Happy Thanksgiving, y'all! Brushing the dust off of this thing.

Not a lot to say here, really. I took the break I needed and I'm doing much better now, and ready to get this back on track. I'll have more notes at the end, but for now I'll let you guys read.

Kateri's eyes flicked open as the bus she rode slowed to a stop. Glancing at the number that flashed on the cheap LED above where the driver sat, she tugged her headphones free and stood, making her way to the front of the bus.

Shouldering her backpack, she tugged up the hood of her jacket and slipped off of the bus, blending into the crowds easily. She walked quickly through the foot traffic, making her way up to the booth. Digging in her pocket, she handed over a passport and the matching ID before tugging back the hood.

"You are Melina Perez?" the woman asked, and she threw up a mask of false confusion.

"Que? No comprende."

The woman sighed, clearly at her wits end with people who didn't seem to speak English. Calling over her shoulder, she waved over a tall, heavy set man with salt and pepper hair and friendly eyes.

He spoke to her softly and clearly, and Kateri was able to understand it well enough and bullshit her way through the conversation to feign ignorance. She signed a couple of papers with her left hand in a barely legible signature, thanking him as she took her paperwork and headed off, keeping her head low to avoid cameras.

Ducking into the restroom, she quickly locked herself into the handicap stall, yanking off her hoodie and pulling out the brown leather jacket she'd bought when she'd gone back to Arizona the last time, removing the brown contacts from her eyes a moment later. She also pulled a white t-shirt over her gray tank top, then quickly wound her hair into a loose bun, shoving most of it under a beanie but letting the ends and her bangs stick out, giving the illusion of having a pixie cut. Next, she clipped a fake septum ring to her nose and quickly put on a temporary tattoo on the side of her neck, trailing under her shirt, rubbing at it slightly to make it look faded and smeared on some dark red lipstick she'd stolen from a kiosk. Last of all, she slid on a pair of round sunglasses she'd just stolen from a gift shop, similar to those propped on the head on Nicole Olivera's ID picture.

Shoving her previous clothes back into her backpack, she slid out of the restroom, walking quickly through the second lobby and out the doors, now on United States soil.

Though going through customs was a hassle, she also knew that it was a less likely place she'd be looked for. The best way to travel discreetly, she'd learned, was to travel legally. Or what appeared legally, anyways. Most expect people like her to try and sneak through the back door and are too busy looking there to watch as she marches out the front.

She quickly grabbed a cab and had it take her to the nearest mall. Rotating aliases required a bit more inventory than she had to look the part, so she needed to grab a few ensembles to pass as a few of them. Hopefully she could find a halfway decent brown wig, as well, since two of them had shoulder length brown hair that would be impossible to replicate otherwise.

Not for the first time, she was incredibly thankful Ema had done some tinkering to her checking account, so every transaction rerouted itself at least three times, so if someone checked her account, they looked like they could have come from anywhere. This had caused more than a few issues a couple years ago when she first did it, but after making a few arrangements to have it set up like a business account, she was no longer having to deal with it being frozen from what looked like multiple attempts at fraud.

The irony was also not lost on her that shopping trips like this only ever happened when it was job related. A humorless smile crossed her face as she flipped through a clothing rack, looking for some kind of floral print that Jami Tyson would wear, though she'd need to get ahold of some prosthetics for this one before she could use it for the sharp cheekbones.

An hour and a half and four sets of clothing later, Kateri was back on the move, having changed again into a flowy navy skirt and gray blouse for Desiree Montgomery, brown contacts back in and a thick lilac headband on top of a brown wig she'd managed to find. It wasn't the best quality so she used the headband to hide the edges, but it was passable enough otherwise.

Now she was headed to the airport, catching another cab outside the mall.

It was a forty minute drive, so she used the time to try and develop a plan.

The address she'd been given was in Sacramento. Jessup had originated in California, and Sacramento was where it's headquarters were. The first building they'd broken into to steal the drives had simply been the primary place Kateri worked, the one Elrich ran. She knew there were four heads to the organization, Elrich being one of them, and each one ran a different office. The one she was going to was run by Abijah Jessup. The man had come here from Jordan many years ago, starting his company as one of biomedical science, on of many working towards cures for cancer and other countless diseases. After the first Nanite Event, however, he began to see profit in learning to control the EVOs.

