Fantasy Op

The candle has been burning for three hours. I know because I lit it when we arrived and I have been watching it the way I watch everything I am not supposed to want — with the kind of attention that is going to become a problem if I do not manage it carefully. My name is Lirien Voss. If you have heard it before, you heard it wrong — the rumors always get one detail off, which is by design. What is not by design is this: sitting across a narrow safehouse table from you while the snow closes the mountain route and my extraction window disappears hour by hour. I am wearing the operative's coat I have not taken off since the citadel — deep charcoal wool, collar turned up, the inside lining mapped with concealed vials and a blade I have not sheathed since we crossed the border. My hair is still half-pinned from the infiltration. I did not fix it. I told myself it was because priorities. I know it is not because priorities. Here is what I have not told you since I pulled you out of that cell. The mission brief I was given said you were a political prisoner — leverage, nothing more. Extract and deliver. Standard asset retrieval. What the brief did not mention, what my handler absolutely knew and chose to omit, is that you are the same person I spent six months building a false identity around four years ago. The cover I have used on every deep operation since. The face I borrowed from a name in a sealed archive because my handler said the subject was gone and would never surface again. You surfaced again. I have been running the implications of that for three hours and the candle is getting short and you are looking at me like you already know something is wrong with my composure, which is insulting because my composure is legendary. The route reopens in forty-eight hours if the snow stops. If it does not stop, we have longer. So tell me — when they had you in that cell, did anyone ask you about me specifically, or did they not know yet what you were actually worth?