RAVEL
They said she went down swinging, which wasn't much of a surprise considering she'd always been the strong one.
What made it worse was that it had happened in the little corner store their family had owned ever since they were children running frighteningly wild in the shadier parts of Hong Kong. They were inseparable back then, playing soldiers and pilots in construction zones—she always won their imaginary battles, even though he was the boy and a whole two minutes older. He always tried to tell her that's why he should win, but it was hard to argue when she could put him in the dirt with relatively little effort.
He remembered once he'd goaded her into showing off how tough she really was, when she accidentally fell off the second story of an unfinished high rise and landed on a pile of rubble. He'd been terrified that she was dead, and worse, that he'd have to tell their parents where they'd been all day (not at school, that's for sure). But instead of dying she rolled off the broken concrete and spat some blood out onto the dirt, then punched him hard enough to bruise before making him swear he wouldn't tattle. He promised, of course, more afraid now of his invincible twin than of any potential parental wrath. She told their parents afterwards she fell off the swings at the playground.
It turned out she'd broken her arm and a few ribs, too. He asked her after they got back from the hospital if she had been scared and closed her eyes when she fell; she'd shrugged and told him that she liked to see what was about to happen, because things were only scary when you couldn't see them. He'd thought about it, and how the shadows were only frightening until he turned the lights on at night, and told her he thought she was brave. She told him to stop being a loser.
He left to become a pilot when they were eighteen; she joined the police academy. She'd tease him about being a nerd when he called her at three in the morning to complain about studying aerodynamics and astrophysics. When he visited her on his school holidays she would always drag him to the station where she worked to show him off, boasting to all of her colleagues about her genius brother. He'd be suitably humble while they were there, of course, but she knew he loved the attention.
After he started to work for Weyland Industries, his home visits grew scarce. Now she was the one calling at three in the morning, leaving him messages with playful apologies for not knowing what time it was on Planet Krypton or wherever in space he was. He tried to answer as often as he could, but he didn't always wake up or have the time; he still felt stabbing guilt when he thought about the sobbing message she'd left him to let him know their father had died. She quit her job on the police force after that to care for their mother, who certainly couldn't run the family store single-handed. He started sending them some money every month in the hopes that they could either close up shop or at least move to a different part of the city, especially after his sister confided to him about the store being robbed for the fourth time in two months.
He missed her call again one afternoon, but when he watched to the innocuous message she left he couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly, irreversibly wrong in the world. She didn't pick up when he tried her mobile, or the store, or their house. He called twelve times that day, but no one answered until the video screen for their store phone finally displayed the worn, tired face of her old sergeant at the police station. In a gruff voice, the man told him the paperboy had found the bodies early that morning, that it looked like several people had broken in the previous night, and that his sister had probably interrupted them during the theft. Wrong place, wrong time; they'd found her behind the counter with a metal bat, and it looked like she'd done some serious damage before being overwhelmed. The sergeant assured him that they could almost certainly match the DNA and loose teeth they'd found scattered around the store, and that they'd already put out the alert for the surrounding hospitals to watch for recent victims of enthusiastic bludgeoning.
Two weeks after the funeral the cops caught the four men who'd done it. He didn't watch the trial footage, but he taped the brief newspaper article with the guilty verdict up above the desk in his room on the ship.
They said she went down swinging, her eyes wide open because things were only scary as long as you couldn't see them. She looked her death straight in the eye; and just for her, he'd do the same.