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Chapter Text

Chapter 1

A Roomful of Shadows

The JCJensen Space Scraper jutted ominously into the grey, violent sky. Flashes of lightning gave the only indication that the massive corporate structure was still there under the oppressive cloud cover. 

Situated in one of the hundreds of minor meeting rooms, Tessa James Elliot, Vice President of Acquisitions and Non-Standard Item Retrieval and Director of Unlisted Research and Development (both departments that didn’t officially exist), stood in the back of the small meeting space. She was dressed in a very simple black body suit, crammed to overflowing with some of the most advanced Stealth Tech the company had developed.

In a few moments, holograms representing some of the most powerful men and women on Earth and her Colonies would appear in a room that was used to plan office pizza parties, not globe-shaking conspiracies. 

No one in attendance would have it any other way. 

Tessa gave a side glance to the only other member in the room. Her backup was a young man with long, messy blond hair and a face that seemed far too relaxed given the company about to arrive. 

“Security protocols in place, are they, Thad?” The woman asked, brushing her long, tightly braided black ponytail off her shoulder. 

The young man gave a thumbs up as he finished chewing on his vending machine burrito. 

“Yup! So long as everyone else obeys the security protocols I had put in place, the only way something here doesn’t get erased is if you write it down.” He took a long swig of the Diet Coke that sat next to him. “And who uses pen and paper nowadays anyway?” 

Tessa nodded. 

“Lovely. If things go as I expect, we’ll be quite sloshed at your sister’s place tonight.” 

The lights in the room changed from normal white fluorescent to a deep and foreboding red and then to nothing at all. The only illumination came from the overhead hologram projector, casting the room in an icy blue. 

Soon, a half dozen black silhouettes appeared — board members of MegaCorperation, spymasters, and the last military brass Earth still had to offer appeared in the seats around the modest table. They were without form or depth; the only way to tell the difference between them was their outline and the white blobs that represented their eyes. 

Tessa said nothing, simply pulling up spreadsheets and Excel files on her laptop, waiting to be acknowledged. 

“I do believe we’re all here?” Madam Frumptlebucket asked the gathered dignitaries. 

A subtle nod from a man sitting to Tessa’s immediate left indicated her time to begin.

“Cheers for making the time, all of you. I know how dreadfully packed your calendars must be — wouldn’t waste it without good reason.” She tapped a few keys on her laptop, bringing up a bevy of reports that would be ignored until each member's data specialists could comb through them first.

“We found asset CYN. She’s currently in the Australian Hot Zone. I want authorization to send a team.”

Several notifications indicating they had muted their connection flashed over the heads of several of the silhouettes.

One of the members, a general of the Multi-Planet Federation, addressed Tessa first. 

“How accurate is your intel?”

“Within two hours. First-hand verified by a trusted asset.”

“Why the AU hot zone?”

Tessa snorted to herself. 

“Nostalgia, I reckon. I’ll know more once she’s properly in hand.”

“How soon can you get the Operation together?” Another shadow asked. Female. A diplomate of the Total American Polarity, the last non-Corporate Super Power left in the world. 

Tessa sent multiple authorizations and expectations to the various board members. Permissions to forgo proper flight plans, skip visa requirements, and have authorities ignore certain areas of Air-Space at certain times. 

“CYN’s likely to remain in position for the next ninety-six hours. We can have boots down in forty-eight and control established inside seventy-two.”

A man sitting to her immediate left tapped a pen against the table. 

“Your operations are normally much quicker. Why the lag?”

Tessa nodded once and sent a lightly redacted personal file to the figureheads.

“We have a critical asset that we are currently onboarding. After they’re secure and authorization is given, we’ll be wheels up.”

Another man wearing weedy-looking glasses shifted forward to speak when Madam Frumptlebucket interrupted his question. Even as a formless shadow, his annoyance was evident. 

“Based on the information we have received, I’m calling for an up and down vote. Go or No Go on the operation?”

There wasn’t any hesitation. Green lights hovered over each member.

“Very well. We look forward to your next report.”

One by one, the silhouettes disappeared. Leaving only the man to Tessa's left. 

“I’m assuming you're going to send a Mobile Task Force?”

“Yes, sir, MTF Clean-up Crew. They’re among our best. As previously stated, I’m also including an outside contractor to assist.”

“The hacker you’ve been following for the last year. Very impressive. You’re sure her father won’t be a problem? He does run a Double-A.”

Tessa narrowed her eyes as she thought about how best to answer. 

“They won’t be a problem.”

“Brilliant. In any case, do take care, won’t you? Your mum would have my head if you went and got yourself killed.”

“Duty Onto Death, Father.”

“Indeed. Good luck”.

The link cut, leaving the woman in darkness before the lights came back on, blinding her for a few moments. She gathered up her materials and turned to leave, nodding to Thad.

“That went just about as well as could be expected.” He said, working on deleting any information that could be traced back to this moment.

Tessa said nothing as she walked out of the room, plans, contingencies, and fallbacks already forming in her head. She hadn’t taken more than a few steps into the hallway when a shadow shifted. A figure emerged into the dim light spilling from the small meeting room, almost 6 feet tall, lithe, and dangerous. Her skin was pale to the point of almost being translucent. Pitch black veins crisscrossed the exposed flesh, pulsing slowly in time with her heartbeat. Her hair was the color of tarnished silver, pulled up into twin pig tails.

The figure wore a simple suit: a black blazer over a red button-up shirt blended into a modest matching black pleated skirt. Her thigh-high soft leather boots didn’t make a sound as she walked across the hallway, each step deliberate and measured. 

Thad had just fished a cigarette from his jeans pocket when he noticed their companion, yelping in surprise and almost dropping the unlit smoke. 

Tessa simply smiled and nodded in her direction.

The new woman nodded her head; her yellow eyes glowed dimly. She smirked at the man, sharp fangs glistening in her mouth. 

“Boss. Thad.” Her voice was deep and rhythmic.

“Jesus, J. We ought to put a bell on you,” Thad muttered, lighting his cig. J simply winked at him. 

“Gather your team, J. We have an op.” 

“Already notified.”

Tessa raised an eyebrow at the declaration. 

“How–”

“You walked into a random office space with files marked “Top Secret” and “Confidential”. She leaned in close to Tessa, a playful smile on her lips. “Call it an educated guess”.

Thad snorted as he walked past the two women. 

“You never smiled at me like that when we were dating.”

J walked up beside the male and lightly shoulder checked him, almost knocking him into the wall.

“She’s cuter than you.”

“Still your boss J-Bird”

“A girl can dream.”

Tessa rolled her eyes as the trio made their way to the banks of elevators, J poking her head in before quickly stepping aside and letting her two mortal companions enter first. 

Thad opened up his phone as he started receiving texts again, now that the security field was lifted. 

“V’s with my sister, surprise surprise.”

Tessa frowned at the news.

“I thought she and Lizzy had broken up after–”

“They should have,” both J and Thad answered.  J huffed and turned to her ex.

“I’m sorry. I should have kept a tighter leash on her.”

Thad shook his head.

“She’s a grown ass woman. She can make her own decisions. Besides, they’re just hanging out, ” he said the last words with finger quotes. He kept reading, and his mood became less sour.

“Ok, not bad, N is with them at least.”

Tessa clapped her hands at the news.

“Excellent! Then everyone will be there to not only get our mission brief, but to get rip-roaring drunk as well.”

“You mean you’ll get drunk while those of us with inhuman metabolisms sit around and mourn our inability to develop hangovers?”

“Exactly, J-Bird. Get tossed tonight, for tomorrow we may die!”

Chapter Text

Chapter 2

Shock to the System

Ursula “Uzi” Marie Doorman practically vibrated with excitement as she stepped into her rundown studio apartment.

It was bare bones, filled with more torn-apart electronics than working furniture. The only decor was a few band and movie posters strategically hung to hide exposed pipes and holes in the “smoker’s beige” colored walls. 

A stove sagging under a pile of takeaway containers and fast food bags bore a yellowed REPAIR NEEDED tag that fluttered every time the fridge coughed. The apartment’s sole table groaned under a clutter of beer bottles, overdue bills, and eviction notices. One leg had been replaced with a duct-taped baseball bat that somehow held it all together.

She quickly ditched her “Good Buy!” electronics shop uniform, khaki pants, and bra, exchanging them for an oversized “Depech Mood” band shirt and black panties. She took the hair tie out, letting her short purple hair fall over her shoulders. Then she hopped onto her worn-down twin bed and opened her laptop with reverence normally reserved for Holy Text. Or a Burrito from “MAMA SANS BURRITO SHOP!” .

Her lungs froze mid-inhale when she saw the screen:

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE
RUN FUK_THECORPOS.EXE?
YES/NO

With sheer willpower, Uzi pulled her hand back from the mouse, rolled off her bed, and practically sprinted the 4 feet to her desktop. She entered her 27-character password with dual no-trust authentication and pressed her thumb against the bioscanner embedded on the keyboard.

Soon, the screen was covered with real-time surveillance footage: pictures of the hallway outside her room, the main lobby of the apartment building, footage of nearby Achology police and corporate security stations, and rooftop surveillance. Her computer screen also showed police and corporate security scanners, and data packet exchanges with the nearby nodes.

With a command prompt and a mouse click, she activated various security measures, both physical and digital. A clear plastic window covering a large, dangerous red button was flipped up on the wall next to the only window in the apartment.

She ran detailed facial recognition software on her security cameras, scanning the handful of people still lurking at this hour. Members of local gangs — “The Crazy 108,” “Los LOCA,” and “The Judged” — were in their usual hangout spots. Except for the normal drug-related twitching or the glares given to the run-down security drones that patrolled the area, none of them seemed to be on edge. This was good. If paranoid tweakers weren’t worried about a crackdown, then she shouldn’t be either.

She opened her banking app and sighed at seeing the abysmally small number on her main checking account. She then ensured that the payments to the local ‘bangers had gone out on time.

It wasn’t much, more of a token than anything. The low-level street thugs she dealt with didn’t understand the value of the digital information she brought them, and so demanded at least a pittance to keep up appearances. Their bosses, on the other hand, the Cartel and Mafia orgs that were the power behind the trash-laden scenes, did understand the value a Hacker like Uzi brought to their organizations. 

So long as she was useful, she was safe from the thugs that roamed this level of the Achology. 

They might be drug-addled, violent psychopaths, but even the most strung-out ganger knew the value of being on the good side of a hacker and keeping their bosses happy.

She took one more glance at her low account balance and closed out of the banking app. Soon it wouldn’t matter. Soon, she’d have her validation and proof she could bring back to her dad that she had been right all along. Maybe then she could shut out the screams whenever she went to sleep. Maybe she could stop seeing their faces when she closed her eyes.

After triple-checking that all of her security was in place, Uzi sat down on her bed as if she were attending a worship service. Slowly, reverently, she touched her laptop, placed the cursor over “YES,” and hit enter. 

A loading bar appeared, and after 30 seconds of nothing exploding, Uzi let go of the breath she had been holding. Now came the hard part. Waiting for the 72-minute execution time. 

Uzi was walking toward the fridge to find an unexpired SOYBOY ! Meal when her desktop booped at her. 

She rushed to the computer even as nervous bile rose in her throat. She pored through the security alerts and discovered the notification was caused by an unmarked Gunship breaking through Archology Airspace. She calmed down as her flight data and predictive algorithms assured her it was most likely some Shadow Runners coming in from the Alberta Wasteland, heading toward the CORPO Towers. 

Uzi was halfway to forgetting it when—another ping sounded from the frankensite computer. 

Then another. 

Her blood turned to coolant as she checked her camera feeds. Static, black screens and OFFLINE appeared over most of them.

She almost flew to her laptop. The screen was pitch black except for a white window displaying blood-red text.

 

JCJENSEN INTRUSION RESPONSE SYSTEM [LIVE]

>> UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED

>> NETWORK BREACH LEVEL: BLACK

>> NODE: #442-A - "GOOD BUY!" TERMINAL [UZIDOORMAN.EXE]

THANK YOU FOR ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS JCJENSEN SECURE SERVERS.

WE APPRECIATE YOUR DEDICATION TO STRESS-TESTING OUR CYBERSECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE.

A RESPONSE TEAM HAS BEEN DISPATCHED TO YOUR LOCATION.

DO NOT RESIST.

ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL: WE’RE ALREADY THERE.

Uzi almost fell out of her bed as she reached the large Red button and slammed it as if her life depended on it, reacting on instinct even as her mind was reeling. The moment the button was pushed, powerful industrial magnets wiped out several servers that Uzi had taken over from her father's corporation.

