I returned to the hotel room I’d arranged for the evening to collect my things and take a quick shower before leaving. The Chicago Merlot was a five-star accommodation with bathrobes, mints, high-speed internet access, and a luxurious silk-sheet bed. Say what you will about the Society; it paid magnificently.

Right now, I wanted to lie down on the bed and sleep for a year. There was something about killing people that always made me tired. I was fine during the act, but as soon as it was done, the weight of it all hit me. Not so much guilt—they’d conditioned that out of me—but the awareness of its absence. Having finished my shower and standing in front of my hotel room’s dresser mirror with a white towel wrapped around my waist, I couldn’t help but look at myself and try to put a name to the person staring back at me.

I had clues, small ones, that told me a bit about who I’d been: I’d broken my leg twice as a child, and had two fillings, and there were signs I’d been asthmatic before growing out of it. I spoke eight languages, only two of which I’d learned with the Society, and my natural accent was Midwestern American. I’d also been shot twice in the chest, which made me think I may have been in the military.

Or a criminal.

There were other clues about who I once was, things I didn’t consciously choose but were a part of my personality nevertheless: the snarkiness to my superiors, the fact that I believed in God despite disobeying his most important commandments on a regular basis, and my preference for dark-haired women over blondes. Oh, and I absolutely despised shellfish.

Then there were the dreams. They didn’t happen often, but when they did, they were terrifying in their vividness. They were the memories of someone who wasn’t an emotional cripple and felt everything in vibrant colors to my current dull greys.

A woman in a yellow flowered dress. Laughing. A child, a girl, six years old, playing in a backyard.

Computer screens, lots of computer screens. The Karma Corporation logo.

Gunfire in a desert.

Kissing a dark-haired, brown-skinned woman, passionately, in the shower.

A man with a shaved head in a business suit, throwing me around the middle of my study.

Blood. Screams. Emptiness.

The dreams were a natural part of the conditioning process that removed Letters’ memories. Every one of us suffered them, and the worst part was we didn’t know if they were clues to our past or not. One of us, H, had been obsessed with a man he believed to have been his brother, only to commit suicide when he found out that he’d been thinking of an Eighties movie star the entire time. The people in my dreams were real, though. They had to be.

“Someday I’m going to find out who the fuck you are,” I said to my reflection. “I’ve got people out there who loved me.”

But would they love who I’d become? That was a question with no answer.

Not yet, anyway.

Seconds later, I heard a knocking at my door. I reached over for the gun on my dresser. I kept one behind the toilet, on the dresser, and underneath my bedroom pillow in case of an ambush. I made sure I was never outside of reaching distance of a weapon.

Clambering around, I let my towel fall to the ground and walked to the side of the door. Normally, the kind of people I dealt with didn’t knock, but they might also have been checking to see if anyone was inside.

Risking a look through the peephole, I saw a small olive-skinned Hispanic woman in her late twenties. She had midnight-black hair tied up in a ponytail, several piercings, and a jean jacket over a black halter top. The woman was wearing a black leather miniskirt over black pantyhose. A silver laptop bag with a vampire Hello Kitty design sewn into it was over her right shoulder.

“Hey, G-man, let me in.”

“Marissa.” I unlocked the door and undid the chain to let her in. I put my gun down on the side of the kitchenette table by the door. “You know, the goth look died out in the nineties.”

“How would you know?” Marissa said, walking in. “You don’t remember anything beyond the last five years.”

“Low blow.”

Marissa’s eyes widened as she took stock of my nakedness. “Uh, could you—”

I closed the door behind her before locking it up. “Put on my clothes?”

Marissa looked me up and down before smiling. “I didn’t say that.”

Marissa Sanchez was my assistant as well as my lover. Every Letter had a researcher personally assigned to help them through missions as well as serve as a source of logistical support.

Marissa had been a hacker who’d had the misfortune of combing through the Society’s files. Instead of killing her, they’d put her through a milder version of my conditioning, which had reduced her capacity for empathy as well as instilled a loyalty to the Society’s goals. Assistants tended to have a shorter life than Letters despite their lack of field work. They were considered expendable, and the slightest screw-up was grounds for termination. I wasn’t going to let that happen to her.

