Generating directives.
I turn toward her hotel. Toward the room where she’ll go to lick her wounds and plan her next betrayal. Toward the woman who made me believe I could be something other than what they made me.
She wanted to see the weapon?
Fine.
I’ll show her the fucking weapon.
The flight to her hotel takes four minutes.
I spend every second of it replaying our history through new eyes. Reinterpreting it all, finding the lies hidden in every memory I treasured.
The way she always deflected when I asked about her past.
Operational security, obviously, can’t let the target know too much about the asset.
The way she never quite answered direct questions about her feelings.
Can’t compromise the mission with genuine attachment.
Even the sex. Even that.
I think about how she touched me. The way she mapped my body with her hands and mouth, learning every response, every weakness. I thought she was passionate. Thorough.Hungryfor me the way I was hungry for her.
Now I wonder if she was taking notes.
“You’re going to kill me,”I told her on Lady Liberty’s torch, after she’d taken me in her mouth.
She didn’t laugh. At the time I thought it was odd.
Now I know.
Because it wasn’t a joke to her.
Her hotel looms ahead, a glass-and-steel tower catching the city lights. I head straight to her hotel room. It’s dark right now but I figured that. There’s no way she would have made it back so fast.
The balcony door is locked for once, but locks don’t mean much when you can bend steel. I ease it open, slip inside, and let the invisibility hold as I stand in her hotel room. The space smells like her but the context of who she is has changed. She no longer smells like hotel shampoo and coconut vanilla deodorant.
She smells like violence and lies.
I move through the room, still invisible, touching things she’s touched, things I’d seen before but never gave much thought to. The clothes in the closet, the kind a journalist would wear, the laptop on the desk that is no doubt encrypted and protected by a million passwords, the notebook beside it?—
The notebook.
I pick it up. Flip through pages of neat handwriting, sketches, observations. Some of it is in code, but enough is in plain English that I can piece together what I’m looking at.
Subject exhibits signs of dissociation during high-stress encounters.
Noted memory gaps—possible induced amnesia? Investigate programming protocols.
Physical capabilities exceed published parameters. Suspect additional undisclosed enhancements.
Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures. Complication for mission extraction. Recommend?—
I stop reading and drop the notebook.
My hand is shaking, tremors running through my fingers.
