kind of grey. She couldn't move her hands, nor her feet, and she couldn't speak either. She looked down to her wrists, she was bound to a plastic chair with cable ties, and gagged around the mouth. She tried to make sense of her surroundings, but her brain was foggy from... something she couldn't remember. Her memories teleported around her, skipping frames and leaving out words, she could barely follow the story. It was as if she was watching a scratched DVD, and nothing made sense. Her surroundings were distorting as someone came close to her. She could feel their breathing on her neck as they neared her with a syringe. Their presence somehow comforted her, but she still couldn't stop the tears streaming out of her eyes, and the pain resonating from her insides.

"Don't worry, Fen. Soon all your pain will go away." The voice spoke, a familiar voice, a voice she'd heard a million times, a voice that used to comfort her, but hadn't done so in a very long time. She knew that voice, but she couldn't put a name or a face to it. The voice wasn't lying when they said all her pain would go away, as soon as the prickling sensation from the needle faded, so did the pressure in her chest, and although she didn't stop crying, she couldn't feel anything anymore. She felt blissful, blissful like she'd smoked weed, like she was floating and she was so high that none of her previous problems could get to her. What was she crying about anyway? Why was she sad? In that moment, she couldn't care less, Fenfang Song was out of this world, she couldn't think of anything besides the overwhelming bliss building up inside of her. She couldn't remember anything else either, barely her own name, barely anything about herself. All she knew was the pain was gone, but she couldn't remember why it had been there in the first place.

Yue snapped her fingers in front of Fen's hazy eyes. She'd been completely out of it a moment ago. She refocused her gaze on Yue's short hair, her dark eyes, and in the corner of her eye she could see Linnie worriedly gazing at her.

"Are you okay? You totally spaced out." Yue remarked as she walked over to the kettle and flipped the switch. As it started up, Fen tried to remember what had just happened, but couldn't. She shook it off as a side effect of the splitting headache she was still struggling to ignore.

"Yeah, I'm okay," Fen finally spoke, her voice betraying her, "I just have this killer headache."

"It's probably the stress." Linnie remarked, sitting down next to her and regarding the dark circles underneath his older sister's eyes. He'd always thought Fen was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, that not one of the female agents at the Agency could compete with her, but right then, seeing her pallid skin, sweat droplets dripping from her pores, and her dead eyes, he thought he'd never seen her look this run down. Fen had been tired before, because of jobs where she'd had to stay up for a week, surviving on coffee, energy drinks and caffeine pills, but she'd never looked this bad. Yue placed a pair of aspirin pills down in front of Fen, along with a glass of water and a sympathetic smile which decorated her soft face.

"Thank you." Fen said after she'd practically downed the entire glass of water, and started massaging her temples in an effort to ease the pain.

"You sure you're okay?" Yue returned to the kettle, and retrieved three cups from the cupboard. She threw a bag of tea in each, and poured the water in, letting the scent of freshly made breakfast tea waft through the room.

"Yeah," was all Fen said, before taking a breath, "I just... I feel like I'm missing something. Like there's something I need to remember, but keep forgetting."

Yue's head tilted to the right in confusion as she neared Fen and Linnie with a cup of tea in each hand, "yeah? Any idea of what that could be?"

"Something that I had to do... while the Agency still existed. Someone I loved, that I had to leave. Something I didn't want to forget, but had to." Fen spoke her mind, unafraid of what Yue or Linnie might think. At this, Yue disappeared into the hallway, and promptly came back with a laptop, on which she immediately started furiously typing.

"Does it have anything to do with this?" Linnie came back into the room, but no one had noticed he disappeared. He was holding a manila folder in his hand, the seal broken.

"Bolin Song, where did you find that?" Yue's dark eyes lit up on sight of the manila folder. On the front, it had the Agency's logo on it, along with the Agency's motto of sorts, "the shadows will always protect its kin."

"Is that what I think it is?" Yue grabbed the folder out of Linnie's hands, and splayed the contents out onto the kitchen table. The bright red confidential stamp gave her the answer.

"You stole a confidential file from the Agency?" Yue looked up to Fen, her eyes alight with the fires of curiousity.

"More like it fell into my lap." Fen answered, as she looked over it as well. The contents were all neatly organized by number, and on the first page, was an agent profile she'd never heard of. Actually, there were two. One of a male agent she'd never seen and the other of a female agent she'd never seen, or heard of either. The male agent's alias was Louis XVI, after the French Revolution king, and the female Marie Antoinette, after his stingy wife. What this meant to her, she had no idea, but Yue was combing through the files at the speed of light. Fen hadn't seen her this excited since Weimin came to tell her that she was going to work for the Agency when she was twenty-one, and that was nearly seven years ago.

