Dreams of Demons, R

[Daughterof_Evil]

As many of you know, two months (or so) ago, I completed a very long story called Shadows of Angels. Right now I am giving you the sequel, Dreams of Demons. It will be violent, sordid, and very dark, which is the reason for the R rating. Here is a little description of the current theme so no one gets confused.

After the death of Bruno Mannheim, and the removal of Granny Goodness from Earth, the international crime organization Intergang fragmented according to beliefs and geography. An American terrorist named Geoffrey Mullen arose as leader of the North American sect of Intergang, bringing together the different strands of the criminal underworld. In doing so, he made an ally out of Lex Luthor, who provided supplies and arms for Intergang’s war for “revolution”.

X is an amnesiac cyborg experiment, knowing only of her life after being “reborn” at a LexCorp facility outside Metropolis. She becomes inextricably bound with Intergang when Luthor discovers her mysterious combat talents and gives her to Mullen as an assassin. X travels with North American Intergang across Britain, France, and eventually Germany in order to unseat the leading powers of German Intergang and expand Mullen’s international reach. Tortured, beaten, and drugged with steroids, X eventually escapes Intergang in a bloody coup.

The following is a list of characters to make things easier, since I will by no means require you to go back and read all of the forty episodes of the previous work. All but Professor Peterson and Dr. Vale are my property. The characters listed with an * means the character belongs to my close friend Tonbo Rosso. I’ll tell you now that though many of the characters or situations seem involved in the Superman universe, I deal wholly in the Batman world.

X: A young teenaged girl, a cyborg, and a combat slave to Intergang. During her time serving as a tortured terrorist and assassin, she begins to remember the shattered pieces of her former life, and recalls a mysterious alliance with Robin the Boy Wonder. These recovered memories drive her to escape from Intergang.

Prof. Christopher Peterson: Mentioned in the Superman episode “A Little Piece of Home” as the man responsible for giving Lois Lane a sample of kryptonite, Professor Peterson is a geologist who works for LexCorp. He befriends X and tries to steer her away from Intergang.

Dr. Emmett Vale: Mentioned in both the Superman comics and series as the man who created the cyborg Metallo, he is the doctor responsible for X’s metal body. Though his skills have improved with the alien cybernetics technique of the Shori Engel, he still has a lot to learn about human nature.

Geoffrey Mullen: A former American terrorist/assassin and now the leader of American Intergang. He was spurred into revolutionary feelings by the death of his wife and unborn son by a mysterious assassin trying to get to him.

Annaka Behm: Mullen’s right hand woman, his second in command, a former German sniper with a mysterious past.

Darby Whitacre: Mullen’s general and weapon’s manager; a Haitian-American lesbian. She replaced Mullen’s old weapon’s manager, Marilena Sylvermann, who was killed by German Intergang.

Nevig Lockhardt: An elderly Welsh man who runs both British Intergang and the dummy company that funnels money to Mullen. He is known most famously for his habits of impregnating women across the world to “harvest” his illegitimate children and train them to be assassins, like him. He works with Mullen to unseat the leader of German Intergang.

Dr. Ernest Sylvermann: An Israeli expatriate and physics professor who has given up both his country and religion for science. He became Nevig Lockhardt’s son-in-law after marrying Lockhardt’s illegitimate daughter Marilena. After Marilena’s death, Dr. Sylvermann joined Lockhardt in Intergang.

Brugnon La Touga: The estranged son of a wealthy French shipping family, Brugnon was stirred into the secret service after his mother’s mysterious death. When he began to investigate Intergang as a free agent, he enlisted his twenty-year-old sister Cerise to help in reconnaissance, but she was killed by Intergang when her secret was revealed. Now obsessed with avenging his sister, he aided X in her escape from Intergang, though she doesn’t know it.

Coquin: The nickname of an ambiguous person who is trying to overthrow Intergang. They are an incredibly good hacker, and work within Intergang itself as a member of the group. Brugnon La Touga often works for them, and his role in X’s escape was Coquin’s idea.

Hans Klirren: The leader of German Intergang. Little is known about him, only that he desires complete world domination.

*Hiramiaku: A genetically engineered assassin of Japanese-Indian descent. Stoic, fearless, and sometimes cold, she kidnapped X from Intergang in Paris just for the thrill of it. When Intergang caught up with her and defeated her in battle (until then thought to be impossible) she committed suicide.

*Saru: Hiramiaku’s adopted younger brother, a former Japanese circus performer. Sweet, kind, and utterly deadly, Saru in turn adopts X as his younger sister and does everything in his power to keep Intergang from getting her back. He fails, and devastated by Hiramiaku’s suicide, attempts suicide himself. He is only stopped by X.

*Memoria and Praevidare Khasekemwy: British twin girl and boy who reside in Gotham City. Though their exact origins are unknown, it is obvious they are somehow enhanced (genetically or cybernetically) to have excellent memories and almost unlimited brain power. Batman and Robin use them for information, though the twins are undoubtedly criminals.

Tech Notes

Metallo: The so-called hardest element on the planet, it makes up fifty-six percent of X’s body. Metallo is traditionally used for industrial tools and such, but LexCorp owns much of the world’s supply and the company uses it as it pleases.

Shori Engel: Left in the LexCorp databases by Brainiac, the Shori Engel is an alien bio-mechanical organism that supplements whatever it is introduced to. When infused with X’s body, it created an interesting flesh-metal effect, plating her bones in metallo and giving her bionic limbs a thin, flexible metallo skin.

Macchina: A super-steroid concocted of animal hormones, essential vitamins, and Venom that Intergang fed X in a steady supply.

Nanites: Mentioned in the Superman episode “Knight Time”, nanites are sub-cellular robots made through nanotechnology, or the manipulation of atoms to form microscopic agents. In X’s case, nanites “live” in her blood stream and heal any flesh injuries she acquires almost immediately.

[Daughterof_Evil]

This part includes mild violence and allusions towards debauchery. Hope you enjoy it.
***
(Part of the text has been destroyed by fire, water and smoke damage. The remains of the original are preserved here.) Progression so far in the Shori Engel has led to a great deal of hope with the treatment of Girl X. No reports of missing children have been filed, at least not any matching her description or what we’d think she would look like. The muscle layers are beginning to regenerate over the silicate and metal frame we’ve used to supplement the remains of her facial structure. Not much was left after her accident, just splinters and fragments; we had to completely remove her bottom jaw, fill it with steel dental replacement—(Here the manuscript is torn to obscure legibility.)

(Resumes legibility here.)…seems that the Shori Engel is beginning to coat her remaining bones in a fine, hard shell of metallo, using the atoms of the metal in its nanobionic fusion treat—(Water damage.)—burned beyond recognition, the cartilage is coming back steadily, and in some places the dermis and epidermis are beginning to form as well. At this rate, she should be back to normal in a few weeks, though her mental state is something to be question—(Page ends.)
***
The first page of the magazine special was just a big picture of Bruce, sitting on the edge of the hood of a gunmetal grey, two-seater sports car parked in the driveway. Behind him, Wayne Manor rose up on its cliff above the sea. Bruce was dressed in grey slacks and a black wool turtleneck, dark hair combed back in a shell over his head, one curl dangling over his forehead.

BRUCE WAYNE GOES CANDID, read the giant blue letters superimposed over the image. The much smaller caption said, Wayne posing with the newest addition to his collection of fine cars.

…Besides being a world-class philanthropist, Wayne believes that charity begins with home. Two years ago, he adopted Timothy Drake, a thirteen-year-old boy raised in the slums of downtown Gotham. When we dropped by, Tim, who is now nearly fifteen, was busy with his homework and couldn’t speak with us.

“ I’m so proud of him,” Wayne says, leading us around the stately art deco gardens surrounding the Manor. “ He came here without any knowledge of how to act or what to do, and just jumped right in without any inhibitions at all. He’s done a great job. His schoolwork has improved dramatically.”

Later, Wayne gives us the tour of the giant subterranean garage that houses his collection of fine automobiles. Each one is in mint condition, restored by Wayne himself or his trusted butler Alfred Pennyworth.

As open as he is, he becomes quiet when his first ward, Richard Grayson, is mentioned. As many of us remember, Bruce Wayne made headlines with his decision to adopt the orphaned young circus performer after his parents were killed during a performance.

“ Dick has…gone his own way,” Bruce explains eventually, taking a pleasant tone. “ It was necessary that he find his own path in the world. He knows I’m still very proud of him, of the way he turned out. He’s a good man…”

In the back of the same magazine, there was a five page spread on Lex Luthor’s newest technological innovation: the CX38 bionic prosthetic device. It was an arm made out of lightweight metals and heavy-duty plastic, covered with a complex layer of synthetic skin knit with sensory studs that allowed the user to actually feel sensations like hot, cold, wet, grainy. It was installed directly into the body using a scaffold-like device implanted around the prosthetic site to keep it in place. Then neural lines would be led to the brain with fiber-optic cabling, completing the circuit of tactile feeling.

…the first patient being a die-cast operator from West Virginia named Bernard Liebowitz, who lost his right arm in an accident eighteen years ago.

“ I was so excited when the LexCorp scientists chose me for the trial run,” he explains. “ And Mr. Luthor gave me a job at his company with full benefits so that the future of my family will be secure. You have no idea how good it feels to not have to go back to that die-casting plant.”

The President of the United States was the first one to congratulate Luthor on his success. It is a well known fact that during his campaign, the President had Luthor’s support after Luthor himself was taken out of the running. The two have been good friends ever since.

“ But there are many people to thank,” Luthor says modestly. “ My people in research and development, the amputees who volunteered for human trials. Dear Dr. Bradfield, a cybernetics physician and personal friend of mine who died of a brain hemorrhage a few days before FDA approval became public…”

“ Okay, let’s clear some stuff up,” Tim said steadfastly. “ One, I wasn’t doing my homework when that lady showed up. I was down here, doing research--“

“ Playing video games is more like it,” Alfred mentioned.

“ Can’t prove it,” the boy said quickly and calmly. “ Anyway, I was in the Batcave doing research. Two, Bruce was lying, my schoolwork is crap.”

A costumed Barbara stared at him bemusedly over her cup of tea. “ And?”

“ And…” Pause, “ I forgot my point with that one. But I was in the Batcave doing research while that woman was here. And I…”

The screen of the Batcomputer flickered. Both of them sat up in their chairs at once, staring at it. The report that was laid out on the monitor shuddered, then blinked into black.

“ My word,” he heard Alfred say.

“ That’s weird,” Tim said. “ A bug with the system?”

“ No,” Barbara sat her tea down. “ It’s safeguarded to correct itself if the system ever gets corrupted.”

“ So what is it?” the boy asked. The Batcomputer’s noxious glow had been the sole source of light in the Cave at most periods, so now there was nothing but a deep, satiny darkness that made simple white shapes out of Barbara’s masked face.

“ It’s being attacked,” she whispered.

“ A hacker?”

She nodded. The screen flicked back on, back exactly to the same report, only now the text had been replaced with something else.

I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PLACE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.

SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.

ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR
WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Barbara swore and hit a few abort commands on the keyboard. “ If they’re in the computer, they can hack the security cameras that lead up to the Manor!”

Tim jumped up. “ Hit the switch! Pull the plugs! Do something!”

Alfred walked curtly over and tapped a panel on the side console of the massive machine. The screen blanked, then booted back up, bringing back the same open report, only now with its old text.

“ What was that!?” Tim cried.

“ ‘Mysteries cut into stone above a gate’,” Alfred replied.

“ What?”

“ Dante’s Inferno,” the butler explained. “ A warning scribed onto the Gate of Hell.”

“ Someone’s got a lovely sense of humor,” Barbara said, sitting down and running the security systems. They were all on red code, buttons blinking and tiny sirens going off. Somehow the intruder had worked their way around the systems just enough so they didn’t even detect their presence.

Tim sat on the side console and brought his sneakers up on the edge, wrapping his arms around his shins. “ Weird,” he repeated.
***
They opened up the back of the semi once they got past the Turkish border, sweeping through it with big metal flashlights. Boxes, mostly preserved rations meant to be sent to armies in Saudi Arabia and Iran. The first man who entered the back turned around, the beam of his light bounding across styrofoam crates.

A creak. “ You hear that?” he asked with a crusty French accent.

His companion snorted. He hated French. “ Didn’t hear nothing,” Probably Russian. The light coming in the back of the open semi drew craggy lines on his face; he was short and stocky, wearing a dusty denim jacket like a cowboy in an imported Western movie.

The first man stumbled over something in the back, falling face-first onto a floor littered with tiny foil packets.

“ Dammit,” he muttered, sitting up. The packages under him were ripped, crumpled, their contents missing or scattered in little freeze-dried balls on the floor. He reached out for the big metal flashlight, which had rolled three feet away.

That’s when he saw her, face caught in the orb of yellow light. Sharp features, short, spiky dark hair, eyes big with bags under them. Her eyes looked past him, through him, the eyes of an animal.

“ Vin-“ He barely got the name out. She jumped over him, in a single, solid move, then dodged past his partner at the door. There was a clink. And a flash. He could smell the gas filling the semi. He knew it was a thirty second fuse.

X was wandering placidly down the dirt road when the fuse was up. The semi swelled at first, then contracted, then just blew apart, flames and bits of metal licking up at the dark sky. She pulled the hood up over her face and continued on, towards the east, showing no emotion whatsoever.
***
There was a man on the sidewalk, one in a flannel jacket with dingy blonde hair and the seeking eyes of a john. His hands were shoved in his pockets, shoulders hunched, all defensive moves. Perverted, but not a threat. Still, Robin had the unmistakable urge to string the guy up by his ankles, pull his pants down, and leave him there.

The man turned the corner, and Robin sighed, realizing it wasn’t his job to do that tonight. Besides, Batman had gotten angry with him the last time he’d done that. Batgirl was on the other side of the block, watching just as he was, and she wouldn’t appreciate it if he became distracted.

There was a crackle in his headset, the one Batgirl made him wear because of his absence of a cowl. “ Batgirl?” he asked.

Another crackle, but no answer. He set his teeth and scanned the street. It was still empty. A door closed a few blocks away, very loudly. Some shouting: obscenities, among other nasty words. He snickered to himself.

“ Something funny, chum?” came in very crisp through his headset.

He choked.

“ Ah, thinking of me,” the British boy cackled through the line. “ I tend to do that to particularly handsome men.”

“ What do you want!?” he snapped.

“ Well, other than the obvious,” He imagined Praevidare Khasekemwy rolling his white-iris eyes, tinkering with those ridiculous ruffly cuffs.

“ Get off this frequency! It’s for emergencies!” Robin found himself yelling. Super hero talking to himself on a rooftop.

“ Calm down, Boy Wonder,” came in Memoria’s clean, staid voice. Like her brother, she was British-accented, but far more stoic. Then, to Praevidare, “ Brother, he’s not into girls like you. Begone.”

Pouting, Praevidare replied, “ Fine, sister, ruin all our fun.” He was gone.

“ What’s wrong with you!?” Robin growled. “ I’m working here.”

“ I just got some new information yesterday about the type of woman you’re interested in,” she muttered sarcastically.

“ Huh?”

“ Really your kind of girl. Criminal record and everything…”

“ Spit it out,” He scanned the street again. Prostitute in neon green hot pants, black tank top, track sneakers, strolling up and down the street, looking like she was all of thirteen. She was wearing one of those backpacks made to look like a stuffed animal, a grimy teddy bear with its tongue sticking out obscenely.

“ Definitely not working with Intergang anymore. Solo. Last reports she was in Germany, but that didn’t last more than two weeks. Then she dropped off the map again, though some people in Turkey say they saw her. I doubt that was correct. God, I don’t want to hear Liam’s crap again,”

The prostitute sat down on a stoop, looking at her nails, which he saw through his binoculars were done in chipped pink polish.

“ I‘m not interested anymore,” he said, lowering the binoculars. “ So don’t contact me again.”

“ What?” she asked with mock interest. “ Boy Wonder giving up on the search for love?”

“ Shut up,” he grumbled. “ I don’t care anymore. So stop stalking me.”

“ Your wish,” she said. “ But don’t expect to find us easily the next time you need us.”

He was about to come back at her with a sharp quip, but a snap in his headset told him she had already left the frequency. Below, on the street, the john in the flannel jacket had come back, and was paused before the girl on the stoop. She looked at him disinterestedly, slinging the teddy bear backpack across her lap.

Robin was down to the sidewalk in a second, skidding down a rain-pipe anchored to the building-side. The john hit the cement on his side and submitted dully to being tied up.

“ This some kind of group foreplay thing?” he asked as his face was shoved into the concrete.

The girl swiped at Robin with her backpack. A teddy bear full of bricks hit him in the head.

“ You just cost me some money, punk!” she screeched. Hit him again, this time in the shoulder. He went down on his knees, covering his head. He didn’t want to hit a girl, especially a little girl, and it didn’t look like she could do too much damage. She was all skin and bones, up close.

“ Hey, I don’t think I wanna do this anymore,” the guy on the cement said.

The girl stopped, in a huff, and stepped back. She was Gotham City Pale, sort of grey-skinned, with limp brown hair up in a ponytail. Layers and layers of eye makeup to hide the rings around her eyeballs were you could see she hadn’t slept. She went over to the john and went through his pants pockets. He wriggled in appreciation, then screamed when she found his wallet and walked off with it.

Robin got to his feet and brushed himself off. Then looked up, noticed a smiling woman in the shadows.

“ Don’t even say it,” he commanded at her as Batgirl followed, laughing to herself.

[witness]

Here we go again! Glad to see it didn't take you too long to start on the sequel! Great start to what will probably be another awesome story. I cannot wait to read this. Please try not to take too long in between posts. I love your stories and can't get enough of them. Write more soon!

[Panther]

X is back! Yes!!!! Looks like we're in for yet another great story!

I love those Brit twins - why do I have a feeling Tim just burned a major bridge?

I'd forgotten about the partially destroyed medical report from the beginning of SoA. Very curious that its popped up again. And who could possibly have hacked into the batcomputer? Guess we'll just have to wait and see...

later,

[Sable Phoenix]

YES! I'm SO glad that you didn't wait too long for the sequel, DoE. Now I'll once again have something to check these boards for every week.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Excellent as always!

I really hope things work out for Tim this time with X

ever hopeful:

tNC

[Tonbo_Rosso]

Love it



You have a definite nack for blowing the cieling out in the first few paragraphs.

Keep it up great Daughter of the wich is evil.

Tonbo

[Daughterof_Evil]

witness: Thank you so much for saying you love my stories! That means so much to me! Are you ever going to get back into the writer's groove or are you currently working on it?

Sable Phoenix: My story!? Looking forward to it!? Now THAT gives me a reason to wake up in the morning.

Panther: Yeah, I had forgotten about the medical document, too, until I finally remembered it and put it into the beginning. Just for some continuity. And Tonbo is grateful you like her little British kiddies...I am very fond of them myself.

theNewCatwoman: Ever hopeful, huh? I guess you'll just have to wait and see!

Tonbo: The Devil herself! Thanks for the encouraging remarks, lovely.

And to everyone, I have to express sincere thanks for your comments and support. It might take me a while to get the second part out, so please hang on and don't try to find and torture me!

Thanks!

[witness]

Are you ever going to get back into the writer's groove or are you currently working on it?


As a matter of fact, I've been writing the sequel to Legacys. It is titled A Brother's Quarrel. I've posted seven chapters already and am currently working on the eighth. Looks like you've got some catching up to do! ;)

Patiently waiting for your next chapter as well.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Hey, everyone, just coming back to drop something off with you. Sorry it took me so long to post this part, technical difficulties absolutely forbade me from it. So here it is, all spiffy but not quite clean.

This part includes massive violence, perhaps some swearing. It might take me awhile to post the third part, so enjoy it for now. Thank you all for the lovely comments, and everyone go read witness's incredible story A Brother's Quarrel, which I just read and was blown away by. Thanks again!
***
The day was hot and dry, the earth and the sky melting together at the distant horizon to form one separate entity. Veils of mirage wound up from the sand as the all-terrain vehicle ground along, leaving in its wake a set of tracks that slightly resembled the pattern on a snake. She pulled her hood up. The sun was very bright.

The ATV she’d stolen from an outpost near the border, along with the two plastic containers of gas lashed to either side of it with electrical tape and the pair of aviation goggles she was now wearing. The wind wasn’t bad, it was just the sunlight. She must have spent longer than she’d thought at that Intergang facility, tucked underground, away from the light, because now her eyes were extra sensitive to it. She cleared one dune of solid yellow sand and saw the infinite stretch of the others beyond it.

She had no idea where she was going; she had already established that. East was all she knew, where the languages weren’t quite so strange and she could maybe find more out about herself. She remembered what her onii-sama had told her and held that close as a guiding star. The ATV went downhill slowly and gingerly.

A snap, and she ducked at the right moment. The wooden spike flew up out of the sand and lodged in her back gas tank, right where X’s head had been. The tart smell of petrol hissed into the air. She bounded off the seat as the explosion went off behind her, throwing her to the ground. The sand heaved up again, and X rolled to the side, another puji-stake stuck right where she had been. She struggled to her feet.

It was then that the sand began to melt, to mold itself up into a shape of a human. Beyond that, another person, dressed in black, yellow sand spilling off as they rose up. They had swords with thick, long blades curved like talons.

She pulled her own sword quickly, the metallo katana gleaming out in the sun. She had nearly forgotten how light it was, how agile to her touch. Behind her burned the carcass of the ATV. One of the plastic containers of gasoline went up with a pop and a shuddering boom.

The first man was the quickest to act. He jumped at her, feet not even touching the sand, and struck, hard. Hit again and again. X measured the vibrations of the strikes, and concluded that the sword, a scimitar, was made of stiff, hard steel mixed with something else, something like iron or zinc. She analyzed just where to hit, and did so with alarming accuracy.

The scimitar splintered down its length, up to the tang. Pieces of steel fell like shards of pure sunlight to the sand. X leapt forward and kicked the man in the chest, throwing him back onto the sand.

The second man, as if cued, jumped into action. He ran at her, swept for the stomach, but was blocked, then turned and swept for the head. She ducked and turned, kicking him in the kneecap. He wailed as it fractured into five separate parts. She completed the turn in a perfect arc, lopping off his head at the last second.

She recognized immediately the snap of a cartridge into a high-caliber weapon, and was in a flip just as the bullets stung the hot sand. Replacing the katana into its scabbard in mid-air, she turned horizontal and hit the ground on all fours. The wind shifted and blew a curtain of black gasoline smoke into her eyes. She coughed and jumped backwards a few more times, each leap bringing her within millimeters of the flying lead fired after her. She turned abruptly to the right, making a twenty-foot hop behind the dying ATV.

The man stalked her around the body of the vehicle, squinting into the orange flames and through the melting framework. He couldn’t hear her footsteps; the crackle of the blaze was too loud.

He saw her finally as she whipped around the wreck behind him. He raised the gun, but she had jumped straight into the air, blocking the sunlight behind her dark form. Her feet locked onto his shoulders, the tip of her katana bit into his chest. As he fell over, she flipped backwards and away, landing in the sand some twenty feet distant.

She wiped the blood from her blade with her hand, then replaced it in the scabbard. She could have just shot him -she still had a lot of ammunition and her aim was near perfect- but it hadn’t seemed grand enough. She needed to show them her power, the strength of her rebellion. Squinting into the sun, she made her way down the next dune, leaving the burning ATV and the red-stained sand behind her.
***
The neon bliss of Ginza splayed out under the window, the crawl of animated light displays reflecting off of the glass. He turned away and neatly dodged the edge of the low bed, strolling towards the door. The tiny white refrigerator had a half dozen bottles of liquor in it, each of them marked with an electronic tag that would signal the front desk if opened so they could put it on the bill. He cracked one open and drank it straight, no glass.

His skin was olive-tinted, eyes deep blue, dark hair trimmed just over his ears. He’d never let his shaving go in his entire life, and he wasn’t one to grow stubble in an afternoon, but his face was becoming shadowed with the narrow growth of a beard. He went into the bathroom and leaned into the mirror, rubbing his face with one hand. He set the toy-like bottle of vodka down on the black marble counter and looked in closer. There was a small, pinkish scar that followed his jaw line on the left side; he remembered the exact moment when the silver serving tray Consuela had thrown hit him there.

The beard was annoying, yes, but so were the red plastic rimmed glasses and the packet of cigarettes tucked into the pocket of his blazer. All of it was necessary to complete the deception: he was not Brugnon La Touga, but Bernard de Ferny, a nearsighted chain-smoker from Lyon.

He buttoned up his shirt and left the bathroom, checking the clock. The man was supposed to be here already, and no one had called to tell him he had a visitor. He put on a tie while he was at it, and the white cutout of the silk around his neck contrasted sharply with the black dress shirt. He turned away from the mirror and looked to the left.

“ Well, hello,” he said calmly.

He stood against the sliding glass door, melting into the background of Tokyo. Behind him, a huge pink neon sign advertising canned coffee illuminated, lighting the boy up with a fleshy halo.

The boy, true to description, was tall and skinny, layered with lank muscle, sleek black hair nearly to his shoulders. His pale skin was dull with oil, his long hair matted, his clothes (a limp grey smock and black track pants; he wasn’t wearing shoes) were shabby and dirty. He smelled like viscous brown mechanic’s grease and dust and animal.

Brugnon sighed. “ Do you always come in the window?”

The boy nodded solemnly.

“ You should clean up, for God’s sake,” Brugnon scolded. “ You smell like some sewer creature.”

Saru’s shoulders slumped, he bowed his head in shame. “ Do not matter,” he said quietly.

Brugnon straightened up. They were the same height. “ I heard about Hiramiaku,”

Saru shuddered suddenly, violently. Brugnon could tell he was trying to repress the urge to sob. He went to the closet and began rooting through it. Pulled, from his broad wardrobe, a pair of black slacks, a black houndstooth vest, a white dress shirt looped with a silver-grey tie, and hooked them on the doorknob of the bathroom.

“ Go get yourself proper,” Brugnon commanded. “ You can’t mourn forever.”

Saru disappeared inside and didn’t emerge for an hour and a half. His black hair was combed back neatly, the clothes impeccable on his wiry frame. He was knotting the tie around his throat with sure, quick gestures. His posture had changed entirely, shoulders back and spine straight.

“ What happened to the girl?” Brugnon asked immediately.

Saru looked up, startled. “ Uguisu-chan?”

“ The girl, X,” he said. “ I sent you to free her, and I haven’t heard anything of her since. Has she spoken with you?”

Saru shook his head from side to side. “ No,”

Brugnon lowered his brow, scrutinizing him. “ I heard you two became very close. What is she like?”

Saru kind of gave a screwed-up smile, more like a smirk. “ Imoto-sama,” he explained, holding his flattened hand about five feet off the ground. “ Little sister. Quiet, shy, good fighter. Not a good cook though.”

“ Your little sister?” Brugnon said. “ You thought of her as your little sister?”

“ Middle child,” he said with a big grin. His smile fell. “ Older brother, now. Only child.”

The suicidal impulses had apparently faded with time, though he still got a gleam in his eye when she was mentioned. Saru noted, slightly annoyed, that Brugnon was being particularly tender about the subject of family, and even though he’d never met Monsieur La Touga before, he knew from Hiramiaku’s stories that that wasn’t his way.

“ What does she look like?” Brugnon asked. “ When I saw her, it was only from behind.”

Saru narrowed his long, dark eyes. “ Why?”

“ I’m trying to get an idea of the girl who saw my sister last,”

He stepped back. “ Mademoiselle Cerise La Touga,” he spelled out with a perfect French accent. Brugnon nodded. Saru went on, but it took him a second to remember and pronounce the English word, so he improvised. “ Chibi. Green eyes, black hair,” he gestured at his jaw to show how short her hair was, “ palu.”

Brugnon checked his watch. “ You should go.” He went through the closet and came up with a brand new black trench coat. “ Use the lobby this time.”

Opened the door for him as the boy pulled the trench coat on, shutting the door on him and the twenty-five hundred dollars worth of clothing he’d just given away.
***
It was a personal meeting, something they hadn’t had in the five months since Mullen had left with the girl. The helicopter beat noisily behind them, its engines powering down into stand-by mode. Mercy turned and made a looping gesture with her arm, telling him to keep the engine running.

Forest green marble stretched out for yards in all directions of the floor once they entered the back of the building. Luthor was ahead of her by six or seven steps, and she quickly caught up, striding confidently at his side.

“ We’ve got fifteen minutes, Lex,” she mentioned.

“ I’m aware of that,” he growled. Days of media blitz had left him filled with abstract, pent-up anger. His body language spoke like strings tuned too tightly on an instrument.

They got into a brass-lined elevator and took it down to the sublevels, where the air was slightly cooler and smelled like damp earth. Gilt elevator doors opened on surroundings composed of twelve different shades of grey concrete, a forest of white pipes snaking along the low ceiling. As they went, they passed a laundry room where two Pakistani women –one in a caftan and veil and the other in a pantsuit- were doing laundry. Doors all along the corridor were open, tails of coaxial cabling and phone cording spewing all across the floor.

“ What is this?” Luthor asked before even reaching the door.

The man in the middle of everything looked up, hand fisted around a sheaf of papers. He had a strong, tanned face, dark brown hair, eyes so coldly blue they looked like chlorine pools. There was an X-shaped scar across his face, the intersection of the two pieces in between his eyebrows.

“ Luthor,” he nodded calmly. There was a woman sitting next to him, Annaka Behm, his second in command. She was a tall, blonde German with a cool, business-like appeal.

Luthor strode over and grabbed the papers from Mullen. “ Ten million dollars, Mullen. Ten million dollars of my equipment just walked out of here,”

“ Fifteen and a half,” Mercy corrected, consulting a palm computer from the pocket of her uniform.

“ A damn outrage,” Mullen conceded. “ Your tech people are running the files now, trying to see where it could be possible for them to breach the systems.”

“ You’re very confident of yourself,” Luthor said tersely. “ Especially for a man whose own tech man was crucified last week.”

“ He was crucified to your company’s logo,” Mullen reminded him.

Luthor ignored that. “ I’ll get you a replacement. Maybe ship Cervelle in from Rouen,”

Mullen thought it over. “ Acceptable,” he agreed.

“ In exchange, I want to see the new one,” Luthor demanded.

“ Whitacre!” Mullen yelled.

The woman appeared in the doorway. She was black, with short, bleach-blonde hair, dressed in a black jumpsuit and big gardening gloves. At her side was a young boy. He was pale, with big, dark eyes, brown hair, and a teenaged face chemically hardened. He was about as tall as Darby Whitacre, Mullen’s weapon’s manager, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a muscular form. He was dressed in a black body suit. Mercy instinctively checked for the large-caliber pistol strapped to her thigh.

He bore the expression of someone that had lost something vitally important. A soul, maybe.

“ He came from a hospital in Wales. Badly burned in a warehouse fire. Wouldn’t have survived without us,” Mullen said. “ Probably fifteen or so. His name is X003, but they like to call him Dritte in the lab.”

Luthor turned to face the boy. He remembered the girl, that tiny, pale thing with the big, scared eyes. She cried, that first time he met her. Cried for the blooming expanse of white nothingness in her brain.

“ Your name, soldier?” he asked.

The boy stepped back and bowed stiffly, in the Japanese manner. “ X003, sensei,” His voice was quiet, pained, and unaccented.

“ He can do everything the other can?” Luthor asked Whitacre.

“ Yes,” she said, “ except for the very complicated combat moves. To tell you the truth, I’d never seen anything like what that girl could do.”

“ That’s because this one’s just been programmed; the girl actually had the real life experience to back it up,” Mullen said. “ Otherwise, the downloading program has worked fine.”

Luthor looked back to the boy. “ What do you feel, X003?”

Dritte trembled. “ Nothing, master.”

“ Nothing?”

“ Nothing. There is nothing within me.” He said it slowly, loudly. His eyes bulged.

They couldn’t have seen it beforehand. He had darted around Luthor and grabbed Mercy’s gun, then jumped atop the table Mullen occupied. The man looked up, dumbfounded, into the barrel of the pistol.

Saw in that boy’s face his own madness, the madness of the girl who’d come before him. Madness was an ever-present state, not something like sanity or insanity that came and went like a volatile nuclear wind.

Dritte brought the gun up to his own temple and pulled the trigger.

Luthor stepped back as the heavy body hit the floor. Mercy was up against the wall, face frozen in a numb look of shock. Darby Whitacre was calm, but wounded.

“ And that’s happened before?” Luthor asked. The wall opposite him bore a curt splatter of red and tiny bits of fleshy grey.

“ X002 did the same thing,” Whitacre confessed. “ Last week, right after X001’s escape. Put his hand into a high-voltage electrical socket. Brain dead before we could do anything.”

“ It isn’t some kind of defect with the hardware?” Luthor questioned.

“ The same things were used on X001, and she never became suicidal.”

“ Odd,” Luthor nudged Dritte’s body with one patent leather wingtip. A bunch of wires poured out of the dead boy’s head. “ And you can’t salvage him?”

“ Once the brain is gone, there’s nothing left. The circuitry and fiber-optics become virtually useless.”

“ What about X001? She was nearly brain dead.”

Whitacre shrugged. “ Vale ran over it with me before he left. Actually, there was a lot about her no one could seem to understand.” She shrugged again. “ But that’s your department. I just train ‘em.”

Luthor snorted incredulously. “ What about the others? The works in progress?”

“ Coming along alright,” she admitted. “ Everything with the Shori Engel is in perfect tune with their biorhythms, but X004 is the one they seem to be worried about.”

Luthor rubbed his chin with one hand. His gold signet ring caught the light. “ X004 is the one from Belize,” he said.

“ Caught in sweatshop explosion. Nasty business,” Mullen said. “ Burned near to a crisp.”

Luthor turned to him and glared. “ Now what are you doing to reclaim my property, Mullen?”

The man smiled thinly. “ I’ve got people all over shadowing her. It seems she’s heading East, maybe into Russia or China, somewhere she can get lost.”

“ She’s smarter than we thought,” Annaka said. “ She has already killed two of our agents in the Iranian Desert. They were expert bounty hunters from Saudi Arabia. Never been defeated.”

“ She’s not acting alone,” Whitacre explained. “ This security systems business by itself is enough to prove that. We’re obviously not the only ones looking for her.”

“ Fine!” Luthor barked. “ Do whatever possible to return her to us and I’ll give you a tidy reward.”

He marched for the door, Mercy at his side. Out in the hall, he stopped, then turned back and smiled into the room in a silky way.

“ Oh, and Mullen, try not to damage her too much,” With that, he disappeared.

[witness]

Oh.....my........god.......


Wow! This is only the second chapter and I am now completely in awe. First of all, poor Saru. Kind of funny that he was in the shower for an hour and a half. But still, it seems that he's lost all hope. Though he's not killing himself. Small silver lining.....

Oh, and the first part with X in the desert. I could literally see this within my mind's eye. Seriously, the stories on this board are some of the best. I just wish that they could be made into episodes.

Finally, the thing that shocked me the most. Lex Luthor. Before, the thought of making more than just one X hadn't crossed my mind. But to see him actually using his resources to continue, it amazes me. I guess it should have been expected. After all, he invested millions, why shouldn't he continue? I just hadn't thought it would come to this, with X001 being such a fiasco for them. So difficult to control.

And to see them killing themselves makes it even more horrifying. I am truly amazed and cannot believe that this has only been the second chapter. Can't wait for the things to come!!!!!!

P. S. Thanks for the compliments and high praise. It means a lot.

[Sable Phoenix]

Okay then! It's great to read another chapter... you really are a good writer, DoE.

That being said, it's a good thing you put that disclaimer that this chapter was not quite clean, because for the first time I noticed an error in your writing. Actually two errors. The first was when you said that the sky and earth melted together into one separate entity. Ouch! It should have been one continuous blur, or maybe one contiguous entity, or something like that...

The second error was (and this is a pet peeve of mine, since it's so often done in movies) the fact that a wooden puji-stake caused the ATV's gas tank to explode. Number one, gas doesn't explode--it burns. Gas VAPOR explodes. Number two, how did a wooden stake ignite the gasoline in the first place? Now, if it had been a fire arrow or something similar, then the ATV would have burst into flames, sure, but a wooden stake? Even bullets don't ignite gasoline, like you also see in the movies all the time. Sorry to ride this so hard, but like I said, it's a pet peeve.

With all that out of the way, though, you have, once again, delivered an excellent installment. Keep it up.

You know, every time I read your stories, I'm inspired to write down some of the Batman ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a long time. Maybe I should actually do it sometime.

[Panther]

I got chills up my spine when I saw 'X004'. I can't believe Luther is continuing with the project when little x has casued him so much big trouble! And those poor children!!!! I loved the fight in the desert, a deadly, gruesome scene and also an intereting look into what she is - and isn't - thinking about now. I'm glad Saru seems to be recovering.

But where is Robin????


gotta go

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you everyone for the great comments:

witness: No problem about praising you...it is well-deserved. And thank you for telling me how much you've enjoyed this, it really means a lot to me. Again, glad you liked it.

Sable Phoenix: Ach, you got me there, Sable. When I wrote the "separate entity" thing, I meant it was an entity separate from X, but I should have elaborated. And the puji-stake? Pure drama. You're totally right about the explosion being incited by nothing, I just assumed the puji-stake could have hit the ignition or something and made the explosion. You see, I needed an explosion...I hadn't written one in so long and I was getting withdrawal. So thanks for pointing that out. I'll be much more careful next time. And I'm happy you were entertained by it, despite all the technical errors!

Panther: Yeah, Luthor is all business-smart, really, and not very good at seeing the future. So you can see why I would take advantage of that and make him a money-hungry, inhumane S.O.B. It's just too easy! Thanks for the continuing support. I was beginning to wonder where it was you'd wandered off to!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Turkmenistan had passed like a severe, hallucinogenic fever dream. It was the waning of the Macchina hormones in her system that deluded entire countries into hours, simple slashes of minutes in her brain. She fell into convulsions once they hit Tajikistan, and stayed in a mind-blending stupor for three solid days.

When she awoke, the groaning of the passenger cargo the only thing to accompany her, she was soaked through with sweat. Every nerve was hyper-sensitive, every movement bringing a gush of feelings, thoughts, emotions. The metal under her was rough with rubber gripping compound. She was surrounded by crates, all of them stacked around her in pale pillars.

She sat up and found her mid-section incised by the sharp pains of hunger. Peeled off her cloak and got to her feet, staggering through the crates, her fingers brushing their sides. They were covered in Russian glyphs, some of which she found herself understanding in a base, child-like way.

She quickly organized them mentally by content. Ball bearings in the corner crates, small engine parts in the other corner, screws, mufflers. When she saw the screws, she sat back down, her legs melting out from under her like jelly. Sweat dripped off her brow. She found herself panting, quietly, quickly, like an animal. She very suddenly fell over, onto her side, as the train rounded a corner.

She crawled across the floor to the place where her cloak laid in a limp, warm pile, and knotted it around herself. Trembling with cold. Her body seized in a frigid convulsion. Despite herself, she cried out, tears streaming from her eyes. It was pain that went into, through, beyond the flesh, penetrated her mind, reminded her of the waste of her existence. She was not a feeling, thinking human, but a machine. This agony was imagined.

She fell gratefully unconscious a few minutes later, just as the train hit the core of China and began to slow for a station up ahead. There was a checking of passports and licenses, and the guards began traversing the tracks, unhooking certain cars and reattaching others as the engine began to rumble off.

X wouldn’t be able to recall it, but a shaft of grey-blue polluted sunlight fell over her form as the door swung open. The single guard stared at her a moment before calling over the others.
***
She burst into light and awake the second the steel knuckles hit her in the jaw.

The room was dark, defined only by a few shapes of brown slashed through with blocks of yellow light. Her head throbbed, not from the punch, but from the blood rushing into it. It was about thirty pounds of bondage-fetish gear that weighed on her, hanging upside down, one ankle and both wrists secured with studded patent-leather manacles and chains connected to the ceiling and floor.

She heard the snap of a bootheel and directed her attention up.

“ She is awake?” a woman asked. Almost no accent, but barely a flicker of Chinese inflection.

“ Yes, ma’am,”

X breathed in slow and hard. Three people, one female and two men. The woman was wearing silks scented lightly like lilacs, the men in greasy leathers. The woman took hold of her jaw in long, spindly fingers.

“ You are X001,” she said. X looked into her face. Lank, Chinese, middle-aged, with a dusting of fine wrinkles around her eyes and full lips pencilled in with dark rouge. Her hair was brought back in a loose bun.

X wrenched her face free and found herself swinging backward. The winch above creaked. A leather riding crop cracked her in the ribs, but she couldn’t feel it. Only the sound registered its connection with her person.

“ Mullen’s missing property,” she heard the woman grumble.

She turned to her. “ We see your tattoos, X001. My name is Miss Chian. As you’ve probably realized, you’ve wandered into the People’s Republic of China. We don’t like your kind here.”

X twisted in her chains. They had removed her guns, her sword, her cape. She felt naked and vulnerable hanging there, even though she was fully clothed.

“ Though Mullen is a good friend of mine,” Miss Chian said, “ and I’ll honor that friendship by returning you, there are a few points we need to cover first…”

Someone pushed into the room a tool cabinet on casters and opened one of its drawers. The man left. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw the gleam of steel surgical implements on suede. A glass vial was pulled out, something clear and bright yellow sloshing inside.

As they prepared a very long needle, she sat still. Through the dark she could see there was a door against the far wall, probably locked and with a guard or two outside. Miss Chian would not have a key—they would open it for her from the outside.

She was very calm as they injected the first needle directly into her neck. It wasn’t Macchina, didn’t thrill and burn like steroids or bite like amphetamines. A taste like grass flourished in her mouth. Miss Chian stood back, angry that the needle hadn't had the effect she’d liked.

She’d had lots of needles at LexCorp.

“ She needs more,” the woman demanded. The man at her side, slightly shorter than her and wearing a ski mask, did as she told, filling the needle again. He put it in through the same vein, like a surgeon. X smelled the gamy scent of antiseptic foam on his gloves.

Five minutes passed, and nothing had happened.

“ I’ve emptied the vial,” the short man said dismally. “ This isn’t going to work.”

“ Shut up,” Miss Chian growled.

“ He’s right,” X said matter-of-factly. “ I’m immune to most industrial chemicals for several very good reasons.”

And then, like a bit of ghost, an insane smile flickered across X’s face, and was gone.

Miss Chian’s eyes went wide, probably the same exact time the chains connecting X’s wrists to the floor just broke like they were cardboard. The girl spun in place, grabbing the surgeon and twisting hard till she heard a snap. He fell limp to the floor, and X swooped back and hit the wall with her free foot, striking out at anything she could. The tool chest fell over, spilling its methods of torture all over the floor.

Miss Chian ran to the door and began beating on it. “ Let me out, you useless bastards!” she screamed. The winch in the ceiling broke with a cartoonish ping sound, and she heard X’s feet hit the cement. The girl’s heavy, rushed breathing as she came closer.

The door swung in, and Miss Chian ducked out, the guard in a red-starred uniform shutting it and locking it behind her. She leaned against the wall, panting.

Inside, X paced calmly, stealthily. The broken chains on her wrists and ankle rattled. She put her hands up to her neck and found a thick collar, slick leather studded with steel nubs. Someone has a sick sense of humor, she thought, but didn’t take it off.

She found her things in the corner, bundled hastily in the cape. The ammo was gone, the fancy LexCorp laser rifle missing, but she replaced the holsters and the bandoliers, fitting the cloak over herself. Her hand settled on something round on her utility belt, something about the size of a lime.

Outside, Miss Chian moved away from the wall. “ Don’t make an incident report,” she told the guard. “ This never happened.”

White flash.

Steel, cement, bone flying outward in a solid burst. It sucked back in, succumbed to napalm-fueled flames that licked and pulled at the crumbling ceiling. A hole gaped wide where the locked door had been, haloed by a nimbus of fire.

X moved through it like chaos was her natural element, her life’s blood, her eternal force. Her hood up over her face, she was angel of death to the kingdom of corpses lying behind her.

The long, grey hallway stretched out before her, red disaster lights screaming and bounding. And three shadows running for her.

She drew her sword.
***
Nightwing knotted the bola again. “ How’s school?”

Robin leaned against the brick of a chimney. “ Fine.”

“ No tests, nothing?”

“ Nope.”

“ Liar,” Nightwing stood back from the edge and admired his handiwork: three thugs, unconscious, hanging upside down. And Bruce wondered where Tim got the urge to string up johns by their ankles.

“ Things are good, really,” They both hopped the alley and strolled across the next roof. Robin took out a grappling hook and shot it off, riding it along the street, his feet grazing the building sides. Nightwing soared soundlessly beside him, brow lowered and eyes scanning the alleys.

They came to rest atop a ten story near the waterfront. Robin realized, with sudden anger, that this was where he’d stood contemplating her death.

“ You got a girlfriend?”

Stunned, he gaped at him. “ Huh?”

“ A girl. You know, those people that happen to wear skirts, have long hair…”

“ No kidding!” cracked Robin as Nightwing shook out his lustrous ponytail.

“ Really,” Nightwing said.

“ It’s a boys’ school. You know that, you went there,”

“ I mean, girls come for parties and stuff, right?” Nightwing prodded. “ At least they did in my day.”

“ Why do you ask?” He had an idea why, but wasn’t willing to share.

“ Don’t you like any of the girls that show up?”

“ I don’t go to the parties,” Robin said sheepishly. “ They’re kind of stupid. At least the school ones are. And the only girls they invite are from the Catholic school uptown, and they usually have a nun watching them.”

Nightwing winced. “ Sister Clarice?”

“ Oh yeah.”

“ Ouch,”

“ Well, out of the Catholic girls, you like any of them?”

Robin rubbed the back of his neck. “ Karen Alu-alahi, I guess she’s kind of pretty.”

“ You talked to her?”

“ Once,” It was when he was holding her hair as she puked into a trashcan outside the school gym. She said thanks, he said you’re welcome.

“ Ask her out to a movie or something,”

“ Yeah, maybe.”

“ What’s Batgirl doing tonight?” Nightwing asked.

“ Since when do you care?” Robin asked back, taking his binoculars off his belt.

“ Just wondering. Alfred told me she and Batman had a big stakeout deal they were doing. I was thinking they might need some help.”

Robin, bored, put the binoculars away. “ Okay. It’s pretty quiet here.”

Nightwing stood up, testing the wind. “ Yeah, watch something explode just as we leave.”

They waited a few seconds more for good measure, then took off, the bay at their backs.
***
It was safe to say the action was over by the time they arrived.

The apartment, once lushly appointed in gilt and velvet, had been ransacked; windows broken, chairs and desks lying in shattered heaps on the carpet, ammunition shells scattered about. There were three men dead in the stairwell. In the sitting room, a woman in a black suit lay under a table, unconscious. Further down the hall, men were lined up against the wall, hands and ankles bound with the gold tasseled cording used on the curtains.

“ Yeesh,” Nightwing muttered, entering the bedroom. A man lay on the bed, tied down. Batgirl was on one side, Batman on the other.

“ What happened in the stairwell?” Robin asked.

“ Ambush,” Batgirl said curtly. “ They caught them at the top of the stairs.”

Robin looked at the man on the bed. He was short, slender, with pale skin and a downy mane of brown hair. British, by every indication, wearing a red dress shirt and black slacks. More window cording anchored him down to the flowered bedspread. His shoes were missing for some reason.

He was smiling in a sleazy way.

“ And this guy?” Robin asked, sounding bored.

“ Darien Bonaparte,” Nightwing said immediately.

“ Pleased to meet you,” the man said. His accent was pleasantly British, obviously upper-caste and educated accordingly.

Batgirl prodded at one of Bonaparte’s bound arms. “ British mercenary, stopped in Gotham for a bit. Rumor is you have ties to Intergang, but what we’re wondering is which one.”

Nightwing picked it up. “ Thirty-eight confirmed killings in the last year. Carried out a nasty assassination in Tel Aviv last week that brought him within range of a certain gear in the Intergang machine—“

“ And terribly afraid of heights,” Batgirl went on.

Bonaparte grinned. His teeth were like broken piano keys.

Batman leaned over to him. “ Ever been to the top of the Gotham Empire State Building, Darien?”

“ Never cared to,” the man answered flawlessly. Decades of study in the martial arts had sealed his personality in a hard veneer. He wasn’t even sweating. Robin was beginning to think that he really wasn’t afraid of heights.

The others began untying him, each of them to a limb, and Robin joined in. Once free, Batman hoisted him up by his collar and thrust him out the window.

Bonaparte continued smiling.

