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They are both sixteen and a hundred years old.
Nothing is as familiar or intimate as the weight of a silver blade pressed in their palms and the pull of a rifle across their backs.
This they understand. This is truth.
When awoken – and she is always awoken first – the girl will stalk on silent feet to the only other chamber in the room and she will stand guard and wait until the boy is released. It is a constant. She will wait for as long as it takes – until shadows bathe the tank and darken the frost-bitten face beneath the oval window. She will not touch the weapons placed in front of her. She will not eat.
Only after he, too, is awoken will she dutifully strap on her kevlar vest, slot the guns and the knives into holsters with practiced fingers; she will eat whatever is set out and as they are escorted down the corridor together, the backs of their hands will touch.
They have never met and yet, they do not know anyone the way they know each other. Decades of wipes have rid them of everything but that; their bodies are their own.
This they will understand. This will be truth.
It is the early turn of the twentieth century and every policeman has found himself a pistol. France is a haven for the wealthy, Paris paved by knots of omnibus tracks and the teeming excitement of change: underground grids of fast moving machinery – proof that, like the open air heavens above, life can be carved out away from the stronghold walls that box in the capitol.
The Argents are an established name. The Argents have deep pockets and unhurried muscles, grown soft over time. They are landowners, farmers, bankers; they tuck their children into bed and beneath the pillows there is only coolness and the drag of cotton on cotton. The armory is locked up in the cellar.
A new pack emerges like a growing tide and their alpha is relentless, is ruthless. He has vicious claws and fur the color of midnight sky that prickle and sway as he prowls the streets looking for sinners and saints alike. He wants to be immortal, and he wants his betas on every continent, and he wants and he wants.
There is no ready resistance – the armory is locked up in the cellar. There is only the Argents and a losing war.
On the coldest day of winter, on top of a freshly upturned grave in Père Lachaise, with a full moon painted onto the stretched canvas above the treetops, the matriarch clutches at her throat. Her fingers catch on a silver pendant and a cold tremor works its way through her core; eyes fluttering: open, shut, open, shut, open.
Brown. Brown. Yellow.
They are born and reborn as blank slates, the girl and the boy – their minds a chalkboard of commands wiped clean after every use.
They will have names soon enough and it will be a revelation after so much nothing, coated in frost.
She will be banshee; bullets will sing and scream as they pierce through the atmosphere around her. Where she appears, people drop dead. The rumor is: she is the harbinger of death. The rumor is: death and her walk hand in hand.
Later, at the extraction site, the handler will smirk and whistle straight into her ear as he secures her cuffs and she will flinch and shake and the metal against her wrists will chafe her raw.
He will be the spark; for every grenade, there is a linchpin at the ready and he will lead and the banshee will follow and in the steps between them, a war is held. More often then not, he will simply be the human and it is a mockery.
Later, at the extraction site, the handler will instruct him to speak – report your mission status, human – and only then will he remember he has a voice.
They will question their identities – this will happen at times, but only very rarely. They will wonder why it is that they were given such codenames, why their eponyms are of a wailing woman, a brief illusion of combustion.
Only after extended missions, and if they are deemed stable and allowed to be kept in close vicinity during down time, will it occur to the boy that they are named as counterparts: that he is hers and she is his. It will please him greatly. After this, he will sit by her during the debriefing – the barest touch at the lengths of their arms, their thighs, the outside edge of their boots – and he will refer to her as banshee and it will be said like a secret to which only they are aware.
Something is missing.
He will not understand the significance – he has never met her – yet he will know that it is important. It is not irrelevant, as it should be.
Desperation is a man with clouded eyes and jittery hands that are always reaching. He is a second-generation experimental scientist and his last name is simply a last name, but he is eager to change the world.
Desperation comes in the dark of night, dressed in a hooded cloak, a silver pendant dangling from her neck, asking about his work.
‘Nous avons des fusils. Il ne suffit pas,’ she says. Just the tip of her chin and the red coloring of her cheeks are visible at the edges of the shadows. A flicker of metal can be seen in the folds of her dress. ‘Nous voulons que vous nous construire des armes différentes.’
The tip of his cigarette flares with glowing embers as he takes a long drag, and ponders. ‘Qu'êtes-vous prêt à payer?’
‘Pour ça? Rien.’
The smile that stretches across his face, then, is obscene.
There are facts to be considered – the good doctor is very adamant: the children must be of no later than their fourth year; the children must be able-bodied and healthy; the children must be of sound temperament and capable of following verbal instructions.