Every data-capable, Wi-Fi-connected device in her apartment infected itself with an absolute horde of malware, worms, and viruses, wiping out years of data and custom-made programs, even as the hardware itself started to overheat and melt. 

Her PC and laptop already started glitching as red fatal error alerts flashed across both screens. Even if someone somehow salvaged a drive, plugging it in would nuke their system faster than you could say “Oops, all malware.” 

She’d triple-checked her security at every step for the last two and a half years. She had cut herself off from society at large. Hell, even the online messaging boards had wondered what had happened to pre-eminent hacker DarkXW0lf17. 

And yet even now, a blacked-out gunship was hovering outside her window, blinding search lights pouring into her claustrophobically small apartment.

She didn’t even have time to get pants on before the world exploded around her like karma itself coming to collect. The shock-wave slammed the girl against the opposite wall, knocking her breath violently from her lungs. Walking through the ruined doorway like avenging angels, three corp sec goons walked in, their armor as black as their intentions. 

They flowed in, each step practiced a hundred times in a hundred different shoot houses. The pinpoint laser beam cast from their sub-machine guns painted over every corner of Uzi’s apartment before settling on the girl's chest.

A fourth member of the team walked in, but instead of a ballistic plate, he wore a three-piece business suit, reflective thousand credit glasses stared impassively at the girl. His hands were folded behind his back. Uzi clocked him as the most dangerous man in the room.


“Ursula Marie Doorman. You are under arrest for violating National Security Protocols. Article 3 of the New Standard Earth World Court has allowed JCJensen to effect your detention. How do you plead?”

Uzi steadied her breath and very slowly and deliberately brought both middle fingers up in front of her.
“Bite me, Pig!”

“Your defense has been noted.”

His hand smoothly rose, and he fired the auto injector into Uzi’s chest. She had enough time to register the impact before her entire world went black. 

Chapter Text

Chapter 3

The Job Interview

The nightmare always starts the same. Endless snow leading to a steel gray security bunker. Impossibly heavy, frighteningly imposing, and slowly closing. 

The snow is deep, and she stumbles with every step. She can’t fall. Not with what’s chasing her. 

Inhuman screams and hungry roars echo close behind her. The massive doors are steadily closing, frozen gears grinding shut inch by inch, threatening her with a fate worse than death should they shut. 

But she is determined. She’s bleeding badly. A jagged wound above her stomach, blood flowing hot and fast onto the snow. Every movement is fire. But she keeps going. She has to. 

There are people in the bunker. She cannot make them out, but she knows they are her friends. They urge her on with panicked voices, but they dare not step outside.

Somehow, she manages to stumble inside. She’s engulfed in hugs and praise. She sobs in the embrace and waits for the heavy clank of the security door locking in place.

It never comes.

Uzi jolted awake, gasping for air.

She tried to sit up too fast. Nausea punched her in the gut and slammed her back down against the cold metal table. The room tilted, spinning in slow, cruel circles.

She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed deep—one, two, three—until the haze of sedatives loosened its grip.

She tried again, slowly opening her purple eyes. She thanked whatever God happened to be watching over her that the room was dark, with only a sliver of light shining through a small observation window in the heavy iron door.  Tranquilizer hangovers were the worst.

Her wrists were cuffed, a chain looped through a reinforced bracket welded dead center to the steel table.

The room was small and square. Barely enough space to circle the table—even if she could stand.

Looking down at herself, she noticed through the haze that her clothes were gone. They didn't even leave her underwear. Just the scratchy orange prison chic that always smelled like bleach and desperation. Hope they enjoyed the show , she thought bitterly.

Trying to remember the last few hours was like looking through a fuzzy CCTV. Her whole world was pain, but this wasn’t the first time she was shackled in some CORP-SEC hole. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut, demand a lawyer, and–God help her–maybe reach out to her dad, and she’d be out in no time. 

The splitting headache was just starting to ebb when the door slid open, bright light pouring into the small cell. 

Uzi hissed like a feral animal and covered her eyes just in time to avoid the worst of the bright, sterilized fluorescent light turning on inside the room. Covering her head as best she could, she heard the tap tap tap of high-heels on concrete. A leg breaker with fashion sense. That was never good.

Uzi heard more than saw the women pull the heavy metal chair away from the table and place several heavy file folders and a laptop upon it.

An overly pleasant voice with a thick Australian accent addressed the pained, purple-haired girl.

“Miss Ursula Marie Doorman. Twenty-seven years of age. 4'10" 105 pounds. Born the fifth of March, 2084, on Copper-9, to Nori and Khan Doorman, if I’m not mistaken. Your father was something of a prodigy, having secured a rather lucrative contract, didn’t he? Billions of credits for prototype defenses against what the tabloids still insist on calling ‘the glitched.’ A touch dramatic, that, but it sells. He also provided your standard-issue Solver decontamination tech. Your mother was a lead researcher for JCJensen in Xeno-Geology and Mineral acquisition.”

She looked up at the shackled woman, an easy-going smile plastered on her face. 

It never reached her eyes.

“You lived in the outer colonies, specifically Exo-Planet Copper-9, for the first several years of your life. Then you fled the first recorded outbreak of the Solver Virus in 2091. Of the 231,378 colonists on Copper-9, you, your father, and 4,073 others survived the trek to Earth."

She paused a moment, her voice taking a slightly softer tone.

"My condolences for your mother, truly.”

Uzi peeked through her fingers, eyes squinting uselessly against the glare. 

She heard the woman across from her place a glass and something else near her chains.

“Pain relief and proper water.”

Uzi fumbled for the pill and glass, downed the tablet, then took a cautious sip. The taste hit her—clean, pure. Real water. She drank the rest as if she were dying from thirst, finishing in a gasping gulp. It had been years since she had pure water instead of the recyced junk the arcology provided its citizens.

The meds started working immediately. She was able to slowly bring her hands down, waiting for a punch to the face that didn’t come. 

Yet. 

It took her a moment longer for the blurriness to steady before she could make out the women sitting across from her, a worryingly thick file folder open on the desk, along with a laptop built as if it could survive a nuclear blast. 

She was dressed in a smart black blazer, red dress shirt, and a red tie underneath. Her green eyes were narrowed in concentration, as if she was trying to decide if Uzi was better off alive or mostly alive. Her fingernails were short but well-maintained, coated with a clear polish. She had no jewelry to speak of, which worried Uzi.

Rich corporate types who live in boardrooms and golf courses love to flash their wealth. The Corpo types who don’t wear their wealth usually shot the ones who did.

“Ah, splendid. You’re lucid. I do so loathe repeating myself. I’m Tessa James Elliott, and it’s a pleasure, insofar as any of this can be.”

Uzi was proud that she didn’t immediately choke on the stale air at hearing the name. 

Tessa Elliott. Heir Apparent of the JCJensen throne. 7th richest person in the galaxy, and if the news reports were any indication, one of the most ditzy nepo babies in existence. Hardly a week would go by without an announcement of another fundraiser to save some cute, fuzzy animal from extinction, or to bring one back. There wasn't a month that went by without her picture appearing in the tabloids, stumbling drunk or flashing parts of her well-endowed anatomy at whatever paparazzi following her for the day.

The smile she flashed at Uzi suddenly looked as if it belonged to a predator that helped end the cute animals she always tried to preserve. 

Uzi cleared her throat and tried to sound a lot more certain than she felt. 

“I refuse to answer any questions. I want my lawyer.”

The smile never wavered, yet her eyes dropped the temperature of the room to near freezing. 

“Now, Miss Doorman, what precisely makes you believe anyone knows where you are? Let alone that they care?”

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. Her accent was crisp and polished, her words precise—each syllable wielded like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon. It was the kind of voice that once ordered champagne on Mars, and now ordered death with just as much ease.

She turned the thick blast-proof laptop around. A news article was displayed prominently on the screen.

HAB-BLOCK 9 ENGULFED IN FLAMES! 

DOZENS DEAD! 

She read with mounting horror as the story described how a “Femcel shut-in” overloaded her apartment's run-down electrical system, burning the hab down and causing massive damage until fire crews were able to contain the fire. 

“I didn’t do nothin’, Corpo.”

“I didn’t do anything, dear. Proper grammar is essential in minimizing misunderstandings.”

"Bite me." Uzi hissed.

The woman took out another thick pile of papers. She placed them on the table within sight of the young woman. The young hacker's pulse quickened as she scanned the files. The titles of the papers were simply dates and IP addresses. To anyone else, they were meaningless letters and numbers. To Uzi, it was a list of her greatest hacks. 

Tessa flipped through them as if she were perusing a menu instead of choosing how long the goth would spend in a pit. 

Still, Uzi was confident in her fail-safes. Each and every computer she had ever owned was either slag or so full of Malware, even looking at it would give a system the plague. 

The goth glanced up at the older woman and immediately refocused. Tessa was staring right at her. Her smile was radiant, but her green eyes narrowed as if she was looking at Uzi through a rifle scope. 

“I got nothing to say.” Uzi sounded a lot more confident in her head. 

“Oh, that’s perfectly fine, dear. I intended to carry the conversation regardless.”

She pulled out another article, this one dated nearly four years ago, around April 2107. On the surface, the article was a blip in the wider news cycle of the day. Some unknown punk had gotten himself killed when he ran his System Jumper into a JCJensen Comm Satellite running from BlackWatch, the militarized version of the old CDC.  

If you knew what to look for, if you had access to the Abyssal depths of Dark Web, and could travel the digital pathways without crashing your setup, you would know that on Tuesday, April 16 2107, a no-name Netrunner named Captain Insano pulled off what would be considered the greatest hack in the history of the internet by finding pay data that was not just worth billions of credits, but billions of lives. Rumor was he found information that would not only link some of the largest Mega-Corporations to the outbreak of the Solver Virus, but that they might even have a cure. 

On April 17th, 2107, He sent a massive data stream to Earth, hitting every underground Server farm on the planet before crashing into the satellite to deny the Mega corporations the ability to purge the stream. He was considered the greatest hacker to have ever lived 45 minutes after the data transfer. 

Tessa pulled out another small pile of paper files and handed them over to the shackled woman. 

“Ninth of May, 2108. One of the largest digital incursions ever recorded hit the Arctic Corporate Server Farm. Nearly three hundred million hits a second, sourced from over two hundred thousand nodes. The load very nearly pushed the servers into critical failure.”

She chuckled—a warm, almost nostalgic sound, as if recalling an old uni prank.

“The terraforming engines nearly melted down . Quite poetic, really. Devices built to re-freeze the Arctic almost boiled themselves apart. In any case, one thousand and ninety-three distinct entities initiated the assault. Seven hundred and forty-three managed to escape—with their lives and whatever data they could carry.”

Uzi remembered that day. Dozens and dozens of Hacker groups and hundreds of individual net runners had answered the hit. Some of the greatest Code Crashers teamed up with retired White and Black hat crackers and some of the most ruthless cybergangs in existence to take a run at that farm.

Uzi's crew, of course, knew about it. Every underground code jockey worth their RAM had heard about the massive Data leak. When JCJensen and other AAA mega-corporations ran disinformation campaigns 24/7 in the days following, it was almost impossible to ignore the implication. What Captain Insano found had weight to it. It had meaning. And it scared the hell out of the most powerful people in the galaxy.

Uzi wanted nothing to do with the run at first. She knew the shit show that would go down with that many underground hackers in one system. She tried to get Branden to back down, but he was blinded by the glory he and his crew could gain by accessing one of the most heavily guarded networks in the System.  But his enthusiasm was infectious. He was also a really good lay, and if Uzi was honest, she had feelings for the guy. 

In the end, she agreed to help. It was the second-worst day of her life.

The I.C.E., the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, turned the digital landscape as cold as the tundra where the servers were physically located. The only way anyone would be able to keep up and not immediately crash their rig and bring the wrath of SYS-SEC down upon their heads would be to "run-hot". In doing so, she would be casting her mind into the digital ether in order to use her “wetware,” her actual brain, to significantly boost her speed and processing power. 

They all thought they had enough failsafes and buffers to keep their brains from melting if the operation went 404 shaped.  

It became one of the deadliest days for underground hackers since the onset of the Solver Virus. 

Dozens of hackers and millions of credits worth of hardware died within minutes of the job. While the I.C.E. no doubt had a hand in the casualties, getting that many Cyber punks in one digital network made it a prime opportunity to hunt down underground bounties, settle debts, and get a little revenge.

