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Tai

August 18th, 0700 Hours

Gibraltar, New Morocco

"And here I was, thinking you weren't gonna show..."

Of course I was going to show. I preferred my head on my body, not a spike.

As I set the heavy trashbag down in front of Omar the noise was deafening, his gang getting wasted and high and escaping from hell for a little piece of their soul.

I never had that luxury. If I wanted to forget everything then that would mean giving away my senses... Anyone and everyone wants to kill you in Gibraltar.

And I was never a real member of his gang.

"How do you do it?"

I finally managed to look up at him but quickly looked away.

This was some sort of old government building, the courtyard of it rather. He had his place on the steps looking over it all, a woman on either arm.

Omar's right eye had been gouged out years ago before he'd ascended the ladder and there was nothing handsome about him otherwise, just that he had protection and shelter. Lifeblood.

I just worked for food and the right to live out here.

"I... Just do."

"You just do? Are these defective, is this a setup?"

He opened the bag and firearms spilled out, most of them corroded and scratched. Nothing new came to Gibraltar.

"How'd you get your hands on these Tai?"

I nicked them, all of them. It was wiser to give them away than keep such a precious commodity; after all this was Omar's district and having one gun to defend yourself just threw stragglers off and Omar's gang on.

Besides I owed him. He never failed to remind me who took care of me when I wasn't old enough to walk or talk, until he found a use for me and booted me to the curb at maybe 12.

Kids are unsuspecting. Kids can get places no one else can. The Moroccans at the border don't shoot kids. Usually.

So I worked for Omar but fended for myself. I got tablescraps, which to me was gold.

"You never asked before."

"That's because before you'd bring me maybe two pistols every other week or a rusty knife or a pack of ammo... or a worn out bulletproof vest. This is a trashbag full of fuckin gu- you didn't check the action, you shit..."

I'd never shot a gun, what could I say?

Omar murmured about how much of a dumbass I was, going to flick the safety off until he grabbed the gun.

Pointed it at me.

Cold fear flooded through my body, icy. I'd had guns pointed at me all the time but this one was loaded and it was him, perhaps the one I trusted most.

Omar laughed after a moment and handed it to me. I shakily took it, gulping as he clapped me on the back.

"My mistake. I was... Just so quick getting out of there, I thought for sure with such a heavy load I wouldn't make it."

"You nabbed it from Alistair didn't you?"

"A-aye."

A quick slap to my face. Not too hard, just enough to hurt. "Quit fucking stuttering. It's annoying."

"Yessir."

I still didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do with the gun in my hand. He wanted something out of me though. That was a general rule of thumb for anything Omar gave you.

He wanted you to do something with it.

"See that man? Polar bear over there, fucking huge? He slept with one of my wives, got plans to smuggle her out of here."

Omar's wives were just prostitutes he claimed for himself. There were plenty of women around but we all knew what happened to people who went fucking around with his wives.

As for the man himself he was wearing a sleeveless vest and his back was to me. There was fresh blood on his hands and he looked like he hadn't showered in weeks. Which wasn't exactly uncommon.

He was an ugly motherfucker for damn sure. We all were. I was gaunt, I was a stark white pelt over bones. Cats don't get very big unless they're fat, especially not muscle wise.

I'd laid still in piles of corpses and people passed over me without a suspicion to hide sometimes.

"You want me to kill him."

"Yeah. Right here. And that one next to him, the reptile."

His respective wife, sitting at the table with a bunch of men. Omar liked to call himself generous for letting them speak to men.

God, I wish I'd turned the gun on him...

"Her too?"

"Her too, son... She's gotta go. Now the one you're on don't got much kick but it don't got much power either. You're gonna have to be accurate. And quick, going one-two like that before anyone runs."

People got shot here all the time. There was a fight going on, around the other side of the courtyard already.

The place smelled of death and blood and stale sex but I was desensitized to everything.

But I had never pulled a trigger on someone. Killed, yeah. Not with a gun.

There was something that made me tense up as I raised the pistol, a quake running up my body and I flinched. Some intimacy between the target and the chrome. It was begging me to refrain... Either that or screaming for me to do it.

"And make it fucking quick before they see you, huh?"

I didn't respond or I was going to stutter to all hell and he would beat me within an inch of my life.

I set the irons on his fat head, his fur would've been snowy like mine if it wasn't stained with red.

"...I'm sorry."

///

Opera

GRA Executive Building, Detroit

"Have you informed Director Harper?"

