Chapter 3: She Moves in Darkness
"Was breakfast satisfactory, m'lady?"
"Mm," said Chloe, dabbing her lips with a napkin. "The marshmallows carved in the shapes of rabbits were impressive."
"Thank you, m'lady; my joy knows no bounds," said the butler, in a perfectly flat voice. He glanced at the floor. "Shall I remove the second corpse?" he asked, gravely.
"At your convenience," she replied. "I shall leave shortly." "Blasted ninjas get in everything," she thought.
He cleared away the dishes and box of Stabby-O's ("They're Sanguinarily Delicious!") and bowed low. "Have a safe journey, m'lady."
As soon as the door started to close behind him, Chloe stalked over to an ornate mahogany dresser in one corner of the room and threw it open. Twenty-seven trendy, expensive designer dresses greeted her, a wardrobe expansive enough to cover almost any social situation a growing modern woman might encounter.
"Except for one," she thought, ruefully, as she grabbed the 28th outfit. She tossed the black bodysuit, leather bracers, combat boots, and repeatedly patched green cloak onto the bed, and sighed. "Just once," she thought, looking over the fresh-from-the-store clean clothes in the closet, "I'd like to actually wear one of these things. Especially that one: it was on sale and everything." She closed the blinds and changed into the outfit behind a nearby screen (for decency's sake).
Next, she carefully opened a second smaller but sturdier cabinet next to the wardrobe. Metal clinked. Light glittered off sharp, pointy objects.
Two daggers, their wicked edges evident even through their matte-black sheaths, were plucked from a rack and spun into hidden pockets. Ten laser-cut, finely balanced carbon-steel throwing knives were selected from a rack of 127 identical ones, examined meticulously, one by one, and then slotted into a noiseless velvet bandoleer, which she strapped on. She threw on her cloak, slipped the (now severely crumpled) letter from Altena into a pocket she'd sewn to its inside, then drew it tight.
There, she thought, looking herself over in a full-length mirror. That's everything.
But as she closed the weapons locker, something cold and black glowered at her from the back. "Not quite," it insisted.
She sighed. It made strategic sense, of course; the more tools she had, the more adaptable she was. And, she grudgingly admitted, you could only throw one of those knives so far. And it might come in handy in an emergency. On the other hand, she never needed it, she preferred to travel light, and it was a noisy, clumsy, random thing, so brutish and inelegant that, all things considered, she probably would rather be dead than have to use it.
She reached in and slung the Backup Plan behind her cloak, with visible reluctance.
She gave her hair a final check in the mirror ("Wind-whipped and spiky, "she noted. "Good."), turned on her heel, and stepped out the door, closing it behind her.
A third ninja assassin, nailed to the door by a spoon, flopped off and thudded to the floor.
