Chapter 1: Breath, Blood and Bone

June 29, 2259

The thundering, pounding never ending drumroll of people's feet running against a metal floor. Closer and further, closer and further, the sounds ebbed and flowed like the waves on a beach.

"Don't hear. Don't see. Don't smell. Don't feel. Only breath. Only breath. Your bones are made from steel"

The Cacophony of screams, blasts and the squelching ripping sounds of bones and flesh being torn or broken into shreds.

"Don't hear. Don't see. Don't smell. Don't feel. Only breath. Only breath…none of it is real"

But it was real. And it was not just real…It was far too much. Too much destruction; too much blood; too much death…

"Don't hear…don't see…don't smell…don't feel…don't…feel" icy blues burned with a heat they could not understand. A salty liquid heat that blurred their vision and trickled down a translucent pale high cheekbone just as something crashed loudly close by.

"Split up and find her! She's in here somewhere!"

Pale fingers clutched at the roots of long dark hair, gripping so tightly that several strands of it caught in the sharp nails.

"all clear!"

"Search round that side!"

"…don't feel… you are made of steel" Blunt white teeth gritted behind the lips as the pale hands dipped below to clutch at the sides of darkly clad waist. It would have been nearly straight had it not been for the very slight dip at the centre that provided the slenderest curve that was currently the resting place of a dark hard holster.

"…Don't… feel…" a deep breath and the black diamonds in the centre of the blue icy orbs, shrunk rapidly, dilated with focus.

She leapt around the corner, a small but distorted phantasm to the eyes of the armed men who tried desperately to follow her with their phasers, all of which had been set to kill mode… and smirked.

She hid behind a pillar; the breaths she took making her almost flattened chest expand and contract rapidly underneath her dark streamlined suit. A silent shiver of thrill ran through her body though it had nothing to do with the cold conditioned air.

She could outrun each one of them easily despite her small size, like a young agile doe. But if she was a deer then they were the pack of wolves, snarling, merciless and savage in their nature.

But she could also see that nature isn't always so straight forward. She could still turn this around, she could still escape. She just had to be smarter than they were.

And that wouldn't be too difficult for her at all.

So this was what they meant when they said 'thrill of the hunt' huh?

She glanced opposite her at a shiny silver metal container in a corner beneath a tiny air vent. It was perfect at least to her. It kept her position in the room shielded whilst revealing what was behind her as plain as day. A group of six fully grown men each in black with a deep blue on the torso. But it was what was behind him on the railings that she was most interested in. more gunmen were moving out a doorway and around an elevated walkway towards her position.

Pff! Seriously? Seven gunmen? That's all the back-up they could think of?

She looked away from the container and to her left to see a doorway…but also an unhidden road.

Her full but thin lips quirked in a small smirk.

Too easy.

She shot at the door lock.

"Over here! THIS WAY!"

They all ran to the left but she ran to the right, her small feet barely making a noise as they ghosted up and over the metal container. Her fingers pried the metal grates over the air vent as easily as if she'd been tearing wrapping paper off a Christmas gift.

The men had only turned too late, only to see the scraps of metal fly into their faces, knocking them out. Many voices echoed from behind her but she was already crawling around the corner of the air vent.

She crawled for god knows how long, crawled like a beast searching through tall grass for food, though admittedly she did not crave sustenance.

She deserved better than what they could provide, no scratch that, she was better. They should be kneeling in front of her begging to wait on her hand and foot. She could crush one of their bones in her bare hands without a thought, her mere glance could demand respect and subservience if she so wished it to.

But truth be told, she did not know what she wished for anymore. This life, of daily tests, mental games, the physical endurance, all of it was all she'd ever known. From the time she'd first opened her eyes those fourteen or so years ago to this moment when she was not yet a woman but still no longer a child. What would she do with herself when it was all gone?

She paused to listen as a pair of feet thundered below her in a corridor as a male voice yelled out to his fellows.

"The little bitch is in the pipes somewhere! The boss says to find an opening fast and gas her out"

Well she wouldn't let that happen now would she?

She found another grate ahead of her and crawled towards it and pushed through. She landed on the floor her feet silent as a cats as her smirk widened.

She knew where she was now. The shuttle bay was close by. Only a few more corridors down, a few corridors that was easy for her to navigate stealthily.

Or so she had thought.

"There she is! Stop her!"

A sharp pain in the back of her shoulder made her nerves spasm as the metallic, salty tang of blood filled her nose.

"They never learn" she rolled her eyes to no one in particular as she began to run down into the open space of the shuttle hangar, quickly tugging the knife from her shoulder. It was a deep wound, but it wasn't anything she'd not felt before. It would bleed and hurt but it would heal fast.

