I couldn’t sleep.

The encounter with Darin and Koch was feeling like more and more of a mistake the further it drew in the rear-view mirror. I shouldn’t have shown my hand in such a blatant way. I was hoping that Koch’s irrationality would lead to a stronger divide between him and Darin, but he made his mind up and concluded that I was the one to blame for everything, not Durandia.

Regret was the emotion I always felt the most. Sadness, anger, happiness, joy – those were all secondary to regret. I spent a lot of my free time worrying about what I could have done differently, imagining scenarios where everyone acted exactly as I predicted and all of my plans were perfect in conception and execution.

It was the rawest expression of my toxic egotism. Life would be so much easier if everyone did what I wanted them to! Maria’s spoilt character was bleeding into my own personality, maybe that was why I adapted so naturally to being her once I arrived at the academy.

The biggest problem in my life was the slow removal of my trump cards. People around me were starting to figure me out, solve the puzzle, and that meant it was more difficult to manipulate them. The circumstances became more pressing and my identity became harder to keep under wraps.

Durandia had chained me to a rock and started picking out my innards with a flock of buzzards. I was repeating the same mistake over and over, unable to change course. I stared at the ceiling and felt the anxiety gnawing at me. It was maddening. What the hell was Welt doing while I was stuck here?

The sound was so quiet that I almost missed it, but a piece of paper was slid beneath my door. I turned to face it, hopping out of bed and trying to unlock it before the culprit got away. Unfortunately, they were long gone. I scowled and picked it up. It was a single scrap of paper folded in two, and marked with messy handwriting.

“I have Samantha – meet me by the workshed.”

I re-read it five times until it made sense.

There was that sinking feeling again.

I turned on autopilot and allowed it to drive my actions. I moved to the wardrobe and retrieved my gun, a pair of shoes, and a thick coat to keep the cold away. Creeping through the corridors this late at night was a good way to get collared by one of the dorm managers – but they were occupied looking out for any intruders.

I headed down to the garden using my normal route, relying entirely on the few lanterns that decorated the surrounding buildings to guide me through the darkness. It was cold for a summer night. The work shed was not usually lit during the night, but a single lantern was now hanging from the timber frame that held up the front canopy.

I drew my gun and kept it tucked into one of my pockets. My finger played with the safety as I stalked around the building in search of the person who had supposedly taken my ‘friend’ hostage. There was no sign of them inside of the shack. I moved further afield.

I saw a pair of figures, their frames silhouetted against the shimmering water of the nearby pound. As soon as my eyes locked onto them – the one on the left ignited another lantern and held it up into the air. His other hand held a pistol, pressed against the side of Samantha’s head. The distress on her face was plain as day.

“Koch,” I murmured. He was a cock alright...

“So you really did decide to come and help your friend. That’s a shock.”

Samantha closed her eyes and whispered under her breath.

“Couldn’t get your friends to come and join this plan?” I asked.

“I don’t need them for this,” he blustered, “This is between you and me, and Darin and I never saw eye-to-eye anyway.”

“He’s more reasonable than you.”

“This isn’t about Darin. I told him that we needed to take drastic action to stop you from causing any more trouble – but he’s still too stuck in the mud to threaten the staff or students.”

Koch had that madness in his eyes. Samantha’s distress was there – but there was something about this situation that I was missing. I could tell that there was an aspect to the standoff that I hadn’t considered.

“If you’re mad enough to kill, you’re mad enough to try and call the police out here. That’s what I think.”

“And you decided to stay here and not flee?”

“Darin didn’t buy it, besides, I was the one who said that we couldn’t make a difference without taking risks. This is it. The big play! I’ve been waiting my whole life to see this through.”

“Look where it brought you, holding a gun to the head of a teenage girl. Some cause that must be.”

“It’s not about the methods, it’s about the outcome.”

I scowled, “What a load of rubbish. The ‘ends justifying the means’ is a cliché that people tell themselves when they know the cause is rotten. The means inform the goals. It speaks to your values and beliefs.”

“Where do you stand saying that type of stuff after murdering my friend?”

“What do you think? I’m rotten to the core, and my achievements are seemingly never for the betterment of anyone.”

Koch was confused about that. If I was so concerned about the outcome of my actions, why was I even here? He didn’t understand my motivation, my desperate, selfish drive to carry on for one more day. I was Durandia’s tool – brought here for a violent purpose, and I would not be permitted to stand aside while the world burned.

