Make A Killing

Fifteen Minutes After

Luna's point of view.

    I waited several minutes after the blast to go back into the house. I had not meant to drop the bomb in the house; that created a reputation of destruction for the Guard. We didn't need that. We were the good guys--the heroes. We just needed people to realize that and listen to us. Unfortunately, as a sixteen-year-old, I wasn't entirely able or sure how to spread the word about our rebellion against the Raven King. Weren't these the years that I was supposed to experience first love and take final exams and get yelled at by my parents? 

    Hm. Maybe I'd have to find a way to still do all those things. Unfortunately, there were some pretty big roadblocks:

    1. Experience first love: I feel like this one is self-explanatory, but I'll elaborate anyway. The Guard was a pretty close-knit group of my friends. I loved them...but only platonically. First romantic love was going to be difficult to find, and the thought of finding someone who thought the same thing about me was enough to make me nauseous. This goal may have to be postponed.

    2. Take final exams: I'd dropped out of school when I turned sixteen because I didn't want to have to go through The Raven King's ridiculously dark training. In another world, maybe I would be a pacifist. Unfortunately, in this world, not fighting was just another form of silent violence, and I couldn't bring myself to allow the Raven King to really believe he had my support. In short, I couldn't take final exams because I didn't have teachers to assign them to me. This would also have to be postponed.

    3. Get yelled at by my parents: My parents were murdered. Somehow I doubt they'd come down from the afterlife just to yell at me. Hm. Maybe none of my goals were exactly realistic.

    So maybe I was a little bit bitter that my youth years were being taken from me, but I think anyone would be. As I stood up shakily from my hiding spot behind a large tree, I looked back at the house. The blast hadn't been enough to destroy it, but a few windows had shattered, and planks of wood laid scattered around the grass. I couldn't hear anything inside, but my ears were ringing. Had Isla escaped?

    I was particularly frustrated with Isla. I couldn't understand how she could be introduced to the Guard on a daily basis and still not be tempted to join. Couldn't she see that we had good intentions? Couldn't she see that she could be a major player in fixing the world, rather than making it all worse? I couldn't understand not wanting to brighten the world. All Isla did was snuff out light and good in the world.

    But perhaps I was being too harsh. She had been trained to be that way, after all. Could she really be blamed?

    I tentatively stepped up onto the porch of the house. The door was off its hinges and laying a few meters away. I stepped inside and called, "Isla? Are you still in here?"

    There was no answer. I checked over my shoulder every few seconds as I inched toward the kitchen. Isla wasn't someone I wanted to sneak up on me. She could kill me in seconds if she wanted, or she could make it last. I had gotten lucky on multiple occasions, and sometimes that's all it came down to when we fought. Despite all my training, I was only alive today because Isla usually had really bad luck.

    I inhaled sharply as I stepped into the kitchen. Isla's body was slumped on the ground. Her eyes were closed, and she was either unconscious or dead. I stood frozen for a moment before slowly picking my way over the decimated remains of the kitchen to get to her. 

    Before checking if she was alive, I kicked away the kitchen knife she'd taken. Then I took a dagger off her belt; she was known for killing with a dagger rather than a gun when she was allowed. It's not as if she had never killed with a gun, but her more famous murders had all been done with knives. It made me shiver. I hated that she saw death with such an apathetic view, but I suppose it wasn't her fault. Her training had, like many others, turned her into a killer. 

    I put my hand on her chest. I could faintly feel a heartbeat. Isla was alive. Relief washed over me for a moment. Then the realization kick in: Isla was alive. That meant she could wake up and kill me if I didn't detain her quickly enough. I fumbled with the stolen handcuffs on my belt and gently clicked them around her wrists. Then, I hooked my arm under her armpits and grunted as I tried to stand up. 

    Isla was muscular, which made her heavy. I practically dragged her out of the house and into the grass outside. I took a deep breath and kept going. I had to get her all the way to my cottage, which was hidden in the woods a few miles away from here. 

    Isla didn't wake up the entire walk over. I was a little scared for her. There were many days that I wished we had a professionally-trained doctor with us, but today was especially one of those days. Not only did killing Isla not sit right with me, but if she survived, we could get a lot of information about the Raven King. She was one of the highest-ranked soldiers there; her assassinations were famous and widely feared. I would imagine the Raven King would notice when she disappeared, but hopefully capturing her would be worth any trouble it caused.

    I knocked on the locked cottage door and whispered, "He flies by his own wings." It was our current passcode, though it switched out often. It helped us to know that anyone who entered this house was loyal to us, and it also helped with attendance at our meetings; if someone misses, they may not be able to make it to the next one if we happen to change the passcode. Considering the amount of people against us, we needed our people to be reliable and a clear way of knowing who was not supposed to be on our side.

    Francis opened the door for me. Francis was a buff guy who'd almost been recruited into the Raven King's League. He'd seen a lucky opportunity when the guards at the training center there were off-duty, and he hadn't wasted a second to escape. He had lived on his own for a couple years, and last year he heard about us and convinced us to let him stay. He's been a loyal ally ever since, but he can still be a bit aggressive at times.

    He raised his eyebrows at Isla. "Is she dead?"

    Trinket stood on their tiptoes to look over Francis's shoulder. "If she was dead, why would she be handcuffed?"

    Trinket was our engineer, mathematician, and mechanic all in one. While they didn't really understand classic literature or social cues, they were great with numbers and even better with their hands. They were small, and we didn't let them go on missions unless it was absolutely necessary; their intelligence was too valuable.

