The training took hold. Kylar was across the room in an instant. He yanked the woman forward, swept a foot in, pivoted, and she flipped over onto the ground. He was as inexorable as Durzo Blint. The woman was beneath him, face down on the carpet that covered this section of floor. The next move was to slide the knife between her ribs. She’d hardly feel it. He wouldn’t have to see her face.

He hesitated. It was his life against hers. She’d seen him. His disguise was good only as long as no one knew there was a fourteen-year-old murderer about. She’d seen his face. She had intruded on a deader. She was just collateral damage. An ancillary fatality, Blint said. A wetboy would do what needed to be done. It was less professional but sometimes unavoidable. It doesn’t matter, Blint had said. Just finish the job.

Blint only allowed him to live so long as he proved he could do everything a wetboy did, even without the Talent.

Yet here she was, face down, Kylar straddling her on the floor, the point of his dagger pricking her neck, his left hand twisting her hair, trying not to imagine the red blood blooming on her white servant’s dress. She’d done nothing.

Life is empty. Life is meaningless. When we take a life, we aren’t taking anything of value. I believe it. I believe it.

There had to be another way. Could he tell her to run? To tell no one? To leave the country and never come back? Would she do it? No, of course not. She’d run to the nearest guard. As soon as she was in the presence of some burly castle guard, any fear Kylar might inspire in her would look as small and weak as a guild rat with a knife.

“I told him what would happen if he stole from the Sa’kagé,” she said, her voice oddly calm. “That bastard. With everything else he took from me, he didn’t even have the decency to die alone. I was coming to apologize, and now you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Kylar said, but he was lying. He had moved the knife to the correct place on her back, but it refused to move.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow shift on the stairs. He didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge that he’d seen it, but he felt a chill. It was the middle of the afternoon; there were no torches burning now, no candles. That shadow could only be Master Blint. He’d followed Kylar. He’d watched everything. The job was for the Shinga, and it wouldn’t be botched.

Kylar slid the knife between her ribs, pulled it sideways, felt the shudder and the sigh of the woman dying beneath him.