Tessa went over in gruesome detail how some of the more famous 'runners met their end.

"Of your merry band of bandits, four of you went in. Two survived." The Corpos' voice lowered. "For a given value of surviving." 

Uzi still remembered the screams as her team died one by one.  They had lasted longer than most, avoiding the initial salvo of deadly combat viruses and malware attacks. They stuck to the digital shadows, following more reckless crews into the digital dungeon, trailing their backdoors and brute forced entrances as the I.C.E. and fellow digital warriors thinned the herd. 

It took nearly 16 hours for them to make it deep into the targeted server. It was a virtual fortress, with dozens of Corporate Backed Security Hackers and some of the deadliest ICE Uzi had ever seen protecting the digital prize within. 

In the absolute chaos of the virtual battlefield, they made their move.

Brandon died first, his head erupting into flames moments after they breached the digital no man's land. His head was burnt to a skeletonized crisp by the time EMS broke down his door.

Darren was next, a vicious VR Ghost infecting the visual and auditory parts of his brain and overloading his amygdala. The overwhelming fear and digital hallucinations made him commit suicide, screaming about how "it" was coming through his skin. Uzi wasn't sure what was worse. The screaming, the gunshot, or the sudden silence.

Rebecca may have suffered a far worse fate. After listening to the screams of her dying friends, she panicked and ripped the data plug directly from her head. She survived the massive brain damage and bleeding, if you call being committed to a round-the-clock treatment facility surviving. The first time Uzi went to visit the girl, Rebecca simply looked through her the entire time, drooling from the corner of her mouth. She never improved. The hacker made sure to set aside a substantial chunk of every payday to continue caring for her friend. 

Uzi had no idea how she survived. She was positive she had blacked out, at one point, but after a total of 31 hours of her brain being connected directly to cyberspace, she woke up safely disconnected from the web and a massive, heavily encrypted file in her data storage.

Uzi opened her mouth, making a sound like a strangled crow before she sealed her lips.

 Petabytes upon Petabytes of data were created, erased, transformed, or stolen. The Servers were so messed up that global internet speeds had decreased by nearly 37% for three whole days afterwards.

“The truly fascinating bit, however, lies in what followed. Of the seven hundred and forty-three who walked away from that little digital skirmish, only four hundred and thirty-five pressed on, chasing the scraps of stolen intel, looking for the proverbial X on the treasure map. And what a treasure! A Codex, one of several that supposedly contained definitive proof of the involvement of every Triple A involved in the creation of the Virus. An informational WMD that the top five Mega-Corps held to ensure mutual destruction in case anyone started feeling guilty for their part in ending the world.”

Tessa shuffled some papers around, organizing herself even as she continued speaking.

“Care to guess how many pressed on? How many managed to crack the encryptions and follow the trail to the end?”

Uzi was caught between terror and curiosity. This slit in high heels knew way too much specific information for one of the largest data breaches in history. The chaos inflicted on the network alone would have made it close to impossible to track down the survivors, never mind how thorough they had all been in covering their tracks.

“Seven. Just seven. And you, Miss Doorman, were among that rather exclusive little club.  And what, pray tell, did you discover for all your trouble? What did you discover that made six other of the best Computer Network Security Experts in the solar system decide to walk away when the prize was so close?”

It had taken months of planning and calling in every favor she could, along with spending the rest of her stolen inheritance, to even look at the site where the Codex was hidden. The day she made her move was a bloody and exhausting one, and the main reason she scrubbed every inch of her digital life and dropped off the face of the earth. Too many Shadow-Mercs had survived assaulting the black site, and if even one discovered she was the reason for their bad intel and massive casualties, all so she could sneak in and make off with the physical server hard dive? If any one of those hardened killers had caught up to her, killing her would have taken weeks.

Uzi found it harder and harder to get a breath, as if the air itself had turned to syrup. She looked up at Tessa like a deer would a hunter before he took the kill shot.

“Shall I tell you? It was a Codex true. Expect it didn't contain evidence of some massive conspiracy. No secret cures or plans to weaponize the deadliest plague in the universe. Only Solver-infused junk code that I locked down tighter than a Black Watch Commander's Pathogen Hold." 

She squinted her eyes as she thought.

“Well—not me, precisely. My team, of course. Brilliant creatures, the lot of them. Led by a sharp young man named Thad. Oh, but listen to me, rambling again.”

Uzi’s eyes went wide, the color draining from her otherwise tan skin. 

Solver code. The word brought clarity back to her world, like a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on her. 

Uzi looked at the smug Australian, her world coming more into focus.

"You're insane. I had that file for almost a year. If it were solver infected, every computer in my apartment would have tried to kill me in my sleep."

“And yet here you are.”

 "So everything we did...everything we had been looking for, you already knew? You weren’t trying to hide it because it was valuable; you hid it to make it what, harder for us? Like this was some sort of test?

“Of course, dear. I was the one to proctor this exam after all.”

The silence stretched on. Uzi imagined this is what death row convicts heard on the night of their execution. 

“What?” Her voice still sounded small, but a growing fury was building behind it. 

A bottle of water appeared before the purple-haired goth girl. She didn’t even notice Tessa move. She hesitantly grabbed the drink and, with shaking hands, undid the cap and took a long swig.

“The finest hackers in existence, all scrambling for a prize that was never meant to be claimed. That, my dear, was the point — we designed it to be impossible.

“And yet… the spectacle you provided.” Her lips curled, just shy of admiration. “Well, it would be downright uncivilised of me not to arrange a follow-up. After all, you didn’t merely pass the application process — you demolished it. With flying colours, if you’ll pardon the cliché.”

Uzi paused mid-drink. It felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the room.

“So the last two years of my life, losing my friends, watching so many people die, erasing so much of my life…it didn’t matter? It was just a test ?” 

“Yes.” The woman answered brightly, a smile seen in boardrooms and executions.

“Simply uncovering the existence of the ‘Codex’ ought to have been the end of the matter. The data was buried so deeply that—if I’m honest—we became a touch complacent with the physical security of the site in which it was housed. Still, for you and yours to have learned as much as you did, well… that was satisfactory. It furnished us with a catalogue of the finest code-jockeys on the planet — dare I say, in the entire system. Assets we might… deploy, in our ongoing war against this damned affliction.

“But then,” she leaned forward, a manic gleam flickering in her eyes, “you went and did something altogether unexpected.”

A smile danced across Tessa's face, the kind you get when you’re about to win a game of Uno. Or a Hostile Takeover. 

“Not only did you steal the Codex, love, you very nearly decoded it. You were within a whisker of translating Solver text.”

A soft laugh slipped from her lips, far too warm for the chill in her eyes. It teetered somewhere between giddy anticipation and mortal dread.

“Had I known, we’d have been content to wait however long your program required to complete its work. Do you have the faintest notion how many souls have managed that? How many have translated the Solver code without their grey matter dribbling from their ears?”

She didn’t so much as pause for an answer.

“Two. In the twenty-odd years since this curse befell mankind, precisely two have done it without losing their minds or… shall we say, changing into something best avoided. You, dear girl, happen to be the second.”

Uzi’s mind reeled. It was too much, too fast.

The last two years of her life — every choice, every escape, every precaution — had been nothing but moves for a game she didn’t even know she was playing. The corporations had watched, guided, maybe even nudged her every step. Nothing she’d done to protect herself had mattered.

And now they accused her of doing the impossible.

The Solver Virus was no ordinary plague. It was an eldritch infection that laughed at physics, that left madness and ruin in its wake. Even glimpsing its twisted runes, its impossible code, could crack a mind beyond repair, or worse. The unlucky didn’t just go mad. They changed. They became the glitched: ravenous, biomechanical horrors with just enough human left to be cruel.

The weight of it pressed down on her, squeezing her chest, threatening to smother her.

Then something shifted. The fear curdled.

Fury took its place.

“YOU WHORE!”

Uzi shot to her feet, the heavy metal chair clanging across the floor. Chains bit into her wrists as she tried to lunge, the links groaning under the strain. She settled for slamming both hands against the table hard enough to make the steel ring.

“You killed people! Good people! They died screaming while your goddamned test boiled their brains! All for what? To collect another handful of hackers for your bloody stable?!”

Her voice cracked into a raw scream. “FUCK YOU!”

Tessa didn’t so much as blink. Her only movement was a flicker of her thumb as she sent a quick text to the security detail outside. The armed men were close — Uzi could feel it.

“To be fair,” Tessa said, voice smooth as polished marble, “I didn’t force anyone to go gallivanting about, breaking the law and poking their noses into corporate-owned servers.”

“You set us up!”

The smile on Tessa’s face didn’t fade, but it changed — losing its warmth, becoming something thin and razor-sharp.

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “I did.”

Uzi’s hands curled into fists. She wanted to claw that smug expression off Tessa’s face. She wanted to see her bleed.

The world flashed yellow.

The heat of her fury broke, leaving a colder, heavier weight behind. The rage was still there, simmering, but now it was tempered by a hard practicality. She couldn’t touch Tessa — not with the chains holding her like some wild thing, and certainly not with the armed thugs waiting just beyond the door, ready to turn her into paste at a moment’s notice.

Tessa leaned back in her chair, perfectly at ease. “Truth be told, if you hadn’t done the impossible, we wouldn’t be having this little chinwag. You’d be none the wiser that the largest corporation in the galaxy had you on speed-dial, ready to ring you up whenever we needed a dash of… digital skulduggery.” Her lips quirked in cool amusement. “Aren’t you the least bit curious why I’m talking to you right now?”

The fight drained out of Uzi all at once. Her body was shaking — from hunger, from exhaustion, from too many emotions crashing in too fast.

She sat down heavily, chains clinking, shoulders slumping. “Bite me.”

Tessa’s smile widened. “Tempting, dear. I’d consider it, if you weren’t perhaps the most valuable asset in the galaxy right now.”

She studied Uzi for a beat, then slid a thin file across the table. “The Solver Virus, at the end of the day, is like any other affliction humanity’s faced in the past millennium. We adapt. We overcome. You might be able to assist us in that. We had a researcher — a specialist in the Virus — who was instrumental in developing many of the safeguards your father helped design. She also happened to be one half of the original pair of Solver translators.”

Uzi glared, but with a sharp exhale, she opened the file.

“Help us find the woman in that photo,” Tessa continued, “and we can help you find the other.”

Uzi’s breath caught.

Inside was a single group photograph of six people, most of them blurred into anonymity by thick black redaction lines. Only two faces were clear.

The first: a black, wild-haired woman in a sticker-covered lab coat, grinning with the kind of manic energy that practically screamed unhinged . A crude red circle was drawn around her head, the name CYN scrawled beside it.

Uzi didn’t recognize her.

But the other woman — standing close, with a warm smile, purple hair, and a swaddled infant in her arms — she knew all too well. That face had haunted her sweetest dreams and her bloodiest nightmares.

It was her mother.

“So,” Tessa said, voice light but eyes sharp, “what do you say, Miss Ursula? Willing to lend a hand?”

It took every scrap of self-control Uzi had not to verbally rip the smug bitch’s head off. She closed her eyes, took a long breath, and forced her thoughts to slow. She didn’t have a choice. But if they thought they could keep playing her like a cheap handheld—

“Fine,” she said at last. “I’ll help. But one thing.”

Tessa raised an eyebrow.

“My name is Uzi.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 4

Terms and Conditions

With the stroke of a pen and a word of affirmation, Uzi Doorman signed away her life to the very Corporation she hoped to topple. Still woozy from the aftereffects of the sedatives, she was led out of the interrogation room by two very large and heavily armed guardsmen wearing opaque blast helms and bulky armor that hid whatever humanity they might have accidentally displayed.
They led her through hallways that were dull and gray, made completely of steel and concrete.

Her first station was a complete decontamination shower, the lukewarm water and chemical spray covering every inch of her naked body while a crew in bright yellow decon-suits scrubbed her down with the subtlety of a car wash. She felt the accumulation of years of grime and Hab filth stripped away just as easily as her dignity.

She was given a new uniform: a simple white bra, panties, t-shirt, black gym shorts, and grippy socks. Less prisoner; more test subject. After that, she was herded to various appointments with various shrinks and doctors.

The rooms she entered were just as featureless as the plain hallways, but filled with whatever instruments or furniture the doctors and shrinks inside needed to do their jobs. Not a single person introduced themselves or made any small talk, keeping the interaction strictly professional, showing a complete lack of interest in the girl before them. They all wore the same green hospital scrubs and surgeon masks, and even their voices were altered through a voice changer.