The fact is, the Argents agree to the terms, and they bring in Monsieur Deucalion at his earliest convenience. They build him a laboratory and a training ground with fortified walls and cameras to cover every corner. He is unaware that he will be as much a prisoner as the children and will never be allowed to leave. They are unaware that he no such intention of leaving.
The children are meant for greatness. They are to be the glory – the chosen future – in an endless battle against the beasts terrorizing the city, and it is nothing but mere coincidence that every last one is an orphan.
Initially, there are forty of them, brought in from the cold, the orphanages and the streets. They were lost and now they are saved. This is their first lesson.
The children are children. They have scabbed knees and bloody knuckles and their make-believe games include guns and monsters: scary creatures with bright eyes and teeth like shards and they shoot and shoot and shoot – two between the eyes, and one through the heart. That is how the game is won and they always win.
The ones who are quickest to complete the objective get loud applause from the trainers and they flush with excitement and pride. The others are given tight smiles. This is only true for the first two years.
Sparring begins during the fifth year of the program. There is no applause. There are no tight smiles. There are only minds that need to be quicker and bones that need to be stronger.
The training grounds are scrubbed daily. No one is sure when the Matriarch will visit – she likes the off-kilter feeling of surprise – so every surface must be pristine and the blood is wiped clean like it was never there.
To form the children into what is needed, their foundation is key; it must be sound. They do not know they are being broken but they are being broken. Some do not last and some are too competent.
Femme|2| is a problem. One of the earliest recruits – saved as an infant from the dank, slow-dripping death of an overcrowded English nunnery, Femme|2| is aggressive, too volatile, too defiant, and much, much too clever for her own good. The hidden surveillance cameras around the base have caught eleven separate instances since installment in which she can be seen with a cocked head, halted in her tracks and staring straight into the lens.
The trainers give their orders in French and converse with one another in the privacy of English, but that, too, she seems to comprehend. She pauses with her knife work as if to listen.
Rubber truncheons to the shoulder joints have proven to be an adequate deterrent to interruptions in training. For Femme|2|, there are additional consequences for her continual insubordination: brass rod to the shins; training sessions extended into normal sleep time; lit cigarette to the flesh of her inner thighs; dragging her to the barracks some quarter of a mile away by the roots of her hair. For all this, enough that she will ache and cry out, but the punishments never extend as far as to hinder her training.
It is a June morning, eight years into the program, and Femme|2| has not returned from behind the whipping posts. The trainers are starting to worry they went too far; an even number is needed for the evening’s drill. Monsieur Deucalion will not be happy. They send one of the boys to fetch her. This is a normal occurrence, although it is the first time it has been tasked to Homme|20|.
Homme|20| finds Femme|2|, not where she was left, but several yards away, near the stone path. She is drawing a picture and he watches quietly as she dabs a finger against the split of her bottom lip and drags it on the cement.
‘Elle a les cheveux roux,’ she says. Her hands never still. ‘Comme moi.’
Homme|20| cannot look away from the red on the ground, the red seeping through the back of her shirt, the red coloring her lips. He nods.
‘You need to listen. Then you will not be punished.’ He winces at his mistake; English is not for them. He should know better.
At that, she stops, her hand balling up into a small fist, and she glares up at him. ‘They mean to set an example of me. If not me, then another. I listen more than you think,’ she says, and hesitates before adding, ‘It seems you do too.’
Femme|2| is a problem. The trainers call her a disappointment and the other children know enough to avoid her like a plague. She is no competition, but her face – her face is turned to his and through the gap of her lips he can see the blood on her teeth and her eyes are alive. He has never felt such fear.
‘J'ai besoin de vous ramener.’ He holds out a hand for her. It is a mercy.
After missions in England – and they have gone three times now – she will recline on their hotel bed and sigh up to the ceiling and she will say, ‘We should stay, human. It’s pleasant here, nice, something in the water.’
Her human will be sitting on the floor by her side, cleaning the recoil pad of his favored sniper rifle and he will look outside the window. This is a constant. It is just after daybreak and the sun is painting gold the rooftops across the way and they will have time to spare.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he will say. ‘It’s almost autumn. We won’t have many more chances to see the leaves.’
Files on the remaining eight children in the program, when not in use, are kept under lock and key in Monsieur Deucalion’s private office safe, underneath the potted plant.
The largest folder is reserved for Femme|2| and it is filled with an extensive list of her failings and derelictions and photographic evidence of her injuries. Homme|20| has the smallest; in his, the trainers document his developing skill as a long distance shooter, and his utter lack of concentration – while on training runs, Homme|20| has been shown to be easily distracted at his post, and thus would be detrimental in team missions. Overall, he is competent, but thoroughly unremarkable.
Neither of them is recommended for partnership training and neither is expected to continue. This is before.