“ This is only three stories, Darien,” Batman said. “ Think of a hundred more…”

“ It was Lockhardt,” he said, the veneer splintering. “ He called me to Tel Aviv to kill someone in his way, and once I did, he explained that he and Mullen were having some troubles agreeing on anything.”

“ What kind of troubles?”

“ He never said. He told me he was saving the real job for someone special.”

“ In Tel Aviv, you killed…?”

“ A man named Sonjay Inseleipshan. A sniper Mullen used in Germany. He was useless.”

Batman pulled him back in and tossed him on the bed. No last words or anything, he just left the room, the three others disappearing in his wake.
***
The three came at her quickly, drawing their weapons. She raised her blade so it caught the flickers of the dying flames behind her. Holographic laser sights danced across her face.

“ Stop!” one of them cried. As they came closer, she realized they were not grown, but something caught between child and adult. Teenagers, though the word in her mind was almost derogatory.

She stood still, sword tight between both hands. “ Who are you?”

They came to a stop. In the slight glow from the explosion site, she saw the glint off of their giant submachine guns.

“ There is no time, X001,” one of them said, but which she didn’t know.

“ You must come with us now,” another said.

“ How do I know I can trust you?” she asked.

“ Your older brother sent us for you,”

She breathed in quietly, replacing the sword in its scabbard. They beckoned, and she followed them out into the white daylight and fresh air of a Chinese forest.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Forgive me for taking so ridiculously long to reply to this latest example of spectacular work by DoE. I could go on shamelessly ranting about your fantastic story but I haven't the time.

"If you write, then write like your life depends on it, or what do you have to live for?" - me, myself, and i

[Tonbo_Rosso]

Well I for one am ready to create a small shrine to our favorite evil little girl, but I could just be bias.



As awsome as usual, I see my work is done here.

[Panther]

If I could, I'd think of something clever to say about both capitalists AND communists chasing after X. Poor girl seems to bring out the worst in _everybody_.

BUT - Saru sends help!!!!!! marches around the room chanting: Saru to the rescue, Saru to the rescue, Saru to the rescue!!!

>sits back down< Oh yeah - help has arrived! Wonderful decriptions and character development, as usual.

must go,

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Thank you for taking the time to reply, especially if you have so little time in the first place! I've been watching the progression of Broken with awe, though, like you, it's been hard to find time to reply to anything. I can't believe Lashina had a kid with Supes! Evil, evil! Though I can't wait to meet the little squirt...

Tonbo: Now, darling, we all know you already have a shrine to me, and it's called FINISH REVOLUTIONARY BOY WONDER!!!! Please, for the love of all that's unholy! And thank you for the comments! Whee!

Panther: I bet you could come up with some very witty things to say about X's unwanted fan club, and I would sit placidly here to hear them. Except for--

Saru to the rescue! Saru to the rescue!!

Thanks again, Panther! I've always cherished the support you've given me throughout the months and eventual years! And I can't wait for your next story, whenever you choose to grace us with it.

Thanks to everyone!!!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks a lot for the support, guys and gals. It's been a really weird week for me, so I was hoping this post will serve to even things out a little. It contains mild swearing, mild violence, an all around PG post but I can never be too careful. Tell me what you think, and I will slobber and grovel embarrassingly.
***
“ That guy…” Tim started.

“ Darien Bonaparte,” Bruce filled in for him.

“ How’d you know he was afraid of heights?” he asked.

Bruce tapped out a complex command on the keyboard. A German newspaper clipping sprang up. There was a picture of Lex Luthor accompanying it; he was standing in front of a building with his logo on it, shaking hands with a doctor.

“ Certain contacts told me his stepfather used to hang him upside down by his feet off the top of their tenement when he was very young.” Another tap. The text of the newspaper clipping translated immediately into English.

“ Tenement?” questioned Tim as he sat on the side console of the great computer. “ I thought he was rich.”

“ He approximates his accent and style that way,” Bruce said. “ It’s apart of the deception mercenaries are expected to keep up.”

“ Kind of like you?”

“ Yes,” replied his mentor without hesitation. “ Except I refrain from killing people.”

Tim thought back to the tenements of his childhood, the hulking, dusty buildings overgrown with the rot of industrial decay. The roofs were off limit, but he managed to go up there anyway, the tarpaper sticking to the bottoms of his sneakers, to watch the neighborhood at night. Things got bad, but his dad never held him over the edge by his feet.

“ He have any siblings?” the boy asked.

“ He was the only child by his mother’s first marriage,” Bruce explained, not asking why he would want to know, “ and for that reason he was considered the pariah. He did have four half-siblings.”

“ How do you know all this?”

“ I told you, I have contacts.”

“ And he was with Intergang?”

“ Barely,” Bruce cut-and-pasted the translated article into Luthor’s lengthy file. “ Working on the outskirts of Intergang to avoid the muddy politics of the inner circles.”

Tim scratched his arm. “ He was talking about Lockhardt.”

He arranged Luthor’s video clips by date swiftly and surely, including the newest of his interview with Summer Gleason. “ Yes.”

“ Anybody know where Lockhardt is?”

Bruce paused, then continued. “ You’re very curious about Nevig Lockhardt, Tim.”

“ Just wondering.”

“ Does it have anything to do with the girl?”

“ No…”

“ She’s not working for him anymore. That much is clear.”

“ Been talking with Barbara, Bruce?” Tim asked grimly.

“ No. I just know everything.” It was a joke, though with the way he said it, it could have been bad news.

“ It just made me think, when he said Mullen and Lockhardt were having some problems,”

Bruce was silent, both completely divorced from reality and at the same time not caring what made Tim think in the first place. The boy swung his feet.

“ I guess I’ll go to sleep,” he said, hopping off the computer console.

“ Goodnight,” Bruce muttered. As Tim turned and looked at him, he saw his mentor’s face aglow with the bluish light of the monitor.

“Goodnight,” he said quietly. Then he continued up the stairs.
***
Beijing viewed from the back seat of a stolen SUV, through the heavily tinted, coal-colored glass. One of the saviors (as she began calling them secretly) was driving, another was sitting in the front passenger seat, and the other was in the back with her. They had removed their ski masks, discarded their black garb, stuffing their guns into plastic cases in the back of the truck and covering those with blankets. Under all of it, they were dressed in long cotton sweaters and generic blue jeans, looking as normal as possible.

Just as she imagined, they were all teenagers, and they never stopped talking. Jabbering strings of Chinese accompanied them through the crush of the streets. They were triplets, or just three clones, because they all had the same broad, flat nose, smooth cheekbones, thin lips, brown skin. Each had a matching dome of fine black hair, and small, deep eyes. Big, awkward hands on the steering wheel or in their lap or on the side console, like Saru’s but a medium tone of brown and not his trademark pale.

She fidgeted in the giant pink plastic raincoat they had put her in to hide her clothes as they drove through checkpoints. It made a squeaky noise whenever she moved.

“ You know Saru?” she finally questioned as a man in an olive-tinted suit waved them through an intersection.

“ To an extent, yes,” the driver said. His English was nearly perfect, like Miss Chian’s.

She gazed out the window. A mother was pushing a stroller on the sidewalk, shiny plastic shopping bags clasped in her hands.

“ Then you know what I am,” she said deeply, in a tone she’d never used before. A car honked politely behind them.

“ We don’t ask questions, we only do as we’re told,” the front passenger said.

“ So you work for Saru,” X concluded.

“ We work for those Saru works for,” the savior sitting beside her said. He didn’t look at her as he spoke, and barely moved his lips.

“ Who does Saru work for?” she almost whispered.

“ Just those whose interests involve you staying alive and away from Intergang,”

X blinked at the washed-out landscape of the sidewalk. Just people coming and going, silent, alienated, bars of warm human life stretching away into the bright of the sun.

“ Have you ever heard of Coquin, X?” the driver asked.

The girl sat up. “ No.”

“ Coquin is a double agent working inside Intergang. They were the one that arranged your escape.”

“ That is who Saru works for?”

“ Yes, but even then, Coquin works for someone who works for someone else. It is a chain of command.”

X was quiet for a moment. “ How is Saru?” came out choked.

“ Alive.”

She brought her knees up to her chest, hoping that her older brother had a place to sleep safely, food to eat, clean clothes to keep him warm.

“ And the boy in red?” she questioned.

The driving savior looked back at her, just catching her in his peripheral vision before looking back at the road.

“ I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“ He is a boy, dressed in red. Saru told me he knew he was alive before he left me.” She had become very serious, her tone dropping. The savior sitting next to her looked at her in surprise, like he’d just actively watched a demon enter her body.

“ I don’t know any boy like this. You are being very vague. Do you know his name?”

She wrought her mind for a moment, carefully accessing and discarding every thought or snippet of memory about him. “ I…I can’t remember.”

Driving Savior lowered his brow. “ He is instrumental to your escape?”

“ I believe he may be. I’m not sure who his allies are,”

“ Describe him.”

“ Caucasian, with a tan, black hair all spiky.” Thinking. “ A black mask, black cape with yellow on the inside, a red suit with an R on the left breast.”

As soon as she gave out the last detail, the saviors broke into an abrupt argument in Chinese. Pieces of recognizable words surfaced to her, but then they stopped as suddenly as they started.

“ We haven’t heard of anyone like this,” the driver said.

She was quiet. By the urgency in their voices she could tell that he was lying, that they were covering something up. It was another ready-made conspiracy about to swallow her.

She didn’t say anything, and within thirty minutes Beijing was becoming a dark stain on the horizon behind them.
***
It was dark before they reached a place the saviors thought was suitable, and once they reached an agreement, the driver veered off the road and into the tangles of bamboo.

X jumped out of the car and shed her pink raincoat, tossing it in the back seat and slamming the door with such force the SUV shook. She stalked out into the forest, the beams of their flashsticks bobbing behind her. They had replaced their special ops gear in a few seconds.

One of the saviors offered her a flashlight. “ I can see in the dark,” she said brusquely, nudging it away. “ If you’re offering charity, I could use some ammo.”

He produced a long bandolier of 9mm cartridges, and she accepted it, snaking it around her torso and handing him the empty one. He and the others extinguished their flashlights, turning on the nightvision option on the goggles they wore over the ski masks.

“ You are upset,” he said, keeping an even pace with her.

“ You’re lying to me,” she snapped.

“ We’re only editing our information. You have to do that sometimes.”

“ You’re hindering my progress,”

“ You forget, we saved your life!” one of the other saviors cried quietly.

“ You saved nothing,” she hissed. “ I was doing fine.”

“ You would have never made it out of that compound without us,” the savior next to her said. She didn’t know why she still thought of them as the saviors; it probably was some subconscious decision having to do with Saru.

She was about to come up with a wise-ass comment when she stopped. The others did, too.

“ What—“ She cut him off with a quick hand gesture. They all were still.

“ Listen,” she whispered.

“ What?” asked one.

She stood up straight, craning her neck. Green and yellow stalks rose up on all sides like a solid curtain.

“ Helicopters,” she said. With barely a flinch of muscle, she had disappeared up into the overlapping canopy of bamboo overhead. Seconds later, she reappeared, landing in a crouch.

They stared at her.

“ Two helicopters, coming in from the northeast,” she said. “ About twenty miles off.”

“ Beijing,” a savior said. “ We must hurry.”

The crashing of the brush rose to a deafening degree as they pounded through, guns drawn. X had no idea where they were going, and she didn’t much care. The old person she was had been replaced by a more efficient X, a girl dredged up out of the past.

Rough of the wrist-thick trunks against her palms, smooth leaves against her face…the columns of bamboo seemed to last forever, stretching out in her mind to alter itself into another experience in some other place and some other time. She could smell the wheat, the tall plumes of the dry, dusty grass, and the pounding of feet. They were all running now.

The clearing came up ahead, a wide circle of flattened rushes. The bamboo here was brought together in a dome overhead, tied with twine or wire to hide the landing space. In the middle sat a small black helicopter, its pilot –a thin, old Chinese man in navy Maoist clothes- leaned up against it. A cigarette burned in his claw-like hand.

One of the saviors yelled at him. The man threw down his cigarette and scurried into the pilot compartment, hitting switches. The blades began to turn. Two saviors ran to opposite sides of the clearing and began undoing hard, complicated knots in the twine tied there. The bamboo that had been domed overhead fell away, revealing the clean night sky.

The third savior came up beside X. “ You go with him, now,” he said, taking off his mask. She finally realized how young he was, no older than sixteen or so. There was a small, circular patch on the left side of his neck, partially obscured by his shoulder rig.

She bowed to him. “ Thank you for all your help,”

He patted her on the shoulder. “ Take care, X001. I don’t know why everyone makes such a fuss about you, but it all must be worth something.”

She nodded. “ I hope so.”

He handed her his large submachine gun. “ Just in case. We don’t want to have to rescue you from another compound.”

The old pilot began waving out the window. X bowed again to the saviors and ran for the helicopter, jumping into the passenger seat just as the old man lifted it up from the clearing.
***
Darien Bonaparte had a solitary cell on the outskirts of the temp jail at the GCPD. There was a three foot-by-one-foot window about six feet off the ground, sealed with blast-proof plastic and steel mesh, that looked out onto the city. The guard, a big, hulking Italian man, had excused himself just after giving Bonaparte his dinner.

He didn’t even hear the window open, didn’t feel the little gust of wind the intruder had worked so hard to bypass, and didn’t know he was there until a skinny arm caught him in a head lock.

The steel dinner tray hit the ground with a clatter. Bonaparte jumped up and tossed the boy across the cell, but Robin grabbed the bars that enclosed them and kind of hung there.

Bonaparte spat. “ Damn you! I already told you everything I know!”

“ I need to ask you about Lockhardt,” Robin said, lowering himself to the floor.

“ Unless you’ve got another tall building to hang me out, you’re not getting anything out of me,”

Robin nodded toward the window. “ Doable.”

The man glared at him. “ What is it?”

“ Did he have any bodyguards when you met with him in Tel Aviv?”

“ What the bloody hell does that have—“

“ Just answer,”

Bonaparte sat down. The light coming in the window made his cheekbones look like ice picks.

“ He had one bodyguard, a Spanish fellow I used to know.”

“ No girl?”

“ Girl? No—“ He stopped. “ You fishing for something, Bird Boy?”

“ What did the girl look like?”

“ Spanish lady, barely even a girl.”

Robin was quiet. “ Oh.”

“ He did have a girl for a bodyguard in France, I hear,” Bonaparte said. “ But I never saw her.”

“ Did she have a name?”

He shook his head. “ No name, or I never heard one.”

Robin leaned back against the bars. “ Why did Lockhardt leave?”

“ I told you already: he was having problems with Mullen. I don’t know the sticky details; that’s why I steer clear of them usually.”

“ There weren’t any rumors or anything?”

“ What the hell is this, high school? No, there weren’t any rumors. It was a clean break.”

The boy hunched his shoulders. “ You’re being pretty cooperative.”

“ Why not? I don’t have anything to lose.”

Robin went under the window. “ Sure you don’t.” He jumped off from the white sink and grabbed the window edge with his hands, then pulled himself up and disappeared out, securing the grating behind him.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Daughterof_Evil
tNC: Thank you for taking the time to reply, especially if you have so little time in the first place! I've been watching the progression of Broken with awe, though, like you, it's been hard to find time to reply to anything. I can't believe Lashina had a kid with Supes! Evil, evil! Though I can't wait to meet the little squirt...



Ohhh well, it seems that by now /everybody's/ had kids with everybody else. I was just thinking earlier about how it would be if I grouped them all in a room together. "Children of Superheroes Support" I suppose. Jean and Thomas would be all over each other. Poor Dresden would probably be off in a corner somewhere trying to talk himself into joining the convo...

NEway, while I'm just rattling off, I really enjoyed this fine little piece of writing. I'm glad that X got out of that situation alive, although I wish the saviors had told her the truth. I'd have like to have seen what they thought of the "boy in red".

ta ta for now:

-tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

Hey hey! WF's been down for the past month, but obviously the boards haven't. I just realized that I never thought of trying to find the message boards on their own. Silly me.

Allright, DoE. Once again your writing is superlative. I loved this line:

"Bonaparte grinned. His teeth were like broken piano keys."

You certainly have a way of turning a phrase. Keep it up.

[Tonbo_Rosso]

And the flying wedgy, I mean boy blunder, does it again. I think I'd put money down aginst him in a game of old maid.

Beautiful once again DoE. Such discordent poetry does not come out of a brighter pen.

That shrine is getting completely revamped. Tonbo swears never to post something that half baked after a sushi high again.

All said and done, I'm curious what my little twins will do next.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you, all of you, for the wonderful support. Of course, I'm not going to try and pretend that this day is not significant, it's just that everything has been run through the wringer a few too many times. So let's just focus our thoughts elsewhere, ne?

This episode is rated a strict R for bad language and violence. Please read and review, and next time I think I might have the time to thank you individually for your lovely comments. Thanks bunches, anyway!
***
It was noon, and X imagined herself looking down at Tianjin from ten thousand feet up.

She had been shuttled from home to home since landing outside the city near dawn. Saw two mothers fixing breakfast for their children, watched two fathers kiss their wives goodbye, did the dishes over a sunshine-yellow porcelain sink. Heard the noises of normalcy, the clink of spoons in empty cereal bowls, tiny feet on linoleum, the front door slamming. One of the families had a cat, a fat orange tabby that stood in the corner surveying everything with cool, amber eyes.

She liked the cat, the way it stood back and watched but didn’t interfere, like a spy for a tiny, separatist world all its own.

While she was at You-furen’s kitchen table drinking tea out of a clay mug, the postman came, and she took up her gear and went with him. He stowed her in the back with parcels and undelivered mail packed in brown canvas bags. An hour later, after he made his last rounds in the suburban neighborhoods, he drove back to the giant warehouse that was headquarters for the mail system.

She hopped out once he parked behind the corrugated steel sliding doors, and looked around. There was a small jet idling there, men in brown uniforms tossing bags of mail into its back from a long conveyor belt leading out of the warehouse and into an adjoining one. Once and awhile, one of these men would pick up a stray letter, open it, then toss it back underfoot.

The postman gestured wildly for X. She tugged the hood of her cloak down to her shoulders and joined him. He was a middle-aged man, with shiny brown skin and an unkempt mop of black hair. His glasses were tiny and wireless, perched high on his nose like they were apart of his face.

“ This is Miss X,” he said. The man standing next to him, wearing an olive-colored suit decorated with medals, looked like an official, an older official with neatly shaved hair and a little bit of a goatee. He kneaded his hat between his hands.

X bowed.

“ You worked for Intergang?” asked the official in impeccable English.

“ Yes, once.”

“ Intergang has not been kind to my position or my supporters,” he said, raising his chin. “ That is why I have done so much to get you through my country. Intergang has corrupted the Chinese government to do what they want; they operate freely here without fear of prosecution.”

“ I am very sorry,” X said.

The official waved his hand at her. “ Never mind that. You’ll get on this plane and it will take you out of the country.”

“ Thank you,” She bowed again, then stopped. “ May I ask who’s directing your decision?”

“ I do not know,” the official said. “ I don’t want to know. It could be dangerous for you to know.”

“ I can’t imagine how I could be in more danger,” X said.

One of the men loading mail yelled to the official, and he replaced his hat and yelled back. He pointed at X. “ It is time for you to get on.”

A clatter as the giant corrugated doors behind them were pulled open. X ran over and jumped into the cargo compartment, wedging herself in between two bags of sharp parcels. The engines of the jet roared to life; the men along its polished side pulled the conveyor belt away and flattened themselves along the wall. The hatch went up, sealing her away in the dark.

She heard some yelling, and then quiet as the plane turned. There was only the sound of her breathing, which was slow and even, a sound sort of like the wind along the side of a building with an open window.

The engines powered up. She leaned back and braced herself. It was the same moment she heard the cracks, and the gunfire raked along the side of the jet. The plane started to roll, immediately going at a pace too fast and taking off a little too early. She sat back and sighed.
***
The neon on the sign advertising Chinese dish soap had gone out. That was why it was his favorite choice at night. He sat on the top, his feet propped on the dead neon tubing on the framework under him. The streets spread out below like a grey-blue lattice, glittering from the sparse rain that had hit that afternoon. The impassive blanket of clouds overhead half-shrouded a demure sickle moon.

Robin scanned the police frequencies for something to do. A domestic disturbance on Gibson Avenue, an accidental alarm on the waterfront, a burglary on McAffrey. There was a spark in the sky. He sighed and turned the radio off on his glove. Shot out a grappling hook and rode it all the way downtown.

The tarmac on the top of the police department was still slick from the rain, and when he landed he slipped and skated across the length of the roof, stopping as he hit the platform the Batsignal was rooted to.

He pulled himself up. “ Urgh…”

A scrape, then crash. Glass rained down on him, he covered his head with his arms. Jumped to his feet as the last shards caught the gory red of the sky and illuminated a piece of the blackened shape darting from tarmac to Batsignal and up to the police antennae and back.

A sudden groan as a dark figure jumped into a crouch atop the shattered Batsignal. Robin grabbed a batarang and threw it, but it glanced off the arc of steel and missed the form in black entirely as they jumped off the Batsignal. A boot grazed his forehead. He fell back and hit the tarmac again. A flap of tight black, and they were gone, away.

Panting, disorganized, Memoria Khasekemwy appeared from behind the Batsignal. A giant, ancient-looking musket was clenched in one fist.

Robin staggered up. “ What was that?”

She glared at him and straightened up, brushing herself off. “ Just a little scuffle, that’s all.”

He pointed at the Batsignal. “ You’re paying for that.”

“ It wasn’t me,” she spat. “ I came here to contact you, and whoever the hell that was ambushed me. Broke the damn thing.”

“ I thought I told you to leave me alone!” Robin cried.

She shook out her silver-white hair, which sort of glowed pinkish in the nuclear-red glow off the sky. “ I have some news for you.”

He crossed his arms. “ What?”

Memoria turned around and paced to the side of the roof, laying the musket on the edge and placing both black lace-gloved hands firmly upon it. For the first time, he noticed that she had a rather long braid running down her back in the midst of the head shaved up to her chili bowl.

“ You better appreciate this. My brother was shot in the head for it.”

He hunched his shoulders. “ Is he okay?”

“ Fine. He’s been asking for you…you’re aware how fond of—“

“ Stick to the facts.”

She glared at him out one icy eye. “ There was a bit of an altercation at a LexCorp lab about three weeks ago. They succeeded at keeping it very quiet. A doctor was killed, the very doctor Luthor was using for developing cybernetics, the doctor he mentioned last week had died of a brain hemorrhage.”

He perked up. “ What lab? How was he killed?”

She turned around and sat on the edge, laying the gun across her lap elegantly. It shined in a way that made it seem like a part of her outfit.

“ A lab near Rostock, Germany. The doctor was decapitated. There was another death, but not of anyone they wanted acknowledged. That one was crucified.”

“ Okay, who did it, and why should I be caring?”

“ Remember I told you about X?” Her white eyes bored straight through him. He nodded.

The next words were whispered, slowly:

“ God save the queen, because the little devil escaped.”

“ And…?” His throat was dry.

“ What else?” She leaned dangerously back. “ She’s out for blood, vengeance, the whole she-bang. She is searching and yearning and pining for a piece of the real world.”

Robin stared at the tarmac, eyebrow quirking under the mask. “ LexCorp was the ‘lucrative sponsor’?”

She nodded. “ I honestly thought you’d figure that out before I’d tell you, but the best laid plans…”

“ What does this have to do with the Hoshi Aka?” he asked.

“ Nothing,” Memoria said. “ Nothing at all. Oh, and just so you know, the man you interrogated last night, Darien Bonaparte?”

“ Yeah?”

“ Hung himself in his cell this morning.” He dropped his head. Nothing left to lose, huh…

She leaned fully back to admire the anemic moon.

“ Watch it,” he said. “ You’ll fall. And I’m not really sure I’d catch you.”

She stayed back and smiled at him, running her tongue along her bottom lip.

“ You super heroes. You should come and visit Praevidare, he misses you. And if you’re coming, bring that foxy redhead for me, will you?”

With that, she fell backwards and off the building, completely out of sight. He ran over and looked, but there was no trace of her, no dark cutout against the gleaming wet of the street below.
***
The landing gear popping into place was what roused her from her delirium. A bag of mail across the compartment shifted and fell over. She felt the descending of the plane through the depressurization of her ears, the hum of the ground growing louder and louder, the rubber meeting pavement with a little ecstatic squeal.

She moved, and every nerve and bone screamed. Sleep danced outside her mental periphery, but she wasn’t beyond pure dementia, and she lay and wallowed in it till the jet came to a complete stop. Neon shapes flickered in and out of her vision, a gleaming, oily nightmare of patent vinyl and chains. A scalpel glared close to her eyeball, then became the dagger of halogen light streaming in the open hatch.

She covered her eyes and squinted. The smells of oil and sawdust drifted in to meet her.

“ Up. Get up.” Someone said. Readjusting her pupils accordingly…

“ Get up. This is the Ustare Experimental Revolution front.” A blank, sub-automatic barrel glared her in the face, and behind that, a person in a black ski mask with an emblem sewed onto the forehead. It was a man, she could tell.

“ Who the hell are you?” came out of her mouth without her consent.

“ This is the Ustare Experimental Revolution front,” he said. “ Get up, we need to talk to you, Miss X001.”

“ I’m not moving, *****er,” That slipped by, too.

He primed his gun. “ Please get up. We are a sect of Intergang needing—“

That word. It was enough to prove her convictions, justify her means. Faster than he could have ever seen, she grabbed his gun and hit him in the face with it, then vaulted over him as he fell backward. She was out on concrete and steel in a matter of seconds, leaping in twenty-foot bounds into the air and through the iron eaves of the old hangar. Their bullets were woefully slow. She didn’t even scan their ranks before dropping her last grenade down onto their heads. She was propelling herself up through a whited-out skylight and into the stout release of night air when the charge went off, a napalm-fueled nova blooming along the floor of the warehouse.

The scout on the roof couldn’t have helped himself. He was a sniper, she could tell, not used to close-range combat, with a scope on his gun. She had knocked out his knee and taken his rifle in a second or so, then moved to the edge.

A cold circlet of a gun barrel against her temple. “ Please cooperate. This could be very nasty for you.”

In a few seconds, X had analyzed him. A man, upper-class Pakistani, possibly from the Indus River region from the distinct bitterness of the patchouli smell he wore. Late thirties, one-hundred eighty to two-hundred pounds, most of it muscle provoked into growth by greyhound steroids. The animal musk of the hormones hung around him almost as much as the patchouli. He wasn’t the same man from the plane; this man was PR.

“ Drop the gun,” he said. She did. It bounced off the side and to the ground some fifty feet down, going off with a crack. The city in the distance glowed dimly, a slightly yellowish mirage in the blue dark. Its hum was the heartbeat of a million souls.

“ You will come with us or you will suffer, understand?”

“ Go to hell,” she said. It was very sudden, her hand in his gut, wrist-deep in intestinal tissue. She heard him sputter, cough, and finally, pull the trigger.

The bullet was warm, numb oblivion in her skull. Flickers of ruby-red in the air next to her. Salty-bitter taste like chemicals. And the ground, fifty feet down, rushing closer and closer.

Wound to pain to bliss. Then braindeath.

[Panther]

ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



You killed off your main character???????????????


Other than that this post was suburb, I'm in awe of all the descriptions.

gotta go,

[Sable Phoenix]

Holy COW! You never lose the ability to shock the reader, DoE.

Next installment, quickly, please!

[Coran]

Well done DoE. As always your descriptions are excellent and your knock for leaving us with a cliffhanger is unnerving. Is it possible for X to survive this one, or is that the end of the main character? Please post again soon!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Oh say it a'int so! Oh I'm pretty sure she isn't dead. She can't be. It's not possible....


right?

tNC

[Daughterof_Evil]

Ah, lots of indignation! Thanks to everyone who replied with such lovely comments and exclamations. I would love to respond to you individually, but I haven't the time currently, as I'm smooshed between one thing I have just done and another thing I have to do.

Brave New World is the property of Aldous Huxley and only used here in the sincerest respect. Please note that this episode contains brief allusions toward S&M and sexual humor. Thank you all and goodnight!
***
“ Weekend!” Tim yelled, jumping onto the couch. Alfred appeared at the doorway, Tim’s vest, jacket, and sneakers in one hand in the order the boy had discarded them on his way in.

“ Don’t forget your homework, Master Timothy. Master Bruce expects you to have it done before you go out tonight,” the old butler said as he drifted down the hall towards the kitchen. Tim knew his routine. He’d put on the tea, then iron his wrinkled blazer while the water came to a boil.

The boy grabbed up the remote and switched on the TV, rolling up the sleeves on his shirt. Flipping through the channels one by one, scanning the more than eight hundred international stations Bruce got. Fifteen hundred in the Batcave, but he didn’t feel like going down there so early after school. He paused and watched an Indonesian game show, then went on.

Oddly enough, there was nothing on. Rather than turning the television off, he settled on an artsy black and white German movie and set it on auto-translate. A spew of English profanities came out loud and thick, and Tim sat completely still waiting for Alfred to come in and protest.

He didn’t. Breathing a sigh of relief, Tim turned it down and took out his homework. The math and English were spread out across the coffee table, the science stacked next to him on the couch. Within a few minutes he and the papers had moved onto the floor like they had all oozed there together: Tim on his stomach with Brave New World propped open in front of him, his English take-home test unstapled and radiating around him like a fan, a number two pencil hanging out of his mouth, a rolled-up sheaf of algebra in one hand being used as a drum stick on the carpet.

Alfred came in with a tray of milk and sandwiches made to look like they were for tiny people. Tim accepted the milk with a thank you and gulped half of it down over Mustapha Mond philosophizing with John Savage.

“ Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness…"

“ I say they’re afraid of change,”

Tim looked up. The German black and white movie was gone, replaced with a news program being broadcast from what looked like China. The boy looked for the remote and found it balanced neatly on the back of the couch. Damn, Alfred was sneaky.

It was Lex Luthor, sitting in a leather armchair in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that was a slice of Mount Fuji. The interviewer was the Japanese version of Summer Gleason, with a short black dome of hair and a sweet, round face. Her smile was constant and comforting.

“ We have come so far in the past few years with genetic and cybernetic technology it would be irresponsible of us to do nothing with it,” he said, steepling his hands, “ and there is so much need in the world. I mean, you yourself, Miss Kamui, are a monument to that achievement.”

“ So you’re telling your opponents that there is a definite market for the technology your company has produced?” Folded her perfect, tiny hands over her lap. He noticed that the earring in her left earlobe seemed to be a tiny logo.

“ More than a market—a real, honest necessity for my technology. It can benefit everyone on this planet if we let it.” He clenched his hand decisively, retaining that featureless, platonic smile that shown like the compiled bits of every friendly smile in the world.

It flashed to a picture of the anchorwoman in the middle of a parking lot, talking next to the news van. A slew of kanji glyphs appeared under her image, and she spewed into a long lecture in Japanese that was translated along the bottom of the screen. File footage of protests in Metropolis. People marching with signs reading things like I’D RATHER BE AN AMPUTEE THAN A ROBO-FREAK, or REAL LIFE IS PRECIOUS, CYBER-LIFE IS NOT.

Back to Mika Kamui. He remembered her suddenly from a short news piece done by Summer Gleason a few weeks before, about the Japanese station that had taken on an Akuma Incorporated robot personality construct for its anchorwoman. She smiled in a completely fear-inducing way, then the scene cut to the news desk.

“ She even has a sense of humor,” Tim turned. Barbara was standing behind the couch, hands on its arched back. Her leather jacket was folded over a cushion, it was too warm to wear it.

“ The robot lady?” Tim asked.

“ Sure.” Behind Tim’s head, an image of a slick, shining runway. Svelte young women strolled back and forth, their transparent green vinyl garments showing all the mechanisms at work inside their disassembled bellies. Tiny gears, fiber-optic lines, the perfect flatness of their chests and the narrowness of their boyish hips. They were all manufactured copies of one another sporting different hairstyles but the same large, dark eyes and glass-smooth black hair. Each one was a partially-dismantled Mika Kamui.

“ It’s kind of creepy how perfect she is,” the boy mentioned dryly. “ Give me a flesh and blood person any day. Metal’s just not my thing.”

“ How perfect they are,” Barbara said, gesturing at the screen. A girl in a transparent vinyl kimono strolled to the end of the runway and turned slowly, allowing a three-hundred-sixty degree view of her waist, which had been reduced down to a three inch core of spine-like fiber-optics and metal pieces like the inside of a watch. As she went back up the runway, one could see the screwdrivers stuck into her pincushion geisha bun. “ It’s unfair to think real women can compete with something programmed to fulfill a man’s every desire.”

“ When all you really want is something to do the dishes for ‘ya,” Tim said mockingly. A cushion hit him in the back of the head and he was face-first in Brave New World.

Barbara sat down and started in on the tray of sandwiches. “ You men are all the same,” she said with faux exasperation and a little smile.

“ Hey, you group me with guys like Bruce and Dick?”

“ Gladly,” She took a glass of milk, too. Skipped lunch.

The Japanese news program had gone on to something else, some zaibatsu anger management ceremony. Barbara changed the channel gratefully, skipping through Portugese children’s programming and that same Indonesian game show. She stopped on a Metropolis fashion program.

“ Sheer is definitely in this year,” Lana Lang predicted sagely. “ All the Japanese robot models are wearing it.”

“ My God, Lana!” Barbara yelled emphatically. “ Use your head!”

“ You better get on it, Babs,” Tim advised.

“ Go to the Cave,” she said wearily at him. “ I’ll meet you down there as soon as my lunch is over.”
***
Woke up in a haze of red.

“ I told you not to do that,” said Barbara outside his range of vision. “ You’re going to be sore all week.”

Something cold and flat and porous was placed to his face. One of Alfred’s old tricks, placing steaks on head injuries.

“ Eww, meat,” Tim managed to mutter. He sat up and looked around. The red had receded, replaced with hunks of black interspersed with soft grey. He remembered hitting the balancing beam, then the mat, and going under.

“ Never try to back-flip out of a sweep kick,” Barbara had said. “ You can’t pull it off.”

“ I could if I wanted to,” Tim remembered having said a few seconds before smacking the beam. Barbara was right; he was going to have a sore head all week, and a bruise, too.

“ Dumb boy,” she said next to him, tussling his hair. “ Go work on the Batcomputer for a while. Till your head clears up.”

He obligingly did as she told, and went and sat before the giant monitor. The sheer size of the computer swallowed him up. Using the one hand not holding the steak to his head, he keyed up recent cases.

“ Do be careful with the steak, Master Timothy,” Alfred said somewhere behind him. “ You will be having it for dinner.”

“ Ha ha,” the boy muttered. The Darien Bonaparte case had been sealed; it had been confirmed that the British hitman, approximately thirty-four years old and five-foot-five, had hung himself in his cell at the GCPD two days earlier. He left no note.

Bonaparte’s ties with Intergang had been studied down to the microscopic levels, to no avail. Batman had been right when he said that the man had stuck to the shallow rim of Intergang; wherever Intergang went, he was sure to be in the country next door. He had no family. His friends were few and secretive. He was going to be buried in the municipal plot outside the city where homeless people and John Does were laid to rest in caskets made of plywood.

Attached to Bonaparte’s biography was Lockhardt’s, and Tim found himself opening up the video file from the airport in La Havre. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he clicked on Play.

The video box filled with what appeared to be a long spiel of TV static, the kind that came up when the cable went down. He clicked on it again, tried an abort command, then moved to hit the master switch on the entire system.

That’s when his eyes caught it. Melting out of the static was a picture in black and white, a pale figure lying on their side. Arms tied behind their back, legs folded up to their chest, head bound in what seemed to be a white bedsheet. A tiny, female form was held captive in what looked like scant black vinyl bondage gear, her wrists and ankles held with chains.

“ Tim, what…?” Barbara said behind him. He was gaping at the screen, at the little person with the muscles sticking out of her shadowed legs.

Superimposed over the image came the words:

YOU LIKE IT ROUGH, BIRD BOY??

The screen went black as his fist smashed the keyboard.
***
The basement window popped open. Once he lost his balance, it was only a matter of regaining it in mid-air, and he hit the teak floor on both feet. The flashlight he’d been holding in his mouth had rolled across the floor, casting a little oblong of silvery light onto the edge of an Oriental rug.

He took up the flashlight and went up the basement steps, pausing before the door and pressing his ear to it. Nothing. He tried the knob. Locked.

The door swung suddenly outward, and Robin found himself face-to-face with a big Southern gal called Madame.

She crossed her arms over her ample chest. “ What, may I ask, are you doing in my cellah?”

He grinned and flinched. “ Is Memoria home?”

Madame crossed the parlor. She was wearing a pleated blue satin dress and a pearl choker around her neck, her dark hair piled up on her head in sausage curls. “ Memoria has gone. And Praevidare has a gentleman caller.”

“ Where did she go?” he asked.

The woman produced from a tiny, feathered fan a black business card printed with grey lettering and handed it to him.

“ ‘Suicide Pact’?” he questioned.

“ A club downtown. You won’t know it when you see it, but just trust your instincts, darlin’,” She sat down in a giant velvet wing chair. The hem of her petticoats pulled up and showed her fishnet stockings and low boots.

“ Thanks,” he said, and started back for the basement.

“ You sure you don’t want to see Praevidare, child? He wouldn’t mind,”

“ No thanks,” he said. He disappeared into the dark.

[The_NewCatwoman]

OMGosh, what can I say? It was a throughly enjoyable connection piece. Keep going!

Not much more to it.

tNC

[Panther]

Oh, what happened to X? It's not fair stringing us along like this!! And what will Robin find?

Incredible post, great descriptions all around, especialy the channel surfing!

Hope to see more soon!

later,

[Sable Phoenix]

DoE, I love this. One can really sink one's teeth into your writing and chew on it thoughtfully, enjoying all the little nuances you've injected. You have a very tasty writing style. Your descriptions, detailed but not flowery, are wholesome and filling, like homemade potatoes and meatloaf.

How's that for mixing metaphors?

If there's an example on these boards of "show, don't tell", you are it, my friend. This was a great little episode because it really made me feel like I was there, watching it all. Keep it up.

When are you going to be professionally published, girl?

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Thanks, girl! That means a lot coming from the writer currently churning out all the vampiric loveliness that is Perfect Dark.

Panther: He he he. You know I live to confound and enrage my readers, so you'll just have to wait and see what happens to X, and what Robin encounters on his way...

Sable Phoenix: Anybody who compares my writing to meatloaf and potatoes is okay in my book. I'm so glad you enjoyed it, and as for the publishing part, even I am not sure. Thank you thank you, though, for the vote of confidence!

Thanks for all your wonderful comments, guys and ladies! And now, without further distraction...

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Daughterof_Evil
tNC: Thanks, girl! That means a lot coming from the writer currently churning out all the vampiric loveliness that is Perfect Dark.

Whooo, you sound happy! I'm only here for a moment so, keep up the great work.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Okay, this one answers the pressing question " Is X still alive??"

What do you guys think?

So far, this is the one with the highest level and most diverse objectionable content. The violence is medium, the swearing mild, but it does include a scene of same-sex seduction and drug content. That most lovely scene of debauchery was crafted for me by Tonbo, who realized my talents in objectionable content only go so far, and two new characters, Hands and Mama, are hers on loan to me. I should also mention that I have nothing against the fine people who make Pine-Sol.

Enjoy!!
***
She woke up in what seemed like a roiling piece of hell, her head swollen and eyes sealed shut with blood. A perfect line of pain followed her spine and from there spiked out along her nerves. She pulled herself to her knees and rubbed at her face, the dried blood coming off in flakes. Her vision came back a few seconds later.

It was still dark out, the glowing edge of the far-off city cut against the black sky. Behind her, the fire inside the hangar glowed through the windows. She looked down and found she’d been lying in a pool of her own blood, the wound on her temple sealed but still tender. It hurt to blink.

Slowly, she started to walk, shuffling at first with a deep ache in her hips that made it difficult to move. The further she went, the more the pain grew. She was panting within a few minutes, delving deep into the warm forest surrounding the hangar. She heard a car come to a stop behind her, shouts in Hindi, and hurried through the brush.

Someone began stalking beside her. The boy grinned a flash-white smile at her, and winked. She reached out to touch him, and he disappeared, like he had just dissolved into the forest.

A crash in the jungle behind her, and she began running, every joint and vein and bone burning like napalm ran through her. Whispers fluttered through her ears. She could smell them coming closer and closer, and time blurred, stretched, then broke altogether.

She was at the roadside on her hands and knees, breathing heavily, pink-stained sweat running off her face and arms in thick rivulets. A spot at the base of her skull throbbed and seemed to crack. She coughed up bits of red into her cupped hand, then fell over on the gravel and pulled her cloak around her. Above her, the sky pulled apart in hunks like broken glass.

It was awhile before she got up again, and began trudging down the road. She concentrated on one foot in front of the other, the crunch of the stones beneath the soles of her boots, the lip of tar that ran a ragged ribbon on her left. The city was still there, just above her line of sight. She knew if she could just get there, and find out where she was, she would know where to go next.

The buzz in her skull increased to a piston-roar, and it at once became impossible to continue. Still and straight, she stood at the edge of the road and shut her eyes.

Her voice came to her like a carnal hiss. “ Care to dance, little girl?”

X opened her eyes.
***
Robin opened his eyes.

Outside, it was an ash-grey building that had once been an industrial savings and loan bank. It still bore the giant billboard, faded now, and barely readable. He had come in through the greenhouse skylights, sprayed over with matte black paint and secured with an intricate scaffolding of stainless steel bolts and bars. A glass cutter had allowed him the two-foot hole through which he descended via jump cable.

A blast of laser light caught him in the eye, and he grabbed fiercely to the cable. Below, he listened to the heartbeat thrum of the crowds, caught in their freakish bursts of dance as the lights flushed over them. Flat television screens were bolted to every surface; above the bar, around the dance floor, up in the rafters where he now crouched in silence. They played fractures of light and imaging, old Godzilla movies and soap operas and sci-fi shows and what he figured was pieces of weird fetish porn. For a moment, what appeared to be the diagrams of an automobile flashed across the screens and was then gone.

The dance floor was a sunken pit, and the bar tables lined it on elevated areas ringed with grey metal railings that looked to be plastered with tiny holographic stickers. He saw a gleam of silver-white hair and hopped from rafter to rafter till he was above her head. She was sitting at a table in the corner with a woman who had a shaved, tattooed head and wore plaid pants and go-go boots with a low-dipping black corset and a black jabot knotted around her pale throat.

Breathing carefully, he prepared to fall.
***
X was instantly standing above a tumultuous wave of ravers dancing in the psychotic flicker of the lasers. She slowed her breathing. The music was low and pounding. She let her heartbeat match it carefully.

A thin, tanned hand circled her waist fingers slide across her abdomen, and began running up and down her tight stomach. A body moved behind her dancing and swaing to the music. X was still, and the hand ran up her ribs and over her flat chest. She was emotionless, cold. Another hand ran down the side of her white silk covered thigh.

She pulled roughly away and turned around. “ What do you want?”

A smile out of the dark. A young woman stood in the bits of light, her moves seamlessly confident. She was Indian, that was sure, with large dark eyes and black hair pulled back in a tight, high braid. Her lips were painted black, there was a single, staring eye scribed onto her forehead with gold and red paint.

She pressed herself against her. X backed up till her back hit a vertical rafter. The woman was wearing a fitted red blouse open all the way down her tan chest and black leather pants, no bra. She moved with X and put both hands against the girl’s shoulders; leaning in, she ran her tongue across the ridge of X’s ear.

“ Get away from me,” X said, and pushed her off.

The woman smiled. “ Shy, are you? You don’t dance?”

X breathed heavily. “ No. Go away.”

“ You’re feisty,” The woman smiled a feral wolf grin. “ I like that. I am Hands.”

“ Where am I?!” growled X.

“ Within,” Hands replied as she began to dance again. “ This flesh of yours is deeper than you think.”

“ What have you done to me!?”

“ Made you aware. You dream the memories of someone else.” A flicker of light illuminated all the details of Hands’ face: the dark, upturned lines drawn around her eyes, the finely hammered cheekbones, little gold lotus blossoms in each ear.

“ I want to go back,” the X said.

“ What, back to your metal-flesh? Something that has caused you so much pain? You are dying, X, don’t you know?” Hands stopped dancing and began to undo the white silk sari X was wearing.

“ I’ve died before,” X said truthfully, shutting her eyes, feeling things she knew she did not have parts for anymore.

“ Abandon that body, X, and come to us! We will hold you forever like this, in our embrace, and never let you break or rust or die.” Hands murmured in her ear as she began to nibble at the nape of X’s neck.

X opened her eyes and looked at her. “ But it’s not real.”

“ That matters not!” Hands insisted and stepped back, outstretching her hand. “ The experience is enough!”

X turned and looked down at the people dancing, their bodies and brains forever locked in the hellish waltz of their faux-life.

Hands reached further for her, grinning still as if she knew her answer. “ Don’t you want to live, X?”

She tipped forward. “ No.”

She fell, the second time in so many days, hours, months, and hit the dancers below with a very loud crack.
***
Robin’s feet and hands touched down on the hammered steel table perfectly, just as he’d calculated twenty feet above. The bald woman didn’t waste any time pulling a giant semi-automatic on him, pointing it squarely between his eyes.

“ Move and you get it, hero,” she said with a thick, crude British accent. Both wrists glittered with studded black cuffs, and when she talked he got a sight of her badly managed teeth.

“ Relax, Pip,” Memoria said, standing and placing a delicate hand on the gun. She was dressed in a long, tight black vest and a sheer, ruffled black blouse secured tightly around her neck with a black-shell cameo. Knickers, but with fishnet stockings and low boots with buckles on them.

Pip replaced the gun on a thigh holster and turned to leave. There was a large, red dragon tattooed across the back of her skull.

“ What is it?” Memoria asked, getting up and crossing her arms.

Robin climbed off the table and stood to face her. She was as tall as him.

“ This place isn’t your style,” he grumbled.

She picked a piece of lint off his neck. He brushed her off. “ I’m collecting information,” she told him.

“ Think it’s funny what you sent me today?” he asked.

“ What?” she questioned dully.

“ The picture! That…girl! Some weird bondage thing…it was all you…Trying to get to me,”

“ I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, going to the bar. She gave a complicated hand gesture to the bartender, and he started in on a drink for her.

“ Like hell,” he said.

“ Not my fashion to hack your systems,” The bartender handed over the drink, and gave Robin a cross look. “ It’s too juvenile.”

“ Then who else?”

She shrugged and downed her martini, then slammed the glass down on the clear, yellow resin counter. He stared at the counter closer and realized that stuck in the translucent epoxy were tiny instruments of torture. A pair of tongs, forceps, an eight-foot whip, a length of chain.

“ Someone with a lovely sense of humor,” she said, smacking her lips. Her white eyes gleamed weirdly; he had a feeling she was drunk or high or something, either chemical or information.

“ This is messed up,” he said. “ It came up when I accessed the video file of that airport in La Havre.”

“ They invaded and tagged it,” she told him. “ I’d check the systems and purge, if I were you.”

“ But…why?”

She slid away from the bar and down the platform out into the crowd of dancers. Like liquid, they moved away in a single mass, and she was the only one on the floor. She danced silently, eyes almost shut, turning in tight circles around an axis only she could see. Paused for a moment and gestured for him to come over.

He stepped away from the bar and onto the floor. That was when it happened. The lights stopped strobing, and went dead. The televisions in the walls and ceiling were the only light, their white faces glowing blank. The music went on, a throbbing static beat spliced through with an electronic voice that spoke words he couldn’t understand.

And her.

First the face, pale and thin, cut through with green eyes that were vibrant like acid, the entire sharp image framed with dark hair razored in sloppy chunks around her head. Then pale shoulders, and narrow frame, sheathed in a white cotton slip that just barely hit her knees and shook with grey shapes when she moved. She was barefoot and dancing, her whole body cut into different pieces on different televisions.

Robin was paralyzed at first. Her image was hypnotic, the white of skin against the further white of the background, the black lips open like she was singing to herself, eyes shut. She was keeping perfect time with the music, arms and legs swaying gently.

Then she turned and looked demurely to the bottom of the screen, and pressed her finger to her lips for silence.

The music shut off and he was running.
***
Bound in white. She opened her eyes and took a shuddering breath, her dry throat searching for the words. It was a strong, strange feeling that had brought her back: the tart smell of patchouli incense, the smooth of her skin on just washed sheets. The sensations of simple luxuries. She inhaled the scent of a human in the sueded darkness of the room, and the moment she did, a large, cool hand flattened across her brow. Her name was Mama, and her smell was vanilla and something spicy like curry or pepper.

