Page 6 of Black Heart
I click on the newest file and the footage starts, the top of my supervisor’s balding head darting across the screen as he seeks shelter behind his desk from a figure just out of view on the right.
Mystery Man knows where the camera is.
He edges near the frame but never comes into it. His dark suit, topped with a black fedora that I didn’t notice before, obscures any profile I might screenshot.
I slam the laptop shut and shimmy away from it, biting my nails, wishing I could unsee the footage and un-hear my boss’s damning words. But it’s too late. I know his secret.
Who is the mystery man? What kind of organization would risk creating an AGI capable of influencing global events?
I’ve always been a loner, keeping to myself and avoiding conflict. A people-pleaser who never makes waves. But now fate has dropped a live grenade in my lap, forcing me to make an impossible choice.
Outside, the wind shrieks as if mimicking the churning in my gut. Do I keep quiet and pretend I never saw the video? Turning a blind eye goes against my conscience, but whistleblowing could place me directly in sight of a gun. Powerful people seem to be at play here, and I have no allies.
If they realize what I know, there’s no telling how far they’ll go to silence me.
Illegal AI … a black market sale …Jesus,Emmitt, what the fuck were you thinking?
I sink further onto the threadbare sofa, head in hands.
It finally occurs to me how my mother might’ve found herself in the middle of a shoot-out that cost her life.
Sheer and utter bad luck.
3
KADEN
The blade slices through his carotid artery in one fluid motion. Blood spurts, warm and wet across my hands. His eyes bulge in shock and pain, hands grasping futilely at his throat to stem the crimson tide.
Another mark off the list, another ghost I’ve created to haunt the earth for eternity.
When I’m satisfied his eyes are soulless, I check the time, the hands of my blacked-out Rolex informing me it’s 1:04 in the morning. Pulling a cheap, plastic wristwatch from my pocket, I ensure the time matches up, then remove the battery, freezing this man’s final moments, and wrap it around his wrist.
A token, if you will, or a calling card, a kill signature, or most importantly, confirmation to my client that the Scythe met his end of the contract.
Sometimes playing a role in public keeps the real operation hidden to throw off suspicion or create false leads. But true clients? They never see my face.
It’s only through a long, twisted binary road that theirmessage can reach me, and I never write back. Once the money is deposited up front, the only answer they receive is the person they wanted dead.
My hands are stained with the blood of the wicked, the corrupt, the guilty. And with each life I take, a part of me dies as well. But it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make for justice.
I leave the body cooling in the basement of its multimillion-dollar brownstone, stepping over congealing pools of blood. The night air is damp and heavy with the promise of rain, diffusing the streetlights into halos. I take a winding, circuitous path to my car, using two buses, a subway, and three outfit changes before I slip into a nondescript black sedan in a pristine business suit and join the interstate exit out of the city.
Back in my spartan apartment, I rinse the blood from my skin, watching the pink-tinged water swirl down the drain, one of my hands black with intricate ink from my fingernails up to my shoulders, and the other as bare as it was when I was born. My inked arm is compromised of an intricate patchwork of symbols and designs, but three always catch my attention. A clock with no hands is tatted on the top of my hand. A phoenix rising from the ashes flows up to my elbow. My eyes stray to the coordinates tattooed on my inner forearm—a place I can never forget, where I lost everything.
Greycliff.
It’s as if all the ghosts I’ve dispatched have clawed their way back to me, howlingas they drag me back to where I lost my little girl. It’s not to give me a second chance to save what I couldn’t a decade ago. I have too many sins to be given such salvation.
But … Layla Verona.
An innocent caught up in a tangled, lethal web I doubt she fully grasps.
I groan, my steel-blue eyes disappearing as I shut my lids on my reflection.
There was another caught under the legs of a similar spider. Cassandra Black. Cassie. My daughter.
Despite my refusal to make Layla a target, I’m compelled to researchwhy. Why her? What has she done, or not done, to deserve to have her time frozen by the Scythe?