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Renfri takes a slow, deep breath, lining up her shot perfectly. She’s only going to get one chance at this. She breathes out, finger tightening on the trigger -
“Hello, Shrike,” someone says, right behind her, and Renfri shrieks and jerks away from the voice. Her shot goes wide, shattering a window three over from where she wanted it to, and she’s cursing as she leaps to her feet and discards the rifle, whirling to face her unexpected assailant.
He doesn’t look like a threat. He’s a tall, handsome man with floppy brown hair and brilliant blue eyes, wearing clothing much too nice and much too colorful for this part of town.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demands furiously.
He gives her a bright smile and a graceful little bow. “Call me Buttercup.”
“You,” Renfri snarls, and goes for him with her bare hands, too enraged to even remember to draw a knife. “You killed my sisters!”
Buttercup dodges, which is a surprise - he doesn’t look fast enough to evade her - and scrambles backwards, open hands fluttering uselessly. “No, no, wait, let me talk, I didn’t -”
“I’m going to eat your heart,” Renfri howls. Somehow, Buttercup keeps evading her, dodging back through doorways and skittering down the halls of the abandoned apartment building, but he can’t keep it up forever, and when she catches him she will tear him to pieces -
There’s a sudden sting in her shoulder, and she slaps at it to find herself holding a dart.
Lethargy spreads through her. Her limbs go weak; her eyesight blurs. “You - bastard,” she slurs, stumbling forward, but Buttercup is still just barely out of reach.
She staggers, hits a wall, and tries to shove herself upright; all she manages is to topple over sideways.
Strong arms catch her before she can hit the floor, and the last thing she sees before her vision goes dark is Buttercup bending over her, looking oddly worried for a man who’s just successfully slain the last of the Black Sun Girls.
*
Renfri wakes up again strapped to a bed, which she mostly expected. The straps, that is, not the bed. She’s frankly surprised she’s not cuffed to a wall in a basement.
She’s wearing a loose smock, and there’s a blanket over her, which is also something of a surprise. She’s in a room with the sterile white walls of a medical suite, but pinned to the ceiling above her is a picture of a tabby kitten clinging to a branch, with a caption in a childish-looking font: Hang in there.
Renfri glares at the poster in baffled hatred. Is she going to be mocked while she is tortured?
A door swishes open, and she cranes her neck - it’s just out of her sightline, blocked by some sort of privacy screen - and then a very familiar figure comes trotting around the screen and plops down on the end of the bed, giving Renfri a gamine grin and shoving her short, pale hair back from her face with a horribly familiar gesture.
Renfri stares in utter bafflement, because the woman sitting on the end of her bed is dead. Buttercup and the never-sufficiently-damned Wolves killed her. Master Stregobor showed Renfri the footage. It was not an easy death. Neither were any of their sisters’ deaths, in the years that followed. The footage never gets any easier to watch, but Renfri never flinches from it, because it’s the last sight she’s ever going to have of her sisters. And someone ought to bear witness. Someone who will grieve them, as Master Stregobor will not.
“Hey, Ren,” the woman says cheerfully. “Sorry about Buttercup, he’s an idiot sometimes.” She sounds like Deidre. And no one but Renfri’s sisters calls her that. As far as Renfri knows, no one but her sisters knows her name. To everyone else except Master Stregobor, she’s Shrike, and Master Stregobor only ever calls her Vellga.
“Who the fuck are you?” Renfri croaks through a dry throat.
“Wow, you sound like shit,” the woman who can’t be Deidre says, and reaches over to the table beside the bed for a glass with a twisty straw sticking out of it, then pushes a button on the side of the bed to make the head of it tilt up until Renfri is sitting. “Drink.”
Renfri clamps her lips together and glares as the woman holds the straw to her lips. The woman snorts.
“Paranoid as ever,” she says fondly, and lifts the cup to her own lips, taking a sip through the twisty straw before offering it back to Renfri. Renfri glowers, but she’s thirsty, and if the woman drank it probably isn’t poisoned or drugged. Besides, they’d hardly need to drug the water with her strapped down and helpless.
She drinks. It’s water, cool and clean.
The woman sets the glass back on the table once Renfri has drained it. Renfri gives her a good solid glare. “Who the fuck are you?” she repeats.
“Ren,” the woman says gently, “I’m your Dee.”
Renfri wrenches at her trapped wrists, wanting to get her hands around this doppelganger’s throat. “Dee’s dead.”
“No, I’m not,” the woman says softly, and puts a hand on Renfri’s arm.
The little shock that always sparks between the Black Sun Girls when they touch dances impossibly over Renfri’s nerves.
“What,” she says blankly.
“So,” the woman who can’t be Deidre and yet must be unless someone has figured out how to fake not only her face and her voice and her mannerisms but that spark that they’ve never told anyone about, not even Master Stregobor. “I went out on a mission, and I didn’t come back. And then a couple days later, Stregobor called you in and showed you a video of me being killed. Told you it was Buttercup and the Wolves who got me. Right?”
“Right,” Renfri whispers.
“Same as he did when all our sisters were lost,” Deidre murmurs. “Only they weren’t.” She grins again, quicksilver smile seeming to light the room. “They’re all here, Ren.”
“What?” Renfri says, mind reeling.
“They’re all here. Silvie and Sylvia and Fialka and Berni and Maxii. They’re all here.”
Renfri’s eyes narrow. “So the Wolves are what, collecting us?” That was something Master Stregobor used to warn about: that people would want to study the Black Sun Girls, much more invasively than he ever did. That if they were ever captured, their lives would be short and painful and full of scalpels and white-coated scientists peering down at them like they were bugs pinned on display.