"Caine, one day you're going to lose that tongue if you keep wagging it."

He rarely spoke for that matter, but he only spoke when she wanted him to. Caine was someone for her to manipulate, like a playground for a small child, to do whatever she wanted with. He was meant to be inanimate.

No, she hadn't. And she wasn't going to.

James Harper was her puppet, always had been, and it was going to stay that way until she had no more use for him. Just because he'd had the revelation he was powerless didn't change anything. James Harper was not inanimate.

She made him, all that he was. He was to make and approve 200 global squadrons and auxiliaries and then manage them as requests and fatalities went.

She could do the same thing. And override him for that matter, as was her role as Director of the Global Reformation Agency.

"Caine, are you familiar with the Cairo Accords?"

"Of course, ma'am." His baritone voice was pleasing when she wanted it. The dingo standing in the corner of the almost black office didn't speak much and it would be a cold day in hell when he showed emotion.

"They dictate 200 as the limit of GSS squadrons the GRA is allowed at a time, meant to limit our military power."

"Yes ma"-

"Why the hell would we limit ourselves? Because a few signs and loud people in Ecuador don't like people fighting to keep them alive? Because they want to go back to anarchy under Jinn and starve and die and then get sick of them and be killed in the streets?"

The audacity. This was a democracy but there was a world war that had been going on for nearly seventy years now and this wasn't the time for limitations on power.

If they wanted change they had to kill for it. There was a youth in Madrid who was gunning down Jinn soldiers at 15 from rooftops, and as Opera DeSanta looked at her reflection in the laptop screen, reptilian and pale green with eyes an almost sinister blue, she was determined not to forget her.

Here she was now, 47 and the leader of the free world.

She had killed for it.

"Harper is a mouthpiece. He is a custodian. He keeps our special forces clean and tidy... And I tell him if he missed a spot. If I want to have another squadron then I'll have my damned squadron. What are there, fifteen black ops already? Let's have another."

G201 would be instated as one of the global squadrons on the records, yes, but it was going to be hers. She didn't want it hidden away.

After the failures of her other proxies she'd learned. Jordan was a loss but here in Norway...

"...What do you see in the roster, Caine?"

The dingo approached her desk.

He wore full combat gear, black in the urban setting, and hulked over everyone else in the office. She'd put all the candidates for her personal bodyguard through a brutal and vicious gauntlet and he was the winner, a drone to her. Caine did not question.

It looked overkill certainly, almost gaudy, but it was necessary, as she'd learned from the few mediocre retirees she'd hired as bodyguards even before she was this far up the chain.

"Chiefly, ma'am, I see the liberties Leftenant Marshall has taken. An afflict from Gibraltar, the niece of Ramses Trojan, a Russian, the criminal from Wales... The criminal from the ANZU..."

Opera smirked. Marshall certainly had put together a strange team but putting Reyna in the thick of it was her own idea.

"What bothers you is Marshall himself, isn't it? He's Harper's man, he always has been, but he's damn useful. I've decided I want him. And I want Trojan to watch me take his niece into my fold. And this afflict- it's a statement. Jinn could easily have him but we go where they do not. He is class five the scribes say, and bigger than... What was his name?"

"Krause."

She remembered that particular incident, a nasty one. They'd lost their top afflict that day, he'd been the best player on her side of the board. Meant to be meeting with the Director of Germany.

The blast had left him comatose, a miracle for such a fragile being. She'd given him to Trojan to study, the GRA's science branch lacking in that area.

When she'd asked for proof they hadn't used him for some sort of dagger aimed at her back they sent her his preserved right eye.

"I have you now, Ramses... It's been so long since anyone's put you in your place."

Caine never reacted to her odd mannerisms, speaking to no one in particular, often carrying on for ten or twenty minutes at a time.

She was a narcissist, she was a bit off the deep end... But he got paid. A lot.

She'd wanted some sort of reaction out of him at the mention of Marshall but nothing.

In the end he knew everything was a test.

"It's been quite a productive day... Tell Simmons to pull the gag order on Marshall, let him squeal to Harper. And have my car ready."

"Yes ma'am."

///

The Lynx

Somewhere in China

The sun was still up, I didn't like doing things like this in broad daylight.

Sometimes though it was best to make an example. I barely felt the kick's pressure on my leg, the spray of glass, it was all routine.

He would fall a good 60 stories into the street, already mauled by my knives, and the other rats would go silent.

