NOW.

NEW YORK CITY

IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL LIGHT of the bathroom, Sloane watches the water run. She turns the tap off, and is met with deafening silence, heavy as a heartbeat in her ears. Unable to stand it, she flicks the faucet on again, and the white noise of water guzzling from the faucet fills the gap between her head and her thoughts.

In this wall of static, her mind runs.

In the beginning, there were only villains.

In the beginning, there was only Sergio Castello, and the hand he'd extended to pull her out of the dark. When she closes her eyes, she can still see him lurking in periphery, dark eyes fixed on her as he watches from behind the glass, his hands folded behind his back.

When Sergio had assembled the Horsemen, his vision had been to cull the world of weakness. At least, that's what he'd told them. But the names that Sloane and her crew had been given to strike off the list held weight to them, power that came from business conglomerates, politicians, and journalists. It didn't take much to put two and two together to see that Sergio had been using the Horsemen to take people off the chessboard, to advance his position in the hierarchy of America's elite. Granted, back then—and even now, in retrospect—Sloane hadn't cared much about the morality of the entire situation. Sergio had taken them in and given them a purpose. Had helped them hone their gifts as metahumans to become something more.

Sloane remembered the day the illusion dissolved. After three years of doing his dirty work, of dispatching competitors and politicians, Sergio wanted to go higher. It made sense. If he could crack their genetic code, he could become one of them. If he could crack this phenomenon, he could rise in power, make himself invincible, become richer. He could control the world.

What made a metahuman?

It started with blood samples, skin cells, bits of muscle tissue here and there. Then it was vivisection for organ tissue samples, cutting them open under blinding lights and sewing them back up for the next mission, the next round of testing. When they began drilling for bone marrow, Sloane remembered begging for death when they'd put her under anaesthesia, remembered praying—for the first time in her life—to never surface from sleep.

Was it a mutation? Were you born to it?

All over her body, Sloane's scars blaze beneath her clothes, a phantom ache tugging and tugging and tugging on the thread of memory, threatening to unravel it. To unravel her. Until the seams burst, and memory shatters over her, fragments spliced together in a vicious Rolodex reeling back and forth. A white cage of sterile suffocation and clinical walls and painfully crisp sheets. Needles rattling on metal trays beside the cold embrace of two separate gurneys with their leather restraints. The tail of a white lab coat, a flash of a nametag: Dr. Patmos, and hands covered in blue surgical gloves strapping her down. Gleaming scalpel blades slicing through puckered skin. Syringes filled with green liquid, hooked up to machines and their pointed teeth gleaming in the fluorescent light before they sunk venom into her flesh, into her blood—and lit her entire world on fire.

Was it luck?

Even now, far away from Star City, far from Velocity Labs, even when she'd laid down two years and millions of dollars' worth of collateral between them, she could still feel his piercing gaze dissecting her. As if he were right there, watching her through the glass, his attention a sharp knife slicing through her flesh. On her back, the scars left behind by the surgical drill throbbed, the ache running down the length of her spine.

Or was there merely something more to some people? An evolutionary turn after the fever, a new species rising, leaving behind the old model in the dust?

It'd been two years, but her body kept the score. It'd been two years, and the world had been quiet, empty of the echo of ruin that she'd left in her wake when she'd destroyed the lab, killed everyone inside of it, and it unsettled her. Not because of what she'd done, but because Sergio Castello was still alive.

On the list burned into the forefront of her mind, the list of names she had curated painstakingly on her own, names she'd tied to Vigilare and the program, Sergio Castello's had been written in bold. And she wanted nothing more to see him shredded to pieces, his jugular between her teeth. One name among dozens.

He has to know that she's alive, too. So why isn't he searching for her? Why hasn't he found her already?

Where are you, Sergio?

Gripping the edge of the sink, the marble cool beneath her palms, Sloane looks her reflection dead in the eyes and tightens her jaw.

Where are you hiding?

She sticks her hand under the faucet and the water froths, turning pink as the blood clings to the crevices of her palm. Later, when her hands are clean, she washes her blades, all eight of them, the blood marbling the water, and slips them back into their built-in sheaths within the black arm bands wrapped around her forearms. For a moment, she wonders if there's any spare panadol for the headache coming on, but this isn't her bathroom, and she can't risk touching anything else. Her prints might be unidentifiable since she isn't in any of the systems, but Floyd says it isn't worth the trouble. She has the advantage of being all but existent, a ghost in the machine, and if she plays her cards right, she could get away with everything. There's an ironic freedom in that.