Phaser blasts burst towards her through the air, but she avoided them easily as she made her way into a shuttle craft. She closed the door shut behind her quickly and set to the controls.

There was a small jerk as she felt her space craft rise into the air, before zooming out of the hangar bay, her prisoners left by the wayside as she soared into the blackness that was space.

As she gained several kilometres something jabbed hard into her right wrist and she winced. She looked down at the metallic tubular bracelet from which three needle had pierced into her skin.

"Shit!"

She cried out in pain as she felt something liquid filter into her bloodstream, something that made her arm go almost dead. She pinched it with her other arm trying to aim for the nerve points just like she'd been taught but no matter how hard or how accurate she did it the appendage wouldn't respond.

"Damn! Come on! Fight it! Fight it!" she groaned as she tried one handed to steer the ship. She felt the cold of lifelessness seep up into her shoulder.

She was so distracted between the sensation of creeping numbness, pain and aggravation that she didn't hear the footsteps that came up from the dark depths of the shuttle.

"You need to calm down" a deep baritone voice said from behind her as something warm clapped onto her unresponsive shoulder.

She wheeled around in shock grabbing the knife that had pierced her from before in her left hand and swinging it around. A large pale hand caught it deftly twisting her wrist quickly. It wasn't painful at all but his grip had enough pressure to make sure her fingers dropped the knife to the floor.

Feeling the familiar thrill of fear flood into her brain, she looked up into the pale face of a man. His cheekbones were high and he had a dark brow that matched his dark hair that was mostly slicked back, save a few loose strands that flecked over his forehead. He was looking down on her his blue eyes cold and thin lipped mouth set in a taut thin line.

She'd barely registered the rest of his darkly clad form when the strange man quickly knelt down beside her chair his hand shaking her shoulder slightly. When she tried to shrug him off it did not respond.

"That trinket on your wrist has injected a highly concentrated sedative into your bloodstream. If you continue to stress yourself, the substance will only spread through the rest of your system all the more faster."

The blue eyes darkened and narrowed as he picked up her now floppy wrist and examined the said 'trinket'.

"Why do you care a damn?! And what the hell are you playing at?" she tried to glare at the man as he took the co-pilots seat and overrode her control within a few seconds.

"Just sit, take deep breaths and calm yourself!" the man clipped power dripping with every syllable "Or I will force you to."

"pff! Force is the last likely thing to make a person calm down!" she spat mentally cursing her right arm when it still refused to budge. "And if you think I'm just another child for you to boss around you've got another thing coming!"

"You're still not calm" his stoic expression didn't waver on his face but his hands at the controls clenched slightly.

She opened her mouth but the man seemed to sense her retort coming and an eye flashed sideways to glower dangerously at her. She shut her mouth with a snap and shut her eyes muttering darkly as she took a few steadying breaths. To her surprise not only did she feel her heart rate slow down, but she felt the sedative in her arteries and veins do so too.

There was a long silence in which the only sounds to be heard in the shuttle were the girl's and man's exhales as they mingled into the air. Both felt surprisingly comfortable despite the situation. Indeed the ram rod stiff muscles in the man's back as he sat were nearly on the point of relaxing while the girl almost felt herself sigh with relief though she couldn't not when a disturbing thought kept prodding her at the back of her mind.

How had he sneaked up on her unawares? No one had ever been able to do that to her for years…or at least no normal person had. And secondly why had he tried to help her? Obviously he could pilot a shuttle well enough on his own without her assistance, and she was heavily sedated, currently useless to him except probably to distract him from his task. So if she was not useful…why was he keeping her alive?

She opened her eyes to look back at the front window, in which a blue green dot was slowly becoming larger in the vast depths of space.

"…is that…" she trailed off gazing as she could begin to make out white dots splattering over the tiny orb in the distance.

"Earth" the man muttered quietly in response to her curiosity.

"Earth…" she repeated softly to herself, enjoying the way the planet's name rolled off her tongue.

The strange man's eyes strayed to his younger passenger on his side as she leaned forwards against the straps of the seat, her eyes wide with wonder.

"Haven't you ever seen it before?"

"Only…only in the holograms…or the PADDs but otherwise, no…I've never seen it before…Wow…Now that's a green…" she almost sighed upon seeing the vast expanse of colour spanning over the east of South America.

"And how about the compound? How much of that did you know?"

"I was only allowed to roam freely around my quarters" she muttered tracing the growing circular outline of the Earth in the air in front of her "Otherwise they'd stick a guard on me and walk me around blindfolded"

"And yet you managed to find your way out on your own?" the man quirked an eyebrow at her curiously.

