01.Chapter One
A Wildflower's Petals
“Aha. I was wondering who drew the short straw.”“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Looks like we’re both in the doghouse tonight.”“Did you bring the popcorn?”“C’mon, man, it’s recording. Why are you saying that?”“Right, right. Okay, let’s do this official-like. Time is 02:07, security officers Mason and Stockholm
reviewing CCTV footage from incident, uh… you got the—”“Incident code NSD-LRT-25-000…3? Seriously? Three incidents in twenty-five years?”“Whistle-clean. We’re going to start our investigation with the day of the incident and work our way
back. Tape’s loaded.”“Commencing playback now… You got the schematics?”“Looks like we’re—hang on—yep. We’re starting in the subject’s holding cell.”“Cozy. And she’s calm.”
“Wedged right in the corner. Closest thing to a blind spot this place has. Alright, so the door opens at
21:29, let’s skip ahead.”“21:28:58. She hasn’t moved for a solid three hours.”“And there’s victim #2. So he comes in, and she… oh, gross.”“Subject dispatches victim #1 with their own tactical knife. C’mon, Mason, you’ve seen a killing before.”“It’s still gross. Why’s she just standing there? Shock?”“No-one who can do that to security personnel is feeling shock. It’s like she’s waiting.”“Yeah, but for what? Victim #2 to hit the alarm?”“No, she tries to stop that… there.”
“And off she goes. What’s between her and the exit?”“Report… says eighteen vics, six science and twelve security, and three biometrically-locked gates.”“Alright, let’s flag those deaths on the timeline. How long does it take her?”“Thirty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds.”“What? Let me see that.”“It’s right there, look.”“Incident start 21:28:58, incident end… 22:01:46. Thirty-two forty-eight. Damn.”“It’s rough.”“How come we’re only just being brought in on this? Wait, don’t answer that. Flag the deaths.”
“Done.”“Five clusters including our first pair. So she works her way from holding to lab 3. Vics #3 to #6 there.”“Looks like they were stunned by the alarm. Security hadn’t even gotten their guns at this point.”“Then she goes… lab 3 to specimens, okay. Specimens to… what is that? A broom closet?”“Looks like it.”“Why hide now?”“Adrenaline’s wearing off? Doesn’t matter though, here’s #7 to #11.”“Down they go… who taught her how to shoot?”“Not the job. There’s a ten minute break here between clusters, and she’s… going back in?”“She kills over half the staff and just chills in a closet? What’s the point?”“Do we have eyes in there?”“Hang on, hang on—yeah, 73-A. What is she doing in there?”“…No feed? Is it hacked?”“How could it be? The whole facility’s on an isolated network.”“So it just happens to be down? Did she access a terminal?”“Uh… not according to the report. Vic #2 triggers the alarm and the only other thing the system
registers are the biometrics of each gate opening.”“Hm…”“What are you thinking?”“I don’t know. I’m gonna pull the maintenance records, you scrub until she leaves the closet.”“Okay… Wait. That can’t be right.”“What?”“Hold on…”“Mason, use your words.”“I said hold on, I’m double-checking… oh. Oh, she’s good.”“Huh?”“Subject doesn’t re-appear until the next cluster. The cameras do not pick her up until her knife’s in
#12’s eye.”“That’s impossible.”
“You scrub and tell me I’m wrong.”“Hand over the controls… there’s #11, she goes into the closet… ten minutes… shit, there she is.”“Completely undetected.”“How is she doing that?”“Beats me.”“Unless… scrub forward a little more. A little more—wait, stop. Did you see that?”“No?”“She stops at that corner. Why?”“Who knows what’s going on in her head?”“I think I do. She’s moving between blind spots.”“Uh, no she’s not. She’s right there, bright and bloody.”“No, no, use your head. Go back to the first cluster.”“Okay…”“She kills those two, then she waits. What’s the next camera in sequence doing?”“It’s… oh.”“You seeing what I’m seeing?”“You’re not suggesting she’s memorized all of the cameras, are you?”“Twenty-five years in the facility. That’s a lot of time to plan… and check this out. Go back again. You
see how that first death happens?”“Uh… she moves in for #2, but #1 gets in the way. Out comes the knife… tries to get her…”“And then she takes them down. Go to the next cluster.”“She runs into #3… who tries to grab her.”“#7?”“Uh… Oh, come on.”“Yep.”“This is self-defence?”“It’s overkill, but she doesn’t initiate a single fight. Add that to her trying to move between blind spots,
and I think she would have gotten out undetected.”“That’s crazy.”“And now she’s loose in the city.”“What were they training her for?”