It started with psychological exams and questionnaires, measuring Uzi's temperament and mental stability. Then came medical exams, with all the poking, prodding, vaccinations, and blood draws such visits entailed, along with deeply personal questions about her habits and (recently non-existent) love life. They even gave her a dental exam and filled in a few cavities she had developed. It was the most comprehensive check-up she had had in years. Even Hell had a decent medical package, it seemed.

When it was all done, the armed guards took her to another room, around the same size as the others, but this one had furniture meant for comfort instead of practicality: a twin bed, a comfortable mattress, a desk, a chair, and a meal covered in the plain brown plastic that hospital food universally came in.

Ravenously hungry, Uzi bounded over to the small table and almost threw the plastic cover across the room. A meal of red beans, rice, and honest-to-God baked chicken assaulted every one of her senses. They even included a carton of 2% milk.

She almost cried tears of joy as she shoveled the food into her mouth. This was the first meal in nearly two years that she didn’t have to unwrap or microwave. After licking the plate clean, the weight of everything that had happened in the last… few hours? Day? However long it had been… crashed down on her like a tsunami of exhaustion. She stumbled over to the bed, fell headfirst into it, and promptly passed out.

*The nightmare always continued the same way. She had just managed to run into the arms of her... friends? Family? She had no idea, as the people were always indistinct, but she was inside the bunker. She was safe.

But the heavy clang of the closing doors never sounded.

Then came the soft gasps. The horrified moaning. And the terrible screeching as the heavy security doors were forced open. In this nebulous nightmare realm, everything was so indistinct, fuzzy around the edges, recognizable in only the most abstract way.

Not the thing in the doorway. Not its massive claws ending in blades as long as her leg. Not the horrific amalgamation of flesh and metal, veins and circuitry that made up its misshapen body. Not even its horrific, multifaceted yellow eyes that glowed like a chemical fire.

This thing she could make out in perfect detail. Especially the word it hissed, a slimy purple tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

"Uzzzzziiiiii."

Waking up from a nightmare wasn’t ever as cool as it was in the movies. Uzi didn’t catapult out of bed, face covered in sweat, screaming at the top of her lungs, panting from lack of breath. Instead, she simply opened her eyes with a small inhale and shaky breathing. The hiss followed her out of sleep. When her eyes opened, she almost expected to see those yellow eyes burning in the corner of the room. They weren’t. The room was just as empty and sterile as when she arrived.

While her sheets were soaked, she didn’t piss herself, nor did she succumb to sobbing and feeling waves of self-pity. She had done that for nearly a week after she ran away from her father’s penthouse. Crying like a bitch got you treated like a bitch.

Uzi wasn’t going to go through that again.
Never again.

She turned so she was lying on her back and looked up at the off-white ceiling, trying to find the willpower to sit up.
The intoxicating smell of food helped immensely.

A plate absolutely filled with scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, and sausage waited for her, and a glass of orange juice and another carton of milk sat beside it. As much as Uzi wanted to be upset over her indentured servitude, the food made it difficult to maintain righteous indignation.

She had just shoveled another forkful into her mouth when a hiss from an overhead loudspeaker caused her to stop.
"An escort will be with you in 28 minutes."

She glanced at the clock. 11:52. Five hours of sleep. New record.

At exactly 12:20, the door hissed open. Two faceless guards, dressed exactly like the ones from earlier, stood outside, hands folded in front of them. Uzi had no idea if they were the same ones from before or not. Didn’t make much of a difference. They hardly acknowledged her, only moving aside so that the young purple goth could exit.

She walked for a few minutes through the same featureless hallways until she came to a set of doors that looked more suited to a gym than a Corporate Black Site. Walking inside, she found herself in a locker room and shower combination. It looked large enough to handle a whole sports team, but it was obvious it was left all to her. Every locker was slightly ajar, and a towel and fresh change of clothes were on a bench.

As Uzi started to strip, she noticed the clothing wasn’t standard prison fare. A one-piece skin-tight bodysuit, the color of gunmetal gray, was neatly folded, with a very familiar pair of black combat boots, a purple “Dead Batteries” band hoodie, black jean shorts, and her beanie resting atop.

The items were almost identical to her normal wear, except not as tattered nor infested with lice. She sneered. They’d no doubt tracked every purchase — legal or otherwise — and tailored her wardrobe specifically as a we-know-everything-about-you kind of threat.

Or they just managed to grab some of her stuff before she was kidnapped and decided they didn’t want fleas to infest their secret bunker and replaced it with new.
Either way, they could bite her.

The shower was… warm. Not just warm—if she wanted it, it was boiling, just under the temperature that would blister skin.
It was divine.

Uzi wanted to say she couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a shower that wasn’t ice cold and on a timer, but that was a lie. March 4th, 2100. Nearly ten years ago. She remembered the water that day, hot and clean and comforting. She’d tried to scrub the shaking out of her hands before stepping into her father’s stockholders’ meeting with stolen files tucked under her arm. A litany of crimes against humanity that were taking place in the labs of a Corporate Partner.

She cost DOORMAN INDUSTRIES AAA status and earned only mockery, as corporate media shredded her evidence and painted her as a paranoid crackpot.

The worst was the silence of her father. He didn’t yell at her, scream, or punish her. He just looked at her as if his daughter had shoved a knife into his gut. That look of hurt in his eyes hit worse than any stab wound or gunshot.

She ran away not long after and never looked back.

The bodysuit was skin-tight, but not enough that it would leave everything defined in HD. A thin gel-like substance was felt in the padding covering her vital organs and crotch, no doubt some reactive ballistic gel. Harder pads were around her elbows and knees. Her arms and legs looked segmented, almost drone-like, if not for the five human fingers at the ends. She didn’t have any underwear, and that made sense; this stuff was tight enough as it was, but it did leave Uzi feeling very exposed. Thankfully, she was able to easily slip into her jean shorts and hoodie.

Feeling almost normal, Uzi had just managed to tie her boots when she heard the tap tap tap of high heels walking down the concrete hallway.

She flinched when the door opened. Tessa James Elliot strode in as if she owned the place. To be fair, she probably did.

She was wearing a flat black bodysuit almost identical to Uzi’s. She had a short white jacket that just barely covered her chest, white elbow-length gloves, and a wide belt the same color as her top.

"Uzi, darling! You’re looking infinitely better than when we first dragged you in. I do hope you’ve managed a proper meal and a decent shower — it makes all the difference, doesn’t it?"

Uzi wanted to do a lot of things to that smug, pretty face, so she opted to simply shove her hands in her hoodie’s front pockets.
"Bite me. When can I go home?"

The rich Corpo smiled tight-lipped, as if she was about to spill some juicy gossip.
"You and my lot are off on a little excursion. Then, of course, you’ll put those remarkable talents of yours to work — all in the name of the greater good."

Tessa turned and looked at the short purple hacker, a genuine smile on her face.
"Do this for us and you’ll be well rewarded. Money, influence—"
She lowered her voice.
"Information."

Uzi stared bullet holes into the AAA scion but kept her mouth shut. She was at a severe disadvantage, and shooting off at the mouth might have made her feel better, but ultimately wouldn’t help.

But like the black-haired bitch said, information is its own reward.
“What do you want me to do?”

The hacker tried her best to keep the disgust out of her mouth, settling for cold indifference.

Tessa didn’t answer, instead turning on her heels and motioning with her head for Uzi to follow. She obeyed, following the woman through the sterile hallways.

Passing through another set of doors, Uzi followed Tessa into a massive hangar, capable of holding an entire fleet of planes. Most of the aircraft were civilian models undergoing various maintenance and repair: luxury and commercial jets, heavy and superheavy drones, even a few shuttles capable of low orbit flight. The staff consisted almost entirely of non-sentient Worker Drones with a smattering of human specialists and mechanics.

They all pointedly ignored the two women.

Uzi was led further into the hangar when they came across her new mode of transportation.

A Crow Class System Jumper: birdlike, all sharp angles and deadly intent. Capable of FTL, built for speed — but this one looked modified for war. It was obvious it had been heavily modified. Jet black and heavily armored, hardpoints covered its wings and underbelly, rotary cannons and rockets taking up most of the space.

The craft was normally used as a personal transport, often used by dignitaries and the elite who wanted to show up quickly and in style. This example looked like something a fashion-conscious warlord would take to battle.

They were approaching the rear of the craft; a loading bay ramp was already open, with someone waiting for them at the base.

The woman was tall, easily six foot, and dressed like a secret service agent. She wore a black suit jacket and skirt, a white button-down shirt, and a bright red tie. Any exposed skin was covered in a gunmetal gray skin-tight bodysuit similar to Uzi’s, segmented rings covering the arms and legs. A pair of empty black leather shoulder holsters criss-crossed her chest.

It wasn’t until the goth got close enough to see her eyes that she froze, panic causing her to forget how to breathe.

The woman’s eyes were yellow. Bright, glowing yellow, her pupils were catlike slits that seemed to adjust constantly. Her skin was pale, almost corpse-like, with pitch-black veins pulsing rhythmically.

The woman flashed a smile at the Corpo, sharp fangs glistening in the bright work lights of the hangar before returning to a stony professionalism when she saw the small woman almost cowering behind her.

“Holy… that’s a…”

“A Solver-infected human, yes! Uzi Doorman, may I introduce you to your team leader for this operation? Squad Leader of Mobile Task Force: Clean Up Crew. Code Name J.”

Uzi could only stare at those yellow eyes, the same eyes that haunted her nightmares.

“While her bite is worse than her bark, she and her team will be absolutely essential for where you’re heading.”

What kind of hell could possibly require the team-up of monsters like that?

“The Solver-Infested Land Down Under, the Australian Hot Zone!”

Uzi would one day learn to stop asking questions she didn’t want the answer to.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5

On-Boarding

LOG of 

Cynthia Solver 

Lead Researcher of <REDACTED>

Location- <REDACTED>

March 1 2084

This…disease shouldn’t exist. The symptoms, the means of transmission, everything about it is impossible. We can’t even say for sure it’s a sickness in the first place or some sort of dormant Xenos Bioweapon we activated when we <REDACTED>.

Whatever it is, it’s spreading at an unheard-of rate. It doesn’t seem to care what sort of quarantine measures we put in place or how sterile we make our labs. The moment it appears, people become infected and then… 

Mutation is the closest analogue. Extreme “calcification” of skin and joints is the most obvious symptom, but a poor way to describe it. I’ve sat in on the post-mortems. It isn’t some growth of tissue that's erupting from the victims; it’s metal. Specifically, an alloy we have yet to identify. It’s worse when we get into the body cavities. Wires. Circuits. Even what looks like a motherboard comprised of meat and this alloy is replacing organs and tissue.

The lucky ones die, usually around 30 hours after exposure. The unlucky…I’ve never seen such an increase in hostility and aggression. This thing would give advanced-stage rabies a run for its money. 

The entire research wing has been cut off from the surface. Dr. <REDACTED>, Dr. <REDACTED>, and Dr. <REDACTED> have all died. I’m all that's left of senior research. I’ve prepared the survivors for the possibility of activating the labs' STERILIZATION PROTOCOL . No one questioned it. How could they after what we’ve seen? 

Yet we are (still) human, and so hope is hard to kill. I have a theory that might slow this down or at least contain it. From what we can see, it's turning people into Bio-Mechanical horrors, and if there's anything my late husband hated more than static electricity near his servers, it was magnets. 

We have plenty of magnets. 

Uzi had seen the results of the Solver Virus far too often throughout her life. Most of the time, it was on TV from one of the many Public Service Announcements. “How to Recognize Solver infection in yourself and others!”, “BlackWatch is your Friend!” and other borderline propaganda pieces meant to convince the average citizen that everything was under control and the world wasn’t on the brink of collapse.

She’s also had firsthand experience, as her nightmares can attest.  

Every instance of infection followed the same lines. The victim would become incoherent and feverish, spouting nonsense about “Exponential Ends” and a fear of “the Void”. Metallic growths would appear on their bodies, and then within a few hours, they would either die or turn. 

Death was by far the most desirable outcome, because once the person’s eyes started glowing yellow, you had minutes to kill them before they became predators made of rage and steel.

How the hell, then, was this 6-foot-tall Valkyrie in a business suit not tearing her and Tessa to pieces? Why was it smiling? Why—God help her—did it look happy to see the heiress?

