The Girl in the Yellow Dress.

New York City, New York, USA.

September of 1990.

In the real world, bullets move through people. Someone perches in a window twenty stories above their target and spends hours staring at a concrete square, watching masses of people pass through the crosshairs of their scope, until that one face, that one person, catches their attention. Gently, almost like a caress, they move their fingers to the trigger, and stabilize the rifle with their free hand. One breath in, one breath out. One muscle twitch, and the gun goes off.

In the real world a bullet is moving too quickly to be seen. It races through the air, downward, tugged a bit by the wind. But the shooter has accommodated for every variable, and within seconds of pulling the trigger, the bullet finds its target. It rips through the chest cavity of the victim, crushing the bones in its wake, emerging with such force that it leaves a gaping hole in their back. But it keeps on going, even after the job has been done. It breaks through the ribs, through a dusky gray suit, and into the belly of someone who had just crossed behind the victim. It touches the thin, satiny fabric of her dress – a yellow dress – and finally stops somewhere inside of her. It sits there, a burning piece of metal, while the victims realize what has happened to them.

First to go down is the original target. He slips to his knees, his body telling him that he has just been injured, his heart beating frantically, out of control, electrical signals trying to jump the fresh gap the bullet put in it. He dies before he hits the ground, because his heart stops, and his muscles have not yet realized they should relax. He sits there stiffly on his knees, staring ahead in shock, his briefcase still in his hand.

She hits the ground second, crying out, because her injury is not as suddenly fatal. She claws at the blood blossoming over her yellow dress, like some kind of macabre flower erupting from inside, and the look on her face is something that nightmares are made of. In the cross of the scope, it was easy to see how young she was, how previously untouched. It was easy to watch her face lose all its color, her legs flail uselessly, and then go still. I could not hear her crying, but I knew what it would sound like. She was gaping like a fish on land when the first victim, the dead victim, fell backward on top of her. His muscles had finally let him go.

But no matter how bad it got, no matter how the girl cried and screamed and writhed on the ground, I could not look away. I knew that there would never be anything like this moment again. It could never be matched. It could never be outdone.

She was not alone out there. She had separated only briefly from her family, who now surrounded her, their faces just as colorless. She was freed of the dead man, and a woman took his place, sobbing over her and trying to keep the blood in. People were on their phones, looking up, waiting for more shots to ring through the crowd. But it was just one shot – one shot, two victims.

What had I done?

I slid back into the room, boneless, and tugged my rifle down on top of me. It was heavy and hot, searing the tops of my thighs, but I could hardly feel it. I felt sick. I felt numb. I felt like I had been the victim, like I had a hole in my chest. It was like the world had rocked on its hinges and gravity was all wrong, and I was unable to get up.

Larry came into the room after a few minutes, leaning over me, saying some things that made no sense. He took the rifle and packed it away. He looked out the window and scowled.

"Come on. Get up. Get up!" He kicked me. "Kid, get your ass up!" He kicked me again.

It was enough to get me moving. We fled the building together, blending with the crowd down below and getting out before the cops could shut down the area. But on the first safe street, way beyond suspicion, I stopped.

"I have to go back," I said.

Larry grabbed my shoulder and half-dragged me down the sidewalk. "Shut up. Keep walking."

"No." I jerked away from him and avoided his hands when he tried to wrangle me again. I was reasonably afraid of Larry, but whatever he was saying failed to register. I was only thinking about the girl, lying there on the pavement with the life draining out of her.

I turned and ran and knew instinctually that my mentor would not follow. Larry would never put himself in danger like this. But I had to go back. I had to see her again.

She was still lying there when I joined the crowd of onlookers surrounding the square, but an ambulance had just arrived. Now I could hear all the sounds that the scope failed to translate – the whispering, the shocked sobs, the babies crying.

Her family crying.

What had I done?

I stood there watching, numb to their pain, as the crying girl was put in the ambulance. I heard the paramedics talking and knew immediately, unquestionably, that she was going to die. She had lost a lot of blood already and the bullet was lodged in her spine. Her heart was beating out of control and that yellow dress was completely red. She was dying, but still fighting. I knew what it looked like when someone was on the way out. I knew the way they moved.

