(Niko's P.O.V.)

By the time I’m aware of her, my five-year-old sister has already decorated my entire left arm with a permanent marker. I notice the lopsided cat face on my bicep, but I still can’t move. I can only look into her enormous black eyes. Surprised by the sudden eye contact, Hana bolts down the hall, screeching and laughing.

“Nikolai?! What did you do to your baby sister?!”

Mom’s anxious glare awaits me at the hallway’s end, her fiery hair spilling out of a frazzled bun. She looks like she’s carrying a mini, brunette copy of herself on her hip. Tilting her head, Mom urges me to speak, but the words won’t come out. Either way, she’d never believe “I just looked at her” as anything but a cheap excuse from her scary son.

Hana throws her tiny arms around Mom’s neck. “Ma! Don’t be mad!”

“I’ll kick your brother’s butt if he hurts you, baby.”

“R-really?”

“Yes. Really.” Mom kisses Hana’s forehead, placing her onto the floor.

Hana dives for my legs, burying her face into my hip. “But he didn’t do anything! He didn’t even say hi.”

Mom shifts from I-want-to-beat-you-up-for-hurting-my-baby to genuine concern. “What do you mean?”

I sigh, knowing what’s coming.

“You know what I mean, Mommy.” Hana picks the asphalt from my combat-stained pants. “He was day-sleeping again.”

“Hana,” I groan, throwing my head back to beg the ceiling for mercy. “Why me?”

Her tiny brows furrow into a serious scrunch. Such a mature face on a little kid brings a sad smile to my face.

“Did I do something bad?” She whispers.

I smooth her auburn hair before it escapes from its lopsided ponytail. “No, little sprout. Don’t worry about it.”

“Hana, why don’t you go tell Izzy to come get dinner?”

At the sight of Mom’s serious expression, Hana runs off without another word.

But I grit my teeth. “Izzy?”

Rolling her eyes, Mom sends a clear message; she’s unwilling to waste her breath to argue with me over Lilith’s name yet again.

When we agreed to foster my older sister, Lilith re-named herself. My parents, however, went along with the Department’s suggestion of calling her “Isabel” because “Lilith is a demonic name.” We, the legal killers of America, “don’t want to offend the Christians” by calling a refugee by her name. But Jay, Emmalee, and I refuse to call Lilith a name she doesn’t identify with, a contentious point between my parents and us.

Mom crosses her arms. “What do you need to snap out of it? Your older sister already broke the whole punching wall last night because she was really pissed, so that’s out. Your dad will install a new one tomorrow. Do you need me to fight you, instead?”

I stare at the floor, unsure what I do need, but I’m sure it’s not that. Honestly, I’m still processing that I must need something, according to my mom and baby sister. I can’t feel yet.

“Niko? Do you need me to call your dad to come home and get a read on you?”

This grabs my attention. Dad’s sixth sense would know too much. “No, not Dad. I’m fine. I’ll just... sit in my room for a minute.”

She watches me unhook empty holster after holster until finally, my bulletproof vest clatters to the scuffed-up laminate.

“Are you sure? You’re not going to suddenly, like, flip out and kill one of us, are you?” She chuckles, and I’m glad my back is to her. Mom’s humor doesn’t amuse me, but this is how the Department of Tactical Defense members “bond.”

“No.” I whip around, deadpan to her smile. “I won’t.”

“Good. Pull yourself together and come eat, kid.” She gives me a shoulder slap, closing the door behind her.

I stare at the doorknob, my bedroom’s last sign of movement. Eventually, my head blurs into nothingness, and the thoughts start again. I guess Mom and Hana were right; I’m not doing too well. It’s not the worst, but I do hiccup for air as soon as I’m alone. On the outside, I look like an angry, empty shell, maybe breathing a little weirdly if you look up close. I’m dying to scream, break something, hurt myself, throw up, or maybe even cry, but I can’t. All I can do is sit.

No time has passed in my mind when Mom screams my name. She snags my attention on the first try with a rare hint of panic.

In this atmosphere, my body knows how to exist.

I march into the living room and find Mom’s empty expression—a glimpse into what I must look like these days. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

“Isabel is gone,” she whispers.

My heart clenches. “Gone” can mean multiple things here.

Storming into Lilith’s room, I find a handwritten note on her bed.

I wasn’t joking.

Don’t come looking for me.

I prepare to do exactly that, darting back to my room. Lilith isn’t dead. That’s all the information I need.

Mom fumes in the doorway. “You won’t find her, Nikolai.”

I tense my arms, definitely feeling something now. “You won’t even try?”

“There’s no point if she’s anything like you,” she says. I swallow hard, and she softens her voice. “That was definitely Isabel who wrote the note.”

I’m seething. “Her name is not Isabel.”

“Okay, Lilith,” Mom snaps back. “Lilith warned me she was going to leave last night. That we never were family, anyway, and she’s sick of this place. This is what she wants. Or needs, maybe. I don’t know.”

Mom’s crying now, but I’m pissed.

“I don’t give a fuck what she thinks she needs. She’s my sister! I’m not going to just let her go! Where the hell is she gonna go? We’ve got eyes everywhere! And she’s fifteen! W-well no, sixteen today, but—”

“You’re only fifteen yourself, kid. Lower your voice right now.”

It’s too late; Hana is already bawling. But I’m reaching my limits. Beyond my limits, I won’t kill someone like my mom assumes; that’s the last thing I ever want to do.

Which is why I understand Lilith. I hate being treated like a cumbersome life hazard after they raised me to be one.

