BOOK I: THAT WHICH THREATENS THE NIGHT

CHAPTER 1: The Silver Fox

It is on this wasteland of anarchy and lawlessness, this degeneration of the human race, that this, the Protectorate, has been formed to return order to chaos, to rebuild and protect that which has been torn apart by the ravages of fanatical ideologies and extremist zealotry in its misguided and ultimately destructive attempts to carve out a society in its name. To this end, all men who shall henceforth form the Protectorate must, first, above all, do everything in their power to ensure that none shall threaten the existence of the Protectorate and to ensure that its purpose and goals shall never be subverted or laid waste. No life is more precious than this goal.- Excerpt from the Protectorate Constitution

Alec hissed. The welts and bruises on her lightly tanned skin had turned an angry red, the color a stark contrast against the black lines of the tattoos snaking around her shoulders. Gently she rotated it and swore as a sharp pain ripped through her nerve endings.

"Fuck this. Who the fuck said that this job would be a cakewalk, huh, George? Those meathead Protectorate goons were crawling all over the goddamn place like fucking maggots."

Her companion eyed her from the rear view mirror of their car. The gash that ran across his forehead had already begun to clot. George sighed. "Why don't we count ourselves lucky that we got out with only minor injuries."

"Minor? You call this minor? It's a fucking dislocated shoulder." Alec glared into the darkened streets of Zion, the megalopolis capital of the Protectorate, as their vehicle accelerated. She watched as they passed by men, women, and children, their lives blissfully ignorant of the ways their supposed all-benevolent government fucked them over day in and day out. In the darkly tinted windows her right eye, usually a stormy silver-grey, looked almost identical to her other brown one. Both of them blazed with her thinly controlled rage. She pounded her uninjured fist into the backside of the vacant seat in front of her. "I'll kill whoever ratted out this operation."

And that was it, the crux of why they were here in a stolen car, blood pooling on the leather, bodies pulled low against the seats, dodging the evening traffic in an attempt to put as much distance between themselves and what was undoubtedly an All-Points-Bullet being issued even as they spoke. It was the reason why, despite his words, the expression on George's face was grim, his greying brows furrowed, angular jaw set as his blue eyes darted to the side mirrors every so often checking for the inevitable patrol car. It was why sweat matted Alec's forehead, the tips of her short black hair plastered against it, as she tried to one-handedly apply bandages to her own assortment of cuts, a Remington GPC assault rifle carefully cradled in her lap ready to be fired at a moment's notice.

It really should have been simple. The operation as it had been described to them was to infiltrate a midtown storage facility and retrieve a package labelled "ME-C15" from one of the lower level secure vaults. It was expected that they would encounter some low to mid-levels of security, nothing that they couldn't handle. George would manage the tech and the locks. Her role was to point and shoot down anything and anyone that got in their way. Except less than a minute into the facility it had been painfully obvious that either their intel had been way off or else someone had tipped the other side. The place wasn't some forgotten storage center lost in the maze of Protectorate government holdings. It was a fucking stronghold.

Alec glanced at the small black box sitting innocuously beside her, the words "Classified" and "ME-C15" plastered along its front in big bold red letters. Whatever the hell this was, the Protectorate clearly wouldn't let it go so easily and they were sorely under-prepared for the heat that was undoubtedly already on their tail. It would be a miracle if they got out of the city in one piece, or as close to one piece as they currently were.

George pulled a left and banked the car into an abandoned building. An old factory back in the days when the city was still struggling out of its pre-Protectorate economic recession, it had yet to be re-zoned and replaced with the steel and glass monoliths that now occupied most of the city's 1,100 square miles. And there, hidden behind a black tarpaulin and some haphazardly thrown junk was their spare getaway car.

George killed the engine and was out of the driver's seat the moment they had made it far enough in that prying eyes wouldn't see them through the grimy and cracked windows. With the practiced ease of someone who'd done this drill many times over he pulled a power screwdriver from the boot of the getaway car and ripped out the license plates of the sedan they'd just been driving. In the same motion he plastered a fresh set of fake plates. It wouldn't hold them off too long but anything to confuse their trail helped.

Alec offloaded their gear from the now defunct vehicle and shuffled them into the new one. A quick inventory made her stomach churn. Two Remington GPCs with only one remaining magazine apiece. One flash grenade. One bio-material disintegrator. One set of grappling hooks. Two tactical knives. It was definitely not nearly enough to take on an incoming platoon.

As she stood scowling at the meager remains of their weaponry, George pulled up beside her. He pointed at her injured shoulder. "Take your top off."

She shook her head. There wasn't enough time. Any minute now the cops would barge in.

