Find the Lady

So, the girl currently calling herself Kathryn Blake, who is “only and always Kate – that short, sharp blade of a name that suits her down to the bone.” How best to introduce her? “…straight and slim and silhouetted starkly against the pastel sky?” It hardly scratches the surface, and there are so many surfaces, with Kate, for all that she is not “…inherently threatening…just a girl who might be sixteen or twenty-six, barely five feet four and slim as an eel, with only a touch of hardness about her eyes for warning.” Where has she come from, what has she been? How did she become “…half a phantom…a whisper, a threat…more frightening than ten years to life…?”

Is there really no more to it than Peter Leighton would have it: “She was fourteen; the world had treated her badly; she contrived to fall into bad company”? Brought up in the household of an arms dealer to whom she is not technically related, she has a number of things that she feels a need to make up for, and a number of useful skills to allow her to do so, but is she useful enough to her own government that they will overlook her faults? And will her own morals, however flexible, allow her to take what work they offer?