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It’s 0300 and the night is tar dark: moonless, starless, and stiff with honey-thick heat.
Twilight reloads his magazine by the sorry light of occasional firefly, ducking through brush, running three minutes behind schedule. His ammunition jams. He bites his tongue. He swears. Or maybe his ammunition jams because he bites his tongue and swears, or maybe he swears because his ammunition jams, but he fumbles on the word and bites his tongue.
It doesn’t matter. He’s late.
It could be worse. He could be later, considering how fussy Anya had been about going to bed. Too dark, she’d said, eyes wide and beseeching.
We’ll turn on your nightlight.
No, she’d yelped. I want the moon! Give me the moon!
Alright, he’d said. That’s enough television for you.
So he’d ushered Anya to bed, 30 seconds behind schedule. And then he’d crossed paths with Yor on the way to his room, only she hadn’t been getting ready for bed, not judging by appearances, sporting a crease between her brows he rarely sees. But she should have been, since it’s always at that time that she’s already in her nightgown.
Something on your mind? he’d asked, and she’d started a foot into the air.
No! Nothing! Not at all! Good night!
Then she’d slammed herself shut into her room, taking herself prisoner. He’d waited another minute to make sure she wouldn’t be coming out before changing back into his suit and leaving through the window, sliding the pane shut behind him with practised precision. One minute and 15 seconds behind schedule.
There’d been a few moments navigating these woods that he’d had the distinct sense that he wasn’t alone, so he’d stopped to gauge his surroundings, costing himself another minute and an additional 45 seconds. But aside from the wind in the leaves and the buzz of determined insects swimming through tangible air, he’d heard, found, seen nothing.
Thankfully, Twilight is no amateur. He builds in cushion for exactly this sort of thing. He may be three minutes behind schedule, but he’s three minutes behind his schedule, which means he’s ten minutes early for the time Sylvia gave him. To prevent this situation from getting any worse, he stops at a tree at the edge of the clearing.
His target appears two minutes later, looking over his shoulders like he’s prey. First to the left, then to the right, then the left again. The man—built like Anya’s favorite stuffed animal, all dangling limbs and lack of control—hugs the perimeter, moving in jerks, jumping at the slightest of sounds.
Twilight will appear not a minute too early or late. For now, he bides his time, watching his target amble around like a child lost between grocery aisles. His wristwatch tells him he still has four minutes to wait.
“Hello?” the man calls. Nobody and nothing answers. “Hello?”
“Hello,” somebody says, a tinny sound from the opposite end of this space. “I’m sorry.”
Every atom of dewy air in Twilight’s lungs desiccates. His insides are a desert. There shouldn’t be anybody else here. It should be him. Just him. Him and this man made of appendages held together with twine, some other power pulling his strings.
“You’re sorry?”
“For what I must do. If you’d allow me the honor of taking your life—”
“Well now! No! Absolutely not!”
“Then I’m sorry—”
“I’ll kill you first!”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
Twilights frowns. The voice is familiar. A woman? How many assassins has he run into in his career? But none have sounded like this, like he should already know them. He grabs hold of the nearest branch, pulling himself up, driving his heel into the trunk for grip. When he peers out through the cover, he nearly falls out of the tree.
It’s Yor. The voice is Yor. Yor is standing opposite the man who may as well be made of straw. She holds spikes in either of her hands. She’s wearing a dress Twilight recognizes.
“‘Allow’ that? What, have you got family at home waiting for you? Impossible. You’re an assassin.”
Yor is noticeably silent. So silent that Twilight realizes, for the first time, that not even her steps make a sound. Was she the other entity in the forest with him tonight?
Apparently, the scarecrow man has enough brain to light a bulb, because he makes a garbled noise of surprise. “You do! Well, if you kill me, I’ll have you know that I’ve got a whole host of people who’ll be after you and your fam—”
Twilight doesn’t even see her strike. One minute the idiot between them is threatening her family— his family?— Their family?— the next minute is a wash of red pearling along blades of grass just inches from his feet. When did he climb down the tree?
He watches as Yor roots through the man’s clothing, tearing away with her stilettos at anything that gets in her way. He stares as she finds the token he’d been assigned to take. Gawks as she cracks it between her thumbs and forefingers before throwing it to the ground and crushing it under one dagger-thin heel. Then she whirls around and disappears in a haze of black and red, silent as she came.
He should chase her. Stop her. Confront her. In a fog of bewilderment, Twilight finds his way to the limp man. He’s pristinely dead, the gash along his throat, the jag across his chest, the hole through his skull neat in their exactitude, perfectly placed so the bleed out and loss of consciousness would be quickest. No time to suffer. The token is gold dust, mica between Twilight’s fingers.
