Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Kira lay flat behind the dune and watched the girl feed the fire. The smoke stayed thin and gray, the kind you made when you wanted to be found by one person and no one else. The girl looked fourteen. Dark hair pulled up. A brass disc on a chain around her neck that she kept touching. Cargo pants. Boots too big for her. She fed the fire like she had done it before. Kira ran the three options. Target. Decoy. Ally. Wrong guess killed a child or opened her throat. She drew the cleaver from her hip and held it flat against the sand so the pink emitter would not flash. One charge left. Maybe two. The girl spoke without turning. "You can come out. I've known you were there since you crossed the tide line." Kira did not move. "The compass finds people," the girl said. She lifted the brass disc off her chest. "It's been pointing at you for an hour. Before that it pointed at a man with your face, up the coast. Then he went dark." Kira's grip tightened on the handle. Only two people knew the doppelgänger existed. Her, and him. "Stand up slow," Kira said. "Hands where I see them. Walk ten steps toward the water." The girl obeyed. No weapon on her belt. No bulge under the jacket. She stopped at the wet sand and waited. Kira came up behind her with the cleaver low. "Name." "Kayla. I fix things. I find things. A man paid me two weeks ago to light a fire on this day and wait for a woman with a scar under her jaw." She tilted her head so Kira could see her own scar reflected in the girl's brown eye. "He said if I did it right, a bad thing forty years out doesn't happen. He said you'd want to kill me before you believed me." "Describe him." "Your face. Older. Tired. He left me this." Kayla reached slow into her jacket and pulled out a folded page. Handwriting Kira knew because it was her own. Kira took it. Three lines. Her handler's real name. The name of the girl she had been sent to kill. And an address, two miles inland, where that girl was hiding right now. The fire was not a trap. It was a relay. He had set it before he ever met her in Takala. Kira lowered the cleaver. "How far can that compass reach?" Kayla touched the disc. The needle swung inland and held. "As far as I need. Who are we finding?" "A fourteen-year-old girl," Kira said. "Before someone else does." She kicked sand over the signal fire until the smoke died. The next operative would drop somewhere on this coast within hours, and now they had a heading and no ride but their feet.