It is said that the best way to learn is to teach, and Sarah discovered the truth of this.

It wasn't a matter of fundamentals, skills, or what resources you can bring to a firefight; she knew all of that cold and she'd pioneered many of the latest developments herself. It was the unspoken assumptions about the role of an assassin-servant that she'd internalized at a young age and had to stop herself from saying out loud. She was taught to follow her role, performing specific acts. That wasn't right, or at least wasn't enough. She'd first learned how to take control of situations as Howard's servant, as the young Inheritor started to rely on her experience from the moment she was gifted to him. Then as an Illuminatus she'd learned to command greater forces, putting together the roles of many men under her charge to form solid teams and accomplish a great many goals.

She had learned from direct experience that the best sort of servant didn't merely obey. Any servant could do that, that was the definition of the word. A good servant anticipated her mistress's commands and understood what she wanted, not just what she said; this is why Sarah didn't even consider implants. Better servants relayed orders and worked with other servants to fulfill goals. But the best servants often didn't need to be commanded at all. They were simply fully informed of the situation and operated from there, anticipating everyone involved, including their masters, their allies, and their targets, doing everything they could to further the goals of the one they served, being able to accomplish important objectives from even the most limited initial role, should the situation demand it. This was the level of unity she and Paul had attained with the twins in fast situations, intuitively protecting each other and doing what needed doing at once, not even consciously thinking about it. It had been an Illuminated adage that servants were the hands of their owners, and as she taught this concept, she understood what that truly meant.

Ruby understood as well, even if she had a hard time following through completely. The concept was fairly simple if esoteric; it was Sarah who was hard to understand.

As Sarah patiently inculcated her servant, she realized that a small part of herself was always expecting to receive some kind of direct, detailed order, to be told to play a specific part for unknown reasons in the service of someone she'd never seen before. She hadn't been given orders like that for six years now. 'Karl, you dumb son of a bitch. You taught me all wrong.' But Karl had just been operating by the mentality of his day.

She intended to teach her more details immediately, but, as her servant Richard informed her that Flynt was going to a meeting in Bavaria, they had a field trip to go on first.


Shadowing Richard Flynt was laughably easy. He walked with purpose and never looked to his back. Dead silent, Sarah stayed one corner behind him, Ruby several meters behind her in super-soft shoes that made the tiniest of whispers when she stepped.

They didn't even need to wait for him to get where he was going; whatever secret meeting he had with his friends in the depths of the Bavarian headquarters wasn't their concern. All they cared about was that he was here, and he was alone.

Sarah tapped him on the shoulder and smiled at his reaction before grabbing him by the neck and holding him to the wall, still smiling gently. "Hey, Rick. Let's talk about what you've been listening in on."

"It's an unlogged relay! I swear!" he shouted.

She responded by squeezing his neck just a bit harder.

"What do you want me to do, just tell you what you want to hear?! You can go through my files, I'll show you..." He reached for the miniature laptop he had at his back, trying to pull it from between himself and the wall.

"That if they're accessed in the wrong way, they'll delete themselves? That they're stored in a very special place that won't come out in a full data dump? That they're not on your regular server period, but carefully hidden offsite?" Sarah suggested. She took the laptop from the man's back and examined it without opening it, paying meaningful attention to the earbuds attached to it, wondering what he listened to. She let him go and he fell to the ground in a choking heap. "Go ahead," she said, gesturing to his laptop. "Log in. But if you don't have any phone logs, I'll kill you for incompetence."

"I- what?" he asked, desperately, and Sarah knew on sight the difference between a man fearing for his life and a man fearing for his best-kept secret. He sat up on the floor, paralyzed. This was why he'd quit active participation in the rogues back in 2000 and prayed daily the engineereds would never know. Who wanted to fight monsters like this?

"She's new here. So logs, or I teach her what bones to start with," Sarah told him. What she didn't tell him was that the bone she would be starting with was his skull.