It’s not the state he would have left things in. He’d been tasked to bring the token back for W.I.S.E’s teams to analyze. He was supposed to knock this man unconscious, leave him for the dogs. He’d meant to leave it a clean scene that, in the morning, the S.S. Agents might find the man stupid in the middle of the woods and “take care” of him.
I suppose this saves me a few steps, Twilight muses. I suppose it could be worse.
Though, frankly, the fact that he has no idea who his wife is and why she needs to destroy evidence of Ostania’s corruption is, arguably, about as bad as it could get.
—
His brain tells him to tell Sylvia right away. His brain tells him to remove himself from Operation Strix, to seek dismissal and await reassignment. Replacing agents in ongoing missions is a grueling process, allowed only in the most dire of circumstances. This, his brain tells him, is one such circumstance.
His brain is not the reason why, right now, he’s cutting carrots in the kitchen of 128 Park Avenue. Three days after the night in the woods. There’s a veritable cauldron of stew bubbling in the cast iron pot behind him. There’s a mountain of vegetables on the other end of his cutting board. There’s more roasting in the oven. Is he stress cooking? He may be stress cooking.
“Papa’s in a mess,” Anya says to nobody. Or, well, to Bond, probably. But Bond is a dog. Bond probably doesn’t understand. If only Twilight could be a dog, too.
Because if Twilight were a dog, he wouldn’t have been up all hours of the past three nights trying to dissect the profile of the woman in the room across from his. If Twilight were a dog, he wouldn’t be on the edge of every seat, waiting for the aftermath of having failed to secure the token and letting it fall into other hands. If Twilight had a snout and a tail and walked on four legs, he wouldn’t be asking himself every second of every minute of every hour of the past three days if those had been enemy hands, if Yor is the enemy.
Because he’d be a dog.
Was it really Yor? Perhaps it was a trick of the (lack of) light. But no, she speaks to him, and he hears the same voice. And, Twilight notices anew, he never seems to hear Yor coming or going aside from the groan or click of a door. Her footsteps don’t even whisper.
“Yor?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have a sister?”
“A sister?”
“A twin sister.”
“No, um, not that I know of! Only Yuri.”
“Can Anya have a sister?” Anya chirps from the other side of the kitchen partition.
“No!” he and Yor exclaim in unison.
Does she know he was there that night? Did she sense him the way he sensed her? Did she see him? But when they share an abashed, amused glance between themselves, there’s no guilt in her gaze.
Is there any in his?
—
Seven days after the night in the woods. Still no news of impending war, of explosions, of weapons of mass destruction brokered. Everything is… fine.
Twilight starts tailing Yor.
He doesn’t tell anybody, not Sylvia, not Franky, not Fiona. He stays 100 steps behind her, always. Sticks to shadows. Work as usual. At least, it should be, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels… dirty.
Like he’s spying.
And he reaps what he sows for it in a confusing mess of dread and horror and awe. Yor has likely been doing this work for longer than he’s been a spy, more a child than even he was when he enlisted himself. There’s a medical precision to her kills, but she can kill for dramatic effect when necessary, too. Does she do it because she’s asked? Does she determine herself that a messy kill will better serve her purposes? Sometimes, most of the time, she stays longer to clean up. Is that part of her assignment, too? Twilight knows she’s following orders, but he never gets close enough to enter her base, never meets her handler.
There’s no doubt, however, that whoever it is directing Yor has pruned her to perfect bloom, and it’s sickening, it’s despicable, it’s everything he’s tried to avoid his entire career. Gratuitous, needless killing. Murder.
It’s mesmerizing. He can’t even pretend to wince when he watches.
—
It becomes difficult to tell his dreams apart from nightmares. Shadows grow under his eyes, looming like omens. The longer he watches, the harder it becomes to discern where Yor ends and Thorn Princess begins.
She is the model of a modern major manhunter. She is what burgeoning assassins dream of being, of becoming. She is a killing machine.
She can’t even toast bread without hazarding a house fire.
And she trips over her words when roped up in self-consciousness, can barely look him in the eye unless it’s to suggest he relax. When Anya submits herself to a predicament that becomes dangerous to even the slightest of a degree, she overreacts with a kind of zeal Twilight recognizes in real mothers.
Yor lifts up one end of the couch to vacuum beneath it. Twilight, mid-dishwash, freezes. “Let me take care of that,” he says haltingly, like he’s testing the words out. “It must be heavy.”
The couch collapses. When the dust settles, Yor is panicked. “N-not at all! No, I mean, you’re right—heavy—it is. It is! I’ve just had so much… practice. My martial arts teacher. We lifted couches all the time. And work! I have to carry so much from room to room! Don’t worry! I can do it.”
She splutters and stammers and stumbles over several sentences more. She’s such a bad liar. Such a bad liar.
But he’s the one who always believed her, so what does that make him?
