Good At What She Does
A ten-year-old learns the meaning of empathy. PG/PG-13, 661.

The girl in black bends over the man’s corpse. She loosens the cravat around his neck with deft fingers and checks his pulse.

Nothing. Nothing is what she expected. She never misses.

She doesn’t even bother checking the rest of the guests. They’re all slumped over in the hard folding chairs, eyes bulging from their sockets, mouths desperately trying to suck in the breath they’ll never have.

The banner over the podium is still hanging, rippling a little in the breeze from the ceiling fan. A QUESTION OF PEACE: GREGORY ANDERS’ PROPOSAL FOR A CRIME-FREE CITY. Keiko extends her hand and pulls it towards her chest sharply, and the banner rips itself from its moorings and flutters to the ground.

She leaves the rest of the room intact. Father instructed her to leave as little evidence of herself behind as possible. Father’s instructions are always to be obeyed.

Is there anything she’s forgotten?

A man with oversized glasses and a pronounced shuffle pushes open the doors. And stands there. The files in his hand fall to the ground and scatter. They make a mess. Messes are bad. If you leave a mess, you’re punished for it. That’s what Father says. So Keiko concentrates and looks for the man in her mind’s eye, sees the organs and muscles and bones that make him who he is. She looks for the glow deep within herself and tells it to move the walls of the man’s throat together so he can’t cry for help. With her normal eyes, she sees the man claw at his throat until little drops of blood speckle his fingernails. He slumps to the ground, hacking and turning blue. No. Blue-and-purple-tinged-pinkish-red. That’s a better way to put it.

You must be punished, she tells him with her mind. You looked where you should not have looked. She knows that to be a very bad thing. Father has told her so since she was very small.

Since it’s such a bad thing, she’ll need to punish him very properly. She looks for his left lung and pushes at it with her mind, pulls the fibers apart until it pops and shrivels up into a little dry thing. The man is even more blue-and-purple-tinged-pinkish-red now.

She reaches out to stop his heart from beating so fast—

—fear. Someone’s afraid. Someone’s very scared and getting even more scared and it’s clawing away at her mind and it hurts and it won’t go away and she drops to her knees and holds her head tight and thinks very loudly to her father (emergency procedures: when facing unexpected resistance, summon backup if immediate escape is not a viable option). The man is shrieking, but he can’t be shrieking out loud because she stopped him from doing that, she knows that she did, so he must be screaming in her head and that’s worse, that’s so much worse…

Blue-and-purple-tinged-pinkish-red dots explode in front of her eyes and make her dizzy. She feels a strong, warm set of hands pick her up, feels the firmness of her father’s chest against her cheek. Has she failed?

You have not failed, Father tells her.

Ah. She can’t say more, and she can’t tell if Father said more, because the shrieking is drowning out everything else.

Then as suddenly as it began, it stops. She rests in Father’s arms, but not before something new crawls into her mind and digs out a place for itself there. The thing doesn’t shriek this time; it starts wailing soft and low, a high keening wail just barely loud enough for her mind to register. She waits for it to stop, but it keeps on going, and when she and Father arrive back at the compound, it’s joined by something different.

This thing crawls around on the back of her neck and makes the hairs stare back on end. It hums to itself and smiles very widely. And it’s worse than all the others.