It was a night like every other. An oppressive black smog choked the city, pouring into the wicked hearts and lungs that breathed there. Acid rain drummed against thousands of window panes, the cityscape like a surreal tessellation of piano keys. Thirty years came and went; nothing changed. I stood at the window, smoking cigarette after cigarette, my thoughts distracted by the memory of a woman I hadn't seen since the war's end.
And then I heard a knock a the door. Just like her... Just like thirty years ago.
"Come in," the hoarse words strained from my throat as I mechanically lifted my hand to the wall panel. The metal door slid open noiselessly, revealing a slender figure draped snugly by an inky-black neomil dress. She stepped inside, her gold-plated hips glinting as they swayed. Her lips were a deep ebony, but her eyes... Her predatorial yellow eyes pierced mine and scanned me from head to toe. For a moment, it felt like they were prying my very soul from my body. Then I twisted my lips into an ugly smirk; I remembered my soul was already long gone. I left it in the war, along with the flowers I placed on my mother-in-law's grave.
"Someone's out to zero me," she broke the silence with attention-demanding bluntness. The smooth allure of her voice clouded my mind. I never noticed her third hand – a mistake that would spell my doom...
"Impossible," I started with the beginnings of a roguish grin. "Who'd ever wanna kill a woman with hips and lips like yours? And a corpo, no less."
She narrowed her impenetrable yellow eyes for a moment. In a whirl and blur, she now pointed a machine gun at me with rocksteady aim. "You don't understand," she said quietly, her barrel fixed at a point between my eyes. "It's you. Don't you remember anything... dear brother?"
Memories flashed. My nightmare of the war... Euzebio's blood, frayed wires, the tattered remains of a plush tapir received from Margaret just two days before she died... And her father's last words. Words about my twin sister – a mutant, abandoned at birth, the promise that I'd find her.
Too late. She found me.
