by K. T. Hanna
“Has it always been like this?” she asks quietly.
“Has what been like what? There are a lot of things around us. Your thoughts aren’t decipherable at the moment.” He speaks fast, moving around the cockpit as he sets things up.
“The cities, the outskirts... Has it always been this decrepit?”
Dom glances out of the windows and back at the camera screens. “Ah,” he says softly, “You mean that.”
“Yeah.” Sai chokes the word out bitterly. “That.”
“Not always, but for a very long time. The end of the Psionic Wars left a lot of people without anything.”
“Then I guess I was one of the lucky ones...” She watches the scene for a while longer and closes her eyes to take a deep breath. Feeling sorry for herself and others isn’t going to help anything. They have several hours of preparation ahead of them before she has to kill the man trying to ruin the lives of millions of people within GNW.
If the dossier is correct, Franklin Jarvs is a character. Older, with an inherent affinity for metal, he’s been working on a type of grenade that will react with the adrium used throughout the city and cause it to explode on impact—with devastating range. He isn’t quite done with his invention, but it’s only a matter of time.
“Why the hell me?” Sai mutters to herself before turning around abruptly and glaring at Dom. “That’s a damn good question. You’re made to be the perfect assassin. Why aren’t we using you for this?”
Dom blinks at her and shimmers for a moment, allowing his real self to be visible in all its chameleon glory. He stops before Sai gets a headache. “You want me to try to kill someone who’s traveling around promoting a compound which reacts with adrium?”
Sai blushes and looks away.
“I didn’t realize you disliked me quite that much,” he says, his words dry.
“I don’t dislike you at all, Dom. I never have. I’m just scared...” More scared than she’s ready to admit.
“You can do it. Bastian would have done the mission himself if he didn’t have faith in you. He’s always been GNW’s cleaner. For once, he has someone to share the burden with. It’s why he partnered you with me.”
“What’s boy wonder doing then?” she asks bitterly.
“He’s dosing himself with a shot of Shine and sitting in on two days’ worth of briefings. Trade convention—weapon manufacturers. People are trying to reintroduce guns, and Bastian isn’t the only one who thinks it would be a very bad idea.”
“Guns? Are they trying to blow us all up?”
Dom shrugs. “Not entirely sure. I think it’s been so long since the cities were established that people forget the reaction between the combustion mechanisms and the filtration agent needed to purge our air.”
“He’ll be able to convince them, won’t he?” Sai pushes down the rising panic in her throat.
“As long as he controls his temper. Another reason for his dose.”
“Shine dosing is weird to me.” Sai says
“Understandable. Just know it hurts to come down off Shine as your powers essentially reawaken, but he can’t afford to be seen as what he is. Though...” Dom looks her up and down critically, flipping switches faster than she can follow. “You’d have the same problem. The more punch your psionics pack, the faster your body will build an immunity to the drug. Unless they overdose you.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Dom pauses his flurry of activity and stands in front of her. “Do you really see?”
Sai stands and takes a step back, suddenly hot and penned in. “No, but I probably can’t yet, right?” She shakes her head and hugs her arms.
“But you will.”
“Great—I’m going to be a murdering, insightful bitch! Just what I always dreamed of.” She smiles nervously, her anger depleted.
The time is so close she can smell it. A hysterical giggle starts to rise in her throat and she fights it down, down and away. But it comes back up to the surface after a few moments and pushes past her lips, escaping in what sounds like a soft fart—which only makes her laugh all the more.
Dom stops his work again and looks at her. She can see the impatience in his eyes and it makes her giggle even harder. So hard, in fact, her sides hurt and no coherent words form in her mind or come out of her mouth.
He strides to the medi-kit, just outside the tiny cubicle valiantly impersonating a bathroom, and extracts something from it. Sai can see it through the tears of laughter now pouring from her eyes. She focuses on the object until he reaches out, holds her nose, and squirts something down her throat.
