It was the next morning.

I was standing in front of the girl's cell door once again. The Director's instructions thundered in my head, and with them the sting on my cheek his hand had delivered. I'd be even more of a liar if I said that I hadn't spent all of last night brainstorming all the eccentric ways I could kill him.

I took a breath, rolled my shoulders, and unbolted the door. When I stepped inside, the girl scrambled away to the back wall like a spooked wild animal.

This was going to take a lot of work.

I raised my hands as I sat down with my back to the door which had been shut behind me. She sat about three meters across from me and had her back to the opposite wall. I folded my legs and set my hands on my knees gently.

"I'm sorry," I started off by saying. "I know you don't want me here."

"Then why are you here?"

"I was sent," I said, uncrossing my legs and spreading them out on front of me. The girl eyed the soles of my feet suspiciously. "The Director of this agency wants me to try and recruit you."

There was no point in lying to her. I may as well make this as simple as possible so the Director, who was probably listening in through the cameras, could actually hear it from her mouth: there was no damn way she was gonna agree to be an agent.

The girl's eyes hardened. "So that's what the smell you dragged in is. Desperation."

I swallowed, taken back by her quick change of tone. "Why do you do that? Why do you try and come off like you're mad at me? Are you trying to scare me off?"

"Are you scared of me?" She murmured.

I rolled my shoulders again and kept her gaze. "No. I'm intrigued."

There was a small window above her head, and with the morning sun a small patch of light lay on the floor between us. She was shielded by the dark, being under where the light was coming through, and she still had blood dripping down her face from a cut across her nose. She was running a thin line of intriguing and terrifying, which the very idea of continued to spark my interest.

"I see the way you look at me," she said in a quiet tone, voice whispy. "With pity. Like you're sorry for me."

"There you go again," I said. I leaned forward. "Are you bipolar? We can get that looked at."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm unstable. Erratic. Unpredictable." She held my gaze. "Dicey. Temperamental. Volatile," she listed. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips slowly. "Capricious."

"Well, at least you're good with synonyms," I said. "Like a walking, talking thesaurus, shit."

"Look, I'll save you the trouble," she said, flicking her eyes to the wall on her right. "I'm not joining your agency... whatever kind of agency this is."

"That's nice," I said, shrugging, "but the Director of this place doesn't give a shit. He'll probably cut my hand off if I don't get you on board." I managed to suppress the memory of him slapping me with only mildly trembling fists. "And I consider my hand to be one of my most useful features."

"Gross."

"I was referring to basic functions such as eating and drinking," I said, "but if your mind goes there." I winked.

"Sure you were," she said flatly.

Well she wasn't wrong.

She folded her arms tightly around herself. "I guess we're at an impasse."

"No," I said, "you're being stubborn because you've got nothing to lose just rotting in here. I have four limbs I'd love to keep attached to my body."

"A hand isn't a limb," she said simply.

"Would you just at least listen to what I have to say?"

"No."

"I'm not giving up on you," I said.

"Please leave."

"I'll come back tomorrow, and every day after, trying to convince you. Who knows, maybe it'll be the start of a beautiful sarcastic friendship."

She cracked up. "Friends? How old are you, six?"

I put a hand to my chest. "Oh goodness, where are my manners?"

"Best guess," she said through gritted teeth, "up your ass."

I grinned at her fakely. "I'm 20 years old, I'm 6 feet tall, I was born in Chicago, I've been an agent since I was 12, and my favorite animal is a giraffe."

She raised an eyebrow at me. She should, that was some deep personal stuff right there, I don't tell just anyone what my favorite animal is. "And your name?" She asked.

"Only if you tell me yours."

It fell silent between us after that. The air grew still as our dialogue melted into the concrete walls and floor of the cell.

"Oh," I decided to add. She flinched a little once I broke the silence. "If it helps, I'm also under strict directions not to screw you. And there's a camera over there and I can't do it on tape anyway."

She put a hand on the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. "You've really got a way of selling the product, gotta say."

"At least I got you talking."

There was a long pause.

"That's farther than anyone else has gotten," I said, crossing my arms. "I got you to warm up." Director Flagg may not think so, but (sometimes) I could be pretty damn good at my job.

"Mazal tov, asshole," she muttered, unfolding her legs so they stretched out in front of her.

"You like me," I grinned.

"You flatter yourself," she said dryly. "You're infinitely better at conversation than the big brooding pricks who were in here earlier, I'll give you that, but I would still prefer it if you left me alone."

"We know you were mind-controlled. We can make sure that never happens to you again."