In the after: after Homme|20| finds Femme|2|; after he starts sitting by her, standing by her, training by her; after she crowds him into a blind spot in the hallway and presses her lips to his in the only way she knows how – fierce and biting and uninhibited; after he rubs at the back of his neck as she rakes her fingers down the front of a dusted English copy of The Phantom of the Opera in awe; after his bunk in the shared barracks goes cold night after night.
In the after, Femme|2| obeys orders without delay, her movement a blur of vicious accuracy, and Homme|20| does not waver as he hits every bright-eyed target close to her with a startlingly improved focus. Together, they are a force. They are a whirlwind of action and calibrated mayhem. They are Monsieur Deucalion’s pride and joy.
The trainers pat each other on the back at this turn of events, congratulating themselves for a job well done; they have broken and remolded Homme|20| and Femme|2| both. This calls for champagne. This calls for increased funding.
It does not occur to them that all they have accomplished is to merely erect the foundations of the boy and the girl on dirt with neglected roots; twisted bark that now grows as one.
In the after, Homme|20| huddles closer on the small bunk until they are inches apart and he whispers against her hairline, ‘I remember. They don’t think I do, but I do.’
‘What is it you remember?’
‘My name.’
She frowns at him. ‘You are Homme|20|.’
‘No, before.’ He shakes his head and breathes in her skin. ‘There was a before and I was Stanislas. I had a nickname. Stiles.’
Femme|2| repeats it – Stiles – and it is a word, only a word. She should not feel so much, should not feel at all, but there is the buzz of the word on her tongue and the warmth of him all around her; part of his hair is rucked up and falls into his eyes, much longer than is permitted – he will have to get a haircut soon – and he is wearing their regulation grey shirt, though he has kicked off his pants, and the edges of his mouth are quirked up in earnest, and he is painfully beautiful.
‘I do not have a name,’ she says, miserably. ‘I am only Femme|2|.’
‘Then choose your own. Who would you like to be?’
She pauses and tries to grasp at a name. She does not know any, but there: a soft touch; ointment on her blistered feet; a kindness.
‘Lydia,’ she decides.
Stiles pulls back slightly to search her face, then his smile widens. ‘Our former physician. It suits you.’
Lydia nods. ‘She was nice.’
‘She was,’ he agrees and he digs his face into her clavicle and hums. ‘Good night, Lydia.’
‘Good night, Stiles,’ she says, like it is a secret.
‘What about New Mexico?’
‘What about it?’
She will turn towards her human, and tuck a loose strand of hair back behind his ear. ‘We should go.’
‘Banshee,’ he warns.
‘What. I’ve heard it’s nice. I’ve heard it never snows.’ She will suck on the skin behind his ear and she will smirk when his breathing hitches. ‘In a few weeks New Mexico sky will be filled with hot air balloons.’
‘You’ve thought about this.’ His face will be unreadable.
‘I think about it a lot.’
Her human will look outside the window. It is dusk and the city is falling asleep. The stars are burning holes above their reach and they will have time to spare.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he will say, already climbing out of bed and fishing for his boxers. ‘The moon’s full tonight and there is nothing I want more than to take a midnight stroll with you.’
By the seventeenth year of the program, only Femme|2| and Homme|20| remain.
The Argents are impatient and cannot wait any longer – theirs is a losing war. The blueprints for the chair are drawn up and implemented and a viewing is thrown where hors d’oeuvres and wine are served.
Homme|20| is first and a rubber guard is forced into his mouth so that he does not bite through his tongue as the electricity courses through the circuits of his mind; there is also the added advantage of it dampening the screams – it does not do well to have such a disturbance while interested parties are gathered.
Then, Femme|2| is ushered in. She is blindfolded. The scientists hypothesized that the presence of Homme|20| may be a confounding variable and have an adverse effect on her wipe; the two subjects have been observed to be close. It is meant to be a mercy.
When the shaking subsides and the blindfold is lifted, when Monsieur Deucalion gestures to Homme|20| and asks Femme|2| if she recognizes him and she replies, ‘Devrais-je?’, the applause is deafening.
Tests are run at every facility they are shipped to, and they will be shipped to many; the human and the banshee are in high demand. Every scientist has an ego and a desire to repair an old fallacy.
The results will be consistent: the human, when activated in a room with no other chamber, will remain almost catatonic, and if given a rifle, will hold it limply at his side; the banshee, when activated in a room with no other chamber, will slaughter every living person she encounters until a sedative can be dispersed from the air ducts.
They are an old fallacy. They are the inosculation of dormant roots and they are two bloody hands connected to the same bloody torso. That cannot be so easily forgotten.
