As the bike glides across the dirt road, I do what I do best: overanalyze everything until I'm trapped inside my own head.

What the fuck did I just do? Not the whole blowing up Talon part, that I've been making my peace with for quite a while, but, Sombra honey? Why the FUCK did you just scoop up Talon's single most dangerous agent and put her on your only escape vehicle, you stupid bitch?

God I hate myself. And yeah, I'm panicking but you would be too if you had just thrown out three years worth of work over sentimentality—not only that, but I couldn't have picked a worse tagalong for my whimsical mercy.

(I can still remember the day we met, the sniper standing behind Reaper like the shadow's shadow, looking at me with disdainful eyes. I said something along the lines of, "Ah, the itsy-bitsy spider I've heard so much about. I'm glad we'll be working together~"

Widow stopped, looked me directly in the eye and said, "I know more ways to kill you than you have teeth."

The next several seconds were spent covering the fact that I was trying very hard not to swallow loudly. I came up with a random quip to keep my cool but I don't think it was a very clever one; by the end of the introductions Widow was smirking and Reaper looked like he was trying to keep something down.

(Years later I would realize it was uncontrolled laughter.)

I've gotten over most of my initial (Let's not call it fear. Let's just say…) wariness and formed a better relationship with Widow over the course of our partnership. However, the fact that we were on the same side was a crucial part of that, and I don't think it's a big leap to say that essential fulcrum is now in doubt.

Widow's clinging to me tightly, but her attention is behind us, her head turned toward the distant base. Her hand's squeezing one of my tits so hard it hurts, but I figure it's the least of what I deserve considering what I've done to her, so I suffer the drive in silence. My fear of her is tempered by pity—I've basically just erased all she's ever known. Talon's gone, and soon even the heat in our wake begins to fade.

The miles stretch on, and it takes all of our gas to make it to night. Widow never stops looking back.

I pull up to the safehouse three miles out from the road, completely camouflaged into the bracken and desert shrubbery nestled here. My ass is sore from driving all day and as I stretch, I get my first glance at Widow. It's about what I expected: her eyes are blank, impassive, but not like when she's intentionally emotionless before a kill.

Now, there's no spark or predatory intelligence beneath it. She's simply crushed.

I pull the bike under a tarp to protect it from the elements before I begin to work on the security into the safehouse. To anyone who happened to find the place without me, it'd look like just a door in the desert, completely equivocal to what lies below. But that's what Sombra's best at, isn't it? Three virtual locks and a password later and we're in, down into the temporary sanctuary.

Widow follows me in a haze. She sits down on a plastic chair as soon as the opportunity arises, but all I want to do is pace around. I don't know how long it'll be until her shock wears off—or if she'll decide to come at me when it does—and I'm not much of a match for her in a fair fight. There are no weapons in the base save my own, but I've heard stories of assassins who can kill you with just a pen.

I'm going to need to be proactive.

The safehouse breathes of old tech and even older dust. Sand covers almost everything, from the chairs to the bodies of long-dead beetles stuffed in the corners, surrounding Widow as she sits with her head bowed. A flicker of the sink light glints off the silver disks embedded in her temples, the implants just visible beneath her pulled-back hair. They're for connecting her nervous system to her helmet, feeding her information through seven additional eyes while not overloading her oh-so-human brain, but she doesn't have her helmet. Nor her gun, nor any venom for her mine. I've cut her off from everything, leaving her a sad, lonely woman sitting in my basement.

She looks up, eventually. She's processed enough to look me directly in the eyes and ask, "Sombra. Did you do this?"

I handcuff her.

It's a good thing Widow's so out of it, otherwise I'm sure I'd be dead before I could even try shit. But as it is, I slap the digitally locked cuffs on her, and am able to retreat alive with an expression that looks kind of like (-_-).

Widow looks down at her cuffs. "…I see."

