Page 1 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

CHAPTER ONE

Rain tells tales.

The men whose boots tread softly take care not to let her notice that they’re shadowing her while she walks through a typically torrential Varrow downpour. The hour is late. The moon is obscured.

But rain is water and water never lies.

Not to her, at least.

So, she takes the long route, seeing if they can be shaken this time around. Most times when she catches the attention of the Resets, she loses them in the winding alleyways and side doors of this city she has come to know intimately over the last seven years. Most nights, she shakes them without incident. Tonight, the rain whispers, will be different.

A decision comes due.

It’s not in Blaire’s nature to avoid them.

Wet hair is a lovely feeling. She likes the steady drip of it down her back. Tiny droplets that ground her in the sensory safety of being drenched, head to toe. There are so few reasons to feel anything good anymore, but the rain in this city will always be one that she clings to.

‘Let us stay in the rain then,’ she decides, choosing not to try to shake her pursuers before going home. Choosing the unnecessary risk instead.

Adjusting her route slightly, Blaire takes a path that will lead to the old downtown quarter, a dangerous place to be at any time of day in Varrow City. The rain whispers more about those who follow her.

Water beads on concealed gunmetal, glides along oil in the seams of holsters and the clean edges of knives worn close to skin. It gathers in the creases of well-trodden boots, slips beneath collars, mingling with chemicals in the salt of the skin that whisper secrets desperate to be told. The rain trickles over wires, into ears alive with the faint electric crackle of voices.

There are six of them.

Four have been on her tail before.

They know some of her tricks.

Two are new.

Potentially useful.

As she walks, Blaire replays the meeting in her mind.

Lachlan Tanner always had such presence, even back when she first met him. A determined and practical man who had made a career of gutting himself of empathy to walk the road of contract killing unencumbered. In the early months, she had doubted him enormously. The obvious PTSD aside, he had seemed stubborn and benignly chauvinistic, with a blind spot the size of Paris. In all likelihood, she had expected to easily prove her sister wrong, but in the seventh month of his appointment, everything changed.

No matter what she tells herself, Lachlan Tanner changed everything.

Old downtown Varrow is crumbling brick beside newer, uglier poured concrete and paint slapped on metal. The streets thin into lanes, lanes into narrow cuts between buildings. Fire escapes hang overhead and cellar doors rot in the rain below. There are entire areas that are completely blacked out to surveillance, especially these alleyways.

Blaire knows them all.

She takes the first turn swiftly, then another. She slips through a narrow slice between buildings where the streetlight cannot follow. Walking at an intentionally panicked pace, she gives them one last glimpse before disappearing completely into shadow, flattening herself into an unnaturally tight gap, heedless of the webs that cling or the stench of male piss that fills her senses. The gap swallows her whole and that’s exactly what she wants.

Ahead of her, the alley forks.

The six come through, scanning around.

Everything the rain told her was correct.

The one in charge points towards each of the three splits, giving tactical orders in silence. A black silicone cuff circles his left wrist, a faint blue glow beneath it. The men separate obediently into three pairs of two.

Radio static prickles through the rain, whispering to Blaire that they’re alone. No backup is coming. Yet. They are smart enough not to let the two newer ones stay together, but she’s already identified which one to target, whose cuff to yank free and force a violent Vox into.

The more experienced one goes ahead down the left fork, and Blaire waits for the perfect moment, a burst of dense and disorienting rainfall, before squeezing out of the narrow gap and silently pursuing the two. Under cover of thicker, harsher droplets, she closes in.

She’s almost there when, from behind, someone yells and the pair turn before she reaches them.