“ Good morning, child,” Her voice was pleasant and soothing.

X stared at the ceiling and said nothing. Her whole body yearned toward the silence, the stillness that came only from death. Mama picked something up from the table next to X’s bed and held it up. It was a grey disk, wafer-thin, its adhesive side covered in microscopic layers of pink circuitry.

“ This is a trode. It made you hallucinate last night. We found you on the road early this morning; Hands told me you would be there.”

X was quiet. Her eyes calmly took in the plain white stucco of the ceiling, the air vent directly above her head the only thing marring its perfection.

Mama moved something on the table. She was an Indian woman, quite large, though she carried her bulk in a way that suggested it was all muscle and reserve weaponry. Her dark hair was boy-short around her head, and there was a red bindi between her eyebrows. So she was married. She wore the top half of an olive-colored sari, but her pants were army supply store grade, and her shoes were big black combat boots with grey laces.

X continued to stare at the ceiling. Mama smiled at her and left the room.
***
X stayed catatonic for three days, trapped within the pale, immobile wrappings of her body, staring at the ceiling that became a seamless part of her dream-world. Inexplicably, images and noises faded from the tactile neighborhood along her skin and made her flush with the feelings and emotions of other people. She was paralyzed.

Her hallucinations came and went from the shadows. At times, the boy in red sat in a teak chair near the door and spoke to her in cryptic Japanese. Voices buzzed within the shell of her brain in different languages, with the warm tones of familiars or the frostbitten terms used between business partners. She had lived a thousand lives, and they had now all converged upon her.

It was morning on the fourth day before she seemed to reach consciousness again. She sat up in bed and pushed off the gaudy orange sheets. Someone had bound her body in bandaging, then thrown over it a white cotton chemise with satin ribbon trimming the edge. Her entire head was encapsulated in loops of gauze and knots of red-soaked sponge.

She stared around the room. Oak bookcases stuffed with crumbling texts and warm leather-bounds lined the walls, and the open windows were sheathed in red curtains with gold patterns along the hem. The floor, as she put her bare feet upon it, was light parquet thrown with a couple of drab dhurrie rugs.

She wandered out into the hall, more parquet along a slightly spotted tan wall decorated with doctor’s anatomical posters in gilt frames. There were more doors, painted red with big brass doorknobs, but they were all locked. Toward the end of the hallway there was a red-painted staircase that led down to some lower story and a door that was painted flame-orange. Beside the staircase was a slatted pair of folding double doors drawn partially closed. X went to them and tossed them open.

The breakfast table went silent. It was rimmed with about a dozen people of every conceivable race and nationality; two Azanian men toward one end, a cluster of dove-garbed Muslim women next to them, an Afghani girl in a red headscarf, a French couple all in black, a tattooed American man, and a family of Chinese. Bowls of muesli sat half-eaten before them, little spears of browned toast lying on periwinkle plates in the middle of the table and pots of chai on ragged potholders at either end.

Mama was in the corner, next to the white porcelain stove, and she rose in a fluid manner as X entered. A gold stud glinted in the left nostril of her nose.

“ Good to see you up,” the woman said, smiled. She took X’s wrapped hand and led her out of the kitchen, down the hall to a bathroom. Sat the girl on the bathtub and began to clip away the stained rags tied around her head.

“ I was shot,” X said dreamily, “ in the head.”

“ Yes,” Mama confirmed. “ You’d bled an awful lot before we found you. Luckily your metallic skull kept there from being any serious injury.”

“ How did you find me?”

“ Hands told us. I don’t much like the girl, but she’s useful sometimes,” She unwrapped a line of crimson gauze from X’s skull and threw it in the trash. “ Your wound has closed nicely. Be careful, though, your grade nanites are illegal in India.”

X blinked. The bathroom was tiled in yellow, with a spotted mirror on the wall over the cracked sink. The tub was avocado green, and there was a curtained window over the toilet to the side.

“ We analyzed a few blood samples,” Mama explained. “ Your nanites are very well-designed, probably not from Earth. And your tox-screen says you’ve been exposed to industrial chemicals lately.”

“ Yes,”

“ Someone injected you with Pine-Sol.”

X remembered the clear yellow vial back in China.

“ You’re also a Macchina addict.”

“ Did you check my file on that?” X asked crossly. The withdrawal still burned in her bones. She yearned just to taste its presence in her blood.

“ No reason to be snotty,” Mama said, brushing out X’s limp black locks with a soft-bristled baby brush. The wound on her temple was still painful, and apparently the bullet had blasted through some of her hair, leaving her a half-forehead of charred bangs. “ You won’t find any Macchina out here. It’s rare, and no one knows quite how to make it.”

X mentioned nothing about cleansing her system. It had never occurred to her to kick Macchina; it had become apart of her, like the metal bionics under her skin and the battle memories of the life left behind her.

Mama sat back and nodded toward the kitchen. “ Those people are friends. They stop by on their way to their destinations, like a tradition. Assassins, burglars, anarchists. You might call them revolutionaries, if Intergang indoctrinated you to.

“ But you must be feeling pretty grimy, so I’ll let you take a shower,” She got up and began listing things off. “ Soap, shampoo, towels, I’ll leave you some clothes in a second. Your suit was pretty torn up, but we can fix it, and until then you can borrow some clothes. I’ve stored all your guns and ammunition.”

Mama went to the door. “ When you’re done, give me a call and I’ll fix you up some food.” She shut the door and her footsteps waned down the hall.

X immediately locked the door and stood there, but her desire for cleanliness outweighed her suspicion, and she began to undo her clothes. Sliding the chemise over her head, she noticed her back in the mirror. It was brutally sectioned with deep, grey scars, a solid line of scar tissue following her spine from neck to tailbone. A little bit of red still peppered the hairline around her temple.

She sat in the shower for what seemed like hours, letting the warmth seep back into her a second at a time. It still seemed like a nightmare, the dark, lengthless days of torture and pain. But the evidence of its reality was herself, in the pale muscles and deep scars.

Finally, she scrubbed off the layers of dirt, rinsed the grease out of her hair, came to notice gnarled lines drawn across her scalp. Lobotomy, like a clean, white slate.

She heard the window creak open as she shut off the squealing chrome taps. Brushed a chunk of sloppy wet hair behind her ear.

Out in the kitchen, Mama was stacking dishes in the sink when the bathroom door exploded outward in a nimbus of tiny wooden splinters. A thin, lanky body hit the parquet in the hallway and rolled till it met the slatted kitchen door with a thud.

X was standing in the bathroom doorway, a green towel knotted around her strong form. She was still dripping wet.

Mama sighed and went over to check the body. He was a man, narrow and American.

The woman tsked. “ Still alive. I’ll take care of this, you finish your shower,” She pulled from the waist of her army pants a long knife and proceeded to gore the man open on the kitchen floor.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Awwwwwwwwwwww, I could've swore she and Robin were about to reunite. Damn.

Oh well. Thanks for the new post.

Keep up the excellent work!

tNC

[witness]

I was hoping that you wouldn't be so silly as to killing X near the beginning of this story. Didn't you do this in "Shadow of Angels" as well? Anyways, loving all the description here! Although some of it was a little too gory for me, but hey whatever floats your boat! I, too, thought that X and Robin were going to reunite right then and there! Nasty way of stinging us along again. As always, eagerly awaiting your next chapter!

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: C'mon, you don't think I'd start the story off with a reunion, did you? Where's the angst, the struggle? No, I'd much rather trail you guys along until you get so sick of me you threaten to boycott, and THEN maybe you'll see a reunion. Sorry, it's just the way my sick mind works.

witness: I was wondering where you'd gotten off to! And yes, by this time I've killed X several times, and she has of course been resurrected, and you too will have to wait for the reunion. Nah nah. Sorry, guys. I know this sucks.

Thanks also to Panther, who encouraged me by way of email not to just kill everyone off when I had writer's block. And Tonbo, for creating Mama, Hands, Saru, Hiramiaku, and the Khasekemwys. Love and peace!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Hi, everyone! How are you all doing? I'm glad I got such a positive response from the last post. It's all really thanks to Tonbo and Panther, who have been encouraging me from the start, and helping me with the yummy evil parts.

This part takes place the night after Robin visits the club Suicide Pact, so I've reached backward in time about three or four days. This part also has some graphic violence and maybe a little swearing. I should also mention that the character Cyrus Vyskanti belongs to Tonbo Rosso, and like her other characters, is on loan to me. Thanks, and enjoy!
***
He didn’t realize he was in Britain until he was there, standing at Hyde Park near Buckingham Palace with a pamphlet on London in one hand and a tweed duffel in the other. It was a bright, somewhat warm day, and the sunlight bit straight through his black trench coat and down to the pricey clothes he’d bought with Monsieur La Touga’s money.

He decided to sample the local cuisine, so he found a pub and ate as much fish and chips as humanly possible. The bar was dim and muggy, seemingly plastered over with a veneer of cigarette haze. Dated pictures covered the oak walls, and the three men that occupied the room with him looked more like permanent fixtures than customers. He sighed and left. London had never seemed quite so boring than without Hiramiaku.

The inn he stayed in was cheap and dark, on an out-of-the-way street filled with pubs and motels of shady repute. The desk clerk winced at his incompetent English, but brightened when he produced the international cash card. He remembered chucking La Touga’s credit card into the Thames earlier in the day after finding the new one stashed in the locker at Heathrow. Money and means were the way La Touga had paid Saru for his cooperation, but it all felt hollow now, and futile. Saru wasn’t sleeping, had a hard time concentrating, wasn’t even motivated to eat the usually monstrous quantities he was capable of. He had ceased to be, and just sort of died into the shell-like body of a ghost, a money-trail, a credit card.

The TV had satellite, so that was okay. He stretched out on the bed with the blinds drawn and watched hour upon hour of skinny Englishmen playing cricket up in Camden. It took him a few minutes to understand the rules of the game, but he found watching it hanging upside down from the ceiling fan helped a little.

The first place Hiramiaku had ever taken him was Venice. He was thirteen and blind to the ways of the outside world, stunned at once by the girl who took him and called him younger brother. She wouldn’t stop with that for the first few days, so he ended up reciprocating and calling her older sister. They made a blood pact on it, promising to always stay together.

Blood pact. Saru unbuttoned his dress shirt and looked at the top of his right arm, where the two shuriken had lodged in his flesh. It was completely healed, scarred over like a wound inflicted years before and then forgotten. The nanites in X’s system had been transferred into him in their pact, clasping slashed hand to slashed hand. He was imbued with her power to heal.

He grinned nastily and ordered a pizza, stretching out on the bed. He –and, in effect, X- would be alright. It would just take a little getting used to, that was all.
***
Luthor was patched in through the live-feed camera hooked up to the laptop in the corner. The room was all slippery white, people in decontaminate suits, filtration masks and clear plastic goggles crowded around a steel table in the middle. A circle of halogen tubing lit everything in a cool, snowy light. There was a quiet, sucking sound as they pulled out the trake tube, then coughing.

“ How is X004?” Luthor asked.

“ Top condition, sir,” a tech replied. “ Breathing, heart beating.”

“ You’ve taken care of the others?”

“ I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Jefferson about that,” the tech said.

“ Jefferson!” Luthor shouted. A single form separated itself from the blob of white in the middle of the room. Through the gap they left, Luthor caught a flash of tan skin and a blue tube being pulled from a wrist socket.

“ Yes, sir?” She was a pale woman, with little more than cornflower blue eyes and a spattering of freckles showing.

“ The others? Were they properly taken care of?” he asked, dark face lowered close to the screen.

“ Yes, sir.”

“ Dismissed,” He waved at the screen, gold ring flickering in pixelated form. He was dressed, like always, conservatively: black suit, white dress shirt with a high collar secured by an onyx stud overlaid with the gold LexCorp insignia. His head was perfectly round, like a tan, shined egg.

“ Vale?” he called. The squat man laid down his scalpel and forceps and shuffled over to the corner. His elbow-high rubber gloves were drenched in red. He blinked his tiny, dark eyes through the goggles.

“ Take charge there in Germany,” Luthor ordered. “ I have things to do here.”

“ If I may ask, sir,” Vale began, “ have you found anything of the whereabouts of X001?”

Luthor lowered his brow. “ No. I’ve put out a reward—that should be motivation enough for them. But go back to work. I want to see this one up and running in a few days.”

“ Yes, sir,” He turned eagerly back for the table.

In Zurich, Luthor shut off the live-feed camera and sat dully back as the makeup lady dusted the last bits of coppery powder under his eyes. The lack of sleep was beginning to show in the deep ruts of his face, a face that until then had seemed to defy age with inhuman properties. He wouldn’t be able to get a good night’s sleep again till the girl was safely back in captivity.

Sighing, he stood and started for the stage.
***
“…in Zurich, last night, Lex Luthor received a warm welcome from the locals at the site of his new biotech geodesics program when spectators began throwing rotten fruit and unfurling signs from nearby buildings reading, FrankenLuthor Get Out. Though it was a relatively isolated incident, the program had been garnering threats from environmental extremist groups for LexCorp’s liberal usage of genetic engineering in its agricultural studies. No groups have claimed responsibility, but spokespeople have announced it was simply local outrage…” The impact of the news didn’t shade Summer Gleason’s face as she moved on to another topic, gladly and with a seasoned segway.

Tim stuffed down a square of toast, barely chewing and not tasting, and followed it with a generous gulp of orange juice. His homework wasn’t done. He could feel the circles of insomnia form beneath his eyes, the rapid jerks of his muscles in a tantrum of his synapses. The club from the night before last still lingered on his brain, and sabotaged him. They had been working against him all along, trying to get to him, to break him down into their pawn. For once he felt what Bruce must feel every day and night.

If it wasn’t bad enough, his homework load had increased because of his struggling grades. He was already in the remedial programs, all of the leg-up services the private school could afford, and he was taking the extra work his teachers gave him every weekend. It didn’t mean he was doing it. Every time he finally understood something, there was another thing to stand in his way to a passing grade.

Barbara had spent all night on the computer in the Batcave and had announced in the fragile hours of the morning, as he came in from rounds, that she had traced both hacker attacks. The first, the Inferno Job, as they began referring to it, had been carried out from Havana, Cuba. The second, which they never referred to in any form, had been carried out somewhere in southern Pakistan. The video from La Havre had been erased completely, sucked out when the intruder left. With it went his evidence that she was still alive.

Alfred leaned over the boy and poured orange juice into his glass. “ Cut yourself shaving, Master Tim?” the butler joked.

“ Hgh?” was all Tim could manage. Alfred knew better than anybody how underdeveloped Tim was; he barely matched many of the girls his age.

“ The bandage on your neck,” Alfred explained.

“ There’s no bandage on my neck,” Tim said, rubbing along his hairline for proof. His fingers glanced off something flat and smooth, flush with his skin. He ripped it off, and it stung.

It was a two-inch disc, layered by adhesive, blue micro-circuitry on one side and flesh-toned matte plastic on the other. The whole package was tissue-thin, and if closely observed would seem like nothing more than a nicotine-withdrawal patch.

The boy was up from the table in a flash, nearly knocking over his chair in his haste to exit the dining room. Bruce, at the other end of the monstrous table, lowered his paper to watch him go.

Barbara had resigned from the computer earlier, and Tim found it empty now as he put the patch into the analysis chute of the machine and focused the microscope in on it.

“ Computer,” he said, then paused, “ and be nice to me this time, but what is this?”

About seventy different files on the Mad Hatter sprang up in an instant, but they were all shaded into the background by the most recent, which fell to the top of the pile. It was a report from India on a warehouse found full of young teenagers, all dead and bearing what street-combers were calling “trodes”. Like the Mad Hatter’s microchips, they sought to control the individual, but instead of being nothing but complete subservience, the brain was flooded with electronic signals that released pleasure hormones. It was a brain-drug, and highly concentrated doses led to death by cranial hemorrhage or suicidal/homicidal impulse.

“ So this is a trode?” Tim questioned it.

“ By all accounts, yes,” Bruce said behind him. “ You need to get to school.”

Tim nodded and yawned. He suddenly fell face-forward onto the Batcomputer’s keyboard, and the machine beeped in protest.
***
Tim woke up around noon, in his bed, the grey sheets drawn tight up his chin. The curtains had been bisected neatly to allow in a single needle of sunlight.

He sat up, still in his school clothes, he noticed, though his jacket and vest were folded neatly on the spindly chair that sat perpetually next to his bed as if waiting for the someone meant to tuck him in at night. What luck, to fall so completely asleep as to warrant a day off from school.

He got up and paced the room, contemplating his escape to the Batcave. Every raw detail and nubile thought came back in a slow, comforting wave. At once he remembered Memoria’s chance to plant the trode on him: she had brushed some lint off his costume in the bar. That was all it took; he knew the rules of slight of hand.

The Manor was big anyway, and Alfred was one man. Tim sneaked out of his bedroom and down the hall, down the stairs, across the massive foyer and into the library. The clock was planted firm against the wall, and slid away with a gentle hiss.

The trode had disappeared from the analysis chute, and Tim cursed as he sat down, picking up the computer’s main program and accessing the files by hand from the history. It was a natural reflex to him, like any one of the fight moves choreographed into his nightlife.

Eventually wonder settled on him. It was an ingenious hand that could manipulate its way into the Batcomputer’s system, and the mind attached would probably be one in a billion to even find the right accesses to do it, so why hadn’t they done more damage? They could have scoured each hero’s personal file, learned their methods, duties, fears, even their alter egos. There were hundreds of thousands of files in this computer that any person on the world at any given moment would kill to have. What persuaded them to show restraint? Was their quest so narrow-minded that they would pass up an opportunity that might never come again?

A tiny, red box blinked on the screen. Tim, at first thinking it was some security alarm, got up to run, but sat back down. It wasn’t an alarm, but a reminder for Bruce that his meeting with Vyskanti was this afternoon, and that he better not miss it.

Tim got up, anyway, to get his jacket.
***
“ I’m sorry Mr. Vyskanti couldn’t make it,” Bruce said, taking the polished granite steps with an even stride. “ I was really hoping I’d meet him in person.”

The stranger matched his sweeping gait with his own, and Bruce knew immediately that it was the toned body of an assassin that worked next to him.

“ I really am very sorry,” Saito said with untarnished English. “ It is unfortunate that Mr. Vyskanti has some family business to tend to, and it was impossible for him to come.”

“ It seems he is a secretive man,”

“ When you have an empire such as he, it is important to guard that empire, right Mr. Wayne?” Saito was as tall as Bruce, with narrow shoulders and an all-out wiry frame. His face was smooth and sharp, eyes black, dark brown hair drawn back in a helmet-like wave over his skull. A gold hoop gleamed in both ears, matching the gold ring on his left hand. His suit was impeccable black pinstripe, collected and neat without a hint of either conformity or liberalism.

“ Of course,” Bruce conceded. Saito had no bodyguard, confirming the suspicion that he was the bodyguard. Bruce himself, due to his own corporate policy, was met and swept through by an armed guard every floor. He had to keep up the appearance that he was at least some of the coward he wanted to portray.

As Saito reached to open the door on the thirty-fourth story, Bruce noticed the tiny swatch of inked skin just over his back collar. It was gone in an instant, hidden away behind the collar, but it signified something to Bruce as he went into the office.

Saito was with the yakuza.

Vyskanti was with the yakuza.

It made too much sense, and Bruce silently derided himself for not realizing before.

The office was surrounded with sweeping, floor-to-ceiling windows that gave them a panoramic view of the city. There was a semicircle of tan leather couches at the window, and standing beside them, a man in a grey suit. He turned and nodded at them.

“ Kirk,” Bruce said, clicking on the glad smile. He hated Kirk Priesly. He was smug and presumptuous, with a shock of artificial red hair and about ten years’ worth of laser surgery on his face.

“ Bruce,” They shook hands. “ Good to see you’re out from under the FBI’s thumb,”

“ Me too,” Bruce admitted, grinning. He felt like an idiot whenever he smiled.

They sat down on the couches and watched as a police blimp edged over the horizon.

“ Vyskanti didn’t show up?” Priesly asked.

“ I came in his place,” Saito said. “ I’m Yukito Saito, Mr. Vyskanti’s associate.”

“ A family emergency, I hear,” Priesly said. “ If I offend you, forgive me. Was it his son this time?”

Saito visibly constricted. “ No. His granddaughter,”

“ Poor dear,”

“ If we could get on to the business at hand,” Bruce said seriously.

Priesly sighed. “ Yes, Bruce? What is it you cooked up for me this time?”

“ Priesly Aerospace,” was all he said.

“ What about it? Just because company stock is going up, you’re suspicious?”

“ I believe what Mr. Wayne is saying is that your company’s resurrection is sudden,” Saito filled in. “ Last summer your stock was at barely a few cents, now it is two hundred dollars a share.”

“ We have some new designs that are going to up production by thirty percent,” Priesly said.

“ Are you sure it had nothing to do with Lex Luthor?” Bruce asked.

Priesly smiled. “ He gave me some pointers, that’s all.”

“ More like he’s using your company as a puppet front to drive out aeronautics competition,” Saito said.

“ Double-teaming me, guys? Sorry, I’m not up for that unless it’s two chicks in a tub of pudding,” He stood. “ I’m going to have to cut this little meeting short. I have a credit briefing in thirty.”

“ Fine,” Bruce stood as well. “ But you’re going to have to answer to the Senate when this gets out of hand,”

“ Alright, then, I’ll do that, Bruce,” They shook on it, a hard, grasping gesture like they were trying to cause each other pain. “ And I’ll be sure to mention your heroism when I do,”

“ Look-“ It didn’t even come out of Saito’s mouth before the window shattered inward, the glass flickering in the grey Gotham sunlight. Cat-soft black feet on the floor, then up, in a jump. A bright flash. An androgynous figure all in black somersaulted backward out of the broken window.

Bruce looked up. Saito was standing at the furthest couch, arms covering his face. He ran to the window and looked.

“ No sign!” he cried. “ Like they just disappeared!”

Bruce wasn’t paying attention. He stared at Priesly, who stood completely still, face locked in the same expression he’d had when shaking Bruce’s hand.

A hair-fine line of red circled his neck. Bruce could feel and smell the warm blood spattered on his face. Then Priesly’s body fell over onto the floor, his head rolling about a meter away.
***
Tim, for some reason, was standing outside the yellow tape marking the police line. He hadn’t even thought to tell them he was Bruce Wayne’s ward, he just stood there with his shirt untucked and his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a battered leather jacket three sizes too big for him; one of the articles Dick left when he’d gone off to Europe.

They met him a block down and picked him up off the curb. He slid in beside Bruce and slouched in his seat.

“ Playing hooky?” Bruce asked.

“ Not technically,” the boy replied. He shifted in the giant jacket; it still squeaked, even though it was so old even Dick had thought to leave it behind.

“ Why didn’t you go to class after you woke up?”

Tim scratched the back of his neck. “ I did some research on the computer.”

“ More about the trode?”

“ So you know about them?”

Bruce nodded. “ They’re utilized by an Indian woman named Hands. She’s been labeled a complete and utter psychotic by Interpol, and most of her exploits are funded by a lucrative trust she skimmed off of a corporation. So far she’s been linked to six hundred deaths in India alone, and those were the ones she didn’t manage to bribe the officials on.”

“ Is she an assassin?”

“ No. She isn’t paid for what she does; it’s all out of pure pleasure. The trodes aren’t just for killing, either. Like with you, the trode used wasn’t powerful enough to deliver a fatal dose of endorphins to kill. Somebody wanted to use you.”

“ Memoria,” Tim said.

Bruce quirked an unapproving eyebrow at him. “ You sought the Khasekemwys out without telling me.”

“ I couldn’t. It was…”

“ Personal, I know.”

“ So this Hands lady is trying to use me through the Khasekemwys,”

“ Not exactly,” Bruce said. “ Trodes might have been Hands’ invention, but they’re manufactured under her name everywhere on the planet. It would be easy for someone to just buy some to use with you. In this case, Memoria Khasekemwy probably stole some to use especially for that purpose.”

“ You know them that well?” Tim asked dubiously.

“ Of course. They’ve been around since I started as Batman…”

Tim rose his eyebrows. “ Even when they were little?”

“ Tim, they’ve been the same age for about twenty years now.”

“ And you always used them for information and stuff?”

“ Occasionally.” That was all he would say, and Tim felt it.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Then Priesly’s body fell over onto the floor, his head rolling about a meter away.


*gag* Ewwwwwww. And I thought I was gory. Okay maybe I am, but this definitely put me back a bit.

NEway,

Yay! Shiny shiny shiny Lex Luthor's head!

Saru's okie-dokie. Good, because I wouldn't like it if he died and all.

This was a great part as par usual.

What's the deal with Bruce and the twins? Where's X? I'm sure it'll come in time, hopefully not months down the line, but I'll be patient.

Bye bye,

tNC

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Daughterof_Evil
tNC: C'mon, you don't think I'd start the story off with a reunion, did you? Where's the angst, the struggle? No, I'd much rather trail you guys along until you get so sick of me you threaten to boycott, and THEN maybe you'll see a reunion. Sorry, it's just the way my sick mind works.

I'd never boycott, I'd just request more replies to fill your time so that you can pretend you're not putting it off.:D

[Panther]

Ew ew ew ew ew ew! Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

Aach, dismemberment is definitly number 10 on my personal gross out factor. (were you *ahem* inspired by last week's ER?)

other than that, a lot of good points in this post and - argh, gotta go

later,

[Sable Phoenix]

Okay, this installment confused me a bit. Who's this Priesly guy that he would be worth killing in such a manner? The assassin sounded like X, but it can't be her, so it must be X004. So why did Luthor pull Priesly's company out of the dumps and then off him? Hostile takeover? Not his style.

A slightly confused Sable Phoenix waiting to find out how this all plays in to everything else. Geez, like the story wasn't difficult enough to follow already.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks to all of you guys for the posts, and I'm sorry about grossing you out and making the story more complicated. That will be remedied shortly, I swear.

tNC: Like the new avatar, and I'm glad the shininess of Luthor's head brought you some joy. It's just my way of saying thank you for the continuing loyalty.

Panther: Actually, I wrote this part a few months ago, though I have to admit I screamed while watching ER two weeks ago, in spite of myself. It was just so sudden. Now I just feel sorry for Dr. Romano. Thanks though, for the loveliness that is your encouragement.

Sable Phoenix: I'm sorry that you're confused, I admit I myself get confused once and awhile. It'll straighten out, I swear. The complexity of the current plot serves to cover up certain things that are going on that will only come into play later. So basically, I'm beating around the bush. Thank you for putting up with me.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Yay, more confusion! This post happens three weeks later, and sort of pseudo-details a massive technological turnaround on Earth. It's meant to be a sort of genesis for X, a proper backdrop for her weird self-technology. It will probably confuse (hell, this whole thing befuddles me, it's like I don't even write it anymore, it evolves of itself), but that'll straighten out later into some kind of linear sense.

This post has some minor violence, minor drug content, massive hallucinations, and an ending I might be flogged for. Please read and respond. Thank you all for your continuing patience.

Author's note: Bhang lassis is a very potent Indian drink made from bhang, or Indian marijuana, and a salwar kamise is a long tunic and baggy pants worn by Muslim women in India. An asura is a Hindu demon, a deva is a Hindu god, and a bodhisattva is a Buddhist saint, or one who can reach nirvana (ultimate peace where one becomes a Buddha) but restrains themself so they can help others reach nirvana. The bodhi tree is a tree that Siddartha Guatama sat beneath when he reached nirvana and became the Buddha.
***
In a span of three or four weeks, the world changed. The warm, neon tones of the revolution overcame the media, the technological, the fashionable, and slowly transformed it all in what might be considered the shortest term of evolution ever. It was impossible not to see the mutation, but at the same time, easy to pass it by, because the people became as altered as the world. Technologies shrank and modified, and at the mast of all that was new was Lex Luthor, providing what the new humans needed.

Direct infusions of technology were the inoculation for the world’s ills. The wires of the Internet spiraled from major centers like America and Europe into others like South America and Africa. Thousands of new satellites burst into space, forming a halo around the planet. It was inspiring. The song of the change was electronic, spoken through TVs and computers and the minds of the young, who were most enamored with the new order. Revolution came to mind.

As the world changed, Intergang went with it. Declaring an industrial portion of Berlin as theirs, German Intergang set up a completely separate society, fit with laws and sanctions. The image they pioneered was the metal, bionic arm raising a revolutionary’s flag to a dark background. Mullen had disappeared. For now, they were at peace, and the world was lolled into believing it.
***
She marched in an Eight Trigrams circle around the roof, hands swift and hard against unseen enemies. Torso dipped low in a high kick that rippled every muscle from her ankle up her back to her neck.

She had been with Mama for four weeks, this whole time never even blinking an eye in sleep. Every night was spent up here on the roof, practicing her techniques beneath the giant turning shadow of a windmill meant to generate free power for the building. Her bare feet skipped over hardened tar and gravel, her baggy salwar kamise catching the light wind and fluttering about her. She stopped a moment to strip the long shirt off, exposing a black tank top she wore underneath and the grey scars it was meant to conceal.

Mama was married to a man named Papa, a Pakistani former sniper who had come to India to escape persecution in his own country. It was a marriage of convenience that held no special sentiments; they were only partners in crime, and it showed. He was a somewhat bald, fat, lecherous man and she was a tough, wise lady with no patience for disrespectful males. He steered clear of X, for reasons the maid told her had something to do with X’s paleness reminding him of a devil.

She melted from Eight Trigrams into Samozaschitya Bez Oruzhiya with a single move, hunching low like a sumo wrestler and then rolling onto her back and over her head in a manner used to accept heavy blows. Two strikes forward with the palms out, then a kick that transformed into an impromptu flip.

X could feel herself getting stronger every day, and even though the voices buzzed at the bottom of her brain and corroded her consciousness, her mind became sharper than a blade. Remembering her katana, she swept its scabbard up off the roof with her foot and unsheathed it in midair between her fists. Feint, strike, block, block, thrust. Spinning on tiptoe, she struck out in a complicated pattern imprinted on her brain like codes on a computer.

The air tasted like Macchina. Words failed to describe her new elevated plane of psychosis, which she figured was the closest any human had ever come to nirvana. The voices of asuras and devas and bhodisatvas were funneled directly into her skull, guiding her through the soup of vast visual hallucination that was this place called India.

It didn’t even matter that the Macchina wasn’t tangible anymore. Mama had offered her entire proffers of drugs to choose from to fill the gap in her synapses, but other than the occasional bhang lassis in the mornings, X was clean. The cleansing had taken weeks of pain; her muscles caught in sudden, severe spasms, her mind going static-white, vomiting blood, clawing at the bed-dressings, ripping up the floorboards. She still had to fix the parquet in the bedroom Mama let her rent.

She had almost killed the maid one day, thinking she was an Intergang member sent to get her. The maid was a tiny girl named Radni, skinny and tall, about X’s age. She wore a white and teal uniform and went almost everywhere barefoot, both ankles adorned with gold bangles. Her black hair was flipped up at the edges in a ridiculous parody of an American ‘50s housewife. She had started to pick the laundry up off the floor that morning, tossing it into the red wicker basket she carried at her hip. Then she had reached over to pick a shirt up off the bed, where she had failed to see X lying, wrapped in the sheets.

X jumped up and pinned the girl against the wall, hand at her throat. The wicker basket tumbled to the parquet.

“ Mâf k-kîjiye!” Radni screamed. X tightened her hand around her neck. There was a thud out in the hall, and Mama was at her side, pulling X away.

X still hadn’t apologized for that. She fired off three kicks in blink-quick succession, then turned and did the same with the other leg. Flipped backwards onto the very edge of the building, turning in rapid flips down the length. Mama and Papa owned the whole building, including the “pet shop” on the first story. It wasn’t really a pet shop, but had millions of brass cages filled with fake animals and tiny speakers approximating the noises of prospective pets. No one ever came in, unless they wanted to speak with Mama or Papa about business.

X wasn’t allowed outside in the day. A pale, green-eyed white girl in the middle of…what city was this? She stopped practicing and looked around. It had never dawned on her to even ask anyone. New people came into the house every day, people from every corner of the planet speaking every language imaginable. They ate meals, gave information, maybe took a nap, then left. Just that morning, Radni had warned X to stay inside her room for breakfast. When X had pressed her ear to the door, she heard loops of crude Berlin German. Klirren’s Intergang.

She slowed into some docile Tai Chi movements, breathing deeply. A bhodi tree was blooming within her body. Today, once dawn broke, she and Mama would go to see what they could do about getting X a job.
***
Delhi. Mama’s house was in Old Delhi, locked into a cool, frantic neighborhood run by the local mobster. The sidewalks were stacked with things to sell, things being cleaned, things being organized. Ropes strung across alleys yielded rugs and saris being aired out to dry like colorful pieces of sky. Children shouted somewhere down the way.

Mama’s connection was in a tenement much like hers, but his was painted in flecking flesh-pink stucco with ornate but crumbling plasterwork around the windows and doors. The café spilled out onto the sidewalk, rusted brass-plated fencing keeping in some plastic picnic tables and chairs. A group of lounging men were grouped at the edge, talking in hushed tones and laughing. When they saw Mama coming, they all left.

The windows were burnished to look like brass, and as X caught her reflection in them, she found she couldn’t tell herself apart from anyone on the street. She’d layered her face and any showing parts in thick bronzing makeup, and pulled a long brown wig over her short hair, then braided it. She wore a shapeless brown caftan with a gold design along the bottom hem, brown capri slacks, a red scarf thrown around her neck. Red sneakers under gold bangles on both ankles, like Radni told her was popular. It was important that no one on the street see her in her true form, or Intergang would be there in no time.

X sighed. Mama had already assured her that the man who had come in the window that first day was not Intergang; instead, he was a tourist thief who had scaled the fire escape. She was beginning to wonder how long it would be before they found her. That was why she asked Mama for the job: she wanted money in case she needed to escape.

Mama’s connection was the only one left. He was a tall man, lanky, dressed in straight brown slacks and a red dress shirt unbuttoned at the top. His hair was slicked straight back and shined like it had been sealed with epoxy, gold rings gleamed on his thumbs. His boots were huge, pointed, and made out of alligator skin.

“ Mama!” he cried, gesturing for her to sit down. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of coal-black glasses.

“ How’re you doing, child?” she asked, sitting. Her green sari bloomed out over camouflage pants and combat boots. The gold chain running from her nose stud to her left earring glinted in the sun.

“ As well as can be expected,” he replied. He glanced at X, who continued to stand.

“ Is this the ‘new talent’?” he questioned.

Mama nodded. “ This is…Maut,”

X pressed her hands together to form a point and bowed her head to him. He smirked, teeth incredibly white and straight beneath a dark mustache.

“ Maut?” he questioned. X nodded. “ Interesting you have an Indian assassin with…green eyes, Mama.”

Mama smiled at him, but X could tell she was trying to fabricate an identity for her on the fly. The girl raised a hand.

“ I was abandoned at birth, but they said my mother was from Kashmir, and they thought my father might have been from somewhere in the Balkans,” she said, bringing her voice a little higher and approximating an amalgam of an accent.

He nodded in understanding. “ I see. I know of what you speak, for my mother was a Bengali and my father an Irishman. It is complicated times.”

“ So what do you say?” Mama asked.

He waved a hand around. “ I’ll need some proof, if you know what I mean.”

X could hear them dredging themselves up from every crevice of the street, and her whole body stiffened. A shadow fell over her. Fists knotting at her sides in a spastic contraction. She breathed in deep and slow, analyzing them from every angle.

A six foot, four inch male, approximately one-hundred-eighty pounds, wearing a wrist watch whose internal workings she could hear as clear as if it were at her ear. He wore a type of deodorant shipped in bulk from America that smelled like aloe and aluminum, and from the sound of his footsteps she concluded he wore cheap Honduran work boots stuffed with paper.

She jumped as his arm closed over her space, her foot caught the top of the brass fence and she was propelled up at least six feet. Turned in mid air and landed in his arms like he had meant to catch her. She stuck her foot up against his thick jugular and balanced herself with her hands on his left arm and her other foot planted on his right arm.

The connection at the table stared. X pressed harder with her leg, turning the goon’s head at a severely uncomfortable angle that made him sputter as if being suffocated. She knew he wasn’t deprived of any oxygen, but he was probably in a lot of pain.

“ Okay, okay,” the connection said. X jumped down as he took off his sunglasses and polished them on his shirt. “ Fine. Just don’t do that ever again.”
***
It was nearly dawn, and as he did his sit-ups on the grimy beige carpet he thought of Beijing. It had been awhile since he’d been there, and the time-worn and ultimately ludicrous civilities of London were beginning to eat away at his Japanese veneer. He needed new things, neon, plastic, the smell of seaweed being cooked in giant steel tureens. He needed Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe. He needed his homeland.

He laid out flat on the ground and breathed quietly. Changing hotels seven times had been a start, something bringing him closer to the normalcy he had once known with his ane-sama. He figured he would skip through Tahiti, maybe hit Samoa, soak up some Pacific sun, get a tan. A clash of thunder outside made him hate the amount of rain London got.

Standing in the dark, he sorted through the clothes laid out on the bed and pulled on a dress shirt. It was buttoned up halfway before the knocking started at the door. He shuffled over, barefoot, and looked out the peephole. A short, Italian woman in a teal maid’s uniform. There was a roll of towels under her arm.

“ House keeping,” she called.

He furrowed his brow. “ Come back rater,” he said. Shuffled back to the bed, sat down, and began to do his shirt up again once he’d realized he’d buttoned it wrong the first time.

More knocking. “ House keeping!”

“ Come back rater!” he shouted again.

The bolt popped as the first kick threw it inward, and suddenly Saru was staring through the gaping white hole into the hall. Someone swept in, black and silent. He never felt a thing.

[Sable Phoenix]

Hoo, boy, Doe, you'd better start running, I think I hear the lynch mob just down the street. I hope you didn't, but it sure LOOKS like you've killed Saru. And for no good reason (as apparent this moment) to boot.

Really cool chapter, although you could've done with a bit more explanation of what exactly this technological turnaround was and why it happened so quickly; there hasn't been a technological advance that quickly or that globally in the history of mankind.

[The_NewCatwoman]

I'm sooo mad at you, if you killed Saru I'll....

Okay I won't do that... I'll just be verwy verwy sad with wou.

Other than that, I was intrigued greatly by the relationship Mama and Papa have with each other. I hope to meet him, and possibly any children that came of the deal.

Sayonara,

Kitty

Oh yeah,

and your welcome for the support.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Sable Phoenix: I knew I didn't like that part for a reason. It seemed so out of place, but I wanted to explain (to some extent) the global climate of the story and the theory that Intergang gets along without much opposition because the world is ripe for revolution. Oh, and I heard the lynch mob and avoided them at the corner by pretending to be a Jehovah's Witness. Thanks for the head's up.

tNC: As for you, I'm glad and somewhat dismayed that Saru now has an underground fanclub (Panther, I know, is a member, and you should all throw your thanks to Tonbo for creating such an adorable male character). Glad because he's a great character Tonbo made, and dismayed because now I will receive threats. Anyway, thanks again for your support. And you'll read more into Mama and Papa (more of Tonbo Girl Genius' characters), but that will come later.

Thanks to all of you, including Panther and Tonbo who communicate through the evil eye of email. Love and Peace!

" Shoot first, ask questions later. Oh, and go with God." -Nicolas D. Wolfwood Trigun

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks again to everyone who read and replied; I really appreciate the time you take to comment on my little story. It means so much to me.

This part contains some medium violence, so read at your discretion. Thanks and enjoy.
***
“ Feel any older?” Batgirl asked, zooming her binoculars in on the Gotham Parks Hotel. A flash of polished brass caught her in the eye.

“ Funny,” the boy said dryly. The windows on the twentieth story were sheathed in green silk curtains; it was one of the sprawling suites rented by Vyskanti Private Negotiators for its traveling executives, and was flowing with plush wall-to-wall carpet and tapestry sofas and exotic ferns and oak furniture and a bar seemingly made out of mirrors.

“ Alfred tells me Dick sent you something,” she said.

“ Mm-hmm,” A few degrees to the left. It was a short knife from Arizona, where Dick had gone for another one of his existentialist journeys. He had enclosed a card saying it was given to teenaged boys of the Hopi tribe at their manhood ceremonies. He didn’t say what it was used for, but maybe Tim didn’t want to know.

“ You got clothes from Alfred right? The type sent from a posh British catalog?”

“ Yeah, how’d you know?”

“ Dick used to tell me he got clothes like that every year after his fifteenth birthday,” She made an exasperated sound and panned the binoculars upward, toward the twenty-first story. “ What’d Bruce get you?”

“ Can we talk about this later?” he asked. He clipped his binoculars onto his belt and hopped onto the ledge, scrambling down over flowery stone ornamentation to the very edge where he could leap off.

“ Sorry,” she said, following him. Through the window across the street, a flicker of brass signaled the opening of the elevator. A man strode out, tall, thin, and Japanese. He was joined by three others, an assortment of nationalities and races.

“ Yukito Saito?” Robin asked. “ Who are the others?”

“ That’s what we need to find out,” Batgirl said, pulling out a grappling hook. They rode silent jump lines across the street, landing and then flattening themselves against the ledge. Batgirl placed a button-sized bug against the window and put a finger to the radio in her cowl.

“ Hear anything?” Robin asked.

“ Nothing,” she said. “ They’re whispering.”

There was a bang, and Batgirl winced. “ Someone just slammed a door, though.”

“ They’re going upstairs,” Robin said.

Through the window one level up, the suite had developed from a deep green sitting room into a bedroom the same color blue as the bottom of the sea. Oaken trunks and armoires were shoved into every square foot of free space. Saito and his associates appeared at the top of the stairs, the door pressed inward against the wall.

“ Why don’t we just bust in?” Robin asked.

“ Shh!” Batgirl hissed, cringing against the side of the hotel.

Robin rolled his eyes and made the sign language motions for “ Well?”

She motioned back, “ I’m getting something.”

He was still. Blocked on one side by the throw of blue curtains, he was blind to what was happening inside.

Batgirl nodded to him. “ Let’s go,” she mouthed.

The glass flew inward upon contact, scattering immediately upon the navy carpet in big chunks of white light. Robin hit the floor and rolled, Batgirl taking the side. He dodged up, fist over the sawed-off muzzle of a Magnum. Hopped and flipped over the thug’s extended arm, both feet meeting the man’s stout face.

Silenced shots peppered the opposite wall. Batgirl jumped off the top of the corner armoire and grabbed him, trying to wrestle the weapon away. Bullets sprayed the ceiling, knocking out the bulbs in the wrought iron chandelier. The room was cloaked in black. Batgirl kneed him in the groin. He coughed, chest cavity collapsing in, and fell over. The gun was tossed out the open window.

A lamp clicked neatly on near the bed.

The third man, a stocky Armenian, screamed something profane in his native tongue and pulled a knife from within his white jacket, slicing off all three buttons in his haste. He went for Robin, who flipped backward out of the way, bouncing feet-first off the wall and driving one tiny fist straight into the Armenian’s gut. The man jumped back, laughing, as the boy nursed his bruised knuckles. A well-muscled stomach, washboard.

The Armenian went at him again, and Robin ducked back, then swooped in with both hands at jujitsu positions. The man reached around and grabbed his cape, throwing the boy over his head and onto the bed six feet away. Robin bounced off and hit the floor. He jumped up, dizzy, the same moment the bedside phone began ringing off the hook.

The Armenian had found his gun.

Robin bounded across the bed and flung himself through the bedroom doorway as the bullets carved a neat, straight rift right down the wall. Unsilenced, it was a sudden, shocking burst of sound.

He slid down the banister and into the suite downstairs just as Batgirl broke through the sitting room windows.

“ Get down!” he yelled. Threw himself over the laminate counter and onto the tile floor of the kitchenette, waiting. He could hear Batgirl scrambling in the corner, maybe hiding behind the ring of couches, then the short thumps as the Armenian came down the stairs.

He glanced around nervously, breathing carefully through his mouth. Everything was quiet. Boots crunched on glass on the other side of the counter.

Robin looked up and watched as the Armenian’s image slid smoothly across the unmarred surface of the mirror built in behind the kitchenette’s counters. The boy steeled himself and jumped up.

The batarang just barely clipped the back of the thug’s head, soaring outward and striking a gilded mirror on the wall. It broke in a pretty arc, then fell to the floor.

The gun was a Walther, Robin noticed as it pointed him squarely in the face. Unsilenced, of course, but the grip was wrapped with about ten feet of silver reflective duct tape, a sort of weird thing to do seeing as the gun was practically new and really a nice thing to look at. Two-Face owned one like it.

“ I guess you got me,” Robin said with a smile.

The Armenian smiled back. He didn’t understand a thing he said, but he pulled back the primer with his thumb. The second after her did that, the gilt mirror smashed him in the back of the head. The Armenian went to his knees first, then fell over, the silver stripe of a gun spinning under a sofa.

Batgirl tossed the mirror aside. “ Saito,” she said, and he followed her upstairs.

The room was empty, lit softly by the glow off the single lamp, the two downed thugs tied neatly in the corner. They checked the bathroom, the spacious closets, then went back downstairs and checked there. Robin hung fearlessly out the window and inspected the street before swooping back in. Batgirl was on one knee, lacing up the unconscious Armenian.

“ I think he went out the window,” Robin said to her. She nodded, standing.

“ Then let’s follow his example,”

The trip to the roof was quick, the building being twenty-five stories of angular, art deco steel and granite. Within a span of sixty or so years, the sheer, pure art deco-ness of it had been corroded and defiled, the symmetry of the building compromised for satellite-cable attachments or safety-code changes. There was a dark smudge of smoke coming out of three of the four chimney pipes modeled to look like streamlined angels, their sorrowful faces lined with soot. Robin and Batgirl swept over the edge and began stalking around the forest of cable antennae anchored there.

There was a swift, hard smacking sound, fist against fist. Robin and Batgirl raced across the roof, dodging between trunk-like TV aerials and tiny satellites, skidding around the roof-access hatch and then sliding on the flush steel tiles.

Saito had stripped off his jacket to expose the dress shirt underneath, the egg-blue silk circled with sweat stains. He was proficient enough in battle, matching every one of Batman’s strikes with one of his own, leaping in incredible kicks and hitting all the right jujitsu marks. He grabbed Batman’s fists and turned, flipping the Dark Knight square over his shoulder. The minute Batman’s feet touched the ground, he did the same, throwing Saito to the tarmac. In a few seconds he was bound on his back.

The three figures loomed over him.

“ We want to know some things,” Batman growled. Bowed slightly over, his entire form was bathed in shadow, making it seem like the voice came from the dark itself.

“ I can’t tell you anything,” Saito said.

“ That’s because we haven’t asked,” Batgirl said, taking out a flashlight and shining it across his sculpted face. He didn’t shy away from the light, but his brown eyes glowed calm.

“ Who ordered the hit on Priesly?” Batman asked.

“ It wasn’t Vyskanti,” Saito said tightly.

“ How would you know that?”

“ There would be nothing for Vyskanti to gain,” the man explained. “ No funds, no deals were made. I told you, someone else did the hit.”

“ Then why did you have Alexei Vutskaya with you? Or Mumbei Koro? Or Jon Svenson?” Batman demanded.

“ Vyskanti sent them. He thought Priesly’s friends might consider me a prime candidate for killer. I guess he didn’t have any friends.”

“ Then enlighten us to who might have done it, Saito.”

The man stared straight up at them. “ I’m not afraid to say I think it was Lex Luthor.”

“ Admirable,” Batgirl scoffed with perfect stoicism.

“ I’m serious. When Priesly ran his company last year, he ruined a great deal of people’s lives, including Luthor’s. But even then I don’t think it was that that made Luthor give the order.”

“ What was it?”

Saito looked away, almost ashamed. “ While Priesly ran LexCorp, he became aware of an experiment being executed secretly by the company. Priesly threatened to go public with it, but Luthor shut him up with offers of trade secrets.”

“ But Priesly didn’t stay quiet for long,” Batgirl envisioned.

“ No, he didn’t. Priesly made it clear to Luthor that he would announce the goings-on, despite the deal they made. It was his last mistake.”

“ What project was this?” Robin questioned. His young voice nearly broke the tension of the interview.

“ I…” Saito shut his eyes, “ I cannot say.”

“ Project Ophelia?” Batman questioned.

Robin looked up at him.

“ Yes,” Saito admitted. “ But to even say the name is to speak your epitaph.”

“ Why?”

“ They sought to create the Devil,”

Something lurched in Robin’s chest. He wasn’t sure why.

