…you sit back and wait for him to move on.

You decide to wait, pulling back slightly so your hidden by the roof. You reason that you’ll hear him move when he does and remain crouched by the wall, feeling horribly exposed in the moonlight.

You wait. He’ll continue soon enough.

Anytime now really.

Time passes.

More time; you can’t help but notice.

You tick off milestones with growing frustration; enough time for you to have made it halfway back to the other end of the roof. Now all the way back. All the way back and to the opposite side. Up the opposite side. He still doesn’t move.

You start to sweat. What if he’s waiting for a guard change? You don’t like the idea of facing two of them. Maybe you should go back to the other end of the roof. But then you’ll only be able to see him coming by sticking your head around the corner and being seen. You also know that as soon as you leave he will start to move; that’s just the way the world works. No, you’ll stay the course, hunched up as you are. Did he hear you approach? Is that why he isn’t moving? No, he would have looked around the corner if that was the case. You shift your position, easing the cramp out of your leg and taking the stiletto out of its thigh strap. You don’t mean to kill him, but you do feel a little more in control while holding it.

You hear the wooden boards of the walkway clunk as he shifts his position. Finally. You ready yourself as you hear his feet move, but something’s off. His head appears over the slanted roof as he takes a few steps to your side of building.

He looks down its length, idly at first, mid turn as he finishes his quick check before resuming his path. He stops, looking at you in confusion. You’re not hard to miss but should appear as more of a ball of black cloth at first glance. Your heart pounds and you silently curse every speck of existence. **** now.

You spring forward, seeing the exact moment that he makes out your eyes and the moment after when he sees your blade. You’re much further away than you would like and you have to sprint the distance to him as quickly as you can. He takes a deep breath. He cannot be allowed to scream. With heart hammering in your ears, you leap forward, aiming your knife at the broad slab of his exposed chest. He dodges sideways and starts to raze his arm. Your blade rams hard into his shoulder. He screams.

His razed hand grabs your arm and twists it, continuing your momentum as he turns. Your heart stops as the wall at the edge of the roof passes under you, distant grasses taking its place far far below, and you realise you’re flying off the edge of the building! An indescribable moment of panic takes control of your body. You’re aware of a jolt running through you, of everything inside you exploding like an oil fire. Your momentum is stopped by a sleeve suddenly in your hands. Another scream from the man as his stabbed shoulder is wrenched by your change in trajectory. You don’t even hear him, slamming into the side of the building, hard. Something cracks. Your **** grip on the man’s sleeve starts to pull him over with you, but there’s a window to your right and another frantic, unthinkingly instinctual jolt of energy runs through you and sends you flailing desperately towards it. Toes land on the windowsill and feet start kicking with inhuman desperation. Glass shatters, wood splinters, and a metal latch clatters loose. His nails scratch and claw at your fingers, but you don’t feel it. You’re other hands grips the wooden frame of the window and you let go of him, tumbling forward into the room. The whole ordeal took seconds. It felt like lifetimes.

You quickly stand up in a dark room, glass and wood sprayed all over the floor. A dim sliver of light tells you the location of the door and you run towards it with laboured breath, throwing it open and stepping into the corridor of a long landing. Doors line both sides and yellow light shines in the distance. You walk down the corridor towards the light but the sounds of voices soon stop you.

“...Sounded like glass...”

“...Upstairs?...”

“...What the fuck?...”

The thumping of nearby feet, not from below but up above, worry you more. You duck into a side room just as the sound of running feet on stairs shudder through the walls. A nearby door bursts open. “ASSASSINS! Everyone up weapons! Enemy spotted!” He runs past your door clutching the shoulder that still holds your knife as he runs to the room you just left. You step out as soon as he passes and see the open door to the stairway he came out of. A large door opens in the distance.

Captain Wendy ‘Go’ Washkin walks out.

You can instantly tell it’s her. Blond hair, fine rapier, beautiful red white and gold trimmed clothing. It’s more than that though; she stands with an air of command that dominates the empty corridor. You can practically feel her authority washing over you in waves. Your eyes lock together briefly, your dull grey with her vibrant blue, visible even from afar. The moment is a strange one, lasting a fraction of a second, but it feels full of fiery significance. Some part of your frantic mind wants to attack, to finish what you came here to do, but she’s armed and you’re not. Common sense prevails.

You run through the open door to the stairs. They go up to the roof and down to the lower floor, but the sound of footsteps from below send you up. You take the steep steps two at a time and find yourself back on the wooden planks of the roofs walkway, sprinting along them to look over the small wall on this unexplored side of the roof. A large lower roof juts out below, holding a section of the ground floor that doesn’t reach as high as the rest. With the sounds of boots chasing you, you climb over the wall and begin to lower yourself down before dropping hard onto the slanted tiles below. The fall sends you sliding down them and you only just grab the roofs gutter before it throws you to the grass beneath it, halting you for a lifesaving moment. The gutter slows you before breaking, and an undignified tumbling roll sees you on the grassy lawn of the manor grounds without anything broken, if only by a hair.

A winded pain forms in your side as you gasp for air. Your hand bleeds and a similar wetness runs down the outside of your right leg. You feel neither as you start to make a sluggish trot towards the tree line and the back of the island. Escape is the best you can hope for now.

“Hey!”

You turn and look at the man coming around the side of the building. The backdoor guard, you think. He must be have been investigating the sound of broken glass as he’s closer to it than his post, which is fortunate for you as you landed very close to the backdoor anyway. He starts running towards you screaming “He’s over here!”

