From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez
March 28, 2074
Nina,
I haven’t written for many days. The Psy assassin and I have been in the mountains, laying a trail to disguise the path that leads to the hiding place of the villagers the other assassins are coming to murder.
I thought we’d fight, spill blood, but this Psy, he tells me to be intelligent, to stop thinking with an alcohol-soaked brain and to remember that we are only two against an entire death squad.
“We can’t win one on one,” he says. “We can win only by stealth and cunning and being smarter than the enemy.”
I’ve never fought this way, in the shadows. Even when I ran with the human rebels in the first months after our village was sacked, we aimed to do violence against those who’d harm our people. Any rebels who died in the course of our campaign were held up as heroes.
The Psy assassin doesn’t know about the rebel cells. I’ll never betray those men and women to a man who might turn on me without warning. But he said something to me that was eerily apt: “Don’t try to be a hero, Xavier. A dead hero can’t help anyone.”
Xavier