Signwave Read Free Page A

call it, perhaps the need for another person to be in my life, that need is what has now cost me my own.”
    “You picked the wrong person to…?”
    I never finished the question I wanted to ask. When I glanced down, I saw that the man who had willed off his approaching death long enough to pass along his legacy had finally finished his journey.
    —
    A nd started mine.
    The last man I killed for pay had wanted to die. Desperately, needfully wanted to die. The job had come to me from a cyber-person I would never meet. I say “cyber-person” because I never knew if communication was with a man or a woman—a machine has no gender.
    But I didn’t fear betrayal from that source. Long ago, I had told myself that, somehow, “he” was the grandson of a man Luc had served with in La Résistance. Luc was my father—in all ways but biological. Luca Adrian was the name he gave me, knowing that it would no longer exist the moment my
nom de guerre
was entered on the roster of La Légion Étrangère.
    It had been so many years since the cyber-ghost had entered my life that betrayal was not a question in my mind.
    Later, a woman—a girl, really; I believe she was too young to have served with Médecins Sans Frontières without havingerased her past as I had mine—triggered something in me. She was everything the man who had once been an assassin had warned me against.
    Maybe that started when she took my weapons: my pistol, the Vietnam tomahawk, and my garrote. No weapons inside their field hospital allowed. I never got them back.
    It was years—and that blind tumble of the dice that fools call “destiny” or “karma”—before I saw that woman again. More accurately, our paths crossed for a second time. But from that moment, I knew she was real, not some angelic phantom my fevered brain had summoned up while I was close to dying. In another jungle, another war.
    From that moment, I did everything I could think of to bring her to me. She’d told me her secret. I knew that her “it will never happen” dream was a place where she could live in peace, finally out of that unrelenting stream of dead, dying, and tortured human beings. The stream she’d been trying to stem with her own life—body and soul—since what seemed like forever to her. She knew if she didn’t get out she’d be swept along, too. And what good would she be to anyone then?
    I found that place, just as she’d envisioned it. I offered it to her. I offered myself, too. I knew I had not been part of her dream, so all I could do was ask to join her.
    That meant telling her the truth.
    I did that.
    When she accepted me, I lived without fear of what Olaf had warned me against. If my Dolly were to betray me, I would not want such knowledge to precede my death.
    —
    B efore Dolly, I had given up many things.
    Some taken from me, before I learned. Some after, when I had to discard weight to move quickly.
    Both my childhoods—the one that had been wiped from my memory before I ran from that “clinic” in Belgium, and the briefer but so much richer one that I’d had with Luc—gone forever.
    To be a mercenary may not have been my fate, but it was the only option I had. When that first five years was up, I left La Légion. I’d served long enough to walk away…but to where? The five years gave me French citizenship, but I didn’t want that any more than the French wanted me. No
gitan
could be truly French, and that part of my chromosomal chain was stamped across my face as clearly as the thickened slab of scar tissue on my wrist. And I couldn’t cover my face with a sleeve.
    Soldiering was all I knew. I went back to Darkville, and signed on with one of the mercenary outfits. Being a former
légionnaire
was all the credential I needed. They knew no man would make such a claim falsely—too many of us had later become soldiers-for-hire to take that much risk.
    But waiting with Olaf as he stayed alive long enough to deliver his only legacy, that was when I