Story Summary


On her second attempt, and with help from Suhara, who introduces her to Zen and calm thinking, Carmen arrests Laina Kaidare, closing her first case successfully.

Carmen goes on a great many cases during her years at the Agency, not only with Suhara but sometimes with others such as Jess, Kruchov, and Priya, and sometimes in a group that includers Rodger. Each person teaches Carmen something different. Jess teaches about the thrill of the chase, Kruchov the value of intelligence and deduction, Priya the way to interact with people of different nations, Omoro how to keep cool under fire, and Rodger, the world of technology. She quickly becomes the Agency's best-known and best-skilled detectives. Working on cases this difficult are dangerous, though, not just from the criminals but also the conditions. The Donnekahshaie culture flourishes and becomes well-known throughout the world.

Rodger develops the Transporter System, a precursor to the C-5, but its performance is even worse than the C-5's. After someone winds up in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, Lynn deems the System too dangerous and the agents go back to air travel. Daeslenna (aka The Chief) is upgraded several times and takes on a true personality.

Meanwhile, as the Agency becomes well-known to the outside world, Catherine LeVrai's murderer is becoming well-known in the criminal underworld. Muerganne Giovanni is rapidly achieving crimelord status through the drug, arms, and artefact trades. But the Agency is on to him, and Muerganne decides that if he is to stay in power, he will have to confront the Agency. He knows this will be difficult, and over the span of three years, weaves an intricate trap.

Then, in 1985, the Agency begins to suspect that Muerganne is up to something big. It begins hiring more people than usual. Two of the new hires are new parents, with a young daughter and son, one of which is a great admirer of Carmen's. (The idea that Ivy would have admired and then resented Carmen for her actions is not mine, but I liked to so much I wanted to integrate it into the story.)

Muerganne finishes his trap, a very simple-looking building, almost the archetypical abandoned warehouse. But inside a complex assortment of mazes and illusions. It's not a 60's-era Batman studio set, with trap doors and funhouse mirrors; in fact it's very plain, so that the unwary investigator doesn't know he's being led astray. Once Muerganne's Complex is finished, he drops a true tip about its location and a false one about its purpose. (It's supposed to be just what it looks like, and hold Muerganne's illegal goods.)

Acme gains more information on this Complex than Muerganne would like, but still not enough. They do manage to deduce that the place will take a lot of manpower, and a full two-thirds of the force turns out for the raid. They split into groups and get in through several different entrances. Carmen is grouped with Jess, Priya, Omoro, and Kruchov, while Rodger is back at Headquarters, overseeing the whole thing with Daeslenna and Chief Lynn. Somebody notes that, for some odd reason, there are no sprinklers or fire extinguishers.

Soon after everyone is in the Complex, things begin to go wrong. One by one, the groups lose contact with Headquarters and each other. Lynn starts to call the remaining groups back, deeming the situation too dangerous. As Kruchov tries to lead his group back, he realizes they are lost, even though they haven't gone that far. Suddenly they are ambushed by Muerganne's cronies. Carmen takes cover from the gunfire a little bit away from the others and, at Kruchov's orders, makes a break for it by herself.

Carmen has not gone far before she begins to recognize the corridors. Just as she is almost out, she is confronted by Muerganne himself. She manages to shoot the gun from his hand and fights him to get past. Muerganne tries to kill her. As he has his hand on her neck he finds Catherine's locket. Whatever taunt he had ready is suppressed by his surprise upon finding Catherine's picture in it. He recognizes her for who she is and angrily calls her by her true name. Carmen, terrified, recognizes him as well. All logical thought gone, she fights him off with a burst of adrenaline and sprints out of the Complex.

Muerganne does not go after her; he does not believe she will survive being hunted down by his people. Instead he sets fire to the Complex, with the detectives inside. Only a small few, Kruchov, Priya, Omoro, and Jess among them, survive and make it back to the Agency. Muerganne uses a primitive virus to completely disable and almost destroy Daeslenna, the rest of the Acme telecommunications system, and the Transporter System.

The Agency, now almost completely devastated, calls for help from other agencies, takes new people on temporarily and starts looking for its missing agents. Some have been killed in the fire, some by Muerganne's agents as they fled. Carmen is among the missing.