“You’re the second damned coming of the Black Lady, I swear down on it.”

“That is merely a fairy tale, used to scare children when they’re misbehaving.”

“Then your parents would have been served well by informing you. Only the Goddess knows how a hellspawn like yourself came to be, rotten from birth and putrid in adolescence. I can see it in you.”

We were getting nowhere fast. We stared each other down under the low, yellowed light of the lantern, illuminating a small circle at the edge of the water and allowing the surrounding trees to cast long, stark shadows.

“This is your final chance to give it up. You already know that I can stop your heart with a snap of my finger.”

“I won’t relent in the face of evil!” Koch spat, “And I will not allow you to exploit my weariness once again. The moment you move those hands is the second I pull this trigger.”

Samantha opened her eyes again and looked at me. I couldn’t read what she was trying to say through her silence. This was an impossible situation to navigate. I didn’t even know what Koch wanted from me.

“Are you going to try and kill me? I don’t understand why kidnapping her will help you do that.”

“She’s just bait – to get you out here.”

“It worked. Here I am. Now tell me what you want.”

He had to hold on to Samantha, and he could not risk letting me move my hands to cast my magic either. He would have to be the one to make the first move. It was entirely possible that Koch had not considered the dilemma he found himself in. Much like me, a plan was created that ran headlong into a fundamental problem from the first second it was put into action.

“I’m going to be the one who takes care of you.”

“You think you have the balls to do that?”

The crass words shocked him. Were they really coming from the lips of a coddled noble girl? He set his brow firmly and nodded.

“I do, and I can.”

“If you let her go, I won’t do or say anything. It’ll be like this never happened.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s a good deal – right now you can’t even hope to stop me. You have to keep that gun trained on her to keep me at bay, but you can’t kill me without it.”

I was staking everything on my rhetoric, which was a bad place to be when dealing with a man who had bounded so rapidly between reason and madness over the past few days. This standoff would continue until he got bored or pulled the trigger and threw a wrench into Durandia’s plans.

The tension built and built and built. We stared at each other – doing nothing but exhaling condensed breath into the cool evening air. I was not going to kill myself because he wanted me to. He only had one gun to point. I had to stay focused on him. Stay focused. Stay focused.

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His eyes flickered to the left for the briefest of moments.

I spun around and pulled the gun from my pocket. A gunshot rang out, a flash in the night coming from behind a nearby tree. It ripped through my left thigh and made my blood scatter into the perfectly trimmed grass. While I was falling, I aimed as best I could and shot back at his compatriot, ripping through the thin wooden trunk and hitting him with the shrapnel.

He cried out in pain and fell to the ground. Koch sensed his opportunity while I tried to get back up and move with one leg. Putting pressure on my wounded leg sent a bolt of lightning up my spine.

“Son of a bitch!”

He was running at me. Koch had left Samantha lying on the ground to try and finish the job. The stress of the situation, compounded with everything else that was happening, led to what could best be described as a furious, violent outburst.

Through all of those ordeals, I tried my best to maintain my character. Keep the accent. Keep my cool. Stop my face from creasing. This was different. In that instant I could feel the furnace in my chest igniting with a white-hot flash of anger that eclipsed my good senses. Samantha was lying right there, but she didn’t factor into what I did next.

Koch was already upon me, trying to bludgeon me to death with a wooden cudgel he’d brought with him. I tucked my shoulder down and pushed him over my torso to try and flip him over my back. The sheer weight of an adult man crashing into me meant that we both ended up being wiped out and crashed onto the ground with a heavy thud as he pulled me back with him.

Samantha was witness to a messy and violent scramble as we tussled for position. He swung at me with the wooden blunt – but I kept my head out of the way and retaliated with the butt of my gun. I couldn’t get a clear shot on him, nor could I focus my senses in this state and explode an artery in his chest.

It only took one good swing to change the tide of the fight. I clattered Koch on the side of the head and disorientated him. He rolled off of me and tried to crawl away. I used my one good leg to leap after him and push him down into the dirt.

“Stupid piece of goddamn shit! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

I grabbed his cudgel and used it for my own purposes. I punctuated each word with another brutal blow, cracking bone and swelling flesh, transforming his face into an indescribable mess of shallow cuts and bloody streams.

“You could have chosen the easy way out, you stupid piece of shit!” I seethed, “I gave you every chance to get out of here, but you keep! Fucking! Wasting! It!”

