Lines

“So,” I asked, rage clearly visible behind a smile. “What will it take to make you change sides again? I’d really rather not escalate this further, so what’s your price on killing your new boss?”

“I am a spy, sir, not an assassin, not a terrorist. I acquire information, and I may pass it along to whoever pays me the most, but I don’t kill, and I don’t destroy things that I don’t need to,” she nearly growled at me, before taking a breath and continuing again. “At least, I don’t do that myself. You may say that’s a line in the sand, but I etched it there myself. If I let it slip even an inch, then… well I don’t particularly want to have that happen.”

I couldn’t get it, not personally, and when I turned to my partner I could see the same lack of recognition in her eyes, but even as I opened my mouth to continue the argument, the tinny voice in my ear spoke up. “Let me talk to her. I get where she’s coming from, we can work with this.”

I handed over the earpiece, and tuned out of the only half of the conversation I could hear. We couldn’t work with it, but I knew that was just a turn of phrase. I couldn’t, but someone on my team would. We all had different lines, forming a malformed Venn Diagram that somehow—stumbling along the way like a newborn deer, lurching like Frankenstein’s monster—allowed us to do what we needed to.

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