He stared quietly the darkness, listening to the sound of the strangest girl he'd ever met shifting around under the covers, sleep clearly as far away from her as it was from him despite his fatigue. He lay still for an absolute age, waiting to hear her breathing change to indicate that she was asleep but it didn't. He didn't like the way their conversation had just ended. He shouldn't really care what she thought about him as long as he was alive.

Then again, this girl, this foreign Sector girl was the first person to ever show him kindness. Yes Zeben had taken him in as a child, but the word kind would never be one used to describe the man. This girl, one from a Sector for whom he had absolutely no respect, had saved him, taken him to her home, tended his wound and given him food and lodging! All for a reason he didn't yet know but it didn't strike him as malicious. Why would somebody be like that?

He lay with his thoughts for a long time. The medication had rendered his pain to a dull ache and he'd suffered far worse injuries than that in silence. Eventually though, the guilt got to him and so did the darkness. His demons always came in the dark. Something strange was happening. He'd always been a man of few words and even fewer friends, but for the first time in his life he felt like he actually wanted to talk. Throwing caution to the wind he adjusted his weight slightly to relieve the pressure on his injured side and let out a loud whisper. "Jay? Are you sleeping Jay?"

There was the sound of her shifting in the bed but she didn't reply. She was probably still mad at him.

Undeterred the words started to flow unbidden. "I was seven when it happened", he said softly.

There was a pause and her disembodied voice came from the direction of the bed. "When what happened?"

"When my family died."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

He stared into the darkness. It was so much easier telling the story when he didn't actually have to look at anyone. It took him a while to start, but when he did he couldn't stop. "I went through a phase of not sleeping in my bed. I had a tent in the middle of my bedroom floor and I slept in there while my bed stayed perfectly made. One night, I woke up in the early hours. I was thirsty so I went to the kitchen to get a drink. As I came back to the top of the stairs I heard a noise then saw a man walk from my bedroom into my parent's room. He was holding a gun. I didn't know why but I followed him. I stood in the doorway and watched as he shot my mom and dad while they slept. They never even saw him. But my sister did. Her crib was at the side of their room. She was only eighteen months old. The sound of someone in the room must have woken her. I was frozen to the spot in fear as I watched her stand up in the crib and smile at the man. I willed her to stay still and silent but she just giggled and held her arms out to him. He turned at looked at her for a few seconds then walked over to the crib. I thought he was going to pick her up and take her but he simply held up the gun and shot her point blank in the chest…" His voice wobbled at the memory and he heard Jay gasp.

Despite the pitch darkness he knew that she was crying. "Inside my head I was screaming but in reality I was like an ice cold statue, stood watching powerlessly as he calmly placed the gun on her changing mat and started searching through my parent's closet. I knew it was too late for me to save my family but I could at least avenge them. The man was so busy searching for whatever he'd come for that he didn't hear me cross to the changing mat and take the gun. The safety was still off and I pointed it right at him. He must have heard something at that point because he started to turn around so I pulled the trigger. The shot blew half his head away and the force kicked me back onto the floor, and injured my shoulder.

"I was still sat on the floor with the gun in my hand when Zeben found me ten minutes later. My family was gone and I had nobody so he took me in. He found the men who hired the man who killed my family and made them pay. They weren't supposed to have died that night. The man's instructions were only to threaten and retrieve a hidden file. There was no excuse for killing a sleeping family and a baby in cold blood. I should have been dead too. Apparently there were three bullets fired into my tent."

He stopped talking and listened to the sound of Jay sniffing. He knew that she regretted asking but once he'd started there was no way that he wasn't going to complete his sad tale. "For years I didn't know who Zeben was. He always said that he was a friend of my father and I took his word for it. I didn't do well at school so he didn't make me go. I expected the authorities to try and force me but they never did. Nobody ever did. To me, Zeben was a father figure and he took me under his wing and told me that I was special. It wasn't until much later that I found out there had been surveillance planted in the house the night my family died and he had seen how and was impressed by how calmly I'd calmly shot the intruder. Instead of forcing me to go to the school that I hated he personally taught me how to use a gun properly. He took me with him into the Transit Sectors and I met other men like him. I always knew that he employed many men but I didn't know what for. It wasn't was fourteen when I discovered Zeben was what's called an 'Enforcer'. He's the man that everybody's scared of. And nobody ever messed with me because I was under his protection. Once he'd taught me how to handle a gun properly, he told me how there were many men like those who killed my family. Men with no heart and no conscience. These men needed to be taken out before they hurt others like I had been hurt. I had no problem doing it. As a teenager it was easier for me to slip around unseen and unsuspected. I considered my work a public service. A public service I got paid well for. A job I did for years until…" he pause and collected his words, "… until one day I find that I can't pull the trigger on an innocent girl with the same expression in her eyes as my little sister that fateful night and suddenly the hunter finds himself being the hunted."