He capitulated, quietly. He was actually already logged in, perpetually connected through the general Illuminated network, through another layer of heavy encryption, to the one at home. One quick search and years of phone calls scrolled down, ordered by date and time. Jackpot.

"I swear that is everything." Yeah, but he swore before. "My own notes are appended. I just record numbers and voices and figure out who's who from those. Should I send it to you?"

"All of it. To me, personally," Sarah commanded, and Flynt fumbled through for a few minutes before finding a good way to copy the full files to a folder he could send them from, taking time to deactivate the land mines he'd left in his system to prevent exactly this.

"All right. It's sent. Absolutely everything." It actually was everything; there was a time to hold 'em and a time to fold 'em, and this fell under the latter category. "Now I've given you what you want. I ask something simple in return."

"We have no intention of letting anyone know about your little side business, Flynt. Anybody dumb enough to think you're not logging this shit deserves to be spied on. There's no favors here. There is one more thing, though. We're tapping in. You are to send any and all new calls to me." Flynt had originally intended to ask for the retrovirus. He decided to shut his hole instead. Maybe if they really did kill all the rogues, he'd get it, without calling more attention to himself.

"It'll take a day to set that up, I'm late for my meeting as it is..." Late for his meeting? Both Ruby and Sarah rolled their eyes at how much like a normal he sounded.

"By the way. When we interrogate them, we will ask them what calls they placed to who through what relays. If there's anything they did through your equipment that isn't here, or if we find you've edited anything sent to us, she will be back to kill you. Slowly," Sarah said, pointing her bladed thumb at Ruby, who simply smiled. "Have fun at your meeting." They left the room before he did, and although he wiped the tears from his face and walked out with a stilted gait, trying to somehow further emphasize that nothing had happened, he could not hide the fact that he'd been crying. Sarah didn't get the behavior of normals or even normal-born Illuminati half the time, and could not fathom why he acted as he did.

But Ruby knew why, even if she had no words to explain it with.


And then the hard-intellectual part of the training began, covering everything from weapons systems to obscure secrecy pitfalls. Ruby laughed when Sarah told her how she'd used copies of herself, and laughed further when she realized how Gritzl died. Once Ruby's retrovirus fully took hold, the physical part began, and the unique parts of her biology meant that there were many things she had to learn herself. This was all done in the assassins' base; the twins could survive without Sarah for a week, which was all it took to bring her servant from 'fresh meat' to a thorough understanding of the principles; more specialized training could come later, as needed. Sarah couldn't have asked for a better pupil, as Ruby swiftly learned the details of everything Sarah had to offer and accepted the merciless training schedule without complaint. Many mission-less servants quietly observed the lessons, a few recording for later study. Pedagogy was something they hadn't seen from their Lady before, and most of them learned things they'd forgotten or never heard of. Sarah's plane had left the twins' island with an extremely competent killer and her new servant, and came back with two extremely competent killers.


Luke sat down atop the cliff and thought. He did not yet zone out, as he usually did. He simply considered things he hadn't before, occasionally grinding his fist into his palm when he thought of something he didn't want to think about. He had almost expected to die for last week's impertinence, but since he hadn't yet he was contemplating how he would. Would he fatally piss off the twins, would he be sniped from miles away, or would he die in his master's defense screaming war cries? It would be no problem for him. Retroviral or not, Paul's 'friend' or not, he knew he was cannon fodder, and accepted it without complaint. And when he came face-to-face with Satan he would tear that fucker a new one.

This must be where Japanese meditation comes from, he figured. All those samurai contemplating death every day. Paul had recently handed him a copy of Shogun, and apparently 17th century Japs were like Illuminati, only far more polite and not as smart or vicious.

That was when he saw a burst of orange, and a girl with short crimson hair and a black suit leap fifteen feet in the air. 'I want to fuck that' was his first reaction, with 'How did she do that' a distant second. He ran down a steeper way than he had come up, jump-kicking trees to lose momentum.

