It was raining when Evie emerged from the pod the next morning. She had started to think that it would always be raining, but this morning was particularly bad. The thick canopy above protected her from the worst of it, but large droplets slipped through, bursting on her head and shoulders.

Amelia drifted out of the pod after Evie. “Beautiful weather, as always,” she huffed, floating over to hover above Evie and shield her from the dripping water.

“Come on, Hat,” Evie called over her shoulder. The disgruntled pigeon waddled across the floor of the pod and stared forlornly out at them, blinking sleep from his swollen little eyes. He shook his head, mumbled some unintelligible profanities, and flew to Evie’s shoulder. As soon as he landed, Evie grabbed onto Amelia and let her pull them into the air.

It was still dark, but the sound of birdsong was beginning to fill the branches, indicating dawn was not far off. The plan today was to spend a few hours in Shlordal so that Hat could get some footage of Evie and her weapon together before heading to Beek, the settlement where the informant Inor lived, for their rendezvous. They had decided Shlordal would be the primary setting used in Evie’s episodes. Ude would know they were nearby, but there were dozens of potential targets in Shlordal and its surrounding cities. Hopefully that would keep Ude from becoming too concerned.

Within minutes, Hat was sound asleep on Evie’s shoulder, snoring softly into her ear. Evie had to fight to keep her own eyes open. A soft breeze blew over them as Amelia floated swiftly through the trees, and the sound of irregular drops hitting the umbrella’s canopy was a tempting lullaby. Evie’s eyes had just started to droop when, without warning, Amelia jerked them backwards and off to the side. Evie just managed to keep her grip on Amelia’s handle, but Hat went flying off her shoulder with an indignant squawk. She caught him with her free hand, snatching the pigeon to her chest as Amelia yanked them onto a low-hanging branch and pushed them back against the tree’s trunk.

“Amelia, what the-“

“Be quiet,” hissed the umbrella, furling herself as soon as it was clear Evie wasn’t going to go pitching out of the tree. Her voice was low and held none of its usual attitude. Evie froze.

For a moment they waited in silence, pressed to the tree’s interwoven trunk. Hat was still footballed against Evie’s chest, but he wiggled out of her grip and hopped silently to a higher branch, out of the way. The sound of wet, sucking footsteps reached Evie’s ears, followed by a familiar scent. Honrad. Pressing her head back into the tree, Evie inwardly berated herself. For the last two days, the woods had been devoid of any signs of intelligent life, save for the trains. She had stupidly begun to think of the forests as safe, and let her guard down. Thankfully, Amelia hadn’t been so thick headed.

Wearily, she peeked down at the forest floor below. A lone Honrad ambled towards them, moving in the opposite direction they had been. It made no effort to avoid the mud. All four of its limbs were covered in gray, elbow length booties. The only other thing it wore was a shoulder bag slung over its back. Evie watched its head scan back and forth. Its small, beady eyes squinted at the treetops, blinking away droplets of rain that ran down its bald head. Looking for them.

The Honrad slunk below, passing by their tree without paying it any additional attention. Its hands and feet made sucking, squelching sounds every time it pulled them from the muck covered ground. Right as Evie hoped it would just continue on its way, the Honrad stopped. It turned slowly back towards them, only about twenty feet away. The trunk’s radius concealed Evie somewhat, but she was much more exposed than she would have liked. However, she knew how sensitive the Honrad were to movement, so she remained frozen in place. Next to her, Amelia shifted ever so slightly in her grip, and she tightened her fingers around the umbrella’s handle.

The Honrad sat back on its hind legs. It slipped its front arms from their booties, and swung the bag around so it could rummage in a large, open pocket stitched onto the bag's front. It pulled out a tablet and a cylindrical device about the size of a small flashlight. The Honrad fiddled with the tablet, then held the cylinder to one eye, squeezing the other tightly shut in concentration. Light glinted off of the lens at the cylinder’s end. It raised the device, slowly, until the end pointed directly towards Evie. A bright flash cut that through the murky dawn, and she realized it was taking a photo.