But he already knew what she was thinking. "There's enough time for this. We need to pop that shoulder back in. I doubt you can shoot straight with that thing protruding like some creepy doll part." It was the voice he used whenever she'd stubbornly refused to accept she'd lost a match, be it at the shooting range or on the martial arts mats. At almost twenty years her senior, he'd never been shy of reminding her that he'd been picking locks and loading bullets before she'd even entered high school. She may be more nimble and had the explosive power of youth at her side but he could still best her with his experience and tactics.

"Fine." With a long-suffering sigh, she started to unzip the top of the black polyester bodysuit, the cold winter air slamming against her bare skin like a body blow. She sucked a breath in. Despite the gravity of their situation, a small smile tugged at the corners of George's lips. With one hand he offered her a small plank of slightly rotting wood, no doubt fished out from the junk lying around the place. She firmly positioned it in the middle of her mouth, her teeth clamping tightly onto it. She nodded once to let him know she was ready.

He placed his hands on the offending area and with a crack pushed it back into place. Alec tried to stifle the scream that made its way up her throat. It would do no good to attract attention with her cries. Her eyes watered. The pain was a hundred times worse in that one instant, coursing like lightning bolts through her every pore.

And then they were off, wheels screeching at the hard turn as they shot out of the factory and into the night. The crowd had started to thin and they made better time than they had earlier. But the sense of dread that had been creeping up into her gut told Alec it was only going to get worse before it got any better.

And of course she was right.

A dull beeping sound alerted them to an incoming transmission over the comms channel built into their new ride. It had only three words. "Get out. Praetorians."

"Shit." Shit. Shit. Shit. The fuckers really had called in the cavalry. As the elite tactical unit of the military, these guys were no slouch. George floored the gas pedal. The knuckles that gripped the steering wheel turned white.

Neither spoke. They both knew what would happen if they were ever caught. Death. There was no two ways about it. That was the price to pay for being mercenaries, for giving the Protectorate and its fascist approach to peace and order their middle finger. Alec had once paid a hacker to pull up the rap sheet that they had on her. It read like a nightmare.

First name: Alec
Last name: Unknown
Aliases: Silver Fox
Gender: Female
Age: 25 (unconfirmed)
Relations: No known family relations
Affiliations: Black Sky Mercenary group (anti-Protectorate)
Known/ Suspected Crimes: Robbery, Assault, Murder: First-degree, Terrorism, Destruction of Government Property, Extortion, Arson
Total count of known/suspected crimes: 150
Jurisdictions Wanted: All Protectorate-controlled areas
The individual is to be treated as highly dangerous. All officers are ordered to shoot to kill.

Dead or alive. It was just like those old timey Westerns that George liked to watch whenever they holed up in one shitty motel or the other except their crimes made the evil villains in those movies look like amateurs. And if her rap sheet was bad, George's was definitely much worse.

The shrill sirens forced Alec back into the present. They'd come. She closed her eyes and released a shuddering breath. When she opened them, whatever concerns she may have held were gone. The only thing that mattered was getting out alive. For both of them.

She pulled up the rifle on her lap and rolled down the window. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. She fired into the approaching vehicles, the shell casings of the discharged ammunition pinging inside the car's interiors. They'd reached Hope Bridge. They just needed to cross it and they would be in the neutral zone, a hair's-breath away from the border that marked the Protectorate-controlled area and the massive sprawling slums that extended beyond Zion in a seemingly never-ending fan of maze like streets and houses piled up so close to each other that the end of one and the beginning of the other had blurred.

And then she saw it, the green tube extending out of one of the vehicle's roofs.

"RPG!" She shouted just as the rocket was launched. George swerved to avoid it but they were moving altogether too fast on the icy road. One minute they were watching the rocket explode in the space the car had been just seconds before and the next they were slamming into the bridge's guard rails, the car punching a hole clean through like a bullet fired from the muzzle of a gun. And then they were in free fall, the car and their bodies inside it diving headlong into the cold icy waters of the wide river below.

The second impact as the car hit the water sent a shock wave through the vehicle, lifting Alec from her seat and slamming her headfirst against the window. Even as her vision started to blacken she could see George slumped in the driver's seat, a piece of the guard rail protruding from his sternum, bolting him in place. His blue eyes were open, wide and unblinking, even as the water from the river rapidly filled the car from the broken windshield.

Alec choked back a sob. There was nothing more she could do for him. With a trembling hand she grabbed the package they'd given up their lives for and prepared to swim. She shook her head to try to dispel the impending loss of consciousness. She couldn't die here. She needed to avenge George. She needed to make whoever was the snitch pay. She pushed back the pain as her shoulders and now her chest started to scream in protest. The thought came as though from a distant and badly tuned radio - she'd broken a rib.

