I was injected in the side of the neck with a syringe. Whatever was inside had an almost instantaneous effect.

When I awoke, I still had a black bag over my head. Both my body and mind were numb. My hands and feet were bound with metal handcuffs, closed tight enough to bite into my wrists and ankles. I was in a fetal position, up next to another body, which I assumed to be Lucita’s, and felt my surroundings shake in a regular rhythmic pattern. I was in a car trunk, a situation I’d found myself in before, but usually as part of a plan to get close to an enemy.

Lucita was as still as a department-store mannequin. I had no idea if she was alive or dead, but the differences were academic with a Shell. They could have their bodies turned off while leaving their minds active, a state worse than a coma and akin to being buried alive.

We were, in simple terms, fucked, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. The Carnevale knew about my true identity somehow, and I’d blown every opportunity to kill Lucita. The Zombie was dead, and who knew how many other members of their organization, but I was nowhere near completing my contract. The Caesar was still alive and Marcus Gordon remained under his control.

It was strange how finishing my mission was still important to me. I had more loyalty to the International Refugee Society than I thought. Either way, I had a few tricks up my sleeve, and even in my groggy state I was able to make a call to S in order to give a final report.

S didn’t respond for fifteen minutes.

The little window appeared in the same upper right corner it had earlier, but because I couldn’t see anything else, it was surrounded by a sea of blackness. S was wearing the same attire and looked more stressed than I’d ever seen her, including times she’d emerged from combat.

I couldn’t help but think that part of it was due to my actions. After all, I’d dropped the bombshell; the International Refugee Society was compromised, and would probably be destroyed. There were several boxes around Persephone’s office and I got the impression they were in the process of dismantling the home office.

“G? Is that you?” S asked, sitting down at the desk.

“Yes,” I said, not able to respond much faster than one or two words at a time.

“You shouldn’t have called.”

That wasn’t a good sign. “Why?”

“We’ve got the reports from the Chateau Mondo massacre. It’s a huge deal with the Italian government calling for bloody murder. They don’t know any of the Society was involved, but Luigi was a high-value asset and your failure to protect him is . . .” S trailed off.

“Go on.”

“You’ve been marked for termination. Between the business with Marissa and other issues, they’ve decided to burn you.”

“I see.” It was a fine way to show their gratitude for warning them about the president’s interest in our affairs.

“Stop responding like that. We need to talk.”

I took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be a very good final conversation. “Drugged. In car trunk.”

S was silent for a few seconds. “What?”

“Carnevale knows. Up creek, no paddle.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes.”

“I . . .can’t help you.” S sounded genuinely emotional.

“I know.”

I remembered the first few weeks of my marriage to S. We lived in a picturesque McMansion in the middle of Boston’s suburbs. Our cover identities were of two members of the Society, which allowed us to travel around the world with virtually no scrutiny. The house rarely saw any real use but it was something I hadn’t had until that time.

A home.

It was a cold November morning when I’d awoken with my wife rising from the side of our silk sheet-covered bed. S was a redhead then, and her back was covered in scars. They would heal in a couple of weeks, but I couldn’t help wonder where she’d gotten them. Even between each other, the mission details were classified.

I had been overjoyed when we’d been assigned the cover identity of a married couple. It had been years since our first date after the elimination of Aaron Stevens. We’d had several dates since then, mostly on the rare occasions we had time off between missions, but they held a special place in my heart. They were a chance, really, to connect with someone who was in the same field as I was.

Someone who understood what I was going through.

“We shouldn’t do this again,” S said, putting on her bra and panties.

I did a double take at her words. With a single sentence, she’d shattered all my illusions about what we were. “What?”

S put on a Boston Red Sox sweatshirt. “We’re complicating each other’s lives.”

I sat up. “What do you mean?”

“We’re not going to be like this forever.”

“This?”

“A couple,” S replied. “We have memories of people we love. Fragments of them, yes, but memories nevertheless. I had parents and a girlfriend once. Friends. I hope to someday see those people again.”