Evie threw herself off the branch. Amelia opened above her, breaking her fall just enough to prevent injury. The creature below them didn’t have time to react before she slammed into it, both her feet making hard contact with its chest. It yelped in surprise as it tumbled backwards under Evie, throwing its arms out and sending the cylinder and tablet spinning away. Evie landed on top of the Honrad and spun Amelia around, preparing for a lethal thrust through its heart.

Amelia and Evie had practiced this move many times. Amelia closed as Evie spun her, but at the last minute the umbrella yanked herself out of Evie’s hand. Evie hesitated, looking sharply over her shoulder at the umbrella, and the Honrad almost bucked her off. It opened its mouth and cried out, but Evie lunged forward and slammed its face to the side and down under the mud. Its cry cut off, muffled to a frantic gurgle as she bore down as hard as she could, suffocating it beneath the muck.

The Honrad’s frantic thrashing seemed to go on forever. She did her best to pin the creature’s flailing limbs, but couldn’t spare her hands and risk it completing its cry for help. She gritted her teeth as blunt claws raked along her sides and legs, not sharp enough to cut through fabric or skin, but hard enough to leave bruises. Finally, after an eternity, it fell still. Evie waited another minute to be sure, then cautiously let go with one hand to check its pulse. Nothing. She fell back, painting and trying to clean her hands on her mud-stained pants, staring at the dead Honrad. At the second being she had ever killed.

As her adrenalin slowly receded, she felt herself beginning to shake. This was no golem. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the limp figure, its face still pressed into the mud where she had left it. It’s going to be fine. Evie thought to herself, fighting to keep her breathing from turning into hyperventilation. They’ll bring it back. It’s not dead, not permanently. She shut her eyes and forced herself to take long, controlled breaths. Slowly, her pulse returned to normal. This was what she was here to do. She couldn’t afford to let herself fall to pieces every time she had to take a life.

“Amelia, what the fuck was that?” Evie said, turning on the Umbrella.

Amelia floated a few feet away, watching. “I thought a big, obvious stab wound through its chest might not be the best approach, seeing as we’re trying to avoid notice before the release of the first episode.”

Evie opened her mouth to snap back at the umbrella, then paused. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. Amelia was right. A wound like that would have been impossible to pass off as an accident. The Honrad were members of the Understanding. Violence outside of the Assassination Simulation was prohibited, and enforced by... Evie glanced around. It only took her a moment to spot a few pigeons nestled onto a nearby branch, watching. If this Honrad had been killed by another of its kind, the pigeons would report it. An unreported murder was as good as an announcement that there was an assassin nearby.

Moaning, Evie pressed her head into her filthy hands and tried to think clearly. “It’s going to remember it got attacked. Even if we can make it look like an accident…”

“Maybe,” said Hat, fluttering down to land on Amelia’s handle, looking distastefully at Evie’s soiled clothing. “But remember how groggy you get after a trip through a Resurrection Chamber? I can’t imagine recovering from actually being dead improves that experience. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it won’t remember the last few seconds. At the very least, if this looks like an accident, we’ll have a few additional hours before everyone knows we’re here.”

Evie nodded slowly, rocking back on her heels to take a seat on a root. “How did it find us?!” she said, staring glumly at the limp figure before her.

“I’m not convinced it did,” said Amelia slowly. “Look at its tablet.”

Evie looked and saw the device lodged in the mud nearby, its still glowing screen face up. She picked herself up, wincing at the bruises she could already feel forming along her sides, and walked over to fish it out. The moisture hadn’t damaged it, and on the display was a photo of a chestnut brown bird, its plumage accented with streaks of iridescent green and purple. The bird sat on a half-completed nest, inserting a twig into the tangle.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Look up,” said Amelia.

Evie looked. It took her a moment to find the spot, several branches above where she had been hiding. The bird was gone, no doubt scared off by the commotion, but the nest was the same.

“You’re telling me… the Honrad was… birding??” Evie asked in disbelief.

“So it appears,” droned the umbrella.

Evie threw her head back and groaned. The Honrad probably hadn’t had a clue she was there. If she had just stayed concealed, no one would have been the wiser.

“Well, the good news is that there’s a silver lining to this fiasco,” said Hat. “We no longer need to worry about the first episode. This definitely sets the tone we’re going for.”

