It was going to be one of those nights.

Haze was lying down on a bed in the luxury OSC hotel Intercontinental on New Tokyo. She ended up in bed earlier than usual, the setting sun shining through the glass wall of her suite. The lights of the city below glowed like stars reflected on the surface of water.

She was tired but she could not sleep. It was going to be one of those nights.

It was not insomnia, or any kind of disorder. It was a state between consideration, meditation, pondering, lucid dreaming and thoughtlessness. Normally she did not mind these — as the folk wisdom went, the night brought advice. More often than not those episodes of wandering thought were helpful most of the time and normally, whenever it came upon her, she was grateful.

Except for today. Somehow, deep inside, she knew that today would not be like that. Somehow, she knew that the New Tokyo night would just uncover the horrors beneath the superficial veil of her mental constitution and a facade of her professional demeanour. And of all the days, today was the least she wanted something like this to happen. Today, she just wanted to sleep to awake.

Yet, despite how much she tried to keep her eyes closed and her body relaxed, the deep, dreamless slumber never came. She tossed around the bed for over an hour until she finally succumbed. She wondered what her subconscious wanted of her. Was it a confession? A personal account of her life? Again?

The sun had already set and the room was engulfed in total darkness when she opened her eyes again. The ceiling of her room was impeccable, with no cracks or imperfections. She desperately looked for something to hang her eye on while her mind caved in to her conscience. Finally, she opted for the corner where the great, borderless window to her right met the wall and the ceiling.

"What is it, then? Where are we journeying today?"

Lucid dreaming was something she was fascinated by as a child. She had read about it on the Net as a teenager. Of course at the time it had been untainted by real life and only relegated to her simple, teenage desires. But the grim reality was that the dreams were never lucid. It was like a sensie, a played back five-d experience. No influence over what her subconscious projected. And no escape — stuck in sleep paralysis, there was nothing to do but watch.

Sometimes the dreams were real. They were reminders of what happened in her past. Sometimes they were desires about the future. Sometimes they were projections of her mind, just a prediction of how an event with a certain set of predicates would conclude. Sometimes they were meaningless drivel. Sometimes they were something else entirely.

She had no idea how to fall asleep, so she started by recounting her earliest memories. She was fairly certain most of these were real, but it was hard to say.

"Bretonia is your home, Jenny." Her father spoke in his standard, commandeering fashion. "It's the home of us all. It's a beautiful place that we ought to preserve at all costs. We might be of the nobility here, you know, exalted amongst men, but we are not kings. Oh no! Are we anything but mere caretakers of this place, so that future generations could live in a just and free society? If anything, it's harder for people like us, lords and dames, dukes and duchesses, kings and queens even!, marquises, baronets and counts to live with the weight of our responsibility."

The seventeen-year-old girl sat on a couch flipping through an old, paper book while Frederick, Lord Ashgrove went on his mindless speech about patriotism and responsibility. It wasn't like she did anything to particularly deserve it — she merely just talked to her governess that she found certain aspects of noble life just a little bit too boring, and the faithful servant must have reported her to her father.

She had not been alone during that lesson either. Ashgrove had a friend, an enigmatic and rather dandy gentleman by the name of Wellington, whose son participated in her classes quite often. The boy, John Wellington, was very sharp but, much like his father, a little strange. He would often interrupt the governess, often with disagreements about what she was saying. She did not mind that particularly, as she appreciated the discussion during their classes, but sometimes John would bring up left-field topics, like politics while the governess tried to explain the basics of the functioning of an animal cell. She would chastise John only to have him come back with another odd question a few minutes later.

Jennifer really liked John and they ended up being great friends, she especially appreciated his manifold insights into the nature of other people. Young as he was, he could read the intentions of everyone around him and exploit them for the benefit of the two of them. Initially these were harmless quips that yielded minor rewards, but as both of them realised that with John's cunning they could get out of almost any situation, they progressively started getting more daring. Theft, confidence tricks soon became their favourite pastime, giving a bit of spice to an otherwise boring life of minor Bretonian nobility.

Ashgrove continued talking for what felt like hours, while she drifted away.

The trial was really short and really to the point.

The charge was conspiracy to commit murder in the case of Jennifer Anne Ashgrove and attempted murder in the case of John Wellington. Or so she remembered. The reasons, ultimately, were irrelevant. They would both serve the same amount of time, in Pendleton Penitentiary, one of Bretonia's strictest prisons short of Newgate itself.

All of the time surrounding her imprisonment was a blur, except for the first days. They were locked up with three other women, in total five people in the cell. She remembered wondering briefly why they were not separated by sex, but ultimately, it mattered very little. She did not remember what the other women were doing time for, they did not talk much with Wellington and she did not talk much with them, even though they tried to gauge how much she would hold her own.

That was, up until one day a few months into her sentence Wellington went missing. She asked the guards, to whom she had never spoken a word before, multiple times, she tried to reach to the director, anyone who could tell her what happened to her best friend. But it all was wiped clean, as if John Wellington had never existed.

She would see him in dreams after his disappearance.

One that recurred most often went like this: she stood in a corridor, a long corridor with something at the end. The lights were bright, but they dimmed as she progressed through. She reached the end — a glass door. Behind it, John. He recognised her and waved. She waved back and approached the glass.

Everything went silent. Like watching a movie with the sound muted.