The street filled with the symphony of police sirens, and Batman turned back to Saito. “ Last chance.”

“ That is all I’m prepared to divulge,” Saito told him.

“ Very well. Tell the rest to the police.”

“ I doubt I’ll even be interrogated,” the man said with a slow smile.

The three retreating figures said nothing as they lined up at the edge of the building and one by one disappeared.
***
It was only nine in the morning, but the heat and the rubber smells of the asphalt street were already building within the room. White sunlight glared in pieces through an elaborately carved lattice over the window. A fan with canvas slings for blades turned slowly overhead, stirring the fine mist of incense from the teak table in the corner.

Prastav Dhaljit was stooped over his quarterly reports, a red pencil poised between two long, thin fingers. Violinist fingers. The priest had always insisted he was a born violinist, but the instrument failed him decades ago and now it only sat sadly in his closet in Camden. He sighed and pushed his delicate, gold-rimmed glasses up his nose.

There was a clatter in the room next to his, and he sat up. It was the maid, taking off her shoes in the foyer as she always did. She was an old Bengali woman whose name had never been fully impressed into his mind, whose image seemed embedded with the fine-grained teak of the walls and the gilt threads of the old tapestries. She would bring him tea within a few minutes, then start in on the house cleaning.

His ripe English indoctrination had not only seasoned him towards proper European tea, but also towards a certain expectation in his furnishings. Though Cambridge had found him this place, and he was obliged to make use of it, he usually preferred being out of it most of the time. The Indo-Islamic flavor of it unnerved him, brought him back to a childhood in a corrugated tin hovel and a dog with ticks.

The giant, carved door opened. Instead of the old woman, there was a girl, dressed in a conservative city maid’s uniform of grey with a white blouse. Her hair was shoulder-length and black, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He noticed, strangely, that she wore a schoolgirl’s turned down socks.

“ Where is…the maid?” he asked.

She sat the silver service down on the table over his papers and bowed to him.

“ Abshar wanted me to tell you how very, very sorry she was to not make it in today. Her daughter was very ill. She sent me in her place,” The girl’s English was near perfect, only slightly accented, and carefully spoken. “ My name is Maut,”

He waved a hand at the silver service, and she picked it up off his work. She turned her back to him as she laid it on the incense table near the window.

“ Maut, isn’t that…’death’?” he asked, slightly bored.

Clinking as she arranged the tea. “ Why, yes.”

He circled a group of numbers. “ Interesting,”

“ Indeed,” A click of a different kind. He looked up, then down the sleek, dark barrel of the silencer screwed into a chrome semi-automatic.

He swallowed. She shot, making it quick and clean. Afterward, she laid his body out lengthwise on the plush couch, his feet propped up on the end pillows. She took the pencil from his hand and laid it on his papers. Then she turned and left, tucking the gun into her apron while she slipped her shoes on in the foyer.
***
The decadent antiquity of this old city settled calmly into his pores like the layers of grime enveloping the ancient architecture. The Duomo towered over him, its grove of spikes and spires and leaning, benevolent stone saints punctuating a ceaseless azure sky. The pigeons took flight as he approached, the tiny flutter of their wings mocking the flap of his trench coat.

He hadn’t heard from Saru in days, and a thorough credit check revealed that the cash card he’d given him hadn’t been used lately. There was a terrible feeling inside him, like he had somehow spelled out the demise of that poor Japanese boy, the boy who only helped him so he could free X.

He stopped at a café and had an espresso, brooding coolly over it and the blue Formica table as the light slowly shifted to throw dark, rippled shadows on the street. His job had been done that morning; deliver an encrypted CD bearing a treatise on nanotechnology to its rightful owner, a Romanian scientist from whom it was stolen by Spanish terrorists two weeks earlier.

Brugnon was beginning to like Milan in its closeness to his exiled homeland. It was open, welcoming in its fragile age, the pollutant grime that adhered its every surface like a protective cloak. There were sensibilities here, too. The willingness to delve into the new age without abandoning anything of its past. There was a line of flat-screened computers up against the tea-stained, archaic café wall.

He finished his espresso and left a few coins, strolling back out into the sun. The light burned through his newly bleached hair; since the tangle with those Spanish terrorists, he’d found it necessary to travel more incognito than usual. He would probably dye it back to its natural brown within a few days, but that would require some distance between himself and the general area.

Saru came back to mind once he passed the Palazzo Ragione. He knew what the risks were; for God’s sake, he lived with Hiramiaku, he should have been used to it. If indeed the boy was dead, he had no one to blame but himself. Brugnon shook his shoulders, and all responsibility drifted off of him like a tangible powder.

Still, there was his tie with Intergang. It was only a matter of time before Yuri ordered him back into the fray, and then he would avenge his dear sister, and all those who had betrayed her would suffer. His only fear was that he would actually meet the girl X, instead of only hearing scant rumors about her. What dwelled within the tortured mind of this child? Would her experiences even render her human anymore?

His hotel was near Piazza Della, in one of the gleaming glass skyscrapers that pulled the classic architecture upwards and out of whack. He would be leaving tonight, on a flight to Mexico City, where he was supposed to barter for the release of a kidnapped child. All his inhibitions fell away as he rushed for a taxi later on. This was his job, and he always did it well.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Saru, Saru, Saru. Poor baby, if he's dead, I hope he's happy, and if he's not...

I hope you have a good explanation. I really like him and could see it go either way.

Excellent detail, Tim's attitude kinda depressed me a little. I really hope to find out what Bruce did for the guy on his birthday... If he did anything at all. We all know he's kinda shoty in that area.

Avoir,

tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

Nice work as usual, DoE. Loved the fight scene; lots and lots of breaking glass is always a good thing.

[Tonbo_Rosso]

Daughter of Evil, creature of this exqusite hell that is this epoch.

Your so cool!

[Panther]

Happy birthday dear Tim
Happy birthday dear Tim
Happy birthday dear TimwhoIwishwasmyageandnonfictionaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal
Happy birthday dear Tim!

:D (just a little something I had to get off my chest)


NEway, nice to see what Tim and X are up to. I wonder what Bruce got him for his b-day, and I realllllly don't want to know anyhthing more about the knife. And it was really cool to finally learn the name of the project - Ophelia - how approperiate was that!! But Saru! Saru - be he alive? Don't keep us waiting!



later,

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Thanks for pointing out Bruce's severe disability in the Human Department; it would be just like him to forget or something, but you'll just have to wait and see. As for Saru, I can't tell you anything on that unless you are perfectly aware of the risks associated with having Tonbo stalk you with a cheese grater.

Sable Phoenix: Glad you like flying glass, I have to admit I am partial to it as well.

Tonbo: Thanks for the compliment. I always enjoy your random bits of psycho-finery. Love!

Panther: Um, lovely singing! *clapping* Just wonderful! And clever addition on your part! Thought you'd like "Project Ophelia"...I wrote that with you in mind, you literary fiend. And you really, really don't want to know about the knife.

Thanks a lot, everyone!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Okey-dokey then, here's more of the story for you to enjoy/be sick after reading. This part includes some violence and severe hallucinations. Thanks again to everyone who responded!
***
“ Project Ophelia,” Bruce said, “ was the experiment that created X.”

Tim looked up at him. “ You know about X?”

“ Barely,” He keyed up a specialized file he had spent much of the night creating. There was little information. No picture ID, not even a physical description. Just a list of three places —Schwarzwald, Iran, and Beijing—that she had visited within the last two months.

“ I’m suspecting the Khasekemwys told you about X,” Bruce said, a hint of dissatisfaction in his voice.

“ Yeah,” Tim muttered, staring at the file splayed on the screen.

“ What did they tell you?”

“ Just that she was a LexCorp experiment, that she escaped about two months ago. They…they were trying to make an assassin, right?”

Bruce hit a key. “ Yes.”

“ So what does Vyskanti have to do with this?”

“ I’ll get to that. But I have something else.”

He keyed something in. A huge file came up, complete with a picture of a heavy-set Indian woman with short, dark hair. It was a fuzzy scene taken from a video monitor, her face turned slightly to the side so the light caught on a gold stud in her left nostril.

“ An assassin named Mama,” Bruce explained. “ She got the nickname from her habit of tucking her victims into bed after killing them. No one knows her real name anymore.”

“ So what about her?” Tim asked, propped his chin on his hands and his elbows on the console.

“ She harbors assassins and terrorists in exchange for information and equipment. Her place is a way station, to say the least. A few weeks ago an Interpol agent stopped there in an attempt to case the risk for a bust. He never returned.”

“ Why didn’t they send people in to see what was going on?” the boy asked.

“ She has deals with people all the way up into the parliament. They protect her and she’ll keep quiet on the things she knows about them.”

“ So, how does this tie into things?”

“ I have reason to believe Mama has harbored X in her home,” He went on.

“ Mama is in league with Hands. Hands’ funds once came from money pulled out of the secret accounts of Vyskanti Incorporated. I’ve done research and found that Cyrus Vyskanti is responsible for funding twelve different yakuza assassinations in the past three years, ten of those having to do with Intergang.

“ Three of those assassinations were absolutely, positively carried out by the assassin Hiramiaku.

“ In June of this year, Cyrus Vyskanti made a bid through Hiramiaku at an auction where the property being sold was a young woman. This young woman was X, and she was being ‘rented out’ for combat work, assassinations and bodyguard assignments. Vyskanti was outbid by two-hundred thousand dollars.”

Tim stared. “ Who bought her?”

“ Some say Nevig Lockhardt, others simply say that Luthor bought her back for a job.”

“ So Luthor sold her to Intergang?”

Bruce sat back. “ More likely he let them borrow her.”

Tim looked down at the console. “ No wonder she ran off. It must have been horrible.”

“ Yes,” Bruce said quietly. “ No human being deserves to be treated that way.”

They were still, wondering whether she was really human or not.
***
Hiramiaku.

It had taken her awhile to remember, to even say her name again. Up here on the roof, the distant, haze-cloaked stars her only witness, she spoke the name into the muggy night air.

Tan skin, red hair. Black eyes as deep and far-off as the surface of the moon. Suicide.

X knotted her fists at her sides. Why did she have to die? Why did she leave Saru and her all alone, for Intergang to take and damage? Why, when X had so much more to learn?

There was a crackle of feet on gravel behind her. X whirled around. It was Radni, standing at the hatch underneath the giant windmill.

“ I hear that Western girls dream of when their prince will come,” she said, Mumbai accent thick on decent English. “ Is that what you’re doing?”

X felt a chill wrack her spine. “ No. My prince will never come. He is dead to me.”

Radni smiled. “ You come up here every night. Why?”

“ To see the moon,” X lied. The wind stirred the pages of the book on her lap. “ Why are you here? You usually go home at dusk.”

“ I was doing laundry,” Radni explained, coming over. With the closing of the physical distance between them, X became suddenly self-conscious. Her scars glowed bright against her exposed back, her Intergang tattoos stark on her left arm.

The girl sat next to her. “ Everyone wants you, X.”

Shivered. “ Yes, I know.”

“ Mama wanted me to tell you that Intergang has put a ten million dollar price on you,” She swung her legs fearlessly over the edge, the hem of her grey uniform pulling over her knees.

“ Ten million dollars,” X said grimly. “ That’s all I’m worth?”

Radni smiled at her, a warm, slow smile meant to reassure her. She had cheekbones like Hiramiaku’s, built like pieces of architecture.

“ Don’t you have any family?”

“ No.” The answer was curt to mask the uncertainty.

“ But you don’t remember,”

“ I…I woke up one day with nothing in my mind. That’s all I know.”

Whispers crowded the base of her skull, all competing for the highway to nirvana.

“ But now you know better?” Radni asked.

“ I know. That’s all.” The boy in red. She knew his name now. She called him Robin-boy, reached her hand out to him as he swept out of the dark for her.

Radni stared at X’s hand, outstretched for nothing outside her own brain.

“ Do you have any family?” X asked her, eyes transfixed ahead.

“ A mother. But she’s out in the country, and I send her money.”

“ I once had a brother,” X said numbly. “ He left me, just as his sister once left him.”

“ Did he die?”

“ No. He just disappeared.” She placed a hand on each folded knee, her body tucked into the lotus position. Robin-boy sat next to her, the lovely, boyish curves of his face outlined in blue Delhi night-light. He stuck his tongue out at her, but was still smiling.

“ Where are you from?” Radni had a feeling this was the longest conversation anyone had ever gotten out of X.

“ America. Near Metropolis, where Superman is.”

“ I’ve heard of him,” Radni said brightly. “ He stopped a mudslide in Calcutta last year.”

“ I’ve never seen him before. Not even on TV. The Intergang doctors said it was propaganda.”

“ He wears a blue suit, with a big S on it. And a red cape. And he’s very handsome, all tanned with black hair and dark eyes. All the girls like him.”

“ Why do these men wear costumes?” X asked.

“ Well, they can’t fight in their pajamas,”

“ There is a boy inside my head,” She looked over at him and he grinned sweetly. “ He wears a costume, too. Sometimes I think he never existed, that I just made him up.”

Out of her peripheral vision, she could see Radni’s concerned face. The city lights behind the girl’s head became ones and zeros, a steady stream of codified information.

“ I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, sweating. Each drop of her sweat was imbued with a tiny little scene: a woman doing laundry, dolphins underwater, deep forest punctuated with stark stone figures.

“ The microcosm is being built behind my eyelids,” X said in Japanese.

Radni got up. “ I think I should get Mama.”

“ I already paid her the rent,” X whispered.

“ Your blood is poisoned,” Robin-boy told her.

“ What!?” snapped X at him.

“ I said, ‘You need help’!” Radni cried. She ran for the hatch. In a single twenty-foot leap, X beat her there.

She grabbed Radni’s upper arms in her hands. “ Please…help me!”

Radni’s eyes were brown wafers. There was genuine fear in them. Even though X was half a head shorter than Radni, she was stronger, faster, and, now, insane.

Radni pried loose and put an arm about her. “ Let’s go get some tea, okay?”
***
It was almost dawn, and the tea was cold on the stove. X had drunk an entire batch, hands shaking. Robin-boy had followed her inside, seeming to just melt through the ceiling. He was sitting on the counter, swinging his legs.

“ My system is not clean,” X said. “ My system is defiled. It is dirty, debauched.”

“ Shush, child,” Mama said from near the door. She was talking with Radni, who spoke in low Hindi in the corner near the door.

“ There are some Intergang guys coming up the stairs,” Robin-boy warned her.

X hunched over her tea. The tea was grey, mostly sugary goat’s milk and powdered tea leaves. Her nerves danced within her shell of skin.

“ I’m serious!” the boy cried. “ Ten million dollars! That’s a lot of money! Especially for you!”

“ Damare!” X screamed. The thick mug hit the splashboard behind the counters. Grey tea and chunks of porcelain went everywhere.

Then it was just a long succession of rags mopping up the tea, nimble fingers picking the sharp parts of the mug up off the floor. X fell to her knees and fished a piece of the handle from under the table.

“ I want the money,” Robin-boy said at the door. “ I’m telling them you’re up here.”

He disappeared and she told herself not to listen to him.

Within ten minutes, she was in her bedroom, on the unmade bed, her veins pumped with two times the safe amount of anti-psychotics. She fell catatonic again. The day passed as a blur of sunlight and shadow and bright, indistinct shapes. Then night came again. The Haldol wore off in a sickening wave.

Sitting up, she pulled on her clothes and went into the kitchen. Her body creaked and groaned with the internal workings of a defunct machine.

“ Can you do a job tonight?” Mama asked from the sink. Curls of potato skin fell into the disposal.

X sat at the table. Rank stoicism conquered her slowly.

“ There is a scientist in town. He needs to die,”

X stood. “ Yes. I’ll do it.”

“ Ten thirty at Gandhi International Airport,” Mama cried at her as she reentered her bedroom, pulling the door to behind her.
***
Nikolov Luka finally broke free of the congested terminal at about eleven-thirty, shrugging into his water-proof trench coat and hugging close the calf-skin briefcase in his right hand, his only luggage. The rain had begun to come down in heavy grey sheets, every landmark and monument shrouded in the smell of wet Delhi.

He stepped slightly off the curb and waved to a yellow taxi as it came up the slick street. It pulled in neatly beside him. He noticed, rather dully, that COMMANDANT A.I. TAXIS was painted along its garish flank, signifying it was one of the new robot taxis without drivers. He wondered if it would take his international cash card, or if it needed credit.

He was just about to swing in the back when someone tugged on his jacket. He looked up. She was about fourteen. Her skin (what he could see of it) was pale, her eyes hidden behind large, dark glasses. She was dressed in a flowing black Arabic abaya, the whole thing draped over her head, only allowing for the dark lenses of those glasses to peek through.

“ Do you mind if I share this taxi with you?” she asked in an English accent. “ I’m heading towards Connaught Place,”

He nodded, preferring not to test out his unsavory English on this little flower, and held the door for her as she delicately got in. She was holding a tiny backpack made out of shiny black plastic, a tag in the shape of a cat’s head dangling off the zipper.

He told the robotic driver where to go, and the request spelled itself out in green LED glyphs on a screen implanted on the back of the front seat. Connaught Place was where he needed to go, too, though the girl said she needed Parliament Street while he needed Panchkuin Marg.

They took off down the rain-soaked street, dodging in and out of traffic with the dexterity known only to a human driver. Luka had heard that they had analyzed the brainwaves of several different taxi drivers and then input that into the AI programs. It still felt odd, being in a car with no driver.

The girl was silent, staring out the window. She whispered in tones low and secretive, possibly to a hidden palm computer or cell. Kids these days had more technology than a nuclear missile in their toy phones. Luka himself was a rather low-tech type, and probably that was the way the Spanish terrorists had gotten his disk in the first place. At least he had it back, and he’d be delivering his speech (or rather, the real Dr. Luka’s speech) the next day. None of them would be the wiser.

The car stopped abruptly, and for a second the only noise was the rising pound of the rain on the aluminum roof. Luka looked past the windshield and found they’d paused in the middle of the street. Another cab swerved around them, horn blaring.

The girl had put a card into the credit swipe built into the screen. He followed her movements as removed from deep within her bag a large, chromed handgun.

She pointed it square at his forehead and pulled the trigger.

The credit swipe spat her card out, and she took it as all the locks on the car undid with a loud thump. She slung her bag across her back, then pried Dr. Luka’s briefcase loose from his frozen hand. Threw open the door and walked out into the traffic, the rain beating down at her from all sides.
***
“ Hee-ra-mee-ah-koo,” he enunciated.

“ I know how to spell it,” Barbara said blandly. “ She’s just about the most famous assassin ever. Or she was.”

“ What’s that mean?” Tim asked, stretching out in the chair next to Barbara’s desk. He was in usual after-school attire: black jeans, sneakers, the Faint t-shirt he’d bought at an antisocial department store.

“ Killed herself,” Barbara said. “ That’s what everyone in the underworld says. She and her adopted younger brother stole X from Intergang for a short time, made some use out of her, then tried to run off with her. Hiramiaku got trapped, offed herself by jumping off a building. Her brother went ballistic. Intergang got ‘em both.”

Tim sat up. “ That’s all in your computer?”

“ After a few ‘adjustments’,” Barbara smiled nicely. She was wearing a periwinkle angora sweater and a black skirt with low boots. All of them new.

“ So, what else does it say about her?” he asked.

“ That she’s been connected to at least six hundred killings in the span of her lifetime. When she died she was twenty-one, and she’d been killing since she was seven.”

Tim whistled.

“ There aren’t any pictures of her, since almost every assignment she did was incognito, but by most accounts they say she was of Japanese descent with traces of either Pakistani or Indian.” Barbara sat back and cracked her knuckles. “ So whaddya wanna know?”

“ Her ties to Cyrus Vyskanti,” Tim said.

“ Oh, a toughie,” she grinned as she delved back in. “ Other than when she was his proxy at the now-infamous Intergang auction, I can’t tell you. She just did some work for him. They probably had a contract. Besides, Vyskanti is a real private corporate guy.”

“ Like someone else we know,” Tim muttered.

“ Hey,” she said, propping her chin on her knuckles, “ you never did tell me what Bruce got you for your birthday.”

He scratched his temple. The dial of a new watch glared on his wrist.

“ Lemme see!” she squealed. He showed her. It had a black plastic dial and a black rubber band with steel accents. Waterproof, a heavy-duty type with GPS so he never had to reset it if he changed time zones; a temperature reading, date, glow-in-the-dark, instant messaging, check your e-mail, all the luxuries type of watch.

“ And you can still send a SOS message to the Batcomputer?” she asked.

He nodded, showing her the sequence of commands on the tiny dial that would alert the Batcave to any problems. He pulled his sleeve down over it.

“ What else on Vyskanti?” he said.

“ That’s pretty much it,” she said. “ The yakuza connections, the Intergang assassinations. He probably wanted X so he could double the assassination efficiency he had with Hiramiaku. The way I hear it, they were along the same lines in skill.”

“ Do you think…that X could have killed Priesly?”

She shrugged. “ It’s impossible to tell. Last reports were that X was in Tianjin, China. And if she’s on the run, I doubt she has the resources to get all the way to America.”

“ What if someone’s helping her?”

“ Like, freedom fighters, or something?” Barbara questioned.

“ Yeah. Or, maybe Vyskanti is doing it, helping her escape, because he wants her to be his assassin.”

She nodded. “ It’s plausible. If he’s daring enough to order assassinations, he might be daring enough to order the escape of this girl.”

Tim looked at the wall, squinting at a shard of light from the closed blinds. “ How old do you think she is?”

“ I don’t know,” She looked up at him. Her eyes glanced over him. “ She reminds you of her, doesn’t she?”

He continued to stare at the wall. “ Kind of.”

Barbara turned back to the keyboard. “ I guess there are a lot of people like that in the world, willing to hurt others so they can benefit. I mean, if X is only a girl, and the things they must have done to her…”

“ So what happened to Hiramiaku’s younger brother?” he asked suddenly, eyes clicking over to her.

“ Off the radar,” she said. “ He’s good at disappearing, and that’s just what he did after X’s escape.”

“ A dead end,” Tim said.

“ Leaves us with even more questions, though,” Barbara sighed. “ Who helped X escape, and why? Where is she? I mean, what are the powers that be in this situation? X is just some huge Intergang pawn, so what if they’re playing her off each other? The questions are just endless.”

The air conditioner kicked in overhead, the ornate wall-grate rattling with the cold air. The office had become stuffy in a matter of seconds.

“ She’s just a pawn,” Tim repeated quietly.

[Tonbo_Rosso]

As for Saru, I can't tell you anything on that unless you are perfectly aware of the risks associated with having Tonbo stalk you with a cheese grater.

Hey!! I only did that once! You should talk after the hanger incident.

As usual, a fine peice of torturous beauty.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Awwww, Bruce got Tim a watch and he's all embarrased :p

Otherwise wonderful. I really enjoy Mama's character and feel that Tim's reunion with X is only in a matter of time... :D

[Sable Phoenix]

Excellent installment, DoE. Things are starting to come together... I can see where a few threads join the plot rope now. Heh.

So we've been told why Hiramiaku and Saru were helping X in the first place. That's one step. Now we just have to cover the thirt-thousand-odd other steps and everything will mesh nicely.

By the by, whatever happened to that female FBI agent that showed up for a few installments and then disappeared?

[Panther]

A fancy watch? That is such a guy thing. And men think women go overboard with accessories... :rolleyes:

NEway, great post, as usual. Of course, it's so frustrating to see Tim so close and yet so far. >grumbles< Stupid plot getting in the way of these two kids. :mad:


AND WHERE'S SARU! :(

[Daughterof_Evil]

Tonbo: Well, thank you for the "tortuous beauty" compliment but you said you'd NEVER mention the hanger incident again!!

tNC: Glad you enjoyed the watch, though I'm a little concerned with this reunion vigil you appear to be holding. Remember to eat and get plenty of fluids, but other than that, stay stationed in front of the computer. And thanks.

Sable Phoenix: God, I love that phrase! "Plot rope"! It's perfect! Alas, there are about thirty-thousand other "plot-threads" that need to come into place for any of it to make much sense. Though they will be making an appearance. And, since you mentioned it, Special Agent Helen Arroway has gone back to Washington D.C. for lack of information in Gotham about the case she's on. But I bet she'll make an appearance as well. Thank you for hanging in this long!

Panther: Tell me about it! Those superheroes especially! Have you seen how many gadgets those guys have!? At least it's a multi-purpose manly watch that Bruce gave Tim, though it's kind of the equivalent of giving him a grappling hook as a present. I remember you asking me in an email if those AI taxis were real, and sadly, I have to admit they are not. I put that in there because Batman is supposedly set in something of a slipstream continuity, with everything seemingly current but with a massive amount of advanced technology as a kind of background. I mean, if they can have cyborgs, robots, HARDAC, Brainiac and jet packs, then they can have AI taxis. And thank you for the encouragement, it really means a lot.

[Daughterof_Evil]

I can't explain much of this except that this is what happens when you eat four pounds of potato salad and decide to watch the Adolescence of Utena in the middle of a summer afternoon. It contains some very realistic (so realistic, I don't even know what's real or fake) hallucinations and a very violent suicide attempt. Thank you for responding to my last post, and every post before that. I owe you.
***
Wandering through rain-soaked alleys, cobbles gleaming like dark jewels underfoot, building fronts looming up on either side. The wide, light expanse of her mind flowered, broadened, then shattered as she hopped the curb at the Kinari Bazaar.

The rain had stopped, and the glittery wedding finery was laid out for prospective brides that clustered three-deep in the noisy aisles. X shifted through a prismatic display of silk saris before Robin-boy caught up with her.

“ I’ve been chasing you from Nai Sarax!” he cried, out of breath.

“ You’re not real,” she told him. One of the rupee garlands hanging off of a merchant’s booth grew a snake’s head and hissed at her. Another one caught fire, its ashes falling to the ground and sprouting another snake.

“ Of course I’m real,” he said, bobbing at her side.

“ Go away.”

“ I’m not leaving. I thought you were in love with me.”

“ I hate you,” she spat. An old woman stared at her. X brushed past her and into a forest of tinsel hanging from kite strings strung across the expanse.

“ Hey, I didn’t tell those Intergang guys where you were. That must mean something to you,”

She turned on toe and struck him. Her arm went straight through his body, like it was composed of nothing but mist. His block eyes regarded her blandly.

“ That won’t solve anything,” he told her.

She stomped away from him, but he followed seamlessly, fading through people and things. Her bones began to ache more fiercely than they ever had, her tendons vibrating with the urge to break. Her skin itched.

“ It’s calling you,” Robin-boy told her. “ The Macchina. You need it. It needs you. Together you are perfect.”

“ I’m clean,” X mumbled, head hunched low into her broad shoulders. One green eye blazed strangely, neon.

“ You’ll never be clean,” Robin-boy scoffed. “ Look at your hands. There’s blood on them.”

X stared down at her hands. They were pure, white. Mama had taught her to polish the nails black so no one could see if you had blood under them.

“ And the microcosm behind your eyelids is corroding,” he told her. “ You really should take better care of yourself. It’s going away like old circuits.”

“ Shutupshutupshutup!” she screamed, covering her ears. “ I’m not listening to you!”

He touched her hair, running his fingers through it. She broke away and began to run. Very abruptly, everything stopped. She had hit a wall, smashed straight into it.

Robin-boy was laughing as she scraped herself up off the ground. She stumbled to her feet and covered her face with her hands. Her sobs were dry, tearless.

“ See, your pain will be over,” Robin-boy whispered. She looked between her fingers. A platoon of Intergang soldiers in black, kevlar, leather, plastic armor. Guns drawn, each the same clone, running down the street, bearing down on her.

She folded her arms over her face as they blew through her, one by one. Her screams were neon-toned, like the death cry of a harpy, like the breaking point of some nuclear device, like the blast that created the world and all worlds.

The words of Brahma vibrated along her metal spine.

She was on her knees now, the cold of the rain having soaked through her tights and brought her to her new awareness. A woman tapped her on the shoulder, and X looked up into the face of Mama. A green-painted tempo bearing the pet shop name was parked behind her, snugly tucked up against a booth of golden jewelry gleaming like the sun.

X stopped screaming.
***
Johnny Kim sidled up to Tim from the doorway of the third level science lab, dismissing a group of friends bunched there.

“ So, have any plans for your birthday?” he asked in his prodding, silky way. He was Tim’s best friend by far, the only one who didn’t bother him about being Bruce Wayne’s ward. He was handsome and Chinese, about a head taller than Tim, with a dome of carefully sculpted black spikes for hair. There was a silver ring in his left ear.

“ I don’t know yet,” Tim muttered.

“ C’mon, you have that big mansion at your disposal, so why don’t you use it? Throw a big party or something. You need a girlfriend.”

“ That’s easy for you to say,” snapped Tim. “ You’re not shorter than all the girls.”

“ So the smallness is an issue,” Johnny brushed it off. “ So what? You’re charismatic.”

Tim burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh again.

“ Talk it over with the boss-man,” Johnny encouraged. “ Then get back to me on it,”

“ I will,”

“ Need a ride?” Johnny asked, walking out into the parking lot. He beeped the security system on his brand new, champagne-gold roadster, parked just beyond an artificial knoll of bright emerald grass. Johnny’s father was an oncologist, a very expensive oncologist, and his mother was a lawyer. They made a pretty nice living.

“ Nah, I’ve got Alfred,” Tim said, waving. Johnny shrugged, setting out for his car.
***
It was sometime at night, that was all she knew. The window was cracked a little, the sweet, dark smells coming in and trembling the curtains. She lay on the bed, on her back, dressed in baggy cotton pajamas. Mama had injected her with a dangerous amount of haloperidol, and since then her body had refused to move. Except for the shaking, which never seemed to stop.

Her brain was still. No voices, no constant buzzing, no Robin-boy. The fear and loneliness hit her hard. Her hand twitched for the sword stored under her bed. She battled silently for control of her body. The door of her room lay closed, the warm light of the kitchen beyond it calling to her. It ripped her open, suddenly, viciously.

She woke several minutes later to find the vent over her had begun to rattle. It was a white vent, with vertical slats dusted in a fine, cottony layer of debris. Her eyes began to water. Then, through the slats, little slips of yellow-white began falling toward her.

They were pieces of paper, she realized as the first few began to land lightly on her face. Tiny, torn shreds of newspapers. The first said something about an explosion in Metropolis in big, dark block script. Within moments, the room was filled with thousands of tiny pieces of newspaper blowing around like petals.

X, using the last of her strength, rolled onto her side and shut her eyes tight. It took awhile for the newspaper clippings to settle onto the ground, and once they did, the sound of them scraping across the redone parquet was enough to break her.

This is not a gift, she said to herself. This is a hideous joke. I am a hideous joke. I cannot live this way any more. I’d rather kill myself than go mad.

Nirvana is a lie. When you’re dying, feeling the blood suck from your veins and your breath leak out of your lungs, the sick taste in your mouth when you’re about to go brain dead, you’re not thinking of eternal peace. You want love and compassion from a world that is hate-filled and merciless. You want happiness, joy, pleasure, and you will never attain them. You want redemption from the powers that have destroyed you. In short, you don’t want eternal peace in death, but eternal suffering in life.

So stop your heart, you evil freak! she commanded herself. Do away with what little there is left of you! Show them how unafraid you are to die, something you have been doing slowly from the date of your wretched birth!

The tears ran warm down her face, torrents of them coming from eyes that never blinked. She ground her teeth and reached under the bed, feeling for her katana. She would cut the wicked voice right out of her brain.

Her hands fell on nothing. She hung over the edge and looked, to find only the slim stretch of parquet and the bit of wall.

Outside, Mama sighed as X’s bitter, hungry screams shook the house.
***
Everything got really quiet after she stopped screaming.

She laid on the floor, in a tangled heap of bedsheets, her head resting on the hard parquet. The newspaper scraps were scattered across every available surface, the floor, the bed, the shelves, atop the several piles of books she read every day. The wind coming through the window stirred the long strips of paper she had tacked to the walls during her weeks there; theories written half in kanji half in Hindi, demonic digital prayers in ones and zeroes, short stories she had a feeling were really memories scrawled over magazine excerpts. It gave the room a tattered, demented look, like the walls were bursting, growing, falling apart. Her body hurt; there was no other way to describe it but a low, steady hum right under her skin.

It took her a few minutes to collect every scrap and lay it in a mound on the floor. She sat before them, on her knees, and read them one by one. Each of them brought with it a new series of forgotten memories.

The first she read was about a pipe bomb in the subway system of Metropolis about two years before. It had exploded, killing four people, including the unknown woman who had been carrying it. More than twenty people had been injured. Authorities were saying it was a suicide mission, just a mentally ill woman trying to end her life in a violent way.

Two others were about a gang war in Gotham City, where a former corrupt accountant and a yakuza warlord were killed in the same night. The next she read had to do with a break-in at the Metropolis Museum of Natural History, and the one after that was about the Joker’s reemergence into the public spotlight during an outbreak of Intergang violence almost a year earlier. There were fifty other ones she read that went back as many as ten years, all of them about mysterious deaths or assassinations of well-known public figures. And one clipping from almost fifteen years back, about a baby girl abducted from a Gotham City hospital.

After a detailed description of the Joker’s exploits and appearances in another clipping, X read one about the Joker’s newest ally, a young girl named Grim Jester. She skipped over that one, seeing how boring it was, and went onto yet another.

This last clipping was about an explosion of an unfinished LexCorp building on the edge of Hob’s Bay in Metropolis. Sources said it was an Intergang meeting gone terribly wrong, that the Joker had been involved, that a young girl had been caught in the explosion, and killed. They had never found her body, assuming it had been vaporized in the explosion, which leveled the entire building.

The door clicked and opened. Mama nudged her way in with a tray of cold lassi and coconuts halved with a machete. She laid it on the bed and wiped her hands on the red gingham apron tied country-style across her front.

“ Getting some reading done, dear?” she asked.

X breathed calmly. “ Yes.” Her throat was dry.

“ If you want anything else, just ask,” Mama went to the door and closed it behind her. The small devotional tapestry of Shiva bounced on the wall.

X scooped out the coconuts and drank the lassi hungrily as she read over the clippings again. It was all coming back, and for the first time the memories came back gently instead of in a torrent of violent emotion. Her mind was calm, her nerves ordered.

Joker-man in a purple zoot suit, driving a car viewed from the back seat. He grinned back at her with teeth that were crooked and slightly off-white. There was a woman in black and red motley in the front passenger seat, smiling to herself in a silly way.

Mullen hitting the ground on his back, a sharp object slicing red gashes into his face. Robin-boy pulling her off; the real Robin-boy, not the cruel avatar of her hallucinations. In that moment, she hated him. A taste like fear in her mouth, coupled with grief, pain, and a suicidal urge.

It all hit her at once, and here she lay, in a room in Delhi, on the planet Earth, the navel of the universe.

When Mama came back in with the early breakfast of alu paratha and chai, she found one of the windows lay wide open, and X was nowhere to be seen.
***
To them, she was probably just a girl, wandering in the streets of early morning Old Delhi. She was dressed in a school uniform, her pockets stuffed with what looked like paper. Her face was a smear of numb, stupid tears and makeup she had tried to rub off with her sleeve. Vendors along the sidestreets washed down the cobbles with buckets of scummy water, flecks of it dotting her ankle socks.

There was a woman on the corner, a well-dressed Western lady in a cream-yellow skirt suit, her blonde locks tucked into a giant white hat. She clasped a small black purse at her side. Upon seeing X, she skittered over on tight stiletto heels.

“ You speak English?” she asked in a type of accent reserved for people with college educations and offices.

“ Yes,” the girl whispered. She looked scared, or somewhat paranoid, because she hunched her head low in her shoulders and looked upward like she feared being hit.

“ Can you tell me where a phone is? A pay phone?” the lady asked.

X pointed in an indistinct direction and crossed her arms.

“ Thanks,” The woman walked off, taking wide strides. X pressed into an alley.

The blonde woman strolled for a block before stopping in front of a bridal shop displaying gilt saris and garlands of money in its window. She went through her bag and came up with a little red digital phone, bringing up a number programmed into the speed-dial.

“ Uh-huh,” she said, tone changing immediately. “ You were right. It’s her, Mistah J.”
***
Black vans. Kevlar armor. They now came to her in the daylight, while she moved through the crowds, as the flutter of silk against her skin was as real as the fake bullets speeding through her skull.

She didn’t know where she was going, just that she needed to escape. An olive-flanked helicopter swooped low over the corrugated iron forest, the saris flickering bright on their washlines. Those encapsulated inside it were trapped within decadent dreams, haunted by gaunt faces and hacked limbs and sodden cardboard homes. Slumbering bodies were stacked one on top of the other, like firewood. She tried not to pinch tiny fingers under the heels of her shoes.

Like every one of them, she was caught in this mass hallucination, trapped between knowing what was real and not knowing anything at all. Her body was a testament to that, as was her mind, as blank and soft and brutal as it was.

On her way, she ducked into a small alcove and sat down on a step. It was cool here, the little slabs of concrete thick with lichen and shaded from the sun by over-hanging roof structures. She breathed deeply. Tin clinked on copper. A sliver of amplified sun caught her in the eye, and she looked up.

There was a giant brass Buddha sitting across from her, under an overhang, its body simply a grouping of golden curves. It had a round face, with a peaceful smile, its hands molded into the signs for peace and welcome. Its legs were crossed over a lotus blossom.

It began to speak to her but she left before it had a chance.

She reached Connaught Place just as the sun began to burn off the residual pollution that stacked up along the horizon. Already it was humid, and tiny insects of sweat began dribbling down her back and along her legs. She wiped the rest of the makeup off on her sleeve, leaving there a swipe of tan. Seamlessly, she moved into the ornate marble lobby of one of the English-inspired buildings already busy at the early hour. The cars lined up outside on the street gleamed through the tinted windows of the building. X quickly got into an elevator.

On the roof, she could see the pinkish swathe of the dawn bordered with heaps of blue clouds and intersected with the skyline. A cool, calming wind blew across the roof. The door lay broken behind her, where she had crumpled it without thinking.

She went to the very edge, standing with her shoes lined up neatly. Cold rippled along her skin, so she pulled her sweater tighter.

Breathed in and fell. There could be no matching sensation.

She opened her eyes and smiled just as she hit the car parked below. Hit the water below. The thousands of newspaper clippings in her pockets took flight around her, the demented, shattered pieces of her former self. Cracking glass knit her skin as she flew through the metal frame. As her lungs filled with blood…water.

So this is how it had happened, how it had felt. The day she had died, so long ago. Because now she remembered it all. The cool, calm demeanor of her predecessor filled her with warmth.

[Sable Phoenix]

Geeze, DoE, how much punishment can you put this poor girl through? I mean, I don't expect her to be dead even after this, but... man oh man.

Y'now, this story better end happily for X. She deserves it after everything else she's gone through.

That being said, once again your writing is superlative. Keep it up.

Oh, um, just a thought... you know, in passing... where the heck is Saru?

[witness]

Gotta hand it to you DoE... You've certainly done a great job of keeping my interest. This chapter has been as amazing as the others previous to it. That said, I wish you'd quit trying to kill off X. It's getting a little repetative. However, I do understand that you're only trying to expand her character through all of these attempts on her life. This chapter gave me a little insight as to how the other X's might have felt when they suceeded in commiting suicide. Very interesting indeed. Also was surprised at who's tracked her down in this chapter. It is very rare that the Joker would have an interest outside of Gotham... I'm intrigued as to how you'll explain how Joker found out where X is, not to mention that he "knows who" X is as well. That should make for an interesting chapter or two. Wondering who's going to find her this time? Will Intergang finally catch up with her and return her to Lexcorp? Will Harley pick her up and take her to Gotham? Or will Mama return and keep X stuck in Delhi? I'm also wondering where Saru is.

[The_NewCatwoman]

How did I know that was Harley?! OMGosh, that was ridiculous how I did that, it's been happening all week. But enought about my semi-psychic ramblings, I agree with Sable Phoenix and Witness when I say quit putting her through so much crap already. Got-dangit. Oh, and it was cute to see somebody acknowledging Tim for the shorter person he is, kinda like A.J.

Peace,

tNC

[Daughterof_Evil]

Sable Phoenix: Awww, thanks so much for the nice compliments!! I can't really tell you much in the way of Saru. Believe me, it'll come later. But thanks again!!

witness: Thank you for pointing out that I'm not just trying to torture X...her experiences are proving to shape her character. I want a reason for the way she is, and currently, she's in such a psychological state that nothing short of having her head blown off is going to contribute to that. You and everyone else are so interested in Saru, maybe you want to beg Tonbo very nicely to write a story about him. Then again, don't. You never know what she's capable of when she has possession of a blender.

tNC: Thanks for the loveliness that is your presence...and the fact that you've mentioned Tim's height restrictions. I love bringing that up.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Welcome, everyone. It's been a strange weekend for me (but aren't they all?), so here is the newest installation of Dreams of Demons to salve my wounds. It should be read with special discretion, since it describes scenes of intense torture and contains very blunt references to sado-masochism and child pornography. Just as a bit of background info, the FBI has a special program to deal with cases of child pornography entitled Innocent Images, which is why I made the allusion toward it.
***
The image came back to him that night, involuntarily. Batman had the picture salvaged from the virus tucked into a pocket of his belt: the stark black and white image of the girl on her side, tied up with chains, wearing a patent-leather under-suit with a sheet wrapped around her head. The way her muscles stuck out of her pale thighs, the shadowing of each gouge in the flesh. She probably wasn’t older than him.

She was probably X.

The club was shoved into a respectable-looking corner of the high-rent district, unadvertised in a tall, elegant brownstone with dramatic molding around the windows. In truth, Batman said they most likely migrated from location to location to avoid stigma.

They went in a side window into the hallway outside the apartment, then knocked on the door politely. A Guatemalan maid answered, then stepped back in silent awe as they swept past her and down the hall.

The floors here were light wood, walls painted cream, sepia family photos lined up along the hallway. There was laughter coming from the living room, a spacious room down at the end. They took a drastic left into it.

Batman didn’t flinch at the man in the full-body patent leather hanging from the eyehooks in the ceiling, or at the coifed and painted ladies in steel bustiers wielding whips at the living room table. Chains and manacles were knotted about the floor in serpentine tangles, probably for later use. A long banquet table bore about twenty well-dressed spectators. Two of them were Memoria and Praevidare Khasekemwy, both of whom blew Robin a kiss.

The ringleader of the women, a spry, pale fifty-year-old with a black pageboy cut and a silk Gothic uniform, separated herself from the table of black-clad onlookers. She came around to their side of the room and stood with hands on hips. The women behind her quickly started in again on the whipping, to Robin’s acute embarrassment.

“ Batman,” Madame Dauphine said, “ what do you want?”

“ To talk,” He produced the picture, holding it out at arm’s length.

She rose her eyebrows impassively at it. “ That, I have nothing to do with.”

“ It was salvaged from the wreckage of your little group’s crashed website,” Batman told her, picture still clenched in his fist.

Madame Dauphine sighed and motioned for them to follow her. She went shortly down the hallway, into an office lined with dark bookshelves and walls painted blood-red. Everything was smooth, brown leather, perhaps an allegory to her private life.

She closed the French doors behind them. “ We don’t want any trouble with the FBI.”

Batman laid the picture on her desk. Dauphine crossed to look at it.

“ We were told upon purchasing that image that the girl was nineteen,” she said.

“ Looks twelve to me,” Robin said.

Dauphine glared at him. “ Bad Batman, bringing such impressionable youth to such a debauched place.”

“ Stick to the facts,” Batman told her.

“ Ten hours after that image went up on our site, it was attacked by hackers and demolished. I had people look into it, they told me that the girl was some Intergang wench, that some punisher of theirs had taken pictures of her and sold them without asking permission from his superiors. They said the girl was a real, live slave, not the kind of fake master/slave relationships you get in SM.”

“ And you didn’t tell the FBI?”

“ What would I say to make them believe me? My culture is a secret one for a reason,” she said pointedly.

“ Did they mention the girl’s name?” asked Robin. He was already in complete violation of the promise he had made to Bruce: look at nothing and say nothing.

She shook her head. “ No. I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know I was getting in with Intergang until they torched my site.”

Batman turned and went for the door. “ Thank you.”

“ No problem, boys. Sure you won’t join us?” Dauphine asked as she headed back for the living room.

“ No thanks,” Robin muttered, closing the front door behind him.
***
They were leaving, tides of them at a time, slinking through the darkening forests and along the silent highways. They were headed south in a quiet wave, packing their belongings and setting out at his command.

The semi was parked below, on a stretch of pavement lit palely with giant halogen lamps. From his window in the fourth-floor office, Mullen watched as a figure garbed in a white respirator suit was guided toward the semi. LexCorp guards followed closely, the halogen striking dull shapes off their readied guns.

X004 hadn’t tried to kill herself yet, which Vale informed them was a watermark of success. All of her systems were working properly; if possible, she would be put into action immediately. Luthor had sent them a most sincere message: that he would see the new girl in person soon, like a proud grandfather.

“ Mullen,” He turned; it was Annaka at the door. She was dressed in full-length black, from leather boots to denim to a jet-beaded top and a big jacket. Her blonde locks were drawn back in a sloppy ponytail: a perfect approximation of German ill-tempered youth. She could still play the part.

“ Everyone is ready to leave?” he asked, following her from the office and down the hall to the lift.

She hit the button for the first floor.“ Everyone has left but us. I recommend you, Whitacre, and myself travel separately, so Whitacre is taking the semi with X004 and three soldiers, you’re leaving with Luthor’s bodyguard, and I am hitchhiking.”

“ You’re hitchhiking?” he questioned, throwing a glance at her. The elevator hit the first floor, and they walked out side by side.

“ I can take perfect care of myself, Mullen,” she said. Mercy Graves was waiting at the far end of the lobby, her arms crossed over her brown uniform, cap pulled down over her eyes.

“ Ah, the lovely Miss Graves,” Mullen cried at the woman. She turned and glared at him.

“ Let’s get this over with,” Mercy growled, stomping down the hall to the private entrance. Mullen smiled sardonically at her retreating back and followed. Halfway down the hall, his digital phone began to bleat in his pocket. He answered it.

“ What are you doing!?” Mercy demanded, turning on him. “ We have to-“

“ Shut up!” Mullen yelled. He went back to the phone. “ Yes?”

There was nothing but dry, rasping breath.

“ What is it?” he asked.

The voice was dark, warped electronically. “ The girl. She is in Delhi.”

A click as they hung up. Mullen neatly dropped the phone back in his coat pocket.

“ What is it?” Annaka asked from down the hall.

He waited a second before answering. His face was twisted into a little smile.

“ Nothing.” He continued after Mercy, who had already started off on her own.

Annaka roamed outside just as the semi pulled off down the winding road to the highway. Threw one last glance at the LexCorp facility and then just walked off into the dark, her duffel bag over her shoulder.
***
People moving in the darkness, threading hair-fine needles into his nerves. He grit his teeth under the layers of duct tape sealing his mouth. Something pricked his bare thigh. A burning sensation flowered up his spine, tears of pain leaking from his eyes.

The hard rope binds bit into the pale flesh of his wrists and ankles as he thrashed uselessly, chest rising and falling as he gasped violently for breath. About a dozen hands anchored him back down. They all injected him again, at the same time. He felt his skin bubble and scar inside to out. Burning in his veins. Someone was sewing up a gash in his side, along his ribs.

He couldn’t help it. He screamed. Screamed for his ane-sama.
***
“ Take all my money, please,”

Hands regarded her calmly, snapping on latex gloves. She was done up in full surgical gear, a white gown, her dark hair tucked into a paper cap. People roamed behind her, all of them dressed in blue, all of them wearing gas masks with reflective lenses. It was dark, and cool, and it smelled like powder all around her.

“ It’s going to cost a lot,” Hands told her.

“ I have money. American money, under my mattress. Mama knows where it is.” It was hard to talk, her throat corroded with blood. “ Please, I…I can still feel it in me. I need it all out.”

“ A system cleanse will run you about fifty thousand…that’s as much as heart surgery,”

“ Please!”

Hands smiled and shook her head. “ You should see yourself, you know? You’re all messed up,” She brushed a clump of bloody hair behind X’s ear. “ Your nanites fixed you up pretty well, but if we hadn’t gotten to you, you would have been stuck in some hospital.”

A door closed behind her. “ Here,” It was Mama. She handed over a green tin that had once held powdered tea. Hands opened it and poured out the wads of cash, all of it adding up to about a hundred thousand dollars.

“ You need anything else while we’re in there?” she asked, counting the money.

“ Sweep me for trackers,” X said. Gasped on her own bile, then went on. “ Ugh, can you take off the tattoos?”

