"Sometimes," she said, and though her voice was quiet, it filled the space between them. "People come back from the dead."
"They are not supposed to."
"No," Ziva agreed. "But neither are we supposed to exist."
"You and me, we are not the same."
Ziva sat back, her ankles throbbing. Pins and needles shot through her feet. "What makes you so sure of that?"
"I have- how do you say in English? I have so much blood on my hands."
Ziva held one hand in front of her, examining it in what remained of the light. "And you are so sure that I do not?"
Kai coughed, a sound that in any other life at all might have been a laugh.
"Look at me," Ziva said, and blinked at the shaking in her voice.
"I do not mean my blood."
Kai's blood seeped between Ziva's fingers, and she reached for another rag, pressing it to the wound.
"My father is Eli David," Ziva said, tasting her father's name on her lips for the first time in ages, recoiling at the bitterness it left behind.
"Your father- is he not-"
"Mossad." Ziva spat the word into the ground.
"Why would the director of Mossad have a daughter?"
"Two."
Kai looked up at her, puzzled.
"He had two daughters." A thunderstorm brewed in Ziva's eyes.
"Oh."
"My father trained me in his image."
"You are-" Kai reached for the bottle of water that sat between them. Ziva handed it to her and with her free hand held Kai's head as she drank.
"I am an assassin."
"You are an agent of the American government."
Ziva laughed, a short, bitter burst, from somewhere deep inside her. "You do not seriously believe the hands of America are clean." It was a statement, or an accusation.
"I know very well the sins of this country."
"Then I can be both, can I not?"
"I do not think so."
Ziva adjusted her grip on the wound in Kai's chest. A bullet wound, a narrow miss, a "brush with death," some would call it. Ziva knew better. Death did not brush past the likes of them. It followed them, haunted them, drove them mad. It became them.
"Why not?"
Kai began to recite sleepily. She shaped the Korean in her mouth like an old friend, like it was someone she had missed.
"I do not speak Korean," Ziva interrupted, impatient with herself for her ignorance.
Kai did not respond, but stopped speaking. Instead she closed her eyes, the loss of blood overwhelming.
Ziva breathed deeply and watched as her hands shook ever so slightly. "I answer to them, yes," she began slowly. "I do as they demand, as they wish. But I think for myself."
"What is it that they demand of you?"
"We do our best to bring justice. It does not always happen the way the director wants it to."
"Does he believe in you?" Kai asked. In violence, she meant.
"No. I do not think anyone but Gibbs truly believes in me. But sometimes," Ziva said, breathing in the humid air. "It is not believing in someone that gets the job done."