Chapter 5
Chapter five
Across the solar system
Sector Two
They called him Carver.
Of course, it wasn’t his real name, just the one his superiors used when they wanted to make sure they were talking about the same person, but it fit.
Working for the CORE government day in, day out, it was always the same bullshit. Receive new orders. Follow new orders. Complete the assignment. Reward. Rest. Repeat.
Carver knew nothing else, not since his first kill at the age of ten.
Sometimes there were months between assignments, sometimes only a day, never predictable.
He couldn’t actually rest. He lived in a perpetual state of waiting, at the whim of the higher-ups who needed wet work.
Whenever and wherever they wanted him, that was where he went. No questions asked.
He’d been doing the same job for the past twenty years, and knew he was old for an agent. The clock was always ticking. On him. On his next target.
But this assignment? This one was different.
His target, former civilian captain Milo Archibald, hung suspended by his wrists in his own living room, shirtless.
Blood dripped from parallel cuts all over his body to the plastic sheeting below, mixing with the piss that had already fallen.
Drip. Splat. Drip. Drip. It counted down the remaining seconds of the old man’s life.
Archibald’s wheezy breaths interrupted the smooth sound of the laser scalpel humming in Carver’s right hand.
He gripped a regenerator in his left. The little room was dark except for the one light behind him, illuminating the old man, but casting Carver in shadows.
He’d shut off the bulkhead viewer that played a spacescape of Lunar One.
Usually, a sense of justice fueled him as he took the life of a corrupt diplomat, or a rogue agent, or the potential head of a terrorist cell. But this? Carver’s skin tightened against his muscles in a way it hadn’t in a very long time.
As soon as the unsuspecting man had opened his door to him, nothing had gone as expected. Because the old captain had said, “Ah. Finally. I’ve been expecting you for a while now.”
Despite the perplexing statement, Carver had pushed his way in, and ensconced them within these quarters ever since.
And for the first time since becoming an agent, doubt flickered in his stomach.
He paced in front of the man, not wanting to cut him again, but needing to follow orders and retrieve his answer.
“They just want a number,” Carver repeated, his fingers flexing around the laser scalpel.
A fucking number. The guy could say any number in the world, and Carver would be able to end it for him. The old man could lie, could say a hundred, a thousand, a million, and Carver wouldn’t know the difference.
Because those were his orders: Ask him how many. Get the answer by any means necessary.
How many what? What had this man, this regular civilian, done? Carver shouldn’t be asking these questions, even in his head. He wasn’t paid for questions. It didn’t matter how nonthreatening, how innocent, his target appeared, he had a job to do.
Restlessness settled into Carver’s body, an agitated sensation crawling over his skin as he continued to pace. He needed to move on, but he couldn’t leave without finishing this.
The old man wouldn’t give him a number, even a fake one. Carver paced back and forth, his ocular implant recording everything to report back when the job was complete.
“I always knew they’d send someone like you,” the old man croaked, his head hanging. Only his toes touched the floor. “I’m so glad Miranda passed on already.”
He’d said similar things earlier, things that didn’t matter.
“I should have shot myself in the head the day after she died.”
The old man had said that before too.
Carver’s gaze went to his black case lying on the deck a meter away.
There were a hundred items in there that could make the old man talk, but the only things Carver had pulled so far were the regenerator and the laser scalpel.
He needed to wrap this up if he wanted to get off the station in the next hour, but instead of heading toward his case, he turned and paced again.
“They just need a number, and this will all be over.” Carver would slit the old man’s throat, painless, or create that suicide scenario he’d spoken of. “The only person who can make this easier on yourself is you.”
The old man lifted his head, and Carver paused. He hadn’t done that in a while. A weight settled in Carver’s chest as he turned to face the former captain.
He rarely received full workups on the people he ended, but he could always tell when they deserved to die.
There was a stench to them. Unmistakable evil soaked into their bones as blatantly as an alert for a Tellusian raid.
Maybe because like recognized like, and Carver was as decayed inside as they were.
But when Captain Archibald met his gaze, none of Carver’s usual senses tweaked that this man was evil, that he deserved what was coming—that he’d deserved what Carver had already done, and healed, and done again.
“Did they tell you what happened to the boy?” the old man asked.
That was different. The scalpel twitched in his hand, and Carver shook his head before he could think better of it.
Defeat entered the man’s eyes. “No. Of course not.” His head hung again. “Why would they tell a nothing shadow?”
Insults never landed with Carver. A person could call him anything they wanted, and it wouldn’t affect him.
But that softly spoken question twisted his insides tight.
“They just want a number,” he said again as he resumed his pacing. “How many?”
He turned the scalpel off, then on again. Then off.
Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound of blood hitting plastic slowed. If Carver wanted to end this, he needed that answer before the old man passed out.
“I’ve always wondered.” Archibald continued like Carver hadn’t asked the same question. “Hoped. Even though I knew hope was pointless.”
Carver stopped directly in front of him and turned the scalpel on. It hummed.
“I just didn’t want him to suffer, you know?
” The old man’s voice was stronger than before.
“We had to sacrifice him to save the others. He understood.” Then Archibald’s voice shook.
“Do you think that’s possible?” Carver watched a different kind of light enter his eyes.
“That they wouldn’t make a little boy suffer? ”
Carver swallowed his scoff, feeding that hope nothing. Throughout his childhood, he’d seen little boys suffer day in and day out. He’d been one of them.
After a moment, Archibald’s posture slumped, his gaze returning to the deck.
Carver should take that defeat and use it, manipulate it until the man was sobbing his secrets.
But he… didn’t.
He couldn’t let this go on, and couldn’t understand why he was having such a fucking hard time finishing the assignment.
“I deserve to suffer,” Archibald said, his voice only above a murmur.
