He didn’t know why she had asked, and even more strangely, he didn’t know why he had answered.

“Do you remember the first person you killed?” Celia had said when they walked home from Aspen’s. Her face was pale, her arms wrapped around herself. Aspen had had a bad day, and secrets had come gushing out of him like blood that night.

Riose had halted. “Yeah.”

She’d turned to look at him, and in the half-light, her eyes were shadowed and vague. “Does it...does it haunt you too?”

“Always. Stupid, but I still go back there every year. That first place.”

“Why?”

“To say sorry. To remind myself why I left, and what I used to be. To be proud, I guess, that I’m trying to be someone different now, even though it’s hard sometimes.”

“Will you take me there?”

He’d blinked, startled. “Why?”

“Because maybe I need to see it to believe it,” she said softly, and she approached him as if he were some feral creature, reaching out to cradle his face in her hands. Her eyes scanned him, dark gold in the gloom and puzzled as the frown bending her mouth. “I hear you say it, Ri, that you were one of the Furies, but it doesn’t mean anything. I can’t imagine you hurting anyone.”

That’s because I couldn’t hurt you, he wanted to say, but the words lodged in his throat with the tenacity of superstition. If he said it, it might become true, and the fragile net of summer and friendship and mercy that had supported him all this time would snap, sending him tumbling into the ghastly abyss of the Furies.

If he hurt her, Riose didn’t think he would ever recover. And so nothing filled the space between them but their mingled breaths, and the words he dared not utter.

“Show me,” Celia ordered, and he heard her fear – but knew it was nothing to her determination. “Take me with you.”

“Why do you need to see?” he asked, loathing the desperation that seeped into his voice.

What if you see and you begin to hate me?

She exhaled slowly. “Because it matters. Because I can’t forgive you for all the lies until I’ve seen what the truth would have meant. Knowing you were one of them – it’s changed everything, Ri, and I can’t pretend it hasn’t. But maybe I can accept it – I can see that who you are isn’t what you were.”

The words bit deep.

“All right,” he said, his mouth dry.

But I can’t pretend I’m not afraid.

~*~

Riose Orage had always kept the two halves of his life separate, himself as divided as his loyalties. Time had only widened the rift. A child could make murder a game and just as he’d played kiss-chase in the school yard, so he played kill-chase among derelict buildings and dingy streets, but on rolled the yeas, and suddenly he would look into a face and glimpse some fleeting aspect of a friend.

It had begun to haunt him, and he did not try to deny it as others might have. That lady with the wild curly hair and the exquisitely cut suit, she had Phi’s steady grey eyes, and he stared right into them until all the life was gone and they were marbles, just glass and guilt.

The man he killed had laughed like Finn at first, and the sound had been familiar enough that Riose had killed him quickly so he wouldn’t have to hear it again. Yet the smell of gunpowder trailed him like a dog until he shoved his clothes into the washing machine and scrubbed all trace of slaughter from his skin.

The worst though – the worst had been that steely girl he’d caught when she left a club. She’d turned round, dressed in flimsy scarlet and contempt, and he’d known the fierce tilt of her smile with an intimacy that had made him dizzy.

For a moment, it had been Celia Slone stood there, careless in her scorn. “Finally found me, did you? Go on then, which one are you from? Can’t be K’Shaia, or you’d have put poison in my vodka. I wouldn’t even have tasted it, you know, the cheap stuff they serve up in dives like that.”

“Pursang,” he’d replied, telling himself to do it, now before it got any harder.

“Could be worse. At least you aren’t one of those morons from Nightfire. I suppose daddy dear sent you.”

“Yes.”

Even her eyes were the same, pale in her tanned face. She must have been cold in the autumn breeze that blew smog off the river, but she didn’t shiver. “Huh. The old bastard’s got more balls than I thought then. Did he tell you why he wants me six feet under?”

“It’s not our business,” he’d said. This was all wrong. She stood there facing her death as calm as a sage, and he was the one trembling, uncertain.

“How...mercenary.” She’d looked him up and down, and a touch of amusement warmed her words. “Aren’t you a little young to be knifing people in the dark?”

The cadence of her voice was so similar that he could bear it no longer: he approached, the steel gleaming dully, and she had backed away, rattled. She tried to run – pointless, in those impractical heels – and he caught her easily. And for all her kicking and swiping, she was only a half-witch, if one with a big mouth, so a swift mental blow left her unconscious.

The rest was just logistics.

She was his seventh kill. He was twelve.

After that day, he never saw his job in the same way again. Riose began to re-examine his every move, to try and find the place where he had begun to separate like oil and water and he could draw only one conclusion.

That first kill; the first time he had truly had to chose between morals and the monster, and had been unable to decide just as he had every time afterwards.

~*~

The theatre was old and ramshackle now. A kind of wonder filled her eyes as she drank in the dusty, moth-eaten curtain which had once been a swathe of dark, heavy, red velvet, the shabby plastic seats and the faded wooden beams. The audience had gone, the players left for other stages, leaving nothing but a creaking empty space and the two of them who saw past the chicanery and the scenery: this was a graveyard and he had made it so.

The walk had been brief, through corridors with numbered doors, past small offices and a dog-eared library. And it had brought them here, to this central room and to her answer.

“Here?” she asked, disbelieving.

“Here.”

She stood in her own little pool of air and he did not dare move closer. An edginess to her movements told him she would not appreciate it: the piercing, baffled amber of her eyes was flat-out threat. “Why?”

“Assassins and theatres.” Riose shrugged. “It’s an old joke, I guess.”

“You’d need a cruel sense of humour to appreciate it,” Celia pointed out.

“I had one, then.”

“Who was it?”