But it’s not safe for Lilith out there, no matter her combat expertise. Leaving identifies her as a traitor. Our private paramilitary sector will use endless data pools to track her and make an example of her. I have to find her before anyone else does, no matter what it takes. Step one is to abandon everything I’ve been told and disrespect authority.

“No,” I say. A hot spike of anxiety grips my heart.

Mom clenches her jaw. “Excuse me?”

My stomach rolls, but I think of Lilith. I have to try. “I said no. I’m not going to shut up and obey orders anymore.”

“Hana, go to your room.”

My mother’s threatening tone summons a shiver so deep that my chest tightens, stifling my lungs. Hana slips closer to panic, her eyes darting between us. My heart aches for her. She’s not like us, and we always manage to scare her.

Hana’s eyes land on me for reassurance, so I kiss the top of her head. “It’ll be okay, Sprout. Go to your room, my love.”

We watch in silence as Hana pitters down the hall, escaping into her room and slamming the door to muffle her sobs. It guts me.

Mom pounces at my throat, pinning me to the wall. “Come on, fight. Get your aggression out.”

“No.” My choked throat squeezes out my words in a tight rasp.

She presses harder, trapping the blood in my head. They’ve trained us to withstand choking for a long time, but there’s still a limit where anyone struggles on instinct. Mom knows this, daring me to attack her and let my emotions out “before I do anything worse.”

I said no, I want to say, but it’s been a full minute. I’ve almost run out of air.

My own mother is ignoring my “no,” too.

Reflexively shoving her off me, my oxygen-deprived brain forgets to account for our weight difference, but my facial expressions have been drilled out of me so effectively that she doesn’t anticipate it. My brute force slams her across the hallway, her head bouncing against the drywall with a hollow thud. I dive for her in a guilty panic, desperate to cradle her head and rub it until she feels better like I’d do for Hana. But she slaps my hands away, whipping me around and arresting me against the floor.

“You’re growing too soft,” she hisses. “You expect to go out there like this and survive?”

“I don’t care if I survive,” I mumble.

She digs her elbow into my back, where the diaphragm meets the spine, and my strength reels. “You better start fucking caring. I’m not answering the door when they bring me the news your sorry ass gave up and died for no reason. And you think you can deploy like this on Monday? They’ll eat you alive if you don’t pull it together, fast.”

I struggle beneath her in silence, wishing I didn’t have to fight back. I’ve already done enough of that today.

It looks like Mom read my mind. Her voice softens. “Where were you earlier? Why didn’t you come home right away?”

I grunt. “I did.”

“Three fucking hours late! What are you doing lately at night?!”

At this point, I begin to sob. This shocks my mom into lightening up.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, either. I never cry. Now I can’t stop.

“Niko?! Answer me right now, baby. What are they having you do?”

“Nothing.”

She leans over my ear, cradling my jaw in slender, chilly fingers. “Don’t lie to your mother.”

Catching her off guard, I roll into the small opening she left and escape her grasp. I spring to my feet—feet that stagger around beneath me for a second, giving my weakness away. It feels like I’ve been hit by a truck, and not because of Mom’s gentle sparring; my secret triples my weight. The secret I’ll keep forever.

“I’m never going to tell you.” My voice sounds fake, expressing my emotions.

Mom throws desperate arms in the air. “What the hell is wrong with my kids tonight?! I expected it from Lilith, but since when do you not respect authority? They’ll kill you if you pull this shit anywhere else, Nikolai.”

I shrug.

She scoffs. “My teenagers have lost their fucking minds.”

“Yeah, we have. Thanks to this wonderful fucking place you’re raising us in!”

She stares into my eyes, frozen in her response. I can’t decipher what she’s thinking. She must’ve lost track of her words like she lost track of her adopted child.

Finally, she says, “You need to properly defend yourself and get your shit together. I wasn’t a perfect mother, but I raised you to survive the life we have to work with. You’re right. Lilith has lost it. She won’t survive, like any other traitor.” Analyzing my bulging eyes, she continues in a whisper. “What happened to you, really? Tell me. I don’t care if it’s confidential. I don’t even have to tell your father.” My expression threatens to give me away. But then she says, “Did you kill someone today? Is that it?”

Panting through rageful tears, I grip my shirt in an attempt to hold myself together. “No, I didn’t.”

Her shoulders drop. “Okay, then what is it?”

“I don’t want to fucking kill people! That’s what!”

She thinks for a moment, standing taller as she seethes. “Then why did you sign up for it?”

“Because I thought you wanted me to!”

“I don’t believe that. Part of you wants this life. And now this is the life we have to live, Nikolai. You promised me last year that you wanted to go further in your training, no matter what. There’s no take-backs when you kill someone, and unfortunately, that’s what they’ll ask of you from now on. You have to face this. Whether you think it’s right or not, they chose you to protect this country. It’s too late to live a different life. You already have killed people.”

My nails dig past my shirt and into my skin as I gasp for air. An image invades my mind—my first target’s empty eyes—and I’m light-headed. I was ordered to do it, but maybe I should’ve killed myself instead, sparing us both from the Department’s grasp. They told me he was a terrorist and I cling to that like a prayer, but I think Lilith was right. I think we might be the terrorists.

I can’t stay in this house another minute, so I say the first words that come to my head. “Yeah, Mom, I have. And I’ll hate you and Dad forever for it.”

I snatch my pile of empty holsters, vest, knives, and a pre-packed emergency backpack as I head for the door. I don’t stop to look at her face. I run.