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“I was actually always the responsible one,” I complain. “What happened to me?”
“You know the theory, Eve,” replies Genet – magnanimous, benevolent, sage. “Stressor, break, cycle-”
I’m being compared to a serial killer. Beautiful.
When I was a kid, it was all ‘you must understand losses’, ‘you must make the hard decisions’, ‘you must realise the consequences of your actions and accept them’. And I did.
I’ve been adult long enough. I’ve accrued fatalism and cynicism to fill several lifetimes. So, by rights, now I should get to be carefree…?
Genet’s phone beeps.
“Another body. Same M.O.”
I follow.

“Sister,” Mithra repeats, still stunned.
I lean over her shoulder and type into the search engine. From the results I select a photo of two girls (ages twelve and fourteen). The bigger girl stands, demure, in a dark blue pantsuit. The smaller one wears a violet dress and grins happily.
“She’s pretty.”
Funny thing is, whenever someone says that, I know which one of us they talk about. And it’s never me.
“Her name means ‘flower’ in Japanese,” I add, somewhat pithily.
Back then, my name didn’t mean anything. Maybe that is why I now call myself after a Gorgon.

The morgue is quiet in the middle of the night. It’s very clean and looks borderline futuristic – all sterile white light and stainless steel. I’ve seen evil laboratories that looked less like evil laboratories.
I was led to believe there would be a line of dead bodies under white sheets, with only their toes poking out, tagged like produce. The telly lied to me. Again.
Every shiny surface reflects me back at me.
All cadavers have been frozen inside drawers, all instruments put away, all signs of life abolished. This place is… well… dead.
Someone taps me on the shoulder.

I haven’t stepped foot into a forest since Yorick and I walked into one, both got bitten by probably the only venomous snake in the country, and he died. (I pretty much died too, for a while.)
It’s not that I’m afraid of forests. Forests are fine.
I’m not even afraid of venomous snakes.
But I am scared of coincidences. Everyone should be. It’s part of our
wiring – the fear of the unknown (I’d say fear of death, but I lost that when I ‘died’).
I look at the line of trees, shrug, and stride forth. Here, snakey, snakey, snakey…

“Sometimes,” I mutter, “before I properly wake up, half-dreaming, I believe Yorick is coming back.”
Genet squeezes the nape of my neck and moves closer. I suspect he does actually want to kiss me, but that would make him a villain, and he’s presently rather set on the wise mentor role.
“You’re too old for fairytales, Eve,” he says. “Once someone dies, they are dead.”
Yes, yes. I can see that much in the crime scene photos strewn over his desk. Death is pretty reliable.
I think if I ever again wanted a love affair, I would choose someone reliable.

I wake to a hand pressing down on my mouth.
“You didn’t write.”
I knock the hand aside. “You didn’t write.”
Yorick laughs, far too bitter already at eighteen. “Monitoring our e-mails and cell phones. Classy.”
That does sound like my father. And, now that I’m awake, I realise that Yorick has scaled nine stories to my balcony to talk to me after being dealt weeks of communications blackout.
So this is love.
*
Years later I hang up on my mother, change my number, my e-mail address and my name. My family taught me how to burn bridges: stop writing.

“Where are you?!” Mithra demands from the bud in my ear.
“Run-ning late,” I pant.
“As long as you’re running,” she replies worriedly.
Freerunning, more like.
It’s not a coincidence that the traffic in the city centre has been paralysed by a series of simultaneous strategically-located accidents. Someone really doesn’t want us preventing the assassination of the Mayor.
I wish I had any freerunning experience at all. Jumping fifteen feet down is not fun, and I would be worth fuck-all to Mithra with a broken clavicle.
Alright, time to use superpowers.
“Mith’, make sure all photos of me are overexposed-”

By day Mithra and I work as private investigators for our own agency. It’s a tiny business, but it keeps us afloat. People lose things all the time, things worth paying a fat check. People get hurt, too. They want justice.
However, sometimes the case is solved yet justice won’t be happening.
By night we are what the media call ‘vigilantes’. Superpowered outlaws that fight crime with crime. Superheroines.
And if someone notices a connection to the agency’s cases?
You’ve got to look clueless. Oh dear, Mr Policeman – we use a computer, do you think it could have been hacked?

