August 1 - Maggie and the Mongrel Dynasty

The jig is up when the twins are born. The son, Paul, is white like his parents. The daughter, Maggie, is mixed race like hers.
It's called heteropaternal superfecundation--an extremely rare phenomenon in which each child in a set of twins is conceived by a different father.
Ben, the husband of the mother and the father of Paul, doesn't take it well. He shows up to a meeting of the three parents carrying a gun. After an argument escalates into a fight, there are two gunshots: one for his wife, the other for her lover, the father of the girl.
Paul and Maggie are awakened by the gunshots and are crying in the next room. Ben takes a deep breath and walks into the babies' bedroom. He stands over Maggie's crib and points the gun at her.
Maggie looks up, stops crying, and locks eyes with him. Squints.
Ben pulls the trigger. It jams.
Maggie chuckles.
His hands tremble as he tries to unjam the gun. The faint sound of sirens in the distance grows louder.
He clears the jam and then drops the gun, now slick with sweat, into the crib. Maggie rolls over on top of the gun, and her diaper and blanket get tangled up in it. As Ben frantically tries to untangle the gun and get it out from under her, Maggie's diaper becomes unfastened and she lets loose with a generous helping of #2 all over the gun.
"Shit!" yells Ben.
The sirens grow louder and closer as Ben wipes the gun clean with Maggie's blanket. Then he levels it at her, says good night, and pulls the trigger. It jams again.
There is pounding at the door. The police. He stands over the crib trying to unjam the gun, but it's no use. He looks at Maggie a final time and she looks back, her aqua blue eyes freezing him in his place for a few seconds that feel much longer. He shakes it off, puts the gun in his pants, grabs Paul, and escapes through the back window.
Over the next few months, Maggie bounces around child services and various orphanages before being adopted by Henry and Wendy Lin, a childless Asian American couple from San Francisco--as far as official records are concerned.
However, a couple weeks later, the Lins return to their real home in China and enroll Maggie in the Lin Xiao Ping Finishing School for Female Orphans of Mixed Race Parentage, where children such as Maggie are schooled in philosophy, the sciences, mathematics, world languages, international relations, art, literature, history, psychology, acrobatics, mixed martial arts, survival training, and marksmanship.
Lin Finishing is no ordinary school for orphans; it is a training academy and feeder school for China's most notorious, secretive, and deadly assassination squad, the Mongrel Dynasty. For more than 200 years, mixed race orphan girls from around the world have been brought to the Lins' school and trained in the ancient art of Finishing or assassination.
The girls--or sisters--of Lin Finishing and the Mongrel Dynasty are the perfect assassins. They come from nowhere, they have no past, and they are impossible to track. From before the time when they can walk or talk, they are trained as cunning, resourceful, remorseless, skilled, and disciplined killers.
Maggie quickly rises to the top of her class.
By the end of her 12th year at Lin Finishing, Maggie is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Flemish. While girls her age in other parts of the world are choosing between pony camp and cheer leading, Maggie is choosing between metallurgy and toxicology.
A few years later, as millions of other girls her age are learning to drive cars, Maggie is learning to fly helicopters.
The next year, as girls her age are applying for college and working part-time at the mall, Maggie is carrying out her first solo jobs: taking out a corrupt politician-cum-diamond magnate in Lagos, a Hamas militant in Gaza, and a rogue Mossad agent in Tel Aviv.
When Maggie turns 18 and graduates from Lin Finishing to become a Mongrel Dynasty team leader, Henry and Wendy tell her about her past, as they do with all their girls upon completion of the school.
After giving the matter approximately 10 seconds of reflection, Maggie makes the murderer of her biological parents her next target. She knows very little about the man, only his name and a last known address that is more than 18 years old.
Even still, less than three days later, she is standing in his living room. Evading the police and the FBI for 18 years isn't easy. But evading a sister of the Mongrel Dynasty isn't possible.
Maggie looks her target in the eye and raises her gun to fire. In the moment their eyes lock, Ben recognizes her--with those aqua blue eyes--as the grown up version of the girl he'd tried to kill all those years ago.
"Don't kill me."
"I don't want you. I want Paul. Where is he?"
"Don't kill me."
"I said I don't want you. I want Paul. Where is he?"
"If I tell you, you won't kill me?"
She cocks her gun.
"OK, OK. He's in Albuquerque."
And she knows he's telling the truth because, as always, she's done her homework. The only surprising thing is how quickly he rolls over on his son.
"How does it feel to die knowing that your last act on earth was trying to save yourself by giving up your own son?"
But she shoots him before he can give her an answer.
Afterwards, she cleans the crime scene and destroys all the evidence and goes to the airport to board a flight not to Albuquerque but to Hong Kong. Her only business with her half brother had been completed before she left China.
A few days after Paul learns about the murder of his father, a Chinese lawyer contacts him to tell him that a $2 million education fund has been set up in his name by an anonymous donor. And that's the closest he ever comes to any sort of interaction with his half sister Maggie, one of the deadliest assassins in the world.