The Assignment
Wren Calloway had never had a normal childhood, although she had never been given enough information to know exactly what a normal childhood was supposed to look like.
She had spent most of her life in places where children were taught things that other children were supposed to learn only when they became adults. She had learned how to recognize the sound of different firearms before she had learned how to drive.
She knew how to disarm someone twice her size, how to move through a building without being noticed, and how to identify the quickest route out of a room before she had ever been allowed to choose her own bedroom.
The organization had raised her.
They had taken her when she was six years old, although Wren remembered very little about the circumstances surrounding it. The Handler had once told her that her family had been unlikely to notice her disappearance for long.
At the time, she had asked him what that meant.
He had simply said, "It means you were easier to replace than most."
She had never asked again.
The training compound had no windows facing the outside world, only long corridors that led from one exercise to the next, and clocks that ran on a schedule no child was permitted to question. Meals arrived at fixed times. Silence was expected in between.
The other children had similar stories. Some had been abandoned. Some had been taken from homes where nobody would come looking for them. Others had been deliberately selected because they were considered expendable. They were given new names, new identities, and new purposes.
Wren's purpose had become clear early. She was good at disappearing. She was good with weapons. She was patient, observant, and unusually difficult to frighten. The Handler had always considered those qualities valuable.
"You're a knife," he had told her when she was fourteen. They had been sitting across from each other in one of the organization's training rooms after she had completed another assessment.
"A knife doesn't need to be liked. It doesn't need friends. It doesn't need anyone to understand it. It only needs to be sharp."
Wren had remembered those words ever since. They made sense. Most things the Handler taught her made sense.
Love was one of the few subjects that did not.
She knew that people fell in love. She knew that couples went on dates, kissed, got married, and sometimes had children. She knew that people became jealous when someone they cared about paid attention to somebody else. Those were facts. The mechanisms behind them were not.
The girls in another section of the organization had been trained differently. They knew how to charm people, how to read romantic interest, how to manipulate attraction, and how to make someone believe they were special.
Wren had never been taught any of that. Her training had always been about getting close enough to complete a mission and leaving before anyone knew she had been there. She had never needed to make someone want her. She had only needed to make them fail to notice her.
Getting close enough to kill someone and getting close enough to be loved by them were, she was beginning to suspect, two entirely different disciplines, and no one at the organization had ever bothered to teach her the second one.
That was why her latest assignment was different.
Wren sat in the back seat of a black sedan as Aldric Academy came into view. The school occupied an enormous stretch of land behind iron gates. Stone buildings rose beyond them, connected by wide paths and carefully maintained gardens.
Ivy climbed the older walls in patches, and somewhere beyond the gates a bell tower marked the hour with a sound that carried further than it needed to.
Students moved across the courtyard wearing dark uniforms, carrying books, talking in groups, and laughing as though the world had never given them a reason to be suspicious of it.
Wren watched them through the window. They looked young. They looked careless. They looked free. She had never understood how people managed to be so comfortable with that.
The car slowed as it approached the entrance. Wren lowered her gaze to the folder resting on her lap.
RIAN VOSS.
Nineteen years old. Only child of Adrian Voss, chairman of the Voss Dominion. Heir to an empire that controlled shipping, energy, infrastructure, private security, and financial interests across several countries. His family had enough influence that politicians returned their calls immediately, enough money that entire companies could disappear after one conversation, and enough power that people who hated the Voss family still needed them.
Wren had been studying his file for three weeks. She knew his birthday, his blood type, his academic schedule, his usual routes through the academy, the names of his closest friends, and the location of the residence where he stayed during the school year.
She knew he had been engaged to Isabelle Laurent since he was seven. She knew his favorite coffee. She knew that he disliked public speeches and avoided crowded parties whenever possible. She knew what time he usually left the academy and which security personnel were assigned to him.
She knew almost everything there was to know about Rian Voss. At least, she knew everything that could be written down.
The folder closed with a quiet sound. The Handler's voice came through the phone in her hand.
"Do you remember the objective?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
Wren looked through the window at the students entering the academy.
"Rian Voss is to die."
"How?"
"Social infiltration."
There was a pause.
"You were not trained for that."
"No."
"You were trained for stealth and weapons."
"Yes."
"And yet you were selected."
Wren looked down at the false identity documents in her lap. Wren Calloway. Nineteen. Orphan. Scholarship student. Transfer from a private boarding school in the north. Every detail had been constructed for her.
"You selected me because I can adapt."
"I selected you because you can learn."
She waited. The Handler's voice became quieter.
"Do not mistake the assignment for something it isn't. You are not there to make a friend. You are not there to discover yourself. You are there to get close enough to Rian Voss that killing him becomes easy."
