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Sunset-colored eyes.
They were the first thing he saw, really saw. The flight of poetry struck him like a bolt when he peered through his scope and saw not the back of his target’s skull, but those eyes. Thane had never seen a sunset, in the truest sense, but when he looked into her red-orange eyes, he thought they matched perfectly with what descriptions of the sight he had read. Surely this was the stunning phenomena which had captured so many artists and poets—not that Thane considered himself much of either.
The ruddy orange of Irikah’s eyes, the cool yellow of her scales, the blue flush of her throat—the defiant outrage in her face—the sights flashed against Thane’s eyelids every time he shut them, and the sudden onslaught of color dizzied him. He barely finished the job—he did finish, he always finished—but when it was done, the stranger still hounded his heels, her accusing glare burning through his eyes even when he was alone.
That first night, he caught sight of his reflection in a pane of glass, and stopped him dead in his tracks. Green—his scales were green. It was the question every young drell asked the first time one of them was able to see properly—What color am I? Thane had been told—but how did one describe a color? Now he understood—understood why the answers of those with sight failed so badly, how they flopped around and bit their tongues trying to answer the question. Thane did not habitually linger in the open, even when he was not on duty, but that night he stopped in the alleyway and stared, like a blind man seeing his reflection for the first time. Green. Had his parents been green, he wondered?
Kolyat was a beautiful sea-green, all foamy and blue and mottled with darker swaths. Thane was glad he had the memory of the sight, though it was locked in Kolyat’s childhood—if his scale colors had shifted at all since then, Thane was not aware.
It was inevitable that he should track down the yellow woman, but Thane only realized this when he had done it. She was tormenting his conscience, clawing at his eyes, her thundering, soundless voice penetrating his dreams—there was no rest. By the time Thane found her, he could do no more than throw himself at her feet and beg forgiveness for this avenging disciple of Arashu sent to punish him for his sins. She staggered away from him, reaching for the defense pistol against the wall, but her hand stayed and he saw her tremble. Her lips moved, just a wobble, and he thought he saw the beginning of a question on them. What color...?
How much time had they spent together in the early bloom of their tenderness, tracing over each other’s patterns, describing their surroundings, inventing new metaphors and similes to illustrate one another? Each new color was a delightful surprise and on more than one occasion, they purchased things simply because it was a color they had not seen before (the day Irikah ran to show him a necktie she’d found that was teal, though neither of them wore such ties; the day Thane gifted Irikah a basket of red-green-yellow fruits because he had never known a fruit could be so many colors at once).
And Kolyat! Irikah was no painter, but Thane arrived at the house one day to see her agonizing over an easel, tongue poking between her lips, scrutinizing the baby lying on the floor beside her. The image was no more than a mottle of Kolyat’s colors (“Abstract,” Thane pronounced), but they hung it on the wall anyway. They marveled over him anew, as if they had been granted their sight all over again. But wonder did not last: food wanted purchasing, and the roof wanted keeping up, so Thane returned to work, and Irikah tended to Kolyat, and cursed the Illuminated Primacy for its carelessness with the children in its charge.
He was on a job when the world dissolved again. At first, he did not realize what had happened—the area was so dark and gray already that the absence of color did not immediately register. It was only when his hand passed through his vision, as gray as his surroundings, that it became clear.
Thane Krios did not leave jobs undone—but he killed four other people in the frenzied flailing to down his target and return to Kahje. His pay was halved, later, for causing such a mess.
To his deathbed, he maintained that entering that house was the hardest thing he ever did. There were no colors—but there was the smell. The sharp tang of blood, and the sweeter, more insidious smell of rot. Irikah was gray, the shimmering gloss of her yellowness lost to him forever more, sucked out of the world. It was cruel, and perfectly fitting—why should he see, when the only thing that mattered to him was discarded on the kitchen floor like a displeasing rag doll, limbs askew, eyes dull and unseeing, the taint of death wreathing her like a cloud of poison. Thane did not know what pain was—not until that day. Anything that came before were the pinpricks of a child’s scraped knee, and now he was holding his heart in his hands, watching the blood stream in rivulets down his arms.