After that it's…really, really awkward. I think about how it might have been more merciful to boot her off the bike as soon as we were out of the range of the blast—abandoned, yet alive. At least then I wouldn't have ended up showing her my base. Huh. Wish I'd thought of that half an hour ago. Well, guess I'll just call that Giant-Ass Mistake #2.

The silence stretches on as Widow continues to look between me and the cuffs. With a tilt of her head, she says, "So what are you planning to do with me?"

"Do with you?" I blink, not in the least bit prepared for this conversation.

"I assume you don't need my services personally, otherwise you would have found some way to go through Talon more easily," she continues. "What is it then? Selling me to the highest bidder?"

I groan, rubbing my eyes and marveling how every decision I make is the exact wrong one. "No, I'm not- dios buenoWidow, I'm not going to fucking sell you."

"Why not?" she asks, as though she's asking why I don't like cilantro instead of asking why I'm not a human trafficker. "I'm the greatest weapon to ever be created by Talon, the most deadly combination of neuron-development and genetic engineering ever conceived. What other reason could you have for kidnapping me?"

"Okay, first of all, I didn't kidnap you," I explain, putting my hands on my hips.

She raises an eyebrow. "Then am I free to go?"

I pinch the bridge of my nose and wave my other hand wildly at our underground bunker. "No, obviously not."

"Can I contact any of my colleagues?"

"No."

"Then can you at least take off these handcuffs?" She raises her wrists, causing the little sensors to beep wildly.

I think of pens being expertly driven through my windpipe. "…No."

She lets her head tilt in a way that was both equal parts sarcasm and unsurprised disappointment. "I see. Definitely not kidnapped then."

I can tell the conversation is getting us nowhere. I whisper honestly honey, if I could un-kidnap you I would, in Spanish, before flying to the various screens on the walls. I know Widow doesn't understand, and I don't really want her to. There's too much to explain and the truth is only going to make her hate me more, so it's better to let her just stew in her own conclusions.

"What are you doing?" Widow asks as I begin dragging data out of the safehouse's tech.

"Purging this place," I say, already forgetting the whole keep her in the dark plan I made less than .2 seconds ago. "We're not staying here long, so get ready to move soon. Relájate."

"Where are we going?" Her voice is so plain. If I didn't know what I know about her I'd almost say it was innocent.

"Away."

And that's all I say. I can't let her go—not when she could lead Talon back here and possibly track me through the old equipment they'd find—and I can't just leave her here. She may be subdued now, but I know that once she sets her mind to it, no prison I construct can hold her. Somewhere, in the dark part of my brain I don't like to remember is there, I hear, there's always another way to get rid of her.

I shut it down immediately. (A little hypocritical, maybe. After all, I was 100% ready to murder her this morning, but if I wasn't able to leave her to her fate, what makes me think I can do the deed personally?) So instead I pack, grabbing what I need and arranging for another transport. Widow's cuffs come equipped with a scrambler, which should keep her from getting a signal out even if she did manage to find a communicator, as well as a shock feature I can activate just in case things… get out of hand.

When I'm ready, I turn to see her exactly as I left her. She's watching me, and her face is blank but I know how much betrayal must be going on just below the surface. I manage a smile that doesn't reach my eyes. "Come on araña. Don't you think it's about time you got out of the house?"


"Why do this, Sombra?" she asks me less than an hour after we touch down in Erbil.

I look up over my kebab and give it a small wave. "Why? Well, I won't lie to you: I have a weakness for the deep fry." I take a wonderfully juicy bite.

She doesn't humor me. She might never again. Instead she says, "you know what I meant."

I raise an eyebrow. "Do I?"

There's no inflection in her voice when she says, "Why did you kill Talon?"

The accusation catches me. It turns me stiff, like she has the ability to reach into my chest and grab a hold of my still beating heart. (Maybe she can. I don't know how many tricks she's picked up from Reaper.) The way she says killinstead of destroy gets me, and I feel like I saw the conglomerate much differently than she did.