You sprint again, towards the trees, pulling down your facemask to gulp fresh air into your burning lungs. The roof, the window, the stairs, the drop, and now your run; exhaustion begins to catch up, with little your pounding heart can do to compensate. He, meanwhile, holds a heavy looking bat, but it doesn’t slow him too much as he runs towards you. Indeed, he starts to gain on you in short order. As you reach the tree line, you start to lag, first out of necessity as you gulp air, and then by choice as you picture being run down by the man. You look about and see a broken branch, and without thinking, you pick it up and turn on your attacker. He slows down as he nears you.

“Hah, hah, hah. What are you gonna do with tha- ...wait, you’re a woman?” He smiles as he catches his breath. You hold your branch out, splintered point first like a spear, but it’s dry and old, nowhere near as threatening as his heavy wooden club. “Oh. Oh sweetheart. You’re so fucked.”

He may be right; other forms catch your eye as they block the light from the backdoor, drawn by his earlier cries. They seem hesitant, looking for you both. The man follows your gaze and turns to them.

“Over ere! She’s a wom-“

He turns to you. You ram your stick spear into his right eye.

“AHHHHH! Ohhhh! For Fucks Sake!”

You drop it and dash into the woods. He follows, down one weapon and one eye, but screaming for your blood. Branches lash at you, roots threaten to trip you and always he’s on your heels. He’s wounded but you’re very tired. He has half your vision but it’s so dark anyway. Your wearing black but breathing so hard you can be heard wherever you go. Trees block your way. Rocks and bushes turn your course. Direction becomes meaningless. You move away from the laboured breathing, raging growls, and pained cries that are ever behind you.

The trees give way to sea and it’s a heart stopping second as you realise that there is a big drop between the two of them. You grab a tree and save yourself from a fall half again as high as the mansion roof that leads straight down onto frothy sea rocks below. The moonlight plays across you as you turn to face the shadowy form coming through the darkness of the woods. He stops when he sees you. The shadows hide his face and missing eye, thankfully.

“You an me bitch! Right now!”

You look to the sides, trying to find a way you can run. He charges, arms out, ready to grab, aiming for your chest or perhaps your neck.

You grab his wrist and twist it, continuing his momentum as you turn and throw him behind you, attempting to emulate what was done to you on the roof. You jump away as his hand tries to grab you, watch as he flies out over the cliff screaming his way to the rocks below. You don’t see him land, but you do hear the moment his scream ends: more a wet thump than a splash.

You collapse to your knees, gasping for breath. Your heart beats no faster, but it beats harder than ever before, punching the inside of your ribs with a **** ache. How long were you sprinting? How far from the mansion roof? You fall to the side and lie in the rocky dirt, listening to every groan your muscles make, the wheezing of your breath, the scraping of your bones. It’s safe to say that you have never been more exhausted in your life. Your hand is bleeding. Scratches mark its surface. Strangely, it only starts to hurt when you look at it, but the stinging pain starts coming in throbbing insistent waves. It doesn’t look critical. It does remind you of your leg though, the impact on the building, kicking the window and the wetness that followed. You gently pull down your trousers and have a look. You breathe a sigh of relief at seeing only clear liquid; it was just the vial of poison that broke.

You tense again. Wait, what?

You look closer. The deadly poison coats your leg and is soaked into the material of your trousers. You hurriedly take them off and untie the thigh strap that keeps the vial attached to you, careful to do both with your uninjured hand. You hold it up to the moon and see that only a single oozing hole marks the glass. No shards or sharp edges, no blood mixed with the poison. You throw it into the woods.

Thinking back, it was the other leg that kicked the glass window in. Neither of them bares any visible cuts that you can see, thank the gods! No sounds of pursuit from the other pirates. No sound of anything but waves on rocks and wheezing lungs. You give a short, involuntary laugh. The last of the things your body has done recently that you had no say over. You’re still alive. A tentative breeze caresses your face and legs and the rocky dirt feels cold on your bare bottom. Somehow, they both feel just fine. It takes several minutes before you try standing. During those minutes, you chart the position of the gods twinkling above and try to work out what direction you need to go.

East, following the cliff to your right.

You set off tiredly, dragging your feet and holding your trousers in your uninjured hand. You must make an odd sight: a woman walking exposed from the waist down. With your pale legs shining and you black top melding with the night, the effect is probably quite ghostly.

You follow the cliff face, which fortunately starts to lower in height, keeping to the edge of the dark woods. If a man jumped out of those trees right now and saw your bare state, you don’t think you could muster the energy to cover yourself, let alone fight him off. Your chuckle turns into a cough; you don’t think you could ever be _that _tired.

No sound comes from the woods now, nor light, nor the feel of eyes. They thin before giving way to a lumpy looking field of grass. The cliffs look lower here, even taking on a sloped quality as broken stones are eaten away by the sea waves. It should make your decent easier. A pang of regret tinges you but you can’t go back; your dagger is gone (now the prize of some wounded pirate) and even your poison is lost to you. Both cost a pretty penny, which makes this journey an expensive write-off at best.

You climb down, thinking of the things you learned. If experience is the best teacher then you suppose the trip wasn’t a complete waste. You wash your hand in the stinging sea before wading in and washing the poison out of the trousers and off your leg. You look back up at the island as you put them on, taking a few minutes of reflection and letting the water fully carry the poison away. Captain Washkin bested you this time. But you’re alive. And so long as you’re alive, there can be a next time.

Ready for the swim ahead, you wade out to see and head for the distant island that hides your guide, picturing the eyes that caught yours down a long hallway. Next time, you’ll do a lot more than see her.

And next time…

…she won’t see you.