She smiled at him. He smiled back, but there was something wrong with his smile — it was a smile of sadness, one that tried to cover grief but in essence only emphasised it. He was very distressed about something, but he did not want her to see.

And now she saw what the glass door was. It was a door of a coffin. Wellington's.

A dark figure drew a curtain over the door. She screamed at him, but she did not hear her own voice, much less an answer.

A jolt of electricity started at her ears and ran down to her feet. That was when she would usually wake up.

As before, the electric jolt in the dream woke her up.

"Woke up" was perhaps not the right term, she had been lucid all along, her eyes open and all, but it prompted her to rise up in bed, breathing heavily.

The moonless and starless skies of New Tokyo provided no respite as she gazed out of the window. She gazed down instead, at the brightly lit up business district. To the left edge of her field of view, she located the root of the docking ring and followed it up, a bright stripe in the otherwise black firmament of the Kusarian capital.

A few minutes passed while her breath stabilised. She had been through this many times. For a minute she pondered whether to call in room service with a warm drink, but she decided against it and walked to the bathroom instead. Her eyes were used to the darkness of the room, so she did not turn on the light.

She twisted the tap handle until the little display below showed a warm temperature and she slowly stuck her head underneath, letting the water run across her eyelids, cheeks and nose. Her hair got partially wet in the process, but she did not seem to mind.

After a minute or so, she turned the water off and sighed deeply. She needed the cool down.

Leaving the bathroom, she evaluated her options. She considered a night walk, but the thought of getting dressed, going out into the light of the corridor and risking being harassed in the street somehow did not seem that appealing. Glancing towards the queen bed, sheets thrown about, she wondered if her subconscious would let her sleep the rest of the night.

Resigned, she returned to the bed, sat down and hid her face in her palms, controlling her breathing again. No sleep.

After a few minutes she tilted into a horizontal position and descended into her lucid dreaming again.

Who was John Wellington?

The wonderchild admired by all. The one who got away. She did not accept the reality in which John Wellington was not alive. He must have been.

He could not have died in that jail. He was alive.

Either he was alive or he did not exist at all.

Maybe John Wellington did not exist? Was he just a figment of her imagination? Was he a memory she conjured up, somehow? Maybe one created by her failed lucid dream attempts?

Or maybe...

Maybe it was Jennifer Haze who did not exist without John Wellington?

Who is Jennifer Haze?

She was awake again. She sighed, looking at the boring ceiling of her suite. Who was Jennifer Haze, indeed?

What horrid chain of events let her to this place, to this suite at the top levels of the Intercontinental hotel on New Tokyo, a place where just a night costed about as much as the bottom ninety percent of Sirius made in a month, and yet it made her so unhappy?

Fifty.

The grim reality of a five being the first digit of her age for — she glanced to the clock — the past two hours. It was a moment that something clicked. What was she thinking?

A job of an assassin is a dangerous and self-denying one. No family, no friends, no home, no trace, no life, nothing. Only cash. And greed. It was not even real, anyway. It was just a number on her bank account.

She chuckled to herself. A bank account! It was a legitimate business, after all. She paid taxes in Liberty, on all the policemen and navy soldiers that she shot down. It was through a shell corp, laundered and properly untraceable. But it was done for a reason. All of the money she had was clean. Everything was ready in case she decided to retire.

That ever-increasing number enticed her very much.

Her first attempt at a retirement did not work out. She spent time on the OSC liner Hawaii, a couple of months of that, and then the cash ran out. It had turned out that with the inflation and all, she could not just sit on it all the time. She had to make more with it, else it would be eaten up by the ever-increasing inflation.

The usual way women her age ensured safe retirement was by having children. But that option was taken away from her, first by the jail time, then by the line of work she chose and the lifestyle she had to lead because of that choice. And now...

Fifty.

Too late for kids. As if she could find a man who would date her, even if it were possible. She laughed to herself in the dead of night. The number fifty was firmly etched in her brain.

Maybe she should have gone into business instead? That's something that scales. There are jobs that scale, that one can be good at, teach others, take a part of their money, and then the business grows. Repair jobs, construction, trade.

Assassinations were not like that. They were more like — she tried to look for a better example but her consciousness went to the most extreme one first — like prostitution. Strictly limited by the time and opportunity that she had. No matter how good one is, there is an upper limit to how much an assassin — or, indeed, a whore — could earn. She felt like she was firmly at that limit, at least for the assassination part.

The only ways from here were down or sideways.

It felt like she managed to sleep for a little bit. Actually sleep, without any unwelcome thoughts invading her mind. She had heard it said that meditation is not for everyone. Here, it was not like she had any choice in the matter.

But she woke up with a seed of a plan to finally put the thankless life of killing people for money behind her.

She stood up from the bed and walked up to the window.

Jennifer Haze was a facade. There was a person behind that face, but the cold, hard assassin was not who she really was. She had lived a tough life, there was no question about that, but maybe there was room to learn for her and teach others about it.

There was nothing to do in New Tokyo. There is no space for self-made people in Kusari. She had to go back to Liberty and she had a plan to put in place to ensure that it would work. She would need help from her friends there, of course... But at the end of the day, it was just something that she had to go through with.

It would take a while, she had to set her affairs in Kusari in order, the only place with civilisation in Sirius that did not outright hate her.

But Jennifer Haze was a person whom she wanted to leave behind. She had to reinvent herself. Drop the mask, leave it alone.

Jennifer Haze is not real. Jennifer Haze does not exist.