Carver’s fingers flexed on the regenerator. It didn’t matter what this man had done. Those weren’t his orders. He just needed that fucking number.
Gritting his teeth, Carver stepped right up to him. He turned on the regenerator, and a different sort of buzzing filled the space. Looking down, he healed the oldest cut first, the one near his collarbone, while he gripped the laser scalpel in his other hand.
Once they were all healed, he’d start with the laser scalpel again. The old man would wear down. Eventually.
“Would Miranda want you to suffer like this?” he asked, trying another tactic.
The old man’s response came so fast, Carver hadn’t finished asking the question. “She knew what was at stake. We all did. She’d be doing the same thing right now if she were alive.”
The ferocity of the statement crashed through Carver. What the fuck was he talking about?
Not my orders. Don’t ask questions.
Carver concentrated on the next cut and watched how the two sides meshed together while listening to the drips slow.
The old man twitched as his wounds healed, and stared at Carver, unrelenting, while the regenerator buzzed between them.
“Maybe you can help him?”
Carver didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know.
Not my assignment.
“Maybe you’re not as bad as what they want you to believe.”
And maybe it was all a test. Carver wouldn’t put it past the CORE to have some sort of loyalty task he had to pass, or be terminated by another agent the next day.
But something told him this wasn’t that.
He healed the last of the cuts on the old man’s chest, dropped the regenerator on the deck, then leaned into his space until their faces were only a centimeter apart. With a flick of his thumb, he turned on the laser scalpel, then held it close to the man’s eye.
Archibald barely flinched, even though Carver could feel the heat from the tool just as much as the old man would.
“You’re strong, I’ll give you that,” Carver said, hating the hint of desperation leaking through his voice. “You don’t have to prove anything, but I can’t leave until I have that number.”
They stared at each other, the scalpel humming between them, the old man’s gaze jumping between Carver’s eyes, searching. A look of understanding, of resignation, swept over his features.
“Twelve. But you’ll never find them all.” Then the old man moved quicker than Carver would have thought possible while being suspended by bleeding wrists.
Archibald lurched forward, right into the path of the laser scalpel, impaling his face against the heat of the tool.
Carver dodged, but not fast enough, trying to pull the device away.
The old man’s scream tore between them, followed by the scent of burnt flesh.
The laser sank into his cheekbone, then his eye, before Carver could retreat far enough.
The scalpel had done a lot of damage, but not enough to kill him, and the old man let out garbled shouts of pain. Carver stepped close, grabbed his white hair, and tilted his head for the killing blow—one swipe across his throat.
Silence enveloped the room in the next instant, punctuated by Carver’s fast inhales. What the fuck was that?
Carver’s grip flexed on the scalpel. He took a deep breath as he stared at the hanging body, the bulk swaying gently back and forth.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
This was sloppy. He didn’t have the time to make it look like a suicide now. That meant it would look like a murder.
Murders meant questions. And questions made his superiors twitchy.
His chest rose and fell like he’d just done laps around the station. This felt like his first kill, messy and filled with too much emotion.
Emotions get you terminated.
Carver shut everything down inside him and focused on what needed to be done. First, he swapped out the tainted plastic for a clean sheet, taking the bloody one to the reclamation chute and shoving it inside to be incinerated.
Then he cut the body down from the overhead, removing all trace of the ties he’d used. He picked up the regenerator from the deck and used it to heal the cuts on the old man’s wrists. That he had to do. Murder was one thing. Torture was another.
Maybe the cleaner could play this off as a crime of passion if the man had a girlfriend or something, but it wasn’t likely with the way Archibald had been talking about his late wife.
Using a cloth from his case, he wiped the blood off the body as best he could, but there was a lot on his pants. He removed those too.
Hefting the dead weight over his shoulder, Carver carried the man to his quarters and laid him out on the bed before covering him in blankets.
Lastly came Carver’s clothes. He peeled off the flight-suit and swapped it for business garb before tossing the blood-tainted items into reclamation as well. Then he hit the destroy and recycle button before returning to the main living space.
With one last glance over his shoulder toward the bedroom, he picked up his case to leave, then hesitated. Usually, he would reconnect to the grid at this point and send all his recordings and data to his superiors, but that agitated feeling traveled over his skin again.
Carver took a deep breath, then another, before touching his PALM to access his ocular implant’s interface.
He watched as what had happened over the past few hours sped by in reverse.
With a touch of his finger, he paused his feed at the moment Milo Archibald opened his door for him.
He went forward again, cutting the sections where his superiors could find fault, where Carver had hesitated, where he looked weak.
Then he took out the parts where the man talked about the boy.
I don’t have time for this.
And he didn’t, but Carver did it anyway, cutting and blending with touches to his PALM, adjusting the readout, adding still moments, so everything matched up.
He would have cut more, but couldn’t linger any longer. He paused at the last part where the man spoke of the twelve. Carver needed that part, or he couldn’t complete this assignment.
So why did he hesitate even then?
Hesitation means death.
He left the remainder of the recording untouched, knowing he’d get a reprimand for the cause of death. He didn’t have time for anything better.
With the recording altered, he meshed the timestamp with the current time, and strode toward the exit, his black case slung over his shoulder.
He stepped out into an empty corridor and squinted against the bright after being in dim lighting for so long. As he headed to the closest lift, he touched his PALM, reconnecting with the grid to send a message to his handler. Mission complete. Cleaner required.
The lift door opened, and he stepped into an empty car. The doors closed with a swish behind him, and the lift descended. A second later, the acknowledgement of his completed assignment came through, along with a notification of creds delivered into his account.
He turned to face the door when new orders appeared at the bottom of his ocular implant.
Carver inhaled a deep breath. So much for a rest period.