In alleyways, in crypts, under dumpsters- anywhere two or more homeless addicts gather for some salvaged food and a hit of Zydrate- a rumor is spreading. A rumor about a woman.
They say she's as quick as darkness and as pale as a skeleton. They say she's a genius, that she can pretend to be anyone, that she has a different wig for every day of the decade.
She's gathering an army of street rats and nobodies, scalpel sluts and stagehands, because her ghostly wanderings have uncovered something that no one should have to know alone: the plague is fake. GeneCo started it, pumping chemically-engineered toxins into the city's air so that they could profit from the ensuing pandemonium. Stop the poison, kill the rich, and liberate everybody, that's what she says, because everyone deserves to be free, because nobody should have to be a prisoner.
And then there are the rumors about her imposing lieutenant. They say he used to be a graverobber, that no one's ever seen him without his corpse-white makeup. They say he follows his lady everywhere, lurking just off her fragile shoulders, and that his hair really does grow that way naturally. They share a bed a lair an everything, and it's said that he'd die for her. That he has died for her, and she walked into Hell to bring him back and rocked out on electric guitar with the devil himself in the process, and now she wears her lover-lieutenant's soul in a pendant shaped like a taxidermied butterfly. (Or maybe the bullet he took for her was only in the shoulder, and she stitched the wound up herself and then cried over him while he was sleeping drugged unconscious.)
He used to be a graverobber. Now he's the Graverobber. As for his young mistress, her followers (and they increase in number every day- faster, even, than the ranks of the dead-) rarely refer to her by name. They don't need to. She's the pale lady, the butterfly child… their Savior.
Sometimes, though, they call her Shilo.
An army of the overlooked is scurrying through the streets like plague rats. Its leaders are frightening, brilliant, inseparable.
And they're going to change the world.