“ Not possible,” Hands said. “ It would be like picking nanoscopic shrapnel out of the metallo of your arm and leg, and it could be connected to a failsafe in your brain. I wouldn’t take the chance.”

“ What else…what else can I afford?”

Mama gave her a look.

“ Some judicious plastic surgery,” Hands smiled. “ Straighten out that nose of yours? Sand you out some righteous cheekbones? Collagen in the top lip? Maybe erase those scars? I could make you look real pretty, and Intergang wouldn’t recognize you.”

X sighed, and something in her chest rattled. Her body was still healing itself from the fall, so occasionally she felt a pop or heard a crack as some body part mended. Hands leaned over her and hit a button on the other side of the bed, their chests bumping deliberately as she did. A chrome-rimmed circular scan machine swooped up over the head of the bed, balancing over X’s skull. It scanned in a few seconds.

“ Something to make me look…vicious,” X said. “ I want people to fear me, including Intergang.”

Hands grinned and disappeared, then came back a few seconds later, holding a tray laid with blue paper. On the paper were two triangular teeth, about half an inch long and slightly curved. They were bright white.

“ Grown in a vat from the genes of a Siberian wolf. Lovely, eh?” the woman said.

“ Put your tricks away, girl,” Mama scolded out of view. Hands frowned at her.

“ I like them,” X croaked. “ I want them in.”

“ Then you will have them, darling,” Hands told her, leaning over and kissing X on the forehead. The girl went immediately under.
***
Milky green surrounded her on all sides. Ropes, cords, tubes tangled tightly around her, squeezing her in. She thrashed. Screamed.

Skin was flayed from bone in a hot, cauterizing kiss; tiny veins in her eyes ruptured, staining the water red. Around her the beats of demon hearts pulled her deeper in. Everything burned. Burning, burning still. She had the distinct flavor of bile in her throat, and felt, hopelessly, that this was a collage of experience. Her memories were returning and singeing the neural pathways as they did.

But it didn’t matter. There was only so far she could go back, so far where she could remember the smell of gunpowder or the feel of a kiss or the touch of living in skin like pure spun silk. It was all right. The old girl was dead, and she was the successor.
***
When she woke, there was no urgent pull of Macchina in her body, no tired ache in her bones. For the first time since the day she was recreated at LexCorp, she felt truly pure, clean, alive.

She sat bolt upright. The bed she was on was slightly transparent white plastic rimmed with chrome and lit from within. Ran her tongue over the wolf teeth in her top jaw. They were sharp, and so wide the technicians had had to file some of her other top teeth to fit them in. When she smiled at herself in the mirror, she looked mean, serious. This was her newest rebirth, one that she had control over. They had wiped her system clean of the Macchina, pulled the drug from the neurons in her brain.

Her clothes were in tatters, laid out on a silver bed like a forensic investigation of a homicide victim. Folded neatly at the foot was a black salwar kamise, black undersuit, combat boots, and a patent leather collar—everything she had requested from Mama’s house. She put the clothes on quickly.

She went home with Mama that afternoon, their car speeding through the night streets. As they approached the house, several men lounging on the steps got up to move. Papa’s friends, who believed his stories of the pale demon who lived in his home.

They went upstairs immediately.

“ Get Radni,” Mama told her. “ I need her help with dinner,”

X obliged, heading for the laundry room, a small, windowless closet in the back of the house. The dryer was on, shimmying as it spun. Radni had her back to the door, folding clothes over the washer. She had her shoes on.

“ Mama wants your help-“ She stopped in midsentence, feeling the change in the air. Radni turned and pointed the blue-steel handgun directly at X’s head. X backed up, and felt another cold barrel level with her spine.

“ It is best you do not resist, child,” Mama said behind her as X heard the helicopter land on the roof. “ I would hate to ruin your new good mood.”

[Tonbo_Rosso]

yea! My babys are playing well together.

As always, a master peice of masticated rapture. keep it coming!

and as for the blinder comment, I think I would get better results with a coffee grinder, thank you very much!

Tonbo

[Sable Phoenix]

Holy COW! That was a CORKER of a cliffhanger, DoE. More! More!

Such deliciously agonizing anticipation...

[Panther]

He couldn’t help it. He screamed. Screamed for his ane-sama

SARU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh Saru, why is DofE being so mean to you????????????

[Tonbo_Rosso]

SARU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hehe. I wondered if any one would get that.

Tonbo

[The_NewCatwoman]

*sighs* Ayyyyyyye! Why can't X find somebody who isn't trying to do her in, or sell her off, or use her?

And when's she gonna meet that sister X004? (which always puts me in mind of my grad year.)

I won't even comment on Saru as I believe something much bigger than this will come along in the future.

And Bruce taking Robin just any old where is certainly disturbing to me. It got me thinking about all the stuff he must have seen living in Gotham and being exposed to really freaky sexual stuff like that. But I mean, he's from the streets so he's probably seen a lot more than just that despite his age. It's just the part where Bruce condones it that kills me.

Can't think of anything else to say.

Avoir,

tNC

[Daughterof_Evil]

Tonbo: Glad you're liking it, Tonbo. Hope I haven't used any of your "babies" inappropriately, then again, how would you define "inappropriate"?

Sable Phoenix: Hey, thanks! There is always more to come!

Panther: The meanness to Saru isn't my fault! Really! He's Tonbo's demented "baby"! Blame her! Oh, and thanks for replying!

tNC: Concerning X, she will never come upon anyone who won't want to do her in, sell her off, or use her. That's just the baggage that comes with being her. As for Robin, I have to agree with you. He's probably seen more in his life than most normal kids, and Batman knows this. But Batman wasn't really "condoning" the S&M lifestyle; it was more like he was using them, and their secrecy, for his gain. And Robin knows this. So they have an understanding here. Thanks for replying. And I just read more on Perfect Dark and was blown away by the graphic imagery of Tim's past. Panther's right: when you take into account the events of ROTJ, everything about Tim seems different. In this continuity, did everything happen the same way? Or was there a different M.O. this time around...?

[The_NewCatwoman]

I always kinda ignore the ROTJ part of the story when I write fan fics. And with my two stories now, it's the exception to the rule. I have two different outcomes, the one in Broken I won't tell you, although one can kind of guess. The other one that's in Perfect Dark is somewhat more happy with Tim still being Robin.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks again to all of those who replied. I really appreciate the time you take to comment a little on my story.

This part has very little objectionable content, so I'll just leave you to it. Thanks and see you later!
***
X recognized the man in the helicopter immediately. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing an impeccable pinstripe suit. Black hair combed forward over a tan face and dark eyes. Umberto Calivez, her first ever opponent in battle, back when she lived at LexCorp.

He pulled her into the cabin of the helicopter, and Radni shoved in on the other side, the delicate semiautomatic handgun still in X’s ribs. The moment the hatch slid shut, they lifted off, curving wide over nighttime Delhi and out toward the southwest horizon.

Even in the dark, she could see the long, sloping green surrounding the intricate house and wondered again why she was allowing this. She leaned over Calivez to watch the estate grow up out of the dark. He gave her a smothering look, but she ignored him. The house was what interested her: it appeared to be a mix of traditional, musty English castle and crumbling Hindu fortress, some long-standing refuge of the incarnated god Ram.

It was dawn by then. The helicopter landed on a plain stone platform buried in the midst of the forest; the pilot didn’t even turn off the engine, so Calivez had to nearly double over to keep from being decapitated by the whirring blades. Once X, Calivez, and Radni were clear, the little craft took off again, turning back in the direction of Delhi.

There were circular ponds rimming the back garden, the water in them thick and smelling of decomposition. Lotuses rose, fat and pale, from the flotsam, their blooms lit as if from within by an unmistakable glow. The back patio was made of shiny brown brick, with a tall stupa-styled gazebo planted in the middle of it. It was under there that she saw the crest of crane-white hair, the Romanesque profile, the impeccable clothes.

As she approached, Lockhardt stood and bowed.

“ Little X,” he said, a tinge of fondness in his voice.

“ Lockhardt,” she said quietly.

He quirked an eyebrow. “ No ‘Master Lockhardt’?”

She stiffened her whole form out. “ I have no master.”

He shrugged and motioned her over. Radni prodded her in the back with her semiautomatic, and X followed Lockhardt up to the white metal lawn table.

Lockhardt was a tall, lean man in his late sixties, built like a lucky man of forty. His hair and goatee were snowy white, eyes hard and blue and glimpsed through pince nez balanced on his nose. He dressed in a light grey vest and a black silk dress shirt with black slacks, the gold of his pocket watch chain gleaming against brocade.

“ Your memory is worse than I thought,” Lockhardt said. “ I figured you’d immediately remember that Radni worked for me in Portsmouth. Can’t you recall it? The maid?”

Now that he mentioned it, X could very well remember Radni, and chastised herself for the slip. She sat across from the old man. A Spanish butler brought them out a silver tray of tea. As he poured her some chai, she felt the distinct presence of twelve or more armed individuals hidden in the foliage around them.

“ Interesting look, X,” Lockhardt mentioned, waving a hand at her outfit. She was dressed in a black salwar kamise, the patent leather dog collar forced on her in China about her neck. She felt a strange impulse to wear it, like she was asserting her independence with a symbol of bondage.

“ Why am I here?” she asked frankly.

Lockardt had his cloissoné teacup raised to his face, but he put it down and folded his hands. “ X, I have split from Mullen. We are no longer working together.”

She was silent. He went on.

“ He asked for too much, wanted to do everything on his own. As you know, it was my connections that saw us safely through Europe in the early days. Now Mullen believes his bond with Luthor will take care of everything; in short, he has sold his soul to LexCorp.

“ Now that they’ve both lost you, it’s become a desperate situation indeed. Did you know, X, that you had siblings?”

“ What?” she whispered.

“ Rijos,” he said backwardly. A woman stepped from the dawn-shadows. She was tall, Spanish, with short black hair and a masculine grace that hit X full force. She wore blue-lensed glasses low on her nose and a black pantsuit. Handed Lockhardt a leather-bound palm computer.

“ Siblings,” He sat back. “ They created others like you, from other children in the world on the brink of death. However, they have all died mysteriously, and the only way for them to figure out what is going wrong is for them to have you back. That’s the reason for the ten million dollars on your head.”

“ Why are you telling me this?” X asked.

“ Because,” His voice fell, “ I need you to help me kill Mullen.”

Something inside her lit fire.

“ I don’t want anything to do with him,” X said.

“ If you don’t kill Mullen, they’ll only keep looking for you. But once he’s dead, Luthor will know enough to back off. It’s a win-win situation, X.”

She crossed her arms. “ What will you give me in return?”

“ Food, clothes, ammunition, any type of supplies you need, the best possible. My connections will speed you through any country, you won’t have to fear law enforcement. And,” He leaned forward, “ I will take care of you, X. When everything is done I’ll make you one of my chief advisors, maybe give you your own little Balkan country. What do you say?”

She sighed. “ I want to think it over. I’m not the same person you left in Paris, Lockhardt. I’ve grown. I know things.”

“ Of course, of course,” he said, waving a hand and taking a sip of tea. “ Think it over all day. But you will need to leave for Berlin tomorrow, if possible.”

“ Tomorrow?” X questioned. “ Why?”

He rubbed his chin. “ Another difficulty, I’m afraid. In order to kill Mullen, to lure him out, you’re going to need to kill Hans Klirren.”

“ I don’t even know what the man looks like,” she said crossly.

“ Very few do. He’s paranoid. Which makes him fragile.”

“ All people are fragile to me,” said X quietly.

“ I know, child.”
***
If all of Lockhardt’s servants in Portsmouth had been Indian, then all of his servants in India were Spanish. Besides Calivez, there were the innumerable servants that scurried in dark shadows, out of sight. Then there was Rijos, the tall woman from outside. She led X into the manor with one hand on the girl’s back, and X could feel the slight tingly frequency of a stungun strapped into the woman’s shoulder rig.

Rijos apparently had no first name. She was as sterile and stoic as the men who surrounded her, and as she guided X through the British-occupation Indian motif of elephant-hunt tapestries and rough-hewn floors that smelled of incense, X could see a little bit of Lockhardt in Rijos’ hard face.

“ He’s your father, isn’t he?” X asked. “ Lockhardt?”

Rijos stiffened.

“ You have his Roman nose,” X said.

“ I have nothing of his,” Rijos snapped contemptuously.

“ Sure. It’s a lovely nose, really,” X said.

They went up a curling flight of stairs to the second story, which was more of what the first floor had been. Elaborate screens of carved wood shuttered the windows, allowing bits of the wan dawn light in. Tapestries clogged the walls, pieces probably stolen from the palaces of rajas or bought black-market from peddlers in Pakistan.

The room reserved for X was smack in the middle of a long hall. It was sprawling, the floors bare wood that matched the dressers and bedstead of the same type. One entire wall was mesh-screened wood lattice that poured out to a luxurious view of an indoor courtyard. The deep purple curtains matched the bedspread that matched a simple dhurrie rug thrown underfoot.

“ You’ll need some clothes,” Rijos said, yanking open the lattice-doored closet. She pulled out a black dress with grey accents and a pleated skirt, then laid it on the bed.

“ I like the clothes I have on,” X said.

“ You have to change,” Rijos demanded.

Lockhardt was in the dining room at the lengthy table when Rijos came stomping downstairs.

“ She refuses to wear a dress,” she spat.

Lockhardt stared at her. “ Then get her some pants.”

Ten minutes passed, and X emerged from the doorway. She was wearing a high-collared jacket with grey piping, and under that black tights and thick, clunky ankle boots. Rijos had at least gotten her to comb her hair, which was a slightly better mess than it had been before.

“ It feels like you’ve become an entirely separate person, X,” he told her, standing. “ Like I barely know you at all.”

“ It’s true,” X said. “ None of you know me. I don’t know me. But I’ve begun to remember.”

He stalked around the dining table. “ About what?” he asked in a low tone.

“ I remember Mullen. He killed me, before I was enhanced at LexCorp. He was the one who caused my death. It was an explosion…in America.”

“ You see, now you have more reason to join with me than before-“

“ I’m taking your offer,” X interrupted. “ But just because I want to kill Mullen for everything he’s done to me.”

Lockhardt stared at her. “ I know. Revenge is a powerful thing.”

“ But I want you to promise me three things,” she said severely.

He nodded.

She put up her index finger. “ One, there won’t be any doctors or scientists—unless I approve. Two, I work alone. And three,” She stared him down with this one, “ I’ll do things my own way.”

He nodded again, emphatically this time. “ Fine, fine.”

They shook on it.

She placed her hands on the spindly, high back of a chair. “ So, what’s your plan?”

“ You’re leaving for Berlin tomorrow. I have a person there who is willing to take you in for the time being, while you get the job done. Actually, it will be several jobs. You need to take out several of Klirren’s aides before you hit him-”

“ When will I kill Mullen?” she asked.

“ Patience, child. Good things come to those who wait.”
***
On her way upstairs to her bedroom late that night, she passed the library on the first floor. The door lay slightly ajar, a sliver of yellow light rolling out onto the carpeted hall floor. She pushed inside.

There was a man standing near the bookcase, a leather-bound copy of Ramayana in his hands. His hair was light brown, skin tan, his face very neat and organized. He was dressed in a plain black suit, the collar of his red jersey open at the throat.

He shut the book. “ Little X,”

She bowed. “ Dr. Sylvermann.”

“ It’s good to see you’re still alive,” he said darkly, shelving the book. “ With all the talk I’d heard about you lately, I’m surprised you’re not in bits and pieces.”

“ No. Not yet,” she said.

“ You’re working for Lockhardt again?” he asked.

“ Yes. And you are still with him?”

“ Indeed. Since Marilena’s death, he’s kept me close. Like a souvenir.”

“ He wants to feel closer to his daughter,” she told him.

He shrugged. As he did, she noticed the deep haloes carved beneath his eyes and the dents in his forehead. He had aged since she had last seen him.

“ Speaking of involuntary attachments,” Ernest said, “ I hear you’ve become somewhat of a rogue.”

A curt nod confirmed it.

“ Congratulations on the escape. It was a marvelous job. Award-winning.”

She simply stared at him, cold green eyes boring deep into his.

He waved a hand at her. “ You should get to sleep, though. Someone as young as you needn’t stay up so late.”

She bowed again and left the room. As she went down the hall, she heard a sudden, violent sobbing from the library. Then it quieted, as if to be made silent, and she went on her way.
***
The image had to be approximated for the illusion to be complete. That’s what Rijos told her as she laid the outfit out on the bed early that morning. X was in the silk pajamas they’d given her, doing Tai Chi exercises when Rijos had come in. The comment was an answer to X’s outburst on the subject.

It was obvious, now, what had happened. Mama and Radni, everyone in that house in Old Delhi, had betrayed her. All the time they had spent helping her and hiding her, it had all been nothing. Just a lie. And Lockhardt had let her go psychotic so she could cleanse her system of the Macchina without him having to do it himself. He could cut her dependency to Mullen as surely as if with a sword.

She hadn’t seen Mama or Radni before she left, though her belongings had arrived at Lockhardt’s estate sometime close to three A.M. She had lingered over them in her room, smelling the leather holsters and feeling the light, cool blade of her sword in her hands. In the early hours, Rijos had driven her to the airport in a dark, polished sedan. She wore a gunmetal grey suit and the same blue glasses, though they had been pushed up her nose so they completely shielded her eyes.

“ Valencia,” Rijos said from the front seat.

“ Where you are from?” X questioned, though the way she said it wasn’t like a question. In the last few days her voice had become deeper, more assertive.

“ Where Lockhardt met my mother,” Rijos said. “ I was born in Bilbao.”

“ He likes rural women,” X noted sarcastically.

“ He likes any type of woman,”

X paused, letting the images of the city outside slide over the windows and the smooth sheen of the car.

“ And your first name?” she asked.

“ Lespia,” she said, pulling the steering wheel. “ Lespia Rijos.”

It had just passed noon when X reached Berlin, carrying a passport bearing the name of Alvilde Schromheim and toting at her side a cello case filled with her implements of battle: her guns, her katana, her daggers, a new semi/full automatic sniper’s rifle with a built in silencer and a matte black finish. A gift from Lockhardt, something she had taken to calling Engel Faust.

She cleared customs with a flash of her passport. They didn’t ask to search her bags or person, in which case they might have found the large Japanese dirk strapped to her thigh. She only went on, speeding through the crowds, smelling the smells of their fabric softeners and cheap perfumes. Her case of clothes would be coming round on the turnstile any time now, and her priority now was to get it and get out. Her host would be waiting outside for her.

She hadn’t even gotten to the Welcome to Germany sign before she saw him. He stood behind a nylon rope separating passengers from public, holding a cardboard sign reading SCHROMHEIM. It took her a scant moment to remember that was her false name, and she strode over.

He caught sight of her before she made it. He was tall, his hair blonde and combed neatly back over his head, his skin tan. He wore new glasses over tiny black eyes, and a light, tweedy sweater with khakis. Smiled at her and waved her over.

“ X!” he said quietly, when she was in earshot.

“ Professor Peterson,” she muttered.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Hey Little X is a video producer, the protege of Hype Williams to be exact. But who's noticing...? ;)

NEway, another enjoyable chapter from the author of such timeless classics as:

Shadow of Angels or Fragile Beings.

Can you tell I just at one of those soy cheese grilled cheese sandwhiches? No! Of course you can't. But you will notice I'm being particularly silly right now. Must be the lack of sleep and the Musiq Juslisen CD playing for me right now. I think I'm in love...

Okay, now that I've gone off the deep end i just thought I'd wrap this up.

So...

Bye.

tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

Ooooooh....

Things are coming together. Cool to see Dr. Peterson again.

Who is Dr. Sylvermann though? I don't remember him. And was he weeping for X... or himself?

It's going to take me a while to get used to the new, improved X. Be careful, DoE. If you make her too cold the reader will become detached from her. I already feel a bit repelled by her stoicism at the prospect of more cold-blooded murder. She has no regret, and therefore, no soul. Before, when she was strung out on drugs and pshychologically unstable, her actions elicited pity, since it was largely something she had no control over. Now that she's regained her faculties, well, she needs a conscience, or the reader won't identify with her.

[Panther]

When everything is done I’ll make you one of my chief advisors, maybe give you your own little Balkan country

X, you are being a silly fool. Never ever ever ever EVER trust someone who offers you your own country!!!!!!


The image had to be approximated for the illusion to be complete.

Ummm....what? Is that in reference to a fake ID or to the whole Delhi episode or what? I'm a little confused about who's working for who at this point.


X just seems to be along for the ride at this point and damnit now you've dragged Peterson in as well.

later,

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Put the soy grilled cheese DOWN! Good girl. I remember reading something about someone named Little X awhile ago, but I can't say that directly influenced me naming her that. As for this Musiq Juslisen, I'm not going to ask. But thanks for replying.

Sable Phoenix: I know exactly what you're talking about and I have to warn you right now that, for a select period of time, you will absolutely despise X. And I do gloss (quite heavily) over the loss-of-a-soul factor. I just wanted to convey that this is X in her unadulterated form: no drugs, no indoctrination, just X reacting off of ancient instincts she can't name. But it's her choice whether she wants to be that person or not, or maybe create a new persona. Glad you enjoy Peterson's reappearance. As for Dr. Sylvermann, there's a short bio on him on the first post of the first page of this thread, right under Lockhardt. That might explain really who he was crying for. Thanks for your lovely comments!

Panther: Of course never ever ever ever trust anyone who offers you your own country! It's rule one in the Big Book of Dealing With Old, Wealthy Men! But X hasn't exactly perused that volume, and it looks like, as you said, she won't need to. " The image had to be approximated for the illusion to be complete" is pretty much a fancy way of saying " Put on this wig and carry this cello case and no one will be smart enough to figure out what you're really doing." It also, in an abstract way, alluded to the episode of Delhi and the "betrayal" of Mama, as well as Lockhardt's intentions (which you can probably figure out aren't all that honest). Thanks for writing me and filling me in on all the neurotic little details I forgot I put into the story! And thank you for your continuing and necessary support!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks, everyone, for replying to this story and filling me in on your emotions and opinions. It really helps make the writing process flow when you can work out all the blanks, and I really appreciate your feedback and the fact that you're still here reading.

This episode is rated R for serious sexual innuendo and seduction, as well as language which some might find offensive. The opening lyrics were supplied by the band The Faint, from their song "Your Retro Career Just Melted" off their album Danse Macabre, and the other lyrics are from the Underworld song "Born Slippy". Enjoy.
***
“ Fleshtone shards fly by wild,
they fill a plastic bag with the parts inside,
the bag got dumped, a town nearby,
they reassembled fast as his voice dropped hard:

Your retro career ma-ma-ma-ma-melted
Your retro career ma-ma-ma-ma-melted…”

“ Yo, TIM!” came loud from the doorway. Tim turned and grinned at the new arrivals, a cluster of tenth grade boys in one of his AP classes. They slapped him on the back, then shied away into the black throw of the party, where already the tumultuous revelers were beginning to mosh.

“ Having fun?” Barbara asked behind him. She was wearing an outfit he had never seen on her before, a dark grey silk blouse with a sleeveless high collar and a leather skirt. Knee-high boots with it, the go-go kind made of shiny black plastic.

“ I don’t even know this many people,” Tim said, beaming. “ This is great!”

“ I thought you’d like it,” Barbara said. “ By the way, Dick said he wished he could be here.”

Johnny Kim glided in the door as if by some magical motivation, wearing black slacks and a blue dress shirt open to reveal the jade cross he wore around his neck.

“ Jeez, Tim, drain all the people out of downtown, why don’t you,” he said with mock anger. He glanced past his friend, to Barbara.

“ Hell-o,” he grinned. “ Who’s your friend, Timmy?”

“ Barbara Gordon,” Tim introduced, rolling his eyes a little.

“ Wanna dance?” He already had Barbara’s arm, and was leading her towards the ballroom, where the dancing was somewhere within the cocoon of black and bits of sporadic red or blue. Barbara laughed in a humoring way, lacing an arm around Johnny’s shoulders just to show how much taller she was. They disappeared inside.

Down the hall was the polite hum of the other ballroom, the one reserved for the close friends Bruce had invited over to counteract the presence of so many teenagers. Lucius Fox, DA Van Dorn, assorted corporate lackeys and their token trophy women.

“ Happy Birthday,”

He turned. Standing at the door was a fairly tall woman, tan, Japanese, with a mop of permed black curls for hair. Her face was exquisite, like browned porcelain, cheekbones high and eyes glittering dark under bare slashes of eyebrows. She wore a suit made out of black kimono fabric patterned with whorls of golden phoenixes, and delicate strapped high heels over manicured feet.

“ My name is Motoko Kaneda,” she said, voice sweet and without accent. “ Mr. Cyrus Vyskanti has sent me.”

For the first time, he noticed the large green box she held over her front.

“ This is for you,” she said, handing it to him. It was heavy. “ A present from Mr. Vyskanti.”

“ Gee, thanks,” He sat it on the foyer table, where a pile of wrapped gifts already laid. He turned back to her and realized, with a touch of a blush, that the gift had hidden the generous amount of cleavage spilling out of Motoko’s jacket.

“ Um, Bruce is that way,” he said, pointing towards the other ballroom.

“ You are greeting your guests?” she asked, not even looking where he’d gestured.

“ Yeah,”

“ Of course. Why else would you not go inside?” Her eyes sparked. He found it difficult to look directly at her.

“ Yeah, I’m waiting for some more friends to come,” he said. “ But Bruce is in the other ballroom.”

“ Yes,” She smiled, and her teeth were sharp. She went towards the other room, her strapped shoes making a tiny click on the flooring. “ You should go on in. There are a bunch of pretty girls coming up the walk.”

He was about to comment on that, but three girls did come in the door and Motoko had gone inside the other ballroom. Tim turned and smiled at them. He recognized them almost immediately, three girls who hung out with Karen Alu-alahi. A blonde in a fuzzy pink jacket and matching boots, a Latino girl with orange stripes in her hair, and a chubby brunette all in black.

“ Hi, Timothy!” the blonde cried at him. Bess Farthing, he remembered her name was. A tenth grader whose parents were a professional realty team.

“ Wow, nice place, Timmy,” the Latino girl, June, said, glancing at the walls, floor, the soaring ceiling. The brunette (whose name he couldn’t quite grasp) just stared around, eyes bright with paranoia.

“ Oh, thanks,” He paused. “ Karen isn’t with you guys?”

“ Nooo,” the brunette murmured.

“ She had a study date,” June answered quickly, swiping an orange lock behind her ear. “ But she wanted to tell you how sorry she was she couldn’t make it.”

“ Do you have anything to drink?” the brunette asked quietly.

“ In there,” They tottered for the ballroom on three-inch heels and went inside.

After a few minutes of waiting, he finally ducked inside his own party. It was dark, the strobe striking bright lights against bodies that heaved in the electronica blaring from the stereos. He moved through them silently, using his Robin instincts, picking one face from the next, sorting and storing them away in his mind.

" Let your feelings slip, boy
But never your mask, boy…"

After awhile, the crowd parted, making way for two people dancing in the dark. Two women, one he immediately saw was Barbara from the shiny flicker of her boots as she danced. The other was dressed different than everyone else, in all black, knickers and a long coat, black lace foaming from tightly tailored hems.

Tim grit his teeth. So they were here.

“ The freaky blonde is kind of hot,” Johnny whispered to Tim from the side.

“ Believe me, she doesn’t bat for our team,” Tim grumbled back.

“ So’s Barbara like, your sister or something?”

“ Something,” The music got louder, smothering the rest of their conversation. It didn’t matter anyway, because the anxious crowd sort of melted in on Barbara and Memoria, secreting them away from view, and Tim and Johnny were tossed into the fray. Hands flickered from his shoulder blades, across his arms, down his chest, knocking a button off his shirt so it opened halfway. Someone grabbed his hand, and pulled him through the crowd and out into the foyer.

Tim barely caught a glance of Praevidare’s shock-white clothing as he pulled him through the foyer and into the dark hallways around the kitchen. The boy tried to fight, but Praevidare was strong. Too strong. He wrenched him into the kitchen and had thrown him into the giant pantry with barely a sound.

It was dark. Praevidare closed the door behind them.

“ You’re looking for X,” he said. His voice was musky.

Tim didn’t say anything. He was trying to breathe.

“ You and Batman are looking for X,” Praevidare repeated. “ Why?”

“ X knows things about Intergang,”

“ X is a lost cause. She’s not even human anymore. Barely an animal.” There was a jangle of his bracelets as he brushed a black lock behind one ear.

“ It’s worth a try.”

Praevidare snickered in the dark. “ You super heroes, always saving the unsaveable.”

“ So what category are you in?” Tim mocked.

“ I dunno, love. Why don’t you tell me?” Thin arms around him, fast, shoving him smoothly up against the wall. A can of something fell off the shelf and hit the ground. Praevidare pressed his mouth against his, hard. He was warm, tasting like acidic liquor. Tim was trying to move, but he was suffocating, drowning in it. Praevidare’s strong, slender hands wrapped around Tim’s waist and pulled him close.

Tim twisted away. “ Get off me you fag!”

Praevidare stepped away and backhanded Tim into a shelf of canned peas. “ For God’s sake, boy! You run around in red spandex forty percent of the time, people are going to assume things!”

“ Shut up!” Tim hissed, hand over his hurt cheek. Praevidare hit pretty hard.

“ Boy-whore,” Praevidare accused.

“ I told you to shut up!”

“ Listen, I’m here to tell you something. A major shift has happened in Intergang,” Praevidare’s spindly fingers enwrapped Tim’s lower jaw fiercely, playing over the bruise. “ X has joined with Lockhardt to destroy Mullen. If she wants anything, she’ll have it, and all she hungers for now is vengeance. Blood. Death on a massive scale.”

“ Power,” Tim croaked. Praevidare let go of his face.

“ Exactly. After not having it for so long.”

“ Do you have any pictures of her?”

“ If I do, will you give me a blow job?”

“ No!”

“ Oh well. I didn’t have any pictures of her anyway. I just wanted you in my pants.”

“ Just…go!”

Praevidare sighed and opened the door. “ I suppose I’ll see you later, love?”

“ Screw you!”

“ Hopefully so.” He closed the door as he left, encapsulating Tim in the blackness.

Tim sat down on a giant can of peaches and covered his face with his hands. He didn’t even have time to start crying before he heard the calls from the lobby. He burst from the pantry and skidded through the kitchen, hitting the wall of the hall outside and sort of bouncing into the empty living room.

“ Tim!” It was Barbara pulling him up off the floor. “ Where have you been!? We were looking for you!”

“ I just got kissed by a guy,” he muttered. “ I feel sick.”

“ Stop kidding around,” she growled.

“ What happened?” he asked.

“ Something, I’m not sure,” she said. “ Bruce disappeared someplace.”

“ Does anyone suspect anything?” Tim asked.

“ Nothing.”

There was a thud in the back of the house, and all attentions were directed at the hall Tim had just exited. Bruce staggered in, panting, his tie ripped clean from his throat, his collar bagging open over his jugular.

“ My God! What happened!?” Barbara cried.

“ Motoko…Kaneda,” he gasped. “ In the garage.”

There was a tight roar from outside, and they glanced out the open front door just as the headlights of one of Bruce’s speedsters angled down the curving hill road.

Barbara and Tim stared blandly at Bruce.

“ Don’t tell anyone,” he said severely, taking the ripped tie off his shirt. “ We’ll deal with this in our own time.”

“ What was it?” Tim asked.

“ She excused herself, somehow disabled the cameras in the halls, went through my things and stole a couple very expensive watches and cufflinks.” He gestured at the door. “ Then took my favorite Porsche.”

“ She said she worked for Cyrus Vyskanti,” Tim said.

“ She was lying,” Bruce mumbled. “ Saito called today saying he would forgo the party, and she somehow knew this.”

“ Wait!” Tim said. “ She brought me a present!”

Bruce made him show him where it was. He picked it up.

“ What are we going to do with it?” Barbara asked, following Bruce and Tim as they made their way down the cavernous halls.

She was answered when they took a drastic turn into the library, shutting and locking the giant doors. They pulled open the grandfather clock and descended into the cool, musty darkness as it closed itself behind them.

The lights panned on immediately, the computer opening to the security system default program. Three of the cameras –the one up the back stairs, the one in the hall outside Bruce’s room, and the one inside the garage- were blank, showing nothing but slate-black.

Bruce put the boxed gift in the analysis hatch of the Batcomputer, shutting the blast-proof plastic door behind it. He keyed up a scan program, and a blue light swept gracefully over the gift. It came up in a black, green laced image.

“ Any explosive residues found?” Bruce asked the computer.

It beeped. “ No.”

“ Detection of any biohazardous material?”

“ No.”

“ It seems she gave you socks, Tim,” Barbara said with a raised eyebrow.

“ The gift that keeps on giving,” the boy muttered.

Barbara leaned over him and sniffed his collar. “ You smell like…cognac.”

“ No I don’t,” Tim denied.

She brushed his face with a finger. “ And you’re sort of bruised there.”

He touched his cheek. It still hurt.

“ Lady killer. Must’ve been slapped by a girl,” Barbara teased.

Bruce leaned back in his chair, touching his chin with one finger. A bruise was beginning to form along his exposed neck, like Motoko had tried to strangle him. Barbara and Tim turned back to the task at hand.

“ This all seems a little superfluous to just take some watches,” Barbara pointed out.

“ And there was nothing else missing?” Tim asked.

“ Nothing. My mother’s jewelry is hidden in the vaults in the walls, but she didn’t make any attempt to locate anything else. I did an electric sweep on her trail from the ballroom to the garage, and she left no bugs or trackers.”

“ So the motivation was just simple robbery?” Barbara questioned.

“ I don’t think robbery was any motivation,” Bruce said grimly. “ I’m not sure, but I think that might have been Hiramiaku.”

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Daughterof_Evil
tNC: Put the soy grilled cheese DOWN! Good girl. I remember reading something about someone named Little X awhile ago, but I can't say that directly influenced me naming her that. As for this Musiq Juslisen, I'm not going to ask. But thanks for replying.


Heyyy, don't diss my boy. As far as celebrity love goes, he's second only to Nas.

As for the cheese, i'm down to my last slice, so i'm holding out by satisfying the urge with no-animal fat holiday nogg. pretty good actually.

too late to read now so i'll get this tomorrow

[The_NewCatwoman]

*mouth hangs open dumbly*

what can I say? what /can/ I say?

Tim getting sexually harassed by a boy who doesn't know how to take "no" for an answer.

Bruce's favorite Porche.

Motoko who could or could not be Hiramiaku. *Sigh*

This was splendiferous DofE. That's all I can say. Everything else would just be an understatement. In it's somewhat simplicity it just... rocked!

tNC

[Tonbo_Rosso]

<Tonbo sits under DoE's desk and makes happy sounds.>

Hehe... uhm... Coooool...gee.... happy....

[Casity]

Ok that was great. Tim rules, and so does this story.
I want to see more... and more... and more...
X is a cool character!

[Sable Phoenix]

OH yeah!

This tops them ALL, DoE! As soon as I read that last sentence, I literally said out loud, "What?!", and then started laughing. I should've known you wouldn't kill off Hiramiaku, but it was quite a jolt all the same.

As always, keep it coming.

[Panther]

:eek: Wow. Just... wow.

Conflicting thoughts and emotions about Bruce's announcement. At this point I sincerely /hope/ and do belive it's her. But then why isn't she rescuing her baby brother?? Where is Saru!!!!?????!!!

Great party - but poor Tim!!!

later,

[witness]

Well, well, well..... This story never ceases to amaze me! Something has been nagging at me in the back of my mind about this story for awhile now. With these latest chapters, you've brought X back to what she does best. Working as an assassain! I can't wait to see her in action again! You have however, left a lot of unanswered questions still! So I'll bring them up again in hopes that you haven't forgotten about these things.

Where's La Touga? He hasn't shown up lately and I'm wondering where he is.

Where are these supposed siblings of X? X004 hasn't killed herself yet says you, so where is she? Will you be using her in this story.... or have you started already? (more on this later)

What in the world happened to Saru??????? You left us with him screaming for his ane-sama and we haven't known anything else about him since!

What happened to Mullen? He knew X was in Delhi, is he going to do anything about it?

When are the Joker and Harley going to show up? You gave us a little teaser when Harley caught up with her in Delhi, but once again nothing else has happened with this part of your story. Others may not care so much about Joker and Harley, but I do! I like them, especially when they're used correctly in a story. Which you of course can do.

Finally to say stuff about this chapter. Very shocking indeed. Prev (don't want to spell out the entire name) was really forceful this time around! Tim had better be careful if he ever sees Prev again! Shamed to hear that the whole Dehli stuff was just a set-up from the get-go. I'm glad to know that X can actually make a mistake, it makes her seem more human. Though I'm sure that she'll work harder to never let another slip like that happen again.

Hiramiaku is back!!! Woohoo! Yeah, why isn't she going after her brother? Could it be that she just doesn't know? I mean after all, she died, didn't she? Doesn't that make her a perfect fit for being an X? More specifically, X004??? I may just be fishing for something that's not really there, since I don't think she was burned like all the rest.... but there is that possibility. Motoko (Hiramiaku) said that Cyrus Vskanti sent her, but Saito, Cyrus' usual guy told Bruce that he wouldn't be at the party. Could it be? Is Motoko really Hiramiaku who could also be X004??? If so, and I know that's a big if, could Saru not be too far behind as X005?

[Tonbo_Rosso]

You have however, left a lot of unanswered questions still!

Heehee! I love the suspence! Witness, I love your post. I know DoE will, too.

DoE is definatly building a Gotham sized web here. All I can say now is expect a breakneck path up ahead.

Enjoy and Keep reading!
Tonbo

[Sable Phoenix]

Oh, another thing. I just love all the one liners in this chapter. Great dry humor.

And by the way, "kimono fabric" is also known as "silk". Heh.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Cool! This is the most posts I've had in forever! Thank you all!

tNC: Always first to post, never last to leave me amazed at your off-topic ranting. But it's very endearing. I love hearing about soy cheese and whatever singer you happen to be stalking. And thank you for saying my story was "splendiferous". I tried looking that up in the dictionary, I really did. Just read a little of Broken and I'm still horribly lost, though I was happy to note that though things just complicated by tenfold on Perfect Dark I can still understand what's going on. I got a little behind on Broken...is there any way you can send me a tiny synopsis through PM? Thanks again!

Tonbo: Thanks for the random monosyllabic replies. And the whole borrowing your characters thing. HEY EVERYONE! Tonbo created Hiramiaku and Saru! Kneel and WORSHIP!

Casity: Yay! New girl! Thanks so much for saying you like X! We all love Timmy here, so don't be afraid to share the digital adoration! I'll get on that "more story" thing in a second here...

Sable Phoenix: Thanks, man! Always glad to hear someone is approving of the resurrections of the evil dead! And thank Tonbo for that, really. It's my story but I use her rules. And yes, kimono fabric is silk, but I wanted to imply that it was made from an actual dismantled kimono. Thanks again.

witness: Ahem. Here we go.

La Touga will show up soon; he plays a much bigger part later on, as his true loyalties are revealed.

Same goes for the other Xs. They show up in due time.

Again, all concerning Saru will be revealed shortly (shorter than you think, actually).

Mullen is doing vile, evil things behind the scenes, currently. His main concern is moving through Europe with discretion, so you don't see or hear much from him.

Joker and Harley have their time, and as you pointed out before, their scope is usually within Gotham, so any forays outside will be short-lived and far inbetween.

As for Hiramiaku being X004 and Saru being X005, I'm not obliged to say, but after these next few posts, you'll learn the truth about almost everything concerning X and the Xs up to this point. And thanks for being glad about X being an assassin again! I love writing her as an assassin because, as you said, it's what she's good at. So, to make a long story short, be patient please!!

Thanks again everyone!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Wow, thanks guys! I really love hearing everything you have to say, it just makes my day. Feel free to spew when you post here, it tends to help the thinking process.

As for this post, it's quite violent, somewhat disturbing, and all-around revealing, so use your discretion when reading please. Thanks again, and enjoy.
***
The flat was in a white-fronted, circular-windowed house in Charlottenburg, meant to be campy and futuristic at the same time. She left it in the early morning hours.

Her outfit was that of a conservative symphony player, a cellist. Just for flavor, a handful of bass clef notes were stuffed into her shoulder bag. She had asked Peterson, over dinner, how he could have recognized her with the makeup, the wig, the glasses.

“ Your eyes,” he said, almost incredulous, over his plate of pasta. He had cooked for her in his strange-trendy new apartment, rented by Lockhardt.

“ My eyes?”

“ Yes, your eyes. They’re just so green, it’s unbelievable.”

It had been inevitable, but he asked about the scars. They were deep in her face, now permanent. There were two vertical, one descending from under each eye to the middle of the cheek, and two horizontal strikes on the left cheek. She had filled them with face putty until she got there, but then washed it all off before dinner.

“ I had an accident,” she said, swallowing a lump of stewed tomato.

He looked down. “ I-I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop them from taking you.”

“ It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “ It wouldn’t have done you any good to fight them. They just would have killed you.”

“ What did they make you do?”

She made a face at him that she hoped was a smile. “ Don’t worry about it.”

“ I know now, that Mullen is the leader of Intergang. I feel so stupid for believing he was a doctor back then. And now Mr. Lockhardt, another Intergang leader, approaches me and asks me to do him a favor. I-I’d been transferred from LexCorp, Metropolis to LexCorp, Rostock, and he just said he would make me a very lucrative offer.”

He looked her in the face. “ And then he mentioned you.”

That was where the conversation had ended. There were two bedrooms in the flat, and Peterson had reserved the larger one for X. She didn’t tell him, that first night, that she didn’t sleep anymore. That her dreams were filled with unrest, terror, despair. She stayed up all through the night, meditating or doing slow Tai Chi movements around the undisturbed bed.

And now here she was, out in the pale Berlin morning, up and off before Peterson had even awakened. He’d mumbled something before bed that he had nothing to do here, and how bored he was, and how he could take her to the Guggenheim or possibly to the symphony. He had said a lot of things in the thin time between dinner and bed, many of which she was sure he didn’t know he was really saying.

She hopped a curb and skimmed along the side of a classic, sweeping building front, her cello case thumping against her leg. There were moments now that she would breathe and truly appreciate the feeling of having a clean system. It was still like there was something missing, though. Some vital and necessary organ that had come apart inside her and then fallen out through her pores.

Berlin was a city of swift transition, they said. There were parts of it that didn’t match other parts of it, neo-classical shoved up next to art deco and patched into ancient romantic. Communist influence was everywhere, from the still intact checkpoints to the more sedate nature of the entire East side. Neon and bright glass were the innate fabric of its partner, though both were riddled with patches of blasted concrete souvenirs from a half-century earlier.

The swipe of a lithe granite god brought her into a small but grandly festooned building almost stuffed in between two others. X wandered inside, past pale green doors of sweeping glass and into a pink marble lobby lined with dark wooden benches. Parents waited anxiously with tiny children at their sides, even tinier instrument cases laid neatly at their feet. The ceiling was a swarm of curvaceous art nouveau forms, lilies coupled with shapely women that mutated into avian plumes of long hair. A simple crystal chandelier glittered above, its facets dull with grime.

She stopped at the gargantuan front desk. “ Entschuldigan Sie, bitte?” [“ Excuse me?’]

The secretary, a small, bird-looking woman with glasses, looked up. “ Ja?”

“ Ich heiße Alvilda Flemmer,” X said. [“ My name is Alvilda Flemmer,”]

“ Dort drinnen,” The woman pointed to the door on the right. [“ In there,”]

X did as she was told, and entered the room and sat down in a single wooden chair provided in front of an empty desk carved with chubby angels swathed in oak. The walls were blush-pink, lined with dark bookshelves filled with leather-bound books. The windows were wide and bright, with tiny, crystal-cut panes and no curtains.

The door opened and then clicked closed as fast as possible. Lockhardt came around and sat behind the desk. He was dressed in black slacks, a black blouse, a grey vest and jacket.

“ I can only assume you’re not having any problems with your host,” he asked. His pince nez caught the light like two solid white disks.

“ None,” X said quickly. “ Now, what is my assignment?”
***
Somewhere, deep inside, he was aware of it. The sirens screaming out past his muted hearing, the locks sliding away, bones crunching, bullets meeting flesh far beyond the arc of his tiny, dark world. He felt as though he had atrophied, de-evolved to the state of a fetus caught in a black womb, and exiled from those events around him only to a certain point.

He knew, as the door crumpled inward to halo a figure in blinding white, that this was all coming to a glorious closure. Yet he smiled at her, at his beloved older sister, the truest love of his life, as she slid the blade sweetly into his heart and ended his life for him.
***
This was one of those horribly baroque churches, flowing with delicate curves and sharp, toothy angles from floor to ceiling. As she entered, she pulled her beret tight on her head. She was approximating the exact look of a good girl, a nice girl going to see the priest. A white blouse under a light black jacket, a black skirt and black tights with shiny Mary Janes. She could feel the tight rivulets of face putty along her cheekbones.

The dark wood pews were almost empty. There was a man near the back, in black, his brown hair slightly peppered with grey despite his young age. His face was craggy, like it was broken a long time ago. He was kneeling against the back of the pew in front of him, hands clasped under his nose. His lips moved without sound. A brunette woman sat next to him, wearing a white suit and a hat pinned down with a cloud of red netting and little quail feathers. She wasn’t praying, but sat with a cool, ready eye that seemed to sate her religious appetite simply by admiring her surroundings.

X’s shoes clicked down the granite aisle, towards the gilt cross that was the revolving point of the entire structure. She chose a pew about three rows behind it, about six rows in front of the man in black. She knelt in the aisle, touching her chest in the beginning in the sign of the cross. Her jacket fell open. She reached in, fingers completing the chrome handle of the gun in a metallic tryst.

The way she did it, the act of pulling the gun seemed to melt directly into the act of pulling the trigger as she aimed it directly at his head. It was completely smooth. The silenced bullet hit him directly in the forehead, throwing his skull back and off the pew in front of him. A flutter of red and pink sprayed across the woman’s suit. Her husband’s body crumpled behind the bench.

X clenched the gun tight and leapt over the first three pews and into the front aisle as Frau Meisler’s first bullets bit hard into the wood. She scrambled along the granite floor, her body and brain calm, then crawled behind a giant stone pillar.

Frau Meisler skidded around the front pew and aimed prudently, firing continuously at the pillar as she stalked forward, granite chipping off in all directions. She panted quietly, one bright blue eye shut. Silently, she lowered her gun and went around it.

The girl was not there. Frau Meisler glanced around for the legions of investigators she imagined were racing for their spot. There was no one, not in the dark or otherwise.

Still, she would need to find the girl and eliminate her. She discharged the empty clip from her gun and fumbled with a new one, her white gloves stained with Meisler’s blood.

She didn’t hear the gunshot; the bullet had already nullified her brain. Her body toppled to the floor, carpeted with a swiftly-spreading pool of red, her impeccable white linens going crimson. X, hanging from the intricate baroque stonework of the ceiling, placed her gun in her jacket and hopped down to the floor twenty feet below.

The girl glanced over the scene, brushing her skirt off with black gloves. As she went for the door, she remembered what Peterson had said about her green eyes, and slipped a pair of wide, rimless sunglasses over her face. She disappeared out into the light as softly as if she belonged to it.
***
“ Where have you been?”

X looked up and shut the cello case tight. “ Out.” She had just gotten back from a short mission: kill a man while he was alone in his apartment. It wasn’t that difficult.

Peterson sat on the metal folding chair that was perched directly next to her bed. He was dressed in brown linen slacks and a light, green jersey with no shoes on. His socks were the regular white kind that came in bulk.

“ Going for the goth look, X?” he asked.

She looked at her outfit. Black plaid skirt hacked off under the knees, knee-high combat boots, a short-sleeved black t-shirt and black fingerless gloves. She had repainted her fingernails with more of the black teflon coating Mama had given her.

“ I guess so,” she said quietly. “ I prefer it.”

He looked her in the face. “ What did they do to you?” he whispered.

“ Nothing,” She got up and started for the door. His hand closed around her arm. She pulled away violently.

“ They did something!” he said, jumping up. “ Lockhardt told me all about it. You’ve been working for Intergang for all these months!”

“ I’m fine now, so stop worrying,” she hissed at him.

“ Don’t you understand!?” he cried. “ What they’re doing is wrong! What do you do for them? Tell me, X, please! I only want to help you!”

“ Shut up!” she whispered. She grabbed his lapels and pulled him close, whispering into his ear:

“ They’ve bugged this house. They can hear everything you say.”