—
For somebody who is capable of gutting a man exactly across his carotid artery from half a league away, Yor is perplexingly… “humble.”
“Oh gosh,” Twilight, laid flat in the ducts, hears her murmur to herself. She doesn’t talk to herself often, but sometimes, when she’s had a particularly involved kill, she does. “At least it doesn’t hurt. Hmm, I’ll have to take this to the cleaners. I should get a spare…”
A few days later, Anya skips out of the bus, unrecognizable in her inexplicable coat of mud if not for her horns. The only visible sign that she was ever anything other than a pile of wet dirt is her knees, both of which are skinned. Once she stops at his and Yor’s feet, she grins. An unnerving stripe of white chiclets floating in a mass of earthen goo.
“Oh gosh!” Yor exclaims, hand coming to her mouth. “Are you alright, Miss Anya?”
“Yeah!”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No!”
“Are you sure? Why don’t we have some ice cream tonight?” Yor looks Anya up and down, contemplative, then looks at Twilight. “I can take that to the cleaners. Should we buy her a spare?”
It takes Twilight a second to parse his déjà vu. Once he does, his face gets hot. He gives a clipped nod. “That’s a great idea. Thank you, Yor.” She smiles like she’s been anointed by the gods. And for what? He stops himself from shaking his head.
The weekend arrives, so they take a family outing to the tailor's. Once Anya’s spare uniform has been tasked to their usual seamstress, they decide unanimously that a trip to the nearby department store might be nice. Once there, Anya entertains herself by hiding in the racks of clothing and manipulating them whenever an unsuspecting stranger meanders by. Meanwhile, Yor lingers among the women’s clothing, rubbing fabric between her fingers, holding it up to the light when she thinks he isn’t looking, no doubt to examine the weave.
“That would look nice on you,” Twilight interrupts, startling her. She drops the hem like it’s bitten her.
“You think so? You don’t think it’s too dark?”
“You wear dark colors very well.” Her face turns pink, but she looks pleased as she sets the hanger back. It’s odd to see that sort of look on her face when Twilight knows she has an assignment tonight. “You’re not buying it?” he asks.
Her rouge deepens. “It’s… a little too thin. I’ll have our tailor make a similar dress in a thicker fabric.” At Twilight’s calculated puzzlement, she flusters. “That way I can wear it year-round!”
Weeks ago, he would’ve taken her at her word. Today, he knows it’s because a thicker fabric will prevent staining. Instead of penetrating the fibers, blood will bead and roll off. It’ll save her the step of having to wash it every time. “Smart,” he says. His own wardrobe comes to mind.
Yor hesitates. “Do you think that’ll change its shape?” she asks.
Twilight stops mid-step. He turns, not quite sure what she means, why she’s asking. Red blossoms up her throat, and her gaze darts away from his. Nonplussed, he answers, “I’m sure it’d suit you no matter what.”
Her expression tilts in surprise, as if she’d expected him to say anything else, but quickly falls back into poorly hidden delight. “Thank you,” she says before disappearing quickly to find Anya.
Later, after following her to her assignment, Twilight leaves before the finale. What’s the point? She’ll complete her mission with resounding success, and it’ll only drive him deeper into sleeplessness. It’s been a month of this, and he still hasn’t told anybody. What could he even say? Who would look at this woman and believe him? Not in broad daylight, when she turns petal pink at praise and dotes on a daughter that isn’t even truly hers.
Even if he could convince any of his colleagues to follow her into the night, why wouldn’t they react exactly as he had? “That can’t be Yor,” they’d say. “Yor wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t. Have you seen the way she reacts to ants?”
And even if any of them did believe their eyes, they’d be horrified. They’d tell him what he has to do next: report her to the higher-ups of W.I.S.E, send her profile to Westalis, take himself off this case, await reassignment, work with the newly reassigned agent to make the transition seamless and unnoticeable so that they can kill her, not Twilight, because Twilight…
Even if they did believe that the Yor who sought his opinion on dress was the very same Yor who could kill a man 328 different ways in a single slice, they wouldn’t understand.
—
Understand what?
In the middle of the night, wide awake, Twilight frowns at his bedroom ceiling.
—
“I heard that the famously efficient Thorn Princess has slowed down. I heard she’s found herself a little family,” says the woman at Yor’s throat. “That it’s slowing her down, the old ball-and-chain.”
“My husband is a lovely man,” Yor snaps. “He’s perfect.”
“Oh? Touchy, touchy. Well, what about your daughter? I can’t imagine it’s easy raising a child as a working woman!”
Yor flinches. To any normal person, it’d be undetectable, but Twilight isn’t normal— and neither is this other assassin, who, upon sighting Yor’s tell, grins wide enough to pave a flight runway. “Some of our providers are unhappy with the change. They want it taken care of.”
