The room filled with silence. Number Seven expected one of the women to break it. He heard Sorrow shifting slightly in her seat and Cutty’s fingertips tapping on her desk but they said nothing.

In the silence he fell into his own thoughts. He didn’t want to believe the story. He wanted to believe that this was some convoluted psychological operation designed to rob him of his sanity.

He wanted to believe that Cutty was a liar but he knew that she wasn’t. Seven was a connoisseur of liars. He could recognise the compulsive self-agrandisers, the narcissists and the sociopaths. It would have taken an exceptional liar to spin a yarn like that with such an air of conviction. That kind of liar was unmistakable to Seven and he gravitated towards them because they were so reliably unreliable.

The story was true. He could feel it in his bones. And when he tried to doubt that his thoughts turned to Sorrow. She had known. She hadn’t been able to see through it but she’d known it was there. She’d been willing to take a bullet not for him but for the suit. No wonder she’d counselled Cutty against telling him.

Someone had to say something and it appeared that it would be him. 'So none of this is me?' he said, speaking into his hands, aware that his voice must sound muffled and strained to them.

'No,' said Cutty and Seven marvelled at how even her voice was. She must be worrying that she’d broken him or some part of him at least. 'Some of it definitely is you. The suit wouldn’t fit you if it didn’t resonate with something in your personality.'

'Who was I?' said Seven.

'That’s a dangerous question and now is not the time to ask it. It’s a good thing that I don’t know and I have no way of finding out,' said Cutty.

'Oh come on,' said Sorrow, all hard consonants, flinging the word ‘on’ across the table at Cutty.

'The information is sequestered,' said Cutty, her voice beginning to crack from the strain. 'His few remaining documents are in a warded safe in a secret location and everything else was destroyed when he took the job. No one will have access to it until he retires. Anything I can tell you would be speculation. Dangerous speculation. Ask me anything else.'

'Tell me about the others,' said Seven.

'Your predecessors? Are you sure you want to know?' said Cutty and she’d already smoothed over the crack in her voice. 'Some of this is going to be stuff that you remember doing.'

'I need to know. How many have there been? How did they die?' said Seven

'You’re the sixth and the others are all still alive, as far as I can tell. They all retired in one piece.'

'Alive?' Seven let his hands drop and looked up at Cutty, sure that she must be lying about that. 'How?'

'The suit does a really good job of keeping the operator alive. It doesn’t work so well for people around the operator,' said Cutty.

'So all the deaths I remember?' said Seven.

'The suit operators have lost a lot of friends and lovers.'

Seven tried to reach back, tried to count how many deaths there had been, but there were so many memories and none of them were in the proper order. 'I need a chronology,' he said.

'I’ll do my best,' said Cutty. 'The first one, the one I called Jamie, he stretched the suit out a bit. He’s the reason everyone thinks you’re 6’1' rather than 6 foot like the original. He’s also the only reason your shoulders fit. He’s the one the anger issues come from though you and some of the others added to that. He retired when a Japanese intelligence officer he’d got very close to was murdered in his bed by people trying to kill him.'

Seven could remember her face but not her name. Perhaps he’d never known her real name. She’d been a tiny, delicate-seeming woman, who fought like a tiger. A tiger with an encyclopaedic knowledge of human pressure points. The shocking pain at realising that she wasn’t breathing had been worse than being stabbed. And he knew what being stabbed felt like. 'I remember. I… He was devastated.'

'His decision came as a surprise to his superiors, though it shouldn’t have. He’d been showing signs of burnout for more than a year. I suspect that they half believed he’d stick around forever. There wasn’t a clear successor in place and there was a scramble to find someone. I don’t think they got the personality fit quite right.' Cutty paused, apparently searching his face for some sign of distress.

'Go on,' said Seven.

'The man they found was an Aussie but he’d been to an English public school so he sounded almost right. He had been in the suit less than a year when he fell head over heels for an Italian heiress. Possibly because she reminded him of confused memories of a mother that wasn’t his own. It was a proper whirlwind romance. He didn’t even resign before the wedding. She was murdered on the honeymoon. By enemies he’d made when he was still Number Seven. He had a complete breakdown.'

'That’s not so familiar,' said Seven.

'Perhaps the suit suppressed it. It doesn’t really fit the narrative,' said Cutty. 'The next bit you might remember. Jamie was so angry when he heard about it that he offered to go back in, to put the suit back on, but only on the condition that he could exact vengeance on the killers before he did anything else. He killed everyone involved in the hit. He destroyed the organisation that paid for the hit, tracked down the man in charge and killed him and all his bodyguards.'

Seven felt her words pulling him back into a spiral of rage and grief and violence. He’d tracked his quarry across half the world and then, 'I think I might have drowned him in boiling mud,' he said.

'That’s the one. I’ll bet the autopsy was fun.' Cutty sounded almost cheerful but he heard a grim note in her voice as if she didn’t approve of how much she liked the suit. 'After that Jamie stuck around until they’d found a better replacement. He may even have helped recruit the man who replaced him.'

'Didn’t that create some cognitive dissonance with the suit?' said Sorrow.

