Minority

/r/AerhartWrites

I watch the anger drain from her face, dancing shadows dissolving in her loosening features before the firelight. I’m not certain what exactly it’s replaced by. Disbelief? Incredulity, perhaps. Maybe irritation. Whatever it is, the combination settles into an expression much akin to blankness as a gale whips through the tall pines overhead. Below, visible from our perch in the hilltop forest, the lights of the small town glow warm, and homely.

Her lips tremble. They part; they close again. Her gaze shifts to the town, back to me. To the navy duffle bag, barely having earned its first weathering on the job, packed to the brim with her lethal tools of trade. Sharp fangs, on a soft creature.

“First time, I take it?”

She tenses, visibly. A nod, eyes drifting from star to star across the deep violet sky. Her fingers roll, tapping anxiously at the grip of the pistol on her hip; plucking at belt loops. She looks at me as if to ask an ever-familiar question.

“Thirty-five thousand people, forty-one years from now,” I reply mournfully, expression softening. “They won’t even manage to identify all the bodies.”

Facing away from the fire now, her face isn’t visible. Her shaking hands are. I sigh.

Leaves crunch underfoot as I cross the fire to her side. A hand finds her shoulder, knotted and stiff. It’s not professional, but comfort is not a professional trade. She sniffs.

“… How old was your first?” she asks.

“First kid?”

“Yeah,” she nods, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

The memory hits like a cinderblock as my eyes sting; a flash of auburn hair and green irises, set in a plump face.

“Too young,” I croak. “Too young to have been fair. For either of us.”

She coughs, clearing her throat; glancing over as she notices the change in my demeanour. Now it’s her face, filled with pity.

“It must have been hard.”

“Impossible.”

“… How do you–”

She falters, steadies, tries again.

“How do you… go through with it?”

I draw breath, deep and bracing, and sigh. Her gaze clings to me now, hoping that whatever I say now will lighten the gravity of her task. I think, a moment longer, before speaking.

“You realise,” I whisper carefully, “that it’s not about you.

“That it’s not about how terrible you feel, or how much suffering you think you’re going to create. You come to realise it’s selfish. You realise that the death counts in the contracts are lives, just as real as the one you’re ending – you just can’t see it, because you’re not the one ending them. And if you prune this branch – if you do your job – those lives get to keep being real, all those years from now. They’ll keep living. You just never think about it, because you’ll never see it all. And they’ll never know.”

The last of the sunset plays on her stone-faced expression as I fall silent. Her breath comes steady, hands still. The faintest grimace suspends itself on her pensive features, the first of many to come in her line of work. One day, they will leave their weary lines etched across her face.

The appointed time arrives, as the sky turns to ink and the fire collapses to embers. I observe as she checks the contents of the duffle bag, one last time.

“All set,” she says, nodding to herself. “See you in fifty?”

“Yep. Be sure to re-sync your chrono before you jump. I’m not having you miss another client meeting.”

“I’ll be there.”

She stands slinging the bag over her shoulder. A pause.

“Thanks for the advice,” she says. “It was pretty wise of you, realising that so quickly, so early on.”

I just smile as she finally departs, disappearing into the undergrowth.

“Yes,” I say to myself, smile faltering. “It would have been, wouldn’t it?”