(Another year passes from his last visit to the circus.)
Cain is 16; small, lithe and deceptively innocent. Yet undeniably just as deadly as anyone else in the organisation.
He realizes one day, for no particular reason, that he is the last left of the fifty children indoctrinated into the organisation at the same time as him.
He doesn't remember any particulars of the others - personalities and such - but he knows how every one of them died.
Boy number 1 caught hypothermia after being thrown into a sewage filled London river, no expense was to be paid for his recovery. He was put down, he got off lightly.
Boy number 17 was greedy - a useless and unneeded quality in their blurred world - and wanted to impress his handler, he bit of more than he could chew. The only reward he received was a bullet through the brain from his supposedly defenseless target.
Girl number 22 underestimated her target's bodyguards and ended up six feet under. Metaphorically, of course, her body was left rotting and broken for the crows and homeless.
Boy number 38 got cold feet. He returned from his second mission with nothing but a concussion and three broken ribs to show as a prize. His handler was the one to take care of him.
Boy number 50 tried to run away. His death wasn't quick.
Cain remembers every single one of them, not out of sentiment, but out of need.
He knew from the start that he was the lowest on the food chain and was certain that unless a miracle happened that wasn't going to change. So he watched, he observed and he calculated.
Any mistake made by the others was stored away and capitalised upon when the time was right. If 16 had missed the main artery in his target's neck then Cain's blade would hit the dead centre of his victim's pulsing throat. It takes 29 a week to kill two? A week later Cain returns with four heads to present to his handler.
And it works.
He rises, torn and bleeding and dragging chains of iron that once forced him to his knees. He survives. ( They don't )
He doesn't mourn.
At 16 Cain is a killer, the lowest of the low, broken and shattered into something that isn't right, isn't quite human.
He's actually rather proud of himself.
(Anything you can do. I can (will) do better)