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She steps onto the lower roof, gravel crunching lightly underfoot, the sound of pursuit behind her. She wishes that the roofs were smooth, silent, soft, easy to slip on, to make her escape. Instead, there is cat and mouse.
She hears the tinkling of the cowboy’s spurs, offensively loud compared to her own steps. He has no reason to be quiet. He is the hunter, she is the hunted.
How he reached the roofs she cannot fathom. She had attained her perfect perch through a series of jumps and maneuvers, aided by her hook and her own keen climbing skills. How the bumbling American had managed the same, let alone without setting off any of her traps, is a mystery.
A mystery she has no time to solve. She is not sure if he has seen her. Well of course he has seen her, that is why he peruses, but how well she cannot discern. She must always remain discreet; she is a weapon, a secret, a special something kept close to Talon’s heart of hearts to wreak havoc on the hapless hellraisers below her.
Or behind her.
She rolls behind an air-conditioning unit, launching a venom mine where she was a second ago. Perhaps she can weaken him, finish him off with Widow’s Kiss at short range. Her background on the cowboy is weak, he was not her target today and may never be, but he is persistent, pestering, perpetually hounding her even though she takes two steps for each of his one. If should could get farther, faster, reach further to the other side of the street, she could launch her hook, disappearing into the night with her failure wrapped around her shoulders.
He sees the trap.
A shot rings out as he destroys her carefully crafted web. Another one, and bits of metal ping against the air-conditioner. There is not enough venom to make another one. This will end. Now.
She springs, judging by sound where the cowboy stands. She is right. She catches him in a hail of bullets, but not off his guard. There is no reload, he merely stares her down, and fires the remaining four shots.
Some hit.
She is not sure how many. It is difficult to count when shards of bronze traveling 2000 kilometers per hour pierce your body in various locations. She feels nothing. She always feels nothing. So then why is she screaming?
The cowboy is speaking to her. Perhaps he is conditioning a surrender.
No.
There is no surrender.
There is only escape. She must live. Live to kill another day.
She stumbles back toward the edge of the roof. If she believed in such things as luck, she would say she is a very lucky woman. But she does not so she doesn’t and instead prays to the gods of fate to deliver her in this moment. If she was meant to live, she will live. If she is to be killed…
So be it.
She stumbles backwards, not clutching herself, not even sure where she should press her hands to stem the bleeding. There is a split second where something flashes in the cowboy’s eyes; it could be recognition, or an inkling of what he knows she is about to do. He lunges forward, but it’s too late.
Feeling, finding, fumbling…there!
Her foot slips off the edge, followed by the rest of her. Now she must trust.
There is a lip on the other side of the street. An ancient gargoyle guarding the gates of salvation. Even as she falls, years of training turn her body toward it, lashing out with her hook, watching it recede into the darkness cut by streetlights.
It hits. She leaves visions of red and stupid hats as she feels the familiar tautness in her broken, battered, bleeding body. She’s gliding through the air and for a second there is escape.
It is too much to hope for.
The statue cracks, even under a weight as light as hers. The claw of the hook clutches at crumbling stone and then at nothing and then the feeling of flying is once again replaced by falling.
She hits something. She is not sure what.
And then she hits something that is definitely and most assuredly the ground.
Not dead.
Not yet anyways.
The pavement is cool, bumpy, somewhat smooth beneath her right cheek. And very sticky.
The first thought that jumps out at her is that she hasn’t been discovered. The second thought is a question: why?
Maybe it has only been a few seconds since she blacked out, and she still has time to escape. As she tries to move her head, a more realistic thought comes to her: he thinks I am dead.
It was not an unfounded assumption. She should be dead. She should be…
Oh.
Her suspicions about her physical condition are correct. The stickiness on the cobblestone is her blood, pooled after lying face down in the street for at least an hour. She can’t move. She can’t turn her head or twitch her fingers. Her spine is severed.
Why wake up only to die?
She has failed.
Her target escapes, fleeing under the distraction the cowboy has made.
She cannot even return to report her failure.
And yet…
This feels…
Nice.