Carmen, shocked by Muerganne's appearance, ashamed by her own cowardice, and devastated by the loss of her friends, struggles for survival for several weeks. She is constantly being trailed by Muerganne's agents. She tries to return home but is almost killed by them several times. With few resources, she resorts to stealing. As she wonders how she will explain this to the Agency, she hits upon the Maisadorre, which she learned about during her training. The Maisadorre is when an agent takes any means necessary to solve a case, solo. She decides she will find as much evidence about Muerguanne as possible once she returns home. As she begins going after big-ticket items, she begins to take on a thief persona to discourage her pursuers from knowing about her investigation. For guidance she takes on a talented but easily intimidated thief named Frederick, but doesn't employ him very long. Yet, of course, she tries to make her thefts as clean as possible to invoke as little anger as possible from the Agency. And so whispers of tales of a new thief, who runs for the thrill of the chase and takes pride in not damaging anything or injuring anyone, begins to circulate in the criminal underworld. Acme is too busy with its own problems to notice.

After six months, after the mourning of the dead, the relative stabilization of the Agency, and the restoration of the tech systems (except for Daeslenna), the Agency takes on a completely different persona. The Donnekahshaie culture is almost gone, as most of its keepers are dead. The new Generation is named the Juniors, simply "the generation that follows the Seniors". The remaining Seniors stay on to rebuild the Donnekahshaie culture, but the final blow is struck when Nari finds Carmen.


Nari carries this bad news back to the Agency, which is split on the question of her loyalty. Those who state that she is a thief and nothing more stay there. The others split ways. As Lynn's post requires that she formally condemn Carmen, she does so .and then resigns from her post as Chief, and heads the Epidemical Crimes Division instead. Kruchov goes back to Russia. Priya works for the United Nations. Jess goes back to stormtracking. Suhara retires, but stays in San Francisco. Shirley finishes college and enters Crimelab. She later becomes its head and a coroner. Rodger and Josephine, so deeply hurt by the loss of Carmen, move to Southern California, and Rodger later gets a job in Silicon Valley. But none of them fully believe that Carmen left to pursue a life of crime.

After the parting of ways, the incident in the Complex is referred to as the Case of the Crystal Chandelier, on account of how the complex and brilliant Agency shattered as it fell. The case is too emotionally damaging to open an inquiry, and few outside the Agency know about it anyway, so it doesn't take much in a few years for the public to forget and deduce that Carmen left because she was bored.

Carmen observes all this, and is convinced the damage she has done is irreversable. Ashamed by her failures, she decides that she was not destined to be a detective...but does make a decent thief. She puts her past in a dark corner of her mind and looks at what future she has left, becoming only partially concious in a way as a large part of her mind is put in hibernation. In the back of her mind she still remains on watchful guard of the Agency, making sure its new recruits are tested first on a harmless thief like herself.

"Mahli Saia" ends and "Mata-A-Keymalia" begins.

There are many changes to the Agency over the course of the next ten years, two of them major. The first, implemented at the beginning, is the rule that no one under 22 can work in a Division other than Passangue (Bloodless Crimes). This is the Division that chases Carmen. The second major change comes later on. When Lee Jordan enters the Agency, he fixes many of the tech problems. Daeslenna is restored to working order, but some of his memory is lost, including the true story of Carmen's adoption. Lee doesn't break the news about Carmen to Daeslenna very nicely, so it's no wonder Daeslenna ends up resenting her. Daeslenna becomes Chief of Passangue in a bid to answer his questions about Carmen. Lee Jordan also makes the Transporter System workable, renaming it the C-5.

Lee Jordan's "capture" of Carmen (mentioned in Part 1 of "Boyhood's End")is actually very minor. He does manage to get a set of cuffs on her before she escapes. At this point, that's really all anybody can do.

Zack and Ivy become Full-Time Detectives. Ivy resents Carmen for a long time. A turning point comes when Carmen drags Suhara into a case ("Deja vu"). Carmen finds that Suhara has been living in misery and regret while she has been a thief. Flooded with guilt, she decides to make him hate her, forget her, and give him other friends to look after him. Suhara joins Zack and Ivy on a case in which Carmen pretends to cruelly use Suhara as a challenge. After the case, Ivy befriends Suhara and begins to spend a lot of time with him, learning about Carmen's life as a detective as well as Suhara's friend Catherine LeVrai. After Carmen fakes her death ("Follow My Footprints"), in a bid to see if anyone still cares to see her alive, Ivy is puzzled and a little disturbed and approaches Suhara about it. Suhara reveals that Carmen never left the Agency for a "challenge" and his suspicions that Muerganne must have affected Carmen somehow in the Complex.