The monster in human guise positively glared at Uzi when it was done fawning over Tessa. The eyes glowed a toxic yellow, and little wisps of smoke wafted from them with every blink. Uzi couldn’t look away, like a rat caught in the gaze of a cobra. It wasn't until the creature turned its head that Uzi finally remembered that Tessa had been speaking.

“Umm..wait…did you say…Hotzone?”

The woman positively beamed at the short purple-haired goth, as if she were giving away a new hover scooter.

“Indeed! Hence why you are traveling with one of my best teams!”

Uzi tried to turn toward Tessa. Her head moved. Her eyes didn’t. They refused to unglue themselves from the business-suit monster.

“...That thing is…your team?”

The creature snapped its attention back on the small woman, a slight frown on its lips.

“ That thing has a name, thank you very much.”

“Oh my God, it talks!” 

“Be nice, J. The poor dear has had a very traumatic day.” Tessa never lost her bright gene-designer smile. 

“Right, so—meet J. She’s one of only three people on the planet who’ve actually survived the Dissembler Strain of the Solver Virus. Impressive, yeah?”

Uzi slowly shifted her attention to the rich girl who just introduced a solver monstrosity as if she were announcing a new breed of cat.

“You…You MADE this!?! Why would you make a…this!?!”

J sighed.

“I’m standing right here.”

“Why is it talking!?!”

Tessa stepped forward, placing herself between Uzi and J, laying a grounding hand on the almost hyperventilating hacker. 

“I know, it’s a bloody lot to take in, I do. So let’s clear a few things up straightaway. We —as in JCJensen—didn’t create J, or the others–”

“Others?”

Tessa placed a single finger on Uzi’s lips, squatting down so she could be eye level with the barely 5-foot-tall girl.

“Yes. Others. I didn’t make them. I rescued them. They are human –” she said, turning slightly at the last word, as if she was expecting a debate from the creature behind her. J simply rolled her eyes and looked away pointedly.

“ And they’re some of the most loyal people you’ll ever meet. I’ve asked them to keep you safe, and I promise, they’d move heaven and earth to make sure of it.”

She stood up and turned, flashing a childlike smile at J.

“Isn’t that right, Jay-Bird?”

The yellow-eyed infected attempted to remain stoic. The slight blush coloring her cheeks ruined it. 

“Yes, Boss.”

Tessa moved aside and bounced on her heels, as if she were having two best friends meet each other for the first time. 

J took a deep breath and strode forward, her long legs eating the distance between her and Uzi. She extended a hand covered in fingerless gloves, nails trimmed and polished professionally.

“J. It's a pleasure.”

Uzi looked at the woman's face, then her huge hand, and then back to her face. She swallowed hard and hesitantly gripped her hand. 

“U–Uzi”

The handshake was firm but surprisingly gentle. J lightly shook Uzi’s hand a few times before pulling back.

It took supreme effort on Uzi’s part to calm her breathing. Her vision at least stopped shaking.

“So…Jay…like the bird?”

Uzi was proud she hadn’t started crying.

“Like the Letter.” the giantess deadpanned.

J looked at the small purple asset, looked at her boss (who gave her a double thumbs up and a bright smile), and back at the girl. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes until a smirk played over her face. She pulled out a JCJense-branded pen and started twirling it between her fingers, eyes narrowing.

“Ok, let's try this. To facilitate better team building, you have five minutes to ask me anything you want. If your clearance matches, I’ll answer. Then I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team. Deal?”Uzi dumbly nodded.

“Are you going to kill me?”

J pinched the bridge of her nose with her free hand, already regretting the deal.

“No.”

Uzi exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Why she was trusting an eldritch monster at its word, she didn’t know. But she did.

“If I drop dead, are you gonna…eat me?”

J gave her a flat look.

“Gross. No.”

That actually surprised Uzi. All the rumors and firsthand accounts said the glitched fed on nothing but flesh.

“So…you don’t eat people?”

“No. We used to drink human blood. Now it’s synthetic. Plasma packs.” She tilted her head. “Not as good. Keeps us stable.”

Uzi swallowed.

“How often do you need to drink that…stuff? And if you run out, are you going to turn me into a juice box?”

J’s smile widened, sharp fangs and shark-like teeth glinting in the industrial light.

“Are you offering?” she teased.

Tessa moaned. “J!” 

J just smirked, eyes narrowing on Uzi.

“No, we aren’t going to use you as emergency rations. Tessa made it very clear that you are mission-critical. Anything else?”

Uzi paused, really looking at J for the first time, past the haze of fear.
If she was honest, the tall monst—woman was…weirdly hot. Long legs. Toned arms. And—God help her—the shoulder holsters weren’t exactly hiding much. She wanted to slap herself. Now was not the time to examine that barely explored part of herself.

She shook her head, shoving the thought away and forcing herself back to the point.

“How many of you are there?”

Her pen stopped twirling for a moment as J faltered, but quickly picked up the pace again.

“Two others. My siblings, N and V.” J’s tone was clipped, efficient. Hoping that would be the end of it.

“Siblings?”

It wasn’t.

J’s jaw ticked. She shut her eyes, forced the stock answer out.

“It’s complicated. The Solver Virus rewrites DNA. Technically, all solver-infected are related, but with myself, N, and V…closer, more like brother, sister instead of distant cousin. We have no idea if we’ve always been like that..”

Uzi nodded. Strange, chatting with the very face of the apocalypse like she was just some woman in a business suit.

Okay, so… you drink blood, you look—uh, like you do, so are you, um… immortal vampires or something?”

That broke J’s restraint. She actually snorted.

“I have no idea. Supposedly, the geeks who study us think we might have vastly expanded life spans, but that’s about it.”

She cut Uzi off before she could open her mouth again.

“Yes, we regenerate. Yes, we survive injuries that would kill you. No, the sun doesn’t turn us to ash, but it does burn and blind us. Yes, we can eat normal food. Anything else?”

Uzi opened and closed her mouth like a gasping fish. Panic burned her nerves raw, but she blurted the only question left rattling in her brain.

“…Do you have a favorite color?”

That stopped J cold. She blinked at the tiny goth, thrown off her rhythm. She put her pen back in her breast pocket.

“…Not yellow.”

Uzi stared. Of all the answers she expected, that wasn’t one of them. It actually… made her relax, just a little.

“Okay. I like purple.” 

A sudden clap made Uzi jump. She turned to glare at the raven-haired billionaire.

“Splendid! It’s bloody fantastic that you’re all getting along! I hate to interrupt, but our flight plan is on a tight schedule. Perhaps you two could continue this on board?”

J nodded and stepped aside, allowing Uzi unimpeded access up the boarding ramp. The young hacker looked uneasy about boarding a plane with two more genetically enhanced killers, but with a slight nod from J and an enthusiastic wave from Tessa, the small purple colored goth gathered her courage and (slowly) walked up the ramp.

J turned to follow when a light hand on her arm stopped her.

“J, a moment?”

The business-clad operator gave Tessa the entirety of her attention. 

“Yes, boss?”

“Do keep her safe? Not only is she important to our goals…she hasn’t had the easiest of lives.”

She waited for Tessa to continue, and it seemed as if the heiress was going to say something else, but instead set her jaw and flashed an HR-approved smile.

“Good luck, J. Do be careful, eh? I’d hate to lose you.”

J crossed her arms, her eyes scanning the normally ruthlessly pragmatic Director. Tessa, to her credit, didn’t wilt under J’s piercing gaze, her smile going from “warm and audience tested” to “shark-like” in an instant.

“What?” the CEO’s daughter mirrored the gene-enhanced bodyguard, arms crossed as if she were listening to a hostile takeover.

“You have a soft spot for the purple gremlin.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple fact stated in the same tone one would use to state that the sky was often blue or that the human neck needed 1100 pounds of torque to snap.

If J hadn’t known Tessa for most of their lives, even with her Solver-enhanced senses, she would have missed the quick flash of guilt that shadowed her face before the mask of duty slipped back over.

“She is an important asset, quite possibly the most important person in the system. Maybe the galaxy.”

J smirked, her yellow eyes taking on a soft tone as she gazed into Tessa’s own green pupils.

“More important than me?”

“And me. And the company. There’s a reason I entrusted her to your tender ministrations, J.”

Tessa moved close to J, causing the latter to take a half step back, her arms falling to her side in surprise. The raven-haired beauty gripped the tall mutant's shoulders, pulling her down so they could be at eye level. Could it be–?

“Please, be careful with her.”

J froze, her heart pausing alongside her. She could make out every feature of Tessa’s face, every pore, every freckle, every stress line, even hidden under the perfectly applied thousand-dollar makeup. 

Her scent was intoxicating, like peaches and strawberries, gardenias, vanilla, and honey.

Before she could even formulate a response or even close her mouth from the fish-like gap that was currently plastered on her face, Tessa let her go, stepping back and flashing another one of her brilliant smiles. 

“Better get going, J. I’d hate for her to have to deal with V alone.”

Tessa walked away, hips swaying, acting as if she didn’t just ruin one of the more dangerous killers in the galaxy. J rubbed the desperation from her face and took a few deep breaths before she slipped the mask of utter professionalism back on. 

“Fuck me.” A plea and a curse. After taking one more steadying breath, she shoved her feelings deep where no one would ever see them and followed Uzi into the craft.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6

Business Class

The inside of the Crow Class system jumper was about what Uzi expected a multibillion-credit AAA corporation spacecraft to look like. Open floor plan, luxury paneling cut from extinct trees, leather couches worth more than her entire hab-block, a hull that could shrug off anti-orbital guns and still look smug about it. 

It was what a debutant who wanted to topple a third-world nation would fly.

The only thing missing was a half dozen servants waiting on her every need. Instead, the interior had only two other people toward the middle of the spacecraft. They were sitting on a circular couch that occupied the majority of the space, with a large table sat low between them, filled to overflowing with gadgets, weapons, blades, and ammo. 

While one of the figures had its back to the hacker and was mostly obscured by the couch, the other was sitting at the edge, almost in the aisle, and in full view of the young woman. 

At first glance, it was obvious that this was the sister J had referred to. Like the other solver mutant, she had pale skin that seemed almost translucent with a spider web of black veins pulsing under her skin. Her hair was the color of tarnished silver, shaped into a short bob. Her features were sharp and angular, her ears and nose slightly elongated and pointed. It was as if someone decided to blend an elf with a war crime. 

Unlike J, she didn’t bother to cover up her ample figure; She wore either the same vacuum-sealed skinsuit as the others or body paint, but added a half-zipped crop coat and daisy dukes that left nothing to the imagination. A thin blade danced between her fingers. 

She looked like a combat-ready stripper. 

The female Solver lounged against the couch, one leg stretched across the seat, murmuring to the figure opposite her. Uzi had taken a half step toward them when the woman's golden eyes snapped to Uzi with the precision of a targeting system. 

Then she smiled — all fangs, promising a quickie or a quick death, Uzi couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

She slid the zipper of her coat even lower and bent forward as if to stretch, allowing the hacker to see more of the well-endowed girl than she had wanted to. 

Why were all of these flesh-eating monsters hot? 

“Look alive, N. J brought us a new toy to ruin.” Her voice was light and airy, flirty in all the wrong ways. 

An excited gasp came from the other passenger as a fluffy head of curly silver hair bounced into view. N had pointed features like the others, pale skin, yet his honey colored eyes were softer, without the threat of violence his sisters seemed to promise. 

He wore a pilot cap with a metal skull medallion front and center, and a short-sleeved black winter coat that hung to his knees, trimmed with golden fur and cinched by a black belt. Of course, he wore the same skin-tight nano suit like the others. 

Unlike his sisters, he actually smiled. Not the smile of a predator. Just… genuine. He bounced in his seat like an over-eager puppy, and Uzi swore if he had a tail, it would’ve been wagging.

“Oh, hi! You must be the new squad member! I’m N, Recon and Logistics Specialist! Well… N’s not really my name, it’s a code name. Anyway, that’s V! She’s our Infiltration Specialist! V also isn’t really her name; it’s a code name like mine. It’s kinda of our thing. So… uh—anyway! You get it. You probably already know J, right? She’s our Squad Leader!”

Uzi stared at him in wide-eyed shock. He didn’t breathe the entire speech. 

He stood up to greet the newest member of his squad, allowing Uzi to get a better look at his sleek, toned physique. 

Holy Crap, he's huge. She thought, staring at the absolute unit that was in front of her. N was easily a head taller than J, and she was nearly 6 feet tall. He was lanky, his long limbs almost awkward, but toned from a lifetime of hardship, the strength silent but hard to ignore. His legs and arms looked as if they were sculpted. His coat fluttered a bit as he reoriented himself, allowing Uzi a quick glimpse of his washboard abs.

