A piece of paper blew down the deserted street, dirty white against the dirtier grey-black of the asphalt and its patches of dark green and dark blue gum.
It was followed by a man in a dark suit, his head down, shoulders hunched, eyes eternally grim. He kicked at the paper, which had blown back onto his once-polished, now-scuffed black shoe, and irritably bent down to rip the paper off, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it to the side of the street.
His cellphone buzzed noisily in the depths of his pocket. He drew it out with two fingers and stared at the screen, sighed silently (with a hint of maliciousness), and flicked it open.
"Yes?" he said, his tone dark.
"Mrmuble, mrumble, mumbrle," said a tinny voice. "Mrgrmble mgrmblye mrumble mumrble!"
The Agent listened, his face expressionless. "And?"
The voice reached a higher pitch and began to shriek.
The Agent held the phone farther away from his ear. In the distance, he could see looming skyscrapers; beneath them sat high-rise apartment buildings. The sun was glaring down from overhead, sparkling brilliantly off the shingles on nearby roofs, glancing off his phone and bouncing off the dark lenses of his sunglasses.
The voice in his ear continued to scream.
Eventually he pressed the end call button, without answering the final words of the caller, and dropped the offending device back into his pocket. He continued walking down the empty street.
There were a few cars parked along the side, but they were dingy and old, their paint peeling. One was propped up on bricks, its tires were missing. The radio appeared to be gone also.
The Agent cast a cursory glance over the decrepit vehicles and kept walking.
At the end of the street he emerged into an old, open-air mall. The store signs were faded and drooping, and the neon bulbs, which festooned a scant few, were burnt out, and some bulbs were smashed. He walked straight through, occasionally shooting glances into the vacant shops. The only sign of life was a cat, a small black one, sound asleep in a store window.
He glanced up at the sign (Botonia's Baubles), and passed on.
The rest of the shops were empty. He paused once, looking back over his shoulder, but turned and left the mall behind, heading for his car and civilization. He spat onto a cobblestone as he went around the corner, disappearing into the hazy sunlight of afternoon.
He had not seen the purple-striped bike that was carefully propped up against a store wall and padlocked to a pipe. Neither had he seen the person that came out of Botonia's Baubles an hour later, carrying the sleeping cat and wearing a strange motley of clothes: dark jeans, long brown trench coat, lime green shirt, and one pair of briefly-seen, purple-striped socks.
