Sharli watched from a distance through an extensible eyeglass Deaf Sam had bought her from a seller of useful instruments he’d met. The wise assassin only used it at night because otherwise the glint of sunlight on the lens had a habit of giving you away to a careful target. This lot weren’t careful, and it was dark, so she made a comprehensive survey of their camp while the opportunity presented itself. They were, as far as she could see, largely unarmed if you didn’t count the dog.
She was interrupted when Deaf Sam came and sat himself down in front of her, getting right in the way. She sat up, and tried to push him aside, but he caught her wrist and made signs at her.
He’d been like this the whole time, and it was getting on her nerves now.
‘Look,’ she said, pulling her arm away, ‘I haven’t got any secret to tell you.’ She backed up her sign replies by talking out loud. In the moonlight he’d just about see her mouthing the words with her lips, but it wasn’t about that – she wasn’t not speaking just because he couldn’t hear her. She wasn’t the deaf one. ‘Why do you keep going on?’
Deaf Sam started a complicated sentence, full of motions he was rushing in his now overfamiliar, irritated way, so that she couldn’t work out what he meant.
‘Forget it!’ she said, not signing at all now and turning her back on him.
He stomped round to where she’d turned and made a new set of signs, but they didn’t make any sense. ‘Are you an imposter’, is what she thought he’d signed, but that can’t have been what he meant.
‘Am I an imposter? Is that what you’re asking?’
Deaf Sam, after a while in which strange emotions that Sharli couldn’t understand played across his face, nodded.
She didn’t reply, but instead slammed the eyeglass shut, took his hand, and slapped the bronze tube into it.
He took it, and Sharli stormed off into the darkness.
She thought to herself, as she left, that the sooner this job was over, the better, and that these next two targets were really going to get it.