There is nothing for her to do now. Her only purpose is the lie here, wait for the end. There is no responsibility now. And it is quiet.
Wait.
Why did she think that? It is always quiet. Silence is a crux of her job.
But there is no other way to describe it. As the blood drains from her body, something else leaves too. She has no word for it.
She merely lets her death sweep over her, seeking that silence in every soft sigh.
They will stand under the bright sky, sparkling in all its splendor. The stars will not be out, washed away by the lights of the city, but it will still be the most beautiful night they have ever seen. Fairy lights will hang over the street, bouncing on strings, lifted by the spring breeze.
They will laugh. They will drink. They will hang off each other, stumbling down beautiful roads full of beautiful colors.
Somehow, they will find themselves up high, now above the fairy lights and the laughing shadows below. From here, they will see the tower unobstructed.
It will be gorgeous.
She will ask him to dance. He will say yes. They will hold each other while the world spins on.
She wakes with pain behind her eyes and his name on her lips.
Her body jerks forward, curling into a sitting position even as the bandages around her chest constrict. There is no time to take in her surroundings, only the blinding, burning, biting pain that ripples from every nerve.
“Gérard,” she repeats, her voice a sob that echoes through the empty room.
Why is she here? She was so close to escape…
She puts here hands to her face, her skin raw and sensitive to her surroundings. There is a bed beneath her. The coverlets are itchy. The fluorescent bulbs burn her eyes.
And someone is coming.
The mask enters the room, noticing her sitting upright. “You’re awake.” A slithering growl escapes him, grating against her ears in a way that it never has before.
She almost says the name a third time. But then she stops. No. That is the wrong thing to say.
Instead, she replies, “I have failed. The Russian escaped.”
The mask nods.
“I am alive.”
The mask nods again.
“Why?”
For a second, she is almost afraid. That was the wrong thing to say. Something in the back of her mind tells her that she mustn’t let them know about the vision or the name or the peace she almost had. But the question comes anyways. She needs to understand why she was taken from her dream only to be shaken into this too bright room with curtains made of plastic and floors that are nothing like cobblestone.
If there is contrariety, her partner doesn’t notice. “I found you during extraction. I was able to bring you to safety without further spinal injury.”
He found her.
Reaper doesn’t see her fingers curl under the blankets, or the flash that crosses her face. He merely drones on, nothing better than hearing his own decaying words.
“Your augmentations will make your recovery slower. It will take at least seven days for to reach a workable state, and three weeks in order to return to maximum capacity. We receive a new briefing in ten.”
His voice is like the last gasp of a dying animal. Her own seems heavy, haggard, helpless by comparison. “My spine was broken.”
He shakes his head. “Merely damaged. You’ll make a full recovery soon enough.”
He saved her.
Something rises in the back of her throat, even as Reaper talks about losses and damage control. It is a feeling, not discomfort or annoyance or hunger, but a true feeling. The kind that courses through her after a successful kill, or that burns her tongue and back of her hands when she takes that single shot. Only she hasn’t killed. She failed. Why? Why is this blaze filling her?
She looks at the mask at the foot of her bed and she knows.
Hatred.
Baking, boiling, branding hatred.
He took away that wonderful, blissful silence she had almost been released into. And for that she hates him.
He takes her silence at aggreeance.
When the mask has left, she has nothing but herself. This is wrong. She should feel nothing; she has always felt nothing.
No, she corrects herself, not always. There was a time when she felt all emotions, big and small, years upon years upon decades ago. A brush with death, a cracked body lying face-down in a gutter, and suddenly the ability to hate returns to her.
Her corpse wasn’t the only thing to have broken that night. Something had shattered inside of her, Talon’s grip slightly looser than it had been. The thought is terrifying.
She shakes her head, even if there is no one in the room to see. No, she can’t deal with both fear and anger all in one day. The hatred is enough. It is something to latch onto.
Something—the same something from before, that held her husband’s name inside her, safe and close—tells her that she must let no one know of her discovery. She must play her cards right, wait until the right moment to…
To what?
The something doesn’t say. For now she has hatred.
And, all things considered, that is just as good as hope.