Chapter One

Kara Zor-El Danvers had contemplated mortality at thirteen years of age, watching her planet explode in a reflection on the window of her escape pod. She had promised, in her heart, to continue living for her family and all the rest on Krypton who had perished. And then she had gone to sleep and been trapped in a timeless void for two decades.

If only Kal-El had kept his powers hidden. If only he had been satisfied to live his life as Clark Kent. If only he had never donned a cape and accepted the title of Superman. And if only he had put less faith and trust in the government when he was approached and asked to submit to some testing and studies to further the knowledge of alien life-forms.

But he had trusted. Trusted and been betrayed by the father of the woman he loved. General Lane had met aliens before Kal-El. He had met them in underground desert bunkers and seen them laid out on dissection tables, still alive. He had seen one attempt to escape and snap the neck of one of his jailers with one twist of its wrist. Those aliens had looked less human than Kal-El, but in General Lane's mind, they were all alike.

One of the last things Kal-El had done, as Superman, was retrieve his cousin from her pod and bring her to the Danvers' home. It was the last time they would see each other.

Kara had been unable to believe the news, only weeks later, that Superman had disappeared. El Mayara, she had repeated over and over in her head and told herself that her last remaining family would not abandon her. But it seemed that he had, and Kara closed herself off even more and pretended to be human even as she struggled not to slam doors off their hinges and break plates by cutting too hard.

Now Kara - because she remembered that was her name even if everyone referred to her by a number or the letter K - struggled to remember the face of her cousin. The faces of her adoptive family. The faces of her parents whom she had sworn to live for. She knew she was still breathing: heart beating, blood pumping, but she was no longer sure if it was the same as being alive.

There was a harsh rattling of the steel door and she scurried to the corner, curling herself onto a thin mattress, Kryptonite-laced bracelets crossed over her head as if that could protect her from whoever was outside of her cell. This time the door didn't open, just a slot in the middle, and a tray of food was pushed through along with the command to eat quickly.

It was an unnecessary command. She had been denied food so many times or had it snatched from her grasp, that she wolfed down any meal she was given without pausing to so much as breathe. That continued to hold true. Kara rushed to retrieve the styrofoam tray - nothing metal, that could be made into a weapon - and hardly noted the contents before starting to eat. It was almost always the same anyway. Breakfast meant sort of meat, a scoop of eggs or oatmeal and bread. They had learned that the Kryptonians didn't need the variety of vitamins that humans required. They only had to consume enough calories to keep their bodies from shutting down. And they knew exactly how much that was and rarely offered more.

On training days the rations were doubled or tripled but by the times she was permitted to eat, Kara was so hungry that she never felt full or even satisfied.

Training days meant twelve hours in a room with dim lights and thin pads that smelled of sweat and vomit and blood. She was made to fight one opponent after another. The first month she had picked up techniques only as a matter of survival until inevitably she was beaten unconscious only to be woken by a splash of ice water over her body and a new opponent to fight. These days, when they dialed her bracelets down and let her have a tiny amount of her true strength, she could hold her own against most of the men they sent to fight her. It took two men, in the final hour of the day, to beat her until she didn't rise again.

They have forced her to beat prisoners who were in worse conditions than her. They have forced her to watch when those prisoners were then killed right there in the training room. When she cried, they brought in another weakened Kryptonian and made her do it again. Then they brought in human prisoners who had agreed to fight in exchange for reductions to their sentences. Some were stone-cold murderers and rapists, but some were not much more than teenagers, with crimes that surely did not deserve the punishment she was forced to inflict.

She refused again and again when they brought her young people full of bravado in their stance but fear in their eyes. The prisoners were still summarily beaten or killed and then she was punished - tortured - until they threw her back in her cell only to start again the next day. It was two months before she finally killed one of the young prisoners. The young man begged her to do it and she did it quickly - much quicker than the guards would have - and she felt her soul die with his. She refused again the next day and the next until Maxwell Lord finally came around and saw her huddled in her cell and declared that her spirit was clearly broken and that part of her training was over.

"She won't be fighting any weaklings like that in the ring anyway," he said with careless callousness as he walked away.