I gave her a passionate kiss on the lips. “Perhaps we can find a way to take advantage of my appearance.”

Marissa grinned alluringly. “What would your wife say?”

I frowned at her reference to my fake marriage. If I had a wife, it was the woman in my dreams, not the person they’d married me to at the Society. “Probably ask if she could join in or ignore us completely. S is like that.”

S and I had been assigned to live false identities as husband and wife in suburban Boston. Neither of us spent much time in our house and the marriage was mostly in name only. I say mostly because while we’d only slept together a few times, the very act of cohabitating as Letters was more intimacy than the vast majority of our kind ever achieved. If not for the fact that I had much stronger feelings for Marissa and wanted, someday, to find out if I had a family waiting for me, I might have pursued something with S.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Marissa pulled away at my statement. “You’re such a romantic.”

“You’re the one who brought her up.” I picked up the bathrobe I’d set out earlier on the bed and put it on. It was white, with the hotel’s name printed on the front lapel. “I’m surprised you’re not already on your way to Boston. Persephone indicated the issue was urgent.”

“It is. Part of the reason why I wanted to show up was to share what I’ve already found out before you left.”

“Oh?” I said, going to the kitchenette to make some coffee. I always brought my own bag of it during missions. It was illegally imported straight from Venezuela, grown on a plantation I’d once killed a drug lord on.

“It has to do with the Carnevale.”

I paused while lifting a scoop of ground coffee. “I see.”

The Carnevale was one of the few rivals the International Refugee Society had in the world of high stakes international assassination-for-hire. After World War 2, Italy’s Operation: Gladio had gathered a bunch of mafioso, killers, fascists, and psychopaths and trained them in military techniques and espionage. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Carnevale went global and became infamous for taking just about any job they were paid for—up to and including terrorism-for-hire.

Just for the “right” side.

“Maybe the Society is going to be dispatched to take those bastards down,” Marissa said, walking over to the bed and plopping herself down.

“If so, it’s because someone hired us to do it.”

“Yeah, the governments of the world.”

I gave her a “Really, do you want to have this discussion?” look. “What else do you know?”

“Y and Z are dead.”

I paused, letting that sink in. Despite how cool and detached I’d become over the past five and a half years, I was still a human being. The drugs and conditioning made it possible for me to kill without trauma, or at least to the point of crippling trauma, but they didn’t prevent me from making associations.

Friendships.

Y had been a friend of mine, as much as you could be with a man who had no more past than you. He had been a big burly black man with nine years of service to his name, as well as more compassion than any member of our little club had any right to possess.

Z? Z had been a psychopath. But a damned entertaining one. Z had never wanted anything other than to continue serving the Society until she was dead and buried, which I suppose was a dream she’d managed to realize.

Both had been good. Both had been careful.

“Well, that’s not good,” I said, not really having words anymore for the kind of grief I wanted to display but could no longer.

“Understatement of the year.”

“Yes.”

If the Carnevale was targeting our agents, then things were about to get nasty. They didn’t have access to our level of technology, but its members were strange—and this is coming from a man who once fought a cyborg who took fourteen shots to the chest and two to the face. The Carnevale’s agents were theatrical, which is my term for “bug-fuck crazy,” with some near-magical ability to get the job done despite it. Also, just because they didn’t have our level of technology didn’t mean they didn’t have some nifty toys.

“There’s something more,” Marissa said.

“Oh, this just gets better and better.”

“Delphi has summoned all of the Letters back to the home office.”

I cursed. “That just makes it so much worse.”

Strange Persephone hadn’t mentioned it. Then again, I sometimes wondered if she wouldn’t be happy for me to die in the field. More likely, though, this was a very recent development.

“Worse than war with the Carnevale?” Marissa asked.

“Delphi is a machine intelligence who monitors the entirety of the planet twenty-four seven. Snowden didn’t know the half of it when he talked about the NSA monitoring us. What scares her should scare us all. Eventually, she’s going to get sick of our crap and go Skynet.”

