Code: Zero Dark. It means I am dead, and you're next.
That was the last Op Code before she ran.
She ditched her military cell at full sprint, barreling through Midgar City's Fountain District on an adrenaline rush. The SIM card was traceable from anywhere on the outer continent to the Nth coordinate. It shattered against durasteel pavement that gripped her Vibram soles. Paratrooper boots, resin-coated, recon issue. She flew like a shot deer downtown.
Around busy suits and ties she weaved, fleeing the encroaching shadow of the Shinra headquarters building, splayed like an engineering nightmare of manifest steel and carburetor pipes. Her oath of service was left behind on the sidewalk like they were.
The turnstile at 42nd Street on Loveless Avenue, she jumped it and fled into the station. The bullet train rocked a Mark III carbide engine on magnetic zip-rails at speeds that could flatten a hummingbird, approaching, fast. She leapt down onto the tracks, full view of oncoming rail lights, dashing to get to a service walkway on the inner tunnel.
The train slowed into the station, jet stream sweeping shard lilac bangs over neon-cyan irises—Mako eyes—the mark of a SOLDIER. She rushed like a panther to the far wall, sliding into the connecting balustrade between cars. Those doors didn't DNA scan.
Into the car as the train took off, slow, then rocket propulsion jettisoning them off on a soundless air cushion in a vacuum tunnel. She swiped a grey hoodie off a sleeping rider's knee. No one cared. Through three more connecting doors three cars down she sat in the corner, hood up, eyes down, hand at the Gunblade on her hip.
Twenty minutes to go. Home free…until the surprise checkpoint at Union Square.
Limelight sirens roared in technicolor, cranial distortion scattering passengers as a forced DNA scan caught her in Car Three. Magnetic locks jammed, emergency exits barred, and she leapt up as the rear door flew open.
Infantry troops with psycom rifles trained laser dots on her, opening fire into the sprawling and screaming passengers. She dashed like a tracer round whipping the hoodie at the first sergeant, distraction, front handspringing over shot snare lines. Time slowed to monochrome as she drew her Gunblade in a timeless arc, sweeping the lines of reality in red tendrils midair. She landed behind the detachment, a spiraling elliptical crescent slash ending their bloody lives.
Reinforcements from the car behind bashed through the opposite door. She jammed a clip, full-auto slashing bullets away as she dropped into a sprint firing back at them. In a streaking line, feet flying off the ground, she bashed through their detachment in a centrifugal slash.
It means I am dead.
His voice echoed in her mind, blurring tears ripping from blue irises to cloud her depth perception. A deep voice like silver velvet, emanating like soft flowers through her sweeping blade that tore through troopers' bulletproof vests in centripetal motion melee. That singular phrase ran on repeat like an old phonogram glitched on a digital auto-loop.
I am dead.
Black blood splattered on the train windows, as if the infantrymen had been dead already, and she was fighting animate corpses.
Dead.
His strong touch brushed her face in technicolor, sweeping shard bangs out of her eyes that flared in a combative storm, the loveless prowess of her mentor.
You're next.
A hypermiotic octaslash splayed eight streaking lines of crimson carbide across the car. She whipped into a slash and kicked off the wall straight into a monoslice, just like he'd taught her. Desperate like a cornered tigress, she fought for her life against troops that kept funneling through both doors.
Last stop on the L-Line, a train no one took this far, she pulled the emergency brake. The doors jarred open and she flew into the darkness of Sector Zero, where no street lamps stood lit and tenement housing blared like behemoth claws. The Infantry halted at the station's edge—they dared not follow her here.
Broken bottles busted underfoot against dirt tread roads and oil chip, she barreled on gasping for breath. No light to illuminate her way—under the Plate, there is no light. Bioluminous tagger stencils glowed in three interlocking triangles on brown brick walls and steel grates, marking a territory where all were forbidden, especially her.
A whirring rush of air behind her, a steel chain slammed into her head. She toppled across the scraping ground face first to slide against dirt and asphalt, her palms and bare knees shredded on broken glass. The lunatic laugh of delinquents echoed in the dark.
"Hey SOLLLLDIEERRRR!"
They came from shadows with swords and modified blade-rifles, edging from alleyways like street felines in the hunting dark. Savages, warlike and tattooed with biopaint in limelines like microchips. They came to hunt, to prey.
"Trade! Reactor codes! Sanctuary!"
She screamed to the ground with all the breath in her burning lungs, but it did not stop their egress. Into the stray line of dirty glare that cast from artificial moonlamps on the underside of the Plate—500 feet up and didn't work this side of the Slums—a rogue with a battle lance stepped forward.
She saw her standing before a legion of gangsters at command, adorned in a traditional blue sari but wearing combat boots, a strange combination of sanctity and sacrilege. Shorn black Native hair and olive skin confirmed her heritage, but a tribal sleeve tattoo of clawing lines wreathed around a fang desecrated her culture—a headhunter's mark.
The lady gang boss smirked and called off her troops.
"Good trade, SOLDIER. Welcome to the Triads."
[Received Chrysanthemum]