Christen was to spend two weeks at a safe house with Specialist Moore and Major Lagerveldt being 'debriefed," but they were giving her the training she supposedly already received before being deployed into a mission situation.

Only seven days passed before Moore frowned at her from across the dinner table.

Major Lagerveldt was an excellent cook, but Christen had a craving for her mother's lasagna that wouldn't quit, and the Major kindly procured the ingredients she needed.

"Who the hell are you?" Moore asked out of the blue, and she stared at him.

"Sometimes you seem so young, but you cook like this, and you hit a moving target with anything I hand you like you're incapable of missing. You learn as if I'm teaching you things you already know, and don't quit when something doesn't come with the same ease everything else does.

"You don't get tired or fed up with repeating a task you've already mastered. You died and returned to life, and I know you can't tell me, but you seem too good to be true," he struggled with putting his thoughts into words.

"I'm Supergirl without the cape, the spandex, the flying, the fanfare, and the glasses," she teased, grinning as she enjoyed her favorite dish, but her heart ached with the loss of her family and her twin.

"So, pick up this table and put it over there," Moore challenged, and she laughed.

"Not today," she pretended bored disinterest. For now, they could not learn that she had more tricks up her sleeve than coming back to life and thriving under pressure.

"A moment ago, you looked so sad and lost, but out there, it's like the world only exists within the confines of your task. You can push everything aside to focus on what you're doing. Those five soldiers, were they your first kills?" Moore asked, and she hesitated before taking another bite of her food.

"Yes, and I knew them. Two of them were instructors, and three lived in the same barracks as me," Christen admitted.

"Why did you go for headshots?"

"Don't know. Instinct. They wore body armor but no helmets. I didn't want them getting up and having another go," Christen admitted. "I hated seeing their eyes go blank, but I feel worse about what happened to PT Officer Mills. I cut her throat and impaled a surgical instrument into her brain to get her to stop what she was doing.

"She was a great soldier with an idealized idea of the army. A woman like her should not have died or have been willing to kill someone for not measuring up," Christen said, pushing her half-eaten lasagna away.

"Christen, I suspect someone used Sergeant Driscoll and PT Officer Mills. I think this whole thing has nothing to do with saving the lives of soldiers by not allowing inferior specimens to graduate. We suspected for a while now that someone gets into the minds of these good people by playing the appropriate cards and saying all the right things to convince men like Sergeant Driscoll that they're doing the righteous duty of a soldier, but it has nothing to do with any of that.

"They turn our soldiers against each other, sow discord, propagate fear, dishonor, disloyalty, and harm the army's public image by using our own people. Nothing does more damage than that. This whole thing is a PR nightmare, and now we must waste our resources policing our agencies instead of keeping track of our enemies," Moore said.

"It is brilliant, though. They use forums and chatrooms to destroy us while we provide the weapons and the dead bodies," Christen said, toying with her fork.

This news made her feel even worse about what had happened.

"Are you going to eat that?" Moore asked, snagging her plate, and Christen stole it back.

"The Private made enough to feed us for a week, although, with her appetite, I suspect it won't last till tomorrow. Although where she puts it, I don't know," the Major teased, and Christen smirked.

"Superheroes need their carbs," she taunted, getting Moore a second serving, and just as she touched the oven, a twig snapped outside, followed by a metal click.

Gun.

Christen propelled herself backward and bowled the Major from her chair. A bullet grazed her arm, but if she had reacted to her instinct to dive out of the way, it would have hit the Major in the face.

She popped to her feet, keeping low, and grabbed a gun from the table beside the door before diving through the door and sprinting into the darkness as low as she could while keeping behind the low shrubs.

A bullet pinged into the doorframe, ricocheted, and hit a tree near her.

Diving behind a big tree, she entered the darkness without waiting for the others to react.

When her night vision flared to life, the unexpected ability to use it with the watch on took her by surprise but didn't impede her forward motion.

***

The steady beat of her assailant's heart told her he wasn't scared or surprised, calmly waiting to spot her again. A cool customer, and thus a professional.

Although she had already determined where he was, he didn't know where she was.

She traversed the darkness as if it were the light of day, and he never heard her approach, his attention on the house and the two agents trapped there because they didn't dare shoot into the dark, fearing they would hit her and probably cursing her stupidity.

When he did become aware of her, it was too late, and she knocked him out cold. For a second, something flowed through her veins, wild, untamed, dangerous, but she took control of it.

She listened carefully to the night, straining her hearing, but all she heard was his heart beating. Nobody else seemed to be out there but the four of them.

She'd be sure if her watch wasn't on, but she could still hear almost as well as a dog, and grabbing him by his arm, she dragged him back to the cabin.

The others exited the house when she appeared from the darkness, and their flashlights momentarily blinded her as her eyes shifted from night vision to normal vision.

Her reflection in the glass warned her that her eyes glinted blueish green like an animal's for a second, and she wondered if Moore and the Major noticed. Then again, she dragged a larger large man through the forest like a piece of wood, which was not normal either, but she wasn't willing to leave him behind and risk him waking while she fetched help she didn't need.

Moore quickly helped her drag the prisoner inside, and the Major put the blackout screens before the windows while Christen and Moore tied their would-be assassin to a chair.

***

"I'm going to make sure he didn't bring any friends. That was stupid to run out there alone, and thank you for saving the Major. You're bleeding," Moore said all in one go with a frown that made him look sterner than usual.

"There's no one else out there. If I hadn't, he would have had us pinned in the house, and I'm harder to kill than you. He aimed at me and didn't count on the fact that I wasn't entirely as feeble as formerly portrayed, and don't worry, it's just a scratch," Christen said, casually splashing a glass of water in the face of the man who just tried to murder her.

For a second, as she stood behind him in the forest, she almost killed him. It would have been so easy to hit him in just the right way, but she wasn't that person.

***

Their attacker had one of those forgettable faces that could get lost in a crowd, but his icy gaze took in the room with a calculated hardness that warned her he possessed neither empathy nor pity.

A quick search of his pockets before they woke him had come up empty. He had nothing with him but his silenced, military-issue gun with the serial numbers filed off, and Christen would bet his fingerprints would be on no database; if he had any.

He took in the situation, his heartbeat steadied, and before they could react, he did something with his tongue in his cheek, bit down, swallowed, grinned at them with blood on his teeth, and convulsed.

They had all watched enough TV to know only one thing acted that fast: Cyanide.

"This place has been compromised. I bet this asshole followed us from the base," Moore said, barring the doors and slipping his phone from his pocket to make a call.

"No, he didn't. Are you two not wearing your little club ISS watches? The mole gave him the coordinates, or he would have come after us when we arrived, and if you call for backup, we'd be dead by morning.

"There's a summer house down by the lake that looks like it has been empty for a while. Leave him here along with all your electronics, and I'll contact Dana in the morning," Christen suggested, and Moore frowned with approval in his eyes.

She was a natural agent.

"What about your watch?" he asked, and she smirked.

"It's just a watch and has no GPS," she lied to him, and his frown deepened.

"Take it off anyway," he commanded, and she shook her head.

He grabbed her arm firmly, his gaze challenging her to attack him.

"Take that watch off my arm, Specialist Moore, and you blow my head off. If my people want me dead, all they have to do is push a button," Christen informed him as he searched for the catch.

This edited revelation caught him off guard yet didn't surprise him, but he carefully let go of her arm as if she were volatile. Neither of them sensed the half-truth. There was no actual bomb in her head, but the electric current could easily kill her; there was no recovery from a scrambled brain.