“What the hell!” she splutters amidst fading giggles. At least she didn’t cry. There’s a warmth spreading its way through her stomach suspiciously like vodka. But the hysterics are gone, and suddenly her legs won’t hold her up anymore.
“It’s okay, Sai. You needed some sort of release. Laughing is as good as any—it’ll make everything easier when the time comes.”
She just nods and sits down in a heap on the middle bench. “Mmm this was green before? Did you...How did you...” And the whole vehicle slowly changes. From the holding cells at the back to the pilot panels up the front, a comforting blue seeps through the cabin.
“No way,” is the only thing she can think of to say.
“Yes, way,” Dom says. “This little beauty is mine.” He pats the side of the walls affectionately. His eyes go distant for a few moments. “She was the last gift made for me by my creator. She’s attuned to me.” He loses the faraway look and focuses back on her. “I call her Mele. Short for —”
“Chameleon. Not the fighting style. Got it.” She pauses at the surprised laugh from Dom. “You’ve mentioned her before. Just like you, huh?”
“In more ways than one,” he answers softly.
Sai stretches out on the seat, which is far more comfortable than it originally appeared to be, and tries to focus on anything but the near future.
Dom squats down next to her and waits until she opens her eyes and looks at him before he speaks. “I think you should know something.”
“Mmm?” she asks.
“If you weren’t reluctant about this assignment, I’d think I misjudged you. It’s precisely because of your reluctance and fear that you are the better choice.”
She mulls that over in her head. “I don’t quite get how—”
“It’s highly unlikely you’re going to turn into a rampant glee killer on us.”
Sai closes her eyes again. Maybe that is a good thing.
“I see them,” Dom moves his foot, and the transport opens silently.
Sai follows him out, breathing in the torrid air. Her lungs struggle for a few moments in the approaching twilight. Once the sun sets, the air will ease up. It still won’t have the filtered thickness of the cities, but it’ll be better. Now she understands why the workers who travel to the steel mills in the distance need oxygen masks.
In the lingering sunlight, the sandy ground appears to hold all the blood the Psionic Wars spilled over twenty years ago. The cold tinge to the air reminds her seasons still exist outside the controlled environment of the cities. They need to work this quickly, or the cold will creep in after the sun sets.
Only the hardiest of trees survive out here—some cactus here and there, a stubborn fir. The cluster of cacti they hide behind is the perfect camouflage, and as she glances back at Mele, Sai realizes the importance of the vehicle given the current situation. Just like Dom, she can take on her surroundings and blend, like she was never there.
Sai hefts the blade in her hand, weighing it and frowning. The knife is long and runs down the length of her forearm to her elbow as she grips the simple leather hilt. It feels heavier than it did before, but it could be the shaking of her entire body. “Focus,” she says, steeling herself against her conscience screaming to run instead.
“For the good of GNW,” she mutters to bolster herself and feels Dom grip her shoulder reassuringly.
Sai reaches out w
ith her mind to locate Franklin amidst his entourage. She scans each person she finds very briefly, not wanting to use up too much of the valuable energy she’s going to need to phase. It takes a few attempts before she finds him.
“Bingo.” She breathes the word so it’s barely more than an exhalation and closes her eyes to follow him with her mind.
Bastian’s words come back to her, the warning.
“Lock down your shields. Make sure you don’t leave yourself open to hear a dying man’s thoughts. Sometimes they can be confusing or psionically trapped. If you’re really that morbidly curious, make sure there is no way for them to get a foothold in your mind.”
Sai frowns and reinforces her shields twice, just in case, while she continues to track the man. The last thing she wants to do is be drawn into a mind trap.
Dom leads the way to the checkpoint they chose a few hours earlier. It’s the only route the man can travel. The plan is to zip in and out, kill the target, and be gone before they notice she’s there. In quick, out fast. Clean and clear.
She’s not sure what possesses her to do it. Maybe it’s the feeling of rebellion against Bastian and his well-worded omissions that roils in her gut, but as she follows Franklin with her mind, she finds herself seeking his thoughts out.