Samantha was so shocked by the incredibly gory scenes that she hesitated to run in and stop me. The sounds became more gruesome by the second as I chipped away at the different layers of skin, blood and bone. Her revulsion eventually became too much to ignore.

“Maria! Maria!”

Samantha charged at me, pulling back on my shoulders and stopping me from coming down on his skull with another blow. My shirt was covered with drops of blood, staining the pristine silk. My hands and face were also marred with more bloody marks. We staggered back, away from Koch’s prone body, and fell onto the floor in a heap. My leg was crying out in agony.

I was so enraged that I lashed out at her, trying to wrestle free and continue turning his face into a piece of blood-soaked cauliflower.

“Let go of me!” I demanded.

“You’re going too far! What the heck are you doing?” she cried.

“He’s tried to kill you! He’s tried to kill me! Why are you stopping me?” I yelped.

I was flustered, covered in blood and dirt, with a look in my eye that Samantha had never seen before. I was always composed and in control. I held all the cards and kept my cool, yet here I was losing my rag and beating the guy to death with a wooden stick and bared teeth. It was the very first time that Samantha saw the ‘real’ me.

“It wasn’t loaded,” she panted, “He told me it wasn’t loaded...”

The gun that lay by his prone figure was empty. The magazine well was clear. A combination of that revelation and the pain caused me to double over and clutch my thigh. His bastard friend had ripped a large chunk of flesh out of me, and potentially fractured one of my bones.

Samantha reached over and pushed my hands away, “Let me fix it. I can fix this.”

There was a strange sensation running through the wound. Samantha activated her restorative magic, expelling a huge amount of energy to pull the separated tissues back together again. What I could see beneath the blood was my flesh being knitted back together, leaving a small scar in its wake.

“There are still fragments in there. We have to get you to a surgeon and remove them.”

I wasn’t listening. I hobbled back to my feet, still feeling the aftereffects of the bullet going through my thigh. I could tell that there was shrapnel inside, rubbing up against something it shouldn’t, but there was no time to go find a surgeon to extract each and every piece of it. We needed to leave before they came to investigate the noise.

Samantha was hot on my heels, “What’s wrong with you? Maria! I’ve never seen you do anything like that before!”

“We’re leaving.”

“Answer me! For goodness sake! You always do this, you never tell me anything!”

Maybe it was the delirium settling in after getting shot, or maybe this had been building up over the past few months as I tried to delicately navigate the secrets and truths I dispensed to Samantha and the others. I was tired of being delicate.

“Maria isn’t fucking real!” I roared on impulse.

My admission cut through the chaos like a knife. Samantha released me and stepped back. All of the anger was replaced with confusion. Samantha stared at me as if I’d grown a second head. I took a deep breath and twisted my neck to the side to try and release some of the tension.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, “What does that even mean?”

I was too deep to walk it back now. I dropped my accent fully, returning to my old American drawl.

“What do you think it means? You always kept asking me what Durandia’s other blessing was, that big secret I was keeping. Ask yourself – how do you think that a pampered, noble girl learned how to do all of this stuff without anyone finding out? It doesn’t make any sense!”

Samantha didn’t get what I was saying. She just shook her head.

“Then let me spell it out for you. Maria isn’t real, she never was. All of that history and meaning, it was never real. Maria isn’t real. She’s isn’t real!”

“Y-You’re standing right in front of me!”

I pointed to Koch’s body, “This! This is what Durandia brought me here to do! She wanted a killer – so she found one. Took my mind and threw me into a convenient puppet she had ready, just for me.”

Samantha finally connected all of the dots. The things I told her, the way I behaved, and my cynical perspective on Durandia’s actions.

“You’re... there’s no way that’s true. You’re madder than a bag of cats right now!”

She continued to chase me up the garden until we reached the greenhouse. I could hear voices moving back the way we came, presumably some of the men watching the wall were spreading the news.

“You have to explain this to me. I don’t get what you’re on about!” Samantha pleaded.

“I already told you,” I said, slipping back into my high-class accent, “Durandia brought me here. I’m not a thirteen-year-old girl, far from it.”

“Who are you supposed to be?”

I glanced at her, “Dead.”

She paused.

“I’m supposed to be dead. I died. I got shot, gunned down, whatever you want to call it. That was why she snatched my soul and brought me here – so I could do some good for once before she gets tired of playing with me.”

“She wouldn’t do something that horrible.”

