Ivy Wheeler kicks the dirt and leaves as the walks through the barely lit back alleys of San Francisco. Sometimes she hits a wet spot from the rain or blood or beer or something else and is glad that her boots are black leather and rubber. She could have just transported back to her apartment, but she prefers the walk. She usually loves walking with Anthony, but tonight he is just droning on and on about nothing. A gray cat crosses their path and she reaches down to pet the animal, it hisses and tries to bite her so she jumps out of its way. Anthony laughs and they keep going. She hopes that Crawford won't be there when she gets home, he rarely is since he started working in New Dresden. She used to be very in love with him too, but his work was more important. Because she was a menial Starfleet science officer and he was a professor, if you want the glamor and prestige you have to make the sacrifices. So she brings home her various friends from work and fucks them in his own bed. She doesn't change the sheets either.
Ivy hates walking by old dumpsters and dark corridors. It was amazing how much that part of the city was unchanged from the times of the eugenics wars, how unsanitary everything was. Anthony's voice buzzes on and on about quantum singularities and this and that, but warp theory was not her area of study. She was a botanist through and through, but by this time, even discussing carnivorous plants would bore her to tears. As they are passing an old abandoned building, Ivy feels herself being tackled. There are three strange men with phasers and knives and black cotton masks. She grab Anthony who tries to run away and they drag the two of them into the building.
One of the men with a stench of opium and sweat gives Ivy a sharp kick to the back of the head and she slips out of consciousness. She awakens groggy with her clothes cut off and her wrists tied to a metal pipe. The room is dimly lit from the lights outside, across the floor Anthony is screaming in a puddle of blood. One of the hooded figures takes out a knife from a holster at his waist and runs the blade against the intended victims cocoa colored skin and he cries out. "Please don't hurt me!" he begs "Please!" and the hooded figure just shoves the blade in between his ribs. He hisses and cries as he feels metal sinking into his lung. He thrashes around and still tries to get to his feet. The other two men hold him as the knife man removes the blade and jabs it into the Anthony's abdomen, right under his sternum. The hooded figure pulls the blade down toward the victims groin as they all laugh wildly. Anthony just cries out and gurgles blood. Sick and red and sweet and metallic, frothing and bubbling from his nose and lips. His intestines spill out into the floor and his eyes move down to them. He manages to scratch out one last word. "Don't..."
They turn toward where Ivy is, naked and freezing. Knife man runs the blade up her inner thigh and she kicks his hand. "You cunt!" his nondescript voice rings out. "You're going to pay for that! Hold her head!" The other two men held her head still while knife man grinned grotesquely from behind black fabric. "How do you like being fucked with steel, girly?". He traces around her eye teasingly with the blade and she quivers and tries hard to be strong, tries hard not to cry. Suddenly he jabs the blade into her eye all the way to the back of the socket. Blood spurts and it takes her a few seconds to even feel it. She screams out in pain and tries to break free. He scrapes the remnants of the eye out and flings it to the floor. Ivy's optic nerve dangles out and the can hardly breathe from the shock. She looses consciousness to the feeling of the men pushing against the insides of her legs. She does care at this point and just hopes for death.
Lennox wakes up in pitch darkness, his vision immediately adjusts to the conditions and he can see that he is in a storage room. His short, dark hair unusually disheveled and the last thing that he can remember is walking to the morgue with a body. He feels strange, the android equivalent of grogginess and a sort of electric stinging in his temples. He stands up and walks into the blinding hallway as he taps his com badge. "Lennox to Dr. Stein, this may seem like a strange question, but did I deliver that body?"
"Yes" the knowing, serene voice answers back, praying that he doesn't look to far into the incident. "Is everything alright there, Mr. Lennox?"
"I do not know, I have one hour, ten minutes, twenty three point five seconds missing from my memory. Perhaps I just blacked out. I will run a diagnostic promptly."
The willowy, thin android stands by the wall for a moment trying to orient himself. His pale skin and paler blue eyes are drowned by the fluorescent lighting. His face looks gaunt and hollow, shadows over-accentuation his Nordic features. He turns to walk to the nurses station when a stretcher and its accompanying team of wolves whirs by him with a fresh patient. "We need you in trauma room 6, doctor!" a womans voice rings out. Lennox follows an Andorian nurse into the room and begins to assess the patient. Its a young woman, maybe twenty years old. She is human, of African descent, with curly black hair tied behind her head and makeup and blood smeared across her face. She is naked an bleeding. Her left breast has been severed, leaving a gaping, fatty crater in her chest. Her eye has been inoculated and and there is a large wound to the back of her head, an apparent skull fracture. There are numerous other lacerations, contusions and other signs of mutilation across her body. Sexual assault is also evident, but this woman wasn't just assaulted, she was tortured. "Who found her?" the android asks as he begins to treat her for shock. "Security patrol" a medic answers with a sick smirk "Some abandoned building, they also found a fresh corpse."
"Nurse, this woman needs a blood transfusion. Dr. Katz, Nurse Tala, start working on those wounds." The android speaks like a general, commanding his troops, leading them into battle. The victims is kept comatose during the procedures to save her life and bodily integrity. The remaining eye is motionless behind its fleshy covering, things are hit and miss for a while and she doesn't notice it. Her vital signs are stable and fluttering, rabid wings through smoke and dust. But the doctors keep her living, despite the small fact that if most of them were in her position, suicide would be a real option. But the beauty of implied consent is that the patient has no say. So they piece her head back together like an ugly, bony puzzle and heal the masses of twisted wounds across her body. A nurse swabs her for semen or blood or any other kind of identifying material from the assailants.