Blood stains on clothes and skin can always be removed; incinerated in a bonfire far from the crime scene or washed off with water and peroxide. But some stains just won't come out no matter how hard she scrubs. Sloane had stopped trying after her second assassination. After that, it became just one body after another, one less name on her list.

It's better that way. Floyd always says that before inscribing to the business of death, you have to check your emotions at the door. You isolate yourself from anything that could compromise the mission. Otherwise, you start to give meaning to your kill. And that's dangerous. You should always treat a dead body like a dead body. A life isn't a sacred thing. Floyd says that. Once you strike their names off the list, you wash your hands and you leave and you don't look back.

Never look back.

When Floyd kills a person, upholding his end of a contract, he etches their names onto his skin in ink and moves on. By now, he is a tapestry of proof, of evidence, of memory. But Sloane doesn't like the idea of branding someone else's name on her. It would feel too much like crawling back inside the cage and locking the collar back around her own neck.

It didn't matter now, whether they meant to hurt her or whether they believed they were doing what was right. What mattered was that they did it.

Slipping her dark hair out of its tight braids, Sloane cocks her head, and brushes her black hair back into a ponytail, like her mother used to do for her when she was a child. Still, she smothers that thought the moment it flickers to the forefront of her mind. Her mother's name might be on that list, but it's not the next.

Stepping away from the sink, Sloane purses her lips. Her dark eyes are flat, her chin tapered to a point, her lips pressed into a perpetual line, sharp apathy carved into her features the way a mask melds into skin. The freckles dusting her cheekbones and the bridge of her flat nose less endearing now that she's twenty. Her mother always said she had a face built for scorn, always said she would be sweeter if she smiled, and so Sloane never did.

She didn't want to be sweet.

She wanted to be free.

At once she is someone strange and familiar. A wave of resentment rises in her throat, choking her like a steel beam. In a flash, her arm shoots out sure as an arrow and a silver blade shoots out of her armbands like a shard of glass, glinting in the sunlight, but just before it can shatter her reflection to pieces, she closes her hand into a fist and the blade halts, hovering just centimetres from the glass. For an endless second, Sloane stands there, holding her reflection at knife-point. And then, with the flick of her wrist, the blade pinwheels, slashing through the air and shooting back to her palm. She catches it by the hilt and pushes it back under the armband.

Now, Sloane can hear Floyd's disappointed drawl in her head, you disappear.

And you don't look back.

✷

ONE HOUR AGO.

SLOANE presses her hand against the lock at the front door.

Through the wood, she can feel the vibrations under her palm, a steady hum echoing through the metal, singing up the bones of her fingers. When she can finally feel the shape of the bolts, an image painted through the subtle frequencies, she seizes hold of it, and crooks her fingers. The bolts slide into place with a sharp click, and she slips through the open door, silent as a shadow, into the sleeping house and ten years into the past.

Back then, she'd known him as Amos, a vague silhouette in a tweed jacket and the musky hair gel. Sloane never spoke to him, even when he was at her door, but she knew about him. He'd come to the funeral they'd held for Phoenix and her father, had shaken her mother's hand and offered her his business card and a number to call. Timing, Sloane had come to learn, was everything. After the funeral, the money had stopped coming in, her father's restaurant had been reclaimed by the city, and the eviction notice splashed across their door was days away from expiring its patience. Everything Amos had offered her mother looked attractive in light of their dire circumstances. Gotham was always a city that devoured its weak and vulnerable, cut chunks of flesh from your body at the price of scraping by, and a widow burdened by debt and two young children was its prime victim.

"I hear," Amos had said, his plastic salesman's grin unwavering beneath her mother's severe countenance, "that you have one of them. A metahuman. How extraordinary."

"There is nothing extraordinary about it," her mother had said, lips pressed into a tight line, her face darkening at the implication. "And she has cursed our family."

He'd offered them a home, a place of shelter, enough money to scrape by. In exchange for the reparations and respite, Sloane had been signed over to Vigilare. To Sergio Castello. Now she was his curse to bear.

