"He threatened to tell you the truth about me," Marina said, "and if you have to hear it all, then I don't want it to come from him."

She sighed. "So... okay. My real name isn't Marina Rhodes. My name is Sanclara Etti and I was raised in Haiti. It wasn't a great place to grow up - there's a lot of corruption and crime and death. The government... they don't help people, they only hurt them. When I was fifteen I joined a resistance movement, you could call it. They trained me, they taught me. We weren't professionals but... we did what we had to do to make things better and a lot of the time... that involved violence. I learned how to fire a gun, how to wield a knife, how to wire up a bomb, how to incapacitate someone, how to kill them if I had to. I hurt people. Sometimes because I had to, sometimes because they were bad people, but sometimes there were just innocent people caught in the crossfire. But it was war and I'm not proud."

She looked carefully at Percy, wondering if she should go right on or give him a moment.