“Do you think they’ll even remember us?” I asked, staring at her. “Ten years is a long time.”

“Versus trying to live the life of happy assassins?” S gave me a look that was not so much skeptical as disbelieving.

I stared at her. “What’s wrong with being happy?”

“We don’t deserve to be happy,” S said, turning around to face me. “We kill people for a living. We ruin lives. We destroy everything we touch. Playing house isn’t going to make up for that.”

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“I see.” In that moment I realized I hadn’t known S in the slightest. I’d just assumed she’d been happy about our union. I felt like a mark, having seen what he wanted to see rather than what was there.

“Don’t you want to know who your loved ones were?”

I turned away from her. “I don’t know them. These images floating in my head are just that. Images. The same as yours. The same as any Letter.”

“I don’t believe that. I believe they’re a promise.”

I felt emotions bubble up from within as I clenched my fist. “A promise of what? Our spouses could be remarried, dead, or even nonexistent. Our children will have grown up in ten years, in all likelihood, barely remembering us. Do you think we can just let go of our pasts as well? All the death and destruction? What can we even say to these people?!”

S reached over to touch my shoulder.

I pulled away, getting out of the bed and going to the window. The street outside was full of people who were living normal lives. Lives I refused to fall into the trap of envying. In the three years I’d been a member of the Society, I’d seen everything from human trafficking to mass murder to general profiting off misery all lying under the surface of the so-called normal people of the world.

There was no normal.

S was silent for a moment. “I don’t intend to remember anything, G.”

“What?” I looked back at her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, a pained expression on her face.

“I want them to erase everything related to being a Letter from my head. I want to be free of this place. Would you really want to go into Reassignment remembering all of… this?” S gestured around herself as if the home we were living in was part of a nightmare we should want to awaken from.

“I don’t want to lose myself again. I am not a separate person from who I was. I don’t divide myself into the past and future.”

S stared up at me. “I pity you for that.”

I shook my head. “You’re right, this was a mistake.”

In time, we reconciled and returned to a quasi-state of being friends and I’d learned to let go of any belief I might find happiness in this life.

Then Marissa had come.

S’s voice returned me to the present. “There is something I can do for you, G.”

“Don’t endanger yourself. I’ll find my own way out of this.” I felt slightly less groggy now. My metabolism was better at processing this sort of toxin than a normal human’s.

“We both know that’s a lie.”

I didn’t deny it.

“I can’t give you any help with the current situation with the Carnevale, but I have access to the information buried in Delphi. Marissa’s rootkits haven’t been removed yet. It’ll take months, but I can access more data than I ever expected.”

“I’m not sure how that’s helpful.”

“Our pasts might be inside. I can find out who we were.”

“And I thought I was the curious one.”

“Don’t you want to know who you are before you die?”

“I’d rather not die at all.” I paused, taking a moment to reassess my situation. “Please tell me.”

S typed away at the computer in front of her. Seconds later, her eyes widened. “Crap.”

“What?”

“I’ve triggered some sort of alarm. All of the files on our backgrounds are empty. There’s not a damn thing before our training, just some references to our names. I think the Discipline Unit is coming.”

“Shit, S, you need to get out of there—”

“It’s Samantha Keane. Your name is Daniel Gordon.”

I blinked, stunned by that revelation. “I… I…”

“You’ve been a good friend, G—no—Daniel. I’m breaking your connection to Delphi and wiping your data.”

“Wait, no!”

The image of her disappeared, and with it, my last tie to the Society severed. Attempts to connect with her again achieved nothing but pure static.

Daniel Gordon.

If it had come under any other circumstances, I would have been overjoyed. Instead, the events just left me numb. Even the name had a hollow ring to it. Who was Daniel Gordon if he didn’t remember his family, friends, or loved ones? I had friends, family, and loved ones in the screwed-up horror of the Society. It was possible they were going to kill them or they were going to die with it.

I tried to scream, but it came out as nothing more than a choked rasp. I had never cried before, but at that moment, I felt the tears of both rage as well as incoherent sadness pass down the side of my cheeks. It was half an hour before we arrived at our destination, and by then, I had run out of tears to cry.

