The black-clad figure standing in the rain with her hands clasped as if in prayer blinked open her eyes. Just a moment ago so full of life, they were now blank, dead, cold as steel and twice as sharp. She sighed as she slid twin knives from thigh-mounted sheathes and buried them in the mortar of the brick building. It was going to be a long climb.
Vera punched her left hand at the wall for what would be the last time, driving the blade into the crumbling mortar. Her fingers frozen and sore from the death grip she had maintained for the majority of the ascent, she surveyed the balcony she was dangling beside. Satisfied that nothing was waiting for her, she swung a leg over the railing and landed lightly on the small balcony outside of room 209.
Yanking her knives out of the wall, Vera replaced them in their sheathes and peered through the sliding glass door that led into the apartment. She tensed, poised to shatter the glass with one clean blow from her boot when she remembered the specification on the paper. Quiet. Fine. She could play like that too.
She drew a thinner knife from her forearm sheathe and eased it into the door latch, working it up and down until she heard the click that announced the unlocking of the door.
Vera slid thin fingers into the handle and curled her hand around it, her frozen knuckles popping and protesting at every movement. The door opened easily, and she slipped through, quiet as the shadow she was.
Golden eyes swept the room, scanning for the object of their owner's assignment. Nothing moved. Vera's muscles contracted, a slight doubt nipping at her mental shield. She blinked it away as she looked through the other rooms: a Spartan bedroom and an equally unfurnished kitchen was all that she saw. She was about to push open the one closed door when the watery sound that she had assumed was the rain came to an abrupt halt and she heard the rustle of cloth.
Uh-oh...
Then the door opened and a wash of steam flowed out of the bathroom, followed by the same tall blonde Vera had heard speaking the day before. This time, though, she was only wrapped in a towel. She blinked her eyes open as she sensed an intruder, purple irises blazing, scanning the killer with the same intensity Vera had experienced before. Sizing her up. Staring straight through her.
The speaker closed her eyes and sighed, apparently not liking what she saw.
"You're here to kill me, aren't you?" It was more a statement than a question.
Vera only gazed at her, that nagging thought back at the edge of her blank-slate mind. She quashed it again, and raised her left hand, the knife she had picked the lock with still clutched in protesting fingers. She started towards the orator, crouching, knife held more tightly than usual, her fingers almost white.
She flexed her grip on the knife, trying unsuccessfully to ease the pain building in her knuckles, and came to a stop no more than a foot in front of the other girl. Her brilliant violet eyes slid closed as she spoke, her words tinged with an air of finality.
"If you are going to kill me here, then so be it. But do not let me die in vain. If I am to die, make sure I die for something worthwhile."
Vera took a great breath, dispelling for a third time the persistent irritation of that buzzing thought at the edge of her mind. She poked the knife through the towel, placed the steel directly between the speaker's breasts and felt the blade bite in...and felt the heat of her victim's body radiating outwards, as if her heart was a sun in miniature. The all too familiar trickle of blood coated the tip of her blade as she studied it, and all of a sudden the nagging was back. Vera gathered herself to try to dissipate it again, but the steady pumping flow of blood flowing down the spiraling grooves of the blade distracted her. The sight of the life of someone she knew to be innocent at the very back of her not-so-clear mind draining away shook her to the very core.
Seven long years she had been doing this bitter business, killing others so that she might live. Vera had heard begs, pleas for life before. She'd heard threats, curses, insults, almost everything. Never before, though, never before had she heard someone accept their fate so stolidly for the sake of good. Never once had she heard someone be willing to die so that others might benefit from it, dying a martyr instead of living, as Vera did, as a parasite.
A warm wetness touching the tip of her finger, the unmistakable feeling of blood flowing down her hand, blood that was not her own. Vera blinked as she felt the knife quiver, pulsate, in time with the speaker's heart.
Why was she here?
Why did this person have to die?
A piece of paper slipped under a blank wooden door into a blank apartment signified the imminent end to a life, but did the people who placed the paper there have any right to do so? Did they know what was right and good so that they had a reason to kill, a reason for this blood, this life to flow out and pour over Vera's hands? A reason for this beautiful throbbing to stop?
Vera's head spun and she shook it slowly, then rapidly, as these thoughts twirled around, desperate for it to be back, desperate for the quiet to return.
It didn't.
Vera sank to her knees, her mind screaming, the knifepoint slicing the towel open and leaving a trail of red down unmarked skin, that one question circling, a shark and a vulture, why, why, WHY?
Her teeth clenched as her mind reeled, trying to keep it all inside, trying to bottle it up, to stem the flow, to do something, anything, to be free of it again.
But she failed.
Her mouth moved on its own, against her will, framed words, seeking answers to questions she didn't want the answers to in a voice almost imperceptible.
"...What did you do?"
"I did nothing."
But she had to have done something, Vera was only sent after criminals, for her to be sent after someone that didn't do anything would mean...
"They're lying to you."
Delivered with sympathy that did nothing to let Vera down easily, the words shattered her. Sights, sounds, thoughts, every single kill she had made over the past seven years came rushing back to her, emblazoned with one, single, devastating word: lies.
It was all lies. Everything she had done, everything for the purpose of helping all the people in this city, to stop what had happened to her from happening to any more children, to stop anyone else having to do what her parents had done-
Her parents. Had they really given her up for a better chance at living, or were they dead? Killed? Simply abandoned their daughter or forced to?
More and more questions tore through Vera's skull as she knelt there, at the feet of some mostly-naked girl she had only seen for the first time yesterday and exchanged words with today, the girl who she had been send to kill.
No, not kill.
Murder.
If none of these were criminals, if no one of the literal thousands she had killed over seven years deserved to die, did that mean...
"You did not dispense justice. You were not sent after criminals. You murdered hundreds of people in cold blood. People with families, children, spouses. Futures."
"Lives."
ns 15.158.61.20da2
