Tasìa put a finger up in a bid for the Serbian assassin to be patient and stay put as she walked away towards her bike.

Silvia held her arms together along the top of her baby bump and she rubbed at her elbows with nervous thumbs as she stretched her neck to see what Tasìa was doing.

The assassin's jowls and eyes lowered in a hangdog expression.

It reminded Tasìa of a time she watched Brazil's football team losing a game one season that cost them a spot in the quarter-finals, and every player on the team as they slumped together as a group had that same expression on his face.

It was the expression of professionals at the top of their game, who had suddenly slipped, and were now at a loss to understand how they were bested.

Tasìa grabbed the two remaining beers in the pack, and she returned to the assassin.

"What are you doing," Silvia asked. Her head held down.

"Don't move from where you are," Tasìa commanded.

"I won't."

Silvia's voice was soft and that of someone who had been defeated. She could have been faking a surrender like her companion who attempted to buy time to prime an armed mini-drone, but Tasìa doubted it.

After being humiliated in battle, there is no fight left in this one.

As Tasìa eyed the tattoo once more, she also suspected that the assassin had been humiliated into submission long before this evening's course of events.

When Tasìa popped open a bottle behind her, Silvia winced. She did not brave to peer back.

She has known a great deal of humiliation in her life. Tasìa thought as she observed the reaction.

"Hold your hand out," Tasìa asked.

Silvia complied. Tasìa placed the bottle against the woman's palms. Silvia grasped it and pulled it to her ribs. She stared at it like a zoned-out hippie with her eyes set upon a flower.

She can't be faking, can she? There is something quite off about her.

"Silvia. There are many ways you could kill a person with a bottle like that, but I trust you understand I am never off my guard, and my speed and accuracy are ranked to the point of ridiculous."

Silvia raised her eyes stressed against the frown lines of her forehead. The light reflected off of her pupils shimmered erie for a moment.

"We, the team, were under the impression your abilities were still suppressed and nowhere near being fully optimized, as of yet," the assassin admitted.

Volunteered all too easily. Is there a game being played here?

"The treatment cycle was still in an early phase. You had not even been reassigned."

Tasìa inspected the vulnerable appearing assassin once more.

If the tattoo didn't confirm the hit squad came from the same group performing experiments on her, that remark certainly did.

Tasìa eyed her skeptically.

"Did they not show you video feed from my escape from the IMCQ prison complex?"

Silvia dropped her eyes again.

"No. They did not," Silvia said as she rolled the bottle in her hands.

"Go ahead and drink it. It's yours."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Silvia's back stiffened.

"I'm pregnant. I shouldn't . . . I am thirsty. A few swallows shouldn't hurt."

With her first swallow, Silvia bowed her head in a grateful nod.

"Tasìa, may I ask you something personal?"

"Sure. Fire away."

"As you are deep in the cycle now, has your increased tolerance for intimacy been accompanied by a strong propensity for violence?"

Tasìa froze in place as she stared back at the assassin.

"Is that the reason they are trying to kill me? They think I'm a walking time bomb ready to shoot the shit out of everything?"

Silvia shrugged as she fidgeted with the bottle.

"I can only hazard to guess the reason, but they do believe all violence needs to be controlled and when necessary, to serve a purpose towards a greater good."

Tasìa shook her head, feeling bewildered. She decided to get on with her next task. She inspected Silvia's clothing but found nothing unusually weapons-grade about any of the items.

As she gathered the clothes in a pile, Tasìa recalled a spy movie she loved as a kid. It featured a Central European femme fatale as the heroine. She hid a garrot in the underwiring of her bra, and she used it to brutally kill a minister.

After feeling through the niches of all of Silvia's items of clothes, Tasìa concluded that these were just plain clothes. Plain being the operative word.

Though she was a beauty, there was likely nothing glamorous in the life of this Balkan-born assassin, in Tasìa's estimation. The way she held herself, bored but stiff, she lived the life of a functionary.

Tasìa glanced at it again. Two wolves devouring Christ. What was its purpose?

When Tasìa explored Hugo Brassi's suite back at the prison office complex, Tasìa got a certain orthidoxical vibe from him and the cryptic and unnamed organization whose decorative effects provided his office with an onerous ambiance.

Tasìa considered this hunch with a stern grimace.

She isn't a ranking member of that society. This woman is their property.

They had already done to her what they planned to do to Tasìa. She rose to her feet. Before returning the clothes, Tasìa had another hunch she needed to check.

"Silvia, don't be alarmed. Could you standstill as I check your eyes?"

Silvia threw her a long, rogue's smile. It came across as highly affectatious.

"Do you really need to ask? You have the gun."

Tasìa chuckled. There was a reason Tasìa asked her ahead of time. This was an assassin. Assassins have reflexes.

Tasìa approached with slow and deliberate movement with her pin-light in hand. She inched the light along the white of Silvia's left eye.

Silvia's tight smile then relaxed in a more natural-appearing thin archer's bow. The woman sighed.

Did she know? Is she feigning in the hope of throwing me off, or genuinely giving up her pretenses?

Tasìa clenched her gut and held her breath once more. She switched the pin light to a soft focus and steadied the angle of the beam of light like a careful obstetrician.

Silvia's eyes were a hazel that blended into a deep brown on the ends. So pretty, Tasìa nudged herself not to get caught up in aesthetic appreciation.

As she reversed the motion the light-pen traveled, a flicker occurred.

There. She saw what she was searching for. It was just as she read in Demona Heloïste's neoPalm PAM days earlier, as she recovered from her abdominal wound.

Tasìa found a faint cloudiness in Silvia's pupils. In her enhanced vision, Tasia pierced through the cloudiness. At a tighter magnification, it became defined in an overlap of pointed crystal matrices.

One set grew bright, and from the nearest sets the pattern spread to affect the furthest ones away from it. The other sets responded in kind.

Though ratios of crystalline structures were in the place of numbers, Tasìa could read the logarithms of matrix calculation as they occurred.

She smiled at the revelation.

These matrices were no more complicated than the ones she ciphered by hand in her pre-calculus classes, but the complexity they built with each move was mesmerizing.

Tasìa steadied herself away by a few feet as she took her eyes away from what her extended senses revealed.

She gave the assassin a relaxed smile.

"Silvia, when I say this, don't get the idea that I am in any way distracted."

Silvia's voice was as flat as a Serbian could possibly sound.

"I am not going to try to kill you Tasìa del Alma-Gris. What is it you wish to say?"

"Your eyes, what is occurring there is utterly beautiful. Is that how they keep your condition under control? And keep you under some kind of hypnagogic trance?"

Silvia raised her chin.

"So, you know?"

"Silvia, do you remember what your life was like before they threw you into Ward Ocho?"

Sylvia looked away to the stars in the night sky. Her face beamed.

"Before I became Manifest? That I do. I was an astronaut."