It was three hours before Marissa and I had familiarized ourselves with every single detail of the Carnevale’s operations. I’d read up on safe houses, gun types, contacts, financial records, and weird habits. I’d learned who was bribing whom, how, and when. I also knew of such delightful individuals as the Smiling Killer, the Red Ronin, and the Black Whisper—all of whom I might end up facing while infiltrating the Carnevale’s inner circle.

“They love giving themselves fun names, don’t they?” Marissa said, picking up a document describing the Smiling Killer. He’d killed thirty people during one botched mission. The Spanish government had produced a body, some poor unnamed transient, to make it clear they’d dealt with the problem.

“I was disappointed when I found out they were the ones giving themselves their names,” I said. “They love to advertise, and that’s a seriously screwball way to be an assassin.”

“Perhaps it means you will have an easier time dealing with them,” Delphi said, having been with us the entire time. “They do not seem very logical.”

“Logical people are better. You can predict what they’re going to do. The Carnevale’s killers are emotional, which means I have no idea how they’re going to react.” I closed the manila folder in front of me.

I had the beginnings of a plan, from pretending to be Agent F to dismantling the Carnevale from within. The problem was that all of the texts and transcripts I’d read of their conversations indicated that neither F nor the Caesar had trusted the other. F had made it abundantly clear he considered the Caesar an ally out of necessity. Adopting that sort of attitude and winning the Carnevale’s trust would be difficult.

I wouldn’t be able to draw from Marissa’s help for most the mission, either. She’d have to infiltrate the area on her own and get close enough so that I could contact her. Throw in the time element, as well as the fact that I didn’t know what they wanted Doctor Gordon for, and… well, this mission was rapidly moving from the difficult to the damned near impossible.

“G,” Delphi said, interrupting my thoughts. “I regret to inform you it is time for your procedure.”

I looked up, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about the fact that they were going to be altering my features. One less piece of my past. They could probably turn me back, almost certainly given Black Technology’s ill-defined limits, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared.

“Thanks,” I said, not sure what else to say. “I suppose that means we’re done here. See you soon, Delphi.”

“Be seeing you,” Delphi said, cheerfully.

“I’ll take care of the document disposal,” James said, his voice calm. “I don’t like you, G—”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“But try not to get killed,” James said, anyway, surprising me.

“He won’t,” Marissa said, looking up from a yellow pad full of notes. “I have a couple of ideas for dealing with the Carnevale that might make things easier. I’m going to suggest them to Persephone before we leave.”

“Looking for a promotion? Want to become one of Persephone’s Assistants?” I asked, half-jokingly.

“Would that be so bad?”

I frowned. “No, not at all. I think you’d be good for it.”

“Thanks.”

Persephone would never let her be more than an Assistant. Those who were conditioned to obey the Society were treated as less than human on some level. They were like hammers or wrenches, tools that could be replaced. Only those who had voluntarily, for some definitions of the word, “chosen” to join the organization had any hope of promotion.

“Do you have any ideas about how to weaken the Carnevale or get them to trust you?” Marissa asked, getting up.

I got up from the table and stretched. I hadn’t eaten and was famished. I doubted I’d get to eat before dinner, though. Being put under rarely improved one’s appetite. “Divide and conquer.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all I’ll need. The Carnevale is a powder keg of extreme personalities and distrust. I’m going to see if I can light a match.”

Marissa looked at me, and then nodded. “I’ll see what I can do to help.”

James watched us depart even as I tried to force down my anxiety. This mission was bad enough, but there were other things sitting ill in the back of my mind. Persephone was handling the fact that we had a mole extremely well—too well, in fact—with no sign that we were going to be evacuating our headquarters or backing up any of our material.

I couldn’t help but wonder if this had all been planned from the start, but that was ridiculous. The International Refugee Society was ruthless, but even they weren’t stupid enough to risk a valuable asset like Gordon falling into enemy hands, let alone risk all the unwanted attention the events at the airport had drawn.