The last spark of hope dies in the dead of night. The lead is a dead end. Literally. Chesterfield’s confirms the missing woman as one of the cadavers in their morgue.
I stare at my cell phone – battery’s dying – and try to restart my brain. What now?
“We’ll deal with this tomorrow,” Mithra decides, and yawns.
“It is already tomorrow,” I reply, and lift my phone so she can read the time.
“Dying.” Can’t seem to shake the idea. They’re dead, but-
He’s not trying to kill them.
Oh.
He’s trying to save them from death.
I’ve found the motive.

“How did you get home yesterday?”
Mithra gingerly sits. “Okay. Everything hurt, and I had to come up with an excuse for the hubby, but he cooked dinner, brewed tea and took care of me. He’s so adorable.” She smiles softly. “Yourself?”
“Me?” I fake a chuckle. No one makes coffee for me; I’m followed everywhere by Yorick’s ghost. Still, no need to rain on Mithra’s parade. “Same as always. Had a hot date… with my laptop.”
“And you had take-away again, because the only consumable matter in your flat is alcohol,” she accuses cheerfully.
She’s wrong. There’s coffee, too.

“What are you complaining about?” Mithra’s voice asks from the headset. “We’re finally on the right track.”
“Explain this to me,” I grumble, moving as fast as I can without risking that I fall, hit my head, and die in the most disgusting way imaginable, “I got the data-stick, Quetzal extracted relevant intelligence from it… What is your contribution? Shouldn’t it be you here in this-”
“I am coordinating this operation,” she chimes in happily. “It’s the most important job.”
“I am becoming disenchanted with my job.” Whoever said superheroism was glamorous?
“Don’t be so negative.”
“One word, Mith’: sewers.”

They call her Diva, but she goes by Alice. I’ve never met her before; I hope I never meet her again.
She hides away; the only thing that can bring her out is a threat to children. When she appears, it’s always to defend, but the best defence is a good offence, and Alice’s supernatural power is in her voice.
When she sings, she sings your life; she strums your pain – like in that song – she’s killing you softly.
Her song doesn’t know friends from foes.
It only knows the guilty from the innocent.
My conscience grows teeth.
It hurts.

Public gym. A long glass wall, and behind it a line of stuck-out backsides encased in tight spandex, tensing and shifting with exercise.
A man passing by walks into a door.
Our sports bags contain t-shirts and baggy sweatpants; there is not even a glimmer of a chance that we could fit in among Cato’s supermodel-like minions.
Mithra curses.
I look around. Smack-dab opposite the gym is a strategically positioned patisserie.
“Surveillance instead?” I suggest.
“Might as well,” she agrees.
We walk off for coffee and cake to lift our mood.
Behind us another man crashes into a rubbish bin.

Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Move.
Kick the door in; throw a knife straight into an eyeball, cut throat, duck.
Spray of bullets.
The anticipation has built up to the point that my brain is saturated with dopamine, such sweetness, and then – whoosh! – a shot of adrenaline straight into the bloodstream. Grab a body, twist neck, spin and let the fresh corpse catch bullets for me. Smells like blood, like gunpowder.
Stab a guy from behind, upward angle, through the heart. Grin.
I’m flying high.
Yes, I get off on it.
No, it doesn’t make me sick. It just makes me human.

The man across the table leans closer to me, mouth parted.
Our gazes meet. I tilt my head for a kiss.
I have him where I want him – intrigued, eager, eyes straying to the strap that slid off my shoulder. The prey is captured; I can once again congratulate myself on proving that people are just puppets – that if you try even a little, you can make them do whatever you want.
He holds my hand. The pad of his thumb presses against my bitten nail.
Wryly smiling, he whispers: “This disguise isn’t even skin-deep, Miss. You’re showing me everything.”