Seven smiled, but with his face turned away slightly so that Sorrow wouldn’t think he was mocking her. Sorrow liked to pretend that she was a bluff, uneducated, working class squaddie who specialised in hitting things but she had a fierce intelligence. It’s not every squaddie that can drop a concept like cognitive dissonance into a conversation.

'It seems not,' said Cutty. 'If I had to guess I’d say it wouldn’t have been sustainable in the long term but with an experienced operator who was only sticking around for a few months it didn’t cause trouble.'

'But did it result in a better fit?' said Seven.

'If anything it was too good. The next guy was English and he just loved the suit. He’s the one that made you completely insatiable. The suit was always a bit of a tart but he used international espionage as an excuse to debauch his way around the fleshpots of the world. He’s the reason we know it’s immune to all the common STDs.'

'That would have been useful to know,' said Seven.

'You shag women who keep guns under their pillows,' said Sorrow, 'You really going to pretend you care about safe sex?'

Seven didn’t want to discuss that. 'If he liked it so much why did he leave?' he said.

'Time,' said Cutty, 'the suit slows ageing but it can’t resist it entirely. He liked the suit too much, stayed too long, his reactions slowed and he didn’t even notice. There was a woman. She was an enemy but an honourable one and working for a monstrous man who seemed perfectly reasonable most of the time. When she found out what he was really up to, how many civilians would die, she switched sides. She died saving lives. He felt that a younger man would have been quicker, that things wouldn’t have got so bad, that if anyone had to die it should have been the man in the suit.' Cutty stopped again, searching his face for signs of recognition.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Seven remembered that woman. She’d been as tall as Sorrow and as dark as Sorrow was pale. She had been about as strong as a woman could be without divine aid. He had found her terrifying and arousing in equal measure. Which wasn’t far from how he felt about Sorrow.

He met Cutty’s eyes. Her forehead was creased in concern again. 'How are you holding up?' she said.

'I haven’t snapped yet,' said Seven. 'Tell me about the next one.'

Cutty paused before she spoke and glanced at Sorrow as if looking for reassurance but whatever she was wondering she kept it to herself. 'The next guy was Welsh. He was…' Cutty stalled mid sentence, apparently caught off guard by her inability to find the right word, fingers clutching at the air as if trying to grab for the concept. '…Intense. He took everything personally. That intensity combined with Jamie’s anger issues to start that unstoppable force thing that you’ve perfected.'

'They call it Hulk mode at HQ,' said Seven.

'Did you get someone to explain that to you?' said Sorrow.

'Number Two,' said Seven. The mention of her sucked the remaining warmth out of the room. Seven found himself thinking about her again. Lying dead in the rubble.

'Not your fault.' Cutty’s voice was sharp again, cutting through the fog of reminiscence. Derailing his train of thought.

'How did you…' Seven started to ask but Cutty wouldn’t let him finish.

'It doesn’t take a witch to connect the mention of a beloved and departed colleague to your sudden look of regret and come up with a diagnosis of survivor’s guilt. I’ll say it again because I know you’re stubborn. It wasn’t your fault unless you threw the dart. Did you throw the dart?' Cutty said it so lightly, as if it was nothing, as if it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask him.

'No!' The word was out in a stab of anger before he’d had the chance to rein himself in. 'Of course not.'

'Good,' said Cutty.

'You were about to tell me all about my anger issues,' said Seven.

'Actually I was about to tell you about your occasional insubordination problem. That comes from the Welsh guy. He had a number of issues with the chain of command. And, as I said, took everything personally. At one point he went over the wall and it looked for a while like we’d have to break out the contingency protocol. Fortunately he came back once he’d finished comprehensively fucking someone up.'

'The leader of a South American drugs cartel. Nearly killed a friend of mine. I may have parked an articulated lorry on his face.'

'Sounds about right. The files are a little hazy on that one because it wasn’t a sanctioned mission but it does gel with some of my outside reading,' said Cutty.

'So how did they get the suit off him then?' said Sorrow.

'He agreed to retire,' said Cutty, 'I don’t think they could have taken the suit off him. As far as we can tell it comes off when the wearer retires. We don’t know what would happen if the operator died. But I’m going to assume that it wouldn’t be good. Enough psychological damage might make the operator throw it off. It’s probably possible that if the operator fucked up badly enough, did something to become unworthy of the suit that might break the connection but again, we don’t actually know what would happen to the suit.'

'So just by telling me this you’re risking breaking the connection, maybe destroying the suit?' said Seven.

'Yes. But if you don’t put it like that in your report and I don’t put it like that in my report maybe we’ll both get to keep our jobs,' said Cutty.

Seven stared at the woman across the desk. Was she joking? Serious? A little of both? He couldn’t tell.

'Do you want to go on or do you need time to let it all sink in?' said Cutty.

'Might as well go on. There’s only one more left, right? My predecessor? What was he like?'

'Quick,' said Cutty.

'That’s it? Quick?' said Seven.

'He was a lot of things. He was born in Northern Ireland. He was the best physical match of all of you. He was friendly. You’re all charming but he had something extra. He made friends, loyal friends, some of whom started out as rivals or even enemies.'

