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'Ah! changed and cold, how changed and very cold!/ With stiffened smiling lips and cold calm eyes'
-Christina Rossetti, "Dead before Death"
She'd remembered the gun—now stolen—in her hands, targeting a shot impossible to miss. One word: objective. Fulfill the objective and prove your purpose, show the program it needs you.
Cain.
Nicky remembers the Before. She grasps at it from a distance as bit by bit her chromosomes realign with the chems she's given. Green. Purple. These are issued with the order to go to Mandy as soon as she's low. Two dosages per day. Nicky pulls out the gold case that hangs around her next and taps it against her palm for two of the pills to come out… stop taking them, stop being manipulated. Get close to find the real enemies. Bourne, remember Bourne. Not Cain, Bourne.
In one dream she's pointing the gun at Cain and she fires it to leave him drowning in a pool of his own blood. Mandy is there, congratulating her for completing the objective. Bourne is taken away to become a part of the same program.
In the other dream she's handing him the files that spell the death of LARX.
Nicky lowers her hand, the tiny round capsules clenched in her palm.
With the files and her assassin, Mandy had retreated back to her apartment until she could decide what to do next.
LARX 2 had gone offline. No contact in fifteen hours might be called collateral damage if this hadn't been the side effect everyone had warned Mandy about. Put an assassin in a situation that required her to adopt emotion and expect her to adapt to her surroundings—fatal. Is she becoming as idiotic as Byer? LARX was engineered to be superior so why couldn't there have been a way to make the agents less susceptible to emotions. It's the same problem with the Outcome agents. Too emotional. Outcome Five and the later LARX 2 had practically concealed a whole relationship through their training, she'd learned from some digging into their pre-program files. It makes her hate the uncontrollable agents all the more. She hates Byer for his stupidity and Shearing for her prying. Most of all she hates Jason Bourne, the origin of all this.
I'll kill you with my own hand if I get close enough.
But then she has Parsons. As Mandy sees it, it's a vengeance against Parsons' moral high ground and resistance. Who knows… Bourne could be turned too. She imagines that moment when she can hold Bourne down, spit in his face and inject him with the LARX programming serum.
Justice.
It leaves the next move to be made. She needs resources and agents if she's going to find Bourne, meaning she'll need to find the successor to the program. Or, in the case of LARX, the rightful director. Byer's pet project had been Outcome, with some dabbling in LARX with permission from administration.
It should be a simple name search. Mandy sorted through the files she'd taken, looking for a director name… two assassins deceased, one offline, she sets those files aside… LARX 6 is the file she stops at, a note in the file lists her as deputy director of LARX. She stopped at the photo. The assassins aren't programmed to have emotions but there is something commanding in Six's expression. And recognizable. Mandy reads the file and finds out why Six looks so familiar. Six, or Siobhan Kane as she's preferred to be known, is Noah Vosen's daughter.
If it were that simple, Mandy wouldn't hesitate to return, but she's been interfering in Vosen's projects. Byer might've been the exception—he'd have had permission, but she hadn't been so fortunate. She can only imagine what Vosen will say when he finds that Parsons, a former employee, has been forcibly brought into the program.
Will he understand that it was required under the present circumstances?
A creak from the floorboards and she looked up to see Parsons there, a vacant expression in her face and her fist clutching something.
"You missed the objective, but you'll have a second chance. Have you taken your chems?"
Parsons looks down at her fist, a spark of defiance in her eyes. She's already fighting the programming…it should've been a larger dosage while she'd had the woman tied down. That scientist had made a mistake.
"Greens for physical, purple for intelligence… they'll help you survive." Mandy meets Parsons eyes and interjects more command into her tone. "You need to take them. Remember your objective."
"Cain. Take out Cain."
"You need the chems to complete the objective."
She dips her head in obedience and downs the two pills. Once they are down and begin absorbing into her body, the spark of opposition dies in her eyes and Mandy can release a small sigh.
Greens are physical but the purples break down resistance.
"How will we get Cain?"
"We'll have help." Mandy picked up her phone and dialed the listed number for LARX 6. It can't hurt to get to Vosen through his daughter—he might be powerful, but he could still be manipulated with the right leverage. Tracking down Bourne is all that matters.