I was going to kill the people involved in this.

All of them.

Pulled out of the car trunk by forces unknown, I could only helplessly go along with my captors until they brought me up a set of stairs and dumped me in a metal chair. Only then was my hood removed and I found myself in a concrete shower stall. The air smelled of blood and meat while the lights above were cheap fluorescent ones. Standing in front of me was the Caesar and behind him were a pair of paramilitary-dressed guards holding S515 machine guns.

The Caesar was wearing a white suit, panama hat, and a set of gold rings covered in little sigils. Despite the fact I’d killed his son, ruined his organization, and played him for a fool, he didn’t look particularly angry at me.

No, instead, he looked more disappointed.

Holding out his hand, one of the guards handed the Caesar a long, red-handled cattle prod. The Caesar proceeded to jam it into my chest and send jolts of electricity through my body. My arms and legs thrashed along with the rest of my body as the Caesar held the prod against me until I could smell my chair burning.

Then he applied it my genitals.

That was when I screamed.

The process continued for several more minutes. The Caesar finally tossed me out of the chair and proceeded to deliver a brutal series of kicks to my chest and face. One of my teeth chipped and he broke my nose as well. He looked ready to deliver another shock with the cattle prod but instead handed the device back to the guard behind him.

The Caesar crouched down beside my head. “Are you familiar with parilla, Agent G? It roughly translates as “barbecue,” but I mean the torture method. It was a very popular form of torture from the seventies to the nineties and was chiefly used by the late Augusto Pinochet. We don’t have the facility set up here to properly do it; otherwise we would have wrapped wires around your penis head and testes to deliver the shocks. I’ve always been particularly fond of it as a method of punishment. Victims describe it as indescribably painful. Some even broke their limbs during the spasms. I used to do this to suspected communists during the good old days. My father taught me some of the intricacies, even showing me how to soften up men and women with rape beforehand. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that later.”

“Sounds like a wonderful guy,” I spit blood from my mouth. “Is that why you killed him?”

“No,” the Caesar said. “That was over something stupid. A woman. In retrospect, I was young and hot-blooded. I was eager to become the king and unwilling to wait my turn. I made the mistake of setting a precedent that gave my children unfortunate notions that has led us to our present situation. Of course, I don’t believe Lucita would have turned against me without your influence.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Lucio. It didn’t take much prodding to put her on the path to taking you out.”

The Caesar grabbed me by my cheeks and gave them a squeeze. “Such a pretty face. I wonder if you seduced my daughter or whether she seduced you. She’s not even a real woman, you know, but a product of surgery and flesh-sculpting. A boy with a misguided brain.”

I wasn’t troubled by the discovery Lucita was transsexual but suspected that had gone down like a ton of bricks with the Caesar. “What a wonderful father.”

He slapped me across the face. I barely felt it, my face was so battered. “You’ve managed to bring down the wrath of the Italian government on me, and while I’ve crushed Lucita’s little rebellion, there’s not much of the Carnevale left to salvage. However, that’s not important. Not anymore.”

“Isn’t it?” I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going.

“The United States government is going to destroy the International Refugee Society soon, which will be my vengeance. That and what’s going to happen to you. I’ve grown tired of following my father’s legacy anyway. I’m going to take Doctor Gordon to a less-developed nation and sell his secrets to the highest bidder and live the comfortable life of a billionaire.”

“You’ll be a fugitive for the rest—”

“Not after I move my brain into a Shell and leave my body for the enemy to find.”

Ah, there was that.

“I warned them,” I said, muttering. “They’re going to survive.”

The Caesar shrugged. “I can live with that as long as I have you. Besides, you’re going to reveal all of their secrets soon enough.”

“Torture rarely gets you the answers you want.”

The Caesar smiled. “No, my friend, it doesn’t. However, it’s not going to be torture that reveals what you know. No, my little hacker friend is going to tear them all from that computer brain of yours.”

That was when Marissa walked in, dressed in her punk attire.

And another part of my soul died.