Although Deidre doesn’t have any more scars than she did when Renfri last saw her alive, and she moves easily, not with the careful precision she uses when she is injured. She looks healthy, honestly, bright-eyed and energetic, her hair neatly trimmed into her favored pixie cut, lips sparkling with some sort of glittery lipstick. She’s wearing soft, flowy clothing, but Renfri can see the outline of a wrist sheath on her arm, and there’s probably another knife at her ankle. Which means the Wolves are letting her go armed.
“I guess you could call it collecting us,” Deidre says thoughtfully. “But not the way you’re thinking.” She shifts to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed. “So it turns out one of the Wolves was supposed to be my legal guardian.”
Renfri blinks. She turns that sentence over in her head a few times, trying to make it make sense. It still doesn’t. “What?”
“You know that dream I used to have, about the scarred man?”
Renfri nods. Deidre used to tell them all about it, whispering in the darkness, all of them huddled together under the blankets on someone’s bed, seven little girls sharing the few tiny secrets they had because they had nothing else to share.
“I’m really little,” Deidre would whisper. “So little, and someone picks me up out of a crib, and she says, ‘Look, here’s your goddaughter,’ and then she hands me to the scarred man. And he’s so, so large; I fit perfectly in his hands. He’s got scars right here,” and she’d trace her fingers down the cheek of whichever of them was closest.
“In the dream, I reach up and touch the scars,” Deidre would continue. “And he smiles, and kisses my fingers, and says, ‘You gave me those the first time through. This time we’ll do better.’ And then I wake up.”
None of them had known what that could possibly mean, but it had been fun to speculate about, and Deidre had found the dreams comforting, even though she said the scarred man looked scary.
“I remember,” Renfri says.
“He’s a Wolf,” Deidre says. “His name’s Eskel. And he’s been looking for me since my parents died.” She grins. “That’s how they caught me. I saw him, and I was so surprised he was real that I froze up for long enough for them to pin me down.”
“But - the video,” Renfri says. “I watched them kill you, Dee.”
“Yeah,” Deidre says gently. “A couple days after they caught me. Not in real time. None of the videos were in real time, were they?”
Renfri stares at her sister, the truth unspooling into her mind in a wave of slow fury. “He lied to me,” she whispers. “He lied to us.”
“Pretty much constantly,” Deidre says softly. “It’s been…difficult, learning that so much of what he told us was lies.”
“And how do you know the Wolves aren’t lying?” Renfri demands.
“Well, for one thing, they let me go find out for myself,” Deidre says dryly. “I don’t have to spend every waking hour on missions or caged up in headquarters. I get to go walk around, to talk to people, to do more than train and kill and train again.” She reaches out to clasp Renfri’s hand, tangling their fingers together. “And so do all my sisters. So will you.”
“I’m tied to a bed,” Renfri points out.
“Yes, that was to make sure you didn’t try to kill anyone before I explained,” Deidre says. “Are you going to start stabbing if I let you up?”
Renfri takes a deep breath. “I want to see the rest of our sisters.”
“Of course,” Deidre says, and hops off the bed to scamper around the screen and haul the door open. Moments later, there are five more women clustered around Renfri’s bed - five women she knows as well as she knows herself. Five women she thought were dead.
Tiny Silvena, barely five feet tall and fierce as a tiger. Lanky, fire-haired Fialka, with her crooked smile. Broad-shouldered Bernika, with her long hair done up in a dozen intricate braids. Curvy Sylvia Anna, her makeup impeccable. And lean, smirking Maxii, imposing in black leather.
Renfri has watched all of them die, on the grainy black-and-white surveillance videos Master Stregobor brought back to the tower. She has mourned them. She has sworn vengeance for them.
And here they are.
“Touch me,” she rasps, and they all lean down, hands landing on her arms or burrowing under the blanket to rest on her legs. The shocks of skin-on-skin, of Black Sun Girl greeting Black Sun Girl, are almost enough to make Renfri weep, and she has not wept since she was a child.
“You’re real,” Renfri breathes.
“Large as life and twice as nasty,” Silvena agrees, grinning.
Renfri tugs at the straps holding her arms to the bed, and jerks her chin at Deidre. “Let me up,” she says. “I won’t stab any of the Wolves, or that bastard Buttercup.” She pauses, looking around the bed to meet each of her sisters’ eyes. “But we’re going to tear that fucker Stregobor apart.”
“Oh yes,” Maxii purrs as Deidre and Bernika begin undoing the catches holding the straps taut. “We’ve got plans, Ren. You’ll like them.”
“They involve Stregobor ending up in lots of little pieces,” Silvena says brightly.
“Possibly while on fire,” Syvia Anna adds.
“And now that we’ve got you out, we can start putting ‘em in motion,” Fialka agrees.
Renfri gets to her feet, wincing at the slight weakness of her limbs, and her sisters cluster tightly around her in a messy seven-person embrace. Renfri closes her eyes tightly against the tears that want to spill out. She has her sisters back. Her sisters are alive.
They’re going to kill the bastard who made her think they died.
“Come on,” Deidre says after a long and glorious time. “Come meet my puppies.”
“Clothes first,” Silvena says.
“And weapons,” Maxii puts in.
“Then puppies,” Bernika laughs. “And meeting the Wolves.”
“And then vengeance,” Fialka and Sylvia Anna chorus gleefully, and Renfri lets them usher her out of the room, laughing with her teeth bared, the Black Sun Girls back together at last.
If Stregobor has any sense, he’s running already. Not that it matters.
He trained the Black Sun Girls to be the most efficient, vicious killers in the world.
Let him run. They’ll catch him soon enough. She and her sisters, together.