“What tone is that?” muttered Evie, exasperated. “That I’m a hot-headed idiot who doesn’t think things through?”

“Sounds right,” said Amelia.

Hat ignored them both. “I think I can frame it to look intentional. Like you were stalking… whoever this is. It’ll be a great red herring! But right now, we need to make this look like an accident.”

“And maybe check the area for more Honrad,” Amelia added.

Evie swore under her breath. She had been so flustered by having to kill one Honrad that she had forgotten about the possibility of others. She had to pull it together. “Amelia, do that now. As quickly as you can, if there are any other Honrad within half a mile, I want to know. Go.” Amelia zipped away without another word, forcing Hat to launch himself ungracefully from her handle. He flew down and landed on Evie’s mud-spattered shoulder, picking his feet up one by one in disgust before falling still as he looked into Evie’s stony face.

“You did good, kid,” he whispered, ignoring the mud and pressing himself to her neck. Beneath her mask, Evie shut her eyes, taking comfort from the soft feathers against her skin. “You didn’t have a choice. It would have been stupid to just hope that it hadn’t seen us.”

Evie nodded and reached up to give the bird’s head a grateful scratch.

Amelia found two other groups of Honrad nearby, both engaged in the search for more birds. Luckily, neither group was close or headed in their direction. The umbrella continued to patrol as Evie searched for and found a recently fallen branch. With difficulty, she hauled it back to where the Honrad’s body lay.

Evie examined the creature, trying to decide how to pose it convincingly beneath the branch. She paused when her eyes fell on the Honrad’s bag. It was sturdy and looked waterproof. She could use a bag like that, but taking it would make the scene more suspicious than it already was. It wouldn’t hurt to have a look inside though, she decided.

The bag was mostly full of food. The Honrad had come prepared to eat lunch in the forest and had packed several Tupperware-like containers. Beneath them was a large, folded tarp. A picnic blanket? As Evie carefully repacked the items, her hand brushed the open pocket at its front. The pocket where the creature had pulled the tablet and cylinder from. It wasn’t empty. She sealed the main part of the bag, then reached into the front and pulled out a small box and a medium-sized sack. The sack was full of birdseed, but the box was more interesting. It contained a stack of six transparent, nickel-sized discs, each about an eighth of an inch thick. They were flexible, and backed with what felt like pieces of cardstock, like stickers. When Evie held them up to the dim light and squinted, she could just make out the subtle circuitry running through them.

“I think we can risk keeping these,” she said. “The pocket’s open, they could easily have fallen out. I want to ask Inor what they are.”

“And the seeds,” said Hat sternly. “You, uh, never know when those might come in handy.”

Evie rolled her eyes but pocketed the two items. She spent a few minutes arranging the body underneath the branch until she thought it looked convincing. The muddy ground around them held no footprints, and the thick droplets of rain falling through the canopy had already washed away all other evidence of the scuffle. She dropped the tablet next to the body where it might have fallen, and went to retrieve the cylinder, taking a moment to examine it. She knew it could take photos, but it was also a magnifying lens, like half of a set of binoculars. A monocular? If she hadn’t figured out how to use her mask to see over long distances, she might have been tempted to keep it. After a hesitation, she dropped the monocular into the mud near the tablet.

“What if no one finds the body?” Evie asked Hat as she surveyed her work.

“They’ll find it. If someone doesn’t stumble across it, eventually they’ll notice he or she’s missing and track their tablet,” Hat reassured her, “but if it’ll make you feel better, we can swing by here tomorrow and make sure they’re gone.”

Evie took a deep breath. There was nothing else she could do. Hopefully, the scene was convincing, and the creature wouldn’t remember what had happened. Suddenly, Evie became acutely aware of her drenched, muddy clothing. She looked down at her fingertips, which were puckering as if she had spent too long in a bathtub.

“Can you let Amelia know we’re ready to go?” she asked the producer. “Do we have time to go back to the pod before we meet with Inor? I want to clean up and change into some dry clothing.”

“Yes,” replied Hat. “We can grab footage in Shlordal tomorrow. I’m not sure how much first impressions matter to the Honrad, but in your current state, I don’t know if she’d let you into the house.”