It was unwise for the shooter to hang around the scene of the crime, covered as they were in gunshot residue, white as a sheet and looking guilty. But there were so many people that the police only shooed us away. I staggered along with the crowd but kept my eyes on the family. Police were leading them into cars, asking them questions.

I heard their names, the name of the girl – but nothing registered. It was unreal.

What had I done?

XxX

It took me three days to get the whole story. Her name was Kenna Crane and she was sixteen years, four months, and five days old. She had dreams to be a writer and everyone who had known her described her as an angel – or at least that was what the news reported. Even if some of it was not true, even if she turned out to be a terrible person, she was still sixteen and she was still dead. She died on the way to the hospital, in her mother's arms, in a yellow dress.

Her family lived outside of the city and they never came downtown much. Her father thought it was too dangerous. But they were meeting her aunt for an early dinner and wanted to surprise her at her job – at the office building in front of the square. Kenna had dashed across the square to run up the stairs because she saw her aunt coming out of the building. I hadn't seen her because she was running, and my scope was narrowly focused on my target. Every night they showed her face on the news asking for information on what happened in the square that day.

Larry found me on the third night. He picked the lock on my hotel room, strolled in, opened a new bottle of whiskey I had left sitting on the coffee table, and sat across from me. We both had a view of the skyscrapers outside, of the sun and the beautiful autumn sky.

"What are you doing, kid?"

His question hung in the air as he guzzled down the whiskey. I had bought it for myself, but never opened it. I didn't have a taste for alcohol.

I had no answers for him. I had killed and killed and it had never bothered me like this before. I had sprayed people down with rifles in the desert, watched Larry gun down a police officer and helped cover it up, witnessed torture and torment. Why was this one affecting me so much?

It burned inside, like a fire in my gut, like that bullet must have burned in that little girl. If I had rechecked his surroundings, fired a second later, she would still be alive. But I had been hunting this man for weeks, plotting out his movements, trying to find another weak point to take him down. He was only ever in the open when he was in the square. It had to be the square. Why was she running? Why couldn't she have walked to see her aunt? Why did they have to come into the city that day? Why did I have to go to witness her final moments?

Larry could not possibly understand how I felt, but he might have been trying. He looked at me with sunken, concerned eyes, more like a father than usual. "It happens sometimes."

"Not to me."

There. That was it.

It wasn't supposed to be me gunning down civilians. I wasn't supposed to be the one single-mindedly shooting people in broad daylight. I wasn't supposed to be the one with my eye to the scope of a rifle, scouting a crowd. But I was. It was me. I had done this.

How did I even get here?

"When I first got in, I was young like you." Larry took another sip of his whiskey. Only a third of the bottle remained. "It's not the torture or the failure that keeps you up at night – it's when you win and you lose at the same time. You got your guy, but you killed that kid. You killed her. That's on you, and it always will be."

"Are you trying to make me feel better?" I asked bitterly. There was no bite in my words. I let my face sink into my hands, my eyes burning.

"No. Nothing can do that."

I looked up at him, saw the sincerity in his words, and left the table. Larry was not the person to take moral advice from. I went into the bathroom and locked myself in, leaning over the sink to stare at myself in the mirror. I could have sworn I saw him looking back at me – those cold blue eyes, that hard scowling mouth. And he was right. Three days in, and the numbness was fading.

I was in too deep. It was obvious.

The man in the mirror was not the same man who had walked into that office in Panama. I was older, darker, with lines beneath my eyes and an untrimmed beard. There was a coldness in me that I didn't recognize, that was horrifying. Remnants of my younger self tried their damndest to shine through, to be seen, but covering them was the mask that Larry helped me make.

I saw the girl in the yellow dress lying beneath the body of my target, a living scene behind my eyes, and held onto my guilt. I held onto it, but it was too late. It was too late.

Larry knocked on the door. It sounded like he was leaning against it.

"We have four new assignments in Russia, if you're up for it. We can go do that – save American lives – or you can fall apart in there."

It was too late.

I looked through the mask in the mirror and wondered how long those untouched parts of me would linger. I forced myself to stop thinking – to stop thinking of how that family would do now that their child was dead, to stop thinking of the blood blossoming on that yellow dress. I shut it down, and pushed it away, and opened the bathroom door.

Larry put his arm around my shoulders and smiled at me.