by Kris Delake
Jack was right about that: it was unusual, and it colored her thinking. Just not in the way he assumed.
Maybe it was time to get out of the game. Try to live a real life somewhere.
But that frightened her too. She wasn’t cut out for a life without some kind of purpose, a life that followed the same routine day after day. She didn’t even drop into that here, where it would be easy during her off times.
She needed some kind of adrenaline high—she needed something to keep her occupied.
Plus, she needed money if she was going to retire. She had more than enough to take the next few years off (if she watched her spending), but she didn’t have enough for the next eighty years or more, however long she was going to live.
And in the first few years of that, she would need mobility. She would have to be able to afford a ship rental and several transports like she had just done on this trip to see Jack. Because someone might come after her. Someone who actually thought revenge was viable.
She sighed, opened her eyes, and grabbed one of the tablets. She clicked it on. Fifteen messages. The first few were for jobs that had since vanished. She deleted those.
That left five requests for work. She double-tapped the screen. Five people that other people wanted dead. Five people whose deaths other people believed would be justified.
This moment in her job, when she looked at the faces of people she didn’t know, people whose lives might intersect with hers in a very dramatic—and usually violent—way, always astonished her. She had no idea who these people were, so she didn’t know what they had done.
They were just faces, pleasant faces primarily, and they peered at her from their various attached files, smiling softly as if they all held a secret.
Well, she held the secret. Someone wanted them dead.
And if she was just a bit less honorable, she could take one job, and then contact the other four. She could get money from them to reveal the person who contacted her.
Behavior like that was against Assassin Guild rules, and she understood why. But she also understood the temptation. She knew dozens of operatives who supplemented their incomes that way, making her job—and the jobs of other legitimate assassins—much harder.
Still, at moments like this, when they were just faces, people she could possibly empathize with, she thought about the different ways her life could go.
Imagine what would have happened to her if she had turned down the Testrial job.
She set the tablet aside and sighed. After the whole Testrial experience, she was going to have to do even better research on the people who might become her targets—and spectacular research on the people who wanted to hire her.
All the way back here, she was wondering if she should hook back up with the Rovers. That loose affiliation of rogue assassins provided all kinds of vetting services and some partnering services as well, so that she wouldn’t be working alone.
Although the way Jack had looked at her when she asked if he was still with the Rovers bothered her. He had said he was no longer with them in a tone that brooked no further discussion.
And that meant she should have probed.
She sighed and went back to the tablet. Right now, she would just have to do a lot of extra research.
And if she chose the wrong target for the wrong client, the blame would be all hers.
Just like it had been with Testrial.
The blame would be all hers.
Chapter 28
Misha hunkered in the apartment two and a half blocks away from Rikki’s. He couldn’t believe she had such a glamorous hiding spot. Not that hiding spot was the right word. Nothing about that apartment hid. It was on the top floor of an elegant building in a relatively upscale neighborhood.
Although he suspected the neighborhood hadn’t been upscale not too long ago, considering the place he was sitting in. This apartment had ruined walls, a carpet that smelled like pee, and windows so filthy he wasn’t even sure they would work for his nefarious purposes.
He managed to clean the windows, though, with some kind of nanosolution—he didn’t need to hire exterior robot cleaners after all—and then he had set up.
He was going to spy on her for a few days and figure out what she was doing.
He realized he had set up this surveillance the way he would set up a hit, and somehow that disturbed him. He liked to think he was setting up this way because that was the only way he knew, but he also realized that wasn’t true. He had other ways of conducting business.
Hell, he could just grab Rikki’s arm and pull her into one of the many restaurants that overlooked the lake, have a conversation, and get it all over with.
Except that he didn’t believe a single conversation would solve anything.
He had tracked her relatively easily, and that wasn’t her fault. She was more than cautious enough. No one who had just started looking for her would find this particular hiding place.
He had to admit, she was very good about concealing herself and her identity.
Her big mistake, after stealing that lifeship, was going back to the ship rental on Oyal. She had returned the ship, gotten her deposit back (which had shocked her and him both; he wondered if it had happened because the owner knew that Misha had enquired about her), and then had traveled to Nety.
She seemed to sense him, and she looked over her shoulder more than once. But he used a variety of ways to track her, sometimes renting his own ship to trail a transport she was on.
She took an amazing number of transports, and a lesser assassin would have lost her. He had come close a couple of times. But he kept telling himself that it didn’t matter, because he had access to her real name and several of her aliases. And he had yet another piece of information: He knew how to send her money—or at least one way to do so.
That conversation with Liora had bothered him, though. Not because Liora had shown up on Oyal (which bothered him in a different way) but because of her mention of the Rovers. Then he learned that Rikki had gone to Krell, of all places.