She pushed him away slowly. His dark eyes were huge, the edges trembling like he was going to cry.

“ How do you know?” he mouthed out.

X leaned in close. “ I just do.”

She picked up the cello case and left the room. A few seconds later, he heard the front door shut and lock. He sat back down slowly.
***
X and Peterson were in the white flat for a week before Lockhardt recommended they leave. Their new place was two blocks away, in a big tan building meant to replicate the brownstones of New York. They had little luggage, and by then X had carried out ten assassinations, shaving off the lower portion of Klirren’s command. They had been mostly contributors, gang lords, small-time politicians, some corporate people. Unimportant in the scheme of things, but Lockhardt had told her she would be working her way up and X knew in her gut that he was right.

She tried out Engel Faust the night after they moved, working her way into a charity auction with the pretext that she was a musician late for the live performance. Inside her cello case, like always, was her arsenal. It took her twenty minutes to get in, choose a suitable sniper position, then fire off a single shot that almost completely decapitated a sleazy Reichstag politician who had been garnering underground support for Klirren. Then she was gone, dissolved into the mist of crazed witnesses rushing for the exits. She knew at once that she loved this gun.

Her missions left less and less time open for her to see Peterson, a good thing since they were awed into silence whenever in the same room. He had become pale and slightly paranoid, roaming the streets and museums to escape the prison of their opulent apartment. He was coming to realize that X was different, that she had evolved since he had last seen her. She never told him about Robin, or about her recovered memories. They never spoke. They ate together, usually takeout, but there was never conversation.

So nothing ever hurt. There was no pain between them, only a steady stream of static, like communication between two broken machines. X had resolved to never tell him her secrets, and she had a feeling he had done the same.

[Casity]

Hey! *Grins* Thanks for that great review first off and second off (the most important) thanks for posting more! hee-tee-hee, I can't write a lot cause I am doing this at school, and if I am caught its called trouble. So just let me say this:

Good Job!

Ok, I so want to see a lot more. I love this story, and I think X is a really neat character!

Tim rules!

-Casity

[The_NewCatwoman]

Ummmm, the assasinations themselves are making me paranoid. Like I already know that half the little stories we see on the news are incomplete at best but what about the stuff we don't hear about at all?

I'm caught between fancination and utter disgust with X's personality these days. And even though she's a completely different person now, she still seems the same as in those early days.

Kinda like me.

tNC

[Panther]

He knew, as the door crumpled inward to halo a figure in blinding white, that this was all coming to a glorious closure. Yet he smiled at her, at his beloved older sister, the truest love of his life, as she slid the blade sweetly into his heart and ended his life for him

Ok, that's it. I'm officially wearing a sackcloth and pouring ashes in my hair and will commence wailing until any evidence of Saru being alive presents itself. I refuse to accept he is dead, but will mourn for his death until it has been proven otherwise.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Casity: You skirted punishment for meee! How kind of you! Well, the praise is much-deserved. A Hero's Night Off is blindingly hilarious. I mean, I just couldn't believe their luck when Barb got boinked on the head by none other than Catwoman! And Tim acting all sweet was too much! Tim rules! Thanks again!

tNC: We've all changed since this story's started, even X. In fact, it was her perogative to change in this story, otherwise it would get really boring. And yes, I was meaning to set the assassinations up like you might hear about them on TV...you never EVER hear the whole story on anything, so I'm not explaining X's motives or what these people did wrong. And thanks again for the update on Broken. I just read it and thought it was phenomenal. It was totally Bruce-style for him to know everything about everyone he knows, including Terry's little virginity thing. And Perfect Dark isn't too shabby either. I love the way you underscored Bruce's anger and hurt when he realized he wasn't the only one Selina bore a child for. Then again, Bruce was the only man Selina bore a child for that she married, and A.J. isn't half bad (unless you count the religious obsession), so I think his machismo instinct is a little off base here. Anyway, thanks again!

Panther: Thanks tons for the evaluation, but please stop wailing and flinging ashes about. In fact, go fling some ashes on Tonbo; he's her character and his fate concerns her chiefly. So you know where to find her.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you all for the commentary, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. This part includes some coarse language and mild sexual discussion. Other than that (and including that), enjoy.
***
Leslie Weste, that was her name. They put it in the paper, along with her school picture, a day after Tim’s party. She had been the brunette, a friend of Karen Alu-alahi’s. She was quiet and into goth. The other kids called her Leslie Waste. They had found her dead in the morning, sprawled on the dew-blanketed quad of her seminary girl’s school, her hands folded neatly over her stomach and her body bathed in the shadow thrown by a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Time of death, they said, had been three in the morning, just as Tim Drake’s birthday party had begun to wind down and the students began drifting off into the night. Friends said Leslie Weste had wandered off sometime after twelve, borrowing her best friend June Gutierez’s new car. There were no signs of foul play; they said her heart had simply stopped as she lay there.

Questions rose thick and fast. How had she known she was going to die? Had any chemicals lead to the stopping of her heart? A coroner’s report said there was no chemical residue in her system, though Leslie Weste had been known to abuse Lithium. Just a strange kind of bruise on the side of her neck where a few blood vessels had popped right under the skin.

“ A trode,” Bruce told him. “ But someone removed it. That’s why they didn’t mention it in the coroner’s report.”

“ So, we know trodes can cause people to hallucinate, but how does it stop your heart without chemicals?” Tim asked. He was half-dressed in his Robin suit, just missing the cape and mask.

“ By sending electrical impulses to the brain to stop the heart,” Bruce said. “ I used to know monks and yogis that could do it by sheer will. The real question, though, is who removed it.”

“ Hiramiaku?” Tim fished.

“ We’re not sure that Hiramiaku is even alive,” Bruce said sternly. “ I’ve fought her before, I know her style, but she makes a point of changing her style every few years. It’s a feat of incredible mental strength. Besides, she hated Hands for several reasons I’m not sure of. She would probably do anything to jeopardize Hands’ secrecy.”

“ O-kay. So we know Hiramiaku did underworld work for Vyskanti. We know Hands is a crazy lady.” He paused. “ Help me put this together, Bruce.”

The second Bruce opened his mouth, there was a beep on the line. “ It’s Barbara,” he said.

“ Put her on,” Tim hit a few buttons on the Batcomputer. Bruce’s car phone patched Barbara in.

“ I’ve got something you’ll be very interested in, guys,” she said.

“ What is it?”

“ A picture of X.”

Robin swallowed. He had been getting suspicious lately, wondering if possibly X and Hollye had been connected. Maybe they had worked together, seen one another. Maybe they were the same person. It bothered him not knowing.

“ Send it through,” he said, voice shaking.

“ Okay.”

“ Where did you get it?” Bruce asked.

“ A security camera from the lobby of a very posh Indian home. They say she killed the master of the house.” The picture materialized slowly on the screen. “ You better appreciate it. I had to hack like crazy to get it.”

The shot was in color, an obvious watermark that whoever installed it was rich and didn’t mess around. There was a long stretch of cool, polished red concrete, and a set of wide teak doors in the back. Very bright yellow afternoon light came in from shuttered windows, falling upon the head of a girl standing there.

She was stout, tan, with long black hair, wearing sunglasses and a maid’s uniform. Robin sat back in his chair. Not Hollye. Not the pale, willowy girl he remembered both from his nightmares and that Rouen video. They were not the same person.

“ She killed him in less than five minutes,” Barbara said. “ Prastav Dhaljit, an accountant for the local mob. Except he didn’t know he worked for the local mob, he just thought he worked for a bunch of very small but very lucrative corporations.”

“ Go on,” said Bruce.

“ Including one Vyskanti Incorporated. Working for its ‘senior executive’ Ms. Hath Marna.”

“ Hands,” ground Bruce.

“ Did I miss something?” Tim asked.

“ ‘Hath’ is Hindi for ‘Hand’, Tim,” Barbara said. “ ‘Marna’ is ‘to kill’,”

“ That sucks.”

“ But now we have a connection. There was some reason for Dhaljit’s death, as senseless as it might have seemed,” she said.

“ Can I say something?” Tim asked.

“ Don’t,” Barbara advised. “ I have this sixth sense thing that Bruce is going to make a major revelation.”

They waited.

“ Well?” Tim asked his mentor.

Bruce sighed. “ Actually, I was thinking of getting some nachos.”

Barbara made a growling noise. “ All right, Bruce. I’m going to come and get Tim and we’re going to do something you told us never to do.”

“ What?”

“ We’re visiting the Khasekemwys.”
***
As Madame pushed them into the parlor with the barrel end of a giant mahogany-handled Georgian shotgun, Memoria smiled at them from where she sat in the corner. Her white, ruffled collar was pinned up close to her throat with an onyx brooch, long, slender hands tapping restlessly on the arms of the angular grey chair she sat in.

“ Very sensitive security systems,” Memoria explained with a mean little smile. Madame nudged Batgirl and Robin into two more grey armchairs across from her, and then she disappeared with a whorl of lavender perfume.

“ Changed addresses?” Robin asked. The grey chair was uncomfortable. The whole room was decked out in industrial-style metal and fabrics meant to emulate steel. They were in a loft two blocks from their old place; though the Shiori Massage Parlor still seemed to be in business, its occupants had left.

“ Praevidare wants to redecorate,” she said frankly.

“ Where is X?” Batgirl asked immediately.

Memoria shrugged. “ Got me.”

“ Let me ask a less forward question,” Batgirl continued. “ What about Vyskanti Incorporated?”

“ You want to know how they tie in?” Memoria thought about it. She picked a teacup up off the steel table next to her. The steam veiled her eyes as she drank from it.

“ Cyrus Vyskanti has, in the past, worked with Intergang, the yakuza, and just about every mafia on the planet. His company, Vyskanti Incorporated, works in kidnap and ransom cases to the public, but to the underworld he is a property broker and an arms dealer. He’s been known to trade in biological weapons and cybernetics, which is where Hands comes in.

“ Hands used to be his right-hand woman, so to speak, till she went completely blazing mad and started using his weapons for fun against innocent civilians. Understand that in Vyskanti’s world, innocent civilians equals publicity, so he completely cut her off.

“ It didn’t stop her for long. She invented a couple of lucrative microchip designs and has been using those for income. Her prosperity has won her respect in the underworld, but also contempt for her dishonorable practices, and you won’t find too many people willing to deal with her. But you want to know about Mama, don’t you?”

Batgirl opened her mouth but Memoria silenced her. “ I know everything you know, darling, and more.” She winked at her and Batgirl flushed.

“ We already know about Mama,” Robin said severely. Memoria was beginning to annoy him.

“ Do you?” She sat back. “ I bet you didn’t know she sheltered X for more than a month while she eluded Intergang. The girl lived in her home—“

“ Before Lockhardt asked for her to work for him,” Robin said, sitting forward.

Memoria smiled at him. “ Why Boy Wonder, you do amaze me.”

“ To assassinate Mullen,” Batgirl muttered, piecing it slowly together. “ It makes complete sense.”

“ Yes, there is a power struggle going on,” Memoria said wearily. “ Who wins it will probably shape the world. Klirren wants to destroy everything not Intergang, Mullen wants to control world governments and civilians through Intergang, and Lockhardt simply wants the international underworld in his iron fist so the monarchy of his various children will take over after he dies.”

“ Typical Brit,” said a high-pitched voice from the steel spiral staircase at the rear of the room. Praevidare thumped down step-by-step, his outfit a collection of twelve different colors of white impeccably layered to make it look like he was only a bleached shadow. He swiped his black hair back and smiled at them all.

“ Evening, dear brother,” sighed Memoria with faux exasperation. “ Please do us the honor of leaving the room. You know how uncomfortable you make the Boy Wonder.”

“ Yes, I do know,” Praevidare giggled, bending at the waist and looping an arm around his shoulders to press his cheek to Robin’s. Robin shrugged away.

“ And X is just a weapon all over again,” Batgirl muttered, throwing a sidelong glance at Robin.

“ Yeah,” he said, as Praevidare left the room, blowing a kiss at him.

“ Of course,” said Memoria. “ That’s what she was built to be.”

“ You hear anything about Hiramiaku lately?” Robin asked.

Memoria snorted. “ That b*tch? I’d be likely to rip her bloody head off at the first thing I hear about her,”

“ Not friends, huh?” Batgirl noted.

“ Not at all. Hiramiaku was the one who shot Praevidare in the head a couple weeks ago.”

“ Wait,” Robin said, startled, “ you’re telling me you knew Hiramiaku was still alive back then and you didn’t tell me?”

Batgirl stared directly at him, and he felt his neck get hot.

“ It wouldn’t have helped you,” Memoria insisted. “ She doesn’t have much at stake here, really. Just…”

“ Yeah?” prodded Robin.

“ Hiramiaku and Hands are…were not good friends, though they once served the same master, Cyrus Vyskanti.”

“ All we want to know is whether or not Vyskanti ordered the mission that freed X,” Batgirl said.

“ I’m not yet sure,”

“ Editing your information, huh?” Robin said.

“ Mm-hmm,” she said, sipping her tea.
***
Screaming. Endless screaming within the silvered bubble of his brain. On the edges of his peripheral vision, he could see a girl stretched out in a dentist’s chair, her limbs tied down with metal sheaths. Every time he turned to look directly at it, the image disappeared.

Tim’s dreams had become more and more disturbing, haunted by the non-vision of the girl in the chair, sometimes by her face slack with despair and lined with tears of blood. Once and awhile, he caught a glimpse of a metal hip or elbow or neck vein spattered with red. He awoke, usually, sweating. Crying, once, but he rubbed the tears off his cheeks and forced himself back into sleep.
***
“ Dick’s coming back from Arizona today,” Barbara said. “ I was thinking you could come with when I get him from the airport.”

“ I guess,” Tim said. He pushed the eggs around on his plate.

Barbara stared at him through her glass of orange juice. “ So what’s going on?”

“ Nothing.”

“ It’s something. I know it.” The waiter stopped by to see if Barbara wanted anything else, and she told him she didn’t.

“ Did something happen at your party?” she asked him, leaning over the table. She was dressed casually, in a grey tank top and black jeans with black boots. There was a fringed black suede bag hanging over the back of her chair.

“ No,” He stuffed his mouth with eggs. An old trick, filling his mouth so he wouldn’t have to speak.

She brushed a bit of red hair behind her ear. “ You know, I didn’t tell you, but the Khasekemwys were at your party.”

“ Yeah, I saw you dancing with Memoria,” Tim grumbled. A shaft of sunlight bounced off the flank of a grey sports car parked at the curb.

She laughed. “ Yeah. Later she kind of tried to feel me up. I was so embarrassed when I saw them last night, like I knew she would see right through me.”

“ She didn’t say anything,” Tim said hopefully. Maybe Barbara didn’t know.

“ Well,” She folded her napkin and placed it beside her plate. Tim, realizing he had never used his in the first place, pulled the napkin slyly into his lap.

“ Praevidare kind of made eyes at you, though,” Barbara said, looking around the restaurant.

“ I didn’t notice,”

Barbara pulled out her checkbook.

“ So, what’s your ulterior motive for waking me up early on a Saturday?” he asked, reaching for his wallet.

“ Put your wallet away,” she said.

“ No. I’m the guy at this table, I should pay.” He looked at the check and counted out some bills. Bruce gave him a generous allowance, but he didn’t use it much. A CD, a shirt, some jeans, maybe, but nothing big.

“ You’re fifteen, Tim,” Barbara said, smiling at him.

“ Yeah, my big handicap,” he muttered, laying down the cash. She rolled her eyes and put the checkbook away.

“ Machismo,” she said.

He lowered his face and looked up at her briefly. “ Everybody treats me like I’m still little, Bar,”

“ Bu-“

“ I’ve changed!” he insisted. “ I’m not thirteen anymore! I know stuff!”

“ Tim,” Her voice was quiet and serious, “ I know you’ve seen stuff, experienced stuff that other kids never will, but don’t let it control your life. You’re still really young.”

He furrowed his brow. “ But that doesn’t mean you guys have to treat me like I’m something that could break,”

“ And we don’t,” She sat back in her chair. The waiter swooped by and picked up the bill. “ See, I let you pay for breakfast.”
***
Barbara swiped a bit of black lipstick on at the curb, leaning against her car. Tim hung out the front passenger window.

He whistled. “ Touching up, Bar?”

She glared at him and clicked her compact closed. “ Shut it and keep an eye out for Dick,”

Tim obliged and scanned the crowd. Pilots, caterers. Passengers in every race, wearing every type of clothing, pulling or pushing or hauling bags by hand. A cluster of bottle-blond Japanese girls came out of the terminal, dressed in clear green vinyl trench coats and little black slip dresses with knee-high combat boots. An Indian matriarch in a pink sari, her passel of male relatives following with her bags.

“ See him?” she asked. The compact was back out, and she was checking her eyeliner.

“ Not yet.” He got up, his knees on the seat, and stretched out the window. His hair fluttered in the wind, but he pushed it back over his forehead.

Dick was in the middle of a Hopi family, talking and laughing with them. Aging parents, two older children and three younger ones. His black nylon duffel was tossed rakishly over his shoulder. Like always, his clothes were fashionably derelict, his black hair tied back with a little bit of string.

Tim waved at him. He nodded, said something in Spanish to the mother and father of the little family. Thanked them profusely. They thanked him in return. He turned and walked toward them.

“ So Mr. Grayson returns from his newest spiritual journey,” Barbara said mockingly from the curb. Tim could tell by the look on her face that she hadn’t meant for it to come out that way.

Dick spread his arms. “ And the fan club awaits.”

Barbara and Dick hugged in a brief, platonic manner. Tim, slightly aloof, put out a hand for him to shake. Dick did, but then reached up and ruffled Tim’s hair.

“ In the back, squirt,” he said.

“ So how was Arizona?” Barbara asked once they were on the highway. She flipped on the blinker and changed lanes.

“ Dry, hot. Slightly enlightening, though,” Dick said. His elbow hung a little out the window, the muscles in his upper arm jutting out a little. Tim wondered when the hell he was going to start looking like that.

“ You visited the Grand Canyon?” Tim asked.

“ That was where I was staying,” Dick said. “ In an Indian lodge near the canyons.”

“ Do they have casinos out there?” the boy asked.

Dick thought it over. “ Sometimes.”

“ So what did you learn?” Barbara asked, hitting the accelerator and bounding up past an SUV. She was an aggressive driver for a girl.

“ The need to be in tune with nature,” Dick said. “ Also how to cook hot dogs campfire style on a gas stove.”

Barbara and Tim looked at him.

“ There weren’t any pots or pans or plates at the cabin I was staying in,” Dick explained. “ I didn’t want to ask anyone to borrow theirs so I just ate with sticks and a single fork I found.”

“ That’s kind of extreme,” Barbara said.

“ It was a learning experience,” Dick said.

A maroon pickup truck with an extended cab swerved in front of them, cutting them off. Barbara swore.

“ Defensive driving, Bar,” Tim advised from the back. He sat up so he could see between the two front seats.

Just as he did, the pickup threw down its back gate. Two men in ski masks pulled their semiautomatics up to eye level. And pointed them directly at their windshield.

Even with the windows up they could hear them yelling for them to pull over.

Barbara began to shake. “ I’m going to lose them,” she said calmly, hands poised to turn the wheel.

The first bullet ricocheted off the front bumper. There was a rasping sound, then a clatter as the license plate flung under the chassis and was lost.

“ Pull over, Barbara,” Dick said quietly. “ It’s not worth it. Not in daylight.”

She started slowing, and began to turn slightly onto the highway shoulder, wheels grinding on gravel. The pickup began to slow, too, the two men in the back keeping their barrels straight towards them.

“ They’re going to kidnap me,” Barbara said casually. “ Every criminal in the city probably knows my license plate number. They want the commissioner’s daughter.”

“ We won’t let them take you,” Tim said. He had his hand on his seat belt buckle, ready to jump out once they’d stopped.

A sleek grey Porsche pulled up alongside their car, then gunned its engine and shot up so it was neck and neck with the pickup. Abruptly, forcefully, the Porsche rammed the pickup from the side. It shied back, then struck again. The two men in the back fell to their knees.

Barbara took advantage of it immediately. She jerked the wheel to the right and off the shoulder just as the little grey Porsche shoved the pickup completely off the road. The truck smashed into the steel and concrete median and then disappeared behind them. A few seconds, and a pop went off, along with a firework squeal as the truck exploded.

The Porsche bobbed at their side for a second before skipping across four lines of traffic and escaping off an exit ramp.

“ That…” Barbara panted, “ that was Bruce’s stolen car.”

Tim stared blindly out the window. The other commuters had no idea what had just happened. But he knew. He had seen the long, pale face in the Porsche window as it ducked away from them.

“ Yukito Saito was driving,” he said aloud. Dick looked back at him.

“ What are you talking about?” he asked.

[Casity]

Great new chapter! I can't wait for the next one! I checked my E-mail and was shocked to see that you had written more. I came right over... goodness, it sounds like you got a new car or something and I just checked it out... *grins*

Thrilled to see the next chapter! Never knew long storied could actually hold my attention, usually I am all over the place, but you have me on hold! Hee-hee, keep writing!

-Casity

[Sable Phoenix]

Read this a couple days ago but had no time to respond until now. Only one thing to really say here... keep it up! Can't wait for the next installment.

It's funny how I'll leave this board completely alone for quite a while at a time, but every so often I think, "You know, it's about time for another one of DoE's installments," and it's invariably a few days at most after you post a new one. Funny thing, that.

[Panther]

"Don't you people ever die?!?!?" Toad, 'X-Men'

Geez, no one seems to stay dead in this story! It's starting to get very confusing! (Uhhh, *starting?*)

LOADS of questoins raised here, most of which I suspect you will politely refuse to answer, so I settle for just one: why did Praev want to redecorate?

[The_NewCatwoman]

I'm so glad Dick is back. It's also nice to see their training come into play in a situation where other's might have pissed themselves silly. A great chapter. Tim is being his cutie pie self as per usual. Dick is being his "I don't want to ask for help" self as usual. And Barbara is showing off for the guy in her life, as per usual. Excellent.

[Tonbo_Rosso]

why did Praev want to redecorate?

Have you ever tried to wash brains out of the carpet? It doesn't work. And the walls, don't get me started on the walls!

Prevadare

[Daughterof_Evil]

Casity: Thank you so much for rushing over here! I really enjoy your posts, and the continuation of Hero's Night Off is coming along nicely ("nicely"? Did I just say that? I meant "fantastically",). Are you writing more on it anytime soon? The last time I checked Bruce was about to b*tch and destroy the whole lot of them...

Sable Phoenix: I'm very happy you enjoyed it. And yes, I make it just so whenever you check this board there's a new episode up. Just some polite customer service.

Panther: Nope, no one ever stays in the crypt for long here. And, well, you saw Tonbo's reply to your little question. Thanks again for the extended analysis; you really help me reach a higher understanding of my own convoluted storyline.

tNC: Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. But isn't Tim always a cutie pie? And I just read more of Perfect Dark and, as usual, am loving it.

Tonbo: Thanks for your input, Tonbo-sama. Just put down the potato peeler.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you all, again, for such nice replies to this story. I really appreciate the time you take to fill me in on what is confusing the hell out of you.

Well, prepare for a little more confusedness. This episode has graphic violence that should be read cautiously. Just so you know, the Ferneshterm is a big TV aerial tower in Berlin. Also, thanks to a Bill Moyers show on PBS for the information on chemical rentention in the human body. And the comment made about "the fallen" is adapated from a similar quote from the episode Ballad of Fallen Angels from the anime Cowboy Bebop.

" Angels who are pushed out of heaven have no choice but to become devils..."
***
They were scared. They were calling her the Angel of Death. X snickered to herself as she jumped from one rooftop to the next, Engel Faust strapped across her back. Her black trench coat bloomed around her legs as she made the twenty foot leap down from the top of a sandstone apartment building, landing on the roof of the building she now shared with Peterson. They had just made the change a day before, and already its location was seared deep within X’s mind.

There was a gated courtyard in the middle of the building, its brick sides blooming with ivy and potted plants anchored into the walls. She came in through here, scaling down the black wrought iron fire escapes to land silently on the cobbled ground. She looked around and smelled immediately the leather and oil and chrome.

A sleek black motorcycle was parked in the courtyard, its underbelly a collection of slim chrome muscles knotted and corrugated up into its main driving components. She ran her hand over it. It was still warm, its ignition just silenced. She lowered her face to the handles and smelled a fragrance that seemed very close to her, almost like a part of the fabric of her being.

The flat was sparsely decorated, just bare wooden furniture and a few Persian area rugs thrown over cream-white carpet. The vertical blinds were maroon and always drawn tight, the conical ceiling lamps the only source of lighting. Her room was in the back, but she swerved for the kitchen and laid all thirty pounds of Engel Faust on the counter. She went through the fridge swiftly. Somewhere in the back, the shower went on.

Taking up a carton of milk, X sat on the linoleum floor and drank it. So Klirren’s adherents called her the Angel of Death to sedate their fears of her omnipotence, her strength, her fearlessness. She finished up the milk and tossed the carton into the sink from where she sat. Typical, for humans to dismiss something inexplicable as something divine. She frowned deeply.

Her job that night hadn’t been hard. Derek Sheridan, an Irish terrorist grouped with Klirren’s Intergang because they promised him significant support in his war against the Southern Irish. She had dissected Klirren’s bottom rung of power, his contributors and secret political sympathizers, and now she was moving on to the real meat of his campaign. His assassins, saboteurs, the terrorists and flunkies.

Derek Sheridan had been particularly adept with pipe bombs, but his skills in combat were weak. Still, she decided to pick him off from the roof across the street as he left his girlfriend’s flat in uptown Berlin. As he fumbled his car keys out of his pocket, she shot. An inky splatter across the hood, and he slumped over the windshield, setting off the car alarm. She began to leave, but on last thought she turned and shot another precise bullet straight through the car’s gas lines. It exploded exactly two seconds later, torching the evidence of the assassination.

It had taken so little time she crossed him off her mental list and went on to the next target. He was an elderly man with the last name of Erin who made particularly realistic forgeries of documents. His entire practice rotated around Klirren’s Intergang, even the location of his apartment in Charlottenburg.

She began by sneaking in the parlor window, the bare silk curtains brushing against her wrists and sending a chill up her spine. Someone was playing the piano somewhere in the back of the French Provence-styled apartment, the notes registering sharp and bright against the hard walls and the marble floors. X drew her gun.

She heard him talking –speaking clear, accented German-, as she continued silently down the hall. He made a joke, a woman laughed. A young woman. From the similarities in their sentence structures and voices, X concluded they were related, probably father and daughter. They began to talk, boisterously, of their summer home in Bonn, and how much they looked forward to seeing their distant relatives.

X breathed in deeply. They were in the kitchen, and there was a third person in the living room playing the piano. She closed her eyes and stopped outside the door. Her hands moved smoothly over the matte black finish of the gun's outer shell. She clenched her index finger on the spry trigger and turned.

The first silenced bullet was destined for Erin. The oven door shattered. Erin slumped to his knees. A direct hit to his shoulder. The bullet had been partially deflected by the oven door he stood behind, leaving him with a nonfatal wound. Before the brass cartridge even hit the floor, Erin’s daughter was screaming. X turned and shot her, too. The twenty-eight year old blond fell back against the counter, her white linen dress blossoming with growing crimson.

The piano in the back had stopped. There were a few tentative footsteps down the hall. Then silence.

“ Was ist los?” It was a man, deep-voiced and purely Berliner.

X backed up, her boots quiet on the tile floor. Erin was unconscious, slumped on the ground. His daughter was crumpled in the corner of the counters, still and pale. X’s gun was slack in her hands. Quietly, she pointed it at Erin's head.

The footsteps down the hall started again, then quickened towards the kitchen. X backed up quickly, then turned completely around and dashed from the room.

X scowled in Peterson’s kitchen, her legs stretched out on the linoleum floor. She had never failed before, and she didn’t like the bitter taste failure left her with. Not only had she not assassinated Erin, but she had succeeded in unintentionally murdering his daughter. Then she had run, when she knew full well she could have taken the man who was coming into the kitchen. If she had killed the Berliner, she would have been able to finish the job on Erin, and there would be no need for a second try.

X leaned her head back against the fridge. Erin would be at hospital by now, safe in his bed, naïve to what had just occurred. She pushed herself up off the linoleum and swiped Engel Faust off the counter. Some yoga in her room, probably, before reading some. She had become awfully fond of a writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald, an expatriate American. Like her.

That’s when she saw it, the mar on the carpet. She reached down and touched it lightly with her fingertips. A wet footprint deep in the cream nap. A size eight woman’s foot, by her call. She swung Engel Faust into firing position and followed the footprints down the steps and into the courtyard.

There was a woman stretched out beside the motorcycle parked on the cobbles, her lithe, dark form just simply a compliment to the machine’s grace. The only thing adorning her tan skin was a thin veil of water from the shower. She dropped a wrench, then pulled her head up and looked at X.

“ Kon nichi’wa,” Hiramiaku said, and placed a screwdriver firmly between her teeth. She was wearing a tan cowboy hat for some reason.

X blinked, slowly. Once her eyes were open again she was still unbelieving.

“ Hiramiaku-san,” she said quietly.

“ Not expecting me, Uguisu-chan?” the woman asked. A bolt came loose from the underbelly of the bike and clattered to the stone. Hiramiaku swore to herself.

“ You’re…alive,”

“ Indeed,” She reattached the bolt with sure fingers. Her wet red hair was slathered under the hat in soaked whorls.

“ But…I saw you jump. We found your blood.”

“ A carefully constructed ruse. I hope you don’t mind me using your shower,”

X looked away. “ Saru was…afraid, and sad.”

“ He ended up fine,” she said quietly.

“ You’ve seen him lately?” X asked anxiously.

“ Yes. A lot of him.” Hiramiaku sat bolt upright, a single drop of water running down her genetically engineered chest. She pushed her cowboy hat back on her head. “ I see you’ve been doing well. Twenty men in two weeks.”

“ You make me sound like a whore,” X growled. Tightened her grip on the cold shell of Engel Faust.

Hiramiaku smiled at her in a gentle, greasy manner. “ They call you the Angel of Death, but you know that’s not what you are. Angels who are pushed out of heaven are fallen, they must become demons.”

The front door of the flat behind them popped open, and Peterson shuffled out in his pajamas and robe, his glasses shoved up on his nose. He glanced from X to Hiramiaku, then blushed.

Hiramiaku smiled at him. “ Pass me that wrench over there, darling?”

He looked down at the leather-bound wrench set sitting next to the doorway, and picked out the topmost one. He walked over, furiously red, and handed it to Hiramiaku.

“ Thanks,” she said, narrowing her shoulders in a way that showed off both her breasts and the deep-set muscles of her upper arms. Peterson backed up a little.

“ One of your friends, X?” he asked.

“ X and I go way back,” Hiramiaku answered for her. “ Close buddies, we are,”

X glanced over at him from the corner of her eye. “ Go ahead inside, Peterson. I’ll be a second,”

Peterson went inside gratefully, shutting the door quietly behind him. He had been getting more sensitive these days, more nervous to loud, sudden noises. He whispered if he needed something from her, but otherwise they had no conversations at all.

She glared at Hiramiaku. “ What are you doing here?”

“ I need to talk to you,” Hiramiaku answered.

“ Then get some clothes on,” X snapped.

Hiramiaku stood and tossed the wrench to X. She went inside. X put Engel Faust delicately down on the doorstep, then laid down on the cobbles, stretched out on her back, and finished Hiramiaku’s work on the motorcycle.

A click, right next to her. A red leather boot with a black heel. “ Let’s go,”

X got up. Hiramiaku was dressed in skintight black leather pants and a tan leather vest top that bared her toned brown stomach. There were leather, lace-up cuffs on her muscular upper arms and finger-less gloves on both hands. Her nails were lacquered black, just like X’s.

X stared her down. Hiramiaku was tan, with a finely sculpted face and dark, narrow eyes. Her short hair, through a twist of genetic fate, was a brilliant red, and pinned down under the tan cowboy hat. She was tall; X barely came up to her chin.

X took her black trench coat off and tossed it at the doorstep of the flat. Then she reached up and punched Hiramiaku in the face.

A dash of red peppered the cobbles. Hiramiaku dabbed her nose and then raised her chin in defiance, a cruel smile on her black lips.

A swing, and she smashed X back.

The girl nursed a sore jaw as Hiramiaku got on the motorcycle, kick-started it, then hit the gas to rev the engine.

“ Get on,” she said in a rumble that rivaled the growl of the bike.

X did, tossing a leg over the seat, and laced her strong arms about Hiramiaku’s waist. The woman shot the bike out of the courtyard. Peterson, watching from the window, shut the blinds and went to bed.
***
“ I had to leave,”

Berlin spread out beneath them in a map of glowing, bleating lights. The Ferneshturm was just a glowing silver needle under their feet.

X glanced over at her. The wind stirred her dark hair. “ Saru and I,”

“ I knew you could get along fine without me; it was just a matter of time,” Hiramiaku was still wearing the cowboy hat, but it had been pushed so far back on her head it looked like it would just fall off with a scant breeze.

X leaned back on the steel slant of the television tower. “ And you felt you had to see me why?”

“ I heard you were working for Lockhardt again, and I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t trust him.”

Pinpricks dappled the sky overhead. “ Really,”

“ You already know about the others like you,”

There was no expression on her face. “ Yes.”

“ They want an army.”

“ How did you survive?” X asked blankly, staring straight ahead.

“ Shed some blood. That’s all. They didn’t need to find my body.”

“ But you jumped. You fell thirty stories.”

“ Don’t you remember? I’m genetically engineered, X.”

X turned her head to the woman. “ Where were you all this time?”

“ Here and there,” she replied casually. “ For awhile, I was in Gotham City, then there was Paris, Rome. I stayed in London for a few days, just to get some work done. While I was there, I heard about your exploits here in the Deutschland and I thought I should visit you.”

X shut her eyes. She could feel the piece of jade hard and warm against her chest. “ How is Saru?”

“ Dead, X.”

Her eyes flew open.

“ I had to kill him. In London. That’s why I was there.”

X choked on something.

“ It was in Paris, the day you were sick with Macchina withdrawal, when they made the switch. The original Saru for the clone Saru, the Saru you called older brother. Since then, they had the original Saru in captivity, being used for gene therapy and experimentations—“

“ What!?” X screamed, sitting up.

Hiramiaku gave her a cool, hard glare. “ I’m trying to tell you, my little steel pixie.”

“ Who?” X asked.

“ Hands. Ever hear of her?”

She looked back over the city. “ Things were complicated, but Hands and I have always hated one another, and to get back at me she stole Saru and replaced him with an already complete genetic clone she made from blood she had gotten in a fight with him a few months earlier. But the clone was faulty. I knew it the night Mullen sent his goons after you: when the ninja threw those shuriken at him, he by all means should have caught them. Instead they struck him in the arm.”

X was silent.

“ Your brother Saru escaped the same night you did. He went on to London, lived well, at least until I killed him. He was a redundancy, you see. I had to eliminate the redundancy. The real Saru was being held in India for experiments. I freed him two weeks ago. He’s still trying to get use to seeing light again.”

X breathed out calmly into the night sky. “ Why are you telling me this?”

“ No reason. I just thought you would like some closure. The Saru you knew is dead.”

“ Well, thanks,” the girl said sarcastically, drawing her knees up to her chest as she rolled onto her side.

“ You want answers.”

Nothing from the girl.

“ You want to know about your past, about Robin and the Joker and Lex Luthor. You want to know how it all came to this.”

“ You’ve been ‘speaking’ with Hands,” X said quietly. “ She’s the only one who’s had access to my brain lately.”

“ I killed Hands, too. Last week. But no, it wasn’t her. It was Vale.”

“ Vale is handing out my secrets, huh?” X snarled.

“ They’re not just your secrets,” Hiramiaku said. “ They’re everyone’s. Do you have any idea how much your memories mean to people?”

“ Is that the reason I can’t remember everything?” X asked, rhetorically.

“ The reason you can’t remember everything about your past life is because it would serve certain people better if you didn’t,” Hiramiaku leaned back, her long, lithe body tensed under the dark orb of sky. “ How would Intergang mold you properly if you kept remembering little tidbits about your formerly rebellious existence?”

X sat up. “ They erased my memory on purpose?”

Hiramiaku make a slurping noise. “ Scooped it out, reconfigured it, then jammed it back in your skull.”

“ It was a little more delicate than that,” said a deep voice behind them. X looked up towards the TV aerial behind them. Vale was standing there, a short, squat silhouette against the open hatch. He was an older man, and though a genius and therefore exempt from physical upkeep, quite ugly. He had a pug face, long nose, and a grey comb-over. His ears stuck out a little.

X scrambled to her hands and knees. “ The last time I saw you, you were branding me with Intergang tattoos.”

He stepped up out of the hatch. In a single flash of a second, X was at his side and holding him by his lapels.

“ Calm, child, calm,” he said, eyes darting back to the circlet of Berlin below.

“ Why should I be?” she asked.

He placed large, callused hands over her fists. He smelled, always, of foam antiseptic. “ It was necessary to…correct your memory. I knew that once you were rebuilt, you would be haunted by your past. It was already apparent that you had, on several occasions, been seriously suicidal. I’m not even mentioning the hundreds of psychotic homicidal impulses…”

“ Get to the point,” X growled.

“ It was Luthor’s idea to wipe your brain completely, and once the download was complete—“

“ What ‘download’?” she asked.

Vale released one hand from her fists and reached inside his jacket. He pulled, from the inner pocket, a scan film on thin plastic. He held it out sideways so the lights of the city shone through it.

“ Your brain was seriously damaged,” he said. “ Drastic steps were necessary. When we got you, you were almost braindead. On the verge of nothingness, X.”

X was no longer looking at him, but at the film in his hand. Her mouth was slightly open. Beyond the film, she saw Hiramiaku’s dead-still face, expressionless.

“ We rigged up some very sophisticated machines to the electrical impulses of your brain, translating those impulses into bare data, then transferring the data into actual memories…Nothing like that had ever been done before! Here we could see directly into the psyche of a person, view their life through their eyes and feel their emotions! That experience alone could have won me a Nobel prize…”

A blank white skull. Nothing inside. Absolutely nothing but the tiny cube of darkness and its minute L sigil. The chip and its neural leads consumed almost nothing of her brain cavity, just the lower portion where the brain stem would have been.

X slowly let go of Vale.

“ When Luthor saw the ‘director’s cut’ of the results of your scan, he demanded I carefully edit what I left in the chip we replaced your brain with. When I looked through the pieces of your past, I realized why. You had known Luthor, and he had had such an impact on your late existence that you would harbor animosity towards him forever. Plus your…parentage…”

The man in the purple coat.

“ I didn’t do what Luthor asked…I left you some of those last few months of life out of some bizarre sympathy. The rest of your past life, though, is gone forever. You had such a sad existence, I couldn’t…”

X took the film out of Vale’s hand. She studied it closely. It was a penetration, non-magnetic scan that sliced through her metallic skull layer by layer. Her brain cavity was bunched with tiny wires, fiber optics, she knew. And that chip.

“ The scan you showed me at LexCorp,” X mumbled.

“ Was a fake,” he admitted. “ You were still fragile. I couldn’t shock you so then.”

“ But now you can?” X asked calmly.

Vale nodded. “ You’ve grown, X. You’re forming your own personality, building your own life. I have to tell you other things, though.”

She looked at him.

“ Your body is eighty-two percent metallo cybernetics, instead of the fifty-six percent we told you before. Again, Luthor told me not to disclose that to you, for fear of your reaction. And in Portsmouth, we trifled a bit with your genetic code, made it easier for you to build significant muscle. It’s a valid procedure, used on the weak and enfeebled all the time to keep them strong.

“ Through studying your genome, we learned some very interesting things. Like how your unique genes allow for you to be exposed to highly toxic amounts of chemicals without being harmed. Did you know the typical human body harbors eighty-four industrial chemicals? Your body harbored two-hundred twenty-four. And you weren’t dead yet. It was amazing. Your whole being is an incredible scientific find, X.”

She crumpled the brain scan in one hand. “ I’m just a piece of meat to you all, aren’t I? A toy! A…thing!”

Vale threw up his hands. “ Don’t you realize, X, that you are power? There has never been anything like you before. Such a perfect melding of flesh and metal, innocence and strength. Why do you think you were so important to Intergang?”

“ But I’m not original anymore, am I?” X asked fiercely. “ You made others.”

Vale sighed. “ Yes. Three others. X002, X003, and X004. The first two were males; we called them Sekunde and Dritte. They committed suicide almost immediately. X004, however, has lasted longer. Her name is Vierte.”

“ ‘Her’?” X questioned.

“ A girl about your age,” He stared at her piercingly. “ They’ll send her after you, child. It was my mistake, trying to make more…but I thought I could replicate the success I had with you. I was sadly mistaken. They were taken, twisted, made monstrous by Mullen and his ideas. I had no recourse but to abandon them.”

“ Then why are you helping me?” X asked.

“ I couldn’t stand that they took so much joy in destroying you. You, my most precious creation, the one I couldn’t recreate. I’ve never been so proud of anything I’ve made before.” He looked out at the city. “ You are the next step in human evolution, X.”

Hiramiaku had risen to her feet and was coming towards them. She wore the strange stoicism of one dangerously bored.

“ And you’ve been in on this?” X asked Hiramiaku.

“ A little,” the woman conceded. “ I can’t deny that it sounded like something exciting to do on a Thursday night.”

“ When Hiramiaku killed Hands in India, she checked on you,” Vale said. “ I suppose she’s been your guardian angel, all this time. Even when people got too close to your secret in other countries, she went out and dealt with them.”

“ I like to travel,” Hiramiaku said, stretching her arms over her head.

“ A nasty bloke in Gotham City a month ago,” Vale described. “ He worked with Luthor, and he’d learned about your project, X.”

“ He was annoying. And I just severely disliked Hands,” Hiramiaku said. “ As for Praevidare… he was talking to the wrong people about the wrong things…too bad he didn’t die, but I know his kind never do. Just wanted to scare him…”

“ All this, all this time,” X stammered. “ Everything?”

“ I worked with Coquin to free you in Rostock,” Vale told her. “ Coquin has an agent working named Brugnon La Touga…perhaps you’ve heard the last name? He is Mademoiselle La Touga’s older brother.”

“ There are people looking for you in Gotham City,” Hiramiaku broke in. “ Ever heard of Batman?”

Something clicked deep in X’s memory. “ Yes. And Robin.”

Vale looked at her. “ Yes. The boy.”

The way he said it made X acutely angry. If he had sifted through her personal experiences, her feelings, he would know about Robin and how she had felt for him. That sad, sick mix of passion and hate.

“ You can’t trust them,” Vale explained. “ They work beyond the law but also for it. If they learned about you and your powers and your exploits, they would not hesitate to imprison you.”

“ I’m not stupid,” spat X. “ I know not to trust a crime-fighter,”

Vale rose an eyebrow at her, but said nothing.

“ Never let your feelings get the best of you,” Hiramiaku advised. “ Smash them down, deny them completely. It’s the only way to stay safe. Even with Lockhardt. It’s obvious how he got you to help him.”

“ And that Peterson man,” Vale started.

X began to sweat under her shirt.

“ Separate yourself from him now. It’s the only way he’ll live.”

X turned and went for the open hatch. “ I’m going back. But I’m keeping in mind what you’ve both told me.” She stopped and looked at them. “ Thank you.”

She disappeared inside. Hiramiaku and Vale were left alone in the rushing wind atop the Fernsehturm.

[Sable Phoenix]

WOOHOO! Finally, answers!

Some of them, at least. And such answers. Answers that are worse than not knowing, in many ways.

You remind me of Robin Hobb, DoE, in that you tend to pile the misfortune on your characters in painfully copious amounts.

I eagerly await the next chapter.

[Casity]

I was re-reading a few fav. moments in your fanfiction when I came to notice that you wrote to me twice without my knowing it. I am still the rookied, man, the new kid... *Grins* Heh, yeah right! If you knew how old at writing I really was you would give me the boot! I'm 16 and have been writing since I was 13, serious writing, I'll let you do the math and hope you are off a few years!

*Pauses* but enough about me, back to you... I was shocked to see that you finally posted more and when I came there was nothing! Nothing but a thank you letter, which was nice and all. But we all await the story! Just to let you know, yeah, so any time you feel like writing more just do that!

Thanks for the little push of encouragment over my fanfiction!

-Casity

[Casity]

i just had a major idiot moment! Call me anything you want, I am such a rookie for doing this! I posted not waiting for the page to download completley! Arg! You did write more!

I like how I try to act all old and then mess up like this, yeah...

-Casity

[Sable Phoenix]

Just a few more comments.

You pulled that movie prop of the bullet causing a gasoline explosion in the car again. Didn't I warn you about that already? If it was a tracer bullet, I could see it, since the phosphorous would have ignited the gasoline, but a regular bullet just doesn't do that.

Sorry, but that's a pet peeve of mine.

If X's brain is a microchip, how do drugs affect her? Most drugs, especially hallucinogens, work on neurons and transmitter sites and stuff like that, stuff which a computer chip has none of.

Hiramiaku's not very modest, is she?

[The_NewCatwoman]

Okay, first I was like... Noooo Saru... Then it was like... wow,

hands, dead, sheesh, then it was, Vale? But before any of that

ever even happened, it was whoo Hiramiaku!!!! Yeah, she's

alive, she's kickin' it, and she's naked on a motorcycle!

Quite fresh and clean if I do say so myself. Another enjoyable

chapter by the queen of action-drenched darkness herself, DofE!

tNC

[Panther]

Just to let everyone know, on behalf of Saru's lametably dead and very human clone, I have started the C.A.P.T. organaization - Clones Are People Too!!! I'm looking for more members, since now I am the only one. Our (my) mission goal is to demand all clones be recognized as human and that Tonbo and DofE allow for at least a decent funeral and a good crypt for SaruII until he staggers out to rejoin the cast as all dead charcters in this saga have a tendancy to do.

You pulled that movie prop of the bullet causing a gasoline explosion in the car again. Didn't I warn you about that already?

Considering all of the laws of physics Batman defys on a regular basis, I'm willing to let this one go. :D

Glad to see Hiramiaku is alive and well, but MY GOD, the sheer staggering amount of information she brought with her!!!! And yet..and yet... the mysteries!!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Sable Phoenix: Thank you for your reply. As for the bullet through the gas tank thing, you caught me. I forgot about this one, since it wasn't a major part of the story, and I apologize and thank you for pointing that out. As for X's brain, the explanation is closer than you think...

Casity: Don't worry about the newbie moves. We'll look the other way. And I always (unless time restrains me) write a reply to those who support me, and then I get around to the posting. So thanks for sticking around!

tNC: Thank you for the reply and the utter hilarity that followed me reading it. Hiramiaku, as Sable Phoenix pointed out, isn't very modest. And that's okay with us, right?

Panther: Count me in. Though you have to realize that once Hiramiaku kills someone, they tend to stay dead, and in many different pieces. Unless, of course, they're Praevidare. And he violates all the rules anyway. But thank you for bringing our attention to the plight of the clones, and thank you for replying to my story!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you for your replies and your guidance, and here is the nineteenth (nineteenth!?) part of my story. It's dark, twisted, and very violent, so please read cautiously. The lyrics mentioned in the "third act" are from the song God Bless the Child by Billy Holiday; I took them directly from the recording, so if they're innaccurate please forgive me.

Thank you all.
***
“ Let’s stop pandering. I want to kill Klirren now.”

Lockhardt looked at her from behind the opaque orbs of his glasses. “ Excuse me?”

X strode straight at his side, exuding more power than her tiny form had ever before. “ Klirren. I’m going to kill him.”

“ Do you realize that unless we depopulate his lower ranks, there will only be more to rise to his position once he is dead?”

She crossed her arms. She was wearing a black, Mandarin-collared fitted jacket and black slacks with knee-high boots. It all made her look like a small, frighteningly serious general.

“ His adherents are no more dedicated to him than they are indebted to him; once he is dead they’ll placidly wait before their next leader comes along.” They were out in a stretch of green park outside the front entrance of a major metropolitan hospital, the sun making their swatch of dark fabrics look like a tiny, individual goth convention.

“ You seem to know what you’re talking about,” Lockhardt said warily.

X stopped and turned to face him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, or wigs, a dangerous feat at this time of day and in such an open place. In the bright light he could clearly see the scarring of her face.

“ Trust me, Lockhardt,” she said coldly. “ I want to get this over with and eliminate Mullen as quickly as possible. I’m looking forward to the benefits you’ve promised me.”

He raised his chin. “ You’ve…matured to some extent, X.”

