She looked at me. You’re an assassin, aren’t you? When there are rumors the government has someone on the payroll, they’re talking about you, right? I let out a long exhalation. Something like that. T...
Immediately the sounds of the street below grew detached, distant, the meaningless echoes of urban voices whose urgent notes reached but held no sway over the park-like necropolis within. From where I...
I squeezed her hips, then ran my hands up and over the curve of her ribs to her breasts. Her nipples were hard under the wet fabric of her dress. Her body radiated heat. I heard myself groan. It sound...
I shifted my head slightly. The corners of our mouths brushed together. I felt her breath on my cheek. Then we were kissing. Her mouth was warm and soft. Our tongues entwined and simultaneously I thou...
I reached the end of the street and turned right. There they were, about twelve meters away. The Japanese guy had his left side to me. He was talking to the American. The American was facing me, an un...
He wiped his brow. So. Consider this state of affairs from Yamaoto’s perspective. He understands that, with the immune system suppressed, there must eventually be a catastrophic failure of the host. T...
When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Of eternity.
The insult was calculated. Whether this guy was an amateur or a professional, he would perceive himself as the latter, and would now be invested in proving it to me. Interrogators call the technique e...
It’s a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.
It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you s...
I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some poin...
I read it somewhere once. She laughed. You did not. I did. Okay, I wrote it down first. Then I read it. But still.
I noted he had no place to conceal a weapon or transmitter. I wondered whether the attire had been chosen deliberately, to reassure me. Dox liked to play the hick, and a lot of people bought the act,...
He smiled. What’s going on? Why does something have to be going on? Maybe I just missed you. He gave me an uncharacteristically streetwise look. I had a feeling I knew where he’d picked it up. Yeah, I...
Gradually our surroundings became more residential. We passed wide, open doorways. These I checked automatically, but they offered no danger, only miscellaneous domestic scenes: four elderly women abs...
But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she’d been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
Between her hand over my heart and her hips at my crotch, she might as well have been administering a polygraph.
Mono no aware, the sadness of being human,
Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls,...