A single serving meal meant that today would not be a training day, and there was some relief in that, but not much. Often, non-training days meant hours of testing or time spent in total isolation locked inside a sensory deprivation tank. At least they no longer interrogated her. She had stopped speaking altogether after eleven months and nothing they did to her could convince her to talk. They considered that a complete success.

The first two months had been nothing but horribly invasive tests and interrogation. They knew she hadn't been in Fort Rozz and they wanted to know who had sheltered her. They wanted to know why you'd rescued that plane. You had changed your name before moving to National City, and they didn't know that Alex was your sister. They would never learn that from you.

Alex. Kara tried to picture her face but it was fuzzy. She tried to form the name but it felt foreign in her mouth. Vicious fight training and isolation and torture had stolen her thoughts. They were reduced to fear of what would happen next and when her next meal would come.

General Lane's Department of Extra-Normal Operations wrung all the information they could from the first Kryptonians they caught, and then handed all the rest over to the two high-powered companies. Of course first they had let a few prisoners escape. The most violent offenders. Those rogue Kryptonians had created havoc in Metropolis, killing people and destroying property until the armed forces swooped in to subdue them with Kryptonite weapons. The move had assured that the public agreed when Kryptonians were declared hostile entities to be immediately jailed.

The Alpha fights had come later and The Cadmus and LordTech Corporations were the two main players but both of them had received their Kryptonian fighters from the government. They had been offered up as test subjects - for a heft fee of course - with the DEO claiming that the prisoners would be well-treated. After Cadmus and LordTech had run their tests and experiments on the first few prisoners, there had still been plenty of Kryptonians left, and more still running free. It had been easy to present the fights as voluntary acts that the aliens participated in because they were inherently violent. Before long they were as popular as baseball.

A few people objected. People who had known good Kryptonians. Had known Superman. But those people and their demonstrations were silenced until only fringe groups and a scattered few journalists still fought to have them stopped.

In her more lucid moments Kara wondered when they would enter her in her first televised fight. Then she wondered if her foster sister and mother would watch it. Her foster father had been killed during one of the first demonstrations against the fights. The Cadmus Corporation had insisted that it had been an accident. Kara had felt responsible, knowing that Jeremiah Danvers might not have been so invested in the treatment of aliens if he hadn't been sharing his home with one.

The cell door rattled again and Kara rushed to put her tray back on the shelf in the door before retreating to her mattress, and wrapping her arms around her knees. She rocked slightly, stealing some comfort from the action before whatever horrors were to come.

Harsh light bathed the cell as the door swung open with a loud clang that made Kara flinch despite how many times she'd heard it. Or perhaps because of that. A moment later and the light was partially blocked by the form of two men who entered her cell. One was a guard who always treated Kara with casual roughness. The other man was Maxwell Lord and Kara felt her meal rising in her throat, her gut clenching and churning while her heart pounded. She tried to make herself even smaller as he walked towards her as if he was simply looking at an interesting experiment. And perhaps in his mind, he was.

"The doc said she could be moved down to the general population now," the guard said, voice deep and too loud in the small space.

Kara had heard the doctor say the same thing the last time she'd seen him. She'd been strapped down while a shard of Kryptonite was inserted deep into her womb and after a week of bleeding and pain that made her scream herself hoarse, she had been strapped down again. The Kryptonite had been removed, the doctor had made his pronouncement and in the dim recesses of her mind that still held her sanity, Kara had known that she would never have children.

Now Maxwell Lord crouched on one knee on the cold concrete and reached out to touch Kara's face. She knew better than to flinch away.

"No, I don't think so," Lord said as he shook his head in some secret amusement. "This one was never in Fort Rozz. This one is special. I've been waiting for her to complete her training. I have the perfect opponent for her and I don't want her damaged beforehand."

The two men left soon afterward and Kara held herself tighter and started rocking again, trying not to think about the future.

Her respite was short-lived and within the hour, her cell door was pushed open again and two female guards entered and hauled her to her feet. That meant she was being brought to the showers and she stood erect, as she had been trained, and kept her eyes on the ground as they led her through the cold, bright-lit hallways. The female guards weren't nice. They showed her no kindness. But they weren't as brutal as their male counterparts and Kara had no fear of being pushed or tripped or otherwise abused as she showered.