Kolyat was gray, too. When Thane finally found him, coaxed him out of the closet where he was hiding, had been for days, the resplendent blue-green-black of his scales was gone, just shades of muted gray, and a shivering child too frightened even to weep. Thane pressed Kolyat’s face into his chest as he carried him out of the house, though Kolyat had lately insisted he was too big to be carried. If there was one last act of parental mercy he could give to Kolyat, it was to spare him the sight of his mother’s defiled corpse.
Irikah’s sister and her husband were gray when Thane passed Kolyat over to them, and her pleas for him to stay, to let the saga end with Irikah’s death, were white noise. Thane had never known how to get along with Irikah’s family, having had none of his own that he knew, but it had sometimes pleased him to sit on the sidelines and be an observer to their familial warmth, if he was not wholly a part of it. Now, even such pretenses were gone. Thane did not have a family—but Kolyat should have one.
To work once more in black and white, Thane had to train himself to see again. He had grown too used to the color, and the grays began to blur together. So too did the passage of time. It took years to hunt down every last one who had contributed to her death. Kolyat was a teenager when Thane was done, and then, a stranger. So just as before, without direction, Thane returned to what he was trained to do. It was only biding time—his lungs would take care of the question for him sooner or later.
Nassana Dantius was a job difficult enough that it might speed along the process. Kolyat was an adult when Thane took the job—must have been nearly twenty. Older than Thane had been when he left the Compact to marry Irikah. Older than Thane had been when Irikah birthed their only child. Thane prayed Kolyat made better decisions--that Thane’s absence might at least spare Kolyat his influence. Irikah’s sister had not spoken to him in many years, and Thane did not press it.
Imagining that Thane did not feel anymore after Irikah’s death was a fantasy, even for him. For a long time, things were dampened, but he knew still anger, pleasure, amusement, even a rare moment of peace. When he saw someone trying to steal his kill, it roused something he had not felt for some years—irritation born of a wound to his pride. How long, since he had been a cocky youth, allowed to take solo jobs younger than any other assassin working with the Compact? Since he had strutted about like an animal flashing its crests, marking his territory as the most talented and promising young assassin on Kahje? Thane did not like to think of himself as that same callow boy—but he knew the child existed in him still, and he was howling his displeasure at the thought of being bested, as some strike team crashed through Nassana’s hideout, forcing Thane to double his speed. Just because he meant to die here, or shortly after, did not mean he would allow someone else to take his kill.
Thane Krios did not leave jobs undone.
And while the human—it was a human, wasn’t it, despite the motley crew?—wasted time talking, Thane swiped Nassana out from under her nose. Assassination was an art—and he would not be shown up by anyone.
But the competition did not rage or shout or shoot as he had expected. In fact, they were wholly unconcerned with Nassana’s death.
“My name’s Commander Shepard,” the human said, reaching up to pop her helmet off. “And I’m not here for Nassana. I’m here for you.” What a confounding place the world was—as Thane tried rapidly to figure what anyone in the Alliance could want with him, he studied the Commander’s eyes, searching for answers. What kind of person targeted him on a job? Put so much work into hunting him down, but not to kill him? The penetrating brown of the Commander’s gaze, a few shades lighter than her scale-less skin, was marred by a red glow, an unmistakable sign of bionic implants. Commander Shepard had brown eyes.
Commander Shepard had brown eyes.
Commander Shepard had brown eyes.
“You have brown eyes.” Thane spoke without thinking, shock punching through his considerable defenses (an assassin with a loose tongue did not live long).
Commander Shepard had brown eyes.
“Uh. Y--.” She squinted in the light, and he watched as her eyes began to flick around wildly—he knew the reaction. It was the same one he had had after catching sight of Irikah for the first time. “Yes. I do.” She mastered herself quicker than he had, forcing her attention back to him, batting away the explosion taking place before her eyes. What kind of person was this Shepard? “But more importantly, I have a job to do. And I want your help.”
Thane took the job.
When Kalahira finally came for him—so many years after he had begged her to hurry—he kept his eyes open to the end, so the last things that tethered him to the world might be Kolyat’s sea-green scales, and Shepard’s fair brown eyes.