A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The hub had no monitor above it. The hub had a window.

The chamber was small and very clean. White walls, white floor, a drain in the center, a cot bolted down along the left side, and a chair nobody had ever sat in.

The girl sat on the edge of the cot with her hands flat on her knees.

She was small. That was the first thing, and it kept being the first thing no matter how many times Vera made herself move past it.

Thin arms, bare feet not quite reaching the floor, the grey shift they issued hanging off one shoulder because there was nobody in the room to fix it.

Her head was inside a machine.

It was not a helmet. A helmet would have suggested something protective. The apparatus swallowed her entire head and came down past her jaw to the base of her neck, a smooth dull metal shell the size of a diving bell, wider than her shoulders, and the weight of it forced her spine into a slight permanent forward curve.

Six pipes ran into it, three on each side, ribbed and grey, disappearing up into ports in the ceiling. Two more ran down from the underside and vanished under the collar of her shift.

Something inside the machine cycled every four seconds. Vera could hear it through the glass, a soft mechanical breath, in and out, in and out.

"Neural suppression," the technician beside her said, in the flat friendly voice of a man explaining a boiler.

"It’s not sedation. Sedation was tried. Sedation doesn’t work on her, she dreams through it, and dreaming is the entire problem."

"Then what is it doing?"

"It’s keeping her under the line." He tapped a readout on the wall, where a green trace ran nearly flat, twitching now and then and being smoothed back down. "Her ability runs on imagination. Give her a story, give her an image, give her thirty seconds of boredom with nothing to look at, and her mind will make something to fill the space, and then the something is standing in the room with you." He shrugged. "So we don’t let her make anything. She’s awake. She’s not thinking. There’s no in between with her, so we hold her at the bottom."

Vera watched the small figure through the glass. The machine breathed. The green line twitched and flattened.

"For how long?"

"Continuously since intake. Two months."

"And you can bring her back up? If you needed to?"

The technician’s friendly voice did not change at all.

"We’ve never needed to."

Vera looked at the girl’s hands, because the head was unbearable and the hands were the only part left that was a person.

They were resting on her knees. Small, still, fingers slightly curled.

And as Vera watched, the index finger of the right hand moved. Once. A small deliberate stroke to the left, the exact motion a thumb makes turning the corner of a page.

Then it went still again.

She looked at the girl for a long moment. Then she said nothing and turned away from the window.

***

She made the call from the visitor lot, standing beside the car with the door open, because the lot was the first place her phone had worked in ninety minutes.

Councilman Larry answered before the first ring finished.

"Vera! My favorite voice in the world. Please tell me you’re calling from somewhere with better coffee than the last place I sent you."

"I’m in a parking lot, sir."

"Tragic. Tell me everything."

"The subject is stable." She watched her own breath in the security lights. "Suppression is continuous and holding. The technical staff describe her condition as unchanged since intake. Containment integrity is intact and the annex is intact. Nothing has been touched, nothing has been moved, and nobody down there knows anything"

"Wonderful. That’s wonderful." She could hear him settling into something comfortable, could hear ice in a glass. "You know, it really is the great sadness of my career, Vera. Forty-one years. Forty-one, and we finally do it. We finally make the strongest specimen this program has ever produced, the real thing, the one all the paperwork was for."

The ice clinked.

"And that," he said pleasantly, "is the exact month they find Ronald."

Vera said nothing.

"The timing of it. Honestly, if you wrote it down nobody would believe you. All those years of nothing, and the very moment we have something, our dear Ronald gets himself opened up in front of a hero and half the council’s laundry falls out on the floor." A soft laugh, entirely without bitterness. "Poor man. He was never careful. I did tell him. I told him at dinners, I told him in chambers, I said Ronald, you are keeping receipts like a man who expects to be audited kindly."

"...Sir."

"I, on the other hand, was raised properly." The warmth in his voice did not waver a millimeter. "I swept the whole house before anyone thought to knock. Every ledger, every courier, every clever little man who thought his signature was an insurance policy. There is not one page anywhere in this world with my name beside that project, and there never was, because I never once let there be." A pause. "You should be proud of that, actually. You reconciled some of those files yourself."

Vera’s hand had gone cold around the phone.

"Anyway. Enough gloom." The ice again, brighter.

"Operations resume. Not tomorrow, but soon. The heat is off, the council is busy congratulating itself, and I have a very patient list of people who never stopped being interested in what we were building." A small satisfied sound. "And the girl comes out of there. Nine floors down is no place for an asset. I want her somewhere I can visit without surrendering my telephone."

"Move her?" Vera heard her own voice climb and could not stop it. "Sir, that facility is the only thing in the country rated to hold her, they don’t even open the door, they watch her through a window..."

"Yes, and I paid for the window."

"Sir." She pressed her fingers to her forehead. "What about Phantom?"

The line went quiet.

"He’s been on our neck since Denvi," she said, faster now, because the quiet frightened her more than the laughing had. "He put Ronald on a slab. He’s the reason there was an inquiry at all. He’s a hero with a hundred million people watching him and he has been pulling on this thread for eight months, and if we move her, I’m sure he’ll find out. Something could happen."

Larry let her finish.

Then he chuckled, low and delighted, the way an uncle chuckles at a child worrying about the dark.

"Vera," he said. "Sweet, thorough Vera. Don’t waste a single night’s sleep on that boy."

"Sir, you’re not..."

"I’ve prepared something for him." The warmth was still there as he muttered with a low dark tone. "Something very good. I’ve been preparing it for quite a while now, and I’d rather not spoil it, because the pleasure of a thing like this is really in the watching." A soft, contented sigh.

"Let him pull the thread. Truly. Let him pull as hard as he likes."

Vera stood in the parking lot and looked back at the low grey building.

"...Alright, sir," she said. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, dear. Drive safely, the roads are terrible out there."

The line went dead.

She got into her car, and she drove, and she did not look at the building in her mirror.

And not long after she left, the lights on Sublevel Nine went out.

They did not flicker. There was no alarm, no failover, no red emergency wash.

"Now that’s a great entrance Shadow!" Hexi’s croaked voice came from the side as they stared at the building before them.