The first time I saw her, she was looking at me from the surface of a spoon.

I was sitting in my apartment—the one with no windows on the fourth floor of a building on the east side of Manhattan that the landlord forgot to demolish—and I was eating soup from a can I had found in the pantry behind the sink. The spoon was dirty, but I wiped it on my shirt and the reflection was clear enough.

There she was. Not my reflection. Mine was older, thinner, with eyes that had seen too much and remembered too little. Hers were younger. Darker. The eyes of someone who had not yet learned that the world is a mirror and everything you see in it is something you have already lost.

"Frankie," I said.

The spoon showed me only soup.

I have been a shooter for twenty years. The Agency trained me in a place I cannot remember, behind walls I cannot describe, under a director whose voice I can hear but whose face I cannot picture. What I learned was simple: a target is a target. A contract is a contract. A life ends when the bullet arrives, and the quality of the work is measured by the cleanliness of the end.

瞄准谁，与枪无关。The principal's words were etched into my brain like a prayer. Who you shoot has nothing to do with the gun. The gun simply does what guns do. It moves metal through air and changes the temperature of what the metal touches.

I believed this for twenty years.

Then the phone call came. Three people. The poorest in the city. Money already in the account.

I checked the account. The number was there. Long enough to buy a life. Long enough to buy twenty lives. Long enough to make me wonder what a life was worth when you could put a number on it and the number was real.

I found the first one in a subway tunnel near Union Square. She was scavenging—picking through trash the way people pick through a refrigerator, looking for something that hasn't expired. She was small. Dark. Her eyes, when they met mine, did something my twenty years of professional detachment had never prepared me for.

They recognized me.

Not my face. They recognized me the way a mirror recognizes an object—by returning exactly what is given, but inverted. Left becomes right. Past becomes future. Loss becomes presence.

"Frankie," I said again, and this time my voice cracked, which is something guns don't do. Guns are reliable. Guns don't crack.

She didn't answer. She went back to what she was doing.

I didn't shoot her. Not because I had suddenly become a moral person—I hadn't. I had become something worse. I had become a person who could no longer tell the difference between a target and a ghost.

I told myself I was just postponing. That's what professionals do. They don't refuse the job. They reschedule it.

I found the second one above a laundromat in Boyle Heights—or what passes for Boyle Heights in a city that has been redlined into oblivion. He was a painter. Or he had been a painter. Now he was a man who painted on whatever surface was available—cardboard, the sides of dumpsters, the inside of his own shelter, which was a collection of tarps held together by hope and tape.

His paintings were full of eyes. Everywhere. In the sky. In the water. In the mouths of skulls. Eyes watching, eyes judging, eyes remembering.

"Slide Donovan," he said when I entered his shelter. He didn't look up from his canvas. "You're late."

"I've never been here before."

"Yes. You have. Thirteen times. You just don't remember."

I should have left. I should have raised the gun and ended it and moved on to the next target and the next and the next until the number in my head reached zero and the job was done.

But I stayed. Because the painter's eyes—his real eyes, not the painted ones that watched me from every surface—were the same color as Frankie's.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Someone who has been waiting for you." He set down his brush. "Do you know why you're here, Ed?"

"To do a job."

"To finish a job you started thirteen years ago."

The name Ed hit me like a bullet I hadn't seen coming. Nobody calls me Ed. Not since... not since Frankie called me Ed.

"Frankie," I said.

"Frankie," he said. "Your sister. Thirteen years ago. Overdose. The police said overdose. You said something else. But you didn't say it out loud. You said it in here." He tapped his temple. "And then you forgot. Because forgetting is what you do. It's what the Agency taught you. Shoot. Forget. Shoot. Forget. Like a machine. Like a gun."

I raised the gun. My hand was steady. Twenty years of practice. A gun never shakes.

But I didn't shoot.

Because the painter was right. And because somewhere, in a part of my brain that the Agency hadn't been able to seal off, Frankie was still alive, still sixteen, still standing in the kitchen with a look on her face that said she knew something I didn't want to know.

I left the painter alive. He didn't seem surprised.