"I understand."
"I know you do."
The call ended. Wren slipped the phone into her pocket. The car stopped. She opened the door.
Aldric Academy was louder than she had expected. Students crossed the courtyard in groups, talking over one another. Someone nearly collided with her while carrying a stack of books and muttered an apology without stopping. Two girls were taking photographs near the fountain while a group of boys stood nearby pretending not to watch them.
Wren stepped aside and studied the entrance. Three visible security cameras. Two guards. Four exits from the courtyard. The main building had six accessible doors. The administration building had two. The west wing connected to the library. The library had another exit at the rear.
She committed the layout to memory the way she memorized everything else that mattered, filing it beside the exits of a dozen other buildings she had once needed to leave in a hurry.
She had mapped the academy before arriving, but seeing it in person was different. It always was. Buildings changed when people occupied them. People created variables. Variables created problems.
"Wren?"
She turned. A woman in a dark suit stood several metres away.
"Yes?"
"Headmistress Arlen is waiting for you."
Wren followed her inside. She listened while the woman explained the academy rules, although she had already memorized most of them. Students were expected to attend classes, maintain a certain academic standard, and follow the school's dress code. There were restrictions regarding weapons, alcohol, unauthorized visitors, and leaving campus without permission.
Wren nearly smiled at the last one. Nobody had mentioned that rule in her training.
She was escorted to the headmistress's office, where she was introduced, given her schedule, and told that she would begin classes immediately. The conversation lasted twelve minutes. Wren remembered every word.
The headmistress had a habit of tapping her pen against the desk between sentences, a small unconscious rhythm Wren catalogued without meaning to, the way she catalogued every unguarded detail about anyone she met.
When she left the office, she adjusted the strap of her bag and checked the time. 9:17 a.m. She had twenty-three minutes before her first class. Enough time to locate the classroom. Enough time to familiarize herself with the building. Enough time to find Rian.
She walked through the main corridor. Students moved around her without much interest. That suited her. Being ignored was familiar. Being watched was not.
She reached the staircase and heard laughter coming from the courtyard below. Wren stopped and looked over the railing.
A group of boys had gathered near the fountain. She recognized three of them immediately. Lucian Vale. Elias Laurent. Damien Cross.
And then she saw him.
Rian Voss.
The photographs had not prepared her for the difference between seeing him on a screen and seeing him move.
He was taller than she expected, dressed in the same academy uniform as everyone else, although somehow he still looked as though the uniform had been designed for him rather than issued by the school. His dark hair was slightly untidy. He stood with one shoulder angled toward Lucian, listening with the kind of quiet attention that suggested he was only half present.
When he laughed, the sound was low and unguarded, as if he had forgotten for a moment that people were watching.
Wren stared. It was not an important observation. It was not useful. It was not even particularly relevant to the assignment. Yet she found herself watching him longer than she intended.
Rian turned his head. Their eyes met.
Wren's heartbeat suddenly accelerated. She froze. For almost two seconds, neither of them looked away. Then Rian smiled faintly.
Wren turned and continued walking. Her pulse remained unusually fast. She touched two fingers to her wrist. Her heart was beating harder than it should have been. She checked the time again. 9:19. Nothing had happened. He had looked at her. That was all.
Wren continued down the corridor. She had been shot at before. She had fallen from a second-story window. She had once spent eleven minutes hiding inside a ventilation shaft while three armed men searched the building around her. None of those things had made her heart behave like this.
She stopped outside an empty classroom and looked through the glass panel in the door. There was nothing unusual about her reflection. Her breathing was steady. Her posture was normal. Her face revealed nothing. Everything appeared fine. So why did her heart disagree?
Wren lowered her hand. She had no answer. That bothered her more than the reaction itself. She had spent nineteen years learning how her body worked. She knew what fear felt like. She knew what adrenaline felt like. She knew what pain felt like. She knew what exhaustion felt like. This was different. She did not know what to call it. And Wren did not like things she could not name.
She considered, briefly, writing it down somewhere, the way she wrote down everything else she needed to remember. But there was no file for this, and no heading it belonged under, and in the end she let the moment pass unrecorded, though it did not pass unnoticed. She only knew, distantly, that she wanted to feel it again despite everything.
The bell rang. She looked down the corridor and continued toward her classroom.
Rian Voss was her target. That was all that mattered. Whatever had happened when he looked at her would eventually make sense. Everything did.
At least, everything except people.
And for the first time since receiving the assignment, Wren had the uncomfortable feeling that Rian Voss might be much harder to understand than his file suggested.