The covert department Sergio had cobbled together was a tangle of pseudonyms and false paper trails. After she'd blown Velocity Labs apart, it'd been dissolved, its employees disbanded, crawling back into the ground to lead normal lives, having severed all ties with Vigilare, like cockroaches scattering into the shadows when the light was turned on. Majority of them forged new identities, new lives, their slate wiped clean, as though the entire operation had been a fever dream.

In some semblance of normalcy, Amos set up shop for his new life in one of the more temperate boroughs of New York, not quite the suburbs yet, but a more established urban area, with his wife and two children. He works a nine-to-five job in legal consulting. He goes by James Reston now, owns too many golf clubs and a receding hairline, and where he was trim in the waist before, there is now a belt of fat sagging over the waistband of his slacks.

It wouldn't take much to topple all of it.

Lingering in the vestibule, Sloane cocks an ear toward the living room, but there's only the sound of the suburbs turning over in its sleep. Wrapped around her arms, the black armbands, concealing a plethora of sheathed blades, hums with a low frequency she's always attuned to. She runs a finger over one, counting the sheaths. Four blades in each. Two more strapped to her ankles, and at least a dozen more concealed in the folds of her clothes, a constant electrostatic thrum running through her body. Under the red cloth masking her features, her breath is warm and steady as she works her way down the corridor to the bedrooms, her feet ghost-silent against the wooden floorboards.

The first door had been left ajar, the fan whirring quietly in the corner. Pink walls, canopy draped over the bed, a dollhouse shoved in the corner. Reston's youngest, a lamb of a girl with her father's watery blue eyes and her mother's chestnut locks, glances up, bleary and fearful, at Sloane as she hovers over her, and cowers further into her sheets. The flash of a blade in Sloane's gloved hand draws a whimper, long, blonde lashes fluttering. Panic seizes her breaths. In the ghost of the girl's cherubic cheeks and her wide, round eyes, Sloane almost sees someone else, but blinks away the mirage.

"Who're you?" She asks, in that tiny, child voice, bottom lip trembling.

"You're dreaming," Sloane whispers, her blackened heart steeling, "this is a very bad dream. You must be quiet. You will wake up to worse."

She sweeps out of the room in a blink, and shuts the door gently. At the clench of her fist, the bolts within the lock shudder as she slides them into place and warps them out of shape, sealing the door shut inside out. She tests the door once. It doesn't budge. The next door sports a plaque across the middle with a name, GEORGIA, in purple glitter and faded rabbit stickers. Sloane seals this one, too.

Now the real work's just begun. Sloane twists the knob on the master bedroom, and enters like a bitter draft of wind, a shadow rippling over the wooden tiles. Moonlight slices across the room, illuminating a pool of light hair, and two slumbering forms beneath the comforter. In bed, Reston and his wife face opposite sides of the room. Sloane swipes their phones off the nightstand, noting the bottle of melatonin on the wife's side, and tucks them in her pocket. A second blade slides out from a hidden sheath beneath her armband and into her awaiting palm.

She flicks both knives into the air, and stalls them with a wordless command. They drift toward their targets, sharpened points glinting, poised over the sleeping bodies. Palms splayed before her, fingers singing with power, Sloane feels the thermonuclear furnace of her rage flicker to the surface for a moment. When she blinks, she sees him ten years ago—seated at the dining table with her mother, his plastic grin gleaming as he watched her trace her initials into the dotted lines, everything will be taken care of. The compulsion to slash his neck open, let him bleed out and be gone before his wife wakes to the sound of Reston choking on his own blood, is there, ever-present and emergent, but he isn't deserving of a quick death.

He'd known, the entire time, what he was signing her off to, and she'd suffered all of it with her eyes wide open.

And now, so must he.

In the dark, Sloane lets her rage sit, a live coal burning up in her chest, a double-edged blade forged in the abyss, waiting to let fly. Headlights pass through the thin curtains, illuminating the room in dim flashes. The curtains flutter.

Sloane lowers the knife, and the glinting tip pricks Reston's throat, pressing down harder and harder until the blood begins beading.

Reston starts away with a sharp intake of breath—until he catches the flash of the knife hovering over his throat. His mouth clicks shut audibly, and the scream dies in his throat. His eyes dart around the room, searching for his assailant, pinned down by his own fear, thick in the air. Beside him, his wife barely stirs.

