Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (16 page)

She wasn't sure how she felt about the plants. All the other kids knew what the green ones were called and why some of them had red blossoms and others purple blossoms, but she didn't. She'd never had regular schooling.

In fact, she'd never been in one place long enough to know where she was from. Her parents hadn't named her for the sky she now saw above her, beautiful and blue and clear.

Instead, they'd named her Skylight, to remind them of a daring escape they'd made out of some ancient palace on some faraway planet. She had no idea what a skylight was until she'd come here, and someone had shown her one that existed in the upper towers of student wing.

Even then, that person hadn't known her name. No one knew her as anything but Skye. She wouldn't even tell them her last name.

Not that any of the kids asked. They were more concerned with prestige and wealth and backgrounds of the parents.

"Hey, Skye," some kid would say, "how much money do your parents make?"

That one was easy and true: "I don't know," she'd say. "They never told me."

Or

"Hey, Skye, why haven't your parents come to Parents' Day?"

Harder, but also able to be truthful: "Their job takes them all over the sector. They never know where they'll be from one month to the next."

Or

"Hey, Skye, what do your parents do?"

That one she couldn't answer, not truthfully, not and stay here.
They're pirates
wasn't quite true—they didn't steal
ships
per se, but they did steal things on ships.
They're thieves
made them sound small, and her parents were anything but small. They had grandiose plans, and sometimes those plans even succeeded.

So she'd say something almost true: "I don't know what they do exactly. They can't tell me what they're doing most of the time."

"Top secret, huh?" the kid would always answer, and she'd smile knowingly.

"Top secret," she'd say, and go back to her bug study, or whatever else she was doing.

No one ever asked her how she got here. No one ever asked her why she was here. She didn't even know this place cost money until six months in, when one of the administrators pulled her aside.

"Your probationary period is over," the administrator said. "Congratulations. You're a perfect candidate for our school. We've gotten you several scholarships to get you to age fourteen, but after that, we will need to review your situation."

Fourteen seemed like forever away. She didn't think of it.

Nor did she think much about it when, at fourteen, they explained that she could move to Kordita's biggest city, Prospera, and go to public school at the city's expense or she could stay here, have a top-notch education, and then work off her debt to the Guild once she graduated.

Working off debt sounded just fine to her.

It wasn't like she had plans.

But, of course, back then, she hadn't known what working off debt actually meant.

Václav, her handler, strides through the door. He's whip-thin, muscular, and not much taller than she is. He keeps his head shaved, not because it's perfectly formed—it isn't—but because he lost his hair early, or so they say.

His skull shows his difficult life. Scars scatter across it like tattoos. He can have the skin enhanced so that no one sees the former injuries, but he's proud of them.

Skye thinks they make him look like he has been stitched together by an inept seamstress.

He sits in front of her. He doesn't reach under the table and activate the walls. She at least expects to see her failure in slow motion.

Instead, Václav tilts his chair onto two legs, one elbow resting on the back, and says, "I don't think you were objecting to the spear."

She doesn't expect him to say that. She raises her chin anyway. "It's a stupid weapon, especially at close range."

"Yes, it is," Václav says. "That's why the assassin who actually killed your target didn't use it. In fact, you're the first person to do the simulation to set the spear aside, just like the original assassin had."

Her stomach twists. He's not supposed to tell her how the actual job went. "Why are you telling me this?"

He smiles. His smile reveals laugh lines around his mouth, but not his eyes. She's always found that curious. He has learned to smile and look amused without changing the expression in his eyes at all.

"I think you know the speech I would normally give here," he says. "I suspect you could recite it to me. I also think that it doesn't matter to you."

Her heart pounds. She's not used to being seen so clearly.

"I do want to ask one question, though," he says. "Does it matter to you that after this guy escaped the first time, he murdered sixteen people, including ten children?"

She shudders just a little, and looks down. This is the reason no one tells the apprentices the names of the simulation targets. That way, the apprentices can't look up what really happened. They have to trust their instructors to tell them the truth.

"Or that our projections showed that if he had been allowed to live, he probably would have killed—conservatively—another two hundred people over the course of his natural life?"

She swallows. She wants to say,
Statistics can be manipulated
or something else equally vapid like,
We can't predict the future.
But she doesn't because she knows there is no excuse for what she has done.

She's an apprentice. She's been given a target. She's supposed to assassinate him.

In fact, her instructions were to kill him in any way she can, only she must
not
let him escape.

The word "escape" filters into her consciousness. She frowns. "Did you say he escaped?"

Václav's smile finally reaches his eyes. Still no laugh lines, but the edges turn downward in amusement. As he trained her over the years, she always enjoyed seeing that downward turn more than she enjoyed seeing him smile.

"And the actual assassin didn't use the spear?" she asks. Then she tilts her head. Her breath catches. "This isn't a training simulation. You guys first created this simulation to see where the original assassin screwed up."

Václav claps his hands together slowly.

"Brava," he says. "You are the first student ever to go to the metalevel. Of course, in doing so, you've also managed to fail to qualify as an assassin."

She isn't sure what he means, why it amuses him, or why he finds it all praiseworthy. So she focuses on the failure. "Just because I set down the spear?"

"What do you think would have happened to you had he escaped?" Václav asks.

She doesn't know. No one has ever talked about this. All she has ever learned in the Guild is that failure is not an option.

"I don't know," Skye asks. "What happened to the original assassin? The one who screwed up?"

"She didn't report her failure," Václav says. "The only reason we learned of it was the loss of those sixteen souls."

Skye's breath catches. "You mean, she just came back here and said she succeeded?"