“ You said it yourself; I’m like a whole new person.”

They strolled calmly down the white cement stretch towards a small lunch alcove under a spread of dark trees. Lacy shadows blossomed and mutated on the ground, fractures of sunlight catching the dark tints of X’s hair.

Collected around the stone benches were three men. The first was identified immediately as Ernest Sylvermann, Lockhardt’s son-in-law. The second she knew from pure infamy, a tall, finely-boned African man called simply Remington, dressed in pure red silks and a gold tie. The third was an older Polish man back from a long hiatus in Guatemala, Ivan Svensk. He was short and round, as if his long and rich life had somehow stunted his physical stature, and had little white hair.

X bowed to them.

“ My advisers and associates,” Lockhardt introduced. He was aware that X already knew who they were, and it bristled him slightly. “ This is Miss X.”

Remington sized her up without even a full-body glance. “ Yes. We are aware who she is.”

“ I thought she would be taller,” Svensk mentioned.

Lockhardt sighed. “ X has a plan. She wants to kill Klirren as soon as possible.”

They were silent. A car horn honked near the hospital entrance; a taxi sent to pick up Sam Erin, who was getting out of the ICU that day.

“ You think you can take on Klirren’s defenses, child?” Svensk asked. “ He has a dozen bodyguards, maybe more. He moves locations twice daily. He has look-alikes stand in for him periodically.”

“ I’m ready to accept the risks,” X monotoned. “ I would think Lockhardt’s allies would want an end to this war as much as I would.”

“ I think your real goal here is Mullen,” Remington said, standing. He dwarfed X in his shadow.

“ You would not be incorrect,” she admitted, staring him down. He reluctantly shifted his eyes.

“ How can we be sure you will do this properly?” Svensk asked, eyeing her through thick glasses. “ You could not even assassinate Sam Erin a few days ago. Your attempt at his life failed.”

A scream, and a huge blast shook the cement. In front of the hospital a few blocks away, the taxi bearing Sam Erin exploded, glass and sheets of flat metal blowing to pieces like leaves. The fireball coursed up about twenty feet, then died down into the smoldering carcass of the vehicle.

X didn’t blink. “ That one probably didn’t.”

Ernest Sylvermann, silent and still seated, looked at her widely. The tiny ember of the taxi burned in both eyes.

“ I think we should listen to her,” he said. “ She obviously knows what she’s doing.”

“ I think we should get going,” Remington said. “ It was foolish of us to meet in this place, out in the open like this.”

Svensk got to his feet with the aid of an ebony cane. “ You’d better not fail us, girl, or you’ll be in much more trouble than it’s worth,”

X watched all three disappear into the crowds. Sirens moaned above the expectant hum of the onlookers. X turned back to Lockhardt and looked up at his face.

“ Three big men, all pushing around the little lady,” she said to him.

“ In time, they will learn to respect you,” he assured her. “ Now get along. I’ll speak with you later.”

“ One more thing,” she said, taking time to remember the brittle revelations of her sleepless night. “ I want a body scan.”

He looked at her, obviously impatient. “ Fine.”

“ A non-magnetic scan,” she said grimly. “ I don’t want to be pulled apart at the seams.”

“ Fine. Three this afternoon. I’ll call with directions. Now leave!”

She shrugged and in three brisk leaps had cleared the park. A twenty-foot jump brought her to the top of the nearest building, and she melted away as well.
***
Dr. Cindie Wu’s office was near Potsdamer Platz, locked within a harness of new-age buildings that were modern without looking too flashy. Acres of steel and glass lattice stretched upward toward the unforgiving sky, while underneath the floor was matte, unpolished granite in the same nameless green color as the granite floors at LexCorp.

“ They hollowed you out,” Dr. Wu conceded solemnly. X was dressing behind the screen that separated them. “ Your brain cavity is empty; that biochip is bolted directly into the base of your skull. And when I say biochip, I mean biochip; it’s manufactured from your living cells to transmit electricity, so it functions just like a real brain. That explains why you became addicted to Macchina. Did you know you have two hearts?”

“ I had an idea,” X said, pulling on her black Mandarin jacket.

“ And one kidney. No appendix. Your liver is somewhat enlarged, though, like with steroids.” Dr. Wu was a Chinese expatriate with a strong Boston inflection, which somehow did not strike X oddly.

She continued. “ All your bones, I mean every one of them, is plated and infused with this metal; even your internal organs seem to bear a very fine mesh of it. Of course, you probably know about the bionic arm and leg.

“ And there are no reproductive organs. Nothing, like they were completely removed.”

“ They spayed me,” X said darkly.

“ Couldn’t have you breeding, could they?” The doctor looked over her clipboard, thick glasses sliding down her nose. “ But there’s a chip there, too, that sends electrical impulses to your body to spontaneously produce estrogen. Obviously to counteract the Macchina therapy.”

X was lacing her boots.

“ Are you alright?” the doctor asked.

“ Fine,” X replied, rubbing her face on her sleeve. Her eyes had begun leaking for some reason.
***
As he jimmied the window open on the ledge outside, he suddenly began to think about X. Where she was. If she was scared. If she could feel anything at all. The lock popped almost silently, and he stole inside.

He made a loop around the sitting room, around the kitchen, and met up with Nightwing at the foyer.

“ Nothing,” Robin said.

“ Dead end,” Nightwing muttered.

“ You checked the library, right? You didn’t find anything?”

“ The computer is a fake. All the drawers are empty. Luthor wouldn’t just leave things lying around.”

Robin sighed deep into the marble encasement of the foyer. Lex Luthor’s Gotham penthouse was as posh as they come, but for all its opulence it lacked any of the slightest material evidence.

There was a chirp in Nightwing’s cowl. “ Yes?”

A whisper, barely. He nodded along to it, then, “ Okay. Out.”

“ Well?” Robin asked.

Nightwing gestured for the window and they ducked out.

“ Batgirl got past the LexCorp firewall, but for only about five minutes. Then…something weird happened.”

“ What?”

Again, no answer from Nightwing. He stalked down the carved granite length of the ledge and grabbed the side of the building, hanging out over the street.

“ Check it out yourself,” he said, pointing towards Gotham Times Square.

Robin leaned out.

Plastered across the pixelated mesh of the giant TV screen was an image of a skull, maybe an MRI scan. Only the skull was completely empty. As he watched, it melted into the bondage-fetish image of X, bound on her side. Head wrapped in a sheet. He felt like throwing up.

“ Let’s head home,” Nightwing said. Robin nodded.

Batgirl was waiting for them in the Cave, leaning against the swivel chair that sat in front of the Batcomputer. She was dressed in street clothes, black jeans and a blue sweater. There was a blue headband over her red hair.

Before either of them could open their mouths, she hit a button on the console of the computer.

“ I recorded this from a few minutes ago,” she said. “ I copied the exact programs and everything.”

The screen lapsed into black. A filing program, the numerals entering in one by one. Then, spastic red, blue, frost-white.

“ I’m sorry for the interruption,” said a British man’s voice. His narration was accompanied with the message in clear green on the white screen.

“ My name is Coquin. I have been the one attacking your systems for the past few months. I don’t mean to be an inconvenience, but it is quite imperative that my message get across to you.”

The voice suddenly warped into a woman’s voice, one with an Indian accent. “ I should tell you now that Hands is dead. Yes, Hiramiaku is alive and she did do it, but she is the least of your problems. I am aware that you now know of the existence of the one named X001, and you have been investigating her lately.

“ I must warn you now, do not continue with your investigation.”

“ The simple truth is my mission is to free X001, and any inquiries into her existence will only fuel actions to reclaim her. It is best that-“ The voice melted into an Australian woman in mid-sentence, “ she disappear. She is only dangerous to those who seek to imprison her, and will not harm any who prove themselves to be allies. If you can possibly cooperate with me on this, I’m sure we can both benefit.

“ I want to assure you I am not an AI, not a criminal. I am appealing to you in the most sincere way.”

It blinked into black.

“ You traced it?” Tim questioned as the computer rebooted itself, the screen warming to a slow, even green.

“ Nepal. But I know it’s a fake—nobody hacks from Nepal unless they’re one of those crazy Buddhist monks.”

“ What makes you think Coquin isn’t a crazy Buddhist monk?” Dick asked.

“ The style,” Barbara answered, sitting in the giant swivel chair and executing an intricate series of commands on the keyboard. “ The monks are generally known for philanthropic or altruistic endeavors, but nothing like helping a pre-manufactured Intergang assassin escape. There would be too many politics involved.”

The computer screen melted into a news channel. “ Tonight, a car explosion in downtown Berlin signified the beginning of a vicious Intergang war. Two were killed, one an elderly accountant native of Ireland and a second a German cabbie. In the past six hours, there have been ten random shootings, two police raids, and a series of intricate burglaries that have been traced to Intergang. It seems the clash between Mullen’s North American sect has come to a head with Hans Klirren’s order…”

Dick sat on the side console. “ Maybe they just want to help a lost little girl,”

Barbara gave him an unsympathetic glare. “ A lost little assassin, is more like it.”

Tim watched them bicker from outside the circlet of light the Batcomputer provided. He was debating, silently, whether he should wander back out into the night. It was barely twelve, and on a busy night he could stay out until three.

“ You haven’t found Yukito Saito yet, Barbara?” he asked.

She shook her head. “ No. He’s out of Gotham. Worst case, he’s left the country.”

“ This guy worked for Vyskanti Incorporated?” Dick asked. He had spent all day reviewing Saito’s file, or Hibiki Noe’s file, as they should say. Judicious web-searching had found that Yukito Saito was the chosen alias of a professional yakuza hitman from Yokohama named Hibiki Noe. “ Then why would he help us?”

“ Unless he knows who we are,” Tim said grimly.

“ No,” Barbara said. “ He has some obligation to keep the close friends of Bruce Wayne out of harm’s way. He needs Bruce for something, and if he lets one of us get hurt, there sure as hell won’t be any negotiations between them.”

“ And this whole thing about Saito working with Hiramiaku?” Dick questioned. “ It would make sense, if they both worked for Vyskanti.”

“ I think it was an accident,” Barbara said. “ They might be working in tandem without knowing it. My sources say Hibiki Noe and Hiramiaku had a little spat in Tokyo three years ago that cost the city two million dollars in damages.”

“ They don’t like each other,” Tim concluded.

“ Understatedly so,” Barbara agreed.

“ Then Saito and Vyskanti need Bruce for something,” Dick said. “ Probably having to do with X.”

“ Maybe an alliance to take her and protect her so they can keep her as an assassin,” Barbara said.

“ Like LexCorp,” Tim mentioned.

“ Exactly like LexCorp,” Barbara glanced at him. “ You going back out, Tim?”

“ I dunno,” He shrugged.

“ Batman’s doing a bust on 73rd Street,” Dick said, more like an afterthought. “ I guess you could help him out.”

“ He sounded like he wanted to be alone,” Tim said to himself.

“ You can always stay here with us,” Barbara suggested.

Tim turned around and headed for the pedestrian exit. “ Nah, I’ll leave you two alone.”

Something flew at his head, but he ducked out just before it hit.
***
It was a nice place in Charlottenburg, a big house with a brick front and white stone accents, any kind of house from New England. The windows were small and tightly curtained, the front garden penned in with a short wrought iron fence. She vaulted over it and strode up to the front door, knocking three times.

Wright, Hertzen, and Damon were in the front playing cards in front of the soft fuzz glow of the monitors. Damon, a tall blonde Irishman, was the one to get up and check the front door camera. There was a girl on the front stoop, with short red pigtails, wearing a black Catholic school uniform.

“ Wright,” he called backward, “ it’s Judith.”

Wright, a middle-aged American, got up, tossing down his cards. “ Judith? I told her not to come here unless it’s an emergency.”

Damon shrugged. “ Maybe she’s just lonely in that place all by herself,”

Wright went for the front, undoing the baroque fastenings on the door jamb and shutting off the security program at the same time. All the time thinking about his daughter, for whom this trip to Germany was so difficult.

He threw open the door. “ Hon-“

He didn’t even get the whole word out. The girl on the stoop planted her fist directly in his abdomen. He coughed up flecks of blood and toppled over onto the Mexican tiles of the foyer.

“ Wrigh-“

The next one didn’t get it out either. She had drawn her katana and neatly bisected his head from his neck, the flicker of red against the hallway the scant banner of her passing. The third man, sitting within the circle of television monitors, barely squeezed off a 9mm shot before his entrails stained the ivory carpet.

X knew that there were two men in the stairwell, and now that she had tasted the blood she was sure. She dashed up the steps like a flash. Bullets burned the air around her, but she was their god, their creator and superior. She dodged and deflected them with the pure blade of her sword, barely stopping to eviscerate the two gunmen.

At the end of a long, wide hall there would be a white door, she remembered. Behind the white door there would be a bedroom. In the bedroom would be Klirren.

As she turned the corner a single bullet bit straight through the slack sleeve of her school uniform, barely knicking her arm. She ran in a fast weaving pattern, ducking from one end of the hall to the other. An intricate flip caught one bodyguard sideways, crushing half his ribcage. He dropped his gun.

She swiped it up, and, still holding the katana, shot twice down the hall. Through the left pupil, through the trachea. Her aim was impeccable. She realized she was getting to be a smart-ass and tossed the gun away, preferring the ancient way. She reclaimed her sword with a samurai stance and flew against the tall doorway.

It burst in without much resistance. Of course, there were three armed men standing there, but with one single swipe she had sliced the steel heads off their submachine guns. The two flanking fell away, but the middle one remained, awe-stricken. Blade through the chest and twist, and he fell to his knees like a pilgrim.

The two others had gone for their reserve weaponry, and X threw herself behind a long dining table as the first bullets bit fiercely through silk and mahogany. Fake flowers and ancient porcelain pottery sprayed everything in tiny colored fragments. She rolled out from under the table and hit the wall. Breathing heavily, she jumped up and grabbed the back of one of the dining chairs.

It hit the left gunmen straight in the head, knocking him out. As pieces of wood clogged the air and distracted the other, X jumped atop the table and then leapt at him, the sword hitting the thick bone of his sternum and biting clean through. She flipped backward and landed in a crouch on the carpet, wiping the katana blade off on her skirt.

That’s when the bright, cool notes began to sift in from the bedroom.

“ Them that’s got, shall get,
them that’s not, shall lose.
So the Bible says
and it still is news…”

She stood, holding the sword straight, and walked toward the sound.

She kicked in the double doors. It was a maroon room, fit with dark woods and silk flowers in cloissoñe vases. There was a wide, red bed, the covers tossed.

“ Yes, the strong get smart,
while the weak ones fade.
Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade…”

Up against the French windows there was an expensive desk with carved scrolling of rich roses and sylph lilies. There was a man standing behind it. He was tall, middle-aged, with dark auburn hair and a mustache. He was dressed in a limp black t-shirt and dress slacks.

“ Money, you’ve got lots of friends
crowding ‘round the door.
When you’re gone and spending ends
They don’t come no more…”

Klirren had a gun to his head.

“ Mama may have,
Papa may have,
But God bless the child who’s got his own.”

He didn’t get the chance to pull the trigger. He wouldn’t have anyway, she reasoned as his head bounced off the desk. He was goading her. Waiting for her to do the job for him. As the body slumped behind the desk, she heard the crackle of footsteps downstairs. Reinforcements, or maybe a survivor just stirring in unconsciousness.

A man stumbled into the doorway. Startled, X drew the katana. The survivor in the dining room. Her whole body felt strange, like she had been infused with a particularly radioactive material. He wasn’t armed. Through his ski mask she could see the blood running off his temple.

He held up his left hand. The grenade was about the size of a lemon.

She jumped the desk and hit the window full force.

Glass scattered around her in a sharp, glowing halo as she flung herself out into the alley. The explosion went off behind her, singeing the fibers of her uniform away from her skin. She made a flip in the hot, wretched air, replacing her katana in its sheath as she righted herself for the descent. Hit the concrete running, glowing embers and debris stinging the ground around her.

Breathing hard. She stumbled into the street, and a flash of white headlights sought out her form and trapped it.

A man hung out the window, holding a gun at her.

“ Halt!” he shouted. “ Interpol!”

[Casity]

Thanks for the update! When I finished reading part 19 I looked down to see that I had been chewing on my blanket. This might mean three things, only two are true. I think you can rule out the false one

1) It's late
2) I drag a blanket wherever I go
3) Your story was great and I got so into it that I was bitting my blanket. Lets look at it this way, at least it wasn't my nails!

and.... number 1 and 3 are correct!

I Can't wait to see more! Tu escribas, y yo veno a leo! Trabajo bueno mi nina.


-Casity

[Sable Phoenix]

Right on. Awesome action scene there, DoE. Once again, lots of breaking glass is a good thing. All I have to say about this one is, just keep it coming.

[The_NewCatwoman]

and he fell to his knees like a pilgrim

...

"Wow."

And poor X, I can only conclude that all of this makes her so much lesser of a human. She can't even reproduce if she chooses to. And in the subconscious of her mind, she mourned the fact. This was an excellent part, just the kind of thing to read after an ace day. Thanks.

tNC

[Daughterof_Evil]

Casity: Or it could mean that your blanket is very, very tasty. But thank you for the reply, I'm glad that you're enjoying it and that this story doesn't stop being interesting when it leaves the circle of us crusty old members. It's good to have new blood injected once and awhile.

Sable Phoenix: Thank you for the compliment, and I'll get around to that continuing it thing in a second here.

tNC: No, thank you for reading and replying. You're very perceptive. And you're right; on the Human Scale, X is just sliding further and further down. Thanks again!

[Daughterof_Evil]

This post marks two things: the first is my two-hundred-eighieth post. The second is the twentieth part of this story. I'd just like to thank all of you for being here, and being patient, since I got behind in the posting this week and couldn't say Merry Christmas on time. But Merry belated Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

This part has a lot of graphic violence and occasional swearing, so read cautiously. And thanks again for all your wonderful comments. Happy New Year.
***
X pulled her arm up over her face and jumped onto the hood of the sea-green sports sedan, then raced over the windshield and onto the roof. She danced around bullets that knifed up through the steel, then flipped off the car entirely and ducked behind the rear. The brake lights drew strange red shadows across her face.

One agent, she concluded solemnly. Solo.

The passenger side door popped open, and the Interpol agent swung out, having moved to the other side of the car to use it as a shield. He warily circled around the front of the vehicle, then knelt and checked under it.

X jumped up onto the trunk and from there darted to the hood. She was so silent the agent didn’t see her until he stood up, and when he moved to pull his gun up to eye level, she struck. The katana blade severed his neck cleanly.

Standing atop the blood-spattered hood, X wiped the red off her sword and stepped down. Amid the various other nighttime noises, the distinct squeal of tire rubber and a short burst of sirens alerted her to at least three more cars heading in that direction. Without a hint of doubt, she got behind the wheel of the sports sedan. Clicked the seat belt shut and threw it in reverse.

She could never remember having driven before.

As she barreled down the street at an obviously illegal rate of speed, she couldn’t help but think of the things she knew about herself. The lies Intergang had told her, the secret memories they had stolen and then destroyed...it worked her blood to a fine boil. All those years missed. All of the good memories (if there had been any) gone.

She swiped through several red lights within the first few minutes, barely skimming two or three cars in her haste to escape. In the middle of one particular intersection, she caught sight of a motorcycle police officer jetting down a parallel street in the same direction, then turned the steering wheel in a vicious right-hand arc and flew opposite. She had a feeling that if the authorities weren’t looking for her already, her erratic driving habits would attract their attention soon enough.

She delved into the heart of the city, traveling the tangled roadways as surely as a blood cell unconsciously travels the maze of coronary arteries. Her weeks in Berlin had paid off, even though she had been wasting time all along by knocking out Klirren’s lower tiers of support.

Ernest Sylvermann was the one who had miraculously found out Klirren’s rotation habits, and the fact that the leader would be in one particular safehouse on this exact night with so many guards. That one guard, Reynold Wright, would have a young daughter enrolled at a local Catholic school. The layout of the building came to them surreptitiously the night before the assault, and X had memorized every square foot of it.

She pulled off into a side street and was quickly lodged in a bank of gridlock. Imprudently, she pulled it into reverse and just missed the car in line behind her before turning onto the sidewalk and continuing on in her former direction. She began running through places to ditch the car, which she was almost sure was being traced.

She took a page from the book of Saru and swooped into a parking garage, knocking off the red-striped arm of the ticket booth and racing all the way up to the top story without even slowing down. She parked it roughly in the corner and got out, leaving the engine running. Stopped, then briefly turned back to stab a hissing gape into the front left tire with her sword.

The parking garage was connected to a law firm building, as indicated by the curiously grouped names on the bronze plaque above the elevator buttons. She found the elevator woefully slow. As she opened the door to the stairwell, she heard a news helicopter yawn over the garage, its flight pattern so close that the whirring of the chopper blades sounded more like a fetal heartbeat.

Ten stories down, and she was sweating through her blouse and vest. She wondered how far she would get on the streets with a sword at her side. Before she could estimate an answer, she was on the sidewalk, walking along at a normal pace. A police car pulled into the parking garage behind her, but stopped on the first level and didn’t go any further. The front window rolled down.

She was running.

She knew how she could lose them, thinking hard back to the flight in Paris. Of course, that whole thing hadn’t gone well, Intergang having gotten her back and Hiramiaku having committed a fake suicide. Torture and experimentation blinded the rest, making a few weeks back under their thumb seem like eons on the lowest circle of hell.

She got to the doorway of the next building and grappled with the unmoving steel and glass doors. Locked. With a little groan, she sent her left fist through the wide glass panes and stepped quickly through the hole even as the tiny shards continued to fall.

Loud, audacious footsteps in the silent, grey marble tomb of the front lobby. Her reflection danced across black glass office windows as she flew to the elevators. She hit all the ‘up’ elevator buttons at the same time, and each maw opened for her simultaneously. Got into the far left one, hit the twenty-first story. She wasn’t sure why twenty-one was so significant to her.

The five minutes inside the elevator passed like a thick stupor. The air conditioning had been shut off for the day, and the air inside the lift was warm and raw. X found herself gasping, despite herself. She leaned over and put her hands to her knees for support.

Someone had set this up. One of Lockhardt’s so-called allies, the ones who had so disapproved of the tiny, pale assassin girl. Or maybe it was Mullen, working in tandem with the local authorities to make it seem like all he wanted was to get a dangerous person off the streets. Still maybe it was all Interpol. She had no reason to count any of the possibilities out.

As she sat there, waiting, she heard the other two elevators pinging away on their own. Police, following her. She stood up straight and swallowed while the elevator cleared the twentieth floor. She clenched a fist around the hilt of her katana, and stepped out just as the doors parted.

It was a long hallway, done in linoleum made to look like terrazzo and wallpapered in a flat, dark green pattern of ivy. There was a huge potted silk bouquet opposite the elevators, and beside that, a glass case featuring the names of the private practice doctors who occupied this floor. She absorbed all of it while also ignoring it, and ran down the hall, turning a corner just as the two other elevators opened.

At the end of this next hall, she decided. She charged, and hit the carved oak door of Dr. Mair’s office with such force that she was sure she had broken a bone somewhere. Inside, her momentum carried her into a small waiting area furnished with floral couches and stacks of rubbish magazines. Everything was dark, but through it she could see nothing. No flicker of human life.

She went past the check-in desk and kicked in a second door, this one lighter and with a flimsy lock that gave off a pathetic click as it broke. Then down another hallway. Past a desk full of curious plastic models that gave X the impression that Dr. Mair was a fertility specialist and not just some pervert. She tried the individual exam rooms one by one. All were locked. Without much effort, she drove in another door, this one the last on the hallway right before the bathroom.

It was a small room, with a gynecologist’s table up against one wall and a counter against the other. Lurid diagrams were plastic-sealed to every flat surface except for the floor-to-ceiling window, its blinds drawn slack so the city was spelled out in horizontal slices through the slats. With a zip, she pulled the cheap white blinds all the way up, and began to search the window for a latch.

In the hall outside Dr. Mair’s waiting room, a troop of cautious police were edging their way in. X’s fingers traced every inch of tar-sealed glass. Nothing. No latch, no safety escape. Couldn’t have a window that opened, X thought with sudden manic humor. Just in case an infertile mother decided to jump out.

There wasn’t any other way, though, since she heard the jangle of chains and keys as the officers entered the office itself. In the dark, X sighed. She drew out her arm and punched the glass with a nimble boxing hit that brought her fist back as the glass began to shatter. The sudden smash-noise made the police outside pause momentarily before rushing down the hall.

They got to the doorway just as X stood at the edge, contemplating the fall. The wind outside stirred the blinds to a chatter.

She braced herself and jumped.

The wind hit her full force as she descended, her body tensed but muscles elasticized to absorb and then refract the impact. She wasn’t falling the whole twenty-one stories. She had made sure her leap of unfaith was wide enough to take her five stories down to the roof of the hostel complex next door.

She landed in a crouch, the force not as bad as she had thought. Maybe she had just become amazingly tolerant towards the unusual, her mindset still geared toward the frail, lovely girl-child she had been, once upon a time. But now things were different. Now her shoes scraped hardened tar and roof gravel, her katana thudding against her leg. The news helicopter circled again, this time its giant floodlight panning on and seeking with intent. She dashed across the roof, avoiding its glow, and jumped the alley between the hostel and the bank next door.

They hit her in mid-air.

The force felt like it was splintering her bones, but then her nerves fused back again and she righted herself as she fell. She hit the roof and rolled, coming up on all fours, gasping. She looked up, sensing them all around her.

The gnarled mass of the flash grenade clattered to the shingles. They were trying to knock out her sensory perception, whoever they were. She took to her feet and drew the katana in a blaze of bright metal. She could taste their presence.

The cleverly disguised helicopter pinpointed its light all on her. She squinted up at it, flipping them off with the one hand not holding the sword. Then she turned and fled again, jumping and darting in a weave pattern that confused the searchlight and threw her into sporadic banks of shadow that even the city’s ambient light couldn’t illuminate. All of her being was in tune with this instinct that forced her into the dark.

She didn’t have a gun. Not even a grenade, or shuriken. Nothing projectile that could be used as a long-range weapon. All her fighting would have to take place within five feet, and her combat brain told her that within that distance the risk of mortality was incredibly high.

Someone hung out the side of the helicopter and fired off a long, piercing blast of submachine gun fire. It raked along the roof beside her. More sets of bullets followed, fired by others in the helicopter. They had the high-ground, the superior position. Intergang bullets cut holes in her already ruined clothing. Hot lead caressed her skin. As she made a frantic leap between houses, her black vest disappeared in a forest of tatters, becoming only a spare scrap of black floating out of the air. She landed on the tarmac, and was in a second flip as a bullet gouged her in the right knee.

She screamed, and fell. The pain shot up her leg and along her vertebrae. She didn’t even see the skylight until she hit it.

Glass and steel scaffolding tangled with her red wig, ripping it off. Senseless, X was somewhat amazed she hadn’t lost it earlier. Down she continued, hitting the dining room table below with a bang. Fine crystal and flatware salvaged from before the war went flying in pieces. X found herself tangled in the pink light-haze of a red silk tablecloth. She could smell bratwurst and thick cream butter.

A woman in the spacious kitchen screamed. Behind her, the front door burst in. Men in special ops gear swarmed in, their boots heavy on old porcelain tiles and thin carpeting. Surrounded the red tangle of the tablecloth and drew their guns.

“ Die Zeit ist um,” one of the Intergang men said.

X shifted under the tablecloth, and the men closed in.

“ Aufstehen,” said another. The woman in the kitchen continued to scream.

X sat up under the cloth. Triggers clicked.

“ Oh, I get it,” the girl said to herself.

“ Den Mund halten!” the leader shouted.

The tablecloth bloomed up in a beautiful red arc, the girl thrashing and kicking beneath it. A gut crunched under one of her fists. Ruptured spleen. Broken dishes and bratwurst ground deep into the carpet. She turned in a wheel kick and deflected a gun pointed at her, ripping it free from its owner and then using it as a club to shatter the skull of another man across the room. Submachine gun fire raked through the tablecloth as it fell. The man responsible she disarmed with a hard punch. Then she bounced onto her palms and locked his neck between her feet. Twist, crack.

X had disappeared out the front door before the red tablecloth even hit the ground.

She took the stairs down to the empty lobby, barely even a green-tiled kiosk on the first floor. As she headed for the door, a black figure emerged from the keyhole of darkness under the stairwell.

Feeling their presence, she turned and kicked at their face. They deflected it with their left forearm. She saved the effort and in the same movement tried to elbow them in the neck. No such luck. They grabbed her elbow and flipped her onto the stairs. Her face met linoleum.

She locked a fist around her katana before even making a move to get up. She understood it, now. The style, the attitude, even the smell was the same. This man in black, this ninja, was the same man who had fought Hiramiaku all those months ago.

She flipped backwards off the stairs, and in her haste forgot how small the lobby was. Her feet struck the opposite wall above the glass doorway, and she unsheathed the sword in her descent towards him.

He pulled a steel sai at the last moment. Metal screamed against metal. The ninja planted a foot in her polished stomach and threw her to the floor. He was on her immediately, straddling her, sai locked with her katana hilt.

“ Remember me, syau ning?” he asked, voice rough even through the voice scrambler.

“ Unfortunately so,” X replied, jerking her neck up. Her forehead cracked his nose with an ungainly pop, and the sheer force of it toppled him off of her.

She rolled backwards, up the stairs, standing at attention on the eighth step. Sword at the ready, its blade glinting through the milky lobby lighting.

The ninja snuffed up the blood. There was a thud in one of the upper levels, heavy armor meeting thin wall in the rush to descend.

He stood in the doorway, blocking her.

“ Take on me, or all of them,” he said. A little drop of red fell from his mask and dotted the floor.

She held the sword at attack position.

“ Fine,” Suddenly, he fell to the side. Standing behind him was a teenaged girl. Tan skin, short dark hair in tiny round pigtails in the back. She was a little taller than X, dressed in a black and white plaid schoolgirl’s outfit and a black hooded sweater. Her eyes were bright gold and cut directly from her face, Asian eyes. Wide, hawkish nose. Plump black lips in a straight, stoic non-expression.

That was when it hit X. She was her replacement.

“ X004,” X said.

The girl stared at her.

“ Traitor,” X004 snarled.

X lowered her sword. The ninja had dissolved into the shadows, gone. X004 took a defensive stance, arms jackknifed to her chest, knees swaying for momentum.

“ Aren’t you going to fight me, traitor?” she snapped.

X sheathed her katana. “ No.”

X004 reached inside her sweater and pulled out a gun. A very nice Glock, with scrollwork on the handle grip. The barrel leveled with X’s face.

“ I’ll make you fight,” X004 said, pulling the trigger.

The first bullet X dodged. The second nicked her waist as she flew at X004, and the third just barely burned her thigh. The knee had healed from earlier, cartilage and metal mending into one.

X knocked the gun out of her descendant’s hand. Her fist closed around the girl’s collar. She was heavier than she had thought, harder to throw.

X sent X004 straight through the glass door of the apartment building, and the girl skidded out onto the street, rolling on the pavement over and over again before regaining her balance and flipping to her feet. X emerged from the lobby, brushing off her sleeves. Her shoes crunched glass.

X004 took one twenty-foot leap at X and planted a fist square into her left cheekbone. X, incredulous, felt something crack. She realized it was her skull hitting the sidewalk.

X004 turned her over and knelt on her chest, X’s wrists locked under her knees. X004 was biracial, of mixed African and Filipino roots. Her face was a series of surgically beautiful browned curves, without a dent or scar, just a spattering of freckles across her cheeks. Someone had taken a lot of time with her features. Someone had crafted her to not only be a weapon of war but an object of beauty. A true doll.

X004 drew a finger down the gnarled scar extending from X’s left eye.

“ You’re not too pretty,” she said, awe-filled. “ They cut you up and didn’t fix you.”

X gasped. The girl was heavy.

“ And I don’t understand why you left,” X004 continued. “ Don’t you want to be part of the revolution?”

“ Never,” X threw her legs into the air and tried to use her momentum to throw X004 off. X004 leaned in harder. X saw that there was a belt of grenades slung across X004’s plaid school uniform.

“ Nothing ever works out the way you plan it,” X004 said, darkly. “ That’s why I have to come out here tonight, to break you, big sister.

“ I’ve never left LexCorp before. They never told me there was such a big world out here, outside the labs.” A tear streaked out of her left eye.

“ It’s…bigger than this,” X whispered closely, sensing the deep vein of wonder in this girl. “ Much bigger. The world stretches as far as you can see.”

“ Shut up!” X004 struck her across the face. A fine layer of sweat collected on X’s brow. She came to the slow conclusion that she might not live through this, because even if Mullen wanted her alive, this tiny girl-soldier might not make the same distinction.

“ You’re just a traitor!” X004 was screaming, tears running. “ A traitor who denies the new world order! You are working against the revolution!”

“ They’re lying to you,” X whispered. “ There is no new world order, no revolution. Everything will be the same as it ever was. There has never been a revolution that could change the whole world and there never will be.”

“ Stop it!” X004 brought her hands up to shut her ears. X saw her chance. She heaved herself up and threw X004 to the pavement, then scrambled up and in one single, hard leap, had struck the side of an apartment house. Her fingers clawed mortar and stone as she pulled herself up to the roof. Behind her, she heard the Intergang soldiers organize themselves in the street, lining up according to rank.

But she was already running, dodging from house to house. Her katana scabbard thudded heavily against her leg. She heard a metallic click, then another. Panting, she threw herself off one building and into the street below, landing as the concrete fractured around her feet. A small flash explosion went off on the roof above. A momentary lapse back into sense told her that the upscale architecture and superfluous cafes meant this was Mitte.

A police car swung into the street and skidded, stopping at an angle that blocked the road. Another car squealed in behind her, its sirens set to screaming. Above, a police helicopter circled in a noisy arch, its searchlights panning around her. X covered her face, reacting to a primal instinct she couldn’t name.

Police officers surrounded her, guns drawn. They were fit in kevlar vests and rain slickers, though there wasn’t any sign of a shower and the moon glowed unheeded from a flat, obsidian sky.

“ Please surrender,” one of them said in carefully scripted English. “ We don’t want to hurt you.”

X peered between the two arms guarding her face.

“ Surrender your weapon, miss,” he said again, harder. “ You are under arrest.”

She was perfectly still, possibly acting on a theory that if she didn’t move they would just leave. She had never come this close before. Never. Not even in La Havre, when she had killed those Interpol agents. At least then she had had a chance to escape.

Something clinked sharply against the sidewalk and bounced into the open window of one of the police cruisers.

Crash.

It exploded with a hard bang, an oxygen-starved semtex blaze gutting the car and extending twenty feet into the air. All of the officers hit the ground. X, still standing, was illuminated in the grenade’s fury.

She placidly walked off. There was another clink behind her, and the second police car went up in a bigger, fiercer ball of flames. Officers raced around, screaming into radios. X nearly ran up the side of an elaborate apartment house before she ducked down on the roof to hide from the helicopter.

Her right knee felt stiff. When she looked down at it, she found that her sock was caked in red, and the knee itself was healed but swollen in a curious fashion. There were still rumpled bits of flesh from the bullet wound scattered in a circle around the patella.

“ They took our souls, you know,”

X004 threw a punch that X promptly blocked, and the latter returned fire with a fierce, unrelenting kick to the ribs. X004 shied away, but then came back with a wheel kick that X flipped backward to avoid. Her knuckles scraped gravel shingles as she continued to somersault back, X004 striking at her all the way with cuts and punches that never even grazed her.

X righted herself and kicked her across the face. “ You’re pathetic, X004.”

Blood dripped out of X004’s nose. She dabbed it away with her sweater sleeve, then ripped the sweater off and tossed it away. Her shoulders were broad and arms thick with graceful muscle. She lowered her brow and then launched into a specific series of Krav Maga attacks that X knew by heart. Each feint or strike X counteracted as seamlessly as a dancer trying to correct a partner. She could smell hormones in the air as thick as fog. They had been drugging X004, too.

“ There were others, right?” X said. Struck for the throat, was deflected, and went to the stomach.

“ That’s none of your concern, traitor,” X004 blocked the abdominal shot and chucked X under the chin with her elbow.

“ Boys. Two boys. Sekunde and Dritte. They killed themselves,” X’s knee came up and hit X004 in the diaphragm.

X004 slumped, breath gone. “ Shut the hell up, girl,” she wheezed.

X turned around behind her and had her neck locked in her elbow.“ You were the special one. No…suicidal ideation?”

X004 crouched and flipped, turning in mid air. They both landed on the roof with a hard crack, X pinned under her, pressure points burning.

“ Your name is Vierte,” X said quietly, tasting blood.

“ We’re ending this now, b*tch,” Vierte hauled X up off the ground by the back of her blouse and tossed her effortlessly over her shoulder. X slipped over her back and sweep-kicked Vierte’s legs out from under her. The girl toppled to the edge of the building.

X stood over her, and placed a foot directly on Vierte’s neck.

“ I was the chosen one,” Vierte choked out, smiling strangely. “ The one meant to bring revolution. You gave up your chance.”

X pressed her foot harder to Vierte’s throat. It was an odd sensation; she knew she didn’t want to do it, but some animalistic drive told her to smother this girl, to destroy her and in turn destroy the threat. She drew her sword and held its tip to Vierte’s forehead. Do it both ways, her brain commanded. Splatter her.

Slowly, X eased her foot off, sheathed her katana, and walked away.

Vierte sat up and gasped, rubbing her neck. X could feel her golden eyes smoldering at her back.

“ Stop,” Vierte said, her feet grinding on the shingles as she rose. She stood, tall and graceful and straight, near the edge.

“ You didn’t kill me.”

X paused near the opposite edge. Her tattered skirt brushed her legs. She was short, pale, her darkness not only expressed in the shadows of her black hair but in the grey circlets under her eyes.

“ No, I didn’t,” She leapt, touching down on the next roof. And she kept running, skipping over alleys, her breathing slow and even. She shut her eyes and continued on, listening to the sound of Vierte in pursuit behind her.

Mitte, the most ancient yet most fashionable district of Berlin, was scattered through with places like this. Relics of the past kept around to seem nostalgic and maybe even strike a chord of guilt for past sins. X flew and grappled onto the side of the giant, old neon display sign, unlit for ten years but still clearly reading the forbidden, capitalist logo of Soder soft drinks.

She clamored into the steel lattice, losing herself in the maze of metal, feeling comforted by its womb-like encompassment and unnerved by how much it reminded her of a cage.

Vierte’s feet sounded hollow on the narrow metal beams as she strode seamlessly over. She took a flying leap and landed perfectly on the pole X sat on, right behind the O in Soder.

“ You had a chance to kill me,” she said.

“ You had a chance to kill me,” X said back. A wind rose from the streets and ruffled her dark hair.

She could hear Vierte’s breathing. “ There is no revolution, is there?”

X nodded.

“ All of this,” She opened her arms to embrace the circle of the city they saw through the O, “ is a lie. There is no grand plan for us.”

X shut her eyes. “ You make your own destiny, that’s all.”

“ If there’s no such thing as revolution, then why live? Why live without hope?”

X didn’t have an answer.

“ Tell me!” Vierte demanded.

“ I don’t know.”

Vierte began to gasp. Her world was splintering, falling apart. X knew the feeling personally.

“ Everything about me is Intergang, is centered around the revolution!” Vierte said frantically. “ They gave me this body, this name, everything I know! Without them, I cease to exist!”

“ Pull yourself together,” X said glumly.

“ How did you find the will to live?” Vierte asked her.

X was silent. She had never said anything about having a will to live. She only had a will to escape.

“ But…I have only one logical use! I was made for battle!” Vierte cried. “ I can’t survive without their guidance!”

X jumped up and grabbed Vierte’s lapels, pulling her roughly up.

“ Stop acting like a victim and get a hold of yourself,” she hissed. “ Did you know, Vierte, that there is a chip in your skull, acting as your brain?”

Vierte’s golden eyes widened. “ The supplementary chip, I know.”

“ No, no, no,” X was beginning to enjoy it for some reason. “ They removed your brain, Vierte, and replaced it. With a chip.”

“ You’re lying,”

“ No, I’m not,” X’s mouth twisted into a cruel smile. “ I have one, too. They did it with all of us. Sekunde and Dritte, too.”

“ No! You’re lying!” Vierte twisted away, backing her way down the metal platform. X followed her closely.

“ Stop it!” She covered her ears.

X punched her, hard, across the face. Vierte braced herself against part of the metal scaffolding.

“ Get up and quit whining,” X snarled.

Vierte looked up at her, eyes glowing a kind of weird yellow. X immediately sensed the change in mood. She threw up her lower arm to block the first of Vierte’s hits, but the second caught her in the neck, and she fell.

Down. Past the forest of narrow metal that was the capitalist scaffolding, knocking her head on one as she descended. She righted herself in air, watching as the street and the confection-colored cars below raced faster and faster to meet her.

She hit the blue sedan feet-first, crushing the trunk so the front half of the car jumped a little. The shock wave of impact ran through her body better than a Macchina thrill, but she was up in the air again ten seconds later, bouncing and skidding down the slick steel and glass of the traffic-locked autos. She realized, somewhat annoyed, that she was bleeding all over the place, and that her travels had left a trail of crimson across the cars she traversed.

More red. Vierte smashed her from the side, sending her ten feet straight over the next lane of traffic and onto the sidewalk, beached in the middle of a flood of pedestrians.

X got up. A few people lingered beside her, asking her if she was all right. Drivers got out of their cars, walking toward the ruined sedan. X backed up as the pedestrian crowds parted and she caught sight of Vierte, crouched about twenty feet away on the sidewalk.

Ignoring the gasps of the pedestrians, she pulled out her katana and held it at a threatening slant.

Vierte looked blandly at X, then turned and ran away.

X was after her immediately, replacing her katana as she dodged through groups of late-night revelers and men in suits just getting out of the office. Her body hurt. She could smell Vierte through the crowd: the distinct mass-manufactured LexCorp soap, her shampoo, the almost palpable hormones given off by her exposure to Macchina steroids.

As the raced together through the streets, they passed the new, improved Reichstag without even giving its grand, overly masculine structure another glance. It was apart of the background for them, a stationary object under constant assault by the kinetic organisms that populated the world. And nothing else, nothing with meaning or metaphor or any sense of injustice.

X was gaining distance on Vierte. Closer. She reached out, her hand brushing the back of Vierte’s plaid jumper. That was when the girl swerved into traffic, dodging free-flowing cars like a balletic suicidal, dancing in between them. One screeched to a halt beside her, its doors popping open.

X dove into traffic and was next to Vierte almost immediately. A black tractor trailer emblazoned with the Priesly Aerospace logo barreled down the street toward them.

It stopped at half-distance and jackknifed right there on the road, blocking the street to any further traffic. X took a step back as the rear of the semi clanged open, and ten men in special ops gear swarmed out.

A machine gun came to rest on X’s shoulder. She glanced to the side. A man in a navy sweater and dark slacks, a ski mask tight over his face. He reached one leather-gloved hand up and pulled the ski mask over his eyebrows.

Ernest Sylvermann.

“ What are you doing here?” X asked him. The man’s grey-green eyes crinkled at the corners with just the barest hint of a smile, but there was no change in his mouth.

“ I’ve come to help you out, Little X,” he said quietly. He looped an arm over his head; the special ops troops flooded over and surrounded Vierte. The teenaged girl stiffened into a ninjutsu defensive stance.

“ I don’t understand,” X said. The machine gun still rested on her shoulder.

Car horns blared on the other side of the semi. “ I told you, I’m trying to help you out,” he said, pulling the gun off X’s shoulder as she glanced warily at it. The troops closed in on Vierte. The girl snarled at them like an animal.

X pushed away from Ernest and waved at them. “ Withdraw!” she yelled.

The troops immediately shied back, staring at her. Tiny green lights flickered on their guns and on the visors of their plastic helmets.

X turned back to Ernest. “ This is my fight, Dr. Sylvermann. I suggest you leave it that way and return to Lockhardt.”

“ You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ernest said, low.

“ Tell me,” X asked, staring directly into his eyes, “ did you come here of your own volition or did Lockhardt send you?”

He narrowed his eyes. “ You’re making a mistake, X. Let me help you.”

X was unfazed. “ I know you’re not working with Lockhardt here. So instead of the uncomfortable questions, why don’t you pack up your boys and head home?”

Ernest took a deep, dissolving breath. Then he looped his arm over his head and pointed to the tractor trailer. The troops funneled back into the truck as smoothly as water, pulling the doors closed behind them.

Vierte watched everything happen with hungry, animal eyes, her body tensed into an awkward standing position.

Ernest clicked the safety back on his machine gun. “ Take care, Little X,”

She glared at him. “ Leave town, Dr. Sylvermann.”

He nodded, then slipped back into the slick black SUV that lay live-parked beside Vierte. As he pulled away, racing around the tail-end of the reorienting tractor trailer, it made her wonder why she had sent him away. He could have ended all of her problems right there, but instead she had pulled rank as Lockhardt’s favorite and had made a grown man shy away like a boy.

Breathing in tightly, she considered the fact that maybe she just liked trouble.

Vierte stared at her. Cars swerving around the semi found themselves making a second swift turn as they met the two girls standing still in the road. Slowly, Vierte turned and then ran for the mouth of a nearby Stadtbahn station.

Both of them took the collection of tiny, gritty steps in single leaps up to the ticket counter. Both of them jumped the brushed steel turnstiles, blowing past commuters locked in the grid of public transit. It wasn’t quite clear who was chasing whom at this point.

Vierte, ahead, pushed her way through a crowd and jumped onto the lowered U-Bahn track. Amid gasps, X followed, chasing Vierte down the slim slip of steel that was the rail glowing in the dim lights.

X felt the vibrations of a train coming.

Vierte came to a pause once they’d cleared the station. It was dark, past the middle of the night, but still she didn’t want any witnesses.

“ They took our souls,” she repeated from earlier. “ That was the reason Sekunde and Dritte killed themselves. I told you that without hope, there’s no will to live. And without a soul, there’s no hope.”

X was quiet. Her chest had begun to close in on itself, like a corkscrew was being tightened in her diaphragm and with each twist her ribcage became narrower.

“ You’ve been through a lot,” Vierte told her. “ They took your soul and you’re still living.”

X took a shallow breath. “ I don’t think I had a soul in the first place.”

The lights of the oncoming train blazed on behind Vierte, lighting up her slender, pretty figure with a halogen halo.

She shut her eyes. “ All I want is silence.” She turned on heel and began walking toward the train, her arms outstretched.

X followed patiently. Her body hurt worse than it ever had, every nerve aflame, every neuron in soundless punishment.

The train came closer. Its horns blared. There was no conductor, not these days, but a laser sweep would alert the robotic train to whether there was anything on the track. If Vierte was lucky, the train would stop immediately upon sensing her presence. But it didn’t.

X darted over and grabbed the back of her jumper, pulling her away and onto the secondary track. The train roared by behind them with a fury that was all metal screaming and surging. The lights anchored to the posts along the track stuttered.

The long steel snake of the train eventually tapered off and disappeared down the line. As soon as it was gone, Vierte pushed X onto that used track and thrust herself onto the other one.

The second train hit Vierte a moment later.

X’s mind was screaming in a way that harmonized with the squeal of the train itself, her body caught in its frantic whirlwind motion and nearly tossed to the ground. She lowered herself into a crouch and covered her ears, all the time aware of the thunk-crunch sound of Vierte’s body under the wheels.

When that final train passed in a whine of white noise, X stood. Bits of Vierte were scattered across the rails and ties, fine curtains of her blood staining the gravel underneath. Scraps of plaid were stuck to the bolts of the rails in torn shreds. A pink-grey gelatinous substance was a pure smear along three of the ties. So they hadn’t taken her brain after all.

As X began to wander towards the street, she thought lazily about where the true form of Vierte’s body had gone. In all respects, her mangled metal frame would probably be trapped under the train until maintenance crews could find it. She smiled in a sick, strange way, and looked down at herself. A torn, bloody, shattered body. But still not broken. She folded her arms and wondered how she would get home quick enough to save Peterson.

[The_NewCatwoman]

She kills, witnesses suicides, wonders about other's only half-heartedly, is angry, gripped with dementia, yet...

She always wears her seatbelt.

He heh.

Great as always DofE. Too bad X004 ended as quickly as she began in this story. I wish X could've answered her question for her. How does one find the will to live if there is no revolution?

tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

Happy 280th! Nice work again, DoE. Intense and enjoyable action from start to finish.

That being said, I did notice a few uncharacteristic errors.

...she barreled down the street at an obviously illegal rate of speed...

