When Memories Stabbed

The name glared from a project invoice, its logo a stylized ZW entwined with lotus petals. Clarissa’s hand flew to her pendant—a habit when memories stabbed. Bintang’s voice crackled over a secure line two months ago: “We’ve got whispers about Zhang Wei… biolabs in Kalimantan… entire villages quarantined.” Her old Interpol team had dismissed it as a rumor. Then Bintang went silent. They’d found his motorbike abandoned near a Jakarta dock, his GoPro footage showing men in hazmat suits loading steel drums stamped ZW.

Now here it was, linked to Mei Ling. And the Nine Dragons.

She clicked a video file. Grainy footage showed a lab, its walls lined with biocontainment units. A researcher in a mask adjusted a microscope—too familiar. Clarissa froze. Dr. Amina Hassan. A neuroscientist who’d vanished from Kuala Lumpur University after publishing a paper on airborne neurotoxins. The timestamp: six weeks ago. Mei Ling hadn’t just funded Zhang Wei—she’d weaponized it.

A chat log popped up.

UserX: Progress on Project Black Rain?

ZW_Admin: Field tests successful. 98% mortality in primates. Awaiting final approval.

UserX: Expedite. Clients are impatient.

Clarissa’s coffee cup slipped, shattering on the floor. Black Rain. The same phrase scrawled in Bintang’s notebook. She’d thought it a metaphor. Now it loomed literal—a pathogen, a silent apocalypse sold to the highest bidder. Her mind raced: Subianto’s Interpol briefcase in the footage… Had he handed them access to containment protocols? To respond to teams?

She dug deeper. A map loaded—facilities flagged across Southeast Asia. Jakarta. Hanoi. Singapore. One marker pulsed downtown, three blocks from her apartment. A “Wellness Center” catering to politicians. A distribution point.

Her phone buzzed—a blocked number. A photo of her at The Neon Lotus, timestamped an hour ago. Followed by a voice message. She played it, pressing the phone to her ear.

“You breathe, we hear it.”

The voice—mechanical, genderless—chilled her. Then, a second sound beneath the distortion: faint, wet coughing. Amina’s last lab recording had that same rattle.

Clarissa slammed the laptop shut. The room spun. They weren’t just laundering money. They were laundering death. And now, she’d inhaled their secrets.

A knock rattled the door.

“Ms. Tan?” A lilting female voice. “We have your delivery.”

Clarissa peered through the fisheye lens. A woman in a crisp white hazmat suit stood holding a floral arrangement—lotus blossoms. The same ones stamped on Zhang Wei’s logo.

She grabbed her go-bag, heart hammering. The ventilation ducts—too narrow. Fire escape—they’d have it covered. Only one exit left: the sewer access hidden under her floorboards, a relic from the building’s wartime past.

As she pried it open, the door exploded inward. Gas canisters rolled across the floor, hissing green vapor.

Black Rain.

Clarissa plunged into the darkness below, the toxin biting at her heels.

A Silent Assignment

Rain lashed against the windows of Clarissa’s Singapore safehouse, the storm mirroring the

tempest on her laptop screen. Files labeled HITORI – PATIENT ZERO and VACCINE

DISTRIBUTION PHASE 3 glowed ominously. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, encrypting the

data. If Lia and the coalition get this, we can expose the whole operation—

A shadow shifted in the hallway.

Clarissa froze, her hand drifting toward the pistol hidden beneath the desk. “Who’s there?”

Silence.

Then—a whisper, soft as static. “You should have stayed in the light, Investigator.”

Haruto stepped into the room, his face obscured by a black half-mask etched with serpentine patterns. His gloved hand held a silenced pistol, its barrel steady. Rainwater dripped from his trench coat, pooling at his feet like ink.

Clarissa’s breath hitched. She recognized the insignia on his collar: The Silent Whisper, one of the Nine Dragons’ elusive Successors. “You’re supposed to be a myth,” she hissed.

“Myths are warnings people ignore.” Haruto tilted his head, his voice devoid of malice—clinical, almost bored. “You uncovered the wrong truth.”

Clarissa lunged for her gun, but Haruto moved faster. A single suppressed shot cracked the air. The bullet struck her laptop, sparks erupting as the screen died.

“Data first,” Haruto said, stepping closer. “Then witnesses.”

Clarissa clutched her bleeding shoulder, staggering back. “The coalition will burn your syndicate to ash.”

Haruto’s masked face betrayed nothing. “The coalition is a footnote. This war is older than you know.” He raised the pistol. “But you won’t live to read the next chapter.”

A flash of movement—Clarissa hurled a desk lamp at him, diving for the window. Haruto sidestepped, firing again.

The bullet struck her spine.

She collapsed against the glass, rain blurring the city lights below. Blood streaked the window as she gasped, “Why…?”

Haruto knelt, removing his mask. His youthful face—sharp, unblemished—contrasted with the deadness in his eyes. “Because cycles need sacrifices.” He pressed the pistol to her temple. “And you’re expendable.”

