A week before Hoshimi wakes up.
The corridor stretched ahead of Sam. The lights, casting everything in shades of washed-out white and clinical gray. His footsteps made no sound on the polished floor.
His smile was still there. Fixed in place. A permanent fixture of a face that had forgotten.
He checked his watch.
The building was empty at this hour, the administrative staff was gone, the night shift security concentrated at the perimeter rather than the interior. He'd timed his route carefully, the camera blind spots, the precise moments when each corridor would be deserted.
The phone in his pocket was a cheap burner, purchased three days ago from a convenience store in the lower city.
Disposable.
He'd made calls like this a hundred times before, in a hundred different buildings.
He stopped at a junction where four corridors met. The cameras here had a two-second blind spot as they rotated. He stepped into the intersection at precisely the right moment, letting the lenses sweep past him without catching anything more than empty air.
"Report."
The voice on the other end was flat. Mechanical. The voice of someone who had been doing this long enough.
Sam leaned against the wall, his smile unwavering. "The target is recovering. Him waking up is expected within the week. Security protocols have been relaxed following the failed assassination attempts, the government believes the immediate threat has passed."
"And the woman?"
"Reina?" Sam's smile flickered "She's protective. More than anticipated. It's... unusual. The snipers we've scattered throughout the rooftops have been taken out as well. They're really thorough."
A pause on the line. The faint crackle of encryption algorithms doing their work.
"She's a level ten witch," the voice said finally. "One of the only few in existence."
"She'd kill anyone who tried to take him."
"Then we won't take him. Not yet." Another pause. "We're sending you something. A tool. It should arrive within the week."
Sam's eyes narrowed. His smile didn't waver, but something behind it shifted. "What kind of tool?"
"A girl. Approximately twelve years old. She's been in development for the past six years, she has biological augmentation, mana suppression, we won't be taking him anymore, since we can't have him, no one else will.
"She's designed to be a walking bomb, unable to be detected by normal bomb detection hardware. When activated, she'll release a concentrated burst of thermobaric energy within a fifty-meter radius. Nothing survives within that radius. Nothing."
The corridor felt suddenly colder. The fluorescent lights seemed brighter, harsher, casting everything in stark, unforgiving relief.
"You're sending me a child," Sam said. His voice was flat. Empty.
"We're sending you a weapon. What she looks like is irrelevant to her function."
"When?"
"Seven days. There's a warehouse in the industrial district, the same one we used for the Seoul operation. She'll be delivered there with a handler. The handler will brief you on activation protocols and safety measures."
"And after that?"
The voice on the other end was silent for a moment. When it spoke again, there was something almost like amusement in its tone.
"She won't survive the activation. I think that's obvious."
The line went dead.
Sam stood in the empty corridor for a long moment, the dead phone pressed against his ear, his smile fixed in place. The fluorescent lights hummed. The cameras continued their slow rotation. Somewhere in the distance, a door opened and closed.
He pocketed the phone and walked.
The warehouse was exactly as he remembered it.
It sat at the edge of the industrial district, a sprawling, rust-eaten structure that had once been a textile factory before the wars had gutted the city's manufacturing sector. The windows were boarded over, the loading docks chained shut, the exterior walls covered in layers of graffiti that had been painted over so many times they'd become an abstract canvas of grays and blacks.
The interior was worse. The air smelled of mold and machine oil and the faint, sweet undertone of decay. Pallets were stacked against the walls, their contents long since looted, their wood rotting in the perpetual damp. The concrete floor was cracked and uneven, pitted with holes where machinery had once been bolted down. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, its glow barely reaching the corners of the vast space.
"This place has become more run down since the last time I came here."
Sam stood in the center of the warehouse floor, his hands in the pockets of his tan puffer jacket. He'd arrived early.
The handler arrived at 6.
He was a small man, unremarkable in every way, average height, average build, average face. The kind of man you'd pass on the street without a second glance. The kind of man who had built a career on being forgettable. He wore a dark suit that was slightly too large for him, and he carried a briefcase in one hand.
The girl was with him.
