Chapter One

Paranoia

Some days she came home and stayed home, chatting with the neighbour girls on her floor whom she had met the first week or so there. Some days she came home and soaked in a hot bath, working the kinks out of tired, sore muscles. Other days she came home and thought about her partner, Michael. And still others she came home and stared out the window, contemplating her work.

Nikita worked in a place called Section One, an organisation dedicated to cancelling the terrorists of the world. She dealt with those people on a near-daily basis—biological terrorists; the true terrorists; people who sometimes just needed to be cancelled before they could cause any more destruction. She knew now why people with her type of work haunted bars and such; they needed to sort out the good memories from the bad. But sometimes you needed both, to get you through the work. And sometimes all you wanted were the good memories.

Nikita had tried to block out those unwanted memories, oh, had she tried! For a time it worked, until something inside snapped and she started blaming herself for everything that had ever gone wrong on every mission she'd been on, most of them with Michael. Madeleine had said it was normal, as had Operations. But was it truly normal for a woman her age to wish so desperately she was dead?

She poured water into a nondescript plastic bowl, stirred the contents, and microwaved it for five minutes and sat down to lunch. Lunch and dinner were nearly always convenience food like this when she was home, even though she despised it. It also, more often than not, included some sort of pint ice cream, whether sorbet or the real stuff, eaten in one sitting because she hadn't yet had the time to go out and get a true freezer. Oh, the refrigerator she had worked for refrigeration purposes, and sometimes ice formed on the liquid tea mix when it was on the top shelf, but the freezer was nothing more than a crisper, and turned ice cream to soup. Nikita stared thoughtfully into her bowl, slightly surprised at how hungry she'd been. One lone noodle swam in alfredo sauce. She didn't dare make another bowl of the pasta, because it had been a week since her last assignment. Sometimes it was only a few days between assignments. Sometimes it was a few months. Usually it was a few weeks. By the end of the first week, if she wasn't on assignment, she started getting paranoid, wondering when her next assignment would be….what her next assignment would be.

What was it Madeleine had told her once, during her training? What was once thought to be easy is never easy, and what was once thought to be difficult turns out to be the easiest of them all.

Nikita tried on a smile, but it didn't quite come. It was a sad smile, one she wore whenever she thought about the Section or her life before the Section. And she wondered where she'd be that day if she had not been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, as Madeleine would say, in the right place at the right time.

"Josephine."

Nikita froze, the phone to her ear.

"I'm on my way," she said.

Michael blocked Nikita's path as she entered Section One. "You're on assignment in Miller's Point," he said.

Nikita stared at him. "That's where my stepfather's from," she said. "It's not too far from where I grew up."

"I know," Michael replied. "I wanted to warn you."

"About what?" Nikita started toward the briefing room.

Michael shrugged, knowing she couldn't see him. "Never mind."

Miller's Point, Nikita mused as she made her way to the briefing room. Am I going to be cancelled during this assignment?