Everything the Guild had on a rogue organization of assassins called the Rovers said that they often used Krell as a base for their operations. So she had been reporting in to someone.
And that had made Misha angry.
But he had tried to keep his focus, working hard at tracking her. It almost got impossible, as she changed names and looks on each transport she took. But the one thing she didn’t do was book passage with someone else. So he looked for a female of the right age and same general look, knowing she would occasionally wear lifts to make herself taller, pad her clothes to look heavier, change her hair and eye color, and alter the way she wore clothing.
The one thing she couldn’t—or, to be more accurate, didn’t—change was the way she moved. She probably hadn’t even thought of it. That was one of the many drawbacks of not having formal training. He had learned quite early in his Guild classes that changing movement was as, if not more, important than any elaborate disguise.
So as he watched vids of the various transports, he mostly watched for a very familiar (and very attractive) walk.
A walk he was seeing now, just outside Rikki’s building.
He had placed high-powered lenses over his irises. The lenses were thicker than most zoom lenses, which usually ran on nanotech, but that was because they were better than any other he had ever seen.
He had complete control over distance and could see something as small as a piece of gravel from six blocks away.
These weren’t surveillance lenses; these lenses were specifically designed for snipers. He had never been a sniper—even if he had been a good enough shot, he didn’t like killing from great distances—but he loved these lenses.
They allowed him to see the main entrance to Rikki’s building, and the nearby ground transport stop. He had checked visual footage from around the building for the last year before he even set up here—that’s how he knew this was her building. The building itself didn�
��t save its footage (or at least, it didn’t make the footage available to people like him), but several other nearby buildings did. Plus the Lakota Transport Authority was more than willing to help a police officer from a nearby town on a particularly vexing case. They showed him their footage for the past year, and that she appeared repeatedly.
Plus he had an entrée into the law enforcement echelons of Lakota society now, something that might come in handy on a future case.
He had known she would arrive here, since her last space transport ended up on Unbey, but he wasn’t sure if she would come here directly. It seemed that she had, however, if that rather dumpy woman with Rikki’s walk getting off the ground transport was any indication.
She carried the same rucksack she had carried onto her last space transport. He had seen that footage as well, then he had hired a speed cruiser to get him here ahead of the transport ship. He had had a week to prepare, which was almost not enough. She also had a small bag that he hadn’t seen before.
He watched her stop in the middle of the sidewalk, and glance up at the building itself. It was that movement, more than anything, that convinced him he was looking at Rikki. The long graceful neck, the way her head arched. He remembered that movement from their night together.
Damn it, he remembered everything from their night together, every single detail.
He couldn’t clear it from his mind.
He made himself focus on the sidewalk, two and a half blocks away. He had picked this apartment for the unobstructed view of her place on the upper level of that upscale building, not for the view of the sidewalk. He had a partially obstructed view of the sidewalk—he saw the transport stop and the entrance to Rikki’s building, but there was a blind spot in between, caused by a chimney-like structure on a building one block over.
Rikki stepped forward, and the obstruction blocked Misha’s view. He held his breath and then made himself stop holding his breath when he realized what he was doing.
He was worried that she was just going to vanish on him again, like she had done on the ship. And it bothered him. He almost took it personally.
Rikki reappeared, walking purposefully into the building. She used some kind of palm reader identification—maybe a DNA scanner—to get into the building.
This time, it didn’t feel like she had disappeared, but that was partly because of the monitors he had set up.
He had gotten into the building through the basement entrance, which had fewer security protections than the main entrance. That was a sign of a building being rehabbed, not one with a full slate of tenants.
The building’s owners needed maintenance people, robots, and equipment to get in and out easily, without a lot of restrictions. Misha had initially planned to pose as one of them, but his friends at the Lakota Transport had given him a better idea.
He had posed as a member of the Transport Authority, to see if there was any possible way to locate an interior stop in the basement of the building. The building’s owners were thrilled, even though they knew it was a remote possibility.
But with an interior stop, they could attract a higher class of tenants, ones that wanted to stay invisible.
Like Rikki should have, but didn’t.
Misha had tracking devices on almost every part of the building. He had cameras on the interior staircases, and two more inside each of the elevators. He had sound equipment outside Rikki’s door, as well as some truly sophisticated cameras, some that no existing locating equipment could find.
He flicked a remote, shutting off the sniper lenses in his eyes for a moment, turning the lenses into clear material. Then he turned to one of the screens he had set up below the window, and watched Rikki climb the stairs.
She didn’t get winded as she climbed. That was another sign it was her, and not some woman who looked like her.
The cameras gave him a better view of her. Her hair was back to its normal color, which he very much liked. It accented her high cheekbones and made her beautiful eyes seem wider. She looked prettier, less austerely lovely, like this, almost approachable.