Sarah looked like standards of beauty had gone into her creation. This girl looked like someone had started with 'killer', and added gender as an afterthought. Particularly her face, which was skin pulled over muscle and bone. Wait, wasn't everyone's face that? But hers actually looked like skin, muscle, and bone, and it was shaped in human patterns yet completely failing to come together in Luke's mind as a singular whole instead of collections of cells. The fact that she was regarding him with a complete lack of caring only amplified the effect.

This, of course, did not stop his penis, which considered her face a second-place or perhaps third-place alternative.

"Hey! You're hard to catch up with! I'm-"

"Luke. I know who you are,' she said, knowing this would be a problem long before she got here. And the very first time she uses the open ground for training and the exhilarating explosive jumps (store it up in the special shoes while running, then jump and ignite!), he shows up doing the same tired courtship dance she's seen so many times before. Murphy's Law.

"Yeah, I guess you would. Listen, if you-"

Yup, definitely a problem. Time for Plan A. She held up a hand, in the traditional 'talk to it, not me' gesture.

"Oh. Right. Ice princess. You know that you're going to be here for a very long time, so.." He trailed off. It looked like she was trying to show him something- wait, was that a hole in her hand or-

Fwoooosh!

In the first instant he saw red, he didn't know it could hurt him and so didn't move. A twentieth of a second later, he pulled away, screaming. Oh Jesus, his face, the whole left side of his face was on fire, she'd burned halfway through his cheek, he had to get out of there, get to some fresh water, get away from this crazy bitch--

The Duumvirate, however, was dealing with a more usual problem: a deal had gone sour. This time the agreement was between Andrew Wilkinson, a fourth level, and Toshi, an engineered fifth who still had relatively few holdings. It was a straight-across trade- all the servants in organized crime from Toshi, and de facto ownership of the Japanese Internet from Andrew. Toshi had no further use for the Yakuza (his late father primarily used them to perform hits without needing to use Illuminated resources; Toshi found it easier to just do it himself) and Andrew felt that corporation ownership was wholly overrated, mostly due to secrecy. Hence the straight-across trade.

This was, as he was finding, a poorly-worded agreement; one large corporation in particular controlled a small but significant swath of the Japanese Internet, but it wasn't an "internet holding" by his view- there was no way to easily separate the corporation's assets. He'd given Toshi the other corporations no sweat, but the boy had simply asked him where the rest of it was, and so he'd gone to the Duumvirate before Toshi did. Andrew was incensed- he was so obviously right that it was hard to explain- but didn't dare show it.

And the Duumvirate, equally incensed but hiding most of it, was quietly determining that they'd probably have to choke a bitch today.

"And maybe in some theoretical world, I would have access to this overarching control mechanism, but it's never existed and I've never seen a need for it, so just because one of your-" He was interrupted by Luke rushing directly across the space between the viewscreen and the couch, heedless of the authority, clutching his face and yelling in agony. "..the fuck was that?" Luke's door slammed and the twins looked at each other, then at Andrew, and started laughing.

"He had a request too, although likely of a more.. amorous nature," Howard said. Pause. "It was rejected." More laughter.

Andrew chuckled despite himself, taking a breather, reason flooding back. "All right. Never mind, I'll just break off the relevant part and give him that." No matter how hard it was. "But I want more from his end of the bargain. I wasn't kidding when I said that was difficult here."

"Then ask. But don't expect him to give it to you. He didn't know your internals and isn't obligated to care. This is what happens when you make deals and assumptions at the same time," William said.

Well, yes, strictly speaking that was true, but that kid should have- no, strictly speaking was the only interpretation the twins cared about. And the only one he could reasonably ask for. Why the hell did he call them up? They were going to kick his ass! He'd really stepped in it. Apologize, no, admit fault, hell no, just get the hell out of there before he fucked up even more... "Very well, Dominator." Click. Bitch-choking, cancelled.

"Poor guy," Howard said.

"Which one?" William replied, and they broke out in laughter again.