I shrug. "I didn't like what color they painted the cafeteria." The joke is weak, even by my standards, and Widow continues to gaze listlessly at me.

"Is that all?"

I can tell that, like many of my conversations with Widow, playing coy will get me nowhere. Reaper, if he gets annoyed enough, will eventually give up on trying to pry me open, but Widow has a well of determination deeper than the pits of Hades.

Rolling my eyes, I make a show of pretending not to care. "Listen Widow, the world's better off without Talon in it. I knew that coming in, and I knew that going out."

"So you planned to do this from the beginning?" she says and I mentally smack myself for letting that slip. When I don't respond, she presses, "Why join us then? Why pretend if you were only here to martyrize?"

And suddenly it seems like us doesn't refer to Talon at large. I can't look at her, nor hide behind my kebab (which is now down to a nibble,) and I wish the Earth would just swallow me up. I can't tell if Widow is genuinely hurt by my betrayal, or if she's just trying to make me feel guilty, or what but it's working.

She steps forward and I instantly reach for my gun. Maybe it was just an attempt to pleadingly touch me but I can't be too sure—her face reveals nothing either way.

Instead she stops, and with the smallest hint of pain in her voice she asks, "Was it always a lie?"

"No," I blurt, because dammit I'm back on my bullshit again. The alleyway is cramped, out of sight from the city streets so Widow would attract the least amount of suspicion. (A purple woman might draw some attention in a place like this, but a purple woman who also appears to be an unwilling hostage most certainly will.) The heat is suffocating, and I stumbled on to say, "No it wasn't- I mean at first but I…look I just needed some of Talon's intel. You guys were never meant to be part of the equation."

"Intel," Widow says. "…on what?"

"Nothing you need to know," I cut, and chastise myself. I was just weak enough to fall for her, to feel actual guilt, and now I'm unstable enough to start slipping up. Widow shouldn't know about that. Shouldn't know anything about the bigger picture. "Come on. We have another plane to catch."

She senses she's lost me again, and follows me out again into the side streets.


After Erbil it's St. Petersburg, then Kyiv, then Bitola, never staying in a city for more than a day. I'm doing what I can to shake Talon's tail, so whenever they do decide to hunt me down they're going to have a whale of a time. In my mind, the mysterious organization wears Reaper's face, and it's all too easy to imagine the demon hot on my heels as I prance around Eurasia.

In this weird sort of vision I've concocted for myself, he's coming after me in all his fury, doing all in his power to bring Widowmaker back. Of course, I know that's not true (as far as he knows, Widow died with all the others in the base explosion) but the mental image is enough to keep me up at night.

After a while, even that pretext is starting to sway under the burden of time. I've stopped running from Talon and started running because I don't know what to do. Widow hasn't tried to escape but I can't expect that to hold forever, and I'll think of something has turned into let's just get to the next day. I can't move on to the next stage in The Big Plan with her hanging around her neck, but every solution I come up with is a dead end. Not only do I need to move on but I want to move on, and short of killing my best friend the only choice I have is trying to go on with my mission with her along for the ride.

This whole time, Widow's been strangely…inquisitive. Usually she doesn't care what or why she's fighting, but now she just can't leave me alone about my ~motivations~

She also isn't as torn up about the loss of Talon as I thought she would be. Perhaps she's still in shock, but honestly she seems more perturbed that at the fact I almost killed her than that I destroyed her overseers.

…although now that I say it like that, fair enough.

"If Reaper would not have gone on his mission, would you have killed him as well?" Widow asks at one point, as we arrive at a discrete location outside of Giza.

I sigh, wondering if I have enough energy to have another conversation like this. "You say that like he's not going to die, araña," I tell her as I push into our sanctuary for the night. It's an old gas station, one that didn't survive the transition to electric transportation. "When he figures out it was me, he's going to come after me. One of us probably won't survive the encounter."