Ivy, stunned by this new information, tries to research the Case of the Crystal Chandelier and finds her efforts blocked by the Seniors. She befriends Ambassador Seldavia Mociyambuti, a fellow Junior who has been discreetly studying the Case and Donnekahsahie culture for some time. Her Donnekahshaie name is "Mata-A-Keymalia", Ambassador to the Enemy. The name comes from her ease with negotiations with people on both sides of conflicts, as well as those in the criminal underworld. She works in the Ethnic Crimes Division. Ivy begins to have doubts about her perceptions of Carmen.

Meanwhile, after being in hiding for years, Muerganne decides to get rid of Catherine's daughter for once and for all…not by killing her, but by imprisoning her. Aside from torturing her in this way, he figures that if Carmen is in prison, she can't give the Agency any information about him she might have found. (Muerganne also is not 100% convinced she wanted to be a thief.) He is satisfied with this for revenge on the LeVrai family.

Muerganne does not know about the Khisondhanna, an inquiry in which a disgraced agent (dhanna) must explain his actions to the entire Agency.

To start his plan, he poses as a small-time thief and allows himself to be captured by Juniors Armando and Joshua. He asks to exchange his freedom with a sure-fire Carmen capture. This kind of deal, or Roundabout, is not unheard of in the Agency. Armando's family ranch has fallen on hard times, and he needs the extra money he would get after being promoted for catching Carmen. Josha is eager to impress his crush, Ivy, and it's a measure of how little he knows her to think at this point that Ivy would want Carmen sent to prison with no questions asked of her. Both agree to the deal.

After faking her death, Carmen begins to once again think about her life outside of being World's Greatest Thief, and begins to remember things she long kept in the dark reaches of her mind. Then, out of nowhere, Carmen gets a tip about Muerganne from Rodger. (This is reflected in the Prologue). She is shocked to find that he is still alive and that (as the tip says – Muerganne is baiting them) he is planning to kill some of the Juniors. She is baited into another empty building. Both of them go in together to rescue the Juniors.

The Juniors, of course, have been told by Muerganne that Carmen is in this building. They don't find anything in it worthy of stealing, but Armando, Joshua, and Zack persuade them to go. Carmen and Rodger are separated in the building. Ambassador Mociyambuti follows, finds Rodger, and tips him off about the Juniors. Carmen is tipped off by Ivy. Immediately afterward Carmen stumbles upon some twenty-odd Juniors. After several frantic attempts to get away, she is captured and arrested.

Carmen is brought back to the Agency and put in a holding room (the "Kiema Room") to await the Khisondhanna. The Lost Generation, those Seniors that left the Agency, return. Rodger and Suhara explain what they have discovered, but the Agency is still split on Carmen's intentions. Carmen reveals to Ivy that she kept the rose Ivy put on her "grave" ("Follow My Footprints"), and gives her Catherine's necklace. Suhara reveals to Ivy Carmen's connection to Catherine. Ivy befriends Carmen and learns about Muerganne's plot.

Muerganne's plot begins to come true, in a way. Furious upon finding that Carmen is in a prime spot to damage him, he decides to launch another attack upon the Agency. He knows that the Agency is nowhere near as skillful as it used to be, and he plans to come after Carmen for one final time.

As he weaves his plan together, the Khisondhanna begins. Carmen reveals all that has transpired since the beginning of the Case of the Crystal Chandelier, as well as her connection to Catherine LeVrai and Muerganne's new intentions. Afterward Carmen is completely drained and the Agency is in an uproar.

Carmen is kept in the Kiema room as the Agency is unsure of what to do with her. As they plan for Muerganne's attack, Carmen pleads with the Agency to help with the case, to offer experience few have and to redeem herself. Carmen's Senior friends, as well as Zack and Ivy, stand by her. Finally the Agency decides that it needs all the help it can get. The Seniors put the Juniors through a crash course in all of the skills that made Acme unique and a formidable detective agency.

In the final showdown with Muerganne, Ivy finds him first. After an angry exchange, Muerganne attacks her. Ivy is rescued by Carmen, who is quickly followed by the rest of the Agency. Muerganne draws his gun on Carmen. Lynn issues an ultimatum, saying that if he fires he will be shot. Muerganne fires.

Carmen is gravely injured but still alive. As she recovers in the hospital, the Agency decides her fate. After much deliberation, emotional outbursts on both sides, and legal wrangling, they decide not to imprison her. She will pay off her debt to society by working for the Agency, under surveillance by the other agents for a few years until they decide she can work as an established detective once more. As Rodger puts it, she is much more valuable to the world with her skills as a detective, rather than languishing in prison as a result of her skills as a thief.

"Mata-A-Keymalia" ends and the epilogue begins. 1