Dawn knelt down on the floor next to the woman’s body. She would have looked asleep, if not for the bullet hole through her forehead. Dawn pulled a mask from her pocket. A blank, but it slowly melted into a perfect match of Dawn’s face as Dawn exposed it to her effect, setting it down clutched in the woman’s dead hand. She had been sure to be seen as herself approaching the mansion. Hopefully, with luck, the woman’s husband would assume she had been murdered by someone imitating Dawn, not Dawn herself. They should have implemented better effect tracking here, they would have caught Dawn. Zarokhava was wise in that. They knew security was a right of the people.
She heard a voice from the hall outside. “Hello? Who’s there? I thought I heard gunshots.” The old grandmother rounded the corner and stopped suddenly when she saw the room. Blood sprayed cross the wall, a dead body on the floor, and a monster in a steel mask crouching over it. Why... Dawn didn’t want to kill this grandmother. She was just a bystander. Dawn heard Lorena’s voice in her mind. “No witnesses.” This woman had seen Dawn’s effect.
Dawn closed her eyes, quickly cocking her gun and pointing it toward the grandmother. It fired. A loud bang. And a thump of a body dropping to the floor. Dawn turned, not looking at the dead. They were enemies of the nation. It had to be done eventually. They were criminals from law. Still, Dawn shed a single tear as she left the mansion, putting on a mask of some important official. She didn’t know who, and riding for the tri-border council to meet Lorena. She would need to change back into herself there, this mask was only to frame whoever it was made from.