02.Chapter Two
Blossoms of Resilience
Labra had come to love the rain. In her first nights of freedom, rain had kept her safe. Sheltering from the downpour made people inattentive, gave them incentive to move just a little faster, keep their eyes down and their attention on the road ahead. No-one had time for the woman crouched in the alley, eyes and ears trained on the slightest hint of notice.Now, a year into her escape and preparing to secure her next mark, Labra had learned to make the rain work for her. No longer was it her silent protector; now, it was her ready companion.Kneeling atop the shipping container, she closed her eyes and focused. The droplets spattering against her ears faded away. The trickle down the back of her neck melted into the background. One by one, she tuned out each distraction the rain brought until a single thing remained.Smoke. Not the acrid, piercing stench of trash fires she’d learned to avoid in the slums, nor the cloying, corrosive odour of industry near the factories and power plants. Gently fragrant, born from the cinders of a leaf Labra knew neither the name of, nor how anyone in this city acquired in it. Its scent, though, she knew by heart, and even with the rain drowning almost any scent a normal person could detect, she could pick it out from her vantage.She rose from her vantage, Labra watched as the sedan, its back left window lowered just enough to allow the smoke to escape without letting any rain in, skulked into the docks. The same sedan she’d been tracking for almost a week.Her tails flicked. Once upon a time, this moment used to set her heart aflutter with anxious anticipation. Now it calmed, by her will and a few practised breaths, to a steady thrum.The sedan turned right, carving through a puddle where cracked concrete had been left untended, and came to a stop between the containers opposite her. This morning, the workers had cleared the space to make room for another container due to arrive in the week, but now their work revealed its true purpose; from all other angles, the car was invisible.Labra counted the minutes, timing them against the rhythm of her tails. For all her advantages, she could not hear inside the vehicle. She knew only that its occupants would be waiting; her mark, in particular, she rarely saw without his phone.
After five minutes, the front passenger-side door opened. An umbrella sprang out, shielding from view the one who exited. Labra narrowed her eyes, leaning forward ever so slightly. Straight, jet black trousers. Office shoes, not combat boots. Silver watch. Their gait favoured the right foot—a limp? No, simply heavier. Armed. She caught the holster as her mark’s security adjusted their jacket, opening the back left passenger door and stepping aside in one fluid motion. Assuming five passengers, that was at least five guns. So far, so expected.
The remaining passengers all alighted at the same time. She paid special attention to her mark, watching for the briefcase that had brought her out to this dark corner in the first place. No sign of it yet… They would wait for the handover, surely. Labra tried to piece together a clearer picture of the security detail instead. Five people left the car, and whilst none of them carried automatic weapons, she knew for a fact that their sedan usually held one or two. The driver—she marked her by the scent of decidedly less expensive tobacco—kept one hand in a loosely-curled fist. No doubt the keys and, more importantly, the quick-release button for the boot, would be clasped inside. Taking her down would be the first priority if this all went south.Labra counted another five minutes. Another ten. The group fell from wary attention to impatient pacing. She spotted a knife when one of the men ducked away to relieve themselves around the corner. Her mark, face obscured by the umbrella held by his closest attendant, turned periodically to the left, a potential sign of his nerves. What did he keep glancing at, she wondered? Guns in the trunk or, dare she hope, her target?Given nothing else to do, she kept time and continued to study. She was about to mark the fifteenth minute of waiting when her nostrils flared and her eyes widened. A new scent surfaced from the morass of the city, washing over her in a wave so overwhelming that for a moment, she forgot entirely about her mission. Powerful, but not pungent. Distinct, but not demanding. She couldn’t describe the scent any more adeptly than smelling like home.
Labra blinked, shaking her head roughly. Wet hair slapped her face. This wasn’t the first time she’d scented whomever, or whatever, the scent belonged to. The first time had been mere days after her escape from the facility. It had cut so cleanly through the gore and the filth that she believed herself to be dreaming. It was only after the second time, shortly after her first successful theft, that she convinced herself that the scent was real. What a maddening thing, though; any time she thought to chase it, the scent disappeared. It did so here, too, when she turned her eyes away from the group to try and track it. The scent felt… alive, almost. Like it knew she was searching for it, and knew to dance away from her senses the moment it detected her attention. So, like a cat ignoring its owner, she had learned to let it be.The sound of a second car arriving brought her back to reality. An unmarked vehicle, its plates obscured by a thick bumper and its windows tinted so dark they consumed what little light remained of the evening, pulled into the dock. She tensed, prowling to the very corner of her vantage point as the car stopped in the alley that her mark had turned into.
Again, her tails began to count. Tick, tick, tick.