"I hear," Sloane says, her voice low, muffled by the bandana. "You're no longer working for Warner. How remarkable."

"Please," he whimpers, his voice quaking with fear. "If you want money—"

"Shut up," she snaps, her eyes flashing, lips pulled back in a vicious snarl. "Unless you want her to suffer, too." The knife poised over his wife dips to a pulsing point in the graceful arch of her neck. "If that's not enough, your daughters will do just fine. Now, up." Her voice is sharp, but soft in the way of thunder, rolling over the room and striking a chord within Reston. His throat bobs as he regards her, pale with fear. She draws the knife back, inch by inch, and lets him sit slowly upright. "Walk. Hands up."

Reston lets out a sharp exhale, his breaths coming up short as he struggles to untangle the sheets from his legs. Despite the stiffness of his movements, he complies, raising his hands up behind his head. Sloane draws in the second knife hovering over his wife as they cross over the threshold, keeping them trained in his back, where he can feel them along his spine, she marches him into the corridor. The door shuts behind them with a resonant click, and Reston chokes on a sob, the sound echoing through him. Sloane presses a hand against the lock and bends the bolts in place.

Well and truly alone now, Reston's sniffles echo through the walls.

"What do you want?" Reston asks, his voice tremorous but quiet, and Sloane has sent enough people to their deaths to know where their breaking points lie, hysteria fraying his tone. "Please, I have a family—I can give you cash. Take anything you want. Just leave my kids alone."

Sloane snapped her fingers, the sound slicing through the air, shredding him to ribbons. The switch in the doorway flicked on, flooding the gleaming, marble kitchen with light. Reston flinched against the brightness. One of the knives slashed across his back, drawing a line of red over his torn shirt as the blood sprang to the surface. Sloane drew both blades back into her palms, fingers closing around their hilts.

Reston turned gingerly. "Who are you?"

"You don't recognise me?" Beneath her drawn hood, rising from the dark in an outfit of black leather—jacket, pants, combat boots—she could've been anyone. She tugs the fabric mask obscuring the lower half of her face down. As the cold air hits the bare skin of her face, she slants Reston a malevolent grin. "For your sake, you'd better."

From the way he stills, wide, pale eyes darting to the block of knives on the counter, uncertainty cracking the false bravado into pieces, Reston does not remember.

In a split second, he snatches up a knife, but the way he holds it—both hands on the hilt, as though wielding a bulky sword rather than a delicate chopping knife—only illuminates a glaring lack of proficiency with it. A fierce determination steels his features as his chest heaves, breathing hard now with the adrenaline rushing to his head. Eyes wide and manic, he slashes the knife wide, his movements jerky and erratic, in a futile effort to ward her off or to deter her advance.

Letting out a sigh of disappointment, Sloane closes her fingers into a fist, crumpling the blade in his hand. In the same motion, her arm snaps out, and sends the rest of the knives in the block hurtling towards him. They slice through the air with frightening speed. With a flick of her hands, she stops them mid-air, hovering over his chest, backing him into the wall.

Fear drains the colour from his face.

Two knives rip through the air, striking through his shoulders. A cry of agony tears from his chest. In that darkest corner of her chest, where the abyss she'd come crawling out of seeped into her body, steeped in her wrath, something glimmers in response, and it sends a sharp ringing through her skull. It drowns out the sound of Reston's blood-curdling screams, the commotion in the bedrooms, small fists pounding against the sealed doors. Sloane lifts her arms, and Reston rises, the knives lodged in his shoulder sockets dripping, wrenching an excruciating wail from him.

A third and fourth skewers his open palms, nailing his arms to the wall, spread-eagle. Trembling with pain, Reston's pleas turn fervent, his voice splintering with desperation. A sharp and pungent smell infiltrates the air as the front of his thin cotton pants darkens, spreading down his left leg, pale amber liquid dripping from his feet. It mixes with the blood weeping from his wounds, slipping down the white wall and pooling in the white marble tiles, so dark it almost looked black against the pristine surface.

"Still don't remember me?" Sloane snarls, her mangled voice ugly as sin, but the rage searing her chest was purifying as hellfire. With one hand, she pulled the bandana down, let the hold slip off her head, exposing her face to him. The last thing he will ever see. "Or maybe you remember my mother. And the funeral for two."

