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Talon prepared me for this.
Feelings are a weakness, they said. They will be used against you, against Talon.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised they were right. Feelings are a lie. They are chemicals in your body, in your brain, as changeable as the weather. One minute you are so in love with someone, and the next minute you feel nothing for them, and the things you did while you were high on those false chemicals seem insane—because they are insane.
I am not insane anymore, thanks to Talon. I am more powerful than any insane person who is a slave to their own chemicals. Now, I use people’s chemicals against them. I use my body to make those weaklings feel things for me. They fall to their knees before me, salivating like dogs, they are practically begging me to kill them. It’s pathetic.
I will never be that pathetic. I will never let anyone make me a slave to my own chemicals like I once was, and I will eliminate anyone who is a threat to me and a threat to the organisation that saved me.
This is why I must kill Tracer.
I have been waiting for her all day. Spiders are patient, they don’t go running after their prey: they set the perfect trap and wait. I have the perfect trap waiting for her to return home to: I am on the opposite balcony to her flat, Widow’s Kiss poised, eyes trained through the sight.
I am far enough that she won’t see me before it’s too late, but close enough to hear her singing on the way up to that horrible little hovel she lives in. She’s singing out of tune, it disgusts me. I hear the rustle of grocery bags, and jingle of her keys as she fits them in the lock. I can see her in my mind’s eye in their stairwell: waving in cheerful greeting to her neighbours, bouncing up the stairs like a child, smiling to herself like a fool.
I wonder what she’s wearing. It’s important I think of that: it will affect how I kill her. She sometimes wears caps—if she’s wearing one today, I hope her clothes are tight. If they are, I will shoot her just above that damn Chronal device of hers, right in the heart.
I find myself preferring that option; it has a certain poetry to it. I smile, imagining it.
When she opens the door, she’s not wearing a hat. Her messy hair pokes in all directions and her athletic clothes cling to her body. Through my sight, I watch her put down her groceries, take her phone and her wallet out of her pocket, and then spend several seconds dancing in her living room to the sound of her own terrible singing.
I have to look away from the sight for a moment, disgusted. Sometimes, I can’t believe this woman.
Like the fool she is, she doesn’t draw her blinds. It’s almost like she wants me to kill her. I watch her put away her groceries in the kitchen, turn on her sound system so she’s playing that awful song she was singing—at least it’s in tune this time—and then spend a few minutes fighting with her hair in the mirror. In the end, she makes a face at her reflection and gives up.
My rifle focuses and refocuses every time she moves. I could have shot her a thousand times already, but it must be the perfect shot. When I kill Tracer, it will be like killing my pathetic ex-husband: I will remember this bullet forever. It must be a beautiful kill.
Tracer is everything except beautiful. She is ridiculous. Cooking her dinner, she puts that damn song on repeat and sings into a salt-shaker. She blinks to the opposite side of the kitchen and sings the man’s part to herself, an then blinks back and sings the woman’s part. It is almost a crime that someone this embarrassing has lived for this long.
She can’t cook, either: she just puts everything in the deep fryer and fries all her would-be fresh food into oblivion. When she eats, though, she makes noises—indulgent noises, with her eyes rolling from the pleasure—like she’s never eaten anything so delicious. It makes me uncomfortable to hear them. I almost shoot her right then to make her stop.
Afterwards, she drops her dishes in the sink without washing them, and disappears out of sight down her narrow hallway.
I curse for a moment—perhaps I have missed my chance!—but then I hear the shower and see her open the small window of her bathroom to a gust of steam. I have to move to a slightly different position to see in.
I reposition just in time to see her unbuckle her Chronal Accelerator and slide it down to her stomach so she can unthread her arms from her jacket. My lips part: soon I will have a direct sight on her naked chest: the perfect shot.
She isn’t facing me yet, though. I watch as she pulls her skivvy over her head and unclasps her bra, dropping it somewhere on the floor. I can’t see her legs, but I can see the movement she makes as she steps out of her pants and then slides the Accelerator but up her torso again. Her back is slender; I can see every notch in her spine. I could paralyse her by shooting any of them.
I don’t want that, though. I want more.
“Turn towards me, chérie,” I find myself whispering. “Show me where your heart is…”
As if she’s heard me, she does, at least partially. She turns sideways, stretching and yawning as she steps under the water. I can see her breasts, small and firm against her ribcage, nipples taut from the cold evening air through the window. I can count each rib on her fragile body as she stretches. Her skin looks so soft, so vulnerable. She’s so small and so slender I could probably shoot her almost anywhere and kill her. My eyes explore her body, considering the organs under each part of it that would be destroyed if I shot her there. I can feel my own heartbeat.
She washes her hair first, sculpting it into different shapes with the shampoo and then giggling at herself. Her little breasts bounce as she giggles. Then she washes her face, shaves several parts of her, and then she’s got her face upturned to the warm water as it runs over her, eyes closed.
I think for a moment she’s probably just enjoying the heat… and then I realised her hands are between her thighs where I can’t see them.
I take a sharp breath, looking away from the sight for a moment. Then, I am immediately disgusted with myself. I am a grown woman, not a child. I weaponise sexuality, how absolutely pathetic that I should be embarrassed by any display of it! I force myself to look through the sight again.
She hasn’t stopped. I can’t see below her waist, but I can see the muscles in her arms working. I can see her curling inwards towards her hands, bending outwards and arching her back… I hope she keeps going, because the further back her neck is, the heavier breaths she’s drawing, the easier it will be for me to land the perfect bullet through her heart.
Keep going, I think, shifting restlessly on my ledge. It’s hard for me to sit still, because I can feel the kill is close. I am excited by how close it is; I can even feel my own pulse hard and fast. Keep going. Bare that chest, bare that neck for me…
She does. She arches her delicate neck, she throws open her fragile chest, and I am breathing with her, panting with her, the Widow’s Kiss fully focused and waiting for her to turn towards me so I can see the perfect target on her chest. When her mouth opens, mine does too, and as she grabs for the shower curtain, as she braces herself against the wall, I can hear her gasps, her little moans, and my own fingers quiver on the trigger for the life I am about to take—and then finally, she turns towards the window, laying her chest bare for me, looking upwards towards the sky as she—
—sees me.
Her eyes open wide in shock, and so do mine.
For a moment, we stare at each other, horrified.
“Shit!” I hiss in French, and then drop to the floor of the balcony I’m on, out of sight. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest; it’s such an alien feeling. When I touch my cheeks, they are hot.
For a moment I can’t think; all I can see behind my eyelids is the slope of her neck and the curve of her chest and I am paralysed against the cold tiles. I let my hot cheeks sit against them.
How sloppy of me, to be so visible—what was I thinking? Talon trained me better than this!
It’s because I was greedy, I decide. It’s because I was too greedy, wanting the perfect kill. That, and because I had assumed I was shooting a fish in a barrel, I was too relaxed and let down my guard.
Two mistakes I won’t repeat, I promise myself several times. I have nothing to worry about. I don’t. This failure means nothing. So she knows I’m hunting her: so what? I will just have to be more careful. This way is more of a challenge anyway; I have nothing to worry about.
Talon won’t find out. They won’t; they won’t find out what I’ve done and plug me in again, or pry my eyelids open again, I won’t scream until my throat is raw again—no one will find out. I don’t need reconditioning. I just need patience.
“I just need patience,” I repeat to myself, my eyes closed. I won’t be greedy again.
I won’t be.
When my heart has slowed and my skin is cool, I stand. She has drawn her blinds and turned off the lights; tonight won’t be the night I kill her, it seems.
No matter.
I will get her. I won’t be a slave to my chemistry.