Genesis had given me all the liberties apart from burning down the building with him on the roof.

I gave him a good view of the kabuki mask as he fell, so it would be the last thing he remembered. There was a small trail of corpses behind me and I'd done the same with them.

This man's crime was leaking our military information to that bastard Singh, and loose tongues only cried for death in China.

I turned to go, the comms integrated in the backside of my mask coming to life.

"When I said make an example I meant hang him from his intestines, not... Dump him into a busy street."

"Picky as usual. They'll remember this time, I always do that."

Genesis sighed, his voice somewhat metallic even without the distortion of the mic.

"You'll have to make your way back to Kashgar on your own, it's too risky to send a plane in."

I noticed a man struggling for life out the corner of my eye but a quick crack from my uzi finished him off.

I didn't pity him. He was weak, he had been born in the wrong place. In the comfortable life.

"I have a new assignment for you when you get back."

"Care to detail?"

I slid out a window I'd shot open earlier and onto the fire escape, the alley far below less appealing than the rooftop.

"There's a certain James Harper I've been wanting dead for a good while and my eyes on the other side tell me there's a new GSS squadron in play."

I grunted as I pulled myself up, looking out over the sunlit skyscrapers and red flags with silver eyes.

"There's new ones all the time."

"This one has the afflict in it. The one the scribes were talking about... And Reyna Trojan."

"An afflict and some bitch from high society. What do you want me to do, kill them?"

"I'll detail it later. We sent men to Gibraltar and what they told me can't be a coincidence."

Genesis cut off, and I felt almost alone.

If he ever wasn't comfortable enough to say something over mic it made me nervous.

It was practically saying something in my head adverse to in my face, as it was integrated into my mask.

I had been fortunate to guard his greatest secret. Most others had been killed, we'd never found Ajax, didn't dare approach Katia, and Damien was running away for a reason.

As for the others they were under lock and key. Money and loyalty.

Add that to a good show of crimson red to keep them fearful and there's the best formula for power one could have here in Jinn country, beyond the red borders.

I saw a camera and gave it a wave. Genesis owned it more than likely.

///

Tai

August 19, 0300 Hours

Gibraltar, New Morocco

I had gone well beyond my legs giving out at this point, even the survival instinct running dry.

Falling to my hands and knees, I coughed and hacked madly, not caring for the noise.

After my task in Omar's courtyard I'd been sent back out, barely eaten my food before I walked out the gates.

As soon as I'd left I felt it.

It was some sort of presence, incautious and unafraid, as if it wanted me to know it was just behind me, back where I turned I wouldn't see but I knew on everything it was there.

I'd had these weird senses since I was young and they never failed me.

I never ignored it but it had never kept so long, usually it was just run a few minutes but I'd gone every sidewinding route I knew.

Did I fuck up? Did Omar want me dead? I-I'd done good, hadn't I?

Maybe it was Alistair and his people coming back at me, so deep in Omar's territory... No, they wouldn't come this deep. And stragglers never coordinated, I knew everyone and nobody could chase so hard.

Footsteps and I spun around, my switchblade clicking as I pointed it at...

The first thing I noticed was the hood and gas mask, the second the silver eye on their arm.

Like some creature. It certainly felt that way to me, I'd only ever seen pictures.

My first thought was how the hell did anyone manage to get their hands on Jinn combat gear in an area they hadn't been in since before I was born.

And then I realized this was an operative.

"Cat! Come with me."

She was aggressively walking forward before I tensed and she backed off.

"I have... Food? Shelter." Not a native speaker for sure, probably from a world away that should never have been able to get into the hellish bubble of Gibraltar.

"Let me help"-

Her head popped with a bang and there was a scuffle out of a side alley before a Jinn operative fell out of it, crawling a moment before another deafening shot ended their life, rattling my teeth.

The first time I saw Marshall I was sure if I had anything to piss I fucking would've.

He was wearing some ratty black coat like a native over probably heavy combat gear, but his shades broke the illusion.

Not that anybody would fuck with a giant gray wolf with the biggest bull barrel you'd ever seen in hand.

He looked over at me and put it away, just thinking for a moment.

I dropped my knife but didn't move to pick it up, sure that he could make my ribs into splinters with a quick draw if he wanted.

"...Tai. That's your name. Isn't it?"

"Y-yeah, I'm with Omar's"-

"I know, I've been watching you for a week. And so have they."