"Oh, no," Václav says. "She was still on his trail. She caught him shortly after the sixteen died, and then she dispatched him quite quickly—and very nastily, if the truth be told. She was angry."

"I'll bet," Skye says softly.

"But she did get reprimanded," Václav says. "And then she got removed."

Skye leans back just a little, as she understands what really happened. "She lied to you. She told you it wasn't possible to kill him on his estate."

Václav's smile grows. Then he looks away and nods, as if Skye's done well. She knows she hasn't, so she's even more surprised.

"Yes," he says. "That's why we created the simulation. We ran it with dozens of trained assassins. Every one of them found a way to dispatch the fat man on his estate. The spear, by the way, proved to be the most popular weapon."

"Only because it's unusual," Skye mutters.

Václav's eyes twinkle. "And here I thought it was because it's ancient, something humans have used since the dawn of time."

Is that humor? From Václav? She can't quite tell.

He says nothing else. She knows this trick. He studies her, and then waits until she breaks. She's not going to break. She knows how badly she failed. She just wants the verdict.

"So," she says, "what's the metalevel?"

His eyebrows go up, moving all of his scars. "That," he says, "is a very good question."

Skye started to get an inkling about the ways she'd work off her debt when she was told she'd go into Assassin School. Some of her peers—most of her peers—got to choose whether or not they'd continue in the program, but she didn't.

When she finally asked if she could choose something else, her advisor had looked at her like she was dumb.

"You know what we are, right?" her advisor had said. "We train assassins."

"But lots of people do other jobs here," Skye had said. "There are scholars and investigators and teachers—"

"All of whom have been through Assassin School," her advisor said.

"I thought only assassins go through Assassin School," Skye had said.

"Yes," her advisor said. "That's right."

***

"Before we go any further," Václav says, "you need to tell me why you didn't kill him."

The debriefing room had gotten cold, or maybe Skye had. She had come in here covered in sweat. After all, she had been the only real thing in that simulation, and as a real thing, she had had real reactions to her physical efforts.

She felt damp, sticky, tired, and annoyed.

She's had this discussion with Václav before, often in this wing of the Guild—when she blew her first exam to get into Assassin School; when she failed her laser-pistol test, the one where all she had to do was get the pistol to fire; when she refused to punch MingLee in the face hard enough to cause damage.

Skye should hate these plain, windowless debriefing rooms, because she's been in them a million times, but she doesn't. In fact, she feels just a bit victorious every time she enters.

She isn't trying to fail at being an assassin, but she's told everyone for years now that she's not suited to it. And time and time again, she's proven it.

As if Václav can hear her thoughts, he says, "I don't want the discussion about why you're not suited to be an assassin. We've had it. I want to know why you didn't kill this target in particular. You were nearly there."

His smile is gone, which she expected, and so is that little downturn at the edges of his eyes. He's not happy with her, which shouldn't surprise her. He's usually not happy with her.

"The fat man wasn't worth it," Skye says.

Václav's face reddens. She's never seen that before. She actually got an emotional reaction out of him.

"Not worth it? We can prove that he killed hundreds of people in cold blood. How is that man not worth killing?"

She knows better than to bark out the answer that comes to mind first:
Most people in the Guild have killed in cold blood. Does that make them worth killing?

Instead, she says, "Not worth killing
to me.
I'd lose a bit of myself. I don't want to do that."

"Lose a bit of yourself," Václav repeats as if he doesn't understand. And maybe he doesn't. After all, he was one of the best assassins ever until he failed his last physical and had to retire from the field. She has no idea how many people he's killed.

Her cheeks warm. "I'd lose a little bit of my—soul. Some people call it soul. Others call it... humanity. I don't want to lose that."

Is this the first time she's told him this? Maybe in those words. He's looking at her like she used to look at the bugs. Like she's interesting and strange and imminently squashable.

"You think none of us have humanity?" he asks.

A verbal trap, one that she opened up. She answers cautiously. "I think we're all different."

She wants to stop there. Maybe he will let her stop there. She
hopes
he will let her stop there.

"But...?" he says.

And here it goes: the trap closing, mostly because—for once in her life—she's tired of giving the expected answer.

Tired of lying.

She shrugs. "You believe that what you do puts you on the side of right. I think it makes me the same as the fat guy."

Václav slams his palms on the table. It bounces up and then down. He stands up so fast his chair flips over.

She's never seen him like this. Her heart pounds, but she doesn't move.

He glares at her so coldly that she actually shivers. Then he yanks the door open, slamming it against the wall, and leaves, pulling the door closed so hard behind him that the entire building shakes.

She lets out the breath she was holding.

She'd managed to keep those thoughts to herself for more than a decade.

Now everyone will know.

"Oops," she says softly to herself, and wonders if she means it.

She was nineteen and one year into Assassin School when she finally had enough knowledge to marshal her arguments against continuing her education. She went into the chief administrator's office.

It overlooked the kids' garden, but the windows were so sheltered that Skye had no idea the administrator could watch the kids until this meeting.

So many secrets in this place, some of them built in.

The office itself was asymmetrical, walls jutting out at odd corners, spaces set aside seemingly haphazardly, unless one knew where to look. Skye had always known where to look.

Nothing in the Guild was accidental. Either those walls hid secret passages or secret viewing areas or just plain old secret rooms. Sometimes they were designed merely as decoys, so if anyone broke in looking for the secret passages, viewing areas, or rooms, they'd find one of these places.

But Skye saw all of them, the decoys and the real ones. She just said nothing. She would look at the Guild architectural drawings later to confirm her suppositions. She'd found the drawings nearly a year before when she was researching something else. Of course, the drawings had been miscategorized on purpose, so that no one could do what she had started to do—study the Guild from the inside out.