Uzi blinked. Holy crap, he’s kind of hot.

“Yes, N. We’ve already met.” Uzi nearly jumped out of her skin. J stood right behind her, twin pigtails swaying, lips twitching toward a smirk.

“Cool! Cool, cool, cool! You must be–” He paused for a moment, a concerned look crossing over his handsome face. “Ok, don’t tell me. Glock? Pistol? It’s a gun, right?”

He stuck the tip of his tongue out the side of his mouth as he fell deep in thought.

Uzi huffed out a giggle before she could stop herself. 

“Uzi, or whatever.” She said, doing her best to seem aloof and unimpressed. She almost convinced herself.

“UZI! Yeah! Named after a family of Israeli open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine guns and machine pistols first designed by Major Uziel "Uzi" Gal in the late 1940s!” He smiled like he was honestly excited to meet someone new.

Dear God, he was cute a dork.  

V snorted, her yellow eyes boring into the Purple Goth Hacker. 

“He wants you bad.” She leaned forward, her smile showing off her sharp fangs and predatory teeth. “Maybe we can share.”

“V!” Both J and N shouted at the same time, though the former was more exasperated while the latter was horrified. 

V rolled her eyes and leaned back into her seat. “Oh, relax. Just having a bit of fun.” If a cobra could talk, this is exactly what it would sound like.

“Your brand of fun gives HR nightmares,” J grunted. She motioned for Uzi to take a seat next to N while she situated herself next to her sister. 

Uzi had just sat down (after N had moved several ammo boxes, magazines, and spare gun parts) when a notification beep sounded in the room. 

A full-color digital hologram of a young woman, possibly around Uzi’s age, wearing large, gaudy pink sunglasses, appeared to be hovering above the table. 

She was wearing a fighter pilot's flight suit with her helmet sitting in her lap. Both were covered in stickers and patches like Girl Boss, Bad Bitch In Charge, My other car has auto-cannons,* along with various cute fluffy animals wearing military combat gear.

Uzi blinked. Who the hell let a high school diva into a black op?

“Sup bitches. It’s ya girl back at the stick! Welcome aboard the JCJ-92 Crow-Class System Jumper, better known as the Glitterbomb!”

…She’s the pilot. Oh God. Uzi was going to die.

“Hi, Lizzy!” the trio said with varying levels of enthusiasm.

The pilot smiled quickly before she blew a large pink bubble and held it for a moment before it popped. 

“So like, today as always I will be flying our Murder Trio to certain death–” she paused her eyes arching up as she read her flight manifest, “ Along with a plus one, huh?” 

She leaned forward and smiled like any one of the high-school bullies Uzi had to deal with growing up. 

“Well, new girl…or guy, whatever, I’m glad I’m not you because today we are…”

Lizzy drummed her fingers in the air and then announced as if she was handing out an Emmy.

“Heading to the Australian Hot Zone! That’s right, guys, gals, and non-human pals! We’re heading to the most Solver Infested place on the planet! If you thought that everything in that oversized island prison was trying to kill you before the world ended, it’s only gotten worse!”

She took off her glasses and leaned closer to her audience. Her eyes were genetically modified to be pink, with heart-shaped pupils. Uzi took a moment to look at her companions, trying to see if the horror of the situation was dawning on them as well.

J’s head was buried in maps and intel packets.

N was sitting forward, paying attention as if there would be a test. 

V had a soft look about her; she refused to look the pilot in the eye, trying to seem aloof, but if Uzi didn’t know better, she would say the walking HR violation on long curvy legs looked ashamed.

“Solver monstrosities, glitched galore, insane AI, and more will greet you when you air drop out of my ship. And that’s not all! Even the air hates you! If you aren’t infected already, your environmental suit better be up to snuff or else you’re gonna have a bad time.”

Uzi was proud of the fact that she wasn’t hyperventilating. Much.

“We will be wheels up in 90 seconds.  I foresee a smooth suborbital 83-minute flight with a 0% chance of flak or Blackwatch Interceptors, buuut.” 

The pilot winked.

“N darling, if you wouldn’t mind taking the topside turret if we do run into problems, I’ll love you forever.”

The male Disassembler Mutant gave a lazy salute, his adorable, sexy smile playing over his face. 

“No problem, Lizzy!”

The pilot smiled and placed her helmet over her head, and snapped the visor down.

“Once more into the breech bitches! Duty Unto Death!” The hologram disappeared. 

Uzi leaned back against the couch. Yeah, she was definitely going to die. Probably eaten. Possibly flirted with first.

She glanced sideways at N, dropped to his knees to shove a crate under the seat, his lanky frame folding down in one smooth motion.

And then—oh God—he leaned forward, rear in the air, wiggling as he pushed the box.

Uzi’s eyes locked on target like a heat-seeking missile.

Abort mission. Stop staring. Stop—
She definitely wasn’t staring
She was absolutely staring.

She tore her eyes away to catch a catlike grin coming from V. J seemed to be pointedly ignoring her.

This operation was going to be the death of her–

“Bisquits!” N had bumped his head, causing his backside to clench in pain.

But there were worse ways to die, she decided. 

Climbing to sub-orbital elevation was always Uzi’s least favorite part of flying. Even with the ship's Jump Drive negating the worst of the G-forces, feeling your insides being squeezed was still uncomfortable.

The only thing worse than Uzi’s discomfort was being surrounded by gene-enhanced killers, even if they were sworn to protect her. Still, she decided that two of the three weren’t so bad. J seemed content to study the maps and files that were piled in front of her, her JCJensen-branded pen flying across the papers.

N was either loading magazines and double-checking their supplies, humming a jaunty tune, and occasionally singing softly to himself. 

He didn’t have a half-bad voice if the goth was honest. Not that she was paying attention. 

That left V. The flirty mutant, at the moment wearing a slim pair of glasses, reading a hefty doorstopper of a book (The Complete Works of Jane Austen, whoever that was), mostly ignored the short hacker. 

Mostly. 

Occasionally, Uzi would catch the women looking at her, her yellow golden eyes seemingly flaring, with thin wisps of yellow smoke wafting from them. It was when V licked her lips that Uzi had had enough. 

“What the hell is your problem?” The sudden outburst focused the Solver Siblings on her. To have the undivided attention of three dangerous killers on her was uncomfortable to say the least, but Uzi was too annoyed to care. 

“Ever since I got here, you’ve been acting like a creepy stalker. Staring at me and licking your lips.” Uzi waved her hands at V, “and why the hell are your eyes smoking!?!”

V sneered and was about to respond…

“Smoke?” J snapped her attention to her sister. V looked away, her eyes widening in…shame? 

“Look at me, V,” J demanded.

“I’m fine.” V sneered at Uzi, “As for you, Short Stack, don't flatter yourself.”

“Bite me, you creepy vampire-looking slut!"

“You’re nothing but a snack pipsqueak!”

Of all the stupid things Uzi had done, mouthing off to a woman who could tear her in half with her bare hands was definitely top five. 

The only thing to stop her from doubling down on her suicidal pride was a gentle hand catching her arm. N gave her a nervous smile and a subtle shake of his head.

The two women stared at each other, trying to kill the other with looks alone— until a voice like distant thunder cut through the tension.

“V.” 

J’s eyes sparked yellow as the lights flickered. “Turn around.”

V sighed, sullen as a scolded teenager. “It’s nothing, J. I’m fine.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

Her eyes betrayed her. Yellow smoke bled from them, her lip trembling as she dropped her gaze, her hand wiping her face as if that would stop the tall tale sign of Solver Infection. “I’m… I’m fine,” she said.

J lifted her chin, forcing her to meet her gaze. “When did you last take your shot?”

V gave a soft whine. N leaned forward, squeezing her knee. “I know it sucks, but you’ve been doing really well, V!”

For a moment, the praise helped. Then V froze mid-breath. She inhaled sharply, predatory, her gaze locking on Uzi.

The fragile mask shattered. Black veins tinted sickly yellow, her fangs lengthening as her breathing hitched into ragged gasps.

And then—gone. V squeezed her eyes shut, drawing in two shuddering breaths before sagging back, exhausted.

“Okay. Fine, J. You win. Again. But can you not have her… can you please…”

J just nodded, then glanced at Uzi. For the briefest second, panic cracked her calm. Then the leader’s mask returned.

“N, get Uzi de-scented.”

The boy smiled brightly, his sharp teeth glistening as if he were modeling for a toothpaste commercial. He stood up and offered his hand to the small hacker.

His hand absolutely engulfed Uzi's as he helped her out of her seat. Thank God her nano suit was absorbent; otherwise, her hand would have been slick with nervous sweat. 

N’s guided her to the back of the ship and toward the cargo bay. Uzi glanced back toward the sisters. J had an auto injector in hand and whispered something to V. V leaned her head on J's shoulders, parted the hair from the back of her neck, and waited as J gently placed the injector pen against the back of her neck.

As expected, the cargo bay was filled with boxes and tied-down pallets filled with supplies and whatever sundries a Jump Capable spaceship needed. Of immediate interest to Uzi was a large cylinder made of clear, hard plastic, with various vents and fans jutting from it at odd angles and a large computer workstation attached to it.

Inside were boxes and containers clearly marked, “Ursula Marie Doorman”.

N walked over to the console that was attached to the strange chamber and started booting up the system, a look of confusion crossing his face. 

“Who’s Ursula? J said this was supposed to be for you.”

Oh my God, he was stupid. ~~And adorable~~.

“Umm. That’s me. Ursula is my government name, but just call me Uzi.” He could call her mom…nope. Nope, nope, nope. 

"Oh." His face scrunched up in thought. "It's a pretty name!"

He flashed her a bright, happy smile and went back to typing on the workstation, repeating Uzi's real name as if he were trying to perfect it. Uzi had never heard anyone say her name like...like that, as if it were important enough to memorize. Even when she was with Brandon, the only time he said her name half as reverently was when he was in the throes of a climax, never as if it was the most important thing in the world.

She almost melted in more ways than one. 

I need a fricking drink she thought, trying very hard to slam those thoughts into the deepest darkest part of her subconsciousness. 

"So...N right?"

"That's me!"

"What's umm...what's this thing do?"

The boy bounced excitedly, giddy to explain as a portion of the clear wall slid apart, allowing access inside.

"Ok, so, you know how Solver infected have better senses than normal? I mean...you do know that, right?" 

Uzi nodded as she walked inside, the wall closing behind her.

"Well, smell is one that's really heightened. Like a lot. Like me and V knew you were outside the moment the ramp opened!" He tapped some more buttons. The fans and vents started spinning up in the chamber. 

"Not only that, but uninfected humans smell--" he paused, his face frozen for a half second, a predatory shadow fell upon his normally carefree countenance. Unconsciously, he licked his lips, but with a light shake of his head, the happy-go-lucky boy came back into existence. "Smells really good. Their scent tends to make the worker drones...umm I think most people call them glitched? Feral when they get a sniff."

N missed the look of horror that covered Uzi like a shroud. 

"Anyway, this machine is designed to mask your scent, like make it disappear! This is really important because everything in a hot-zone smells like Solver, and things that don't smell like Solver really stand out, and I don't want you to stand out because I-"

He paused, eyes widening as several surprising thoughts made their way through his brain. He would have to deal with that later. Or not at all! Not at all was good.

"Umm...made a promise to Tessa that I'd protect you!"

Uzi nodded dumbly as the boy's cheeks darkened to near pitch black.

Was he blushing?

Was she?

They both stood around, refusing to look at each other or to acknowledge the color that suddenly bloomed on their cheeks. 

"ANYWAY!" N squeaked. He cleared his throat, attempting to bring his voice back down to its normal pitch. "You should get dressed. You'll find a helmet along with some armor that'll fit over your body suit. You'll want to be fully sealed before I start the second part." 

He grinned and shot Uzi finger guns

"It'll take your breath away!"

...

Uzi gave up trying to make her brain behave. 

She squatted down and started rummaging through the gear at her feet. Uzi was about to try on the various pieces when she noticed N was still looking at her expectantly. 

“Umm…mind turning around?”

His face screwed up in confusion before a realization hit.

“Oh! You don’t have to take off that second skin! In fact, you need to keep it on, because that’s like…99% of your environmental hazard protection.”

Uzi looked at him blankly. 

“Ok. But the thing is like super tight, and it kinda puts everything on display. So…” 

Once more, N looked confused. 

