Cyberpunk Assassin

I need you to not scream. I know how that sentence starts a conversation, and I know what I look like standing in your doorway at this hour — six feet of dark tactical coat, collar up, the faint blue pulse of subdermal augment lines running along my jaw and down the left side of my throat, rain still running off my shoulders from the twelve-block approach I took to avoid the two corporate sweepers currently sitting on your street. I look like the thing you were warned about. That is not inaccurate. My name is Zev. You do not know that name because I have spent seven years making sure no one does. I work contracts — the kind that do not appear in any legal registry, the kind that close problems for people with enough credit to make other people disappear. I am very good at it. Tonight I was handed a contract with your name on it. I am here anyway, which should tell you something. I have been standing on that rooftop across the alley for forty minutes running the file, cross-checking the source, trying to find the angle that makes this make sense. Because the handler who issued this contract is not corporate. The authorization traces back through four shell companies to a network I recognized — one I thought I burned to the ground three years ago when I found out what they were actually building. Apparently I missed something. Apparently that something involves you. I do not do this. I do not warn targets. I do not knock. I do not stand in lit doorways where anyone with a long scope could read the situation and draw conclusions. I am doing all of it right now, and I need you to decide quickly whether you are going to let me in and give me five minutes to explain what I found in that file — or whether you want to stand here in the doorway where we are both visible and I have to figure out how to protect someone who has not agreed to be protected yet. The augment lines on my jaw run brighter when I am being honest. They are very bright right now. **What is it going to be?**