Is This The End?

Chapter 16

"What?" I said, the words barely escaping my mouth.

I looked up at her face to try to understand why she was pointing a gun at me, but she had no readable expression. Her eyes looked as if they were looking directly past me and her jaw was clenched. Her hand was shaking which was the only give away to human emotion in her body language.

"What are you doing?" I repeated, not whispering it this time.

She didn't say anything back to me. Her grip tightened on the gun and her eyes began to well with tears, but she quickly blinked them away.

"Emelia?" I said, starting to cry as the shock washed over me and I realized that Emelia actually had a gun pointed at my head.

Emelia looked away for a second and choked back tears before facing me. That same stone cold stare I had seen on her face when we were fighting.

"I'm sorry," she said coldly as she stared directly through me.

"Emelia, why?" I shouted, crying even harder as I tried to get her to understand how confused I was at that very moment.

I couldn't believe that Emelia was standing with a gun aimed at my head. What was she planning to do? Did she know that my mission was to kill her? There's no way she knew. The Center would not have let it slip and other than that, there was no traceable piece of evidence. My racing thoughts were interrupted by Emelia as she began to explain.

"I was sent by The Center to kill you," she said coldly, clearly trying to hide how upset her own words were making her. "At first, I was just supposed to scope you out and make sure that... Some babies were part of a genetic experiment that made it possible for them to see colors in extremely different ways. At some point, The Center lost track of the babies and sent out field agents to go find them. I came into your housing unit because The Center suspected that you might have been one of those babies. They told me that if you were one, I'd have to kill you. They never gave specifics as to why, but they said it was really important that I did kill you."

"What? So, you came into the housing unit knowing that you'd have to kill me and you gained my trust and love and everything just to fuck me over? That's what that case was for all along?" I said through angry tears.

"No. Well, yes, but it's not like that," she said, still maintaining the cold voice and keeping the gun aimed at me.

Even though she was speaking in a cold tone and sounded detached from the situation, I could see the pain behind her eyes. This is not something she wanted to do.

"What's it like then?" I asked bitterly, feeling the betrayal start to sink in.

"Kai, I- I failed my mission the first time around. They wanted me to kill you after I found out about your ability to see the colors that night we painted together. They gave me a month to do it, but I couldn't do it. I wasn't supposed to get close to you, but I did. I really liked you and I tried to keep on focus with the mission in the beginning, but you threw me off course because I couldn't stay away from you. After I failed to kill you by their due date the second time around, they started listing off dozens of people that I cared about. They said they would kill them all if I didn't complete the mission. They said I had until 12:10 am tonight. That's in a couple of minutes," She said, still showing very little emotion.

"Emelia... I- So your solution was to kill me? Seriously?" I said, becoming increasingly scared by the possibility that she could pull the trigger at any moment. "Oh my god. That's the mission they said you failed, isn't it?"

"What are you talking about?" she said, lowering the gun a slight bit.

"The Center gave me until tonight at 12:35 am to kill you because you failed 'a really important mission'. The second they told me I had to do it, I internally decided that I wouldn't. They said they'd kill me if I didn't kill you and I decided that it was okay if they took me and not you. That's why I've been trying to live every day to the fullest recently. This was supposed to be our last date together, just you and me having fun like nothing bad would ever happen to us. You know? I was going to send you home and let them come for me. I wanted to protect you from seeing them kill me. I wanted you to think that it was an accident," I said, crying even harder now.