Caitlin Monroe had been generous about that. Sofia knew her now as both a friend and, somewhat problematically, as an Echelon legend. Almost a figure of mythology. Her own controllers, her trainers and even Pappas – her last mentor and probably her first overwatch controller when she returned from Japan and began to earn her place in the organisation – they had all scoffed at the idea that she’d rescued the infamous Caitlin Monroe. ‘Just got in her fucking way, more likely,’ as Nick had put it. ‘Probably stopped her killing everyone five minutes earlier.’

Sofia had bristled at first. She was a proud if profoundly damaged young woman when they spirited her away from America, disappeared her as effectively as the Wave had taken hundreds of millions of souls five years earlier. She had done something as a mere girl that the mighty Echelon had dispatched and nearly lost its champion to achieve. She had laid a hard vengeance upon Jackson Blackstone for his crimes in Texas and New York.

Although, at the time, she hadn’t given a shit about anything but the blood on his hands from the murder of her family and, she’d presumed, her father. Nick Pappas had set her straight on that. She knew it was a purely calculated move by Echelon, assigning him to mentor her through reception and early training. He had witnessed the death of the man who actually had taken Papa’s life, and who had put poor Maive Aronson into a coma, where she still lay.

Sofia had needed many months to get past the idea that Blackstone had nothing to do with her father’s murder, that it had been this Cesky creature whom Papa had beaten down for causing trouble with Miss Julianne, all those years before in Acapulco. She still remembered very fondly the kind and pretty English lady from the yacht on which they’d all escaped la colapso. For a long time she had wanted to grow up to be just like her. And she still marvelled at the idea that Miss Julianne had killed this Parmenter, shot him and kicked him to death right in front of Pappas, before bringing down the man who had sent him and an unknown number of other assassins out into the world to exact his own petty revenge on those he thought had slighted him.

The idea that a friend of Papa’s, indeed the original saviour of the Pieraro clan, had exacted their revenge for her finally reconciled Sofia to letting go.