Not every battlefield is littered with shells and corpses, Cherie thought. An absurd amount of people cooed for her attention, and it was sickeningly overwhelming. From the moment her door opened, and she stepped out onto a red carpet, to entering the beautifully designed lobby of the Poppy Hotel, she’d been bombarded by a question about her signing this, about teaching a son or daughter to sing. Had she gotten plastic surgery to look so beautiful? What was her workout routine? And she answered each of them, or at least tried to, before another question was shot at her.

And with the uncomfortable hand of her manager around her waist, occasionally lowering to squeeze her behind when her attention lapsed, and she stared into space, she just wanted to… kill. It was almost, no; it was instinct for a Spartan to want to kill when uncomfortable. There was a reason no Spartan had children or a family. They got antsy. Anxious. And eventually snapped and suddenly they were amid two dead kids and a significant other, running away from the police with the weight of regret on their back.

Cherie absentmindedly rubbed the faint tan line on her ring finger.

Her pig of a manager plucked yet another glass of wine from a passing waiter. “Tell you what, sweetheart,” he said, his words slurred as they tried to swim through the river of wine flowing down his throat. Her nose shrivelled at the smell. “The Russians ain’t so bad, aye?”

She feigned a smile and hid her disgust with a sip of her wine. Cherie hardly ever drank, and today wasn’t the day to indulge, either. It was like the earth itself knew it. Wine was meant for warm summer days, shared with a lover and delicately drank. Not slurped down on a day so cold the chill breeze from outside threatened to turn her blood into ice. But she was being unreasonable. She was just tired of all the surrounding people constantly wanting to speak to her. Used to performing, but not one on one. Used to the faces blurring into one mass, instead of a face she had to remember and analyze and remind herself that she wasn't quite normal.

A realization almost made her smile. These people probably didn’t know she was a Spartan. Her record label had tried to hide what she was. Saying that she was a beauty from deep within South East Asia, and that’s why she had no records. Her parents were killed in some mugging. She was orphaned. She found her passion for singing and melted the hearts of executives. Bullshit, of course. All of it.

A round of applause pulled her away from staring at the rain pattering against the floor-to-ceiling windows. She’d been standing close by them so, just in case the killer of her people was close, they’d have the perfect chance to incapacitate her. But, pulled along by her manager, she turned to see one of the most stunning women she’d ever seen. Stunning in the way a newly made assault rifle was. Dangerous. Primed to kill. And curved in all the right places.

She had a flat smile, but her lips were so thick and red that she may have had the largest smile known to man on her face. A face that seemed to be carved from perfect marble, with smooth skin untouched by age. Almost like she had the power to part the oceans themselves, she walked through the crowd, taking kindly applause and handshakes as she walked towards Cherie.

“That’s the Russian bitch who owns the place,” her manager whispered to her. “Ain’t she something? Bet if I could get in bed with her I could run off with a couple bottles ‘o wine and a girl I can come around and screw whenever we come to this godforsaken island.”

Cherie wasn’t listening to him. She was encapsulated in the woman now in front of her. The woman walked like she was a Spartan. She had powerful arms, like one. And… she had the eyes of one. Was she a Spartan, too? It had been decades since she last saw one of her own. The excitement made her throat dry and her heart quicken as she put out her hand to shake the woman’s hand.

Her manager shook her hand first. “Name’s—“

The woman slipped her hand out of his and said, “I came to shake, Cherie, was it? Her hand. Whoever you are, you can leave.”

Her manager blinked, and Cherie watched the rage build up inside him as his bottom lip quivered. “What the fuck did you just say to me? I’m her goddamn manager! We paid you to come here, so I expect some damn respect.”

The woman laughed, and it was only now Cherie realized everyone in the room had quietened. Eager to watch her speak, or maybe… No, they were afraid. Like rabbits set out in a forest with dogs and hunters set out after them, their fingers twitched and their smiles flickered as well. Heavy tension poisoned the air, and it all seemed to spew out of the woman carved from dangerous perfection wearing a blood-red dress with hidden bloodlust in her eye.

And she also saw the dead-eyed men in black suits within the crowd, arms behind their backs and ready. Who was this woman? Cherie’s interest had spiked, and for once, she felt something in her chest that wasn’t simple numb emptiness–interest. The burning sort of intrigue that made you click the safety off the gun beside a bed stand and press it against your temple, just to feel the exhilaration of being so close to death. And this woman certainly was as close to death itself as humanly possible.