"This is every hacker's wet dream, Fen!" She exclaimed, unable to contain herself anymore. She jumped around the kitchen like an excited teenager who'd just found out her crush had texted her back.

"What exactly is it?" Linnie asked, as he took one of the papers into his hands.

"That," Yue calmed down, and put her thumbnail under her front teeth in consideration, "I don't know. I don't speak Agency. Maybe father will know?" Yue reached for her phone, and without thinking about it, Fen's hand involuntarily jerked forward and smacked it out of her hand. It landed on the floor with a tiny little flop. Luckily the screen was still intact as Yue picked it back up, and raised a poised eyebrow at Fen.

"Did you have to do that?" Yue asked, annoyed.

"Sorry," Fen drew her hand back, and looked apologetically at the countertop, "I didn't mean to. My hand slipped," she looked back at Yue, who was still examining her phone with the utmost care, "maybe it would be best not to contact your father?"

"Right, because if he found out his prodigy had stolen something from the Agency he'd probably kill you." Her tone was amused, but Fen knew she was serious. While Weimin Chen was a lovable man, he was loyal to the very end, and anyone who compromised the Agency was always eliminated, no matter who or what they were.

"Better not to call your dad." Linnie put the document he was surveying back on the countertop.

"I better get to figuring out what all this is, then!" In one giant scoop, Yue gathered all the papers in her hands, and started carrying them down to the basement. Linnie, having nothing better to do, followed her down, a cup of bitter, strong breakfast tea in one of his hands. Fen, upon finishing her tea in three large gulps found herself gravitating towards one of the kitchen drawers, and pulling out a pair of kitchen scissors. She went to the bathroom, and tried to remember something. During her dream, one of the women she saw, the one with the bullet holes in her head, had short black hair, falling just below her ears, and she figured that if she were on the run now, she'd need to change her hair, or something about her. She was probably going to have to do the same with Linnie's hair, he'd always liked it a little too long, but now they were going to have to cut it all off, just to be certain. He was going to hate it, but at least he'd look a little different. She gathered her straight, mid length, black hair into a ponytail, and snipped it all off. She wasn't worried about whether it would look choppy. With a couple of snips behind her head, and next to her ears, she looked as close as she would to the woman with the bullet hole in the middle of her head. She gathered up the strips of hair on the floor, rinsed off the scissor and exited the room without gazing into the mirror. When she returned to the basement, Linnie and Yue were deep in discussion. The papers from the manila folder were strewn all over the floor, while Linnie sipped his tea slowly and Yue typed away on the computer, gazing over to the papers and saying something to Linnie every now and then.

"Do any of these names ring any bells?" She asked without looking up to face Fen. She was too engrossed with solving the mystery that was the confidential file of Louis and Marie. Fen grabbed a chair, and prepared herself.

"Mari De Luca," she read off a file, while Fen racked her brain for that name, she couldn't put a face to it, so she shook her head, "Brian Anderson? Austin James? Layla Wong?"

"I've never heard any of those names in my life." Fen answered without hesitation.

"That's strange," Yue remarked, and looked to Linnie on the floor, who shrugged, "you should have, because according to this, you're codename Marie Antoinette." Fen's mouth almost dropped as Yue spoke those words, but she didn't have time to react.

"That is not the biggest problem, though." Linnie spoke from his position on the floor.

"It isn't?" Yue raised one of her eyebrows at him.

"Of course, it isn't," Linnie confirmed, "if Fen has the hard copy, then it means Claude Laurent has the soft copy and that he's going to look for a Marie Antoinette, as well as this Louis guy. Meaning that whomever associated with Marie and Louis are in danger as well."

"We need to find all my aliases," Fen spoke with urgency present in her voice, "and we need to protect whomever they left behind."

"But how are we going to do that if you can't even remember them?" Yue looked at Fen for the first time, barely reacting to her hair.

"You need to make me remember, Yue. For their sake." Was all she said. She had to remember, in order to save them. In order to save Linnie. This was what she had to do, she had to find these people, find the woman with the pale-faced little girl, the man with the little boy, the man with the teddy bear, and the man with the floral shirt clutched to his chest, and she had to protect them. From Claude Laurent and his pointless rage, and from the Light, because once she'd touched them, they'd become denizens of the dark, and the Shadows always protected its kin. After all, it was the Agency's motto. The Shadows always protected its kin.