10 facts about Tara Markov.

1. All her personal belongings that she's not wearing or carrying at any given time fit inside two bags: a duffel, containing essential products, like clothes, underwear, spare ammunition, cleaning and reloading equipment, and various and sundry other necessary tools of the trade she's picked up since she started doing this kind of work 4 years ago, and a satchel, containing a few clips for the Colt she has sewn into a special pocket on her jacket, several packs of cigarettes, a makeup kit, a scratched-up disc walkman with taped headphones, a small case with about five CDs inside, separated with tracing paper, and a sketchpad and notebook she'll occasionally jot interesting thoughts or images down in.

2. She has a semi-permanent base of operations in Paris, and in her wallet there is a key that will open a storage container in one of those rent-a-shed type places, and in there is what she doesn't need to carry with her at all times: several more kinds of gun in varying ranges of lethality. There is also an old, ratty chair that looks like it's been sat in one too many times, and a pile of books as high as the chair's back is stacked on it. Some of the names on the spines read: Nietzsche, Heinlein, Greene, Carver. Some of them are more worn-looking than others, dark stains splotching their pages. Some of them are missing pages that look to have been torn out with great force. Besides the chair and the weaponry, there is a file cabinet. It is empty, except for the top drawer, in which there is a framed photograph, turned upside down. Tara has only opened this drawer once.

3. Tara's favorite music to listen to is old-school James Brown. It makes her want to dance. Unfortunately, Tara can't dance, so she usually ends up jerking about like a marionette with its hand in an electrical socket instead, and pretends it qualifies as dancing.

4. The day after her first ever set of false papers arrived at her post office box, she tripped down a flight of stairs and broke her arm, leaving her worthless for a month and change; but the papers held, and she never went anywhere afterwards without a few extra IDs on her, just in case she needed them. Or her insurance card, which she applied for shortly after the incident, using a company she'd heard was good for people in her line of work.

5. Tara was 13 when she used her first gun; it was point-blank range, so she couldn't miss. She didn't actually have to shoot it at all. It felt so cold and strong in her hand, and looking into Dr. Jace's eyes, she realized she felt cold and strong, too, as though she had been waiting for this moment for her entire aggravating, shunted-off, ignored life. She had known what she wanted for a long time without any chance of ever receiving it, and now she knew she'd never want for anything that she couldn't eventually take ever again.

6. She hasn't lived in a single place for longer than six months since she was 14.

7. Her favorite breakfast cereal is Frosted Flakes.

8. She got too close to an explosion once when she was 16, and it burned her eyebrows off. It took her a while to grow them back in, and that was how she came to have a makeup kit on her at all times. The explosion wasn't even her fault. Later, she found out through the merc groups on the internet that some fucker calling himself "KGBeast" had a bone to pick with the city mayor over some stupid political shit she didn't bother trying to follow, and she just happened to end up nearly qualifying as one of his "acceptable casualites." She made sure to check the groups before traveling to a foreign city for a job, after that.

9. She has an upside-down tattoo of the Markov family coat of arms on her shoulder, usually hidden by her jacket, the reasoning behind which she usually keeps to herself.

10. They say you never forget your first murder: Tara's was an ant at the age of 7. She looked down and there it was, walking along without taking any notice of its surroundings, of anything around it, and in that moment Tara hated it more than her childish brain had ever hated anything before. She stomped it flat till it was nothing more than a bunch of ant-molecules smeared across her shoes and the sidewalk. It was her first willful, fully conscious act of violence against another living being.