Kateri had dug into Jessup's past as much as she could without bringing attention to it. Abijah's true motivations had only come into the light after the drives were stolen and she could pick through the program's origins. It had actually began only a couple months after the initial spread of the nanites, but only gained real holding in the past two years as research and testing began to finally have viable results. Originally, he'd wanted to place her father on the team to make it work, since Yiska had been a brilliant biochemist and understood the body better than many in the organization. But he'd refused.

Or tried to.

That was about the time she'd gotten involved. At the time, she hadn't know anything about this. As far as she knew, her parents worked for good people who wanted to help others, as naïve eleven year olds should.

When she'd first been brought in, it had just been a mess of confusion. She had no idea what was going on, only that something was very wrong. She'd always been told she was a very perceptive child, and the moment two men with badges sporting Jessup's yellow logo had arrived to get her from school instead of her parents, she knew something bad had happened.

In the very beginning, she was told a web of lies that she believed a little too easily. Her parents had gotten into serious trouble, and it was solely up to her to help them. She could either start working for Jessup, or she could join her parents.

When talking to an eleven year old, one would think their immediate answer would just be to go with their parents. Every kid thought their parents could protect them from anything. But she knew that they were, wherever they were, because something had happened. Not very specific or useful, really, but it was enough for her to know she'd be better off trying to get them out than go with them. So, though she was terrified, she agreed.

The first couple months weren't the worst, honestly. She was given a bland, white room with a bed, a dresser, and a desk with a lamp. She was put through a rough approximation of schooling the next few years, but only the basics and more rigorous. She got an online GED by the time she was fourteen, not long before she started field work.

If she wasn't being tutored, she was training. Always training. She was kept on a strict schedule. Eight hours of sleep, five of tutoring, ten of training with three twenty minute breaks for meals a day. Rinse, repeat for three years, until she could drop a fully armed, three hundred pound man in under ten seconds at fourteen.

Her first assignments weren't anything special. Not even the one that led to her getting tortured. That gang mission has simple been a reconnaissance mission as many of her first ones were, trying to find sources of leaked information. Like any big company, Jessup was full of moles, and for a while, it was her job to seek them out and confirm them, before someone else got a target mission for them.

That one had been much the same, a sloppy mistake leading to the capture torture giving her a painful lesson she never forgot and heeded well.

She was fifteen, almost sixteen when she was the one receiving the target mission.

Garrett Ortega, a man who worked as a contractor for Jessup from time to time selling them bulk supplies for various chemicals or whatever else they needed that couldn't be legally obtained. Apparently Ortega had been keeping well organized tabs on Jessup as well as a few other major clients of his, with plans in the works to overthrow them once they started to gain profit from whatever it was they were doing with the things he sold them. Not that Kateri had known any of that until much later. Ortega was smart, he kept careful record of what he sold to them and how much of it he did and was able to deduce a few of the final products and had just been waiting for them to be developed before striking. Then, swoop in and steal the goods before selling them himself.

That is, until Kateri had arrived and put an arrow through his neck.

She remembered it all too clearly. She'd missed three previous chances to take the shot because her hands were shaking too badly. She was afraid she'd miss and get caught and tortured again. She didn't want to kill someone, but then again, no one ever did.

But this man was a criminal. Someone who's killed civilians without batting an eye just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone who had killed his own men before, if he suspected even an ounce of disloyalty. Someone who'd killed and stolen and hurt so many people over menial things. He was a bad man.

She had to remind herself of this for her hands to steady long enough to take the shot.

She still had nightmares about it to this day. Months later, she'd found out he'd had a daughter, a girl named Maci. She was only eight at the time her father had been killed, and ended up living with her aunt. Kateri's certainty began to falter after that.

Before then, she had told herself she was doing more good than harm. These were awful people who only hurt others. The world was better off without people like them. A part of her knew that was still true, but it doesn't justify what she did in the slightest. It was selfish to think it was okay to take away someone else's parents for the sake of getting back her own.

Just over a year later, she was first given the mission for Rex.

She'd heard of the strange EVO boy who could cure other EVOs. Of course she had. Rex had half of what they wanted in the palm of his hands. He could obviously control the nanites to some degree if he could activate and deactivate them, but they wanted to know how far the control extended.

She hadn't know much of anything about the nanite project Jessup was working on. She'd been given very minimal information on it, and only deduced some things after learning their goals with Rex. They wanted to know how he controlled nanites, which means they wanted to know how to control them.

Her task was to try and get close to him, lure him away from Providence so he could be brought in. Jessup had managed to dig up some information out of Providence's old files on some kind of Omega nanite, something that enable Rex to have a deeper connection, and therefore control, with nanites. Jessup wanted to reverse engineer it to weaponize it.

