Ut incepit fidelis, sic permanet

Five years. No time at all, and an eternity all rolled into one. As Marisa climbed up onto the balcony and into her apartment, she still felt the pang that drove her, consumed her. It was here in this place that she had admitted her love for her friend, here that she had nearly died, cut down by a cowardly hunter who thought she was Cally, and it was here she had discovered to her surprise that Cally had left to her in a will long forgotten.

It was somehow fitting then that it had been here that her desire to avenge her friend's death had taken shape, and Marisa began along the path her friend had followed to her death. So much of their history in the last few weeks before Cally's death was bound up here that the symbolism was overwhelming, and a focus to keep Marisa dedicated to the task she had set herself.

She was going to hunt Cally's killer, and kill him.

That was the plan, at least. She had discovered that putting it into practice was another matter entirely. As she went into the bedroom and began stripping the sparse pieces of armor she wore from her sweat-slick skin, her mind wandered back, as it always did, into her memories of the aftermath of Cally's death.

It had been hard at first for her to be motivated to do anything. Her mind kept returning to watching the alien return to his ship, the alien that had saved her life, and seeing him place his trophy on the wall. "Honored prey" they had considered her friend, but the honor seemed hollow to Marisa, considering the qualifications for the title seemed to be being hunted down and killed by some psychopathic alien race.

For someone like Marisa, who had led her entire life to that point with a carefree "live and let live" attitude, the shock to her psyche of her friend's death had almost driven her to insanity. For the first time in her life, she felt rage – not anger, but that all-consuming blood-red haze of pure rage and a desire to tear another living creature to pieces with her bare hands.

She had wanted to, then and there, but it had laughed at her. The double hammer blow of seeing that the creature did not think of her as even a remote threat had slammed her into despair, and she had run weeping from its ship, after telling it that she would kill it. Its mocking last words rang in her ears with every heavy footstep on her way home.

"Not yet."

The same words it had told Cally for over two decades. And when "Not yet" became "You're ready"? It had killed her.

Some honor.

Blindly in the night, she had stumbled back to Cally's apartment, though she could never recall why she had gone there. Her last tangible reminders of her friend and love were the apartment and the alien metal mask she had carried from the hunter's ship, the mask Cally had worn in battles, whose eyeshields she would have looked through and saw her death approaching. She had collapsed in the living room, sobs wracking her body for long hours before exhaustion finally overcame her and she slept.

It had taken her a week to collect her senses enough to do more than exist, numbly doing mundane things. She had scrubbed the bathroom, where she had almost died herself, until it was spotless. She couldn't bring herself to enter the bedroom though. The very idea of it would bring the wave of despair at her loss crashing down on her once more. In a real sense, for that week she was insane with grief, and it took the oddest thing to snap her out of the state she had reached.

The TV had been nothing more than background noise, hardly noticeable babble from talking heads inanely blathering on about nothing of importance. One night however, just as she was reaching to turn it off, a news report flashed up that brought her back to earth. She recognized the photograph on the screen without needing the caption below to tell her who it was. The face of the reporter that had hounded Cally stared out, and as Marisa had thumbed the volume of the remote control up, she found out the woman had been committed to a psych institution.

Marisa thought about the time she had met the reporter, the crazed venom in her voice as she had threatened to expose Cally, and could well believe she had cracked. The shock came with the mention of Cally as being a suspect in the mass murder of organized crime figures in the city, which had culminated in the "terrorist destruction" of the bunker the mob bosses had tried to use as a trap to catch Cally. The news item implied that the committal of the reporter and the destruction of the building were connected.

Marisa didn't know the details of that dark night, when predators and Cally had spread through the mob bunker wreaking mayhem and death, but she knew the connection was there. Seeing the reporter mentioned in the same article as Cally offended her sensibilities – Cally had tried to do good, to fight the scourge of the mob bosses, and the reporter was just a crazy looking for a scoop, regardless of who she hurt or destroyed in the process. Marisa knew there was no way she could set the record straight, and with her friend now dead there would be no way of clearing her name from the taint of suspicion.

To Marisa, Cally had died for nothing. And resolve was born. She remembered her promise to Cally's killer, and how Cally had become involved with the aliens to begin with. It took another day for the idea she formed that night, watching the news, to consolidate itself into an icy ball of purpose in Marisa's heart, and that night she began to put her idea into action.

Even so, it had taken another four months before the plan came to fruition. Piecing together what little she knew of the aliens, she had rigged a signal of sorts on the apartment balcony railings, heaters set to warn the railings imperceptibly in the shape of a stylized -TT-, the mark Cally's killer had given her. She knew that the aliens regularly came to earth to hunt humans, "pyode amedha" as the aliens called them – soft meat. She took a chance that they, attuned as they were to heat sensitivity, would see the mark, and curiosity get the better of them, that they come investigate.