Six people exited the larger vehicle, none of them shy about the weapons they carried. Labra sucked the curse on her lips back into her lungs. Her mark she’d been able to track, to understand. His customer, however… she knew NEO intimately, but even sharing the same air as them put her at risk. She’d been forced to keep her distance, and now her abundance of caution clamped its jaws down on her opportunity, like a wolf hunting a rabbit.She saw body armour, stun batons, rifles, laser sights. For a mercy, none of them seemed to wear night vision goggles, but they would certainly be wearing bodycams. If so much as a hair on her tail made it onto that footage…
The only two who weren’t dressed to the nines for a hit job or a tactical assault were her mark and his customer, a mousy scientist flanked by the most heavily armed of the lot. Labra cast about herself, weighing her options. She still hadn’t seen the briefcase, hadn’t confirmed its contents. She couldn’t move until she knew for sure that what she was there for was about to land in hands that were supposed to be hers.They started talking, raised voices only a dull murmur under the rain. Labra moved. She slipped her boots off and, barefoot, bounded to one of the containers that hid her mark’s sedan. She held her breath as she landed, but they were all so focussed on the exchange that not a soul looked skyward.
She exhaled. From here, she could make out some words.
“Consider… lucky.” Barked her mark, posturing under his umbrella. “This… all we… site.”
“NEO… interest in… of vultures.” The scientist replied, implacable despite their tiny stature.Labra circled, moving to the back of the sedan. Tinted windows made it impossible to see inside, but if her mark was here, then his briefcase would be in the back seat. He wouldn’t be so careless as to leave it in the trunk.“Show me.”The hair on the back of her neck pricked. Labra took one breath, short, sharp. Her foot nudged against a stone, dropped by a bird or from a container passing overhead. She picked it up, holding it close to her eye.The sedan’s driver opened the back seat. She saw the white leather of the briefcase.A predator’s focus consumed her. Time slowed. In the blink of an eye, she knew what she had to do.“Guhk!”The scientist’s head jerked to one side. It took a moment for everyone gathered to see his opened throat. The stone ricocheted off the opposite container, sounding just enough like a bullet to sell it.“SNIPER!” cried one of the lackeys.Chaos erupted.A hail of bullets and muzzle flare shrouded Labra’s descent. She dropped neatly down behind the opened door as a bullet caved in the head of the driver, snagged the briefcase as her mark yelled his last curse, and was back to her original vantage point before the last casing hit the ground.She did not wait. Snatching her boots up, she sprinted across the containers and out of the dockyard, leaving only the wisps of tobacco and the odour of gunpowder in her wake.
03.Chapter Three
Flowers of Freedom
The bare halogen light flared like a second sun, blinding Labra. She winced away, causing pain to lance through a broken nose and into the very back of her skull.“Awake, are you?”A hand clapped the back of her head. A detective—the same detective whose greasy fingers she could just about smell on the place her nose bent out of shape—strutted around from behind her to their seat on the opposite side of the interrogation room. “Good night?” they jeered, “Rest well? Me, I slept like a baby. Knowing you’re in here and I’m out there just… warms the cockles of my heart.”
She levelled a baleful, silent stare the detective’s way. It didn’t faze him. “I’m getting overtime for this, so you take as long as you like, little hybrid. We’ve pinned your DNA to about a dozen murders over the past year, not to mention the larceny and theft of intellectual property. How your guts aren’t NEO’s garters yet, well. That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”
A dozen murders? That didn’t sound right. Wait… how many were at the docks? She couldn’t think straight. Her thoughts swam somewhere between the blood congealing underneath her nostril and her absolute exhaustion from being kept awake for this interrogation.Her ears pinned down when the detective slammed grubby, ringed hands clanking furiously against bare metal. “Not a shred of remorse in you, is there? Thinking you’ll skate by just because your file’s sealed? As soon as NEO approves the release, we’ll know every dirty secret you’re hiding. My secretary’s got their brass on speed dial.”She wasn’t sure what to say to that. She had plenty to hide from NEO, that much was certain, but she’d carried every secret about her on her person. Travelling light had always been her way. Leave no trace.
That damn briefcase…He seemed to read her thoughts. Was she really so obvious? “You know, it’s only because of the tracer on that case that we were able to find you. Maybe whoever’s bankrolling your little spree set you up for a fall. The movies aren’t always right, y’know. There’s no honour among thieves. Why don’t you tell me who told you how to find your victims?”“I wasn’t—” Labra began, but soon thought better of it. The way the detective’s eyes popped, leering, sharpening on her like a slavering carnivore, silenced her. Anything she said, anything at all, would be twisted against her.The detective ran his tongue thickly over his teeth, then finally threw up his hands. “No skin off my teeth. Like I said, your file’s unsealing as we speak. Think I’ll take my time reading it. Maybe enjoy some lunch. Wouldn’t want to go hungry over this mess.”His chair scraped as he stood, dusting himself off with a satisfied grunt. Labra’s heart sunk. A year on the run, cut short by one careless mistake. How could she have known? How could she have been so reckless, and for what? A scrap of info on the lab she’d fled, on the project that created her. Had it truly been worth it?A pair of hollow knocks sounded from the other side of the cell. Grunting confusion, the detective opened it just a crack. “Yeah?”Her ear angled towards the conversation. “Lawyer’s here.”“Her what? How did she—she can’t have—”“Seems like she can. Dunno how she did it, but he’s here. What do we do?”“Fffffffuck. Fuck. Where’s my file?”“Still waiting for authorisation, he—”Enraged, but aware that she was in earshot, the detective forced his way past and slammed the door shut, isolating her again. For all its echoing acoustics, the room itself was properly soundproofed.