Pulling in as much air as she could into her lungs, she felt the last pocket of air in the car disappear. With whatever energy she could muster, she pushed out from the open window into the black waters. It had been years since she'd swam. It was not since she still lived in her family's ranch out in the country, her mind not yet turned towards violence and a burning hatred of the Protectorate. Not since she had watched her family burn, their glassy eyes staring into the flames licking their home of twelve years, an act, she would later learn, the Protectorate had ordered on a trumped up accusation that they had harbored rebels of their cause.

Father. Mother. Brother. Two sisters. And now a friend and partner. All of them lost at the hands of the Protectorate. They had thought they had been burning down rebels. They didn't know they had instead bred one.

Every muscle of Alec's body screamed from the pain of her injuries, the cold, and the exertion. More than once she almost lost consciousness, the river's current tugging at her, pulling her downwards and away. Each time she pushed it back. The words she repeated in her head gave fuel to her adrenaline. They will pay. They will pay. It was only when she felt her body heave up onto the dry earth on the other side of the river that she let the blackness consume her.

Legolas made his way through the forest unhindered. For once the guards his father had ordered to accompany him at all times gave way, letting him pass. What did his father know of his heart? Did he truly think that by isolating his people that he would save them? He loved Mirkwood. He loved the elvenfolk who had made it their home. It did not matter to him that he was Sindarin or they Silvan. But day after day he saw the shadow of the enemy reaching, creeping into the heart of the forest. And yet his father would do nothing, ever retreating inwards. Did he not see that if he failed to act there would soon be nowhere to run?

He paused beneath the towering branches of a tree, the early morning light filtering in through the gaps in the foliage in scattered patches. He was not far from the Forest River he knew, the murmur of the flowing water a constant but soft guide to his sharpened elven ears. He also knew that if he ventured too far off his father's guard would hunt him down. He sighed. The "lowly" Silvan elves who served his family's house had far more freedom than he, Legolas Thranduilion, Prince of Mirkwood.

Legolas straightened the light green tunic he wore and turned towards the river. A splash of water on his face would do him good to cool the temper that simmered beneath it. There was nothing to be gained by returning to his father's house in the same rage that he left it. With knowledge born from years of walking the underbrush that surrounded this, his home, it was a simple matter to find the right path amidst the seemingly impenetrable gloom cast by the trees that surrounded him.

At first he did not recognize what it was that he saw as he approached the riverbank. From a distance he noticed a black thing, half in and half out of the water. It lay there unmoving, the river water lapping at it amidst the rocks and sandy earth. Legolas drew his bow and fitted an arrow even as he made his way towards it. If this was a creature of the enemy he would take its head and bring it to his father. Let all in the realm know that where they had thought themselves safe, the enemy had finally encroached into their borders.

But as he approached it became clear that this was no creature, it was a man. The clothing was odd, yes, all black and tightly encasing his body like a second skin but here and there he saw tears where lightly tanned skin peeked through. In one of his hands was a small black box with markings he could not make out at his angle. His head was planted into the sandy earth, his short black hair matted from water and mud. And blood. The stench of it came across clearly the closer he got to the slumped figure. And all the while the man did not move even as Legolas came to a stop right beside him.

With a boot he nudged at the prostrate form. Was the man dead? Seeing no response, Legolas holstered his weapon and bent down. With one hand he took hold of the man's shoulder and prepared to turn the man over. Or was it a boy? The shoulder in his hand was too slight to be that of a full grown man or even that of an elf.

He was definitely not expecting the feminine face that became apparent as he turned the body around.

A woman? There was no doubt about it. It was clear in the gently arched eyebrows, the long lashes, the oval face, the high cheekbones, and the soft full lips. But at the same time there was something hard in her features as though she had seen not only great hardship and sorrow but also war. Was she perhaps a shield maiden of Rohan somehow lost in the woods of Mirkwood? No, she could not be for no Rohirrim he had ever seen wore clothing as this woman did.

He pressed a hand to the woman's chest. It was there albeit somewhat irregular and weak - her heartbeat.

It was then that he noticed it peeking through the expanse of an exposed collarbone, black lines crisscrossing her skin. It did not appear to be from some malaise but something almost chiseled into it. He pulled back the cloth that wrapped around the sides, desiring to see more of this odd pattern inked into her flesh. More and more lines were drawn ever downwards across the left side of her body and through the entirety of her left arm. With his index finger he began to trace its contours.

His touch must have roused her from whatever stupor she was in for, as if on cue, her eyes slid open, one brown orb and the other silver-grey at first unfocused and then as one swiveling to pin him in her gaze. He watched the emotions flit across them, his finger still pressed against the black design on her skin, frozen in place as though by some spell. At first there was confusion, then suspicion and finally rage.

And before Legolas could react, she had straddled him, pinning him to the ground, her hands pressed against his throat in a firm choke hold.