Chapter 2
They catch up to her at a truck stop diner 100 miles east of the mission. She's been sleeping in the hotwired truck, for 30 minutes at a time before driving again. Hana is exhausted and high strung. She exhales heavily, dropping her tense shoulders. Hana doesn't notice the men until it is too late to leave the diner without suspicion. She’s so tired, but she needs to keep moving. She can’t go back there. She has two knives hidden in her sleeves, both no longer than her hands. They press into her wrist, a soothing presence. Her shoulders tense up again, and her eyes flicker up and find her followers.
It's Peter, and two thugs she doesn't recognize. She trusted him even less than the other handlers: he smiled particularly sharp while watching her dance.
One of the final patrons of the small, dilapidated diner leaves. She sips her oversweet tea. Peter tenses himself to strike. He is confident in himself, and his arrogance makes him obvious. The last occupied booth would have to fend for themselves, because this fight wouldn’t wait any longer. She launches herself off and above her chair, her right knife dropping out of her sleeve and into her palm. He snarls an order at her, something that is supposed to make her freeze, but it is meaningless over the uproar of the diner and the furious drum of her own heart.
A bullet clips her waist, and she realizes: this is not a retrieve mission. This is a kill mission.
The game is up. They know. A brainwashed girl would not stage a failed mission to slip away from her handlers.
She twists to kick Peter in the jaw, and he takes the opportunity to slam his fist into her new bullet wound. Her breath comes out in a hiss, and her vision blurs for a moment, and then it becomes scarily clear. In a daze, she thrusts her final knife into his side. The placement is off, so it won’t be fatal, but she is well trained and it will keep him down for a while.
When she turns to assess Peter's thugs, the world spins and melts like watercolors, and they are not there. Instead, she finds the final four civilians–not civilians, it turns out–performing cleanup duty.
The shorter of the blondes doesn’t even pretend to help, his eyes never moving from her. She had a feeling that he had been watching her from the moment she had walked in. The other three men were, undoubtedly, soldiers. This man was not. He worked alone, she could tell. Looking at him made the scar on her left shoulder itch. Hana blinks, and the world darkens fractionally. She's fading, and quickly. She needs to get out of here. She takes a step toward the door, and the blonde mirrors her actions.
"Who are you?" He asks, his voice carefully and deliberately accentless.
"I am no one," She hisses back. His eyes narrow, but he doesn't seem all that surprised by her answer.
Another one of the men approaches her, hands up in a pacifying gesture. The short blonde one warns “Sam” to not get too close to her. She is a wounded animal, and he isn’t sure how she will react.
"Look, we don't want to hurt you. Obviously the bad guys are shooting at you too," He waves a hand toward her wound. Her lips curl upward in a snarl. He should not be able to tell she is hurt.
"She's coming with us," The blonde fighter said brusquely. The larger blonde tried to protest, but stopped once the other started gesturing rapidly with his hands, forming shapes that must have some kind of higher meaning. He quieted.
A tranq gun appears in the smaller blonde's hand. Hana snarls, and lunges towards him, but she is too late.