'Valentin,' said Seven, thinking about the huge man who had taught him the proper way to drink vodka.

'But the most distinctive thing about him is how fast he was. He learned quickly, picked up new skills with unusual alacrity. He was terrifying in melee combat. I found some CCTV footage of him, four opponents and some musical instruments in a small practice room. I’m recommending we start using it in our training lectures.'

'Did I, sorry he, stab a man with a cello?' said Seven.

'Eventually he stabbed one of them with a cello,' said Cutty. 'After he’d run out of other ways to injure someone with a musical instrument.'

'How do you stab someone with a cello?' said Sorrow, voice dripping with incredulity.

'The spike on the bottom,' said Cutty and again there was that guilty half smile that suggested that she wasn’t comfortable with how much fun she was having. 'The suit has always been good with improvised weaponry but he made it fast and graceful.'

'What happened to him?' said Sorrow.

'He was captured.' Cutty started but she paused, giving Seven a sidelong glance.

'In North Korea,' said Seven, feeling the memory hanging there in the back of his mind as if it had always been there but he’d somehow stopped seeing it. 'Accidentally ended up on the wrong side of the DMZ. I really thought they’d just shoot me but instead they took me for questioning. And by questioning I mean torture. A lot of torture. But I knew how to slow my heart rate down?' He wasn’t sure he could trust this memory that seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

'Jamie learned it as a meditation technique when he was in Japan,' said Cutty.

'Every time I did it they’d think I was dying,' said Seven and it was odd to both remember coming up with the plan and to be sitting there in admiration of the ingenuity of the man who had done it. 'I kept doing it and the interrogators thought they’d damaged my heart.'

'But that’s the end of the story, isn’t it?' said Cutty. 'Do you remember the rest of it?'

'I remember that in the beginning I just followed my training. I held onto my cover story and gave it out a little at a time while I looked for a way out. But the longer it went on the harder it was to keep my story in order. I couldn’t remember which things were part of the cover and which I had to keep secret. Then I got angry. The pain didn’t matter. I stopped caring about feeding them the cover. I wasn’t even looking for escape. I got stuck in a recurring loop of resisting the pain until I had to say something and then spitting insults until they knocked me out again.'

Seven ground to a halt, trying to remember but reluctant to actually examine the memories.

'That was your predecessor’s personality giving way to the suit’s memory of his predecessor’s personality. The Welsh guy. Anger was his default coping strategy,' said Cutty, her voice a gentle reassuring hand on his shoulder.

'Eventually I ran out of anger. I was tired. I couldn’t take it seriously any more. Pain had ceased to have any meaning.'

'Yeah. That will happen if pain goes on long enough,' said Cutty.

'I even started to enjoy it. I was flirting with my captors, trying to make a game of it,' said Seven. Eyes closed as he tried to remember. His hands locked together in his lap.

'That was the suit’s memory of the English guy taking over. He was pretty kinky and he treated everything like a joke,' said Cutty, her voice closer now. She must have come round the desk while his eyes were shut.

'They found other things to do to me,' he said, shuddering at the memory, hearing his knuckles crack as his hands tensed. 'Things that I couldn’t convince myself I enjoyed. I stopped caring. Everything was meaningless. I’d already lost everything and there was no point in going on. It didn’t make any sense but it helped.'

'That’s grief. That’s the Aussie’s last gift to the suit. He was still linked to it when his wife was murdered.' Cutty’s voice was even closer now and he felt her hands on his, smaller than Sorrow’s hands and softer save for one callous on the side of her right index finger.

Seven felt the tension leave his body as Cutty unlaced his fingers. 'And when the grief passed I remembered Japan. I remembered the training. Meditating under those conditions was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done but it worked. They’d torture me for a while and then I’d stop responding and slow my heart enough that they’d think I’d passed out.'

'And that was Jamie,' said Cutty and Seven felt the palms of her hands on the backs of his own, as if she was physically preventing him from folding them into fists and retreating into anger. 'It worked but probably only because you’d held out so long. They thought the prolonged torture had damaged your heart, either from malnutrition or exhaustion or just from the drugs they used. They arranged an exchange, agreed to give you back in return for a couple of their own, thinking they were swapping one broken spy for two whole ones.'

Seven opened his eyes again expecting to see Cutty’s blue-grey eyes staring back at him from inches away but she wasn’t there. She was still behind the desk. He looked down at his hands. They lay flat, palms down, on his thighs but he still felt a weight on them as if there were a pair of hands on his. Was he imagining it?

'When we finally got to debrief your predecessor he said it was like he wasn’t alone. He said it was like there were five of him in the cell, sharing the burden. It must have been like trying to interrogate a whack-a-mole machine. You break one down and another pops up.' Cutty still sounded closer than she should. Some trick of her voice perhaps?

'But he didn’t retire right away?' said Seven.

'He had unfinished business. But being dimly aware of the fiction suit was hard to deal with and when the American agent he was working with nearly died it brought all the old trauma to the surface.'

'And then there was me,' said Seven.

'I told you. I won’t discuss your personal past,' said Cutty, her voice rising in pitch for the first time.

'What about my future? Is there anything left of me in here?'