The third one—the girl, the scavenger, the mirror—I found in an underground tunnel beneath the east village. She was sitting on a crate, eating something that might have been bread. She looked at me the way Frankie used to look at me before she died—with eyes that saw everything and said nothing.

"You know who I am," she said.

"No."

"Yes. You just don't want to."

I sat down across from her. The tunnel was small and dark and smelled of damp earth and old fire. Above us, the city moved—the subway rumbling, cars passing, millions of people living their millions of lives, none of them aware that in a tunnel beneath the east village, a shooter was sitting with a ghost.

"Tell me about your sister," the painter had said. And now the girl was sitting in front of me, and she was not my sister, and she was.

"Her name was Frankie," I said. "She was sixteen. She had dark hair and eyes that—she died. Overdose. The police said overdose."

"But you knew something else."

"I know what I saw."

"What did you see?"

I looked at her. The girl. The scavenger. The mirror. And in her eyes, I saw Frankie. Not as she had been in the end—thin and hollow and reaching for something that wasn't there—but as she had been before. Six years old, running through a park with her arms spread wide, laughing at something that only a six-year-old can find funny. Twelve years old, sitting on the kitchen floor, doing homework while I came home from work and tried to pretend that the things I did at work didn't follow me home. Sixteen—

"I saw her choosing," I said. "Not overdose. Choosing. Someone gave her something and she chose to take it because she thought it would make the pain stop. And I wasn't there. I was working. I was shooting someone for someone who paid me, and I wasn't there, and she—"

"Stopped hurting," the girl said.

I looked at her. "How do you know that word?"

"Because it's the only word that fits." She set down the piece of bread. "Ed, I'm not Frankie. I know you think I am. I know your brain is showing me to you because it can't handle the truth. But I'm not her. I'm just a girl who scavenges for bread and tries not to freeze in the winter. I don't know your Frankie. But I know what it's like to lose someone and carry them around inside you like a wound that won't close."

She was right. Of course she was right. She was just a girl. Nothing more, nothing less. A human being trying to survive in a city that had no place for human beings who didn't own something.

And I was a shooter. A man who had killed twelve people in three weeks. Twelve people who had done nothing worse than be poor in a city owned by men who had learned to convert human suffering into profit margins.

I had killed twelve people. But my gun had six bullets. I had killed twelve people with a six-bullet gun.

The math didn't work.

Unless some of the people I had killed didn't exist. Unless some of the jobs were in my head. Unless the Agency—The Director, the voice on the phone—had never existed. Unless I was not a professional shooter sent on a mission. Unless I was a homeless man with a gun and a broken brain, wandering through New York, shooting at shadows and calling it work.

I looked at the girl. She looked at me. And in her eyes, I saw the mirror.

The mirror showed me the Owner. Not the Owner of the city, or the country, or the planet. The Owner of myself. The man who had owned his grief, his guilt, his rage, his memories, his sister, his gun, his life—owned them so completely that they had become a prison.

The Owner in the mirror was two hundred years old. The Owner in the mirror had everything and nothing. The Owner in the mirror was sitting in a tunnel beneath New York, holding a gun, looking at a girl who was not Frankie, understanding for the first time in twenty years that the thing he had been running from was not outside him.

It was him.

I raised the gun.

The girl didn't move. She didn't flinch. She just watched me with Frankie's eyes, and in those eyes I saw the truth: she was not afraid of dying. She was afraid of me living.

I turned the gun around.

I put the barrel against my temple. It was cold. Cold the way Frankie's hands had been cold the last time I held them. Cold the way the spoon had been cold when I saw her face in the reflection.

Seven bullets. I had seven bullets left in the cylinder. I had killed twelve people. But some of them were ghosts. Some of them were me. And this—this was real.

I pulled the trigger.

The sound was small. Smaller than I expected. A gun, in a tunnel, sounds like a door closing.

The last thing I saw was the girl's face. Not Frankie's face. Hers. And she was crying. Not for me. Not even for herself. For the mirror. For the Owner. For the man who had owned everything and lost himself, and in the end, did one thing right.

He stopped owning.