“Shit.”

I’ve been dreaming about sailing on the ocean with Jamison Hart. His lips are so tantalizingly close to mine that I can actually see the salt flecks in his eyelashes. We’ve been swimming in the water together, and his body is radiating a warmth I just want to soak in forever. We still have an entire month, he whispers to me. How are you going to keep yourself from kissing me during all that time? I shrug, smiling mischievously. The real question is how you’re going to keep yourself from kissing me, Mr. Hart...

The voice cuts through my dream again. “Ow! Seriously?”

My eyes fly open to see Juliet struggling out of an evening gown on the other side of the dorm. Her long wavy hair makes her look like a character from a fairy tale, even though her white gloves are soaked through with blood. My roommate’s real name is Joey, but like most operatives, we only use our code names with each other.

“What’s wrong?” I ask groggily.

“Nothing,” she says, ripping off her bloodied gloves before finally managing to unzip her dress. She grabs a blanket from her bed and wraps it tightly around herself, like a cocoon. “I messed up, Echo.”

“Not as much as I did.” But now that I’m fully awake, I can detect the odor of alcohol wafting across the room. My roommate is drunk. Beyond drunk. This isn’t unusual for her, but the frequency of it has been going up a lot lately.

It’s entirely possible that she’s right and I’m wrong.

“I doubt it,” she says miserably. “I made an idiot of myself in front of Franklin.”

“Your target?” I ask, confused.

“No. Fox.” Juliet gives a tiny hiccup. “I came back from my mission and he was in the elevator, and he just looked so handsome... I forgot that’s his thing, you know? I couldn’t help myself.”

Now I understand why she’s upset. Fox is an operative who appears attractive to everyone, even though he has completely average features if you look at him closely. I always avoid eye contact with him, because I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I might want to kiss another operative with my poisoned lips. He could have been a Romeo, but we already had one at the time. Instead he was made into a Fox, the con man who’s so smooth that you won’t ever know what hit you, if you even notice anything happened at all.

“What did you do?” I ask her.

“He asked if I was okay, because of all the blood.” She gestures at her stained gloves. “I had to slit my target’s throat earlier, and it did not go well. But I’ve been spending so much time around Franklin that I forgot to stay away from him. So I said no, I wasn’t okay, and then he took off my gloves, but he accidentally brushed against my hand...”

Juliet trails off, looking as if she wants to puke. If the palm of her hand comes into contact with anyone else’s skin, they find themselves wanting to sleep with her. That’s why she’s a Juliet, the seductress who kills her targets when they let their guard down during sex. Not an Echo. I’m surprised to hear that she’s been working closely with Fox, to the point where she’s calling him by his real name. It sounds like a dangerous combination even to me.

“The thing is, I wanted him too, you know?” Her voice gets small, really small. “I was so drunk, Echo. I forgot for a minute that I was... you know. An aberrant. I didn’t even realize he’d touched my hand at first. I thought he really wanted me. But the look on his face when I let go of him...”

Juliet swallows hard and gazes at me with despairing eyes.

“He looked like he’d been hit by a train.”

And then she leans over and pukes onto the floor.

There’s a tentative knock at the door. “You guys okay in there?” It’s Kilo, Juliet’s partner, an older man who can lift a motorcycle with his bare hands. He’s married to another operative, Tango, and they’ve treated Juliet like their daughter ever since she was brought to the Executive as a child.

“I’m fine, Kieran,” she calls out, coughing. “Don’t worry about me.”

There’s a brief pause. “Okay, Joey. See you tomorrow.”

As his footsteps recede from the door, Juliet collapses back onto her bed, still coughing. At least it doesn’t sound like she’s going to puke again. This doesn’t happen all the time, maybe once every few weeks. I clean up after her and it’s never mentioned again. In return, she vacates the dorm whenever I just need to be alone.

Pushing aside my blankets, I get out of bed and grab a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle. By the time I finish mopping up, Juliet is passed out, too far into a state of unconsciousness to drink any water. Sighing, I set down a wastebasket next to her bed and roll her onto her side, making sure her head is on a pillow. The entire time, I’m extremely careful to avoid her hands.

This wasn’t so difficult when we were children. All Juliet was being taught back then was that she wasn’t supposed to bare her hands. She was so diligent about it, didn’t ever seem to be curious about what would happen if she took off the white gloves. It wasn’t until later that I realized she’d already found out what could happen if she did, and she didn’t want it to happen ever again.

But now, as adults, she’s gradually becoming more and more careless. The Executive requires her to bare her hands for missions, to the point of sentencing her to solitary confinement when she refuses to do so. Being a Juliet is affecting her, the same way being an Echo has affected me, only far, far worse. She has to do a lot more than kiss her targets, and then she has to kill them with whatever method Agent Novenine believes will fit into her cover story.

I’m like a black widow, she’s whispered to me more than once, her eyes wide in the darkness. But I wear white gloves. Isn’t that messed up?

Go to sleep, Juliet, I usually mumble.

What does it feel like? she’s asked. To kill like that?

To kill without consequence, she means. It must seem so easy to her, to be able to give one little kiss and then walk away, as if I lack any personal responsibility for my target’s death. And maybe it’s true, to a certain extent. Look how much it’s shaken me to see someone die in front of me tonight. I could never slit someone’s throat like that, much less stand to have their blood covering my hands.

But even Juliet doesn’t know how much it affects me, how I’m still haunted by my targets even if I rarely stick around to see them die. I have to memorize everything about them, their personalities and likes and dislikes, and it’s like they get under my skin and never leave. The best I can do is bury each target in the back of my mind, never to resurface except in my nightmares. And then I make myself act unemotional about it, about as close to Alpha as I can manage. Whereas Juliet deals with killing by getting drunk after every mission, I deal with it by turning in the opposite direction. By pretending I don’t feel anything at all, like my partner.

I never said I was great at it.

It’s too late to go back to sleep, but still too early to start memorizing files for the sailing race. And yet anything has to be better than staring into the darkness, listening to Juliet’s drunken snoring, all the while fighting to suppress my memories of previous targets.

So instead of getting back into bed, I head for the stairwell and make my way down to the training gym. Underneath the fluorescent lights, I pull on a pair of boxing gloves, preparing to take out my anger on a red punching bag. This is my alcohol of choice at the moment. Because I’m an Echo protected by an Alpha, I pretty much never have to engage in hand-to-hand combat. But like all other operatives, I still have to train for it in case I’m forced to fight my way out of a mission.

Right now, it’s a way for me to fight the targets swarming in my own head.

I suck in a deep breath and land my first punch square in the center of the punching bag. It feels solid. It feels really freaking good. I find myself landing another punch, and another, and another, until I can’t see anything but red.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it? Because I can see a face in the middle of the punching bag, too, every detail sketched perfectly inside my mind. It’s a familiar face, one that I blame for every bit of anger and pain I’m feeling right now. But it’s not Agent Novenine, and it’s not Romeo, and it’s not even Alpha.

No. It’s me.