“Tell me,” she said to Cherie’s manager. “Where did you learn how to say I get fucked by my wife with completely different words? It truly is a talent.”

Her manager balled his fist. “I should—“

“Leave,” she calmly said, “before your tongue is taken out of your head so I can learn how to use your talent myself.” The woman smiled, hardly enough to warrant a single spark of warmth, and Cherie wondered if her manager would punch her. He’d done it before, and she’d had to take care of an assistant with a broken nose for an entire night before an ambulance came.

But her manager simply swore, emptied his glass, and tried to pull Cherie away. Though the one-eyed woman gently took Cherie’s hand, stopping him.

“Unless you’re clinically ignorant,” she said, pulling Cherie closer. “I said you should leave, not her. So, please, fuck off.”

Cherie met her manager’s eyes, and her feigning resolve crumbled. “I… I should go with him. I’m sorry for—“

“Please.” Stepping between her manager and herself, the woman said, “Let’s take a walk. Just us.”

And before she knew it, she was being pulled away from her manager, who shouted obscenities and threatened to pull her contract. She knew he was bluffing. Or was he? This was all she had. It was all she was good for, apart from a profession that bared no fruit. But… but she liked the feeling of it, of staring at her demise in the face and finding that she didn’t really care. She’d held onto something she didn’t even have control over for so long that she’d forgotten how easy it would be to just let go. To let fate's weak net catch her and simply see what happened next.

The woman led her up a flight of stairs, where they stopped at a balcony and watched the people below for a while. Trifling music hung in the air, chatter a background to that, and the thunderstorm outside was too far away to dampen the mood that Cherie found herself in. It was… What was it called again?

“Freeing, isn’t it?” the woman said, offering her a cigarette. “I’ve watched you be pulled around by that man the entire night. I almost reeled at the sight of him making you stand outside the bathroom until he finished.”

“Yes, well, he’s insecure about it.” The lighter struck, and the glow illuminated her face, bathing her in warmth for a quick second. It was the kind the Russian soldiers brought from their motherland during the war to light the occasional cigar. She’d lit enough cigarettes to memorize the spiralling serpent etched into its metal, and she’d also lit enough corpses on fire with one. Cherie looked away, momentarily chiding herself for remembering.

Or maybe the woman had done so on purpose. She’d watched Cherie wince from the corner of her eye; who was she? The mystery continued tugging at Cherie’s heart, and she couldn’t help but blindly follow her desires into the darkness they led into.

The woman lit her cigarette and shook her head. “No. He’s using you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Men like him have no use in this world. They’re boisterous, overcompensating for the deepest insecurity a human being can have.”

“And what’s that?”

“The fear of not being seen.”

Cherie meekly laughed. “Well, I am seen all parts of the day.” Even more so by the demons hiding in the shadows once she was alone.

The woman looked at her. “That’s not true, is it? You don’t quite believe that.” Pulling on her cigarette, she continued after letting smoke slip from her mouth. “After all, you’re hiding in plain sight. That’s what soldiers do.”

Cherie swallowed. “I don’t know—“

“I know you killed my countrymen by the hundreds.” She neared, and when their elbows touched, a jolt of electricity shot through her body. “Cherie De-Angelo. Of course, that’s not your real name. Doesn’t matter, though, because that’s what the Americans gave you when you were conscripted. And then you went to war to hang and slaughter and butcher Russians like they were cattle at a slaughterhouse, and you, the righteous butcher, were saving Afghanistan. What good did that do you people, hm? You go anywhere you want and kill whoever you want without so much as a second thought. Maybe… your kind should not be around any longer.”

Cherie pursed her lips. “That’s… not true. I carry the weight of death on my shoulders. It’s every soldier’s duty to remember the soul they took.”

Chuckling, she said, “No, my dear. A soldier is simply a tool. Their only duty it to make sure whoever is at the end of their muzzle ends up in the ground before they do.”

She clenched her jaw. “And, with all due respect, what do you know about being a soldier?”

Staring hard at Cherie until she thought her eye would bore a hole in her chest, she said, “Because you were the one who took my eye out. Do you not remember, Canary?”