    "That was blunt, Trinket," I told them as I dragged Isla inside. Trinket had made it clear that we were supposed to let them know when they said something that was rude or inconsiderate. They were trying to get better at understanding social norms; I think they see people as puzzles that they haven't solved yet. I didn't have the heart to tell them that that's not how it works.

    "Is mentioning death blunt in general?" they asked curiously. 

    "It should definitely be treated with caution. People don't really like talking about it," I informed them. 

    "Okay, but is she dead?" Francis repeated.   

    "No, just unconscious," I said. I dragged Isla into the cozy living room. A red chaise longue that Francis loved was shoved in the corner and covered in blankets that he had left there. I usually took the sofa, and Trinket didn't have a favorite place to sit. Sometimes they shared the chaise longue with Francis; I think he had a bit of a crush on them. 

    Francis opened the battery compartment on the TV remote and pressed a small button on its interior that opened a secret tunnel that slid open in the floor. Trinket had designed that. They had figured it wouldn't be somewhere that the Raven King would check if they ever found my cottage. Besides, the cottage didn't exactly look big enough to have a secret tunnel. We hoped no one would find it in an emergency.

    I walked backward down the stairs awkwardly, dragging Isla after me. The stairwell itself was lackluster at best; it wasn't exactly meant to draw attention, was it? It wasn't dirty (in an emergency, dirt or sitting water could cause us to slip or make a sound), but it wasn't exactly pristine either. We took good care of the cottage space above, and we routinely cleaned up the labs below, but the tunnel in between.... Let's just say the cleaning here sometimes gets swept under the rug. There wasn't any light in the stairwell either, so the overall effect was that the stairs felt like they belonged in a horror film.

    A woman with a muscular build opened the bottom door of the stairwell for me from the other side. She couldn't have been taller than 5'3", but I knew she could easily beat Francis in a fight if it came down to it. (We had tested that theory a few times to make sure. In boxing and wrestling, she wins. In a footrace, he wins.) Her name was Gem, and she was my second-in-command. She could fight almost as well as me (I would win boxing; she would win wrestling) and her strategy and leadership skills were rather impressive, even if she tended to be a bit more brutal than I was. 

    "Heard you coming. What's all the fuss--?" Her eyes dropped to Isla's limp body. "Holy moly! Is she dead?"

    "No," said Francis over my shoulder, sounding slightly disappointed, "just unconscious."

    The woman furrowed her brow. "Are we going to kill her?"

    "Probably not, but that depends," I answered. I lugged Isla into the first underground lab. Many of our tables and chairs were put together based on the materials we had available to us, and Trinket can only do so much with so little. There were a variety of square and round tables scattered around the room, and most of them were cluttered with one experiment or another. Trinket and Gem usually worked on the experiments together. Gem was better at chemistry, but Trinket was better at engineering. In our work, they usually needed to work together. For example, a table composed of a mish-mash of wood near the center of the room held a small basket of small metallic spheres. Caution tape circled the table. They were a new design of explosives. Judging by Isla's body, they're effective I guess.

    I nodded at Gem. "Can you take Isla's feet? I don't want to risk bumping something."

    She shrugged and hefted Isla's legs over her shoulder so that we could clear some of the robotic projects that took up more room on the floor. We cautiously stepped past them together. 

    "How are we going to ensure she can't escape her cell?" Trinket asked. "Isla's the best of the best working for the R.K., right? She'll know how to escape our dungeon. Maybe I should design a new kind of restraint. Can't rely on any kind of pain factor, though, 'cause I heard Ravens don't feel pain anymore. Don't know how that works. Maybe I'll ask Isla."

    "I'm sure they still feel pain," I grunted. "They're soldiers, not aliens."

    "Yeah, well, I've heard the training at R.K.'s lair is brutal," said Francis in that guttural voice of his. "Maybe it makes them immune to pain. 'S that possible, Trinket?"

    "Hm. I'm not sure. Anatomy and biology aren't my forte; I only dabble in them. Robots don't feel pain, though, 'cause they don't have nerves. Maybe the Raven King soldiers are actually robots," they suggested.

    I nodded my head at Francis. "Can you open the door to the dungeon, please? My hands are full, and so are Gem's."

    Francis twisted a knob on a fake air conditioning monitor on the wall. I used my shoulder to push the false wall away, swinging the door open. Gem and I continued into yet another dark tunnel. The doors on either side of this tunnel were soundproof; Trinket had designed them, and Francis had tested them out by shouting as loud as he could. It had remained completely silent on our side. 

    I pushed open the final door, and finally, we were in the so-called "dungeons." We had cleared out a couple of small cells, each left open and equipped with the necessities. In case of a really bad emergency, the dungeon could double as a bomb shelter. Or, if we had to hide a multitude of people from Raven King soldiers, keeping them down here would make it impossible to hear even large numbers of people.

    We dropped Isla onto a bed in the closest cell. We locked her in quickly since we seemed to be pushing our luck with how long she would remain unconscious. Gem and I tiredly high-fived each other, and then we locked the doors to the dungeon and returned to the lab. After everything, capturing Isla felt like a huge step. However, she wouldn't be much help until we convinced her to tell us what she knew about the Raven King. 

    But...that couldn't be that hard, could it? It's not like she spoke another language, and she had spent most of her life in the Raven King's training. Surely that meant she'd eventually let something slip...?