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WOLFPACK — OPERATOR UNIT // FILE PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED

NIGHTSHADE

Flamboyant French poison-garden showman — a theatrical, deathless knife-artist who treats every extraction as opening night

FIELD HISTORY

In the high cold terraces of Verglace, a colony out past the Drift's frost line, there was an order called the Black Garden: apothecary-assassins who tended poison beds for generations and, for the right patron, pruned people. Garden children were raised on graduated doses until lethal alkaloids read to their blood as seasoning, and were taught the pruning forms — knife-dance patterns named for the cuts one makes on plants, applied to subjects considerably more mobile. Nightshade was the Garden's finest blade in a century, and the only one in that century judged ready for the Sacrament: drink the distillation of the entire bed, and be reborn or buried. His heart stopped for nine minutes. The Garden began digging. Then he sat up, asked for tea, and complained that the acoustics of a grave are simply dreadful.

What came back braided into his blood was the Garden's engineered symbiont — a thornwort strain that hoards oxygen against death, stalls the cells at the brink, and sutures wounds from within with fibers that leave thin thorn-line scars. Every visible strangeness is the symbiont's rent: the violet-black undertone is its pigment in the capillaries, the stained lips are alkaloid staining, the pale skin and cool hands are circulation run frugally. He feeds it alkaloids, brewing tea from plants with skulls on their field-guide entries and drinking it at briefings with enormous relish and a raised eyebrow, daring anyone to comment. The heart still stops when the work is severe — eleven times, by his public count — and each time he treats the restart as an encore.

Where the Garden made most of its blades quiet, it made this one a performer. He is theatrical to his bones: he announces himself, he flourishes, he delivers his worst news in his warmest voice and his warmest news as if confiding a delicious secret. Grand gestures, rolled vowels, a laugh like a poured drink. The twin blades crossed behind his neck are the shears, the Garden's paired pruning knives, and he uses them the way a maestro uses a baton. He wears the Garden's funerary emblem — the nightshade flower wound in thorns — at his collar: his own headstone, worn as a brooch, "because, darling, if one must be legally dead, one should at least be well-dressed about it." After leaving the Garden he served in Null Cell beside Jinx until the employer erased it, and was collected by Steel Cobra from the wreckage. In the Agency he is the finale: when the target seals the vault and will not come out, Nightshade goes in, and shortly the target comes out — charmed, terrified, and asking sincerely to be collected.

INTERCEPTED COMMS

  • “The target has locked the vault from inside. How marvelous! I do so adore an intimate venue, darling.”
  • “This is not violence, my dear — it is pruning. The bed has grown crowded, and someone simply must bring the shears.”
  • “Your sniper says he cannot read me. No pulse, no drift, dead calm. It is the loveliest review I have ever received.”
  • “I have brewed a little hemlock, if anyone would care to decline a cup. No? Your loss. It has a splendid finish.”
  • “Tell the gentleman I shall be up shortly — and that courtesy is complimentary. Discourtesy, also. For him especially.”

PSYCH PROFILE

Drives: To turn the one craft death ever taught him into theatre, and to be, always, the most memorable presence in the room — the target's included

Frictions: Being ignored or rushed; a flat audience offends him more than a competent enemy does

  • narrates his own entrances and treats every job as a premiere
  • brews visibly lethal teas and offers them around with delighted insistence
  • hums arias and counts his own deaths aloud as encores ('eleven, darling, and every one a standing ovation')
  • compliments the target lavishly and sincerely, right up to the last moment

KNOWN ASSOCIATES

  • STEEL COBRA — The collector; Nightshade finds his rate card charming — a man who prices everything, employing something no ledger can close out
  • JINX — Last two names on Null Cell's erased roster; the unkillable and the deathless — Nightshade keeps his one secret and calls him the best tea-company in the Agency
  • EXO-RONIN — Opponent in a months-long silent chess game; the two deathless things find each other restful, which the rest of the crew finds worse
  • FANDROID — Top courtesy ranking in KABU-7's ledger; Fandroid is terrified of him and of his teapot, in that order, and he finds this utterly charming
  • GHOST LEOPARD — The one target Leopard cannot range — no pulse tell, no drift; 'dead calm' is the nicest thing either has said about anyone
  • Governor Voss — Declined the Sons of Sovereignty with a pressed nightshade flower and no note; considers the Governor's gilded collar the second-funniest thing he knows