The soap was utilitarian and came from dispensers attached to the wall, but this time one of the guards handed her a bar of moisturizing soap and small bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Kara's curiosity has been largely purged, but the scent of the soap and the slick feeling of conditioner through her hair was soothing in a world that had never given her comfort without it being a trap. She finished her shower, wrapped herself in the cotton robe one of the guards passed to her, and stepped out, eyes down, shoulders back. Ready.

They took her down another long hallway and then into a small, almost cozy room, with mirrors on one wall and a salon chair in the center. Now Kara was confused and confusion is frightening and she just wanted to run back to her cell, but the guards had tight hold of her arms and one of them dialed her bracelets back up again.

"This is the half-starved, half-beaten girl I'm supposed to turn into a model?" came a voice from the corner, and Kara chanced a look through her lashes and saw a short, middle-aged woman, dressed to the nines and perfectly made up.

She didn't hear what the guards said, she just let herself be led to the chair and for the next hour, the woman brushed and styled her hair, and did her make-up to perfection. She even managed to fully cover the bruise at her temple that stubbornly refused to heal even when they turned her bracelets down.

"Well, I don't know exactly what Max has planned for this one, but you can't say she doesn't look like perfection," the woman said as she spun Kara around to face the guards who had remained by the door.

The two guards just muttered replies before commanding Kara to follow them.

Another room, another middle-aged woman, and Kara emerged dressed in a full spandex catsuit, all black save for stripes of blue down the sides and rings of red around her neck and wrists.

It was past lunchtime now, but in the next room, a beautifully plated meal was laid out, with more food than Kara could even remember. She wanted to rush to the table, but she knew it was likely a trick, and stood stock still, the tear in one eye quickly blinked away before she could be punished for it.

"Go ahead and eat," one of the guards told her, prodding her in the side as added motivation.

Trick or no, Kara could not resist the urge to finally, finally, eat enough, and she devoured everything on the table in less than fifteen minutes. When she looked up from her last plate, Maxwell Lord was standing on the other side of the table, just staring at her. She blinked twice before focusing back on the table.

"No, no, go ahead and look at me," he said, almost jovial. "Today's a special day for you, after all."

He knew she wouldn't speak so he just continued as if she had asked him why.

"Well, your first fight, of course! And a very special one. Very private, no cameras this time, just some people who have paid a great amount of money to see how I turn an ordinary girl into a killing machine."

She flinched at that, but realized the truth in his words.

"Now, come along, come along," he said, motioning for her to stand. "Don't want to keep them waiting, now do we?"

The guards still flanked her as Lord walked ahead, leading down a hall Kara had never seen before. At the end was a door and he opened it with a flourish before ushering her inside. It was nearly pitch black, save for the glow of her bracelets, but even that dimmed as she felt them lowered until they were almost off. Strength surged through the young woman, and a year and a half ago, she would have bolted forward, punching through walls or ceilings to escape. But now she just stood, waiting for further instructions.

A few short minutes later and the lights in the room flickered on, illuminating the fighting ring and the rows of seats off to one side. Maxwell Lord introduced her merely as fighter K, and Kara took up a fighting stance. In some part of her mind she thought that this could be a kill or be killed situation and wondered if she really wanted to remain on Earth rather than succumbing and entering Rao's light. But her training and conditioning kicked in to push those thoughts away. Her eyes hardened as her fists tightened and she would not be losing this fight.

"For our other competitor, we have a bit of a wild-card," Max's voice echoed through speakers set high in the walls. "A human woman we've been training for almost the same amount of time as K. Some might say that isn't a fair fight, but I think you will be pleasantly surprised."

A spotlight shone on a door opposite from Kara and when it was opened, after a dramatic pause, a woman, dressed similarly to her, but wearing a sort of exoskeleton tinged a sickly kryptonite green, was pushed inside.

"Oh my God, Kara."

And Kara was staring into the eyes of her sister and realizing that only one of them would leave the room alive.