Chapter 1
I was startled awake, dazed and confused. Since Yuki’s death, I’ve never felt more alone. She was my best friend, and now that she’s gone, I only have Data and Kevin as friends. Data has been seeming on edge more recently. I roll over in my bed on my right side, and reach for my phone. When I turn on my screen, I notice that I had 2 new messages, both from Data. Did something horrible happen again? When I unlock my phone, and check the message, they both sound somewhat urgent. “Message me when you can, Jax. I have something I need to tell you,” he had written. That didn’t take me by surprise, but the next one did. “It’s about Yuki, I know you’d want to hear it.” Right after I read that, before thinking a second thought, I call him. Data picks up quickly, and sounds panicked. “I did something horrible, and I don’t know if you can forgive me..Yuki is dead, and it’s my fault.”
All I could do in that moment is cry. How is Data capable of something like that? I expected him to say he missed Yuki, not killed her. The cyber-hounds were found at fault, though. Data didn’t control them, or what they did, I assume anyway. Data sounded conflicted, when he said “I love you, but I know you won’t love me now. At the moment, I don’t understand why he said he loves me. He killed my best friend, and he’ll pay for what he did.
I can’t shake our morning conversation out of my head. Being an assassin, you would think death wouldn’t affect me at all, because I kill people all the time. This has stuck with me for months, and getting Yuki out of my head was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I check in with Summer later in the evening, and they tell me about my next job, which is something about killing someone I knew who was a habitual offender. He’s been in and out of prisons, jails, if you listed everything she did, it would take all night. His name is Markus. I’ve never told anyone, but I sometimes wonder if I even like women. Yes, Yuki was my best friend, but I never was romantically or physically connected to her.
I pay no attention though, because I have a job to do, and it won’t get itself done anytime soon. Markus sounds like someone who would cause a lot of trouble, so its a good thing that I’m getting the job done now. Summer said that he’d be at the local bar, but I didn’t recognize him right away. When I walk in the front door, he’s sitting with his back to me, wearing a dark blue tank top and shorts. When I sit next to him, he looks at me. That smile..I’ll never forget it. In that moment it was like time stopped.