After two months of perpetual failure in coaxing me out of self-imposed solitude, Grandfather gives up.
Late in the evening, Grandmother comes to my room and sits on my bed, scrutinising me.
Then she pats my head like a dog’s. “You know a bit about my past. So, trust me when I tell you this: if the future you imagined for yourself falls apart, it becomes a part of your history. Just pack up all those potential tomorrows into a little box and put them away. Build yourself anew. New you, new future, new tomorrows.”
New me… It’s an idea.

My parents taught me that I’m only limited by my abilities. They never spoke of conscience; it took me by surprise.
When I was a child, there was just one rule: you have a right to everything you can take.
When I grew up, I realised that there were, in fact, two rules: you have a right to everything you can take and love.
Then there was death. Rules? Death has one rule: you have a right to everything you can take and love.
I’m almost sane. I have a right to everything I can take and love… and love?

The case is going nowhere. I spend the night consulting Genet.
“Cato was abused as a child,” I induce, “or at least severely neglected. Marginalised. But she got away, and she’s going for the ‘best revenge is living well’ thing.”
‘What will she do now?’
“Regroup, and come back ten times as hard.”
‘Yes. So, dig in your heels, and go catch some sleep. It’s half past four in the morning; I’ve been dead for months, and you’re still talking to me.’
“Because brainstorming on your own sucks,” I reply to the empty room.
Outside the first birds start singing.

Female, approximately thirty. Cause of death: someone removed all organs from her abdominal cavity and sewed a motherboard inside. Her skin stretches over its corners.
The policeman that comes in takes one look at the scene-
Look what he had for breakfast.
Irony. The circle of life.
*
The motherboard is homemade, and it leads us to the murderer.
*
Three days later we get him, but not in time to save the fourth victim. The last thing she sees through the haze of drugs is Mithra taking him down.
Mithra is spitting nails.
I’m not. You win some, you lose some.

Burning debris rains down from Cato’s exploded laboratory.
Mithra punches the wall. “We’re right back where we started!”
“No. Cato is back where she started, only now we’re royally pissed at her and I’ve managed to steal this.” Between my fingers I lift an old, clunky, four-gig datastick. “Chances are, most of it is some really weird porn, but I bet we’ll find names, addresses, maybe even a little about her experiments.”
“Get that to Quetzal posthaste!” Mithra orders anxiously. “I mean it! Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred!”
Fantastic. My life has been reduced to Monopoly.

At a glance, walking alone into a terrorist base to save their hostage seems like a supremely unwise endeavour.
But.
It depends on your point of view. We shrinks call it acceptance of the status of victim.
Genet trained me out of accepting this role – and taught me how to force it on my opposition.
I raise a KA-BAR (less chance of anyone connecting this slaughter to me) and take a deep breath. From now on, they are the scared little people fooling themselves that staying inside makes them safe.
I am the scary thing out here in the dark.

“Oh my god!” are Mithra’s first words when we sneak into Cato’s house. “Is that a white tiger?”
The beast is sleeping – hopefully drugged, because I like my limbs attached. It’s six hundred pounds of white and grey lethal beauty.
“Of course not,” I reply dryly. “There are, like, five specimen on the whole continent. This is a normal tiger; the colour came out in the wash.”
“Shut up,” Mithra hisses, trying not to laugh. “This stinks.”
“Yeah.” I look around the palatial hall. “Bet you they forgot it in the washing machine when they were laundering all this money.”

I hate surveillance.
It’s like concentrating on nothing and everything at the same time, all the time, and I like my concentrating a little more concentrated.
“You got the doohickey?”
“What?”
“That thingamabob-”
“Can’t you call it by its name? It’s the transmogrif-”
“Not in public, you moron! Dr Cato would have our heads!”
I’ll take that as confession. I think we can move on to the retrieval part.
I don’t like long-distance assassination any more than surveillance (there is not much difference between those two), but at least by sniping terrorists I end my day on a high note.

“I didn’t see anything,” a visibly shaken Hannah Harkonnen says at the press conference. “They kept me blindfolded the whole time.”
“Thirteen dead bodies were found at the location where you were held!” yells one of the reporters. “What do you say to that?”
Hannah blanches under her make-up. “I… I am grateful for the rescue. Thank you. I have nothing more to say.”
“Who was it?!” the audience demands.
Hannah resolutely shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
I finish cleaning my knives and turn off the TV.
It’s galling – and unexpectedly fortuitous – that my sister didn't recognise my voice.