They’re jumbled, busy, and boring, but then, he doesn’t know he’s going to die yet. It’s a lot more boring an experiment than she thought and she wishes she’d waited until the cold steel bites into his flesh. She shudders at the image conjured, momentarily scared by her own cold-bloodedness.
Then Franklin passes the point of no return, for him and for her. Dom gives her a gentle push on the shoulder.
Time slows—or, at least, it seems to. She takes three running steps, sure beyond certainty that she can make the jump. It’s why she’s glad she practiced the hall loop regardless of Bastian’s reaction.
One.
“I will not fail,” she tells herself, focusing on the point she needs to phase to.
Two.
Upper slash to the right, back and across to the left. She goes over the motions in her head, eyes never leaving the spot. Another second and it’ll be time.
Three.
And on.
She phases and comes to rest directly in front of him. Lunging straight in as his eyes are still focusing on her sudden appearance, she executes the first slash. Each piece of skin severs beautifully from the other.
At the end of the first stroke she reverses her hand and drags it back across—just as his blood starts to come to the fore.
For one inherently curious and rebellious moment, she pushes her mind at him—to listen.
The blade completes its second arc, cutting to the bone, and she takes one step before phasing back to where she started.
She angles wide and has to take more steps to phase back to Mele, slightly misjudging the distance. She lands on her knees as Franklin’s body topples to the ground. She can still see his thoughts, fading rapidly as he tumbles. Then there is nothing.
“Let’s go,” she says breathlessly as she climbs into the cabin, only now noticing a slight spray of blood has caught the strange black material of her suit. One thing she’ll give assassins—they have a much better wardrobe. Sai seats herself on the middle bench to catch her breath and pretend her body isn’t shaking.
Dom is already in his pilot’s seat, and Mele is silent as she lifts into place, the slow underlying thrum gentle on Sai’s roiling stomach.
“I think I forgot to breathe...” She gasps for air and looks at her hand still clutching the blade so hard her knuckles are white. There’s barely any blood on it—just some skin hanging on the edge near the handgrip where she must have pushed it in too far.
Laughter bubbles on her lips, but she pushes it down again. There’s nothing to laugh at. She just killed a man for wanting to make a difference.
She frowns. He died for trying to make a difference to his own people? What people? Why not...
It happened so fast and flawlessly that it keeps playing over and over in her head. One, two, three—in, two slashes, and she was gone. He didn’t understand what hit him. She’d been there a full second at most.
But it took him far longer than that to bleed to death—all of her journey back to the transport. All of it. Another ten seconds of agony and wondering why before he let go of consciousness. There had to be a cleaner way to kill than that.
She clutches her stomach and doubles over on the bench, retching. The words and images in her head won’t go away. Maybe next time she should listen to Bastian. Nothing in Franklin’s head makes sense; it’s all gibberish. There is no evil or sinister intention lurking there. He was proud of his work.
Maybe their information was wrong? Perhaps her mind sift was misleading? She’d only been in his head a few seconds. That certainly wasn’t enough to form a valid opinion of a man, was it?
When faced with death, the only regrets Franklin had were not being there to see his work completed, to find his people set free from confinement and exile.
Confinement?
“None of this makes any sense!” She throws herself back and groans, forgetting momentarily that she’s straddling the tiny bench in the middle of the transport and falling off the end.
“Sai?” Dom turns his head so fast she thinks he should have popped something. “Are you okay?”
“Forgot where I was.”
“Are you okay?” he repeats.
She nods at him, repositioning herself on the floor. “As okay as I can be.”
“Do you...” He glances away, and back again. “Would you like to talk?”
“Not yet...” She looks up at him and smiles, tiredly. If she keeps her hands on the ground to support her, she can pretend they’re not shaking. “Maybe, when I’ve had time to sort everything out.”