Her mind raced. Lawyer? She’d heard the word, but couldn’t fathom what it meant. Was this NEO’s way of finding her? Had her DNA triggered some sort of alarm? Were they here to finish the job?Not that it mattered. She was beaten, tired, hungry. Everything she’d fought tooth and claw to avoid since escaping. Nothing she could do now would change it.The door opened again. A quiet voice spoke. “Uncuff my client and give us the room, please.”Keys jangled. The metal pinning her wrists and pulling her shoulders back relaxed. For the first time since being dragged here, Labra felt relief.A wholly unremarkable man sat opposite her, wearing a white shirt, pinstripe tie, and charcoal suit. He smiled quietly, as if he was in on a secret that he was enjoying holding back. “Hello.”She didn’t answer. Only stared. Without her sense of smell, she had no way of knowing anything more about this… person. Breathing through a broken nose was harder than she imagined.“They’re really done a number on you, huh…”“Who…” she began, but the bleeding cut her short. She spat blood to one side.“Let’s do something about that before we continue. May I?”He stood, leaning over the table and reaching for her nose. She began to recoil, pushing her chair onto its back legs, but the faintest whiff of him fought through the cloying, bloody iron filling her mind. She hesitated. He didn’t.Pain flashed through her. Quicker than she could move, he placed his hands both sides of her nose and snapped it back into place. It didn’t stop the bleeding, not by a long shot, but air flowed freely, and with it, recognition. Home. This man smelled like home, carried that warm, lovely, alien scent on him, in him, around him. Labra’s heart skipped. “Who are you?”He sat back, satisfied. “Feeling better already, are you? According to their systems, I’m your lawyer, but that’s just today’s job. Normally…” He leaned forward, that damnably conspiratorial smile turning into a proper smirk. “People call me Commander.”
“Commander…?” she parroted, “Commander for who? NEO?”
The Commander laughed. “Good god, no. No, I run a tighter ship than they do. I’ll happily tell you more about it when we’re out of here, but first, I need to know about the hybrid girl sat opposite me.”Labra’s ear flicked. She waited for him to continue. With the detective, she’d known from the start than anything he said was a trap. The Commander, though, exuded confidence. She couldn’t even begin to say why she trusted him, but the very core of her being was ready to. She felt like all the scattered pieces of the life she’d lived away from that facility were slotting into place.“We’ve been on your heels for a little while now. I have to say, I’m impressed. We thought you were a team of three, four… two at an absolute push. But a lone woman, causing this much trouble for NEO? Astounding. Simply astounding.” The Commander steepled his fingers. “What I don’t know is why. Why are you running circles around these idiots? What was worth the risk you took two nights ago?”“I…” Labra flexed her wrists, wiping her arm over her nose to clear it. She took another clear, less painful breath, drawing deep of the Commander’s scent. “They had information on me. Where I’m… where they made me.” She looked him in the eyes, searching him. He gave nothing away. “I had to know… what they made me for.”The Commander exhaled, slow and sorrowful. “Another one of NEO’s playthings. I wish I could say you were the first, but…”
He bowed his head, but soon a beeping in his pocket forced him to gather himself. “Okay. We’ve got about five more minutes before they figure out that file isn’t arriving, and that my credentials are forged. I have two more questions, and then we can leave this place. Understand?”She nodded.“Question one. Up ‘till now, you’ve caused headaches for NEO, and I respect that, but I’m out to make them hurt. And to make them hurt, I need folks like you. Folks with skills. If I break you out of here, can I trust you to help me?”He could have asked her to kill everyone in this building, and she would have done it for free. She nodded, eager. The Commander smiled.“Question two. You got a name?”A name? “Labra. They called me Labra.”He repeated her name. “Labra. Lovely.”In the distance, a siren screeched, loud enough that the soundproofing failed to muffle it. The Commander—her Commander—looked to the door. “Maybe we only had one minute. Okay, Labra. You ready?”He offered his hand. She took it. “Ready.”They shared a grin. “Welcome to the Wildflowers.”
Credits
Written by: Nozomi Okumura
Based on lore written by: Missed StrangeBackground image: Haji CastellaMugshot by: Darlingzz