OUCH! I HATE that phrase. "Rate of speed," ugh. It's repetitiously redundant. Please be careful of such in the future. I don't hold you personally responsible--our current culture's mongrelization of the English language is responsible for such reprehensible and tortuous groupings of words. I highly recommend that you read a book called "Strictly Speaking"; it's a humorous and penetrating look at why America will be the death of English.

Feeling their presence, she turned and kicked at their face. They deflected it with their left forearm. She saved the effort and in the same movement tried to elbow them in the neck. No such luck. They grabbed her elbow and flipped her onto the stairs. Her face met linoleum.

Here you are speaking of a singular entity with a plural pronoun. Unlike the Romance languages (and actually the majority of languages in the world), there is no neuter gender in English, and "they" or "them" cannot subsitute, although it's a common enough mistake--one that I'm sometimes guilty of myself, in conversation if not in writing. In such cases "him" and "he" is the generally accepted convention until such time as the gender of the subject is revealed, at which point you may switch to "her" and "she" if it is called for. Especially since this ninja is a male (as far as we know).

Finally, I rather think that X "clambered" into the metal scaffolding of the Soder sign rather than "clamored". The former is to climb hastily, the latter is to create a lot of noise. Although clambering into metal scaffolding could create a clamor. I guess that would be clambering clamourously. Heh.

Despite that (and this criticism is nothing but constructive, I assure you), the piece is as absorbing as the rest of them. The scene of the semi jacknifing in the middle of the street and disgorging SWAT-wannabes was great. It's amazing how many paramilitary groups you have running around in one place at one time.

By the way, X004's death was horrifically gruesome.

[Panther]

I agree with tNC about the seatbelt. She does seem to have her priorities in an odd order.

You've outdone yourself, DofE, something I wouldn't have thought possible until I read it. You give us an amazing chase sequence on par with the Paris sequence, then decide to add a twisted twist with the little living doll that X not only confronts but /also/ defeats, demoralizes, saves (2x), and then witnesses her suicide.

Fascinated by how independent minded X has become. But all this action in the ...European theater, shall we say, begs the question, what is going on in Gothom? Specifcially, what is a certain little bird boy up to?

Post more soon!!!! Oh, and happy new year

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Thank you for your reply! I just read more on Perfect Dark and am loving it. AJ's got himself a handful, a 14-year-old non-virgin who smokes marijuana...and is a vegetarian. As if he doesn't have enough to worry about. I understood, though, how it would be difficult to explain his motives to her; he works for the Church, but is still divorced from it. Great writing, my friend, and thanks again for replying.

Sable Phoenix: Thanks for the constructive criticism. I had no idea "rate of speed" was redundant! But I use the pronoun "they" because I never liked referring to people as "it". And thanks about "clamor" and "clamber"...I really never realized which was which. But yeah, there are plenty of SWAT-wannabes in this little universe. Just to make it interesting, you know?

Panther: Yay! And I was getting worried! "European Theatre"...very cute. Just wait and see about our little bird boy. He's obviously got problems of his own. Thanks for the empowering comments, I always love hearing from you!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks for the replies on that last episode; call it either a really late Christmas gift or an early New Year's gift. I guess this makes this the first post of this story for 2003.

This part has scenes of very graphic violence, and should be read with caution. Thanks again to everyone who's helped me, encouraged me, let me borrow their characters, or edited this story in its raw format before the FDA cleared it for public use. And here's a disclaimer for all you law students:

Disclaimer: Batman and related indicia are property of DC, the WB, Cartoon Network, and are the creations of Bob Kane. Any characters not the property of the above are my original characters and belong to me, or belong to Tonbo Rosso, Queen of Fencers.
***
In the middle of a geography lecture, Tim gasped.

All the other boys stopped listening and turned to stare at him. The teacher paused in his reading.

“ Mr. Drake,” he asked, “ is there something wrong?”

Tim bowed his head and, eyes wide, said no. The teacher returned to the flat recitation of his speech. The other boys turned in their seats to watch the clock again.

He couldn’t explain the reason why his chest had suddenly closed up, why every nerve prickled and he began to drip with sweat. His head hurt slightly, a dull, numb pain behind his eyes. Maybe he had the flu, he reasoned. Or it was stress because of his schoolwork. Breathing heavily and quietly, he lowered his head to his desk and shut his eyes.
***
She reached the Charlottenburg street just as dawn peaked over the city, washing every surface in a thin, watery light that did more to illustrate the scars than to provide illumination.

X had been concentrating on her feet and the simple act of walking for the whole way there. Her socks were browned and stiff with dry blood. Her blouse, torn and singed, chafed with sweat. She had taken the long way back, choosing to avoid the main streets and in turn avoid the gaping stares of the shifting crowds.

Once the architecture of the surrounding area began to congeal into what she knew was “her” neighborhood, she swung her head up to check the street. The usual parked cars, the fancy, shiny ones that were too pretty to stash in the garage even when there was a newly burgeoning theft rate. Down the line, though, there was a new fixture. A grocery truck idling at the curb in front of her flat, its back doors wide open. It was white, its tall sides screened with an elaborate cut and paste of the fare at the Last Supper.

The wrought iron gate leading into the apartment house’s courtyard lay unlocked and slightly ajar. Noises came from inside, slightly to the right near the doorway of the flat she shared with Peterson.

X stumbled in and saw the man in olive-green fatigues standing at the door. He had a fairly large, camo-colored submachine gun slung across his broad shoulders on a nylon strap. He was wearing a full-head helmet with a matte black visor and a cluster of communication devices secured to his jacket.

There was a golden L sigil on his shoulder.

He glanced over and caught sight of her, then aimed his weapon at her head while simultaneously delivering a long spiel of German into his radio. It crackled.

“ What are you doing here?” X asked. He ignored her.

She drew her sword and ran at him. “ Answer me, dammit!”

He made a weird squealing noise as he tried to flip the safety off his gun. Her katana blade hewed his submachine gun in half lengthwise, the brass cartridges spewing out over the cobblestones among the thousands of tiny parts that it surrendered. She replaced her sword, and, swooping low, turned and kicked the guard in the stomach. He hit the red brick wall, shuddering with each punch she delivered to his gut.

As the others came down the steps, pulling Peterson, the watch-guard spat up thick blood and collapsed at X’s feet.

“ X!” Peterson cried. He was hastily dressed, his dress shirt’s collar still crushed under the blue sweater he wore over it. His hair was slightly mussed. The two guards on either side of him pulled their weapons. There were two more guards behind him, both with their guns in Peterson’s back.

“ X001,” the left guard growled in thickly accented English, “ please come with us. Do not fight, or we will kill your friend.”

She glared at them without expression. “ Let go of him,”

Peterson stared at her. “ X…”

The guards readied the triggers. “ Surrender, X001, and this will be a nonviolent experience.”

She narrowed her eyes, and pulled out the katana again without even looking at it.

They pulled the triggers. At the first hard shower of lead, X was up in the air, her feet dodging off the top of the stone arch doorway. She made a complete, horizontal leap from that vertical wall to the next vertical wall, and then back down to the ground. Bullets shattered the cobblestones as she flipped backwards across the courtyard. Righting herself in mid-air, she landed on her feet and jumped up about thirty feet, crawling over the top of the building.

The two front guards paced the courtyard. The two men behind Peterson pushed him into the arched doorway so that wherever X was, she could see that their guns were pressed to the back of his neck.

“ X001!” the first pacing guard called. “ I’m giving you ten seconds before we kill your friend.”

He began counting down. “ Ten…nine…”

“ Seven…”

She flew over the top of the building and descended into the courtyard, hitting the ground in a brief crouch before she bounded up, sword drawn, and ran at the nearest of the pacing guards. He turned on her with his weapon, a blast of gunfire just missing her as she swiveled out of the way in a graceful whirl that brought her around to delve the katana blade deep into his stomach. She turned it, pulled it to the side. A slippery mass of entrails slid out of the hole in his fatigues. He fell.

The next man, the one that had propositioned her, she intended to decapitate immediately. She was upon him in a moment, knocking the gun out of his hands so it clattered to the ground with a single shot. He pulled a knife out of his belt and used it to knock away her sword, then he dove it straight into her right thigh.

The blood and the scream were inextricably entwined. Not her scream, for the pain was not as bad as she had thought, but his as she kicked him in the abdomen, splintering his pelvis. He hit the ground on his back, and she stepped up on his chest and drove her blade through his sternum.

The wrought iron gate squealed as the two remaining guards tried to pull Peterson toward the waiting truck. The professor was struggling, panting, his face slick with sweat.

“ X!”

She felt like she was flying. As they shot single bullets at her, she deflected them with her sword, then ducked down and jumped up. Balance, calculate, and swing. The katana went right through the left guard’s neck, a warm fountain of blood spewing over the side of Peterson’s face. He shut his eyes, then looked at X.

The blade’s edge had stopped barely an inch from his own throat.

The only remaining guard shoved Peterson away and went running for the truck. X had caught him in a few bare seconds and had ended it even quicker.

She wiped the blade off on her skirt and went back into the courtyard. Lazily, casually, X dragged the bodies of the guards out into the street and tossed them into the back of the van. Five of them, piled into the cargo area, and she shut the doors. She jumped into the cabin and shut off the engine.

Peterson had disappeared from the courtyard, and X sighed slowly and re-latched the wrought iron gate that stood out front. Later she would take the truck away, but now she needed to speak with Peterson.

She tried closing the front door of the flat behind her, but the LexCorp men had done something to the lock, and it didn’t close right. She shoved it back into the jamb as much as she could, though a thin line of daylight could still be seen around the edge.

Immediately inside the doorway, a collection of steps led up to the spare dining room/kitchen. She trudged up, beginning to unbutton her torn blouse as she went, daydreaming of a shower and a fresh change of clothes. Peterson was standing behind the counter, in the kitchen, one hand on the rim of the steel sink and the other hanging limply at his side.

X stopped at a safe distance away. “ Peterson, I…”

“ You didn’t tell me,” he said, low and flat. “ You never told me…about what you did for them…”

“ I couldn’t,” she said quietly.

His voice quivered. “ I never knew…what a monster you were…”

“ Peterson, please-“ She took a step forward.

He pushed away from the counter and was pointing at her with both hands. It took her a second to realize he was holding one of the chromed handguns from the stash in the cello case under her bed. As he held it at her, its mirrored surface danced and flickered with the reflected motion of his blood-splashed face.

“ Stay away,” he said. His eyes gleamed with what looked like tears.

Her chest closed up again for what felt like the second time that day. “ Peterson, please listen to me,”

“ I don’t want to listen anymore,” he said. “ Every time I listen, I’m lied to, and I’m sick of being lied to!”

“ I understand,” X said. “ I really do, Peterson.”

“ They why!?” he shouted. He gripped the gun harder and his knuckles turned white. His face was contorted in a way X had never seen before. It made her feel sick.

“ I don’t know,”

He began to breathe heavily. “ Go away. Leave,”

“ Peterson,” She tried a loose, happy smile to offset her step forward, “ please-“

He pulled the trigger four different times, but each shot melted into one earsplitting crack. Three bullets tore through her chest. She heard the fourth hit the wall behind her.

Peterson dropped the gun. X was still standing. Softly, silently, slips of red like ribbons began unwinding from the back of her blouse.

She fell to her knees first, then toppled onto her side. Blood bagged out on the ivory carpet, leaving a big, round poppy around her form. She coughed, the flux of coppery sweetness up her throat almost choking her.

Peterson walked around the counter and knelt down next to her. X tried to say something, but nothing came out. Her mouth only moved silently, a stripe of red running down her chin. He pushed her hair behind her ear. The tears finally dripped down his cheeks.

“ I’m so sorry,” he muttered. He pulled her up and onto his lap, cradling her in his arms. She was very heavy, all of the machinery inside her pulling her downward. Her blood ebbed out over his trousers. He hadn’t realized until then the state her clothes were in when she’d gotten back, or the new, pinkish scar on her knee. The stab wound on her right thigh was already healed, the two sides of the maw pulled together and sealed.

Her eyes felt heavy. Each breath brought a kaleidoscope of sensations to the surface, a crack, a rattle, maybe an acute, sharp pain running along her neural lines. He must have hit something important, she thought lazily. The pain itself didn’t register, just as it never had before, but there was still the deep ache of betrayal expressed in those yawning exit wounds out her back.

She slipped out of consciousness as swiftly as one switches locales in a dream, with light-speed and with no possible chance for redemption.
***
“ Your geography teacher tells me you fell asleep in class,” Bruce said, swiveling the chair from the sweeping view of Gotham City around to the desk. He was twiddling an expensive pen between his hands, one that Tim knew personally had a listening device hidden in the ink barrel.

“ I didn’t fall asleep,” the boy protested. “ I just…rested my eyes.”

“ On your desk,” Bruce rose an eyebrow.

“ It was nothing! Really!” Tim sat forward. “ Mr. Sutherland is such a narc,”

“ I can cut back your night duties, if you like,”

“ No! I won’t do it again!” Tim exclaimed. Crime-fighting was the one thing he could look forward to at the end of the day, the one thing he was good at. But he wasn’t about to tell Bruce that.

Bruce put the pen down. Tim checked his movements to make sure he didn’t switch on the listening device inside it. “ Are you feeling all right, Tim? Anything you want to talk about?”

The boy reclined back in the plush conference chair. “ Nope.”

“ You’re sure?”

“ Nothing.”

“ What about the girl you knew who died? Leslie Weste?” Occasionally, Bruce would attempt something close to communication with Tim, something so ungainly and sluggish that it seemed like a slow death via Muzak.

“ I didn’t really know her. She was a friend of a friend.”

“ But she was at your party.”

“ Been checking the security tapes, Bruce?” Tim mocked, copying Bruce’s exact sitting position: slack, slouching against the back with his elbows propped on the arms, hands joined in the middle in a careful little steeple.

“ After that Hiramiaku thing, yes,” He sat up, almost threateningly fast. “ And you’ve been acting strange since that party. Are you sure you’re fine?”

“ I’m okay!” Tim got up swiftly and paced around the tall leather chair he had occupied. He laid his arms on the top and glared at Bruce.

Bruce glared back. “ What is it, Tim? The assassin girl?”

“ She had a name,” Tim said, bored.

“ Barely,” He tried again. “ Or the new assassin girl?”

“ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“ X. Her case is all too similar. Used, abused, abandoned. Alone. Needs a hero.”

“ You don’t know anything,” Tim muttered, pushing away from the chair. It wobbled a little.

“ I know you have a history with this type of thing,” Bruce mentioned. “ It’s nice to think you’re needed.”

“ Yeah, well, not this time,” he said. “ X isn’t even human. They say it all the time. She’s a monster. Not worth sympathy.”

Bruce sighed. “ I’m not so sure.”

Tim, incredulous, sputtered. “ What do you mean?”

“ If she was human enough to realize she was being mistreated, and human enough to run away from them and stay away from them, then maybe she still has some source of humanity left inside her.”

“ But,” Tim struggled to protest, “ animals run away from owners that beat them. It happens all the time.”

“ You’re talking about a dog,” Bruce said, “ or a horse. X was once a human being. She wasn’t born this way. She’s still capable of morals and values. Every species has a code of ethics, it’s just that X’s has been corroded.”

“ So, you’re saying she’s insane.”

“ Or at least deluded. You see, what’s considered right and wrong is objective. Universal. A person not exposed to society at large would still know that it’s wrong to kill. It takes a specific indoctrination—for example, convincing a child that killing is reasonable—to result in a topical understanding that killing is right. But inside, in their soul, if you will, that child would still know killing was wrong.”

Tim knew where this was going.

“ Assassins trained from birth are conditioned to believe that morals are not connected to murder. That what they do is only an occupation, a means to an end that doesn’t effect their ethical standing. They have families, friends, religion, and yet they kill. The instinct to connect murder to wrong is unconsciously but consciously disabled. It’s somewhat contradictory.”

Tim squinted at the window behind Bruce’s chair. “ Just when I think I get you, Bruce, you turn the tables on me.”

“ It’s the way things are,” Bruce said, clenching his fist on the ink blotter. “ We don’t agree with it, but it is. We put as many of them away as possible, hoping to help them as well as their potential victims, but you never know the effect until the experiment is done.”

It was an interesting choice of words that wasn’t exactly beyond Tim’s adolescent understanding.

“ You’re going home now?” Bruce asked, relaxing back into his chair. Despite his casual appearance, there was nothing casual about Bruce’s demeanor. Tim knew there was never any rest for Bruce, not even a moment of weakness.

“ Yeah, I guess.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“ Anything else?”

“ No,” Tim grabbed his backpack from where it slouched against his chair. “ I better just go home.”

“ Log in some time on the Batcomputer,” Bruce said. “ I want you to collate the files you put in last week; I found some errors when I looked over them. And hit the training simulator.”

“ Does that mean I’m going out?” Tim asked hopefully.

“ No,” he said. “ I’ll see you when I get home.”

Tim let his shoulders slouch as he went for the door. “ Sure. Bye.”

“ Do you want me to call Alfred to come get you?” Bruce offered as the boy was half out.

“ No. I was thinking of going to see Barbara,”

“ Don’t bother her at work; you’ll see her tonight at the Cave,” Bruce said sternly.

“ No I won’t,” Tim stuck his head back in the door. He could just feel Bruce’s secretary Maggie staring at him. “ Bar has a date tonight.”

Bruce sighed from behind his desk. “ Then just don’t bother her at work.”

“ Fine,” Tim closed the door behind him a little louder than he should have. It wasn’t his fault that Bruce was acting more and more like his father recently. Probably because he had hit that all-important milestone of fifteen, the time when parents feel their growing children starting to pull away. But that wasn’t Tim’s fault, either. Bruce wasn’t exactly the most comforting of presences no matter what age he was.

He took the elevator down to the first floor, dreading having to go back to Wayne Manor and spend the rest of the afternoon locked inside its frigid shell. For a rabid instant, he even thought about going to the mall. He hated the mall and its random groups of roaming adolescents too bored to go home and too scared to wander the streets, like he once had. His combined experience of a destitute childhood and his nightlife as Robin immediately illuminated the fine line between the supposed safety and the very real dangers.

He was standing out on the sidewalk when it hit him. Go see Dick. He checked his watch; it was five-twenty in the afternoon, and Dick didn’t go out until night, usually. Another relic from his childhood, probably. He remembered Dick once telling him that he liked to hit the twenty-four hour grocery stores at about eleven-thirty at night.

So he started running down the street, his backpack slung over his shoulder, his sneakers pounding the mid-day heat of the grey sidewalk. Dodging through the tightly-knit crowds funneling out of the local department stores or just getting off work from Wayne Enterprises. A bus barreled down the street with a roar and hiss, its occupants staring ahead behind mercury-tinted windows.

Tim was still thinking on whether to take the subway or the bus; he had just gotten his transit card recharged, and though he didn’t use it all that much, he was just getting used to the novelty of actually paying for the tube. His earlier years had been filled with jumping the chromed turnstiles and running from transit cops, something that had been a kind of game to those in his economic bracket.

The train would be better, he thought, skidding down the oily steps and into the tile-lined corridor below. A few workmen had punched a big hole in the wall, and through it he saw the clusters of pipes carrying the light wiring or the signal optics. He continued on, joining the crowds as they funneled in tightly to pass through the turnstiles.

He took another set of stairs down to the platform. A few more workmen were welding part of the black-painted stairwell railing. Through the sparks of their torches, he saw a single girl standing near a grey-tiled pillar. She was slender, pretty. A tan girl with black hair flipped up in a weird 50’s style. She was dressed in a knee-length, red plaid skirt and a maroon blouse under a black zip-up sweater that was fitted around a narrow figure. She wore loafers and tall socks flipped over at the knees, and the one hand at her side held a brown briefcase.

He sidled over to her in the crowd. She had a gentle, Indian profile turned down to a book in her other hand. Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. A collection of seemingly mismatched and misunderstood words.

She looked to the side and smiled at him, then went back to her book.

The train pulled up with its ceremonial scream of wheels on steel rail and cars smashing together with a clatter of chains and cables. The doors sighed open, and as the passengers escaped, their replacements flooded in. Tim stood, hands clamped around a railing. The girl sat nearby.

The ride on the subway was what it always was. By the time the train had completed the Gotham circuit and come around to the side of town where Dick’s loft was, most of the commuters had gotten off. White plastic benches stretched out shiny and vacant on all sides, and Tim took a seat across from the girl.

She looked up at him. Black eyes gleamed. He grinned at her in a weird way. She gestured for him to sit next to her. He got up and, swaying slightly, did.

She held her book up high in front of her face. “ Someone is trying to kill you.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “ What?”

She nodded towards the end of the train. There was a crowd of six people, all standing. A mother and her baby, two female college students, and two men in sweaters and expensive slacks.

“ The men?” Tim whispered. “ How do you…?”

The train stopped, and the mother and baby got off. The two college students opened the door between cars and went to another one. The two men were alone with them, now. As the train started up again, the lights of the car flickered.

One of the men shifted, putting a hand in his pocket. It dawned on Tim very quickly. These men were trying to kill him.

“ Who are they?” he whispered to the girl.

She didn’t answer, but stared at the men stiffly. She opened her bag and casually put away her book.

“ Assassins,” she whispered as she clasped the briefcase.

One of the men, a brunette with a scar, flew at them. A knife glimmered in his fist. Tim jumped up and blocked, keeping the girl behind him. He grabbed the man’s fist and pried at the tight fingers, trying to dislodge the blade.

The girl pushed Tim away and smashed the man in the face with her briefcase. The other man, a blonde with a white eye, ran over and punched Tim across the face. The boy hit the shaking linoleum floor on his back, face burning.

The blonde, standing over him, pulled a taser out from under his sweater and knelt down to jab it into Tim’s chest. Tim pressed his sneakers into the man’s shoulders, keeping him back, then brought his torso up and head-butted him. The blonde flew backwards and smashed into the wall. His taser skidded under one of the plastic and chrome seats.

The girl was blocking head-shots from the brunette with her lower arms, standard defensive moves. He couldn’t really pinpoint her training. Something Eastern, most likely, but a lot of newer, Western styles had conformed—

The blonde was back in action, taser-less, but throwing punches at Tim’s neck. Trying to get his windpipe. Tim side-kicked him, catching him in the very bottom few ribs a few times before the blonde grabbed his ankle as it came around for another blow. Preoccupied, the blonde didn’t see Tim’s fist until it had made a small but powerful dent in his lower jaw.

Tim turned around just in time to see the little Indian girl jump onto one of the plastic seats and grab hold of two of the standing grips hanging overhead. Using those for leverage, she kicked out at the brunette with one foot, catching him in the shoulder. Her next kick caught him square in the forehead and threw his head back with such force Tim thought she’d broken his neck.

The brunette hit the plastic chair across the car, slumped in it like he was a passenger who had just fallen asleep.

The girl jumped down, and went over to the blonde. She pulled him up into another seat near the end of the car, then brushed off her skirt. She knelt to grab her briefcase, which had skidded under one of the seats, and discovered the taser lying next to the wall. She put it in the briefcase.

The car began to slow for the next station.

“ To be safe, I should have killed them,” she said. Her accent was a little thicker than at first, like she had cultivated an American inflection on purpose just to fool people.

Tim grabbed his backpack off his chair. His Robin costume had been inside all along. The car came to a stop, the station flooding up behind the graffitied windows.

“ Who are you?” he asked sternly, slinging it over his shoulder.

She stared directly at him. “ My name is Radni. I work for someone else, but the twins were the ones who sent me. They thought you might be in danger.”

She swept a hand at the two unconscious men. “ I guess they were right, eh?”

He took a shuddery breath. The doors of the car flushed open, and a tide of people rushed in. Radni threaded out between them. Tim was after her immediately.

He grabbed her arm, and she slapped him. The already tender wound lanced with pain. She started to walk off.

“ Why did they send you!?” he yelled, hand over his face.

She stopped just short of the stairs, and turned. “ Because I have met X. I have seen the face of evil.”

Without another word, she conjoined with the crowd slithering up the stairs, and disappeared. The train set off behind him. Tim, realizing he had gotten off at the wrong station, swore to himself.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Whoa, that was excellent. It's pretty sad that Peterson and X's relationship is dissolving so efficiently. That and that she's so unresponsive to everything she's done.

I loved Bruce trying to show concern for Tim like that. Touching really, in that Bruce kind of way.

All and all a great part. Sorry I can't say more, I'm being rushed off the computer.

tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

Once again, great work, DoE. What's with Tim's reaction in the beginning? Did he feel X get shot? If so, how are they connected like this?

It was cool to see two kids who know what they're doing beat up two brutes who obviously didn't. Who wants Tim dead, anyway? You just can't do an installment without raising more and more questions, can you.

I can't believe Peterson shot X. I can't believe that X let him do it.

Hey, I had an idea. Would you mind if I proofread your pieces for you? I wouldn't be able to start doing it right away, because my life is a little topsy-turvy right now, but if you would like me to let me know.

[Panther]

This is FDA approved??? :p

Would you mind if I proofread your pieces for you?

Oh! Me too! Me too! I'd love to read them first- err... help with the editing process. Yeah, yeah, that's it, help /you/!

Not really surprized by Peterson's actions, but still sad. And very, very, curious about the attempt on Tim's life. I bet I know what he's going to do next! And nice to see Bruce at least /trying/ to have a dialogue.


must go

[Tonbo_Rosso]

Sorry Guys and gals, I'm the only one who gets to preread. Even then I only get to make sure the story line is intact, if not my characters. :D

A beauty as per usual DoE. don't let these wet ties get you down. It is just a fanfic after all.

Tonbo

[Casity]

I really liked that chapter! It was a lot of TIM! *Cheers* Not to mention I found his walk to the station really, really well writen and interesting, making me wonder how long you have been at writing !*Sighs* Crusty old members, eh? Hehehe, 'you have a way with words, you could be a writer'. *Winks*

I noticed, the way how you write X, the action. Its a lot like a comic book, as I was reading it, I was making up pictures in my head of it all, which it really rare for me.

At fanfiction.net, you get a lot of newbie writers, me included in that large count. And this is a real treat to actually see all you writers at work, because you are like the real deal. The actual Batman writers. Heh! Just keep it up! I am learning bit by bit! It's nice to be the reader for once!

-Casity

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Casity
...making me wonder how long you have been at writing !*Sighs* Crusty old members, eh?

-Casity

Yeah, DofE's been here a long while. Back when we were all on the other other boards. Those that I can think of who've been here that long besides her and myself are SilverKnight, Batgirl, Panther, Witness, errrr... Forgive me if I missed somebody, that's all I could think of.

tNC

[Panther]

Yeah, DofE's been here a long while. Back when we were all on the other other boards. Those that I can think of who've been here that long besides her and myself are SilverKnight, Batgirl, Panther, Witness

Oh gosh, this board is old enough to have an "old crowd". And I'm in it! I /have/ been here a while. /Three/ board changes!!! And unless DofE posted something /before/ the story about Nell (sorry, can't remember the title), I think I've been posting the longest - tNC, how long have you been posting? Urg, I feel old - and don't remind me I have /another/ birthday coming up!!!!

BTW - DofE, when are you going to post more?

[witness]

I guess I should thank you for including me in the "old crowd", but I've only been through one board change. I signed up on the old board in I think end of 2000 or somewhere in 2001. I also came along about the same time that SilentBob showed up.

Getting back to the story, wonderful as ever!!! All of the wonderful details you put into each chapter make me excited to read this story! Although it has been awhile since you last posted. Gotten busy again? That's ok, I'm willing to wait. I've enjoyed the fact that you've given Tim as much of this chapter as X this time around. I enjoy the story jumping from place to place back and forth. Although I'm really intrigued as to who's trying to kill Tim, even though I think I can guess. Can hardly wait for your next chapter!!!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by witness
I also came along about the same time that SilentBob showed up.



Yes! SilentBob, I wasn't sure so... Sorry :(

Originally posted by Panther
Oh gosh, this board is old enough to have an "old crowd". And I'm in it! I /have/ been here a while. /Three/ board changes!!! And unless DofE posted something /before/ the story about Nell (sorry, can't remember the title), I think I've been posting the longest - tNC, how long have you been posting? Urg, I feel old - and don't remind me I have /another/ birthday coming up!!!!

I've been here for two board changes. I started Perfect Dark on the board before last. And then they warned us that they were changing servers, but I didn't know how to save my story (tsk tsk) and I lost it all. Oh well. I've still got Broken for a while, and the parts of Perfect Dark that I have posted here. :)

[Daughterof_Evil]

tNC: Thanks for your wonderful comments...and it has been a long while, hasn't it? I remember I was writing Fragile Beings when you showed up and blew us all away with Son of Batman! It's too bad you lost the first sections of Perfect Dark, because you really set it up well. Oh well, I guess now you can do a "director's cut" and trim what you didn't like. That's the good part about writing: you run everything, so if you want to change the course of history, you can go on and do it.

Sable Phoenix: I appreciate the offer, but like Tonbo says, I've already got someone proofreading and I pay her in chocolate and how many times I write in Tim getting hit in the head. And no, I can't write a part without raising more questions. It's a theoretical impossibility. Thanks again.

Panther: The FDA approved it in only minimal amounts, so try not to expose yourself more than once a week. It's like uranium. But yeah, we're old suckers here, aren't we? I guess it's our job to educate the young, teeming masses striving to write Batman fanfiction. Thank you a million.

Casity: Thanks so much! What can I say, I love Timmy! *wink* Got to have Robin-boy in there, if not for comic relief, than for teen angst! When I write, I like to think it out in comic form, and then animate it, so that might explain it. And thanks for saying I 'could be a writer'. That made my day.

witness: Sorry about the wait, things just got crazy in that post-holiday way and I couldn't get around to posting. But here I am, and here you are, so here goes. And thanks a bunch for commenting on the story!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Sorry I haven't posted in what feels like forever, but I really haven't had much time to visit this hallowed institution since the last time I posted. So here I am, ready to serve up more evil, debauchery, and sharp, shiny objects.

First off, thanks to everyone who replied to my last post. I really appreciate the time and effort you put in to come and let me know your feelings. Secondly, thanks a bunch to Tonbo, who created the character Mama, who I use in this part. I couldn't have done any of this without all of you to support me.

X's last few words for this post were sort of retrofitted from the opening theme to an anime called Revolutionary Girl Utena. The song is called "Revolution".

This part has violence and at least a little swearing. And after you read it (ONLY after) please go to the poll titled "An Honest Opinion, Please", and tell me what you think. Thanks again.
***
She woke to a haze of blue and red.

Needles of pain wound along her nervous system as she first tried to move, tiny impulses that let her know she was still alive. She sat up. Her body had laid sprawled on the ivory carpet for twelve hours. Twelve hours of deadpan sleep, fractured through with the disturbing nightmares that had become the fabric of her existence.

X wandered around the house, always coming back to the giant browned stain on the carpet in the living room that marked where she’d fallen. Peterson was nowhere to be found. She went out the front door (still broken, with the seam of light showing through) and into the courtyard. Past the wrought iron gate, there was no giant white truck, just a gap in the line of cars parked there.

LexCorp wouldn’t be sending any more men after her today. Not after she had chewed through five of their guards without even having to think about it. Peterson, however, she needed to worry about. They would try to get him again, now that they knew where she was. They were probably tracking him right now, knowing that if they caught him X would come to save him.

She went back inside. Her body still hurt, not only from the shooting but from the night of ceaseless combat and even more ceaseless injuries. She pulled some clothes out of her suitcase and went to the bathroom, stripping off her clothes as she let the tap run warm. Noticed, lamely, how many new scars she had accumulated.

As she let the water soak through her hair, she remembered something from a long time ago in a bright, clean city on the coast. When in doubt, take a bath. It brought with it thousands of shattered memories of feeling evil, unclean, sinful, but never one whole memory that she could really base anything on. Occasionally, a picture of Robin would come up and stick in her mind. She scrubbed the dried blood off her toes.

When she got out, she dressed in clothes so new they still smelled like department store perfumes. Baggy black slacks, a snug black blouse unbuttoned over a lace tank top. Ankle boots that sealed up the sides with chrome zippers. The pain had dissolved into the background static of her body, becoming like the steady rhythms of her hearts.

Still combing her hair straight on either side of her part, she walked into the kitchen. And ran straight into Peterson.

He had changed; that was good, since her blood had been all over his clothes. A green sweater vest over a moss-colored dress shirt and matching slacks. There were circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept.

He held up his hand. There was a black object in it. She stepped back.

The digital recorder began to play. “ I grew up in Metropolis, you know, in the suburbs. I had a mom, a dad, a little sister. Typical family. Then, one day, my little sister went missing on her way home from school. We usually walked back home together, but I had a chess club meeting and I couldn’t take her.

“ They searched everywhere. Put up posters, asked around. They made a statewide thing out of it, putting her face on TV and on billboards…”

Peterson placed the recorder on the counter and reached out, taking X’s hand. Softly. He led her to the stairs and down to the front door as the recorder continued to play.

“ They finally found her a month later. In one of the canals leading off of Hob’s Bay. My little sister had been dead all this time, dumped in the muck and trash around the gullies like she wasn’t more than a piece of scrap…”
***
“ After my sister’s death, my mother committed suicide,” Peterson said, drinking long and deep from his mug of coffee. “ It was just me and Dad. We tried to stay out of each other’s way, even when he got lung cancer when I was in college. He died in a hospital, by himself.”

X watched him across the table. It was a small café, with scuffed, dark woods and cigarette-burned velveteen. The windows were grimed in a slightly fashionable way and shielded with green awnings that fanned out over the outside seating. They had opted for the dark inside, where the cool atmosphere was provided by a steel fan humming on the bar.

“ You know what it’s like, never getting close to anyone,” Peterson said, looking up at her.

She nodded, stirring her milkshake with the red-striped straw.

“ I tried, when I worked at LexCorp Metropolis. It only got me in trouble for doing what I thought was right. Mr. Luthor gave me another chance, but I had to remove myself from humanity and live at that base out in the country.

“ Then…” He stopped, then finished off his coffee. The steel pot lay on the table with them, along with a tiny, cold tureen of cream and a china pot of sugar. He poured himself some more, but was silent.

“ You can tell me, Peterson,” X said, not looking at him.

She could hear him swallow as he stirred in the cream.

“ Mr. Luthor told you that a LexCorp guard found you in that gully,” he said quietly.

“ Yes?” She sat forward.

“ It was a lie. I was the one who found you.”

She stared at him. “ What?”

“ I found you in that canal,” He paused, shutting his eyes. “ I was there getting core samples from indigenous rock types, measuring pollution. And you…were lying in the trash, near the water. It was like my sister’s case all over again,”

He opened his eyes and looked sheepishly up at her. “ Why did you think a geologist was so interested in a cybernetics patient?”

She sat back in her chair.

He swirled his coffee around in its cup. “ I’ve told you my secret. Now you tell me yours.”

So she did. Told him everything, from the combat practice at the LexCorp base to the flight through Britain and her part in the Bastille Day bombing in Paris. Her escape outside Rostock, those hidden months in India. The memories salvaged from her old life. Everything, right up until that very day.

“ What are you going to do now?” Peterson asked her.

“ I’m not sure,” she said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the hum of the steel fan speak for them.

“ We’re a pair,” Peterson said with a laugh, “ An obsessive compulsive geologist and an amnesiac cyborg,”

She smiled to herself, but inside she reflected bitterly on the truth. Peterson was right; she had gotten herself trapped within Intergang again, and this time there would be no Saru, no Coquin, no savior triplets to rescue her. He knew why, and that was the reason he left the recorder playing on the counter: so that anyone listening through a bug would not know they had left.

“ I’ve got to do this on my own,” she said, quietly.

Peterson reached over and laid a hand on her wrist. “ I…never apologized for shooting you, X.”

She shook her head. “ It’s all right. I understand. You didn’t know.”

“ But I did know,” he protested. “ All along, I think I knew why you meant something to them. I didn’t want to admit that I had saved the life of, of—“

“ Of a killer?” she filled in. He nodded.

“ You were just so young,” he said. His hand went slack on her wrist. She laid her palm on his knuckles.

“ I’ll get myself out of this,” she murmured. “ I’ll get you out of this.”

His small, dark eyes sought hers. “ How?”

“ I need to speak with someone,”
***
He hit the mahogany double doors with such force one of them popped off its brass hinges and the other split lengthwise from top to bottom. Pieces of wood scattered the green, ivy-patterned carpet or hit the intricately painted walls.

X strode in and stepped delicately over the bodyguard’s prone form. The room was a small foyer, with chairs lined up against one wall and a desk up against the other. Opposite from the entry doors, there was another set of doors accented with polished brass. The walls around them were painted with a quiet, vestal country scene of a stone fence leading off into a hazy green meadow—probably a homesick addition of Lockhardt’s Welsh roots.

Mama was sitting directly inside the door. Mama, dressed in a green brocade sari and combat boots. She stood in a whorl that smelled like camphor and vanilla flowers.

X dimly recollected a short conversation she’d had with Lockhardt, about Mama and India and all that had happened to bring X into her emotional about-face. Mama had only been doing a job, he had told her. It was nothing personal. And still, X felt the unfamiliar tinge of something maybe called trust angled toward the woman, the woman who had bandaged her wounds and fed her and nursed her incurable insanity.

“ Where is Lockhardt?” X asked sharply, compartmentalizing.

Mama folded her arms sternly, her eyes flicking to the fallen bodyguard. “ Surely you are not planning anything rash, child.”

“ I need to speak with him,” the girl said.

“ He’s in there,” came from behind her. Lespia Rijos strode in from the opposite doors, the heels of her blunt-toed boots making dull noises on the carpet. She was dressed in a navy pants suit, pinstriped in silver, with her blue glasses riding low on her nose.

“ I want to speak with him,” X repeated, turning to address Rijos.

“ He’s busy right now,” she said. “ If you can wait a couple—“

The doors opened. Lockhardt was silhouetted by the very dim, dank light coming out of his office. He was dressed all in black, excluding the gold glimmer of his pocket watch as it hung out of his vest pocket.

X pushed by Rijos. “ We need to talk,”

“ I’ll get rid of her, sir,” Rijos said, reaching out for X.

Lockhardt put up a hand. Everything stopped.

“ Mama, Rijos, I think you should leave,” he said. “ Obviously Miss X and I have some things to discuss.”

He turned around and, leaving the doors gaping open, went back into his office. As Mama and Rijos went for the door, X marched in after him.

The office had a huge, wrap-around window that featured a dark swatch of nighttime Berlin, all black, baroque shapes and twinkling lights. The stark, frank beauty of the view only made X angrier, however. She turned on Lockhardt as he leaned back against his desk.

“ You lied to me,” she accused.

He hung his head, staring pensively at the convoluted pattern of the carpet.

“ Yes, X, I did.”

“ You’re still allied with Mullen,” she went on. “ All this time, just pretending like you really wanted my help when you really just wanted to use me and get me back to LexCorp as quick as possible,”

He looked up at her. “ When did you figure it out?”

“ When I killed Klirren,” she confessed. “ That was the night you planned to return me to Mullen, right?”

He nodded.

“ You sent all of them after me. Interpol, the polizei, Mullen’s people, just to get me back?”

“ You did a bloody fine job of escaping, too,” he admitted. “ Even eliminated X004, your replacement.”

“ I didn’t kill her!” X cried. “ She committed suicide! The product of thousands of their precious experiments! Gone!”

He pushed away from his desk and went over to her, putting a hand on her shoulder. She shook away from him.

“ I trusted you,” she said, looking up into his face. “ I always have.” She wandered over to the window and pressed her fingertips to it, tracing the shape of the low building next door.

“ I know,” he sighed. “ But X, maybe if you would just think of talking it over with Mullen—“

“ No!” she snapped, clenching her fist against the window. “ You don’t understand,”

“ I don’t understand that you once knew Mullen, in Metropolis, even before you were X?”

X took a shaky breath.

“ Yes, I spoke with Vale. He came to me to explain things. You worked with Mullen awhile ago, when you were a free agent assassin doing odd jobs for the Joker.”

Quiet.

“ I wish the sale of my memories wasn’t so casual to you people,” X muttered finally.

“ You have to face facts, X: you are no longer an independent human being. Your memories are now the memories of computer servers. Your body is patented LexCorp property. Even your name…it’s not really your name, but the name of your series.”

“ I know that,”

“ Then why do you fight it?” Lockhardt asked. “ You knew you were different, once. Unequal. That humanity could not help but be cruel to you for your separateness. But now…it’s as if you expect, no, demand equality. I once respected you for that, X. But you’ve seemed to have forgotten it.”

“ Why should I accept being treated like a non-human!?” X cried. “ You have no idea what it’s like to miss all the little things in life just because you’re not like everyone else! Love, respect, basic human decency! I won’t be passive anymore!”

“ You can’t expect to be treated like a respectable human,” Lockhardt told her gently. “ You’re not a human. You were once, or maybe you really weren’t…”

“ I’m not quite so blind anymore,” X reasoned, speaking in low tones reserved for herself. “ I know what I have to do. If I have to go through you, Lockhardt, I will.”

“…maybe you really are a tool, X, only worth something in the hands of another. Even before you were yourself, you only did jobs for someone else and only let yourself be free when vengeance overtook you…”

“ I’m ready to be an independent entity, now. I can be alone. Hell, I’ve always been alone. I can do it…”

Lockhardt stopped in the middle of his sermonizing. “ You’re challenging me.”

X nodded. She shed her jacket, bunching her shoulders so it slipped off her arms and crumpled to the floor. Strapped across her back was the katana he had presented to her months earlier.

She reached over her shoulder and drew her sword. Brought it to her face in a traditional fencing salute.

Lockhardt gave her an austere expression. “ X, I know you’re serious, but let’s please talk this out. I’d still like to have you as an ally. I’ve requested it of Mullen.”

“ But you don’t see me as an equal, so what’s the point?” the girl growled. “ Now draw your weapon.”

Lockhardt sighed and turned around slowly, knowing she wouldn’t attack with his back to her. He went behind his desk and pulled one of the antique swords from the giant, Welsh coat of arms secured to the wall. It was a Scottish Claymore, with a black-satin lined basket handle scrawled with a design of steel roses intermingling with steel skulls.

He swept the weapon up and around in front of him, the white blur of the blade accompanying the whir of its passage through the air. Even in his old age, he exhibited the startling grace of one trained in the art of war.

X, in her haste, was the first to attack. Lockhardt deflected her blade and struck back without hesitation, each blow hitting her sword and reverberating up her arm.

“ All these new assassins,” he said, “ all they do is gun-work. No real style. No one fights with a sword anymore.”

X caught his next strike and turned it back on him, ripping the blades apart and going in for a kill-hit. He blocked her with the hilt and threw her back. Recovering, X swiped low for his leg, but he blocked it and knocked her sword up into the air, clearing him for a chance at her torso. He jabbed, but she caught his blade between two fingers of her left hand.

“ That’s how I can tell you were trained in the ancient arts,” he said. She let go of the sword and turned, bringing her katana down to pin the Claymore to the carpet. “ You have a certain appreciation for obsolete methods like sword fighting.”

X placed one foot on the Claymore’s blade, keeping it down. Turning on that foot, she spun and kicked Lockhardt in the chest. He flew back and hit the carpet on his back, but was up again in a second. His fist struck her across the face, leaving enough of a stark, black gap in X’s sense of time for Lockhardt to regain his weapon.

They shied back to fighting corners, then jumped at each other. Lockhardt’s sword knocked at X’s katana and then slid down the length of the blade, intent on locking her down. X swept her weapon away and came back for a sweep at his head. He dodged it away and stabbed directly at X’s neck. She turned to the side and the blade nicked her shirt collar.

“ Yes,” he said, pulling back and striking again, this time with more force. “ Anybody else would have just shot me by now.”

“ Like one of your ‘associates’?” X panted. Lockhardt was trying to tire her out, striking at her sword with low-energy attacks that would reduce her to a weary heap.

“ Especially one of my associates,” Lockhardt growled. “ Especially Dr. Sylvermann.”

X pushed him away. “ You know about Sylvermann?”

He huffed. “ I’ve known that Sylvermann has been trying to take me out for months.”

He went at her, but she swiftly deflected him with such strength and ease that it threw him back a few feet.

“ Who is he?” X asked.

“ I don’t know,” He flew at her again, pushing her back with each hit. “ Mossad, MI-6, CIA…I’m not sure.”

X backed into the window. Lockhardt prepared his final strike, evening out the sword and aiming for her face. She ducked at the last moment, and the sword cut straight through the reinforced plastic window. She kicked him away from his weapon and pulled it from the window herself. Lockhardt looked at her from where he stood a few feet away.

She tossed his sword to him.

“ I don’t want to be human anymore,” she said, and jumped at him. Maybe it was because he was dumbfounded by her action, or perhaps still contemplating what she had just said, but his defensive moves weren’t as sharp as they had been. His resolve seemed as steel-true as ever, but his conduct didn’t match it.

She hit his sword, hard, and that seemed to snap him awake. Lockhardt switched to offensive, knocking X back across the floor. The wind whistled through the hole cut into the window.

“ You were right about me being trained in the ancient arts,” X said, shuddering with every hit. “ I was a Hoshi Aka assassin.”

“ Interesting,” Sword fighting was nothing without variation, so instead of a predictable hit, he went in for a jab at her sternum. She blocked it with her hilt.

“ And you?” she asked.

“ Just a long line of paid killers,” he replied, shying back and then going at her with a flurry of steel so fast that all she could smell was sparks.

She pushed him away and glanced around. This fight was going nowhere. If it would ever end, there needed to be some kind of tie-breaker. Lockhardt and X were too close in skill for it to be decided in battle alone.

But, still, there was Lockhardt. He came at her and struck just as she was busy thinking. She had never been good at multitasking, she thought numbly as she hit the window, the spray of brittle plastic around her registering to her as nothing more than high, bright noise.

For a few compressed seconds, there was only air and nothingness stretched out under her. Her felt her body flatten out in that way that meant there was nothing holding her up but empty molecules, and then it all very abruptly ended. She hit a roof some ways down that felt like it was at least a dozen floors below but ended up only being five.

There was no crack inside her to signify the snap of her lungs being emptied of air. Instead, there was a steady roar as her heartbeat rose up in her chest and then went quiet again, or as quiet as it could get when she had two hearts. She scraped herself up off the rough shingles and looked around for her katana, which had been knocked from her grasp by the force of the fall.

She found it near the edge and took it up again, looking up to the rectangle of light that signified Lockhardt’s office in the dark. There was no movement up in the window. She resheathed her katana in the scabbard across her back and went to the edge of the building, preparing to jump.

She heard the tight ziiiiiip sound and whirled around. Lockhardt descended to the roof on a jump line and flew at her immediately. She hit the roof on all fours, his sword just grazing her cheek, and put her palms flat to the tar. Using her hands as leverage, she up and kicked him in the stomach, her other foot flying to the side to catch his sword-hand. The Claymore flew over the edge, and Lockhardt sank to his knees.

X stood over him, the blade of her unsheathed katana quivering against his neck. Her eyes glared strangely.

He let his proud head drop. “ Well, do it cleanly, X. I at least deserve that.”

Carefully, she put the katana away.

“ Why do you want to die?” she asked him frankly. “ You knew all along that you could never commit this lie against me and live.”

He looked up at her. Sharply and suddenly, X realized how old he was.

“ You tell me why I want to die,” he said. “ My ‘associates’ are trying to kill me, my children have died for my demented cause, and there’s a good chance Mullen will work to eliminate me after tonight.”

X blinked at him. “ You want me to kill you.”

“ I know you’ll do a clean job of it, X,” he explained. “ Do an honorable job of it. I’ve known for a long time that you and I were of a dying breed, and that you understood dignity in death. Death before dishonor, don’t you remember that?”

X drew her katana in a bright flash. She weighed it in her hand, speculating.

“ Tell me why I should,” she said.

Lockhardt sighed, sure and deep. “ I had a granddaughter, once.”

He went on. “ My daughter Rosa gave me a lovely little grandchild. But Rosa had some problems…the baby was born addicted to cocaine, and died shortly after. I never learned her name, or saw her face. Then Rosa committed suicide…did you know she was the only of my children to not be trained as an assassin?”

She stared at him.

“ I always blamed myself for Rosa’s suicide. If only I had trained her as a child, but alas, I hadn’t found her till she was twenty and it was far too late to start the process. Some of my other children were beginning to turn towards the more contemporary wave of mercenary-hood, sniper work and enforcing and such, things with no style or art to them. Besides, Rosa was a singer…she was an American, like you, but her mother Gretchen was German and Jewish; she had been sent to England as a child during the war, and that was how I met her later. That’s why I had such problems with finding Rosa; after she was born her mother took her to Gotham City.”

“