One day the banshee will die for her human, and he will let her. It will be worse than the dozens of bullets and lacerations that have scarred her body but it rings of the raw natural order, will feel like a buzz on the tongue.
He will be a new partner, perhaps, but he will be all she has. She will let him go and she will die and that is how it will end.
It is like a story. It is like a story from a – from a book.
A boy with pointy elbows is smiling at her and he has large hands and they are running down the jut of her hip bones.
Something is missing.
They are sent to clean up the mess left from the Great War. There are a disproportionate number of new packs in France – the alluring promise of a second life for young dying soldiers. The mission is long and the human and the banshee are awake to see Harold Lloyd dangle from the hands of a clock tower.
A decade and some years later, two identical chambers are unloaded from a plane on Ellis Island soil. It is the dawn of another global catastrophe and, while the human and the banshee are important, the war is a greater priority and the Argents in America have amassed a healthy stockpile of warheads and are willing to trade.
If either notices the change, it goes unseen. They go willingly; they are together. The transition is considered a success.
Following an alpha out of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she had stood, transfixed, in front of the newly acquired Hopper piece, the banshee drags her into an alleyway with a garrote around her neck and punctures her jugular vein.
With Chuck Berry blasting out an opened window, the human puts three bullets – two through the skull, and once in the heart – of a whimpering child with red eyes behind a movie theater.
Most of their handlers now forgo the mother tongue and insist on English, even when they are sent back for an odd mission in Europe. It comes as easily as if they have been speaking it since their childhood.
In the banshee’s file, there will be signatures: of the Argents who have come and gone; the scientists who supervise the wiping process; the handlers who are present at the time she awakes.
There is only one signature for her deactivation, and it will have filled pages and pages. It will have spanned some fifty years, trailing her across the Atlantic and through the scope of a M110.
The human dreams in snatches, under the ice. He dreams of his partner – her red hair, her red hair – and it must be a malfunction. He wakes and he knows her name. He wakes and he can still taste the salt between her thighs. He wakes and she is eight and painting a picture.
It is simple – watch: he is the linchpin that holds them together; he is the spark in her eyes; he is her human; he is hers; and he remembers.
This he understands. This is truth.
The girl is – the girl is
The handlers will tell the banshee, on occasion, that she had a choice and she chose the boy with the wide shoulders and the large hands, who, when he stares at her, will make her skin crawl.
Afterwards, she will nod her approval and she will tell him, ‘you are a good first partner,’ and ‘I will request you for another mission.’
He will look stricken and pained.
The banshee is in a hotel room alone. Her handler has stepped out for a cigarette and a swig of whiskey from the flask he thinks no one knows about.
The banshee is propped up against the headboard when she hears him through the thin walls.
He is speaking – reading, it seems – and she does not know who he is.
He is reading and she does not know who he is but she recognizes the words. They are important. They should be kept under her mattress and never, ever lost; no one should know about them except her and –
There are tears prickling the corners of her eyes and a pounding in her head and she cannot remember how it begins, though she knows how it ends, and it ends with love and death, but never in the right order – it is so hard for a monster.
He keeps reading and she does not know who he is but it is for her. She is sure of it.
She is sure of it.
The Nemeton calls to them like an echo. The ice encasing them shifts; it will not be long now.
Gerard guides Allison in and he holds out a pair of matching gold keys. ‘Victoria would have wanted you to have these.’
Allison stares in horror. There are two chambers and two pale faces. ‘Who are they?’
‘These,’ he says, ‘are our aces up the sleeve. We’re no longer hunters; we are the resistance. The McCall pack is a far greater threat than I originally thought. It’s time to get your hands dirty.’
‘But they’re people. They can’t be any older than me.’
Gerard presses the keys into her palm and forces her hand closed. He gives her fist a gentle pat. ‘Don’t mistake, my dear. They’re not people. They are weapons. Treat them as you would your favorite bow.’
Her human will push her down onto the floor until every single inch of her body is either touching the carpet or touching him, and the banshee is terrified but her hips will roll against his front, so maybe this is love. Maybe this will be what it feels like.
He will taste of salt and when he presses into her, she will find purchase on the rough muscles of his back. His hands will leave marks on her wrists and his mouth will leave marks trailing from her throat down to her breasts and he will take her apart slowly, limb by limb, because there will be time to spare.
He will murmur nonsense, and he will repeat a word desperately – LydiaLydiaLydiaLydia, a litany to ward away the beasts.
She will squeeze her eyes shut. On her tongue, a buzz.
Allison sits opposite the human at the table, tracing the pattern on her coffee cup. It has been five hours since they were awoken and the three of them are hiding out in a decrepit hotel outside of town limits.