“I don’t fucking get it,” Hat grumped for the hundredth time as he and Evie watched another group of Honrad pass beneath them, leaving the settlement of Beek and heading into the forest. They all carried bags, and some were already scanning the treetops with their monocular. Evie quickly ducked out of sight as one of the Honrad swung their lens in her direction.

Beek was small, containing only around fifty to sixty moderately sized homes, so it should have been simple to locate house number twenty-eight. However, birding was apparently the hot thing to do on a Honrad Saturday, and the number of individuals coming and going complicated their search. Finally, after Evie realized they were at risk of missing the meeting time, she had relented and let Amelia go locate the house by herself.

The number of Honrad in the forest only increased as the glowing section of storm clouds that hid the sun grew higher in the sky. By the time Evie emerged from the pod for a second time, enjoying what would be a temporary state of dryness, it felt like the creatures were everywhere. There were no roads or trails through the forest. The Honrad plodded straight through the mud in their booties, guided by no logic or reason Evie could make out, completely undeterred by the abysmal weather. Thankfully, once Evie started paying attention, she could usually hear the creatures’ footsteps, or catch a whiff of their smell before they came into view. It gave her, Hat and Amelia just enough time to hide.

It took twice as long as Evie had been expecting to reach the settlement of Beek. As they got closer, they weren’t able to go more than a quarter mile without encountering Honrad, some traveling alone, others in groups. They had left the pod with what Evie thought was an abundance of time to spare, but by the time they arrived and realized that locating the right house wouldn’t be a walk in the park either, she had started to worry.

“Found it,” said a familiar voice above them. Evie looked up to see Amelia drifting down to them, hugging the tree’s trunk. “It’s not far. We should move now, though. It’s still lunch time, and a lot of the Honrad are distracted by stuffing their faces. If we wait too long, they’ll start toddling around again.”

Evie nodded and let Amelia pull them up and through a slight break in the interwoven canopy. The second they cleared the branches, rain assaulted them from every angle, only moderately deterred by the umbrella. Up this high, even with the mask, Evie could barely see ten feet in front of her. She tried, unsuccessfully, to take solace in the fact that the poor visibility worked both ways as the moisture wormed its way through her clothing for a second time.

Thankfully, it was only a minute before Amelia dropped back down to the ground. Squinting around, Evie made out that they were in a backyard. She hurried to the back of the home, pressing herself to a section where she wouldn’t be visible from the door or windows.

“You’re sure this is the right house?” she asked Amelia, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the pounding rain.

“Yes. But I’ll go double check,” replied the umbrella. She closed and shot back into the air, abandoning Evie and Hat to the mercies of the deluge falling from the sky. Hat shrieked and scrambled down Evie’s shirt front, shoving himself inside the front flap of her jacket. Evie wrapped the garment tightly around him, miserably fuming at the touchy umbrella, even though double checking the address was probably a good idea.

A moment later Amelia reappeared, opening above them with a pop. “It’s the right house!” she announced cheerfully. “Oh my. You look like a drowned rat. I’m so glad you took the time to change clothing.”

Evie gritted her teeth and steadfastly remained silent. They waited, Amelia quietly counting off the minutes as they ticked by. Finally, the clock rolled over to hour fifteen, and Evie moved to the door at the back of the house. Standing next to it, she realized how short it was, only just taller than her. She raised her hand and knocked.

For an uncomfortably long time, there was no response. Evie knocked again, and was preparing to do so a third time, when finally she heard footsteps approaching. They stopped, and the door opened inward, revealing a Honrad.

Inor was the size of a small human, but bent double on all fours. Her head hovered around Evie’s waist, and she had to crane her neck to look up at Evie, examining her with small, piercing eyes. For a moment, those eyes held a flicker of surprise, but then they narrowed into a carefully neutral expression. She was hard to look at. The color of the Honrad’s skin and the way it sagged loosely off the creature’s body made it look ill, and this close, the smell was overwhelmingly strong. Evie was grateful for the mask, which hid her grimace of disgust.

“Assassin,” Inor said in Common, her voice devoid of expression. She glanced around, checking for watching eyes, then gestured Evie through the door.