Marissa grimaced. “Maybe she’s a good computer.”

I arched my brow. “She’s whatever she was programmed to be and the people who programmed her are empty of anything resembling humanity.”

Like me.

“We’re the good guys, G.”

“Tell that to Martha Stephens or Thomas Jones.” They’d both been innocents. The first two but far from the last. People I’d murdered because I wanted to live and regain who I was more than I valued their lives. For a man conditioned not to feel guilt, I still regularly saw them in my dreams. Almost as often as my wife and child, or the people I thought were my wife and child. Damn, this was a deep rabbit hole.

Marissa wasn’t persuaded, though. “The International Refugee Society has to do favors for its sponsors. It’s not a good thing, but we save many more lives than we take by being there to do the dirty work the other agencies can’t or won’t.”

I’d have argued with her, but it wasn’t her fault. It was just part of the conditioning. Marissa had gone from an anarchist out to put the screws to the Man to someone who believed an illegal organization of professional killers was desperately needed for world peace. Sometimes I wondered if her attraction to me was part of her brainwashing too, but I didn’t want to think about that. If I started thinking everyone’s motivations and thoughts were controllable, there was no telling where that would lead.

“Is that all?” I said, suddenly feeling less like spending time with my lover.

Marissa looked down. “No, there’s one more thing.”

I poured her a cup of freshly brewed coffee, put two creams in it, and brought it to her. The spacious hotel suite suddenly felt smaller, and I began to feel uncomfortably hot under the thick robe. “What is it?”

Marissa looked nervous. She took the cup and slowly sipped from it, peering up at me. “I’ve found some more… stuff about that thing you wanted me to look into.”

That thing. The words made my heart skip a beat. “I see.”

“You realize if you find out who you were, they’re going to kill you.” Marissa gave me a wholly unnecessary warning about the dangers.

“Only if they find out.”

Marissa put her cup on the table beside the bed and pulled out a Society cellphone with an information jack. “You’re lucky I think you’re more important than the rules.”

I wasn’t about to tell her that it was because I’d seduced her with the intent of using her to find more information about my past. I’d done so with full knowledge I was putting her life at risk. They could, after all, just wipe my brain of the knowledge again. Marissa wouldn’t be so lucky. What I hadn’t expected was that my starvation for human affection would turn my manipulations into something real. At least, something I liked to think was real.

“Thank you,” I said, removing the information jack and plugging it into my head. The phone had been wiped of all connection to the Society’s network, leaving it an untraceable means of communication.

“It’s not much,” Marissa said, sighing. “I’m restricted by having to use disposable computers and materials I can keep from everyone else in the Society.”

“You hacked Delphi. You’re the Aztec Goddess of Computers.”

“My name would be Marissaleetlolrofl.”

I smirked.

What popped up before my eyes was a collection of tax records related to Karma Corporation. A holographic white K in the middle of a green square hung above a list of names, dates, locations, and numbers. One of those names was highlighted: Marcus Thomas Gordon. An image appeared of a middle-aged man, slightly on the pudgy side, but looking like he might have once been a great deal more intimidating. He had a kindly face which I wish I could have said evoked an emotional response. Still, there were similarities in our features that made me think that, yes, this could be my father.

“Were you able to find anything more about this man?” I asked.

“No,” Marissa said. “It’s like he’s a ghost. All those files were deleted. They were just backed up in a subdirectory of a subdirectory of a data-cloud.”

Another flaw of modern technology. “I’m sure we could find out more on the ground. Unfortunately, that’s not possible.”

“No.”

I sucked in my breath and removed the jack from my head. “This is more than I’ve had in five years. It gives me hope. Thank you.”

“Do you want me to continue probing?”

“Do not unnecessarily endanger yourself.” I poured myself a cup of coffee, black, and drank it down quickly.

“It’s a bit late for that.”

“You’re right.” I walked back and sat down beside her before putting my hand to the side of her head. I whispered into her ear. “Keep working on it.” I wouldn’t allow Marissa to come to harm, but I couldn’t let her stop, either. This was too important.

Marissa responded by giving me another kiss and pulling me down onto the bed.