Although that might have been the clothing as well. It was nothing special, just some dark pants and a loose top. Maybe too loose, almost frumpy, hiding the in-shape body beneath.
If anyone took a cursory glance at this woman, they would see someone who let herself go, who didn’t care about her appearance.
But a close look would reveal an athletic woman in comfortable clothing, with near-flawless skin, and eyes so sharp that they missed nothing. It was hard to ignore the intelligence in those eyes, even though he suspected people would try.
She reached the top floor and let herself into her apartment with an economy of movement that surprised him.
He would have thought it would take a lot more to open that door’s security. In the two hours that he had given himself, he hadn’t been able to break in. He hadn’t even managed to figure out what kind of security system she had set up—and that irritated him.
He had hoped to place cameras inside her apartment as well, and he hadn’t been able to.
Instead, he had to console himself with the fact that the apartment had nearly a 360-degree view of its interior. Only the bearing walls inside prevented him from seeing a very small part of it.
He switched back to his sniper lenses and looked directly through the windows. The lenses gave him a double vision—one of her heat signature, and another of her movements inside, despite the nonreflective material on the windows themselves.
She set her pack down on a chair, fiddled with the small bag, pulled out bots and worked on them for a few minutes. Then she went into the bedroom. She stepped into a closet and changed clothes. When she came out, she wore even looser clothing, but it was made of a lighter-weight material, and it seemed to fit better.
She padded from the bedroom back to the entry, probably to pick up that pack.
And then she vanished.
He blinked twice, wondering if the lenses had shut down. But he knew they hadn’t. He could see the chair, the table beside it, the knickknacks in the living area, the dishes on the glassed-in cupboard in the kitchen.
He could see everything but Rikki.
She had fooled him again, and he wasn’t exactly sure how.
Chapter 29
Rikki was tired, she was hungry, and she really, really didn’t want to talk with anyone. She curled her bare feet under her on the love seat and set down the tablet, then stretched under the light.
That was the problem with transports. No matter how hard you tried to remain private, you couldn’t—not quite. You always had to smile at a fellow passenger, or tell someone (politely) that a seat was taken even when it wasn’t. You had to fend off the most overly solicitous men, hoping to get laid on this short journey between here and there—no strings, as if that was an attractive part of the trip—and sometimes you even had to fend off interested women.
The key was to do it calmly, evenly, and without being memorable. Not being memorable was the most important part.
And not being memorable was also hard work. No inadvertent rudeness, no cursing, no elbow to the gut of the man who thought it sexy to run his hand over the ass of a woman he didn’t know.
It was tiring to be invisible, and now that she was here, in her hidey-hole, she didn’t want to work for at least a day or two. She wanted to stay private and hidden.
She had thought she would venture back out, get some food tonight, and then in the morning, do a bit of shopping, stocking up her kitchen so she wouldn’t have to venture out again.
She never did that before she got to a place—or rather, she didn’t do it any longer. She’d walked into too many of her hiding places to find that someone else had been there or that someone else was still there. Once she tossed a bag of groceries at some man who got up from her couch, politely smiled at her, and started to introduce himself.
She never ever knew who he was, and she really wasn’t curious.
All she kn
ew was that she could never ever go back to that place—and she never ever had.
This afternoon, she shouldn’t have gotten comfortable. She shouldn’t have put on her favorite clothes and settled in her office. She should have scouted her place, and then she should have gone back out immediately and taken care of her food needs.
But she hadn’t done that.
And, honestly, even going back out was a risk. Someone might see her. Someone might follow her. Someone might try something.
Of course, if she lived her life in a constant state of paranoia, she would die of hunger long before she ever started to feel lonely.
She sighed and got up from her spot. The best thing to do would be to order in. She would use a bot service rather than some human service. Those were her only choices. Many places just sent things through an interconnected automated network. When she first moved here, the neighborhood was too dangerous for that.
By the time the building wanted to add that service, she was ready for them. She said no, and she could say no because she had owned her apartment long enough to be grandfathered into—or out of—any service that the building wanted to provide.
She didn’t want anything she didn’t authorize and couldn’t monitor to have access to her apartment, not even an automated food service network.
Which left her with robotic servers. She’d used several in the past, and as she got out of the ground transport, she had noticed that one of the services still existed. It was only two doors down, and it served sandwiches, which would do for the evening. If she bought a big enough one, it might even double as breakfast.
She stepped out of the office, went into the kitchen, and used the built-in network to order, paying out of her building fund. Then she made herself some coffee from the imported grounds she had brought in from one of her many stops, and contemplated her next move.
She probably shouldn’t be working yet. She probably should wait until she heard from Jack. Then she could have him vet her next jobs.