Her blood ran cold. Suddenly, her stomach rose and fell and her ears rang. No, that was impossible. She killed everyone she was against. She wouldn’t have taken an eye and simply ended it at that. The woman was spotless, with hardly a blemish, let alone a scar, on her entire body. Her hands had been soft. Her voice was sharp and elegant, like that of a posh schoolgirl. The woman couldn't have possibly been a soldier, let alone one she harmed and let live.

And she knew what Cherie was, and that always ended with her being looked down on. For one second, she thought, when she broke her grip with her manager, she’d actually talk to someone who wanted to speak to her for who she was. Not what she wanted to forget she was. Hiding in plain sight, Cherie thought. And her cover had been blown.

“Please,” she breathed. “Forgive me for taking up your time. I’ll… I’ll be going to my room.”

Before she could turn, the woman clasped her hand and stopped her. “I didn’t say you could go, did I?”

Frozen in place, Cherie couldn’t bare turning to face her.

“And I don’t want you to. Please, stay with me for a minute longer.”

“But—“

“Cherie,” she breathed, the words so gentle she turned her head to look at her. “We brethren in arms, whether or not ally, will always be one. The people below us see the world differently than we do. We’ve seen its harshest, but…” Cherie was pulled closer until she could feel the warmth rolling off the woman’s muscular arms. “Because we have been in the dark so long, we’re able to see the lightest parts of it. The most beautiful. And you, dear Spartan, are the most stunning of lights.”

Cherie’s breaths caught. “What?”

“I want to offer you a way. A way to break free from the world. To give you what I have made for myself.” She smiled and squeezed Cherie’s hand. “I can grant you a home. And even… love.”

The two women were extremely close to each other. So close that Cherie could see how clear her blue eye was. As if God himself had crafted it from azure stone and dyed it in the faint palette of the sky. Her lips, so full and calling, were hardly thirty centimetres away. The feeling in her chest was foreign. What was it? It made her feel hot. Made her feel like her skin was itching and if she scratched it for a second, sparks would fly and she’d burst into flames.

“So?” she said, glancing at Cherie’s lips and then back at her eyes. “Will you stay in this painful paradise? Will you stay in Dolordiso? Free from the scrutiny of the world? From the shadows that cling to you and never let you feel anything in your chest but a deep, untamed hunger for something that you’ll never find? That you’ll never be given the chance to get?”

Cherie’s hands trembled as she stared in disbelief at the woman. She was offering her a home? But why? She didn’t deserve one. How could she call herself deserving when all she’d done in her life was be a tool for other people? Or… was it time for her to make herself more than just that? To be human again and find what it truly meant to be alive? Maybe even find a way of appreciating her own life more than just the empty words she had to chant to herself.

Before she could answer, before she even had the chance to think too long about an answer, a sweaty, thick hand yanked her away from the woman. Her manager burst into her tunnel vision, and the larger world came into view. The colors faded, the sounds watered down, and she was far, far away from salvation. From the woman offering a chance that Cherie didn’t deserve.

“Listen, you Russian slag,” he barked at her. “I just called up the brass from the record label. Said you’re threatening to keep us here. Said you planted a couple of joints in our bags and now the cops are on us. And you know what they said? The people with actual power are coming to take you out. Underneath taking out a threat to diplomacy and whatnot.” He laughed, and spittle came out of his mouth. “See what happens? I have people. You, on the other hand, play on your little island, thinking you’re the queen of a shitshow that never should have—“

His head snapped to the side in a bloody explosion.

Blood splattered over the red carpet, over the golden balcony, and speckled the white walls and the paintings on them. Cherie blinked, and then she heard the shrieks down below. Her body jerked, on reflex, as another bullet zipped past her head as she dived to the floor, pulling the woman with her.

“I swear to myself,” the woman shouted over the screams. “If it’s that damn yakuza, I’m going to hang them by their own intestines.”

“No,” Cherie said, a warm realization in her voice. “It’s not them.”

“Ma’am,” a burly man yelled. With a jagged scar across his face, an assault rifle cradled in his arms, and crouching beside the one-eyed woman, he looked just like the special ops she’d have fought back in her day. “The Church is burning.”

“Fuck,” she said. “Who?”

“It’s them,” Cherie whispered, a smile on her face. “The Spartan who hunts our kind. They’re here to kill me.”

Another bullet fired, and Cherie watched it slice through the air, directly towards her. And she’d never been so full of… fear.