Come they did.

-

-

The years had not been kind to Kylie McCullough either. Once a rising star in the news business, now she was ridiculed. She had been released from treatment after four years, but everyone "knew" she had gone off the deep end, talking about aliens and attacks and an interstellar drug war. Not even the police had taken her story seriously, although they were happy to pin the blame for the disaster at the bunker on the mysterious "bitch in black". They refused to acknowledge the scant evidence collected from the site of the pitched battle was more supportive of the reporter's version than not.

It hadn't been long after her release from the institution that she was contacted by someone who had taken her accounts of that night very seriously indeed though.

At first, she thought the mysterious stranger in the gray suit was a set-up, either an attempt by the shrinks to see if she was unstable and have an excuse to lock her up again, or by her ex-colleagues trying to humiliate her with some upcoming special - "When reporters go batshit" or something. That lasted all of five minutes during their first meeting, when he had pulled a small monitor out of his pocket and showed her tape that could only have come from inside the bunker during the night her world collapsed around her.

Once she had recovered from her shock, he patiently explained that he represented the company that had originally designed the data center the bunker had been intended to serve as, and that all the surveillance systems had been connected up to feed through to a main center. They had seen everything - digitally transmitted, recorded, archived, and now in safe hands. Theirs. She didn't think much of the claim about the hands being safe.

Even less when the man in gray had commented that the more compromising footage of Kylie's involvement in the whole affair might have to be turned over to the proper authorities. She had argued against it, but she knew that it was pointless. It wouldn't take much for the authorities to latch onto the proof the man in gray could provide them and use her as a convenient scapegoat, transferring the blame from the bitch in black to her.

When the man in gray had made his proposal though, all thoughts of not co-operating, or co-operating under the threat of the taps being released vanished from her mind. He had done his research well, the tapes were just to get her attention but he knew exactly how to get her to come on board the mysterious project he talked of – he offered her the bitch in black!

Even the news of how they planned to lure the human hunter into their traps couldn't shake Kylie's fevered lust for revenge. Over the course of four years locked away, her hatred for Cally had festered and grown, Kylie's precariously delusional state magnifying the hunter into being the cause of all her woes. So the news that the man in gray claimed to have an alien, like the black ones she had seen over those fateful days, as bait, the knowledge of how lethal the creature was, elicited no more response than a raised eyebrow.

Before he had finished outlining the plans for the project, she would have signed on for anything, agreed to anything, all for one chance at her revenge. She left the country in a private jet with him that very evening, and as they crossed the Pacific ocean she was staring through the window, already playing over and over in her mind just what she would do when she had the bitch in black in her clutches finally.

Kylie would make her pay dearly for all that had happened.

For the next year, Kylie was the ramrod behind the project. It was her experiences, albeit limited, that guided construction of the testing areas, the breeding chambers, and the defenses that were both to contain the black aliens within the project compound, and to take on the hunters if, no when, they came. She had seen the bunker, and how easily it had fallen, and meticulous debriefing of the events of that night, etched indelibly in her memory through trauma, gave the engineers assigned to the construction of the compound insights on ways to counter the hunter's techniques.

Kylie also chose the first host to birth the new generation of aliens for the project they had in mind for her, and in that choice lay the beginnings of her revenge. He had kicked and screamed as they had strapped him to a bench, begging she remember their relationship before, for his life. She had watched without emotion as the alien facehugger had emerged from its egg and sprung to clamp over the terrified bearded face of its victim, turning a deaf ear to his pleas just before he was silenced by the leathery tube snaking down his throat to spare him.

To her mind, he had been the first one to betray her, to testify against her in the committal proceedings the most damningly. He had been the first to recognize her madness, and he was its first victim. She had been there again, watching over monitors, as he had convulsed during the birth of his child, her child. A corner of her mind found it ironic that someone who had been a cameraman most of his adult life died on television, after a fashion.

Lost in the depths of insanity, trapped within her own mania and paranoia, she exulted at the thought her revenge was starting. The company the gray man represented treated her well, but she knew they saw her simply as a tool. She didn't care, because she had her own plans, and as far as she was concerned, they were, in return, a tool for her. The weapon she would use.

-

-

It came in the night, as it always did, relying on stealth and Marisa's exhausted sleep to avoid detection. It entered through the balcony doors, a low growl of amusement coming softly from within as it stepped over the telltale threads Marisa had placed across the doorway that would tell the human someone had been there when she woke. It looked briefly at the sleeping form, tossing fitfully in her sleep on the couch, and considered the words of the trainer it had overheard from its hiding place earlier.

After long minutes, it turned and left the way it had come, avoiding the telltales once more, before shimmering into the night air like a ghost, the only trace left behind the breathy voice of a female human, crackled with slight static.

"Not yet."