As she stared at the word, she felt a dim pang of longing for a half-remembered life, and faces of people she actually wanted to see swam before her eyes . . . but then her phone buzzed with a message on yet another of her groups, reminding her there was somewhere else she needed to be. Esther’s missed call and the reminder Daisy had set for their shopping trip was swallowed up by the behemoth of obligations eating Daisy Wooton alive.

The card issued by the National Union of Students promised a world of discounts, from 10 percent on clothes purchased at Forever 21 to 25 percent off cinema tickets and probably some other things in which Esther had no interest. She was crooning over hers, stroking the passport-booth photo of her own face.

“You have a problem,” Susan said, giving her a disgusted look and edging a little farther away from where Esther was sitting on the lip of the water feature outside Sheffield town hall.

“Says the woman incapable of quitting smoking.”

“Don’t go there unless you want me to go home and order myself a coat online without your input.”

“No!” Esther flung herself across Susan’s lap as if she really had been about to leave. “I bow down to your superior willpower. All hail Susan, queen of iron.”

“Off!” Susan waved her away and checked the time on her phone. “I don’t think Daisy’s coming.”

Not that Susan blamed her. If she’d had even a shred of confidence in Esther’s judgment, she’d have handed over her measurements and tasked Esther to buy her a coat while she applied her 10 percent student discount to something more enjoyable. Like bulk buying a load of tampons.

“But I put a Post-it Note on her door . . .”

“. . . and did you try sending one via pigeon post? Baby Gordon’s a bit young for that.” But Esther had that slightly wounded air about her, to which Susan was gradually growing sensitive. She laid a hand on Esther’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Come on, let’s go get me a parka so I can pretend I’m proper Northern while you spam Daisy’s messages with pictures of all the ridiculous outfits you can’t afford to buy.”

The Assassins Association wasn’t for her, Daisy decided as she slithered through a cubicle window and swung onto the drainpipe next to it. She was a lover, not a fighter. A healer, not a hit man. When they’d put a hood over her head and asked her to swear fealty to the Mercenary Code, she’d pretended to be desperate for the toilet, and now here she was, shimmying down three stories’ worth of drainpipe, unable to check any of the messages she could feel buzzing through to her phone.

If she hadn’t been so averse to killing people, Daisy suspected she might have made a very resourceful assassin.