She clambers up from the floor and over to the passenger seat, making sure it’s as fully reclined as it can get. Dom is silent next to her, and Mele isn’t about to be company. Sai stretches her legs as far as they can go, relieved for once to be so short, and tries to sleep.
Every time she’s about to doze off, she feels wind in her face and opens her eyes to someone about to cut her throat. Except she doesn’t actually open her eyes until they do, and she wakes up in a sweat, panting and clutching her throat.
She gives up on sleep and contents herself with watching the dark sky outside, hoping against hope that the world suddenly turns into sunshine and lollipops so she never has to do something like this—ever—again.
Sai manages to produce her best ever report to hand in to Bastian as they speed back to Central. It’s full of tiny details, right down to the countdown and methods used to eliminate the target, with only one teensy omission—the thoughts of the dead man currently running rampant in her head.
If it didn’t make her cringe, she’d wish he’d died slower so she could have more answers. It’s not that she questions the orders. Her entire life belongs to GNW. She owes them in ways they made very clear throughout her training. She’s sure Bastian and Dom would have checked. But Franklin’s thoughts won’t stop plaguing her.
He was proud of his accomplishments, for both himself and his faction. From what she can gather he was trying to bring an end to the oppression of GNW? To free colleagues?
“Always two sides to a story and all,” she mutters to herself as she finishes the last polish on the report and throws it into her backpack while she waits for Dom to guide Mele into the city.
“Did you say something to me?”
Sai glares at the back of his head. Bloody super-sensitive hearing. “No.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks her for the fifteenth time in the last two hours.
“Yes, I’m okay.” There’s a constant reminder in her head that she’s supposed to be redeeming herself. Supposed to be. Did killing others constitute redemption? Did the ease her knife severed his jugular with count as a good thing?
Her own thoughts mix with
Franklin’s, making the litany in her head almost unbearable.
“Perfect,” she purrs the word out as an idea comes to her.
Dom looks like he’s about to say something, but thinks better of it.
Sai starts planning things out in her head. As soon as she gets back to her room, she’ll make a list on her personal reader and lock it in. She hasn’t done it before, but she’ll figure it out.
At least then it’s where she can watch it, instead of experiencing the rampant confusion in her mind. At least there it might help her from breaking down like she so badly wants to.
Used to recording things, she should be able to extract most of his last moments, make a list of everything Franklin thought while it’s still fresh in her mind. They’re so vivid; she can’t un-see them. Her planning is interrupted when Dom places a hand on her shoulder and gently shoves her forward.
“We’ve been parked for three minutes. What are you waiting for?”
She stares at him for a moment, trying to gather her scattered thoughts before stepping out of Mele. Sai pats the iridescent vehicle, says thank you, and leans down to kiss the side of the hull. For a moment, she thinks there’s warmth to it that wasn’t there before, and then it’s gone. Maybe Mele understands.
Bastian first—then she can get the images out of her head. If only she can keep busy enough not to think about the blood. If only she can keep busy enough so “the incident” stops repeating in her head. If only she can find even a hint of a valid reason why she killed a man left behind in his own memories, maybe the guilt will leave her alone.
Bastian waits for them at his door. She hasn’t forgotten his glaring omissions. Her grudge isn’t against Dom, but Bastian can go ahead and ingest a pound of Shine for all she cares.
Sai walks past him and drops her backpack to the floor after taking her report out of it. She’s knows he’ll have a summarized version sitting in front of him, but she’s proud of the detailed one. Writing it kept her sane, and if she concentrates on it, maybe she can squeeze out a few more hours of pretending not to be a piece of murdering scum.
“Report?” Bastian holds out his hand to her as he approaches his desk. She hands it to him wordlessly and waits, standing at ease, gaze roaming the office. He scans through the device, lips pursed. Sai isn’t sure, but she could swear there are more lines under his eyes than there were a few days ago, and their blue tone seems somewhat muted. He looks more exhausted than she’s ever seen him. She waits for him to finish his perusal, trying desperately not to think.