Looking out to the factory backyard through a window in the stairway that constituted the emergency exit, Maria had caught a glance of a truck parked there. It’d come crashing through the gate and no one had apparently taken notice of it in the midst of the chaos. The panicked screams of the employees following the announcement from the police had evidently drowned it out. Maria figured it to be the masked men’s entrance vehicle. And she wanted a closer look at it. She knew venturing outdoors to-wards an unknown transport vessel was a bad idea, but curiosity got the better of her.

She slipped out through the emergency exit door, duck-ing behind a corner just in case there were more of the goons keeping watch outside. Taking a careful peek beyond it, she counted a grand total of zero of them. Had they really sent in the entire crew just to get one man? Or had there been some men outside earlier but they’d ditched? Maybe someone inside called for backup and everyone on truck guard duty just rushed in?

Well, whatever the case, the absence of guards made it easy to approach the truck. But even when she did, Maria kept her stance half-crouched, staying close to whatever cars she fi-gured she could use as cover. As unmanned as the parking lot looked, Maria preferred to play it safe. She didn’t want to risk getting spotted and shot at, just in case there was a masked man or two keeping watch near the truck.

But the closer she got, the more convinced she became that every single one of the attackers had indeed gone inside. She made it to the truck undetected and unharmed. Concluding that she was safe, she straightened her posture and tried to peek into the truck through whatever windows she could find. To her dismay, the only thing she saw was her own reflection. The win-dows of the truck seemed to act like one-way mirrors – one can see outside but not inside.

Her attempt at surveying the vehicle was interrupted by a tap on her shoulder.

She turned around in a hasty motion, driven by the fear of having been spotted by one of the goons, expecting to be greeted by the sight of a gun barrel staring her down. Instead, she saw a woman. A young Japanese-looking lady with a cyber-netic eye, dressed in elegant attire that somewhat conveyed a sense of oriental traditionalism combined with modern sleek-ness. “Sorry to bother,” she spoke. “Can I borrow your phone?”

Maria raised an eyebrow, still in alert mode. “Why do you need to borrow my phone?” she asked in response.

“Need to make an urgent phone call. And I lost my own.”

She seemed earnest. With a slightly reluctant motion, Maria produced her phone, unlocked it and handed it over, a cy-bernetic hand extending to retrieve it. The woman nodded grate-fully and started tapping, turning around and taking two steps forward when she pressed the phone against her ear.

Josh stared at the screen of his phone for longer than he usually did. An unknown number. He was almost afraid to pick up. It wasn’t common for him to receive calls from unknown num-bers, save for the occasional telemarketer trying to sell him something he had no interest in and trying to meet their sales quota for the month.

Eventually, though, he picked up. “Josh Heynes, Neo-Tokyo police.”

“Great work, officer,” echoed an oddly familiar voice at the other end of the line.

The merc woman. “You,” Josh muttered. “I thought you said you were busy elsewhere.”

“I was. Up until now. Seems you managed to take out the entire crew.”

“No thanks to you. Did you deliberately leave out the part about the back entrance?”

“Trust me, if I knew about a back entrance, I would have let you know. It’s not my fault the intel was inadequate.”

Josh wasn’t entirely convinced the woman was telling the truth this time. If she knew about the operation, how could she not have known about a back entrance? Or was it part of her strategy to keep Josh in the dark about some details?

“Anyway, that’s a sizable portion of the gang out of the equation,” the woman said after a moment of silence. “I appre-ciate the work you’ve done here today. Till next time.”

Josh’s phone beeped in his ear, signifying that she hung up. He shoved it back into his pocket with a particularly slow motion, the realization that Shinji had heard his side of the con-versation eating at him. He turned his gaze to him.

In ten years of working with Shinji, Josh had never seen him as shocked as he did now. “You’ve got a fuckton of ex-plaining to do, man,” he mumbled.

“I will in due time,” Josh replied in a conspiratorial tone. “But for now, keep this a secret from the rest of the team. Okay?”

Shinji sighed, clearly wanting to defy Josh’s request and rat him out, but ultimately nodded in agreement.

Martin Stokes’s reaction wasn’t quite as lenient. With a heavy sigh and both of his hands covering his face, he muttered: “Nothing is safe from corruption these days, is it?”

A lot was going through Maria’s head as the mystery woman hung up and handed the phone back to her. She stared at her with a mix of emotions – shock, anger, disgust, a sense of trust betrayed underneath all of it. In that moment, she wished she could turn back time. Say “no” to her request with the foresight of knowledge as to what this woman was. But what was the exact role she played? At the risk of not receiving any satis-factory answers, she decided she had to try to extract what she could.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked the woman.

The grateful smile on her face faded into something more serious, more sinister. “What do you hope to gain by knowing?” came a counterinquiry from her.

Maria had to admit she wasn’t quite sure. But she had to know something specific. “I just wanna know one thing.” She looked into the woman’s eyes with considerably more intensity, hoping not to miss whatever answer lay beneath the cold gaze. “Did you kill Yoshiro Busujima?”

Something flickered in there. A memory. A wordless confession. The two simply stared at each other for a moment, Maria’s slowly drifting elsewhere as the pain of knowledge took over. Now she finally knew, but at what cost? “So you did,” she mumbled.

“You were close to him,” the woman guessed.

“Yeah. He was my father.”

“Sorry for your loss.”

“Are you?” Maria turned her gaze back to the woman, a sense of anger starting to creep back to the surface. But she did her best to keep her composure. “Why did you do it?”

“I just followed orders. It was nothing personal.”

“Whose orders?”

“That’s information you’re better off not knowing. I’d only be making things worse for you if I told you.”

“You made things bad enough for me when you killed my father.” The facade of calmness Maria was putting on was starting to crack.

“What do you want me to do? Hop into a time machine and kill my boss instead? I didn’t know who I was killing that day. And you’re not the first or last person to lose a family member in such a way.”

Wow. Way to trivialize my pain, bitch. Maria was red with rage. She screamed and raised an arm, beginning to swing it towards the woman in order to slap her, but she was quicker. Her cybernetic hand came up and grabbed Maria’s wrist an inch short of her cheek.

They simply stood in that position for a moment. Maria was breathing heavily, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Look…” the murderer began. “I truly am sorry about your father. I have my fair share of regrets. But your anger would be better directed at the man who actually ordered the hit on him.”

“Then why won’t you give me a name?”

“For your safety. Besides, this isn’t your fight. This is as much closure as you’re going to get.”

“I think I have the right to decide when I’ve gotten my closure. And it won’t be until I get my revenge.”

The woman laughed softly. “Sweetheart, my fate is al-ready sealed. If you want revenge, you can consider it received when I’m behind bars. Either that or just accept that you’ll ne-ver get it in the first place. Those are your two options.” Then the woman released her grip from Maria’s wrist and dashed off, nowhere to be seen a mere two seconds later.

Maria dropped her arm and let herself fall backward, her back slamming against the side of the truck, left to ponder the words that the woman who killed her father had spoken. Maybe this was as much as closure as she was going to get.