A woman sits in a Sno Cat travelling towards Sky Blu. It's stormy, snow and ice cracking against her cheeks as the wind howls at her. Antarctica is making unequivocal its intent for her to leave, and to never tarnish this continent again.

She's used to it. Completely unfazed, in fact. She watches for saboteurs like a hawk.

You would be forgiven for forgetting that she was one, not long ago.

NO RECORDS. NO MEMORY. LEAVE.

Vittoria Rinaldi sits in tremendous pain, barely keeping eye contact with the woman as she rants and ruthlessly criticises. Terra Indomita is a danger to the station, to the world. She will not have mercy on those who seek to bring others to harm. Typhon argues, but it's no use—it never is, with her. She fires. Vittoria Rinaldi sits, dead.

The woman pulls the trigger. The detonator activates, and the sheer noise deafens her, and the station is immediately engulfed by crackling smoke and licking flame. It reaches out at her, at all of her hundreds and hundreds of faces indiscriminately. She chokes on the smog and the ash. She falls to the mercifully freezing snow, and writhes in awful pain. She has nobody but herself to blame.

The pair stand by the canal, almost one o' clock in the morning now, and the woman holds Ashley Samore in a tight dance. The innocent, naive Sceau d'Or photographer can do nothing but stand helplessly as the woman pushes her, effortlessly, into the water. Then she walks away, into an dingy alley, and picks up her walkie-talkie: “Mission success, Crake.”

This is no time for remembering. Perhaps no time is, when you could instead act, protect, destroy. She understands this better than most—it's her job to, after all.

A figure, metres away in the Sno Cat yet almost fully shrouded by the snow, pulls something out of a pocket. A gun, she realises.

She recognises the face of Linda Trace. The mad firebrand who would have the entire group die here, or so the woman has now decided.

She does not think. Not now. She acts reflexively.

The woman shoots first, effortlessly. A body falls from the Sno Cat, and lands on the still ice. Mission success.

The squeal of brakes. Screaming and shouting. The panicked group piles out to examine the body.

Kennedy Crake lies, silent, on the flat, apathetic ice sheet. He, too, shall be lost to time.

It is a summer evening. Outside, the beginning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture slinks through the warm air, as guests in fine suits and simple, elegant dresses laugh politely and drink champagne on the wide, rolling lawn. An old manor house, all dark brick and huge glass windows, stands stately above the garden party. A few other guests mingle inside, just by the doors to the garden, speaking in low, self-important tones. The scent of wisteria in bloom similarly mingles with the aroma of the hors d’ouevres and masks it with the practiced grace of a good host. The rest of the house is empty, save for a few black-jacketed waiters preparing the feast in the kitchen, a guest emerging from the second floor’s bathroom with his bowtie askew, followed by a guest self-consciously patting her hair, the woman, and private investigator James Sinclair in the basement.

It is a well-furnished basement. A few small circular windows allow the dying glow of the sun to trickle in, casting warm shadows throughout the unlit room. Bookshelves filled so tightly with books they might just fly off the shelves altogether line the walls, and several chairs are dotted across the cement floor carpeted with a huge, red Persian rug. There is also a pool table with no cue stick, and a minifridge. James is holding the cue stick, chalking it absent-mindedly. In the entrance to the basement just out of reach of the sun’s light is the woman, turning over a photograph in her hands.

A question is drowned out by a rousing burst of laughter from above.

“Yeah, it’s genuine,” James answers in a slow, easy drawl, though in truth he is a little irritated at the question. He tosses the chalk onto the pool table, runs a hand through his blond hair, his chalked fingertips staining it the faintest bit blue.

“I’m the best around. Based on what you gave me, which was a whole shitload of nothing, this is your guy. I’d stake my life on it.”

The woman nods her head, folds the picture in half, and slips it neatly into her purse. She keeps it open, delicately searching through, her head tilted just enough that her long, feathery hair - a deep chestnut brown - falls over one shoulder. The sunlight snags on her hair and makes it molten. James swallows. His clip-on bowtie is too tight. Stupid request, making him wear a tux to a dropoff, but this lady’s good for the money. And the party’s not half bad.

“So… my payment. It’ll be-”

The woman holds up one finger, silencing him, yet still searching in her purse. Her head tilts to the side further. James frowns.

“Listen, lady, I got places to be and I just need my money. Okay? So j-”

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture rises. From her purse, the woman extends her other hand in one graceful, fluid motion. As it reaches its climax, fireworks burst into the air in time with the music and with each explosion, the woman carefully widens the hole in James’s head. Even a silenced pistol makes noise, but masked beneath the roar of gunpowder and applause from the garden party’s guests, there is nothing to be heard as the body of James Sinclair thumps to the ground. Blood drips down the wall and soaks into the Persian rug. Then there is nothing but faint laughter from above and a fainter click as the woman shuts the door and delicately picks her way upstairs.

Some guests pass by her, and smile as she walks. She turns the corner, and the train of her green dress flicks as she goes, a last echo. The higher floors are empty now, and as the woman reaches the topmost floor the evening light begins rapidly to slip away. There is one door at the top of the house, locked, but the woman fishes a key from her purse and unlocks it. There is no click; the door is well-oiled. She slips inside.

The woman wastes no time. She walks with purpose to the wall at the far end of the room and carefully removes from its centre a handdrawn sketch. It is clear, precise, every angle of the face captured - except that it is missing details. The face has glasses but no eyes. There is something hanging from its thin lips, but whatever it is - a cigarette, a pencil, the lip of a bottle - is unsure, a grey haze in the mist of many, many erasures. The woman pulls the photograph from her purse and compares the two.

Another firework goes off. Its light illuminates the corner of the woman’s face closest to the study’s window; it scatters over her skin. Her skin, which has, up-close, a glassy sheen to it - the ghostglow of a flame that no longer burns. Her eyes, though, illuminated in the explosions, tell a different story. There are ghosts in her bright green eyes, and they are burning. They have never stopped burning, and never will.

The woman places them back into her purse, turns on her heel, and leaves the study swiftly. She has somewhere to be. Before she can shut the door behind her properly, a gust of wind idles by, ruffling the papers on the wall.

There are dozens. Perhaps a hundred. All orbiting around a few central, old pencil-sketches, some in watercolour, some in ballpoint pen. All of people. All, most importantly, complete. A few figures return; a man with warm brown skin and things in his hair that could be flowers and could be beads. A woman, lazily sketched, with purple hair as her only defining feature. A figure in red, with red glasses, surrounded by flame. In every picture the lines of the red figure are harsh, tearing the page. In every picture the red figure’s face is twisted in agony.

But more than all the rest combined are more drawings of the man. Some only whispers of a figure; a gaunt shape. Some are close-ups of expressions that look… off. Some are repetitions of words and snatched phrases, written in a hand so precise it could well be printed. All are of the same man, and all are incomplete. All, save the photograph of the man that the dear, dead detective had so kindly handed over.

There is an empty space on the wall of faces.

It will not remain empty for long.

Written by Molly M.