43. Addie
ADDIE
ELEONORA PELLEGRINO – IMMERSIVE
Turns out how hard could it be were my famous last words. Dr. Calper was an even bigger bitch than Marie—and that was no small stick in which to measure her by.
“Have a seat, Swallow Sinclair,” she said by way of greeting—establishing our hierarchy within seconds, without even looking up from her monitor. She tapped away on her keyboard for another few moments, then finally deigned to acknowledge me.
I didn’t know what I was expecting when the boys warned me about her, but a severe blonde bob framing the face of a woman who looked to be about forty, with the coldest, deadest eyes I’d ever seen a living person possess, wasn’t it.
She pushed her black, cat-eye-shaped glasses up the bridge of her nose, analysing everything from my chosen hairstyle down to the way I crossed both ankles beneath the edge of her hard, grey sofa.
“You are aware that all Swallows are required to undergo psychiatric evaluations following their first mission.”
She framed it as a question, but never really intoned it as one. Nevertheless, I nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“You may call me Dr. Calper,” she said brusquely, already moving onto the next question. “Approximately what time did you return to Blackwing Academy last night?”
I frowned, trying to recall. Unfortunately, I had been plagued by exhaustion and hadn’t even thought to check a clock upon arrival. “I don’t know.”
“According to the Academy’s carpark security footage, you and your handlers returned at 11.47pm.”
“Why did you ask if you already knew?”
Her brows twitched, showcasing the first sliver of emotion since I walked in two minutes ago. “Because it’s my job to determine your physical and mental state following your first assignment.” She pivoted, and I got the vague feeling like I was being led in circles. “Were you injured?”
“Somewhat.”
“Where?”
“My head.” I gestured to my black eye and slightly swollen nose. “As you can see.”
“Is that why Instructor Beckett had to carry you up to your shared living space?”
Ah. There it is.
I raised a brow. “Yes. I believe I was sliding in and out of consciousness at the time, hence, not being able to remember the time we arrived.”
She typed away for several seconds before running me down a fresh line of questions.
“How many hours did you sleep last night?”
Fuck. How many hours did I sleep last night, after… well, after all of that?
“I’d say about seven,” I said, adding two to the real number.
“Describe your emotional state after the kill.”
I jerked back, unprepared for such a subjective question, so out of sync with her previous one.
After some consideration, I finally decided on honesty. “Given the fact that my kill-plan didn’t go to plan, and I was suffering from some very unwanted side effects of Killer Crimson 010, I was feeling fifty percent panic and fifty percent acceptance of demise.”
She remained impassive, but spent a few extra seconds making notes on that one. “Would you consider last night a success?”
“Yes.” More than you know.
“Why?”
“Because the mark was successfully taken out, ma’am.”
Dr. Calper’s nose twitched in agitation, and I decided right then and there that if she was going to get invasive with me, I was going to make her just as uncomfortable in return.
“I see. And did you feel detached from your body at any point during the mission?”
“No, but I did have to pretend to be somebody else to get through it, Your Honour.”
Tap, tap, tap went her fingers on her keyboard. “Whose voice do you hear when under distress?”
Beck. I frowned, shaking the knee-jerk thought loose. “My own, of course, Your Grace.”
Tap, tap, tap. Notably louder this time.
“How often do you question your handlers’ decisions?”
I huffed a deep breath, infuriated at what a waste of time my morning was turning out to be. “Given that they’ve only been my handlers for, what, two weeks? Never. I questioned Marie’s motives more.”
“Who is Marie?”
“The Academy-assigned wax-pot assassin,” I sniped.
Tap, tap, tap. “Do you trust your handlers’ judgement over your own?”
Mostly. “Yes, Your Ladyship.”
“It’s Doctor,” she growled. “Do you believe the mission would have been a success without their intervention?”
“Yes. But then I’d also be dead, so.” I shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
“The Academy never loses,” she deadpanned. “Have you ever concealed information from your handlers?”
Yes. “No, Your Holiness.”
“Would you ever consider it?”
“If Blackwing required me to do so—honestly, what even are these questions, Sara?”
I’d noticed her framed degree on the wall about five seconds prior and unleashed said knowledge almost immediately—and to great effect.
“It’s Doctor Calper to you, Swallow Sinclair.” Her voice lowered, the inflection finally tainted with some sort of emotion. “If one of your handlers operated outside of Academy protocols, what would you do?”
“Report them, obviously.”
Lie. Lie, lie, liar. I’d go to the grave for any of them.
“Do you believe any are emotionally compromised, given their self-insertion into your mission?”
“Of course not. Do you, Mistress?”
Her already thin lips flattened.
I decided to elaborate and see where that got me. “I believe they protected an Academy asset and prevented its losing millions of dollars worth of specialised education.” I had no idea how much it actually cost to train us, but I took a wild stab in the dark. Sounded good.
“Have any of your handlers touched you outside operational necessity?”
Obscenely. Repeatedly. Profoundly.
“No, Sir.”
Tap, tap. TAP.
“And if ordered by Blackwing to take out one of your handlers, would you do it? Answer immediately.”
“Yes.”
No. Gods, no. Not ever.
Dr. Sara Calper’s interrogation was shrilly interrupted by the ringing of her phone. And thank fuck, too, because I felt like I’d been sprinting the whole way through it. Answering her rapid-fire, ever-evolving questions left me reeling, and I was grateful for the reprieve.
She stood abruptly, hanging up the phone.
“You are not yet dismissed, but Commander Varco requires me immediately.”
