All those months of texting and flirting, the promises, and I never even sent her a dick pic. I try to smile but can’t get my mouth to move.
My next breath barely feeds me, and the sounds are fading.
Something comes into blurry focus, and it looks like a damn big spider waving its legs at me.
Cute, and if I can see again, there’s hope.
I should’ve loved you more. So many regrets.
I cough.
The world goes black.
2
TARGET ACQUIRED
From where he walks to my left and slightly behind, I hear my handler curse as a strange wobble overlays the forest with ripples for a few seconds. A high sound descends into a bass-note thrum. It abates slowly, while shivers travel up my legs from the soles of my boots.
I glance at him.
“That’s probably the scheduled boosting of the LHC,” he mumbles, while looking around us at the trees. “Normal.” His left hand has a stranglehold on a branch.
It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself. Does he think I don’t understand?
LHC equals Large Hadron Collider. That explains the other weirdness recently.
This is worse. Being here, among the trees, makes a difference. Not that my remembered past is anything but recent.
“Wait.” He splays his fingers, palm downward, like an owner commanding a dog.
Glancing rays of the last light of day dapple me as I rotatemy arm. Sutures and scars dominate my skin. One set of marks encircles my left forearm. What am I made of, and where do I come from? These are questions that I mean to have answered.
Am I human or merely a jigsaw of misbegotten parts?
This is my first outing, and I plan to use it well, and diabolically…love that word. Diabolical.
“Here we are. Priority One target, Simon Tarrant, is in that house, Struct Four,” whispers my handler, a thirty-three-year-old ex-marine called… What is his name? I can’t remember. I might’ve been told to forget.
My asshole masters rummage through my mind and fuck with it constantly, though I’ve figured out ways around it.
I clench my fist, but quietly, not wanting to be noticed. If they suspect my simmering annoyance, this day might go badly.
Priority oneoverrides my thoughts, and I know why that happens and hate it, but I look in the direction of his outstretched arm. I’m still hating, but I look. I can do both. We are hidden in the trees on a ridge above two houses. Through the sunset-haloed branches and a gap in the trees, I zero in on a fence line between the pair of two-story houses. Two women face each other. They’re chatting, judging by their mouth movements. I can read some of what they say. Reading lips has been useful these past days. One of my self-taught skills I’ve kept hidden.
The one on the left is Hailey Tarrant. The daughter of my target.
I’m supposed to kill her father and anyone who gets in the way.The priority order and the training forced on me makes my fingers itch to close around her throat and crush it.
Forced.
Not voluntary. They talked around us, unfettered, thinking we were dumb.
I am not.
Cracked memories drag themselves from the detritus of my brain when I least expect them.
Knives plunge into the flesh of fellow structs as we wrestle. There were four of us.
