The mystery kept growing. Not only a secret facility, a decades-old secret facility. Not only a decades-old secret facility, a decades-old Imperial secret facility. Not only a decades-old Imperial secret facility, but one that knew her name. Ailen swung her flashlight beam through the darkness over the grey walls. A plastic sign with arrows on it pointed the way to LAB 1 and CANTEEN and other exciting destinations. These didn’t interest her, though.
The trail of carnage that followed behind the Agent was easy to follow. She moved through the base like a whirlwind, scattering furniture, papers and the formerly-living inhabitants alike behind her. Ailen picked up a memo with an eye-catching drawing of a girl on a horse on it.
It read: May. Come see me in Lab a4 after dinner. Paula. xxx.
The drawing wasn’t that good, but a lot of care had been taken over it. Ailen put it aside on a desk and put her hand on the grip of her pulse projector, which had hung useless at her side. She could feel the Agent’s presence, close by. Her hair stood up. The air tasted of electricity, and her tongue tingled. The ache in the back of her head felt like splintering wood, a door threatening to break in.
She stepped silently over a body. It had a white smock, stained with red, and a badge said “Paula.” Its limbs were twisted, and fresh blood ran from the mouth and nose and dripped onto the smock as Ailen watched. She shook her head and went on.
Grip! A hand around her calf! Ailen yelled and shook the hand off, twisting her upper body to point the pulse projector down at the pitiful body. But the body wasn’t moving. It hadn’t moved, in fact.
“Getting paranoid,” muttered Ailen to herself and let the pulse projector fall to her side on its shoulder strap. She squatted down next to the body and took a second look at its face. An older woman, a face that would have been kindly had it been alive. Something about it filled her with a strange feeling of loss. She touched the woman’s greying hair that hung limply beside her face, and all of a sudden she was filled with revulsion for the thing in front of her. She stood up and clamped a hand over her mouth. She’d seen death before of course. She’d seen it happen. But seeing dead was a different matter. The horrible, past-tense finality. The wooden door in the back of her head was not just splintering but beginning to break. Pretty soon it felt like an axe was about to break through.
She had to find that Agent fast.

Victrix Lament’s eyes were blank as she drifted deeper in the facility. The words that gang boss had gloated years ago, the words that had changed the course of her life, still echoed in her mind. You think your powers came from you? Think again. They made you. And this is where they did it. By stealing you from your home, your family, and turning you into a cannon to be pointed at the enemy. She had torn her way through empty classrooms, tossed aside those she came across. This place was nearly abandoned now, and somehow that stung her. After all we’ve done for you.
Something bumped her boot, hovering an inch off the ground, and she looked down. Not with her useless eyes, but with her perceptive psychic sense. It was an ID card, clutched in a dead hand. The hand belonged to a security guard who she sensed had died by accident. A rogue pulse projector discharge. The Empire’s finest were losing touch. Their armies couldn’t hold the territories any more, and the core was on the brink of collapse. Soon it would all come crashing down.
Then the greatest power in the galaxy would be the Agents. Not the Agency. Victrix Lament knew that they weren’t all as principled as she was. No, many of the Agents would relish the opportunity to seize their own slice of the cosmos. They would become warlords, feudal overseers. Then, one thousand, one hundred thousand years in the future, one of those immortal god-kings would be able to unite a new Empire out of the same ancient ashes as the old one. She had contemplated this outcome hundreds of times in her meditation room on the Kalon and come to the conclusion that it was inevitable in the long term.
Inevitable, and had to be stopped. There was only one way to do that, and it was her life’s work from here until eternity: To kill every other Agent, with her bare hands if necessary. And to cripple the mechanisms by which the Empire made new ones. Starting here, starting now. The beginning of the end. And when there were no more Agents left…

Ailen saw the Agent gliding ahead of her and suppressed a gasp, ducking into an open doorway – held open by a shattered body that lay in the path of the sliding door, eternally attempting to close and bisect the corpse. Surely she had noticed Ailen by now? Ailen could almost have reached out and touched her, she was so close.
Suddenly, she remembered her mission. If the Agent was really so dangerous as that, then she had to be removed. One way or another.
“Hey!” called Ailen, not exposing any part of her body down the hallway in case of a return shot. “You have to leave here!”
The Agent’s reaction was unexpected, in that she didn’t have one. She drifted onwards, serene. As Ailen watched, a scientist came around the corner swinging a chair. The Agent didn’t even move in reaction, and his arms twisted in their sockets until they were facing backwards. As he screamed in pain, the Agent gestured disinterestedly with one hand. The scientist fell silent as skin sloughed off his face and muscle melted down to bone, a gleaming clean skeleton remaining as final testament to his existence.
Ailen stepped out into the hallway, turned the power dial on her pulse projector so hard it snapped off, and pressed the button.
Before the wave of energy hit her, the Agent had turned around. Ailen staggered under the weight of the blast and braced herself to be obliterated like the others.
Obliteration was not forthcoming. Instead, a voice, clear as a bell and entering straight through the brain stem: WHERE? Where are you?
Ailen pressed the fire switch again and another shockwave shook concrete dust from the ceiling. This time the Agent raised a hand and Ailen found herself sliding forwards. Hidden. A hidden mind. How? the voice said.
Six feet away. Her head felt like it was about to break open.
Five feet. She screwed up her eyes and let out a yell.
Three feet. Whatever it was inside her head that felt like it was going to break, broke.

Everything went white for a fraction of a second.

All of a sudden it was obvious to Victrix Lament, even as her mind’s eye was seared by the proximity of this explosion of power. Not every child could measure up to the level of control required by the Agency, after all. Suppressing fully-developed mental abilities was a difficult process, but the half-formed mind of a child could simply be nerve stapled in the developmental stage with minimal interference. Without any interaction with the psychic plane, they would be all but invisible to her mental sense.
Still, something was wrong. There was no way a mind that had been arrested at that stage should be capable of a burst of power that great. Unless the process had only half-worked, segregating the conscious part of the mind but allowing it to develop unchecked.
Her mind reached out and attempted to throttle the new psychic persona with razor tendrils, before it could gain awareness. But it was too late, and the other flowed out of her grasp like water. She could sense the raw power she was dealing with, and for a moment it seemed like it would become greater than her own and she was terrified, but she composed herself.
My purpose is greater than one failed Agent. I may have failed to strangle you in your crib, but my business here is completed. Never again will my homeworld serve the Empire, now and forever. Our business is not concluded, but merely postponed. I will see you again, new mind, and I will destroy you for the Universe’s sake.

Ailen Lament watched the Agent fold space in on herself, with new awareness of what that meant gleaned from her own psychic radiance. She watched the silver thread of energy pass through the roof and knew she could sever it and prevent her enemy from ever reaching her destination, and she could see that too: A ship in orbit. Ailen watched the last glimmers of the thread disappear into the ether.

She needed no such accoutrements. She took one last look back at her squad on the surface struggling to break down the door she had disappeared into.

And folded space.