Blood frozen in veins, I watch the TV. John – my technically brother-in-law – is begging terrorists to return his wife unharmed, and offering an exorbitant sum.
I was disinherited; I would jump off a skyscraper before I went back to my family, but you don’t fuck with someone’s little sister. You just don’t.
And I know I won’t stop at justice; I’ll go for vengeance. Rivers of blood will flow.
I need to not implicate either of my identities.
“Hey, Mith’!” I call out.
“What?!”
“I’m taking a couple days off!”
A close-up clearly shows John’s desperation.
I might like him.

What the press has called me to this date, listed by severity:
.
.
heroine – pillar of courage – modern-day-Xena’s sidekick – misrepresented hard-working citizen – Little Bo Peep on crack – the worst dressed superbabe of 2014 – victim of Mithra’s psychological abuse – deranged Fury – Stockholm syndrome sufferer – petty criminal – viable threat to society – pregnant – Jackie the Ripper – American McGee’s Dorothy – [sic] heroin – bad case of penis envy – butcher with no accountability – mass murderer – as bad as ISIS*
.
.
I can’t find the line between good press and bad press. The journalists’ opinion of me changes with the wind.
…my opinion of journalists never changes.

Mithra plops another gummy bear inside her mouth and leans over my shoulder to look at the screen. “Whoa. What’s that?”
“Some kind of carrion-eating scarabei, apparently. I think it’s how Cato disposes of bodies. They clean the flesh off the bones.” And look pretty, I might add.
Mithra chews thoughtfully. “What does she do with the skeletons?”
“Sell them to gelatin manufacturers?” I suggest.
Mithra’s hand pauses on the way to her mouth.
My eyes stray to the packet in her hand, and I have to grin. “Unless you’ve killed it yourself, you can’t be sure what you’re eating.”

“Shhh,” Mithra whispers. “Don’t wake her. She hasn’t slept in three days.”
I keep my eyes shut. The second set of footsteps passes by the sofa and follows Mithra into the office kitchen.
“It’s nice of you to tolerate her,” Quetzal says quietly.
“She’s an overcomplicated weirdo, and sometimes I want to hit her, but she’s not too bad.”
Quetzal hums.
“What was she like as a kid?”
“Always trying to please.”
“Hasn’t really lost that, has she?”
“She’s gotten better at the pleasing,” Quetzal mutters darkly.
And people say you never hear anything nice about yourself when you eavesdrop.

Do you feel threatened?
Are you desperately seeking what you lost?
Law enforcement cannot help?
Share your troubles with us – we will make sure you never have to worry about them again!
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If you could go completely off the rails... release that dark, unabridged, unencumbered thing inside... what would you become? A hero, a villain or a lazy overweight TV-addict? Who are we in our very cores?
“Let’s try something different,” the shrink says with a plastic smile. “Tell me one positive thing about yourself.”
Is that fundamental thing – soul, katra, Id, whatever you call it – how people are sorted into good and evil?
I grip the folded switchblade in my pocket.
Am I evil? Will it be fun?
I shrug. “I’m not the worst thing that can happen to someone.”
Yet.

People rarely say what they mean.
-
“Your Mother and I care about you.”
~I have invested a lot of money in you. You better not embarrass me before my business partners.
-
“Don’t worry about him now, dear. Concentrate on getting better yourself.”
~Your lover is dead.
-
“Hey, babe. Lemme getcha a drink.”
~I want to fuck you; I’m lazy; I don’t mind if you’re mostly unconscious for it.
-
“Duck.”
~I am saving your life because it seems worth saving.
-
Usually, people are a lot more loquacious in spirit than in words.
I listen to both words and spirit.
I hear.

I got my ass handed to me.
It happens. Not often, but sometimes I limp back, shut myself away from the world and lick my wounds alone in the darkness. Still shaking, I sink onto the sofa and start an inventory.
Lip split, but nose isn’t broken. Good. Cheek cut on teeth on the inside, but teeth themselves intact. A humongous bruise, but-
The door opens. Mithra hands me a bag of frozen carrots. “Press that to your face before it swells.”
I obey. The cold burns – but at least she can't see me cry.
Relief is such a bitch.