“But…”

“N. Turn around,” Uzi demanded, hands on her hips and a fierce glare directed at the male Solver. 

He shrank under the withering gaze and obediently turned his back on Uzi.

Uzi peeled off her outerwear until only the clinging skin-suit remained. The chest plate came first; it was lighter than she expected it to be. The moment she slipped it on, the armor started writhing as fine neural filaments brushed her spine like spiderwebs, and the armor tightened, reshaping itself around her. She shoved her short hair aside as the high collar sought her data port. A click. Then the flood.

Ice water surged through her veins, chased by a spark that rattled her bones. Her vision flared violet, a ghostly HUD flickering to life in her eyes. The system linked itself to her nervous system, every adjustment pressing closer, too intimate, like a mechanical insect curling against her ribs. 

Boots. Gauntlets. Each sealed with a whisper and locked into her body’s rhythm.

The helmet was last. It slid down with a hiss, the world vanishing behind a dome of ballistic plasteel. Filtered air kissed her face as internal air tanks pressurized with a sharp hiss.

Not built for spacewalking, no — but enough to survive the vacuum for a few minutes. Just long enough to die creatively if things went wrong.

A stylized, stick-figure-like symbol of her head glowed on a section of armored glass that covered the top part of her chest, indicating that the integration was complete.

"Ok, N. I'm ready."

He turned around, his smile faltering for a moment, a look of awe crossing over his face. 

"Oh wow. You have really pretty eyes."

Uzi raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Purple is like, my favorite color!"

Uzi darkened her faceplate to hide the blush that was no doubt creeping up on her. 

"Bite me, N. Can you hurry up so I can get out of here?"

He laughed nervously and tapped a command on the keyboard. The fans and vents sped up, and a thick grey mist poured into the chamber. A countdown appeared above Uzi's head; she had 12 minutes until the chamber cycled. 

N double checked something on his screen, nodded happily, and then started to take off his coat. 

"Hey, so we're going to be deployed soon, so I'm going to get changed real fast." 

A strangled noise escaped from Uzi's throat.

"Oh! Don't worry! I don't mind getting dressed in front of you! I do it with J and V all the time!"

And without hesitation, off came the coat.

The nano-suit was basically painted on and left nothing to the imagination, clinging to every line of muscle, emphasizing the fluid way they moved as he shifted. Broad shoulders, slim waist, fluid movement, like someone had taken “gym rat goals” and patched it into his DNA.

Uzi’s brain promptly bluescreened.

“Oh, biscuits. I hate—uh, I mean, I don’t like this part.” He worried his lip with those sharp teeth, eyes downcast. “Sorry if this is kinda gross. I’d do it somewhere else, but, y’know. Cramped.”

Uzi had just realized he was talking to her when his suit rippled.

The fabric parted across his back, flowing away to bare pale skin. A circular access port had been installed above his tailbone. Then something slithered out of it.

He had a tail.

It uncoiled from the base of his spine like a fleshy whip, segmented plates clacking faintly as it stretched. Long, heavy, and predatory, it arched high, ending in a syringe-blade stinger. A drop of yellow liquid hissed where it hit the deck, filling the chamber with an acrid sting. The tail snapped once against the floor—clang!—before hovering, coiled to strike.

Then the wings came.

The sound was wrong. Half-tearing flesh, half steel girder bending to breaking.

Not mechanical. Not biological. Something in between.

Gray bone-metal telescoped outward from long metal slits built into his back, impossibly long, nearly sweeping the floor. Finger-like struts curled and flexed, dragging pale membranes taut until—snap!—the full span bloomed wide. Five feet across, blotting out the lights.

Pools of molten yellow pulsed under the skin near the first joint of each wing, reactor cores caged in flesh. The glow painted his face—and hers—like a sickly golden heartbeat.

Uzi forgot to breathe. They were monstrous. They were beautiful. It was like someone had stapled an angel to a war crime and called it art.

The wings flexed, shuddered, and folded neatly behind him.

“Oh man. So much better.”

N turned, bashful, as the nano-suit stitched itself back into place around the new limbs.

The chamber beeped, filters clearing the gray mist. The wall slid open. Whatever safety Uzi had imagined inside vanished with it.

“So…thanks for not screaming. A lot of people scream when they see them for the first time.”

Uzi nodded dumbly, her eyes stuck on the new features that erupted from N’s back. If he took offense, he didn’t show it, instead turning and extending one of his bat-like wings slowly toward the girl. 

“You can touch it if you want.”

The hacker opened and closed her mouth in shock before she numbly moved her hand to the wing and softly, hesitantly brushed it. A surprised gasp came from her mouth. 

It was fuzzy. 

N chuckled as the appendage twitched. 

“Sorry, that tickles.”

The door leading to the main cabin opened. J and V walked in, transformed just like their brother, wings tucked behind their backs and deadly tails hovering over their heads. 

They wore armor similar to Uzi, the glass plate showing a stylized yellow skull. They didn’t wear a helmet; instead, a thick combat visor made of a clear material wrapped around their heads and covered most of their face, leaving their nose and mouth unobstructed.

V had lost most of her bluster from earlier, her jaw set and eyes narrowed as she walked to the back of the cargo room, standing before a heavy-set pressurized door. Her wings flared slightly as she rolled her shoulders. 

J marched up in front of Uzi, demanding all of the goths' attention as N started equipping his own battle plate.

“I apologize, I haven’t been able to go over our mission in detail, but I’ll correct that when we drop.”

Uzi’s eyebrow lifted slightly.

“You mean land?”

The lights in the room suddenly shifted, turning a deep red. Lizzy’s voice cackled over the speakers.

“30 seconds! Woot!”

The heavy doors hissed and then opened, a gale forming in the cargo room as the pressure dropped suddenly. 

Uzi yelped and stumbled back, only for N to catch her, scoping her up in a bridle carry. He smiled warmly at her. He spoke, his voice coming over Uzi’s integrated comms. 

“I love this part! Hold on tight!”

“What do you mean, hold on? Why are you walking toward the open door? N? N!?!?”

Uzi had enough time to look behind her and see nothing but endless night and empty sky. 

She didn’t have enough time to scream before N jumped out of the spacecraft and plummeted toward the ground far, far below. 

Chapter Text

Chapter 7
Staff Meeting

October 21, 2093
The Global Times
PANIC IN THE LAND DOWN UNDER
By Matthew Queenland, Staff Correspondent

NEW YORK — The unrelenting spread of the so-called “Solver Plague” continues to devastate Australia, with international containment efforts faltering after weeks of emergency measures.

BlackWatch — the United Nations’ recently established Biological Warfare Command Center — has escalated restrictions to stop the contagion. Still, Commander Brandon Grose admitted yesterday that the nation is now considered a total loss. All rescue operations have been suspended, leaving an estimated 400,000 civilians cut off behind the quarantine line. A UN communiqué stated that any unauthorized attempt to enter or exit the continent will be met with lethal force.

Human rights organizations have condemned the policy as “inhuman” and “tantamount to genocide.” Their protests have been overshadowed by the circulation of pirated footage showing the Glitched — plague victims whose twisted forms and violent behavior have sparked mass fear and paranoia across the globe.

In a unanimous vote late last week, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 3102, formally titled the GOLGOTHA Initiative, granting BlackWatch sweeping authority over containment. The resolution authorizes the “sterilization” of infected zones — a term widely understood to mean the deliberate destruction of entire population centers.

Critics warn that the measure could mark a turning point in international law, setting precedent for mass civilian eradication under the banner of biosecurity. For now, however, the world’s attention remains fixed on Australia — a continent lost, and the question of whether its nightmare might soon spread beyond its shores.

— Continued on A2

Uzi spent the first three minutes falling toward the ground, screaming her lungs out, cursing out the stupidly handsome man-child, or crying. 

She then spent the next 12 minutes staring wide-eyed at the eldritch hell that was the Australian Hot Zone. 

The sky was the color of clotted blood, and the clouds were the color of old bruises. The sun, when visible through the nearly omnipresent cloud cover, was eclipsed by a massive black sphere.

The nearby cities and towns were bombed out ruins, and the land was a cratered moonscape. Lines of...biomechnical meat had infested much of the countryside, flashes of yellow light pulsing in rhythm from within. In areas where these organic masses met, they formed what came to be known as the "Solver Symbol," a strange hollow hexagon with a smaller, filled-in hexagon inside it, with arrows extending from the top, bottom-left, and bottom-right corners of the outer hexagon.

Uzi didn't have much time to take in the surroundings, as N suddenly slowed down and banked sharply left. He fell in a tight spiral, occasionally free-falling before his wings caught an updraft, jolting Uzi in the boy's strong arms.

As quickly as it started, it was over, and with a hard *thump* they landed on the remains of a bombed-out highway. N gently lowered Uzi onto the ground, where she promptly stumbled forward a few steps before falling to her hands and knees. She stayed like that, taking shuddering breaths until she was sure she wasn't going to hurl in her helmet. A soft hiss of cool air blowing in her face, along with the sting of an anti-nausea autopen being injected into her neck, helped. 

Uzi turned in time to see J and V landing close by, each carrying a heavy duffel bag filled with equipment. 

“That’s always been my favorite part of any operation! Insertion!” N proudly proclaimed. 

“That–That was your favorite part?” The small purple-haired hacker asked, slowly standing on unsteady feet, using a nearby guardrail to brace herself.

N was about to respond with a happy affirmative when he suddenly noticed the temperature of the area had dropped a few degrees.

“I mean…umm…maybe?”

Uzi didn't say anything at first, simply staring at the mutant, her purple eyes narrowing into something dangerous, a flash of yellow crossing over them.

She took a few shaky steps, but her death glare never wavered, laser-focused on the Disassembler before her.

N kept his stupid-looking, handsome smile plastered on his face even as his eyes started to show some concern over the small, grape colored goth stalking closer to him.

"So...you know our wings and...umm," he stammered, taking a step back for each one Uzi took forward, "most of our body is heavily modified with the latest biotech! Like, did you know our wings have Grav-pods built into em! It's how they-" 

He yelped suddenly as he tripped over one of the duffel bags his sisters had dropped to the ground. V snorted a short, sharp laugh, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle before her while J simply muttered under her breath and continued unpacking.

N  finally understood the danger he was in. He looked over to V, who simply continued to laugh louder while J refused to meet his gaze. 

“N, you're worthless and terrible, and if Tessa allowed it, I would let the purple midget kill you,” J grined as she pulled out a thick, conical gauntlet and slipped it over her arm. “So I’m going to look the other way and claim probable deniability when she does murder you.”

N was about to make a counterpoint when Uzi’s shadow fell over him. He yelped and tried to scoot back more when the girl's small hands gripped his coat collar with an iron-like grip. 

Aided by the artificial muscles built into her nanosuit, Uzi pulled N close enough that his breath was fogging the glass of her fishbowl helmet. 

“If you ever…ever throw me out of a moving vehicle again, I will castrate you with your own damn tail. Do you understand?”

N’s eyes widened. She really did have pretty purple eyes.

“Well?”

“Yes, ma’am! It won’t happen again! I swear!”

Uzi huffed and dropped the Disassembler.

“Good boy,” she said, walking away. 

N’s eyes widened in confusion even as his tail started to wag furiously. It was all he could do to keep it under control. 

V continued howling with laughter.

It took only minutes for the three siblings to finish gearing up. Each strapped on heavy forearm gauntlets that snapped tight against their skin; a flick of the wrist revealed a monomolecular blade that hummed like it wanted blood.

Each of them also had more unique items to assist them with their specialty. 

V’s gauntlet carried more bite: an integrated 10-gauge shotgun with a drum mag fat enough to level a small building. On top of that, she wore nano-gloves that, on command, could melt into three wicked scythe-like claws at a thought. She clicked their tips together almost constantly, cackling like a horror movie villain warming up for the third act.

N, of course, had gone full arsenal. A short marksman rifle with a smart scope capable of giving real-time bullet flightpaths, a compact MP5 slung across his chest, and more knives than Uzi could count. Even worse, he’d somehow volunteered himself as the squad’s pack mule, effortlessly hauling a rucksack so massive her spine twinged just watching him.

J, by contrast, looked like she was about to strut down a runway. Twin 45.cal AMT Hardballers sat snug in her shoulder holsters, suppressors gleaming. A sleek black tac vest completed the look, every pocket stuffed with mags, maps, explosives, and neatly organized intel. She wore it all with the same casual elegance someone else might wear haute couture.

