“You're being awfully casual about this whole thing,” Ishumi said to her.

“I was thinking that it'd be fine as long as it's with you,” Shjacky replied. “You don't seem the kind to get overtly shocked by sudden revelations. At least, that's not the Ishumi I've known for all these years.”

The restaurant had nearly emptied out of patrons towards the end of the lunch hours. The servers were cleaning up the bared tables and still not looking directly at the girls' direction. Though they continued to peek through the corner of their whites. Everyone left them alone to their post-meal conversation, not wanting to disrupt the people who stood up to a world leader.

“You're not wrong. But I am still shocked to find out your mother is The Janus,” Ishumi replied. “Why didn't you get Quinton?”

“I didn't know if he would be able to react to the situation with as much... stealth as you did.”

“What am I? A ninja?”

“Is that not what you were going for?” Shjacky gestured to her friend's dark body suit dressing. “You mean that's not a costume of style?”

“No!” She looked almost shocked and offended at the statement. “Is that what everyone thinks?”

“Well...”

“I just like the body suit. It's comfortable to fight and move in.”

Shjacky grinned slyly. “You could just go naked.”

“Why don't you go naked?”

“Do you think Quinton will like it if I went naked?”

“I think everyone will like it if you went naked.”

“But will Quinton?”

Ishumi crossed her arms meditatively. “You know, now that I think about it, it's actually hard to say with that guy.”

They laughed, agreeing on their friend's sometimes emptiness to the world away from his sister. Finally, a server was brave or curious enough to walk over and asked if they would like desert to which they both declined.

Ishumi asked, “Are you paying for this?”

“Lady La'Grey gave me some spending money.” She looked around the establishment. “She even had some guards posted here for my protection.”

“Really? Where?” Ishumi scanned the room, trying to find anyone else that stood out.

Shjacky shrugged. “I don't know. I told her not to tell me who or how they looked.”

“Does it have something to do with your mother's powers?”

She nodded in affirmation.

The Janus was the leader of Wendereight. The family line of the Janus was unique in the world in that they were the only known family to be able to pass down the power of precognition to their offsprings through means unknown.

“My mother has the ability to see the future of a person's thoughts.”

“That's... oddly specific.”

“It is. From what she told me, every seer is tuned in to a different aspect of time. Like thoughts, gravity, specific dates...”

“Epitaphs?” Ishumi asked.

“That's right. My mother's takes a person's immediate thoughts and predicts what they would do with it in the near or distant future. Basically, if you're thinking of going grocery shopping, she can predict if or not you will go.”

“Isn't that just the power of deduction?”

“Essentially, but a little more than that, I think. It takes in an account of all the possibilities and gives my mother the one most likely to happen.”

“So it's just probabilities?”

“That's what any prediction is. The most likely possibility. Even if they are close to one hundred percent, it's just probabilities.”

“Is that why you had me wait outside?”

Shjacky nodded. “I wanted you to react in a way that is unpredictable. So I gave you information that is different from what you had before in a period of time short enough that you won't have the ability to fully dissect it.”

“You changed the outcome.”

“Yes. She can't know what you will do when you don't know what to do yet. And I can't know what you'll do if I've never seen you do it.”

Ishumi sighed, rubbing her head. “Complicated.”

Shjacky shrugged apologetically. “It is how it is.”

“How does that relate to our epitaphs?”

Shjacky went quiet, leaning her chin into interlocked hands. “My mother once told me that while her powers was substantial, it has a penultimate weakness. Choice.” She picked up her glass of water and took a sip before swirling the remind in the glass. “Think about it. If there were no life in the universe, everything that ever happened, will happen, and has happened, would be predetermined. There won't be any redirection of anything. The bounce of each meteor, the roll of each stone, all calculable. But we get to choose. We get to move in a direction different from what we would otherwise have had we not had the choice. We get to change the predicted path.”

“What does that mean?”

“Predictions are powerful not because it shows us what will happen. They are powerful because they allow us the ability to change the future. If we look at them as if they are set in stone, then they are. If we don't, they're not. The ability for us to choose is the greatest weapon against the future.”

Ishumi leaned back in her seats and raised a questioning brow. “You know, I think we're suppose to be sixteen year olds.”

“Hah! You're not wrong.” Softly, she mused, “But I think that's why we're in Class C, you know? At least, all the tests and training aside, it sometimes feels like we grew up faster than most.”

“Is that right?” Ishumi took a drink of water before looking away. “I can't disagree. The world we grew up in was... chaotic, to say the least.”

The bell above the entrance rang as another lunch customer left. The two girls sat quietly. Shjacky did not know what Ishumi was thinking, but hazarded a guess that it brooded within her past experience with her home town and family during the war. For herself, it was her life before. While her mother had never thought of her as a daughter, there was a period of time when there was care and compassion in the woman's eyes.

“Shjacky,” Ishumi said.

“Yes?”

“What happened between you and your mother?”

“......”

“I understand that you were some sort of assassin sent to kill King Adam, but how? How did you get from whatever you were before to that; then,” she gestured to her friend. “This?”

Shjacky smiled the gentle smile that she could only do after having left the clutches of her old home. “I was already orphaned before the war,” she began. “Back then I ran with these groups of street kids. We had one good suit and I'm pretty tall for my age, so I dressed up as a man and distracted people while they get pick pocketed by the rest. Basic con, really.”

She remembered the shadows. She remembered throwing the younger kids under ragged blankets and running out of alleyways, luring guards to her and hoping that those she said she would protect were safe. She remembered being tied by chaffing ropes and thrown into crates and squeezed with others like her.

“When the war began, The Consolidates thought it would be a good opportunity to invade Aleynonlia. Wendereight began pulling in their conscripts and those that lived on the streets like myself were the first to go. Most of us younger ones were taken in to be conditioned for a longer war. Special agents, raised from young to fight.”

Images of tall crimson walls and tower guards of white flashed through her memories. They knew someone attempted an escape whenever they heard an arrow whistling through the dead of silence. Whistle. Pop. Whistle. Pop. The stars from the grills of their 'bunks' blinked as they slept through another's lifetime.

“The Daekengarde.”

“Death Force. Yes. But of course, we saw how history ended. The war didn't last and Daekengarde was disbanded. At least, officially it was. The truth is that we were executed. Most of us, at least.” She gestured to herself. “I knocked out my trainer and disguised myself. Got as far as the gate before being caught. Mother saw my skills and decided to take me in. Trained me as her personal assassin. Conditioned me to be loyal to her through love. Twisted love, mind you. But still...”

Ishumi said with empathic sympathy, “That's why you still call her mother.”

“You don't get psychologically conditioned into being a serial killed without losing some of your sanity.”

Her room in the palace was doused in gold and red, the favourite colours of her mother. It was the only place in the entire palace where she was in peace when retired to. Between brutal trainings and intense lessons in etiquettes and educational studies, it was her safe space. But it was also engineered. Her mother would come in every day after training and doted on her as a real parent would to stack on that trust and loyalty. A love built on a lie.

After thinking through, Ishumi asked, “Who else knows about this?”

“Four-Chan. Quinton. They know bits and pieces, but I think they have pulled everything together by now.”

“Why not tell all of us? You know we don't care about your past. Maybe we can help?”

“But that's just it, isn't it? You don't care. And that's the life I want. And I'm happy for it. Grateful. Truly. As far away from who I was as possible.”

Ishumi nodded solemnly. “Okay. I understand that.” Shjacky watched her friend's eyes dart introspectively. Then, she looked up. “What happened after that?”

She shrugged matter-of-factly. “After my training I was sent to kill the king.”