She was smaller than Sam had expected. Twelve years old, they'd said, but she looked younger, malnourished, perhaps, or simply built small. Her hair was dark and cut short, practical, uneven, as if someone had taken scissors to it without much care for the result. She wore a simple gray dress that hung loose on her frame, and her feet were bare despite the cold. Her eyes, dark, too large for her face, swept the warehouse with an expression that wasn't quite curiosity and wasn't quite fear.
She looked like a doll. A forgotten thing, left on a shelf too long.
"58," the handler said. His voice was as unremarkable as his face. "Your package."
Sam's smile didn't waver. "She has a name?"
"She has a designation. Badiil-7. She was an orphan, her mother gave her away at birth because abortion was too expensive, she should be glad that we're even giving her a purpose."
The girl stood motionless beside the handler, her dark eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance. She hadn't spoken. Hadn't acknowledged Sam's presence. Hadn't done anything except exist in that quiet, unsettling way that suggested she'd learned long ago that existing quietly was the safest way to exist at all.
Sam crouched down, bringing himself to her eye level. "Hey."
She looked at him. Her eyes were dark, depthless, the eyes of someone who had seen too much and understood too little.
"Can you speak?"
A pause. Then, very quietly: "Yes."
"What's your name?"
Another pause. Longer this time. "Badiil-7."
"That's not a name. That's your ID." Sam's smile softened, just slightly. Just enough. "Do you have a real name? Something your parents called you?"
"I don't remember my parents." Her voice was flat. Empty. "I don't remember anything before the laboratory."
The handler cleared his throat. "The activation protocols are in the briefcase. You'll find detailed instructions on trigger phrases, safety parameters, and containment procedures. I'd recommend memorizing them before-"
"I'll take it from here," Sam said. His voice was pleasant. Affable. The voice of someone discussing the weather.
"I'll call you Dill then."
"Like the plant?"
"Yea, like the plant."
The handler studied him for a moment. Then he shrugged, set the briefcase down on a nearby pallet, and turned toward the warehouse exit. "Comrade, the motherland thanks you for your service."
He was gone before Sam could respond.
The warehouse fell silent. The light bulb swayed slightly, casting shifting shadows across the cracked concrete floor. Badiil -7 stood exactly where the handler had left her, her bare feet pale against the grime, her dark eyes still fixed on that point in the middle distance.
Sam picked up the briefcase. Didn't open it. Didn't look at it. Just held it at his side like it contained something he didn't want to acknowledge.
"Come on," he said. "Let's get you some shoes."
The city was different with her.
Sam had walked these streets a hundred times, in a hundred different guises. He knew every alley, every shortcut, every storefront where the owner would look the other way for the right price. He knew which cafes served decent coffee and which ones were fronts for various criminal enterprises. He knew the rhythm of the city, the ebb and flow of its endless, indifferent life.
But walking with Dill beside him, he found himself seeing it through different eyes.
The girl had never been outside before. Not like this. Not in a city, with its noise and its chaos and its million small wonders. She'd spent her entire existence in laboratories and containment facilities, her world reduced to white walls and fluorescent lights and the cold, clinical hands of scientists who saw her as an experiment rather than a person.
She stopped in front of a bakery window, her dark eyes fixed on the pastries displayed behind the glass. "What are those?"
"Pastries. Food. You eat them."
"I know what food is." Her voice was flat, but there was something beneath it now. Something almost like curiosity. "We had food in the laboratory. It didn't look like that."
"Really?"
"It was this mushy thing, slimy."
"That doesn't sound very appetizing."
"They said they wanted me to ingest it because it's good for me."
"Let's get you something better then."
He pushed open the bakery door. The bell above it chimed, and the woman behind the counter looked up with the tired smile of someone who'd been on her feet since dawn. "What can I get for you?"
"One of everything," Sam said. "And a pair of shoes, if you've got them."
The woman blinked. "Shoes?"
"Figure of speech." He glanced down at Dill's bare feet. "Mostly."
They left the bakery with a bag of pastries and a pair of too-large sandals that the baker's daughter had outgrown. She ate a croissant as they walked, her small bites methodical, precise, as if she were analyzing each mouthful for data rather than simply enjoying the taste.
"It's flaky," she observed.
"That's the butter."
"What's butter?"
Sam's smile flickered, just for a moment. "It's made of cow milk."
"What's a cow?"
[Did they not take her outside? How miserable a life that must be]
"I'll show you later."