I’d asked Persephone how they’d spun the events at Logan and found out it was being treated as an attack by Red Sword. The bodies had been recovered by our “friends” in the government, and everyone who had seen something they shouldn’t have were being intimidated or bribed into compliance.

It was a national disaster, but would last for a week before the next round of celebrity marriages and break-ups distracted America from the event. The people killed in the attack, the flight attendants and security personnel, were just collateral damage from the Carnevale’s feud with the Society and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Monstrous.

I couldn’t spend much time thinking on them, though, since I was too busy thinking on Gordon. If he really was my father, there was no way Persephone should be sending me to meet with him. They were too intelligent to risk triggering a relapse of my memories or a sudden burst of principle that might interfere with my taking him out. Avoiding people making moral stands was the whole reason Letters existed, after all.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Then there was the fact that Persephone knew about me and Marissa. That made our relationship dangerous. I forced those thoughts from my head as we arrived at the sixth floor sub-basement’s elevator doors. According to the schedule I’d been given in my briefing, I had less than a day to get my IRD updated and my face reconstructed before they were going to have me flown out on a rented private jet for Italy.

Tapping the up button on the side of the elevator, I muttered, “The wonders of Black Technology.”

“Afraid of going under the knife again?” Marissa asked.

“No,” I said, watching the elevator doors slide open before stepping in. “Not really.”

Marissa followed me in as the elevator doors closed behind us. “Liar.”

I hit the button for the second sub-basement level. “Very much so.”

The ride only took a few seconds. When the doors opened, I was greeted by a sharp contrast to Delphi’s messy server rooms. Medical’s halls were a bright white, filled with laboratories, micro-clinics, and two operating theatres. It was a miniature hospital and dozens of people worked here. I knew that the pharmacy was routinely raided for pills, at least six of the people here were petitioning the doctors to get help for dying relatives, and quite a few of the staff had shady pasts.

F’s body was somewhere here, as were the other dead Letters’ remains. Their cybernetics were being removed, wrapped up, and put away for re-use. If you died before your term was up as a Letter, your body would be disposed of along with all of your memories. Your past, whatever it was, simply ceased to matter. But then again, wasn’t that what it was like with everyone?

“G, are you OK with hunting Gordon?” Marissa asked, whispering.

“Shh,” I said, shaking my head. “Not here.”

I looked to one of the security cameras surveying us.

Big Sister was watching.

Marissa nodded. “Right.”

Searching the halls, I quickly found the man I was looking for. He was located in a glass room with a strange MRI-looking machine next to a bunch of computer consoles that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a set of a sci-fi movie. The walls were covered with holographic displays of a human male’s interior as well as abbreviations I did not know the meaning of. Doctor Gerard Saint Croix, head of Medical, was standing at one of the panels, calling up a series of images of the human brain that I found vaguely disquieting.

Gerard was, in simple terms, a beautiful man. A tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, lean, African American with a shaved head, he looked more like an actor playing a doctor than an actual one. Gerard wore a white coat over a pair of blue slacks and a simple white button-down shirt.

“What’s up, Doc?” I said, heading into the room and giving a half-hearted wave.

Gerard waved back, not bothering to look up from his console. “Good to see you, G. Right on time.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t keep you waiting. You’re my favorite doctor here.”

“That’s not what some of the staff say,” Gerard said, smiling. “Doctor Perkins asked about you.”

Marissa frowned.

“She’s a lovely woman,” I said. “But I’m not interested.”

“Of course,” Gerard said. I wasn’t lying that he was my favorite doctor. He was one of the few people who treated Letters like we were human. Doctor Perkins had made numerous sexual overtures to the better-looking males among us, but that was because she didn’t think of us as people.

Just handsome machines.

“Hello, Marissa,” Gerard said, walking over and giving her a hug. “I understand you had quite the ordeal at the airport.”

“I survived.”

Gerard nodded. “If you need psychological counselling, we have a new therapist on staff who is quite good at her job.”

Marissa tried not to snort. “Thanks, I’m fine.”