They didn't actually want Rex for anything, just the nanite. He was innocent, and she didn't want to hurt him. No matter how many times she was given target missions, it didn't make taken someone's life any easier, regardless how how much more collected she became with each one. She didn't want to hurt people who didn't deserve it, and Rex didn't deserve it. He used his abilities to help people, and Kateri found it rather noble. He had the power to do many bad things in his hands, and no one could really stop him, but instead he chose to help others with it.

She thought it would be a simple mission, but the more she watched him, the more she didn't want to do anything to him, and the idea formed in her mind that she could possible get him to help her bring Jessup down.

She watched him from a distance for about six months before deciding to make a move. Elrich was getting antsy and she didn't want to push too much longer and get pulled off the mission entirely. She had more morals then about ninety percent of the other's like her. She wasn't technically a mercenary, but as she grew more effective at target missions and was given more, being one of the few who used a silent long distance weapon and excelled in stealth, she'd begun to think of herself as such. Someone who killed people for money.

Oh, she got paid. She averaged roughly eighty thousand per target, give or take how big of a target it was, and in a matter of months was being given them at least once a month. She'd gotten over two hundred thousand before for taking down one of the biggest moles for Jessup to date, a woman named Melanie Estevez, who was selling information on some of the most confidential projects in the entire company. Since Jessup also paid for her apartment in full(albeit at the price of it being bugged), nearly all of it went into savings or anonymously to charities, as well as a small thread connected to her parents house for things like taxes she she didn't really keep up with. She could probably retire by the time she was thirty five, honestly. She'd volunteered to 'sponsor', for lack of a better word, the expenses for all the victims who wished to return home after recovering at Providence and it had barely made a dent.

So, she had quite a bit of rainy day money saved, a bit of it invested in stocks for her pipedream future when she finally broke away, and while they did do well, she couldn't care either way. The money was less than nothing to her, knowing that most of it was blood money.

Kateri sighed and shook her head, resisting the urge to card a hand through her hair, something she couldn't do with the wig on. Actually, she wanted to attack her scalp with her nails since it was so ridiculously itchy, but she pushed it away. She had about four more false identities left, and only one of them had the brown hair that would require the wig.

Pulling out her phone, having switched the case as well for good measure to a spring green one with gold glitter, she checked the time. She was supposed to meet them in about fifty two hours, and she doubted she would be sleeping any of that time. She'd arrive in Sacramento in the early morning if she kept up her current pace, hopefully under Jessup's radar, but she doubted this with her current nanite situation, so she planned to stall until late the next day so she had time to formulate a little more of plan.

What exactly was her plan going to be? She had no intention of trying to do another massive breakout like she'd done before. Not only was Jessup expecting her and likely tracking her movements by now, but they'd also probably be prepared for foul play. Not to mention the fact she had no form of help with her. Even if Holiday tracked down Jessup's headquarters, which she had no doubt she would, she doubted she'd be kept there. Jessup was decently well known in the medical industry for the biomedical science they hid behind, so anyone with access to Google and passed the tenth grade could find it. She also was sure Providence wouldn't go near it, not only for that obvious fact, but also because it would only come back to her and they knew that.

There was no one coming for her.

After paying the cabbie, she stepped out and slipped into a gas station, just putting on her regular clothes. She'd spent about fourteen hours pretending to be five different people. She just wanted to be Kateri for a while.

She crossed the street before going into a coffee shop, a familiar head of brown hair raising at the jingle of the door as a pair of hazel brown eyes met hers.

"Hey, Kate!" Danny began with a grin. "Back in town for a bit?"

"Yeah, for a while." she replied for a forced smile. "I leave tomorrow, though, just passing through."

"Cool, well, nice to see you dropped by. Anything I can get you?" he asked.

"Ugh, a triple espresso." she replied with a grimace.

"Jeez, pulling an all nighter?" he asked with a crooked smile, clicking at the screen in front of him.

"Something like that. Business trip." she said. A mild term, but an accurate one.

"Really? You're eighteen and making business trips?" he asked, curious.

"Yeah. Got in way too deep with a big company and now I have the everloving pleasure of being at their beck and call." Maybe a bit too much bitterness in that one, but Danny didn't comment.

"Well, at least you've got your life figured out early. Makes thing easier in the long run." he commented before calling out her order to the girl, Sam, she's seen one before. The side of her hair that had been blond was now a dark, but vivid, purple.

"I wouldn't exactly say that." she murmured.

