To the death

It feels like murder every time.

I understand what you experience. Short of dying in actuality, I have no better way of knowing what those last few moments are like before you slide away. Can you ever feel it? Do you realise what I'm doing to myself while I whittle away the last few sickly strands of your defense?

Sometimes you are someone actively looking to pick a fight, and the reason ultimately doesn't matter. You find me, and engage me, and reluctant as I am I'm forced into retaliation. Or perhaps you are fiercely safeguarding what I, as a representative of the Order's wishes, am after. It's true that there is always a choice whether to follow through with a matter or not, but when we confront each other I am given only two options, and by all that I am, I am not permitted to run.

Your face is different every time. Sharp, blunt, masculine, feminine, stoic, fearful, leering. I hate it when you look pleading. There's nothing I can do; I wish you would realise that. Your every throe of panic makes its way into my mind, etching in and expanding that morbid little map that has been growing ever since I first shot you.

I was little better than a boy, then. No mental scarring to hamper me, just an ample dose of youthful enthusiasm to have the job well done. As for you...

You were a slave trafficker. Self-blinded scum. When the field director handed over all the files the Order had on you, I scoured them for the entire duration of the trip over. I loathed the very concept of you, and I needed to understand what made you in the first place. Into what sort of a mould could a man be poured that would distort his view of the world so badly?

But your files didn't tell me. You did. You and your planet, a globe that for all its filth and physical disease retained a sickness embedded into the psyche of every inhabitant, an infection far more debilitating. I could feel it when I arrived, though it would take meeting up with you for it to drive its way completely home.

Oh, you were desperate. The air reeked of it, it became a swarm of flies buzzing about within my skull. That was the beginning of realisation. Every child should at one point understand—no, must understand, absolutely must—that concepts are not to be treated as human beings. They are too easy to hate, too easy to love, too simple to render down, categorise, multiply, anything but kill. Perhaps that is man's misdirected reason for pursuing them so. Even in my comprehension of this phenomenon, I am still occasionally its victim.

You mouthed the words you were supposed to, as if it was a rehearsal, like we were to perform the next night and you were still stumbling over your lines, trying to iron them out. I caught the ideas from where your words were birthed before the disjointed sentences ever spilled from your mouth. That is my curse, you see. That's why I'm here, in the service of those more fortunate than I. If their luck continues, they will never arrive at such a point where silly notions and preconceptions weave themselves into a burial shroud.

To the end, you remained a concept. No—that isn't quite right. Until moments before the end. Then, I woke up. I was there already, invading mental doors you had left open, ones you didn't even know existed, my questing consciousness automatically leaping forward to its last chance at observation. I was overtaking you. I, merely a lad fresh on the field but with the dexterity you wished for.

Perhaps, then, you never really appreciated how close you came to killing me.

It was a jump, the first of many. You ran from hiding spot to hiding spot, trying to shake me, doing your best to eradicate your trail. You didn't know what I was using to track you, but it was working, and you were anxious. Your latest run had already become a bust, and now the Order was mere seconds behind you. I knew all this as I followed you, and I closed in and the jump happened. Black-haired, blue-eyed boy coming around the corner, scramble for a knife, quick, Ader's run off with the money and if you can only catch up—

If you hadn't thrown the knife, you might have lived. I saw out of your eyes, strained and sore from long nights, the blade's glitter whirling toward me and for the briefest moment experienced a surge of confused elation when it looked like it was going to sink into its target.

No, no, wait, I thought—that's me.

My training saved me. Those hair-trigger reflexes I'd worked years to attain split my mind in two, connected by a tenuous link that differentiated us once again, and I moved. I wasn't you and I never had been. You, me, the knife. It sliced into the side of my arm instead of plunging into my ribs and as I heard your mind cascading murderous thoughts, your hand already beginning to draw a second blade, I fired.

I don't imagine it's quite correct to claim that in a way I shared your death. I still remembered who I was. The trouble was that I remembered, too, who you were, in those last few seconds. That could just as easily mean that you are in part still alive, and even after I began to know you I cannot stop despising that.

There are things that files and records never tell us. How can a collected smattering of objective facts condemn or redeem anyone? By your list of felonies alone, the law would not have put you to death. I saw farther, as no one with the ordinary collection of senses can. Sometimes, when I am about to end your life you ask me, accusingly, why I've appropriated the right to decide. Perhaps you don't understand. I like to make arrests, not corpses. The Order pushes upon me the right to commit to each as is necessary. See it now? Just as I said, telepathy is not a gift. It is not the key to deeper revelations regarding the mechanics of sentient nature and the workings of the universe. It is simply another tool for society to pick up and use to hammer the stray nails into place. For me, it is one more reason not to fight.

I still do as I must, every time I meet up with you, and I fear the execution of justice is gradually turning me into a criminal.