Another day without Knives. Honest, he's coming back into the story.

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His pacing ended as he raced towards the door. He barely reached it before she exited, but barely was enough. Bracing himself in the doorframe, he refused to let her through. She didn't try to force past him, though. She said nothing, just paused a foot from him and stared past him into the open hallway.

"What happened?" he asked softly.

"Nothing happened. I had a job. I did my job. That's it." Her voice was dead, entirely devoid of the timbre and inflection that normally gave her voice life. This was what he had assumed all plants would sound like, but coming from her lips, it was wrong, so very wrong.

"What job?"

"I killed the people I was told to kill, and anyone who stood in my way. I was the flashy danger, the reason given when some decided that it might be better to toe the line. I was necessary, they told me I was necessary, and there was no one who could ever be as good at killing as I was." Her voice warmed up a little, and Mark was glad. That had been too wrong, too scary.

"Who were they?" he asked, gently putting one hand on her shoulder and steering her back to her couch. She sat down oddly, like she wasn't really thinking about sitting at all. Her eyes stared at the wall on the opposite side of the room, but he had a feeling that wasn't what she was seeing. She appeared to be lost in her mind, in her memories, and he wondered how he could have known her for so long, and have only guessed at the weight of the past that she carried. He had known that there was something, but this? It was unbelievable.

"They were… they were my government. They were my leaders and my visionaries and my teachers and my friends. I thought I was doing something bad so that they could make something good come out of it. And I was willing to do that, heap all the sins on my shoulders so, in the end, a better future could be made. But there was no better future, and there always were more people to kill. And killing… it's so easy a step to take. Very easy to see a cause and think that it's one you can die for. And if you would die for it, why not kill for it? But they never tell you that you should live for it, no, not that. Living is too hard, and they'll never get anywhere if they decide to live for it. Living… that takes generations, no power there for those who want power. No, the power is in terror and chaos, and you can seize the power you want through the chaos. And they told me to be their chaos, and I accepted," she rambled.

"You killed because they told you to?"

"Who they told me, and when. And where. Never why, and rarely how. I was bloody enough that they never wanted more from me. I was their perfect tool. But they forgot that a person makes a bad tool. They thought I was a good tool, that I was all broken and they could fit me to their hand but I wasn't broken, not all the way, not completely and I realized that they would never make peace. When the people I was killing were just those that they couldn't intimidate into working for them, and that there were bad people who I wasn't allowed to kill because they were part of the power of those who commanded me, I quit. I had had enough, I had killed enough, and I quit."

"What did you do then?"

"They threw me into the worst job they could possibly imagine, the one that they were sure would kill me off in a matter of months. But it didn't. I lived, and then I thrived, and I learned how to live for something, and then I was getting powerful so they threw my past in my face, and then betrayed me to our enemies and I was tortured to death.

She shook her head, and life returned to her voice and her eyes. "Happy now?" she groused. "My life story, minus not very much. I need to get back to work."

"Who were your enemies?"

She looked at her hands. "I have never been what you would term fully human, even when I wasn't a plant. Back there, I was a Genalt, a being created to utilize parts of the mind that normal humans rarely have access to. So I could do things like heal, and sense emotions, and all of that my whole life. Lives. But there are always people ready to brand those who are different as demons, as anathema and needing to be killed. Everything was fine when there were only a few of us. We were created beings, slaves to those who created us. But then came children, and grandchildren, and some of the children had a Genalt for a parent and a human for the other. What of their rights? And finally, some countries said we had rights, and other countries retaliated and took away what freedoms had been enjoyed, and then there were wars, and there were weapons of mass destruction, and the wars stopped, for the most part, but nothing was really settled. The world ended up with one government that granted us rights, but there are all these splinter factions, except that splinter makes them seem small, and not all of them are, and they still fight, still see us as inhuman.

"And I don't want that to happen here. I am human, no matter what you may think, and I don't want to have to keep trying to prove that I am, just because I can do some stuff that you can't."