[ONC '24 SHORTLIST] When a group of assassins is onto her irritating escort, a happy-go-lucky bodyguard must ensure they survive their trip before his escort's past demons catch up to them.
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No one expected easygoing Aspen Mendoza to be acce...
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Francisco Bangoy International Airport
Davao City
4 February, 23:25
The night sky is beautiful at 40,000 feet the way to Davao City, but I'm too jittery to admire it.
Guilt eats me inside like a rot in a tree. I shouldn't have left Rhodes like that, passed out in a dirty bathroom stall. I shouldn't have let Lily poison him just so we could buy ourselves some time. He's my brother for God's sake, but he can definitely arrest me for endangerment if he wants to. Whether it's for professionalism's sake or because he hates my guts right now is anybody's guess.
Everyone else is asleep except for me, Lily, and the occasional flight attendant checking up on guests. I'm stuck between Lily, who's in the aisle seat, and an old geezer's dozing off by the window seat. I wish I switched with Lily when I had the chance.
Lily must've sensed my mood, because she started to tell me more about her past in Poison Grove. As if that would calm me and my nerves down, but I appreciate the productive distraction.
"I've done a lot of pruning in the past." 'Pruning' is a codeword for the kills she's done—she taught me what the Grove uses just in case anyone's listening in. "I used to be proud that I got so many. We in the Grove used to fight for seeds like they were raffle tickets. The more pruning I did, the more perks we got from the Gardener."
'Seeds' is a codeword for the jobs the Gardener assigns to the assassins, including her. They could be anything, but they're almost always contract kills.
Lily smiles like it's something to be nostalgic about. For someone who's run away from the organization that plucked her from her old life and experimented against her will, she's too calm about her past experiences than I would like. Unlike Lucas, who hated every second of talking about it.
My stomach roils. "What kind of perks?"
"New books, clothes, stuff like that," she answers. "If the Gardener's feeling generous... freedom. To do whatever we wanted—as long as it's not actual freedom. We could never ask for that."
"Why couldn't you get yourself out?" I ask. "If you did so many... missions, you could just go away and never come back."
"It wasn't that simple." She turns to face me, her hazel eyes boring into me like knives. "Imagine being taken away from everything you've ever known and strapped into a cold table with needles and tools and everything else that will poke into your body. You have no idea what will happen to you from here on out, but there's this man—a sweet-looking man, almost like an angel—who tells you everything's going to be okay as long as you listen to everything he says.
"After the first injection of poison, he gives you a bunch of candy, the first thing you've eaten for days. You love it so much that you think the man can be trusted. So you do what he says. You stay still at the table. You don't make a sound even as you're prodded by needles as large as your fingers.