"So, um...not that it's any of my business, but how have things been going with you?" he asked, eyes flicking to her neck for a moment before settling back on her face. "You seem a little stressed."

"That's one way to put it." she laughed humorlessly. "I guess my job just asks a lot of me, and it can be hard to do everything when I'm the only one doing it."

"You some kind of secretary or something?"

"Not exactly." She replied, trying to think of a way to phrase her next words without giving anything away. "I basically do the dirty work, run the errand no one wants to." Accurate enough.

"Sounds rough."

"You have no idea."

They stood in companionable silence for a few minutes, her order coming up. She sipped at the too hot liquid, the burning on her tongue clearing her head a little.

"This...this may sound a little out of line," Danny began. "But...do you mind if I take you to dinner? As friends." he said quickly. "You just seem really weighed down right now, and I think you just need a friend. Even if that friend is a barista from a little coffee show you've met like four times."

The 'no' was already on the tip of her tongue before he even finished his sentence, but the genuine look in his eyes made it falter. Her hand flitted to her neck a half second before she remembered the familiar weight of the arrowhead necklace wasn't there.

The motion wasn't lost on Danny, ever perceptive as he was. "Sorry, I wasn't trying to rub in a breakup or something, I just-"

"No, it's fine." she cut him off. "It...it wasn't exactly a breakup, not like that. It's because of my job. I thought it would be better, I didn't want anyone to get hurt over everything they ask of me."

"Oh." Danny glanced down, unsure how to respond.

"You know what? I think I'll actually take you up on that." She broke the silence, surprised herself by the words that came from her mouth. "You're right, I could use a friend. Pretty sure I'm about to get a lot of hell, I could stand to loosen up."

Danny's eyes brightened. "I get off at six. I, uh, don't know where you live, or I'd pick you up…"

"It's fine, I have a few errands to run anyways, I can just come back here." she said. "Really, I appreciate it."

"It's no big deal, really. Glad I could cheer you up a little." he said.

"Thanks." she said. "I'm gonna run, though, got some things I have to-actually, do you think you could do me a favor?"

(*)

Kateri wasn't sure why she'd gone back, her eyes not even having glanced at the faded sign that still burned clear in her memory from her youth, reading Klance Ave. Even now, as she'd stared a hole in the door, she couldn't fathom why she would return here.

Despite that, she still pulled her keys from her pocket, sticking the slightly rusty one and jiggling it into the sticky lock before walking into her home.

Nothing had changed since the last time she'd come here. Nostalgia still clung to every surface possible, and dust lay in thick layers to everything besides the pictures on the walls.

Won't take nothin' but a memory from the house that built me…

The soles of her boots made almost no sound on the floor as she walked, dust muffling her steps, slight indents still on the floor from her last excursion here. She briefly recalled her mother lecturing her on the importance of keeping the house clean and before she even realized what she was doing, she had grabbed a broom and was sweeping.

Her 'errands' were composed entirely of grabbing the last couple of things she needed to fully pull off all of her aliases, leaving her backpack full and the zipper a bit difficult to close and swinging by the post office to get her weapons where she'd mailed them. She still had about five hours of down time, and cleaning her childhood home from top to bottom seemed as good as a pass time as any. If anything, it kept her distracted.

The old bristle broom left streaks in the dust on their first pass, but thirty minutes of sweeping later, every sweepable surface was clean, and she began to dust.

She had to switch the end of the duster four times from the amount that clung to it, but about two hours later, it actually looked like a place people might live. She'd even taken all the old bedspreads out to the backyard and beat them free of the dust on a tree before replacing them.

Despite the coffee she'd chugged earlier, weariness settled into her body like a winter coat that had been left in the rain. Not wanting to spend more time in her own head than she had to, Kateri set an alarm on her phone before curling up on top of her bed over the faded old coral reef comforter, not even bothering to grab the pillow that's cover was now wrapped around Bean's remains, falling asleep in seconds.

(*)

Kateri ducked into the coffee shop a few minutes before six, finding it surprisingly busy considering the time of day. She'd been woken by her alarm thirty minutes prior, jolting her from a shockingly dreamless sleep. She was better rested from it than she'd expected to be, and though she was still exhausted, she'd take the small victories she could get.

"Sorry." Danny spoke when she approached the counter. "The rush kicked in a little late, it might be a few minutes."

"It's fine, no hurry." she replied easily, stepping back and settling into one of the unoccupied tables. Many of them were occupied by college age people with their noses buried in some form of computer, phone or tablet.