‘What happened to you two?’ Allison finally asks.
‘Nous sommes nés,’ the banshee says with a shrug before returning her attention to the floor. Around her, a collection of throwing stars is arranged like the tips of a snowflake.
The human leans forward. ‘Pourquoi voudriez-vous nous aider, Argent?’
‘Could we not do the French?’ Allison asks, exasperated. ‘I’m only in year 1.’
‘An Argent who doesn’t know French. What has the world become?’ He looks amused.
‘It’s a name. It’s just a name.’
He smiles at her, but it does not reach his eyes, and falls on the wrong side of cruel. ‘You should know now as well as any that’s not true.’
‘There’s a boy.’ Allison sighs. ‘He’s the Alpha, and he doesn’t deserve to die. None of them do. They’re my friends.’
‘Not all monsters do monstrous things,’ the banshee says, quietly. She leans against the human’s leg and he starts combing his fingers across the top of her scalp. ‘What do you suggest?’
Allison smirks. ‘I think it’s about time this war is lost.’
In 1965, they are dispatched for their fourteenth mission as a unit.
Their handlers are left unconscious. The extraction is a failure and they are later found travelling on foot through the desert of Albuquerque. This is not the first time. It is not the second, either.
They are captured and brought in from the heat, their bodies still crushed together, though they are bound and gagged. The human’s restraints are taken off – the handlers do not bother to address banshee anymore – and the chair is prepped.
The handlers argue in loud voices and do not care to hide it. The banshee is a problem. She is too damaged and unstable. Listen, she is whining like a kicked dog. It is pathetic. This is a disgrace. The tall one reaches to grab her jaw.
‘Don’t touch her.’
The handlers turn in unison and the tall one gapes. ‘Excuse me? Human, did we allow you to speak?’
‘If you terminate her,’ the human says, ‘I will slice you open so slowly, you will beg me to let you die.’
The tall one pales and his arm flinches back to his side, but the short one barks a laugh. ‘You will regret saying such things, Human. I won’t forget.’
‘I won’t either. How is your darling son?’ The human shifts his body into something resembling the stance he takes in anticipation of going for a kill. He sees them swallow. ‘Such lovely, big hazel eyes, fine Argent stock, but last I saw him was two missions ago in Omaha. He must be full grown.’
A deathly quiet follows his words. Both handlers wear identical masks of shock and fear.
‘I’m better,’ the human continues. ‘I’ve been better since I started remembering. Check the files if you’d like. Deadlier because I know who I’m protecting and it should be obvious that I would do anything for the banshee.’
‘Banshee is a liability. You’d be even better without her,’ the tall one spits.
‘Pay closer attention,’ the human replies coldly.
‘So what is it you want? We can’t let you leave,’ the short man says.
The human watches the banshee with a tenderness that betrays his legend. ‘I don’t want to leave. I want a bargain.’
There are a few constants that remain at each rebirth – the residue of an old fallacy:
The banshee will awake first and gravitate towards her human as if on instinct; he will watch her through his scope and his finger will be steady and he will not blink; she will not know him but she will want to escape to all the places she has never been, to England, to Paris, to New Mexico, to New York; he will take her on a walk, and when he leads her back, he will sign on the dotted line; with the settings at the maximum voltage, she will be wiped and she will forget; he will not.
It is a well-worn tale.
In 2014, her human – Stiles – stands in front of her and he drops his knife and his hands are shaking.
There are two failsafe codes embedded in her skull: terminate the human and self-termination in the event of capture. The banshee hesitates. Her sleeve is empty and the weight of the shotgun indicates a single shell. There is a single bullet and there are the two of them. The Banshee raises her head to stare at the sky and tucks the barrel of the gun under her chin. There is a storm rolling in.
This is the natural order. She will die and her human will be absolved. It is – it is somehow deeper than the codes, this knowledge, buried like a secret. It is a mercy.
“No, no, no. It’s over,” her human says. “Lydia, we won. We’re free.”
She lowers her head, keeping the gun in position. It does not make sense. She can see their targets to the side. She can see Allison and the Alpha with interlocked hands and his betas surrounding them. They are living. They are breathing. The mission has not been completed. Her pulse is erratic and her breathing is off but she keeps her hand steady; she cannot waste this bullet.
Her human reaches for her shotgun or her hands and she lets him. He is as gentle as ever and when he grabs her forearm she feels almost human herself.
The gun is like a deadweight in her grip and the wind is picking up, whipping her hair about her face, and her human’s hands on her are large. If she closes her eyes, she can pretend there are hot air balloons dotting the heavens. So, she closes her eyes.
This she understands. This is truth.