"Well if they wanted to make it difficult for me to find my way around they should've made the guards put a filter at my nose to block out the smell and put earplugs too" the girl snorted derisively. "But they were too stupid to figure that out. Though now that I think about it how did you find your way onto that charming hell hole in the first place? Why did you need to escape? And why keep me alive when I'm obviously not of any use to your escape?"

"You ask for much" the man's voice was light, but there was a strangely sharp edge to it the she could not understand. "For one so young" he added the corners of his mouth twitching upwards as she scowled darkly and bristled.

"Whether I'm young or not they are both reasonable questions considering our… circumstances" she turned to look around the ship again. It was dark at the back, and with his mostly black and grey attire he'd almost certainly have blended in. But still…

"Agh!"

She felt a lot of pain as she tried to rotate her left shoulder to look further back, only for the knife stab from before to twinge again.

"What the…" she reached back with difficulty to touch the wound. It was still bleeding.

Why…why didn't it stop? The bleeding should have stopped by now…unless…

"Oh shit no" She gulped and turned back to face the front, closing her eyes again and mouthing words under her breath.

The man strained his finely tuned ears to try and catch what she was saying. Words like "breathe" and "Steel" and "feel" caught on but nothing else. He strained his ears harder.

"-don't feel, your bones are made of steel"

A rhyme…. She must've been chanting a small mantra to herself.

"Just keep calm and breath" the man repeated himself as calm as he could whilst steamrolling over her gasps of panic.

"But if I can't stop the bleeding-"

"Just do as I say! Whatever that serum was, it was clearly designed to severely slow down whatever you have in terms of accelerated regenerative abilities" he hissed softly.

The girl stared at the man wide eyed with the same kind of shock she'd greeted him with upon first sight.

"Ho-how did you kno-"

"How long were you in that base?" he cut across her firmly.

"Now just wait a mome-"

"How long?!"

"A-all my life…"

"How many years?" he sounded slightly annoyed now.

"Fourteen years, four months, eight days and roughly 22.52 hours."

"And you never left the base before?"

"No…never…that asshole Marcus said it was too dangerous for me to leave…kept having me tagged and tailed at every single possible chance of escape"

There was a pause in which the man seemed to process the information passively, but the girl saw the pale blue eyes flicker with something that looked a lot like loathing at the very mention of the name Marcus

"And what changed that today?"

"Marcus died a few months back. Serves him right, greedy pompous git. Pff! Just a little temptation of the apple and he goes to scoff it down only to choke on it when he discovers it's poisoned…much to his cost…" the girl smirked smugly, like a child satisfied after squashing a rather nasty vile bug.

The man beside her couldn't help the small smirk this time as he continued listening to her story.

"Either way the old bastard snuffed it four months ago or so and apparently left orders upon his death for those bozos back there in the steel pit of hell we just left, to continue watching me like always. Of course without old man there to keep everyone in line, they got sloppy and well…now I'm stuck in a space shuttle headed for a planet I've never been on with my bloody body royally screwed up by a poisonous substance flowing through my veins and probably going to kill me as I sit next to a total stranger who is by far one of the most weirdest bastards I've ever met ever in my pathetic fourteen years of existing"

The man's eyebrows rose high though he gave no sign of being offended. Mentally however he was dying to laugh. For one who appeared young and sweet she had a surprisingly rather fowl mouth on her. That being said she was obviously a very direct person and whatever crudeness she had expressed he could not fault her for her honesty. It was strangely…refreshing.

He turned his attention to the window in front of him as they began to hover over rim of the earth.

The girl turned to look at him watching his expression before turning to look into her lap. The sedative had now taken effect of her almost completely now…everything was beginning to turn blurry and fade. And yet if she was fading…she still had one thing left to ask.

"I…I know I'm just a dying lab rat and I probably don't deserve pity or whatever thing it is in you that is letting me live…but …I need to know…who are you?...what are you?"

The man paused in his tracks. He'd been about to prep the shuttle for entering the Earth's atmosphere. He turned to look at the young girl beside him and his icy blue eyes set into her own piercing her deeper than the knife that had been thrown into her back earlier.

He struck a powerful figure as he sat straight backed and proud. What with the way he sat in his seat the girl could almost imagine him as a king on his throne, strong, wise, benevolent towards his kingdom and allies, and devastating to his enemies. And the image only intensified as he spoke to her in quiet but absolute resoluteness.

"Who I am doesn't matter at the moment. However…what am I?...I am someone like you"