“As you wish.” Gerard turned back to me. “We’re on a tight time schedule given recent events, so we had better get started. You should remove your shirt and any metal objects from your pockets.”

“Uh, I hate to interrupt, but what’s going to happen to me, precisely?” I asked, not exactly comfortable with how fast this was all going down.

“Nothing too extreme,” Gerard said, tapping the MRI-looking machine. “This is going to handle most of it. We’re going to reach into your brain and remove your existing IRD implant before replacing it with a new one in a single easy pair of injections. From there, we’ll be installing the new nano-machine weave into your cranium. It’ll allow us to directly program—”

“English?” I pleaded.

“We’re giving you a new model computer in your brain and making you look like F.”

“Ah. Just making sure we were still going with that.”

“Will he go back to looking like his old self after this?” Marissa asked. “Because that’s not really possible with most plastic surgery.”

“We can do that here,” Gerard said, giving a reassuring smile. Almost too reassuring. Nice guys didn’t work at the International Refugee Society. Ironic as that may be. “We wouldn’t want to screw up your Reassignment, would we?”

“No,” I said, coldly. “We wouldn’t.”

Gerard said. “Don’t worry, this is all well-tested technology.”

“On whom?”

“That’s classified.”

Of course. “Well, it’s not like I have a choice, do I?”

“There’s always a choice,” Gerard said. “Just not always a good one.”

It was a surprisingly observant statement from a man I thought of as primarily good for brainwashing people into obedience.

That was when Marissa’s cellphone beeped. She checked it and looked at me. “Sorry, they need me downstairs. I’ll see you after your surgery.”

“Try not to be too freaked out,” I said, smiling.

“I’ll try.”

Marissa turned around and departed the room, leaving me alone with Doctor Saint Croix.

“You should break up with her,” Gerard said, surprising me.

“What?” I turned to him.

Gerard went to some nearby machines and started calibrating them. “There’s nowhere healthy a relationship between a Letter and an Assistant can go.”

I sat down on the side of the machine that was, apparently, going to do brain and facial reconstruction surgery on me. “Does everyone know?”

“No,” Gerard said, sighing. “But you’re not exactly hiding it, either. People notice when a Letter is happy. Persephone certainly picked up on it.”

“I can deal with Persephone.”

“Can you?”

That was a good question and the answer was, honestly, no.

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you care?”

“Do you know how I got involved here?”

“No,” I said, starting to take off my shirt. “But everyone has a story.”

“Mine started innocuously enough. I was a surgeon, newly graduated, and ready to take the world on by storm. I had a family, fiancé, and money. There’s places where being a Saint Croix will get you everything free.”

“Oh, the tragedy of your story.”

“It becomes more so through my own fault. I didn’t handle the pressure well and took pills to cope with them. This led to the usual domino of mistakes: failure, disgrace, and ultimately my innocent family paying the price. The Society offered to clear me of all charges and make it seem like someone else was responsible.”

“So you took it?”

“Yes.” Gerard got a haunted look in his eye. “I started working for them exclusively, installing their bits of hardware in agents like you and the Discipline unit. It was good for a while. My fiancé even came back to me and we got married. We were thinking about having kids when I started to notice she was always taking the Society’s side whenever I confided in her things she shouldn’t know about.”

I got a bad feeling I knew where this was going. “What happened?”

“They’d taken her and conditioned her. They’d turned her into a mole who existed to make sure I was safe and content in my new job.”

“That’s not Marissa. Persephone has made it clear she doesn’t want us involved.”

“That’s what you think, but can you be for sure? Is there a better way to bind you to the Society than to have you in love with your loyal Assistant?”

I stared at him. “It isn’t like that.”

“You know she’s conditioned, G. Anything you might feel for her is going to be at least, partially, artificial. She deserves better. So do you.”

I tossed my shirt to one side. “I don’t know if anything I feel isn’t artificial. What happened to your wife, anyway?”

Gerard paused. “I rejected Amanda… so she committed suicide.”

I closed my eyes. “Begin the procedure.”