Twist! Or is it?
Wilkinson and I both had sudden intakes of breath; Kragnor seemed more interested in my companion’s reaction. “Oh, you didn’t know?” he said, faux-jovially. “Deckard’s a complete fraud. When I found out that there was a contract put out on me, I naturally investigated who would be sent to do the job. I discovered something most interesting: nobody’s actually seen the raygun in action in years. Decades, really.”
“The jobs still got done!” I was trying for a combination of “badly trying to bluff” and “defensive” in my tone, there. It must have worked, because Kragnor shrugged, well-pleased with himself.
“That’s a fair point, Ms. Deckard. You did do the jobs – but it always turned out that nobody ever saw the actual attack. All they found afterward was a burned corpse. And if one of your employers suspected that you were a fake, so what? The job got done. How you did it was your affair, really.”
“Yes, it was.” That time I was trying for “salvaging what was left of my dignity” while viewing the room. There were three guards, but they were all breathing at the same time and they blinked as little as possible. Those were symptoms of a pretty nasty spell that linked the victims’ heartbeats to that of somebody else. When he died, they died. The Dominion loved that particular magic, which meant that they really were working with Kragnor. Not that I needed proof to keep on with doing the job, but it’s nice to know what’s up, hey?