He drew my eyes back to the corpses, the first with no head and a shattered gas mask, the second with a big hole in his chest, no life to leave his eyes as they were hidden to begin with.

"You know who they are?"

"Jinn." I said, sucking it up and straightening. Some people liked you to play scared, it was best to make it not seem like you were cowering on the inside.

"That's right, Jinn operatives. Yukio Nomura and Koharu Ishida. Both from Japan, both working for China, both trained to reel in afflicts like yourself."

What the fuck was he on about.

This was so bizarre, and it was too much for me. I was going to have to let this... madman talk.

This madman.... Not from Gibraltar. The first foreigner I had met in my life.

The third actually but he was the only one with an intact skull.

"I'm Leftenant Marshall Davenport, I'm working with the GRA to get you out of here. This will seem like a little much for you and I know you don't trust me. But they weren't alone."

"Y-you want me to come with you?"

"I won't force you, I know better than that. You've made it through Gibraltar your whole life but these ones? You want to take your chances against them?"

Sure as hell I didn't want to come with Davenport Leftenant, or whatever his name was.

...

Sure as hell I didn't want to die.

"...I'll come with you."

This was too real to be fake. It was stupid almost, two Jinn goons and this... Guy? That just shot them dead like it was nothing?

Marshall started walking and it was implicit I should follow him, and I found myself getting closer to the man as we did, unimpeded and unchallenged, by anyone.

To this day he still radiates power to me.

As we approached the border, an area I had only seen a handful of times, things got thinner and buildings got more destroyed and decrepit, less signs of life but Marshall took it as a comfort.

"T-there are soldiers"-

"I know."

"...They shoot people like us"-

"I know."

He was almost amused, but he probably felt sorry for me.

I barely noticed the fair sized wall and checkpoint as we passed through it, some strange giddy feeling coming over me.

I wasn't fucking dead, and it felt great.

The soldiers were looking at me like a dead rat someone'd pulled out of the floorboards but I started laughing, Marshall speaking Arabic to them but my native language was foreign to me all of a sudden.

As I looked back into the hell of Gibraltar for the last time I saw what I didn't register then, the shape somewhat like a man, but now I know it must've been a Jinn soldier.

///

My fur was white.

Of course it was but... It'd been all sorts of yellow and dirt and sand and black.

I stood there in front of the fogged mirror trying to make sense of it all.

White fur, gold eyes. When I was real young an old woman had tried to claw out my eyes because she thought they were pretty.

I hoped I never woke up. Someone would stab me in the throat while I was sleeping or something and I could just live this out. Or die rather.

Look at the tiles on the fucking bathroom floor, I wanted to lick-

"Tai?"

Marshall knocked on the door.

"I-I'll be out in a m"-

"Take all the time you need."

I had to have spent an hour just letting the shower water run over me, and under my fur I was pruned.

I didn't realize how much I hurt before, some of it was gone now.

I dressed in the clothes Marshall had given me, the others had gone into the trash. They'd probably have to burn them.

As I came out after another ten minutes a bit of steam escaped the bathroom, and Marshall was just hanging up the phone.

He wasn't wearing that coat anymore, he'd discarded it at the checkpoint but now he wasn't wearing combat gear either, a gray jacket and tie.

Casual wear, for him.

"Tai. It's good to see you, I thought you must've gotten lost in the bathroom."

"N-no sir."

I looked around rabidly, I was an animal to him and I knew it.

"It occurred to me I never fed you." He set a tray on the bed and in about five minutes I'd finished everything on it, the wolf looking impressed.

"D-do you have any more..."

"I'll send for some. You smell a lot better. Look better too." He added as an afterthought.

"Now they're going to have to vaccinate you for half a million things before you can so much as step outside this room."

"What about y-you, aren't you g-gonna get sick...?"

Stop fucking stuttering or you're gonna look bad...

"I don't get sick."

Hell, I believed it.

I crawled onto my bed. I had the room to myself, Marshall had one in a separate room adjoining mine.

Oh my god, I was going to cry-

"Don't get used to this, we might have to move you in the night."

"Why?" I shot up and it came out of my mouth before I thought it.

Why, then, had been just about the last thing I was thinking of. I was too busy enjoying what.

The very corner of the wolf's mouth upturned, just the corner.

"I selected you for Global Service Squadron 201."

"...Alright."

It wasn't even sarcastic, I felt high. Was I high?

"Tai, there's some very important... Maybe now's not the best time. Get some rest, I'll send for some more food."