Free Dualed by Elsie Chapman Page A

here to get as strong as I can. And because—” I stop myself. The two faces in front of me are masks, hard and already halfway toward dismissing me, and I know my pain will mean nothing to them. It might even make them think I can’t handle it. “Well, like Baer said, for the training …”
    Dire shakes his head, his mouth a thin line. “Baer. He should have known better than to send me an idle.” His blue eyes glitter like glass beneath the lights. “But this is the first time he’s bothered to acknowledge I still exist—and what I do. So what does he see in you, Grayer, that would make him break his silence?”
    I blink, unsure what he wants to hear. “I don’t know.”
    The woman smiles. It makes her beautiful, and more frightening, too. “What
I
know is that you have no idea what you’re getting into,” she says.
    “I know that you recruit strikers for Alt assassinations,” I say stiffly. “I know that no one really dares to talk about you, especially the ones who actually hire strikers to kill their Alts. I also know that you’ve managed to avoid the Board so far, and that no strikers have ever been captured. Otherwise they would have killed you, or them, and the Board would have made sure we all knew about it.”
    “And yet you can’t tell us about your own Alt, your own completion. What you would do when it comes down to either killing or being killed.”
    Except she’s wrong. I know all about Alts and completions. When they’re happening to everyone around you, they might as well be your own.
    “See, that’s what got me wondering,” Dire says. “If you haven’t completed, how do we know how you’ll react? There’s just as much chance you’ll make the hit as there is of you running—or worse, leaving behind a mess that will get the Board pissed off enough to do something about it.”
    “I didn’t know I had to pass some kind of test to become a striker, or answer a whole bunch of stupid questions.” My voice turns flinty. “And I think that Baer being the one to send me here should be enough.”
    Baer’s name has Dire’s expression going dark, and it makes me wonder why they’re no longer friends. Both of them oppose the Board and assignments, both give Alts their best chance of survival, even if they do take their own stance on it. Is that why they hate each other now? Baer thinks Dire goes too far, and Dire thinks Baer doesn’t go far enough?
    “There’s no test you have to pass,” Dire says finally, just ascoolly. “And you don’t have to tell us your reasons why. It’s just because I’m curious.”
    “Fine. I need the money.”
    “You’re lying,” the woman says instantly.
    “No, I’m not. It pays better than any job I could get right now, since I haven’t completed.” Two parts to this, and only one I know for sure to be true. What’s fact is that idles get paid less than completes for doing the same job; what’s rumor is that striking pays better than most jobs, period.
If
you’re good at it.
    “What would a girl like you need so much money for?” Dire asks. “Elite training? Makes no sense if you’re going to be a striker.”
    “What difference does it make, as long as you still get the finder’s fee for each client? If I have to stop when I get my assignment, it’s not like I’ll continue to get paid, either. And if this works the way I think it does, you’d just hand a new job off to another of your strikers.”
    He nods slowly. “True enough. I guess I want to be absolutely sure
you’re
sure. We’ve never had an idle or active Alt even come in before, you know.”
    A few seconds of silence as we all digest his admission. The realization that I’m the first is not heady so much as unnerving.
    “Baer says that you do this because you don’t agree with the Board,” I finally say. “That you don’t think the system is always right, why one Alt is supposed to die and not the other.”
    “Just because an Alt doesn’t think they’re