The shot echoed.

Clarissa slumped, her blood seeping into the encrypted files, erasing Hitori’s secrets.

Haruto stood, holstering his weapon. On the desk, he placed a small origami dragon—folded from a page of Clarissa’s notes. A signature. A taunt.

As he vanished into the storm, the safehouse screens flickered to life. A coded message pulsed:

>> TARGET ERASED. PROCEED TO PHASE 2. – RYUJI

—

Through the rifle’s scope, Pandu observes the target—a middle-aged man with tired eyes, pacing on a rooftop. Not a killer, not a criminal mastermind—just a frightened man clutching a briefcase.

A voice crackles in Pandu’s earpiece. “Green, confirm visual.”

He exhales. “Confirmed.”

“Take the shot.”

His finger hesitates on the trigger.

Through the scope, he notices a subtle detail—the man isn’t alone. A woman and a child step onto the rooftop. His wife and daughter.

Pandu curses under his breath.

The rifle felt heavier in Pandu’s hands now, as if the steel had absorbed the weight of his doubt. Through the scope, the rooftop was a stage of shadows—Mikhail huddling his family close, the child’s doll abandoned near the edge, its yarn hair soaked by rain. Control’s voice hissed in his ear, serpentine, unrelenting. “No requests. Execute.”

Pandu’s jaw tightened. He’d heard that tone before—in Chechnya, when a colonel ordered a village burned for “strategic clarity.” Back then, he’d obeyed. Back then, he’d still believed in the arithmetic of duty.

But tonight, the numbers didn’t add up.

He shifted the barrel imperceptibly, the crosshair drifting from Mikhail’s heaving chest to a rusted streetlight two meters behind him. A calculated risk. The suppressor muffled the shot to a whisper. Glass exploded, sparks raining down like dying stars. Darkness swallowed the rooftop.

Chaos erupted. Mikhail shouted, his wife screamed, the child wailed—a symphony of panic. Pandu tracked their blurred shapes through the scope as they stumbled toward the stairwell, the briefcase forgotten. A part of him hoped it held nothing but lunch leftovers and unpaid bills.

“What the hell was that? Green, report!” Control’s voice clawed at him, sharper than the wind slicing through the alley below. Pandu yanked out the earpiece, its tiny red LED blinking like a vengeful eye, and crushed it under his boot. The silence that followed was sweeter than any kill.

He dismantled the Dragunov with practiced haste, fingers numb but precise. The rain thickened, washing gun oil and guilt from his hands. By the time he reached the street, the rooftop was empty.

—

The safehouse was a tomb—damp, airless, smelling of mildew and betrayal. Pandu froze in the doorway, his Glock drawn before his brain registered the anomaly: the door’s lock picked cleanly, the wardsigns on the floorboards smudged. Someone professional. Someone patient.

He flicked on the light.

Felix leaned against the splintered table, arms crossed, his leather jacket streaked with rain. The man hadn’t aged well; scars webbed his knuckles, and his left eye, clouded from a Nairobi shrapnel wound, fixed on Pandu with eerie stillness.

“You’re lucky they sent me,” Felix said, tossing a Zippo between his hands. “The others wanted your head on a pike.”

Pandu kept the Glock raised. “And you?”

“I’m here to offer a choice.” Felix nodded at the table, where a manila folder lay like an unmarked grave. “Open it.”

The documents inside stank of ink and lies. Surveillance photos of lab technicians in hazmat suits. Shipping manifests for “agricultural supplies” routed through Macau. And a name, circled in red: Project Hitori. A bioweapon, engineered by the Nine Dragons syndicate, engineered to profit from pandemics.

Pandu’s throat went dry. Mikhail’s briefcase—did it hold samples? Data? A cure?

Felix lit a cigarette, the flame trembling in his grip. “You think sparing one man matters? They’ll just send another shooter. Another bullet.”

“Then why show me this?”

“Because you’re not a bullet anymore.” Felix exhaled smoke, his good eye sharpening. “You’re a loose end. And loose ends either get clipped…” He tapped the folder. “…or they unravel the whole damn sweater.”

Pandu stared at the photo of a child in a quarantine ward, her face blistered, eyes wide with mute terror. Collateral damage, Control would say. Acceptable losses.

“What’s the play?” he growled.

Felix smirked, tossing him a burner phone. “We burn it all. Starting with Hitori.”

Outside, sirens wailed. Somewhere, Mikhail and his daughter were still running. Pandu pocketed the phone, the weight of it foreign yet familiar—like a trigger, waiting to be pulled.

“No turning back now,” Felix said, vanishing into the hall.

Pandu didn’t look up. “Wasn’t planning to.”

The door clicked shut. On the table, the doll from the rooftop stared at him, its button eyes glinting in the lamplight. He hadn’t even realized he’d taken it.

Innocent. Unbroken.

He tucked the doll into his coat, next to the Glock. Some debts, it seemed, could be repaid after all.