. . .

“I didn’t want to kill you at first,” Maria says. “Isn’t that funny? It took having to hunt down and slaughter four kids that I’ve practically raised up from nothing —”

“It’s been three months,” Tom says.

“— to realize that it’s not my targets that I’ve been fighting. It’s been me, all along. It’s been that part of me that doesn’t want to be an assassin, that just wants to be an ordinary space princess and not gun down a series of lovable scamps.”

Jane sneaks up. She pats Maria’s arm. “I hear you,” she says. She sneaks back away.

“But,” says Maria, after a momentary pause, “once I knew that — once I knew that the only person I was really fighting was myself — I was able to move beyond it. I think. So you’re going to come in here, because you have to. It’s your one . . . slim . . . chance. And then I’m going to charge up my space gun and I’m going to shoot you, and you’re going to be dead, and I will have a 4/27 assassination success rate at last.”

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