I used to think that life was full of variables.
A public school or a private one? Hobbies? Art and books and the unending fascination with taking things apart; everything is puzzles. Everything is math! Even love, there for the taking when you’re young and rich and reasonably good-looking.
Only math doesn’t stop at high school level. It gets more complicated; you stumble over convergences (Yorick, that’s you) and limits (that morning, the Sun pulling giddy us out of the house) and you fall face-first into derivations.
In the end, there is a constant. And the only constant is death.

Despite being tied up and threatened with third-degree burns, the villainous gutter scum keeps his composure.
Mithra grows frustrated. Kids’ lives are at stake, and Mithra has a soul. She needs to know the destination of that cargo box.
“I can get it out of him,” I suggest mildly.
“Then what are you waiting for?!” She glows with anger. It’s quite intimidating.
I point at the door.
She understands. After a moment of indecision, she looks at the bastard’s smirk and remembers the children. She leaves. The door slams shut behind her.
I pull out my favourite switchblade and grin.

“What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the worst that could happen?! You could be killed! Captured! Raped! They could decide to have a little fun and torture you-”
“Point,” I admit. “I don’t like pain.”
Mithra’s hand jerks like she wants to smack me for being too stupid to live.
I stare at her. I’ve been told that I’ve got a dead eye. Wish I could say I practiced in front of a mirror; the truth is that it comes naturally.
“If you get killed, don’t come crying to me,” she snaps.
I solemnly nod. “I promise I won’t.”

A story should end in a wedding or in a funeral. Granted, a wedding feels more like a beginning.
I stand hidden in the shadow of the confessional, in a different church than the one where I’ve once worked. Hundreds of people are packed inside.
My father struts down the aisle as though this day was all about him. Peacock.
Ah, there she is.
I smile.
My little sister, head to toe in white, nervous but grinning at the man who takes her hand as they both face their future together.
I stay until the kiss. I’ll toast them privately.

“Your mother left something for you here. Just in case… you ever came by…”
I know that my mother is aware of my visits to Croatia. I changed my name, refused contact and won’t ever return to her, but I wouldn’t deny her the little my grandparents know about me.
Granddad comes back with a book. He shoves it into my hands and walks away, angry at being used as a mailman.
It’s my old copy of Sherlock Holmes.
I turn it over and look under the dust cover.
They are there: all five existing photos of Yorick and me.

“This is the right address,” I confirm.
Past ten o’clock the Boulevard gets crowded. Mithra and I stand in front of a business that could, politely, be called a nightclub. The neon sign above the entrance reads GREAT MEAT, with the first and last two letters coloured pink.
A pretty good marketing scheme for a brothel.
“I know that guy,” Mithra says, staring at a man with his collar turned up and hat pulled low. “He was at the charity event.”
That means he’s rich, in trouble, and here to try and pay out of it.
It’s all coming together.

“Why did the petrol station have to be there?” the boy asks hazily, blinking from the driver’s seat of the car he had just spectacularly crashed through the glass window into the soft drink fridge.
He’s drunk as skunk and, judging by the smell, high as well.
I’m amazed he knows where he is.
Maybe if he hadn’t done it about ten inches away from me, I would not want to maim him.
“Baby,” he pokes the girl giggling in the shotgun, “that’s a real flamingo. In a petrol station.” And then he starts giggling, too.
I’m gonna kill him.

Usually we’re hired to find living people. They sometimes turn up dead. This is the first time we were going after the effects of a dead man, only to discover their owner – a fairly angry guy but definitely alive.
His widow (or not, as the case may be) starts hysterically screeching: “You’ve been presumed dead for years!”
He jumps up, red in the face. “Dying has made my life worth living again!”
“Too bad we can’t citizen-arrest someone for being an utter arsehole,” I mutter to Mithra.
She slugs my shoulder. “Chin up. We’ll help get him for tax evasion.”