Yor’s carefully gathered composure dips again, a scribble of ache before quick erasure. She bites, speaks through her teeth. “The Shopkeeper would never.”
“No,” the other assassin echoes, looking like she’s bitten into something foul. “He wouldn’t.”
“Then you’re going behind our backs? Who sent you?”
“Oh, so many. You’re just not how you used to be, Thorn Princess! They can’t rely on the best of the best anymore, and you know how impatient people are.”
With each word, the look on Yor’s face grows more and more benign. By the end of it, this Yor is the same Yor that Twilight talks to every day. “How will killing me improve mission time?” she asks. She may as well be asking Twilight how he gets the rise on his soufflés.
“It won’t. But I want to kill you, because I’m ranked second to you. With you gone, I’ll finally surpass you!”
“But you’re second to me because you can’t kill me,” Yor says with the same nonchalance that she lifts their apartment couch with.
The smile on the other assassin’s face drops clean off. She stabs at the tree Yor is pressed against with her free knife. Yor doesn’t react. “Well if I can’t kill you now, then I’ll kill you after I’ve killed your stupid, perfect husband and your dumb little daughter—”
Whatever the other assassin says next comes out in a wet, unintelligible garble. She stumbles backwards, shocked, uncomprehending. Her hands fly to her throat, grabbing, pulling away. Horror dawns on her as she sees the blood. When she looks up, Yor is watching her blankly. The bewilderment in the other assassin’s eyes overshadows the accusation, but the light fades out in a matter of seconds. She crumples to the floor, nothing but a husk.
Yor kneels beside the assassin. “I’m sorry,” she says in undertones, gentle like she is with Bond. “I just can’t have you endangering the people most precious to me.”
Then she presses her palms over her colleague’s empty eyes, sweeping her lids shut. She stands and disappears into the night, only to reappear a few minutes later with a shovel. She picks up the limp body, swings it—with a grace and tenderness that Twilight wasn’t even aware you could swing dead bodies with—over one shoulder, then continues deeper into the foliage. He follows 100 paces behind.
Yor ambles through thickets and clearings, passes a little pool, stopping finally in a densely wooded area. The ground cover is bright and friendly with blooms. She rolls her colleague gently to the ground before breaking the earth. It takes her only a quarter of an hour to dig a grave large and deep enough to house the other assassin.
Once she’s covered the grave, she says, “Thank you for allowing me the honor of taking your life,” then leaves, soundless as she always is.
At home, the door slips open with an age-wearied warble. Twilight looks up over the book in his hands. Yor peers in through the doorway, face lighting up in surprise at the sight of him. “You’re still up!” she exclaims in a whisper.
“Anya refused to sleep. It took seven chapters!”
Yor stifles her laughter beneath a palm. “It’s because you don’t do the voices!” she chides.
“I’ll leave that for the expert,” Twilight sighs. Yor grins at him in reply. After a beat, he clears his throat. “I started a bath for you. I figured you’d be tired after working so late, so…”
Is it weird? It’s probably weird. It’s not something he’s done before. And he’ll probably have to confront her one day, probably soon, about what he knows, which means he’ll have to confide in her his own secrets, because it wouldn’t be fair otherwise, but he’ll keep her secrets to himself for now, away from Sylvia and Franky, Fiona, anybody else that isn’t currently coming to mind, because she isn’t hurting anybody who doesn’t need hurting, quite the opposite in fact, because from what he’s gathered, her own endeavors also prevent Ostania from acting out, so, really, this is for the better, knowing this about Yor might work to his advantage in the long run, might even make Operation Strix run smoother, and who is he to expose her when it might compromise his own efforts, yes, that makes sense, this is for the sake of his mission—
“Thank you!” Yor whispers, eyes bright on him. “You didn’t have to!”
“I wanted to,” he answers without thinking, like she’s tapped his brain with a reflex hammer. She smiles a little before disappearing down the hallway.
It could be worse, thinks Twilight. She could be worse. She could be an actual psychopath, one of those killers that he’s had the unfortunate displeasure of crossing paths with more times than he’d like, the ones who do it for the love of a “game,” not unlike the colleague she’d come head-to-head with tonight. Or she could be an undeniable enemy standing diametrically opposed to everything he stands for as an agent of Westalis, killing the people he needs alive, safeguarding the ones who are determined to start a war.
But she isn’t. Not even close. In fact, Twilight would argue, all things considered, that this predicament isn’t unfavorable in the least. After all, it’s only her name that changes between night and day. She’s still the same generous, forgiving, determined woman he knows, whether she’s emptying arteries as Thorn Princess or picking out breakfast biscuits as Yor. At the end of the day, Anya still has a caring mother, he still has a lovely wife, and Garden still has a hardworking employee.
And Loid, of all people, knows how little there is to a name.