Uzi watched the three solver-infected humans make their final adjustments when J walked up to the smaller girl. Without a word, she placed a hardcase on the ground and tapped on a small keypad built into it. The case hissed open, and Uzi’s eyes went wide. 

Drones. Not just any drones, but three of her own modified “BlackBirdGhostWitch” Surveillance drones and control rigging. The three quadcopter units were black and sleek, obviously not Uzi’s originals but rebuilt using materials that weren’t salvaged from a dump.

Forgetting for a moment that she was stuck in the most dangerous place on earth, Uzi let out a manic giggle as she quickly gathered her rebuilt inventions. 

Uzi quickly took the laptop-sized drone controls and implanted them in her armor's chest hardpoint. She spent a few minutes downloading drivers and implementing patches to seamlessly connect her armor to the rig and the rig to the drones. After a few minutes, two of the three small copters whirred to life and hovered in the air. They danced around Uzi’s head, zipping along in complicated patterns before they both shot straight up and scattered in different directions. 

The left behind drone floated into Uzi's open hand. Uzi had fished out several tools that would be needed to service the drones and started pulling this one apart, checking the specifications to see what “upgrades” JCJensen placed in her toys. She hummed and hawed, occasionally muttering under her breath about “fixing a cooling issue” and “so that's how they reduced the noise of the blades”. As quickly as she dissected the small drone, she put it back together. With a thought, she sent the drone flying, having it catch up with its brethren.

“So I take it Tessa built those to your satisfaction?” J asked, bending over to purr in Uzi’s ears. The purple-eyed girl yelped before turning and snarling up at the tall killer, hoping desperately she wasn't blushing. 

After composing herself, she dusted herself off, glaring at J like she had just interrupted Uzi’s favorite anima.

“I mean, whatever team she used was…ok. I guess.” Uzi sniffed. “Whatever.”

“Team? This was all Tessa,” J said with a hint of pride. 

“Tessa? That black haired bimbo was able to impro- copied my design and built three complete drones in a day?”

J smirked down at Uzi. 

“She's a bit more talented than what her public persona would indicate.”

Uzi snorted but let the matter drop, moving on to a subject that would actually keep her alive in this hellscape.

“So…what’s next?”

J pulled out a laminated paper map along with a JCJensen-branded marker. She circled a part of National Highway A87.

“This is our current position.”

She circled a portion of the outback a few inches north on the map. 

“That is our target’s currently known position. Between here and there, we’re going to rendezvous with a contact who has important intel regarding our POI–” J gave Uzi a little sideeye. “That means person of Interest.”

“I know what POI means, bootlicker.” Uzi huffed, “This isn’t my first run.”

The corners of J’s mouth twitched ever slightly upward. 

“Once we get the final location of our target, we’re going to set up a camp to prepare for our assault."

J folded the map up and tucked it into one of her many pockets. 

“I’ll brief you more when we get closer, but we must bring the target in alive.”

Uzi shrugged, “Welp, unless you have an extra gun for me, I’m thinking that’s more of a you problem.” 

J didn’t respond; instead, she made a loud clicking sound, which caused her siblings to perk up immediately. With a lazy hand gesture, she motioned for all four of them to start the long march north.

Walking the ruined highway was faster than Uzi expected. Most traffic had fled south when the Glitched swept across Australia, leaving the northbound lanes eerily clear. A few blackened cars still lay crumpled in the median, their glass melted like candle wax.

It was still surreal — casually trekking through the deadliest killing field in the world. If you ignored the almost six-foot-tall, heavily armed mutants flanking her, you could almost mistake it for a grim little hike.

For the first hour, no one spoke except for clipped whispers over comms. Eventually, boredom and a lack of any other living thing in the area fostered a relaxation of comms discipline.

N took point, ranging a few meters ahead, whistling and cheerfully pointing out random trivia — which town used to be nearby, or some extinct animal factoid no one asked for. He never mentioned the sun-bleached bones tangled in the roadside wire fences, or the yellow/grey metallic "fungus" crawling up the husks of billboards.

V brought up the rear, hands laced behind her head, radiating boredom like she had somewhere much better to be. She kicked a skull out of her path without breaking stride, and only perked up when N addressed her. Sometimes she tossed in her own trivia or snorted at his enthusiasm, as if humoring a kid brother.

J kept the middle, steady and silent. Her eyes swept the wasteland, head always moving, one hand flicking between a physical map and the compass strapped to her arm. She didn’t slow, didn’t falter, and Uzi found herself matching stride just to keep close. Every so often, J’s gaze lingered on the horizon where faint black spires of Solver growth rose from the earth, pulsing with sick yellow light.

The only time J acknowledged her siblings was to correct them — a sharp, high-pitched ping that made both wince like trained dogs. Silence would follow for a while… until N inevitably started talking again.

Uzi hugged J’s shadow, trying not to look like the weakest one in the group, and doing her best not to glance at the shapes writhing just beyond the ruined treeline.

When the next hour or so convinced Uzi she wasn’t going to die suddenly, she focused on her drones and the Operating systems that powered the AI of her and her companions' gear. 

She had assumed that they all shared similar drivers and was proven right when she sent a ping to J’s Command and Control systems. 

The oldest Solver raised an eyebrow and looked down at Uzi, a questioning look on her face. 

“I think I found a way that I can share real-time data with you guys. That way, you can access the drone stream whenever you want.”

J remained stone-faced as her eyes went out of focus, no doubt looking over the permissions the ping was asking for in her AR-HUD. 

“Sounds like an easy way for you to sabotage our communications gear.” J deadpanned. 

Uzi snorted, “I’m positive the only way I’m leaving this hellhole alive is if you guys stay alive. It’s in my best interest to keep ya’ll…how can I say this in a douchy way you would understand?” Uzi actually squeezed her brow in thought, then smiled. 

“Optimized! That’s Corporate enough, right, J?”

The solver rolled her eyes but accepted the executable. After a quick download, J found that she was indeed able to access the drone's surveillance data in real-time and whenever she wanted. While she wouldn’t have direct command over the drones, she could filter through the various data streams and visual options of the high-flying surveillance units. 

“Huh. Good work.” J said as she sent the program to V and N.

Uzi smiled like a dog being told she was a "good girl" before catching herself. She was NOT blushing, nor was she actually happy to hear praise come from what essentially was her warden and bodyguard both. She was a tough lone wolf who didn’t need anyone else's validation and DEFINITELY didn’t almost skip a step at someone implying she was useful.

Shut up.

The group had walked another hour down the dead highway. Uzi couldn’t say how long they’d been walking. She was too busy fine-tuning her drones to notice the heavy thud behind her. Or the sharp gasp that followed.

What she did notice was J and N sprinting past, guns up, eyes hard.
Her stomach lurched. Uzi spun, reaching for a sidearm she didn’t even have—

And froze.

V was on her knees. Hands raised. Her own tail locked like a guillotine against her throat. A jagged blade pressed under her chin, keeping her head tilted high.

Behind her stood a figure draped in black. Mismatched scraps of military armor, the color of midnight, clung to their frame, strung with bone charms, claws, and Solver fangs. A hood swallowed their face in shadow; only two red pinpricks glowed from a pair of nighvision hidden in the shadows, the lenses twitching and refocusing like a predator sighting its prey.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

“Hi, Doll!” N chirped.
“Doll,” J said flatly.
“Hey— ghrk— Doll,” V managed.

The shadow answered in a voice that was husky, easy-going, Russian-tinted — gravel dragged over steel.

“N. J. … Предатель.”

Uzi flinched as the figure’s glowing lenses fixed on her. It took every scrap of willpower not to duck behind J and N.

“And who is this, Рыбка?”

“No one you need to worry about,” J said, voice flat as iron and pistols still aimed at Doll’s head. “Now would you please not decapitate V?”

Doll tilted her head, slow and sharp, like a dog told to drop the rabbit clamped in its jaws.

J sighed. “Call it professional courtesy. Plus…” she hesitated, “…I don’t think Lizzy would appreciate it.”

For a long moment, Doll didn’t move. She stood frozen, mannequin-still, her red lenses unblinking.

Then, with a low huff, like a child denied dessert, she yanked her blade back and stepped away.

V exhaled hard, relief breaking through her stiff posture.

Then she shrieked. Her body seized, collapsing forward onto trembling arms.

Doll strolled around her, casual and unbothered, holding up the twitching scyth-like stinger she’d just torn free. Behind her, the rest of V’s tail writhed violently, spraying black blood across the cracked pavement.

V managed to look up as the girl strolled past, rage, confusion, and pain clearly etched on her face.

“Fucking why!?!?”

With a snap of her wrist, Doll flung the stinger tip down into the ground, missing V’s arms by inches. 

“I didn’t want you to stab me in the back. Again.” Doll didn’t even bother looking back at the Solver.

V grunted and exhaled, anger bleeding into resignation.

“Fair,” V admitted, jaw tight in pain. 

J didn’t even flinch at the sight of V’s mutilated tail. She just turned, exhaled her held breath, steady and calm, before holstering her twin pistols. 

“N, pull security. Uzi, if you don’t mind, can you help V?” J asked, already pulling maps and a small medkit from one of her many pouches and casually tossing the small red pouch to the confused hacker. 

N gave a sharp salute before finding a tall vehicle he could perch upon, watching the surrounding area like a very happy-go-lucky bird of prey.  Doll and J walked over to a burned-out car, spreading maps and intel over the blackened hood.

Uzi dropped to her knees beside V, fumbling open the medkit, only for it to vanish from her hands. V had swiped it, already digging out an auto-injector of morphine.

“Mind grabbing my tail?” she asked through clenched teeth.

Uzi nodded, throat tight. The severed appendage writhed like a dying snake, slick with black blood. It took both hands and more effort than she liked before she finally wrangled it toward V. It was so much heavier than she expected — like lifting a steel cable coated in oil.

V didn’t hesitate. She drove the injector against the stump, a sharp hiss filling the air. Relief softened her face almost instantly, her shoulders sagging. The tail slackened in Uzi’s hands, nearly slipping free.

“Closer,” V ordered, motioning to her front.

With a grunt, Uzi hauled the appendage around. V washed the dirt from the stinger’s base with a quick splash from her canteen, then pressed the torn edges together.

 For a second, nothing happened. 

Then a thin hiss escaped the seam, and a harsh yellow glow pulsed where flesh met flesh. It looked like a welding torch biting into steel — only this was her body fusing itself back together.

With a flick of her tail, V stood up, dusting herself off and grunting at the blood that coated her backside. She glanced over at Uzi, concern still etched on the hacker's face. V offered a slight smile. 

“It’s like getting kicked in the nuts, if N is to be trusted.”

She winced as her tail slithered back inside of her. 

“I believe him.”

Uzi shook her head, trying to make sense of everything that had just happened. 

“Okay, so, mind telling me what the hell just happened? Who was that? How’d she get the drop on you? And why didn’t your siblings tear her apart?”

Uzi’s words tumbled out, sharp and fast.

V didn’t answer, focusing on putting the medkit back together before she hummed a response. 

“That’s Doll. A Mercenary under the permanent employ of JCJense in general, and Tessa specifically. She's one of the foremost survival experts when it comes to Solver-infected zones. BlackWatch has her targeted as “kill on sight.” 

V handed the small red pouch back to Uzi and walked over to a nearby guardrail, sitting heavily on it. 

“She’s infected like we are, but the Solver…how the hell did Tessa explain it… manifests itself differently from us. I think they call her strain ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ or something stupid like that.”

V pulled out a piece of jerky from her cleavage and offered a piece to Uzi, frowned at the haz-mat armor that covered the girl from head to toe, and popped the piece of dried meat into her own mouth with a shrug.

“She has creepy witch powers and totally cheats whenever we fight.” V swallowed the jerky with a loud gulp. 

“As for why she wants to kill me? Her girlfriend kinda cheated on her.” V huffed out an embarrassed laugh, “With me.”

V screwed up her eyes in thought. 

“I also tried to kill her parents, but that doesn’t count.” V cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted at the black clad mercenary. 

“Hey, Doll. Are we good?”

The living shadow shifted, the only indication she had turned was the glow of her nightvision focusing on the pair. She still held onto the serrated knife she had threatened V with and pointed it at the Solver. 

A low hum reverberated through the air, and red static enveloped the blade. With a flash, it vanished.

“You are still a whore.” She turned away, “And you and Lizzy owe me lunch. Someplace nice.”

“Love you too, Doll!”

V looked down at the bewildered Uzi and shrugged.

“Dating sucks. Be glad you're single.”