Light played like festive ghosts on the almost still waters of Venice. Her eyes reflected the joyful colors as night shrouded the city in the murmurings of poetry. She had fallen in love with her new home, almost forgetting that there was a world that would be swept away, unless she did something about it.

"You like it here?" The shadow asked her from the boat he waited for her in. Thrith's voice sounded soft and strange. How could a stranger make her feel comfortable, how could he seem to know her, how could he seem familiar?

"I do." Zaynab whispered with honesty as she placed her hand in his. He delicately helped her aboard.

"Zaynab, I think we have something in common. Do you trust me?" Thrith asked. She could see light in his eyes, a shadow with glowing eyes, asking her if she felt trust. She shuddered, realizing that the feeling she had was certainly trust.

"You cannot be trusted. I cannot be trusted. We do not tell the truth." She whispered, lying about being a liar. She loved telling the truth, and to Thrith, she could say anything. That is what made him so dangerous. Zaynab sat while he used the pole to guide the boat silently along the channel.

"You trust me." He told her. "It is strange, to be trusted by you. Should I tell you everything? Would that spoil our time together?"

"Why not tell me everything?" Zaynab was so quiet that she could barely hear her own words. Somehow the stranger she knew like her own shadow knew what she was saying.

"I sought you out. Klein told me to, when I told him I had seen you leave Marrakesh and go to Orchard Six. He wanted to know why you would return. That is what he will ask you. I already know why you came and why you left again. I know you, Zaynab." Thrith sounded intimately confident, yet there was no trace of romance in his voice. He was like a man praying to a grave.

"Why did I?" Zaynab offered her response, only after she considered that whatever he had planned, he wouldn't commit until he had told her everything he wanted to say. He had not impressed her as a man who liked to be direct or garrulous. Rather, Thrith preferred to use words as venom. Whatever he would say would be dangerous to hear.

"You must have already known Halfdan was there. You were relying on him to make contact up the chain of command. You are seeking his masters, their masters and the ones above them. You are trying to gain access to the most vital organ of the creature, because you are an assassin." Thrith said without any of his poetry. Zaynab shuddered at the pace of his speech. He was watching her reactions, gauging the accuracy of his deductions. By speaking so plainly he broke character and hoped to get her to do the same. She shook her head, and he stopped speaking for a moment.

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"You think I have turned around from The Path?" Zaynab said plainly.

"When the new day dawns, what will be left of this world? What more can they take from us?" Thrith sounded peculiar when he compared her to him. Zaynab felt a pang of guilt when she realized she was wrong about Thrith. Her instincts were right, but she had refused to believe in him.

"Perhaps tomorrow will never come." Zaynab promised him. They became like silent companions, then, and Zaynab, as a woman, wanted to ask him for his story. The spy in her told her not to ask. His venom was the deadliest kind. When they neared the docks, she finally gave into her compassion and asked him carefully, her voice soft and wondering: "Who did they take from you?"

"Someone I cannot get back." Thrith's cheek glistened in the shadowed light. "It was a long time ago."

"And to you, I am a day of reckoning?" Zaynab offered her skills. "I thought you were someone else, Thrith."

"He is dead, within me, but I still hear his cries." Thrith explained. "I want to let him rest. Would I let the whole world feel like I do? I am the darkness."

"Not alone." Zaynab stood close to him on the moonlit dock. "We are the darkness."

"Then you understand why I came and found you. How long would you wait for them to come for you? If not me, then someone else. How many, like you, have I released from their pain? You are different. You ran, ran away, only to live to fight another day." Thrith took her hands. His were cold and chilled her, a sensation like poison coursing through her veins. Was this all another lie? Her heart told her it was not.

"You could kill me now, if that is how the morning should find me." Zaynab begged him to be real, begged for death if her feelings were a lie. She had already made a fatal mistake, she should not make two, it wasn't fair.

"I would sooner give my own life, because I know what you will do to them if I help you." Thrith was suddenly the man she had met before. His tenderness, his honesty, it was gone. He'd left it behind in their moonlit boat ride in Venice. But he was still hers.

"What will you do?" Zaynab asked as he led her to his car.

"I will get you the key you need to get to them. I will take you to Klein. When we have changed your path, you will be able to walk The Path all the way to where it goes. I will be right behind you." He said, strangely speaking as though more of his venom. Yet he was not lying.

"My shadow." Zaynab sounded bemused.

"I've seen you in the light. Your darkness is the truth, and I so miss the light." Thrith was sobering up from the grief they had sipped together. She liked him as they sat together in his car.

"I've never known the light, nor truth." Zaynab confessed.

"Then you have nothing to lose." Thrith started the car and drove them out of the city as the morning glowed.