Widow doesn't respond, and for a second I hope my morbidness has scared her into silence.

I'm never that lucky. "You are so sure of that?" she says after a moment.

I pop my back, pretending like I'm too preoccupied to answer. I never did explain to Widow that saving her was a stupid accident, and I think it's best to let her go on believing she was all in the plan. It certainly seems to make her less likely to seek revenge.

She's glaring at the back of my head. "What is so worth it to you that you would kill him for?"

I should've learned by now that stony silence is never a way to win these arguments. I sigh. "Look araña, you're not getting any more out of me. We're on a need to know basis, and you're the last person who needs to know."

She looks right back at me, and I find it hard not to falter under the spotlight of yellow eyes. Certainly lesser people have been cowed by the assassin.

Finally she relents, turning away. "I'm going to find a bathroom," she says, signaling the end of the conversation.

"Knock yourself out," I tell her, but she's already gone.

I usually don't like letting her out of my sight, but I'm tired of standing awkwardly in the corner while she takes a leak, so sacrifices have to be made. Instead I dig around the turned-over shelves, foraging for snacks.

Widow takes a long time to get back, and she returns to find me chewing on a fifty-year-old chunk of Hubba Bubba. She makes a face of disgust.

As we bed down for the night, I know I'm going to have tomake a decision soon. I watch Widow eat water chestnuts from a can and consider the worst possible scenario if I decided to bring her along. The data I'd gotten from Talon makes my next goal clear: Tibet, a long-forgotten Chinese research center that Talon had intelligence on but whose mysterious origins they never thought to dig deeper into. They'd never paid it any mind, but I'm not them. I know the signs.

We could make it there within the week, and it'd be remote. If I left Widow somewhere in the mountains it might be distant enough to keep her isolated-

"Sombra," Widow cuts in, her small canned dinner left on the linoleum floor. "How long do you plan to keep doing this?"

I look away. "Go to sleep, Widow."

There's one long pause followed by "No."

I blink, surprised by the sudden harshness in her voice. When I look up, there's a fire I haven't seen in days, igniting every muscle in a killer's body. "Hey, I said to drop it-"

"No," she repeats, and for once I shut up. "I am done with 'dropping it'. I am done with your constant dodging and pretending like nothing means anything to you. I know you, and I know whatever is going on, it is something I want an explanation for."

"I…" It's more words than I've heard her speak all week, and it doesn't take much to batter me into silence.

"Shut up," she tells me. "Even if I am your prisoner I will not sit by without knowing why all of this happened. You show up in our lives, pretend to understand and then destroy the organization I've been with for almost a decade. So tell me Sombra." Her eyes bore into mine. "What was worth killing us for?"

She's sitting up, cross-legged, but body language twanging with fury. She hasn't made a move toward me, but my mind flicks to the shockers in her wrists in a reflex of fear.

But it's more than fear that makes me close my eyes. There's genuine hurt in her voice now, one that's protected by a shell of her own rage. If I had any doubts of her authenticity, they're washed away in light of the facts: Widow's never tried to leave me. Not because she's given up, but because she hasn't wanted to, because she doesn't want to kill me any more than I want to kill her.

For the first time there's actual remorse for what I tried to do at Talon, one that isn't muddled in the self hatred of my "mistake." I've taken the only good thing I'd found in years and tried to crush it underfoot. Why?

And yeah, I realize why is exactly what she's asking too.

"I can't tell you," I say, because I'm incapable of saying I'm sorry.

Widow breathes through her nose. "Do it anyway."

I open my eyes and look at her, at a loss. I'd been considering ditching her in Tibet but…no. No I wouldn't be able to either. I'm still lying to myself after all this time, unable to admit another reason I haven't left her behind: there might be a very small part of me that's too weak to let go. She deserves something, after I've forced her to live long after what fate intended.

Plus, by the end of this she'll either be on my side, or dead. I take a breath, and flex my nails.