She lurched towards me with unbelievable speed, scrambling across the cell and into my lap so quick I barely had time to blink. She pressed me against the cell wall by putting her forearm to my throat, then put her face in my face, her breath hot against my nose. Her limp hair uncurled from behind her ears and swung into my eyelashes. It was crusted in blood and hung down in clumps.

"What did you say?" She asked in a whisper. The bolt on her wrist bonds was crushing my windpipe.

"We know about the experiment," I squeaked, groping at the encasings on her wrists. She pressed harder, and moved her knee so it was between my thighs. I started to squirm, my eyes darting up to her scarred eye. In the centimeters it was away from my face, it looked even more gruesome. Mangled and tarnished, the scars were deep and I could see them starting to scab over.

"Elaborate," she commanded.

"It's in your eye, right?" I managed to say. "We can get whatever they used to control you out of you. We have professionals here."

She jammed her knee forward and it hit right between my legs, causing me to bite my tongue so hard I tasted iron. "Keep going," she pressed.

I managed to get a solid grip on her wrist and yanked downward, gasping at the ability to breathe again. She winced as she released me, starting to massage her steal-encased wrists. I rubbed my throat carefully and took monitored breaths.

She crawled off of me but still crouched near my feet. "Please take your knife out. Slide it under the door or something. I can't relax until you do."

I coughed until my throat opened up again. "Say that first next time, shit," my voice cracked. But I did as she said and with one hand in the air I shoved the small knife I'd been hiding up my sleeve under the small crack in the door. "Okay," I breathed, glancing at her fetal position. "Can I explain now?"

She nodded.

"Fill in the details of what happened to you so we can record it and send a report to the government, agree to work with us as a spy agent, and then we can get whatever they put in you out, and you can live as an agent. Sound fair?" I shifted back into a cross-legged position.

She scoffed. "Fair? Are you fucking kidding me? That's blackmail. That's sick. Coldhearted and sick. No, it's not fair."

"Would it help if I pleaded?" I asked.

"It'd be fun to watch."

"Is that a kink?"

"You're obnoxious."

"Please just consider it."

"No." She got to her feet and limped back to the other side of the cell and sat down.

I groaned aloud and rubbed my face. "Fine." I glared at her. "If maintaining your fucking 'woe is me' 'I'm a terrible person' 'I could pick you apart by your veins' persona isn't worth giving up for freedom from mind-control, then I don't know what to tell you." I sighed and looked down at my hands. "Yeah, I guess I pitied you for a while there, but not in the way that you think. I can see that you're not just some project I can fix, but for the record the only thing I ever wanted to do was save you, not fix you, and not just because the Director of this agency told me to. I haven't been able to save a lot of people in my life, so I guess forgive me for suspecting that an experimented, self-destructive, recovering assassin might be a candidate." I looked up from my lap.

She'd curled up again in the corner, her eyes sad. But this time they were sad at me.

Well it was a little late for humanity, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

I stood up and pounded once on the door behind me. One of the guards unbolted it and tugged it open.

"Are you sure?" Came her voice.

I didn't turn back around. "What?"

"I'm not letting anyone touch me unless you're positive that you can fix me."

I turned around slowly. "I'm positive," I lied. Flagg hadn't actually told me anything about the procedure that would be performed on her. In fairness we don't even know what had to be done because she hadn't told us what happened, or what was even inside her that we'd need to remove.

She breathed in deeply. "Okay," she whispered to her knees.

I took my fist off the door. "Really?" I asked.

"Damnit, do you want me to change my mind?" She asked.

"No!" I cried. She jumped at my change in volume and how my words echoed a bit in the cell. Yeah, that's right superspy, make sure she knows that you're desperate. That dignity I never had? Poof, gone with the wind.

"No," I composed myself. "No, please don't change your mind." I ran a hand through my hair to further calm myself down. "So we have a deal?"

She hesitated again. "Yes?"

"You can't answer a question of this magnitude with another question," I said.

"Yes," she repeated, stronger.

I suppressed my gut reaction from going "really?" again, and instead said: "Okay. Just to reiterate in more detail, here's what you're agreeing to: We fix you, you work for us. Tell us your story, or however much is necessary. We record it, and then we'll run some physical tests, see what's going on inside you and make a plan for how to get it out," I said. "And also... please cooperate. And not just because I'll get beat up if you don't. It makes everything easier if you have an open mindset."

"I don't have an open mindset. You're making me do this."

"And stop being so contradictive," I added. She shrugged. "So, do we have a deal?" I asked once more.

She licked her lips and twitched her knee. "Fine."