Recognition flickered in his eyes, shock slicing through the fog of pain, just enough to gain a second of clarity through the delirium. "They told me you were dead—"

"Not so dead," Sloane says, lips curling into a wicked grin, all jagged teeth that don't quite fit together, a grin that sends a violent shudder through Reston. It is not a grin that anyone should see and hope to live. A grin that has seen blood, has killed and will kill again. "Where is Sergio?"

"They took twelve kids," Reston pants, white in the mouth, his whole body shuddering now, wracked with agony. "I don't know what they did with them. I didn't know what they were going to do with you. I was just the contractor—I just recruited and got the parents to sign. They didn't tell me anything!"

"Not my problem. Where is Sergio hiding?"

"Please—"

Savouring his agony, she pushes another knife through his midsection, cutting through slowly, so he can feel every excruciating inch of it.

"Tell me where Sergio is."

"I don't know!" Reston hisses, through gritted teeth, spraying spit and blood. "I don't know! After you left, after V-Labs—" he let out a keening groan, cutting himself off briefly— "after V-Labs blew up, he let us all go. Set us up in different cities to start our lives anew. None of us are in communication with each other. I haven't seen him since. No one has seen him since—"

His mouth parts in a silent scream as the blade sinks into his gut, piercing through layers of flesh and fat and tissue. Fingers twitching, Reston sags forward, a mixture of sweat, tears and snot dripping from his pallid face. Blood sprays from his mouth as he chokes on a scream, heaving so violently he nearly dislodges from the wall. When it buries itself to the hilt, she gets to work with another.

"Then you're useless to me."

A corner of her lips curls into a sadistic smile, and against the chorus of his cries, the pounding against the doors building in intensity, the sound of his children screaming for him, she pushes blade after blade into his body, sticking pins through a rag doll.

With her palms facing inward, Sloane meets Reston's desperate and delirious stare through the gap between her hands.

Her arms snap crossed over her face. Reston lurches forward violently, as the blades slash up his innards, shredding through organs and flesh. Dark blood pours from his mouth, splashing over the ground. Six blades tear through either side of him, slick with blood and viscera.

Sloane stands on the edge of the threshold, watching the light fade from his eyes.

In moments, his body goes slack.

The air stills.

For an endless moment, Sloane stands there, studying her work as the pool of blood spreads, running in the grooves between the tiles, seeking outward. She ignores the stern voice in her head instructing her to move, to collect her weapons and disappear, to leave and never look back. Silence hammers against her ears. Rolling her head, hearing the little bones in her neck pop and crack, Sloane inhales slowly, feeling her chest inflate despite the tight knot fisted between her ribs. She flicks her fingers outward and catches her blades by the hilt as they dart toward her outstretched palms.

One more name crossed off the list.

Eleven left to go.

In the dark, her ruined voice is a breathless whisper.

Come and get me, Sergio.

✷

NOW.

NOW YOU DISAPPEAR.

By the time she scales down the side of the building, the night sky's begun to bleed out.

She's careful to shift the surveillance cameras away from her path. Heeding the dark voice in the back of her head, she tosses the phones at Reston's feet, and disappears before anyone finds her. Sloane flicks her fingers at a bike rack and the sharp rattle of chains and locks falling off the bikes onto the pavement is swallowed by the sound of sirens wailing in the distance. After wrestling one out of the stand, Sloane wheels it onto the empty street, the cobbled stone jutting into the soles of her combat boots.

At the core of the earth, there is a heartbeat, always alive and seeping into her bones, a steady reverb synced with her own pulse. She pedals fast to the rhythm, the chains on her twelve-speed whirring as she gains momentum. Cold air whips her hair onto her face, slashes at her skin with a savage vehemence, as she takes off under a dark sky fading out and turning a muddy pink, as if racing the sun back to the house.

Breath coming out in clouds, she pedals fast, past the suburbs, down a shortcut through a dirt path, flying past tangled gardens holding up drunken houses along the street, watching as the shining pavement flashes in periphery like silver under the liquid sunrise. In the background the city and its canopy of trees rises. At the top of the hill, Sloane takes her hands off the brakes and lets go.

Don't look back.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
i made an original/non-fanfic version of Deathstalker just for fun - it's on my alt account tinnedfish hehe ignore the similarities. this fanfic is possibly my warm-up for that one