The black water.
I shook it off.
Not now.
The stagehands rushed away.
The music continued. The performance was still happening on the other side of that curtain.
The audience had no idea we were here.
Reo touched the mic. “How close are you to the theater?”
A crackle of static came, and then the first responded, “Ten minutes, sir.”
Another said, “Fifteen.”
“Get here faster, even if you have to run people over.”
They both answered, “Yes, sir.”
We moved forward slowly.
Guns out. Eyes scanning every stagehand, corner, and shadow.
"Okay." Hiroko looked around and then turned back to face me. And for the first time since we’d begun, tension drained from her face.
The tightness around her eyes softened. Her shoulders dropped from where they'd been living near her ears for the past hour. Even her hands had stopped trembling.
She looked like a woman who had just set down something impossibly heavy.
Relief covered her.
Real relief.
The kind that reaches the eyes.
She smiled at me. "I think we're safe. All we have to do now is—"
A bullet slammed into her forehead.
A hole opened right at the center.
And for a fraction of a second—a sliver of time so thin it shouldn't have existed—her smile was still there.
Still warm.
Still relieved.
Like her face hadn't gotten the message yet.
Then the back of her head exploded.
Her blood hit me before her body moved.
Hot.
Wet.