He stopped talking then. This was the first time that he'd ever told the entire story aloud and now he felt physically ill. He hated himself and he hated his life. This he already knew because it wasn't anything new. But somehow it really mattered to him what the girl up on the bed thought of him. She'd taken him in, fed him and patched him up, but he could still yet be thrown out to the dogs at any point. She could decide that she didn't want his particular brand of dead weight to bring her down too. She was innocence personified while he was the definition of corruption and all things rotten in life.

He could tell she was thinking. The silence stretched between them before finally she spoke. He didn't know what he expected her to say but her questioning words still took him by surprise. "But who gave you the right to take life?"

He wasn't expecting a question from her. And he definitely wasn't expecting that one. It wasn't as if it was a question he could actually answer.

His pause obviously made her think that he hadn't heard. "I said, who gave you the right to take life?"

Her questioning made him uncomfortable. All this time he was fine as long as he didn't think about things like that. "It's what I do Jay. It's what I was raised to do, it's what I was trained to do and it's all I know."

She stayed silent for a moment. "You can learn new things. You can be better."

"In my Sector we have a saying, 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'."

"You're not old, and nobody is beyond redemption if their heart motivates them to want to do what's right."

He scoffed. What could she possibly know? "I like you outlook on the world. Its naïve and oversimplistic but somehow it warms those cold dark recesses previously known as my heart."

He heard her shift in her bed again but she said nothing in response to the thinly veiled sarcasm. After a few moments he began to feel guilty about his little outburst. "Now that you know what I am, if you want me to leave in the morning I will, just show me how to get back to the Outside area and I'll be fine. I can fend for myself."

She still said nothing but he was sure she hadn't yet fallen asleep. Just as his own eyes finally grew heavy he thought he heard her voice. "Huh?"

"I said Samuel."

"Samuel?"

"From the bible. He also grew up away from his parents and was taught a career that he had no choice over from a young age. Only his career was for good, not for evil. Samuel became a good man and a prophet."

"Samuel." He rolled the name around his tongue and it flowed easily, much easier than hers.

"And if you want to keep it even more simple you can just say Sam."

"Sam." He liked that. He like that a lot.

After another silence she started talking again. "There used to be a spirit family that lived just under an hour walk from here when I was growing up. Their surname was Evans. We can pretend that you're some sort of relative of theirs. Their hair was dark like ours, not golden brown like yours, but we can fix that."

"Evans." That rolled off the tongue pretty easily too. "Samuel Evans. Sam Evans." He liked the simplicity of single syllable foreign names. Far easier to get on with. To adapt to.

"Sam Evans isn't a killer." Her voice floated back over to him again.

"He isn't?"

"Sam Evans is a good man. He's a man of honesty and heart. Do you think you can be that?"

I can be anything you want me to be, my angel. Alex nodded into the darkness. His previous life was over anyway. It would do him good for it to be erased completely. "I can be Sam Evans if you want me to be."

She was silent for a moment. "I want you to be. I need you to be."

"Then I accept the name."

"Good, because it's late and I'd sleep easier knowing the man on the floor next to me isn't a killer."

"Sam Evans is not a killer." The words sounded alien to him. It was going to take some getting used to, but the alternative to not accepting it was unthinkable.

Her musical voice drifted over to him. "I'm glad to hear it."

"Goodnight Jay, and thank you."

"You're welcome Sam. Sleep well."

He shuffled under the blanket and closed his eyes, hoping for sleep to finally come.

A picture of his sister's gummy smile filled his head.

From this moment I am Sam. This is my second chance.

Let me use it wisely.