She didn’t wait for a response before clacking her little kitten heels out the door—and I didn’t wait until I couldn’t hear them any more to dash over to her computer and find out exactly what that bitch was writing about me.
I barely suppressed a groan when I rounded her desk, clocking that she’d at least been cautious enough to lock her screen with an assassin on her sofa. But Van had prepped me precisely for this moment, and I sent up a silent thanks to the tech gods for it.
Twenty seconds later—and an incredibly unoriginal password of SCalper1—and I was in.
My joy was short-lived, however, because Sara Calper had a lot to say about Adelaide Sinclair and her handlers.
A document lay open on her screen, filled with dotpoints of psychological jargon and academic linguistics, but it wasn’t all that hard to figure out.
Subject appears to be truthful when
questioned about mission specifics.
Subject neglects to provide more than base answers.
When provoked, subject reacts emotionally.
Subject purposefully uses verbal tactics to rile her opponent.
Subject displays an intense dislike for Agent Marie.
When questioned about her handlers, subject rarely offers more information than strictly necessary, indicative of self-restraint.
Subject appears to be demonstrating early signs of attachments towards her handlers.
I almost scoffed at that part. If only she knew the truth.
Subject’s body language is indicative of dishonesty when asked about Academy
hierarchy and hypothetical kill orders for her handlers.
So, I was shit at lying, apparently. But I hadn’t given her anything she could verifiably use against us. Not even in passing.
I minimised the document, curious to know what else my Blackwing file contained. Since it was open beneath the session notes, it wasn’t hard to find and I grinned at the poor doctor’s stupidity.
I glanced at the door before delving in. No sign of her.
A closed-system program stared back at me containing various tabs and headings—just your stock standard stuff like medical records, family history, employment records, digital footprint, and personnel information.
Since I’d intentionally remained offline and had no family to speak of, I expected most of the tabs to contain nothing, or only bare-bones information Blackwing had managed to piece together over the last eighteen months.
I smirked when I clicked the digital footprint tab and it was, indeed, empty.
I’d never owned a social media account in my life—with no loved ones to keep in contact with, and no desire to live a life analysed through the lens of my camera, I didn’t see the point.
I didn’t even own a phone outside the Academy.
My personnel tab was likewise scant. Beneath my scowling intake photo was a snippet of information I already knew.
NAME: Sinclair, Adelaide
INTAKE DATE: 10/04/2024
STATUS: Assigned
DESIGNATION: Swallow
DES. DATE: 10/04/2024
HANDLER/S: Beckett, H. Lockwood, E. Pearce, D.
My gaze snagged on the repeated dates.
Huh. That’s weird.
Figuring there must be some system error producing an echo, I shrugged it off, knowing Calper must only be minutes away. Determined to uncover everything the Academy thought they knew about me, I clicked onto the next tab—
—and discovered that Blackwing knew more than they should. Far, far more.
They knew I’d been a waitress at some shitty high-end restaurant in 2020.
They knew I went to some backwoods emergency department and needed IV fluids because of a severe case of food poisoning back in 2018.
They even knew about the night I punched a guy so hard he needed stitches when he tried his luck in a dark alley on my way home from work.
My stomach somersaulted. Did they know about my home too?
I clicked the tab labelled family, hesitating for longer than I should have considering the circumstances.
My next breath caught in my throat. My heart stuttered to a stop.
No.
Plastered across the top of the page were my parents' names. Their real names—not the fabricated couple I told the intake officer about when Blackwing first brought me in.
FAMILY: Genevieve St. Clare (biological
mother). Marcus St. Clare
(biological father—positive DNA
confirmation)
STATUS: Dead
NOTES: Shrike protocol activated
Confirmed dead 03/03/2008
Key unrecovered
“What the fuck?” I whispered aloud, terrified for what else they knew.
What else I would discover.
Shrike protocol?
That could only mean one thing: that someone had hired the Academy to carry out the assassination of my parents, and they could only do so using brute force. Butcherbirds murdered my parents… not a car crash like I’d been told.
I clicked back over to the personnel tab, this time scrolling all the way to the bottom. Below my intake information, someone had attached several more clickable documents. Bulk selecting and opening them, I flicked through attachment after attachment of increasingly damning evidence.
Tears streamed freely down my face by the final page, and that was exactly how Dr. Calper found me.
I didn’t even hear her return—barely even registered the door opening.
I blinked slowly, my heartbeat hammering in my ears as time moved in slow motion.
She was saying words I didn’t care to unmuffle, approached the desk, withdrawing a syringe from her jacket pocket. Someone else moved through the doorway, but that no longer mattered.
My whole life was a lie.
A fabricated puppet show in which I was the marionette and everyone around me was either pulling my strings in different directions to serve their own agendas—or cutting them, one by one.
Just as Calper rounded the corner, intending to stick me with whatever sedative was inside that needle, time sped back up. I shot to my feet and slid the dagger Beck had only given me this morning from inside my boot in one smooth motion.
In another, I dragged it across the doctor’s neck, then used her dying body as a human shield while the doorway man popped off all the rounds in his pistol.
The second that gun clicked empty, I dropped her, staring coldly at her bodyguard.
Oh, this is too perfect.
“You’ve fucked up now, little bird—”
Whatever else Sebastos Varco was going to say, the world would never know—thanks to Beck’s knife now lodged firmly in his thick-ass skull.
I stepped over Seb’s prone body, backtracking at the last second to retrieve Beck’s dagger for no other reason than I wanted it.
Thank fuck the doctor’s office was in the same building as the staff apartments. I figured I had, at most, ten minutes to retrieve what I needed and get where I needed to go.
And it was time to go.