He could discern nothing from her tone, or from her expression, which had become blank as wax. It saddened him that she could shut herself off like that: he knew where she had learned such artifice, from Aspen and Vaje and himself. It was no part of her, starkly strange against her outspokenness and her kind, candid heart.

Riose let his attention swing back to the stage. It was a coward’s choice, but better than seeing what he had made of her.

“One of my classmates. He was never going to be good enough to kill, but I think – no, I knew – he hoped they’d keep him on anyway. He loved history, and myths, you see, and he had a gift for languages. A thousand years ago, they’d have welcomed him. And even now, Therese might have kept him, but he had applied to Nightfire, and Blue...he didn’t care. Dead wood, he called him.”

Riose couldn’t hear the vulnerability in his voice, nor did he notice Celia twitch as if to touch him – and fall back, confused.

“He was in a play – scouting a target, Blue told him, and aimed him at some random girl in the cast. But it was all just an elaborate set-up to see if I had what it took.” His laugh was dry and bitter. “And I did. Of course I did. Or it would have been me on that stage, taking the starring role.”

She made some small, soft sound, but he did not stop there. That would have been taking the easy way out.

“Not that I thought that. I was a ruthless little bastard and I wanted Blue to respect me. Everyone did. Therese and Aspen were important, but we all knew Blue ran the Furies. And I had more to prove – I didn’t want to just be Therese’s baby brother, trailing after her. I wanted to be better.”

His shoulders were tight and hunched. He thought he could feel the weight of her horror on his back.

“It was Hamlet. The play, I mean, and he was the lead. Another of Blue’s little jokes – he’s always liked a good tragedy. And I was Lachesis, reciting my lines as though they meant something.”

He stopped. It was an ugly thing to relate, hard to speak the truth aloud when he had caged it in his mind for so long.

“Were you scared?” she asked.

“I don’t know. My heart was hammering the whole time, but I couldn’t tell you if it was nerves or fear or excitement or what. And then...”

He could see it so clearly in his mind: the bright lights reducing the audience to blurs, Jasper’s face opposite him, eager, sharing a smile in the way of comrades on a front line. Lines exchanged, hurled like javelins, and then...

And then the kill. That had been the simple part: the round O of Jasper’s mouth as he realised that this was no play-fight: wood clicking on wood, but one sword was blunt and one deathly sharp. So too were the fencers mismatched, Riose gliding from move to move, taking the dance across the stage as if it truly were a magnificently orchestrated charade while Jasper fumbled blocks, sweat beading on his skin.

Riose looked into his target’s eyes and saw his own treachery reflected back, mingled with shock. That threw him, angered him. You joined the Furies of your own volition, and you were too weak. What else did you expect? What did you really think they would do with you?

But Jasper’s expression did not change: and then he leapt back and threw away his sword, baring himself to the execution. He waited there like a martyr amidst the flames, blond hair white in the footlights, mute appeal in his face.

And in Jasper’s fear, in his shaking hands, outstretched in appeal, Riose suddenly felt his own pettiness and his own cruelty.

So he can’t kill: is that all the use there is for people?

Then what of Celia, and what of Phi, and of Finn, who can’t kill? Who, more importantly, wouldn’t kill.

Were all those hours with them nothing? Silly games of snakes and ladders, solemnly deciding what to spend their collective pocket money on, times of jokes and fights, of cajoling their parents into trips to the park or the lake or the shops or the cinema.

No. That was something.

And as he stared into Jasper’s frightened grey eyes, the truth was clear and simple: he cared nothing for this boy. For Celia, for Phi, for Finn, he would stay his hand.

But only for them.

He drove the sword forward, and Jasper gave a last, terrible scream. Riose felt skin and bones give beneath his strength: a grisly cracking filled his ears, but it was a swift death, all the mercy he was prepared to spare.

The corpse slumped into an ungainly heap, and there was only the sound of a hundred people barely breathing – and then the applause began, pattering, climbing, breaking in vast waves. Idiots, all of them.

He fled then to the wings, to the obscurity of shadow, and by the time he heard the first cry of alarm, he was already beyond retribution, slipping into the night on stealthy, bloodstained feet.

“And then?” Celia prompted, jerking him back to the present.

“And then I killed him,” he said softly. “I stabbed him onstage, and I left him dead for the audience to see.”

“But...” She hesitated, then plunged on. “This is a school hall. An elementary school.”

“Yes.” He did face her then, and the shock was raw in her eyes. “I was eight.”

And I was grotesque. I can make no amends: I can make no excuses. There was no question of right or wrong – it was wrong, pure and simple.

But I was lucky. I had you to steady me: the ghost of you flitting through unknown eyes to jolt me. Suddenly every target became a person, fleshed out and flawed as you were. And I could see that money was not a good enough reason to kill. Even hatred was a paltry defence, indifference equally repulsive.

You, all of you, followed me wherever I went. I saw myself through your eyes, and I could find no merit in the boy who walked amidst the Furies. But in the boy who got covered in mud playing catch, who said please and thank you, who was almost human, really – yes. I belonged there.

Yet you haunted me most of all: your boldness, your rashness, your haste and your temper. Your face, glancing out of a crowd in the way a girl tilts her head, or the certain curve of a smile. You, your disappointment boring a hole in my heart.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Even then, you were...even then, Ri. I didn't know.”

Don’t look at me like that...

He wanted to reach out to her, but she only turned her back on the room and left, feet quick and hard on the floor.

Don’t let me have lost you, he pleaded silently. Not you. You, who I am beginning to love.

The thought terrified him: snatched away his breath and his logic to leave him stood in the theatre, unwilling audience to his own fearful heart.

“Neither did I,” he whispered.