“Oh, I kill. I just don’t get blood on my hands.”
This confuses them. You’re sure they’re picturing the manner in which you killed their boss. You take advantage by dashing left, hiding behind a collapsed dumpster piled high with stained planks. Four bullets sail past you. You wonder how long those bullets will fly before they drop and sink through the ocean.
You pop out for a moment, wasting another bullet from the brute, who’s not only a tacky dresser but also a terrible shot, and you dive out from the other end of the dumpster, rolling onto your back and taking cover inside a high stack of construction beams. You crawl your way around the beams, a lot like the days of high school when you would flee underneath the bleachers to hide from your bullies. Except now those who are out to get you aren’t teasing you for the scars on your face. The three of them are wondering if they stand a fighting chance against you.
You slide out the mini blowgun from your boot and insert two more Trance seeds.
This is your favorite part.
You take aim as they all group together.
You blow into the steel pipe three times, each seed finding its home in the neck of your enemies. You crawl out from underneath the beams, like a sniper bold enough for a fistfight, as the three of them wince in pain and realize what’s about to happen to them. The brute points his gun at you, and you point your finger at him.
“You don’t want to pull that trigger,” you say, and he doesn’t. “Go back to base or wherever the hell you came from and kill everyone in their sleep. When you’re done, tie concrete blocks around your ankles and go for a swim in the ocean.”
“Don’t do it!” the girl shouts, holding the brute back. But he knocks her to the ground with a simple push, sending her rolling twice, and walks off.
The wannabe scientist stands there, helpless. He knows if he runs, you’ll tell him to stop. Maybe the stories have trickled down to him, too, that you made others cut their legs off for challenging you to a fight and then running away.
Trying to run away, at least.
“Brute, wait!”
The brute stops.
“Give me your wallet.”
The brute tosses you his wallet. There’s nothing inside. You knew it.
“Carry on.”
The brute walks off to go kill anyone looking for their poor leader who should’ve never gotten in your way.
“Please.” The wannabe scientist cautiously approaches you. “I just wanted to find my friend. Have mercy.”
Mercy.
The client called you an angel.
All these people after you, confusing you for the devil herself, and he saw the good in you. A little mercy can’t hurt.
“Fine. You hate each other,” you say, reprogramming any alliance they previously held. “You want to beat each other to death.”
You watch the switch in their eyes—once fearful of you, now monsters to each other. You sit on a barrel, legs dangling, watching the fight. The girl finds a pipe, and, well, it turns out a little mercy can hurt. A lot. The wannabe scientist is dead within minutes. The girl looks at you, bloodied from the few punches her victim managed to land on her, and awaits instruction from you.
“Finish what he was too weak to do.”
The girl loses the fight against her own pipe in less than a minute.
That was fun.
You finally collect your bag of money, which is unquestionably heavy, but it’s nothing you can’t handle considering you’ve thrown around heavier things—and people. You make your way to Karl, looking around to be certain you’re not being followed, and you stop in your tracks when you see a familiar face—your old assistant. His shoes are untied, and he smells of piss and other nastiness.
“Slate is not to be betrayed, Slate is not to be betrayed,” he chants, walking past you with dead eyes.
A dose of Retrieve could save him, could give him his life back.
But you don’t carry that vaccine around, and you’ve already shown mercy once tonight.
You rush to Karl, putting the chants behind you as you cross empty streets, and tap on the passenger’s window of the Ford truck he’s in.
Karl unlocks the door, and you jump in, throwing the money in the backseat.
“I heard gunshots,” Karl says, scanning your body up and down.
“I didn’t shoot anyone,” you say. You’re not lying. “Or get shot.”
“I’m happy you’re okay.” Karl smiles at you, and although your client’s smile a few minutes ago was pathetic, that one felt more real. You know Karl doesn’t approve of your business, but he continues to love you anyway. He’s a treasure.
You lean in and kiss him. “The client called me an angel,” you tell him.
Even though you rescued Karl, you know in his nods he’s struggling to find a greater truth in this.
You’ll prove him wrong.
You’ll prove everyone wrong.
You grab the black handkerchief from the glove compartment and blindfold yourself, as is procedure. In the event someone ever captures you, the first thing they’ll want to do is drug you with Trance so you’ll reveal where you live. They’ll get your supply and then kill you. Now that you have Karl, you’ve erased your address from your own memory and can relax knowing that someone can kill you, but they’ll never find everything you’ve worked so hard to create.
Your home has to remain a secret. Even from yourself.
You remove your blindfold after stepping through your front door. You let Karl deal with his bastard cat while you bullet straight to your Memory Bank. As you spin the dial of your vault—2-4-8, because you tortured your father for two hours and forty-eight minutes before killing him—you wish you could just throw that cat out the window and make Karl forget it ever existed. But there are only a few things that make Karl happy, so you let the cat live, even though it hates you.
See? You’re good. You put others before you.
You open your vault and put away the extra Dazes and Tokens you had on you in case that kid wanted more than just Trance. You don’t close it immediately. You nod in approval at all you’ve done. The client was right. You are an angel. You’ve come to the rescue for many who’ve gone through traumas. It’s not as if painful memories shrink away as quickly as all your old childhood belongings melted the night you set your house on fire. Your services are needed.
You’ve come a long way.
The seeds here, particularly the grey Dazes and green Tokens, do good. The Tokens will grow in someone’s mind like a garden, where someone can grab a memory off a tree as if it were an apple. The Dazes will blossom, too, except they’ll hide whatever memory needs to be hidden in its trails of thorny vines.
You’ve come a long way, Slate, but there’s still work to be done, and you know it. No matter how you or the others spin it, you know that what comes from the violet Trance seeds is less of a garden and more of an abyss. But you’re not the one creating the abyss or pushing others into it; you just hand others the shovel to dig that hole themselves.
Except once.