“I’m her sacrificial lamb. Once this is all over with, she’ll polish me off and tie up all those loose ends. Why the hell do you think I spent so much time and effort trying to keep you and the others out of the way? I don’t want to drag you into this!”

Samantha bit her bottom lip; “So... that was the truth. You really meant all of that?”

“Don’t act like there’s something redeemable here, Sam. I only did that because of my stupid pride, thinking that I could earn some redemption for doing the bare minimum. It’s a little too late to worry about that after I spent two decades killing people for money.”

I kicked the ground with my good leg and turned away, looking up to the cloudy sky.

“Is that what you want to hear, you goddamn bitch? I admit it! This is on me. It’s all on me for believing that there was a second chance buried here somewhere. What the hell was I doing?”

She was listening. She had to be.

“Maria, you have to calm down, you’re losing it.”

Samantha was right. All of this was stupid. I’d just spilled the big secret that I was trying to keep from her all this time, and brutally murdered a man she felt some small sympathy for while I was at it. He deserved it for trying to kill me – but she didn’t see it that way. His honourable concessions to keeping her safe swayed her heart and fermented a bitter reaction.

“I’m leaving. I’m going to find Welt and feed him a bullet.”

I was done playing games. I’d lost sight of what made me an effective assassin in the first place. This wasn’t about keeping up appearances or maintaining ‘Maria’s’ quality of life. She was a disguise, just another set of clothing I’d stolen to blend in like all the rest. I needed guns, ammo, and information about where he was hiding, and I didn’t care who I had to go through to get to him.

Samantha chased after me, “Wait – don’t go without me!”

“You need to go home.”

She skidded to a halt, “Go home? I thought we were meant to do this together. That’s what the Goddess said!”

I paused and kept my voice low, “Do you think it’s right that Durandia is dragging you into this, anointing you as a saviour, even when it’s this dangerous?”

“How is that any different to you?” she sniped back.

“I told you. I’m already damned. Violence is the language I speak best. I can’t get mad about it when the gun is pointed at me in retaliation. She chose me because she understood what type of person I am. How is it fair to drag you, or Max, or Claude, or Adrian into this?”

Samantha took a straightforward approach in response.

“She didn’t cause all of these things to happen. Didn’t she... ‘reincarnate’ you because she wants to stop it?”

I leaned against the outside wall of the building and took a moment to rest; “Sorry – but when she gets kids involved, I can only think that the outcome is going to be bad news.”

“We don’t have a choice. Whatever this trouble is, it’s going to run over all of us like a rolling boulder. We can’t stand back and let it happen because the chaos Welt’s looking for won’t be contained to one place.”

“That sounds like something I’d say.”

She crossed her arms, “I think you did once before, or maybe not - either way – you’ve been a teacher to me in many senses.”

I frowned, “You should have picked a better teacher.”

“You’re not running away from me this time. We’re in this together. That’s what she told me to do.”

All the anger and worry, and facing the cold reality of what it was like to live in reality. Was that even worth the energy wasted on it? This wasn’t ‘reality’ at all. At no point during my time in this world did it follow the goddamn rules. I was a goddamn action hero – blasting through hordes of bad guys with a pair of pistols, dismantling wide-reaching conspiracies with my wits and skill.

I stared at Samantha and she tilted her head to one side, wondering what I was thinking. Bringing her along... she was the main protagonist. She had plot armour. She could walk into a dangerous situation and come out smelling like daisies as long as we didn’t do anything too stupid.

Was I going about this the wrong way the entire time? Samantha was probably going to be essential to whatever hare-brained scheme Durandia had created by peering into the future. I reconsidered my previous harsh words.

“You’re willing to go along with this, knowing that I’m a cold-blooded murderer? Knowing that I’ve been lying to you about my identity this entire time, since the first day we met?”

Samantha didn’t hesitate in her assessment. She spoke in the only way she knew how, earnestly and without restraint.

“Nobody is perfect. I don’t know how I feel about the story you’ve told me – but until now you’ve always done right by me. Choosing between that and letting Welt do what he likes, the choice is pretty easy to make.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose; “Fine. You can tag along, but the moment we get put into a situation where you have to pick your own safety or mine, you throw me to the wolves the first chance you get.”

Samantha rolled her eyes, “And you wonder why I keep judging your character positively.”

“It’s called ‘self-loathing,’ not selflessness,” I replied.

We needed to get out of here.