"Okay," I say as I stand. "Fine. I'm going to show you who runs the world."

I sift, bringing up everything I need to summarize the last decade of my work. I suddenly spin, showering the room with purple screens, all displaying the same image.

Widow gazes upwards, the symbols reflecting in her pupils and the disks on her temples. It's a stylized eye, black ink and accented with three dots both above and below, set against a red background that now fills the gas station with a hellish glow.

"I call them Iris," I say, waving a hand to the images. "When I was nineteen, I had a run-in with them, and they sent me this as a warning." I smirk tiredly. "I'm never good at listening to warnings."

"They are…like Talon?" Widow guesses, examining the images.

"No," I have to keep myself from laughing. "Compared to Iris, Talon might as well be a bunch of playground bullies. No offense."

There's a threat to the way she points her chin at me, and I choose to ignore it.

"I'm one of the few people who they've gone out of their way to un-subtly displace, all because at one point I'd gotten too close. I've been more careful now, finding ways that they can't track, and every day I get a little closer to the secret I almost stumbled upon eleven years ago."

I know my voice is starting to unravel with awe, but I can't help it. All these years I've been chasing Iris and I've never said their name aloud. All these secrets, kept in drives or my own mind, but never spoken—it's hard to vocalize it in a way that captures how massive the conspiracy is.

"Why did you join Talon then, if you were so busy hunting?" There's no accusation in Widow's voice, and the strain in my throat lessens just a little at that.

"I needed information. A lot of it. And once I was done I needed to make sure Talon didn't know why I'd needed it." It's a rather simplistic way of looking at it, but it will do for now.

I change the images to the data I'd taken from Talon, a small sampling of it. "They didn't know what to look for, but I do." I step over, sticking my finger against a satellite image of the Himalayan Mountains. "That's where I'll find the next clue. As long as they don't know I'm coming and torch the place first."

Widow stares, and I realize I'm breathing heavily. I carry on like that, unraveling and explaining as much as I can to someone who hasn't even begun to understand how connected everything is. I don't think about how I'm weakening myself, how if she goes back to Talon then I'm basically handing over a key to everything I've ever learned. Instead, the only thing that passes through my mind is how much lighter I feel.

Eventually I run out of things I can say that don't lead further down the rabbit-hole of data mining. Widow is still sitting there, processing.

"So yeah," I say trying to keep my voice calm. "That's why I tried to kill you." I swallow. "…Sorry about that."

She closes her eyes for just a moment. Then she looks up at me. "I see."

I fidget, waiting to see if she'll say anything more. But she doesn't, instead freezing in silent contemplation. After all my explanations, I'm just so damn tired, that I crawl back into the small nest I've made for myself to feel days of jet lag hit me all at once.

Widow is still looking back up at where the floating images used to be. I feel the need to say something in closing, so I tell her, "and, uh, that's where we're headed tomorrow. So get some sleep."

That actually registers with her, and she lies down without a word. I still have sensors in her cuffs that will tell me if she tries to come at me during the night, but I have a feeling I won't need them. I've pacified her, for now.

As I close my eyes I wonder yet again what I've gotten myself into.


We're slow to leave Giza since Widow's been dragging her feet all morning. (Okay, it's not entirely her fault—I was the one that needed to shove my pockets with several pounds worth of gum.) I can barely look at her now, though from brief glances it seems like my revelation has hardly affected her at all. Maybe she doesn't believe me. Maybe she thinks I'm crazy, or I'm just hiding more lies. God I wish she was right.

Unfortunately, because of all this, I'm not terribly attentive.

In the crowded streets of Giza, I shoulder our way through alleyways and dust, tripping over myself and everyone else until I round a corner and freeze. He's there. Right in front of me, head to toe in black armor and looking very verypissed.

Reaper folds his arms across his chest. "Sombra. You better have a good fucking explanation for this."