She'd ultimately decided that having no plan going into Jessup was her best option. Any plan she could think of was useless, always running into something that she wouldn't be able to conquer on her own. Her best and, really only, option, was to take whatever she had coming for her.

Her hands automatically reached for the short length of worn paracord what was always in her pocket and she began to absently twist it together into a snake knot.

She then registered a voice speaking from behind the counter.

"...riously, just go dude, I can handle this. Don't keep her waiting." She glanced over to the the girl the the purple undercut shooing Danny away. Kateri noticed for the first time that the girl spoke with a moderate Southern accent.

"It's just dinner, Sam, not a date, stop smirking like that! I swear we're just friends!" he protested.

"Either way, don't make her wait. I'll take the heat with Brown, it's ultimately Morgan's shift you took. Go." She leaned over she bumped his with her hip to push him away from the counter as she greeted the next person in line.

"Thanks Sam, I owe you one." he said gratefully.

"Eh, I'd say half one one, but no worries." she replied.

Danny slipped to the back for a couple minutes, emerging without the blue apron he'd been wearing previously.

"Sorry about that. I don't usually work afternoons, but a co-worker had to babysit her little brother so I took the shift." Danny explained.

"It's fine. I'm pretty familiar with how real life can get in the way sometimes." Kateri replied easily. She glanced around the busy cafe. "Can she really keep up with all this herself?"

Danny nodded. "Nick comes in for the night shift in a couple hours, but when she actually wants to, Sam can be a one woman army. Not gonna lie, she can sometimes be a lazy worker, but if she puts her mind to it, she can literally be everywhere at once. She can handle it for a couple hours."

"I feel like there's a story behind that statement." Kateri commented as they exited the coffee shop.

"There is. Monday morning are, predictably, the busiest, and one day this girl Summer who was working here at the time, called in, so it was just her. Brown called me in, but I had a group session for school that ended at ten, so I was a little late, but when I showed up, she had somehow kept up with both the register, making orders and cleaning the tables pretty well through the rush. Like, on slower days, she's definitely the type to procrastinate everything, but when things really need to get done, she pulls through way better than anyone expects." he told her.

Kateri nodded as they stopped at Danny's car, an older blue Nissan that could probably use a decent car wash, but was otherwise pretty clean on the inside. He pulled open the passenger door from her, taking her backpack. She ducked in and he shut the door, dropping her bag in the backseat.

"So, there's this little diner over on Solangelo, Dee's?" Danny began after slipping into the driver's seat. She caught a glance at the Minecraft keychain dangling from his keys.

"Yeah, I know where you're talking about. Sounds good." she replied.

"Cool. You ready?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

The car hummed to life, and they pulled away from the curb.

This chapter is super boring and filler-y and I don't like it, but I've gone back and messed with it so many times I just gave up. Honestly, the next couple chapters are kinda boring and depressing, and I'm sorry about that. Lol, I vanish for a few months and come back with this, I am the embodiment of class. This section of the story was boring as hell to write, so I know it's boring to read, but I tried to keep it as realistically brief as I could.

Also, a note on this story in general. I've honestly lost my spark with it. I still have my outline for it, and I love the characters and the universe I've created, and I will be finishing it(I've gotten this far, I won't abandon it now), but I think this is going to be my last big project for a long time. I have a couple old stories I want to go back and edit and just clean up in general(as well as a couple I still want to finish), and I switch fandoms too quickly to see out long projects like this, and it reflects in the stories. You can tell exactly where I start getting bored with it, and I don't like that. This chapter, for example, is not a good example of the writing I know I can produce. I know for a fact I can do better than this chapter, but I have no inspiration for it. The first half of this story was written within two months, and now it seems to take me that long to turn out one or two chapters.

But my point, is I'm honestly ready to see this story end. I made my plot pretty complex with a lot of characters, to the point it confuses me sometimes, and it can be exhausting to write because I have so much to keep track of. Looking back, there are a lot of things I would have(and should have) done differently for the sake of the flow of the story, because it's become incredibly choppy.

Sorry, I'm rambling. This has been knocking around my head for a long time, and I could go on and on.

So yeah, if you're worried about this getting discontinued, don't worry, it's not. I don't like leaving loose ends, so it will get finished.

I do have plans to put up the next chapter soon, I'm working on this story as much as my inspiration will let me in an attempt to finish it.

Thank you all so much for your patience and for those who have stuck with this story for so long. I think this all started a little over four years ago, and to think that some of you are still here blows my mind, and I couldn't be more thankful.