Aaliyah watched dully as Mirah’s opponent walked out of the Arena. The entire situation was just… bizarre. They had quite literally just stood still for the two minutes it took for the surrender signal to ring.

Aaliyah had been the only one of the team to witness the match, Walter still sleeping and Ajax deciding to rest on a bench in the waiting room and letting his battered body breathe for a few minutes.

As Aaliyah walked down the short flight of steps and through the door of the waiting room, she immediately locked eyes with Mirah. The other woman looked totally unperturbed, as comfortable as she could be—despite the tension she’d sensed in her before her match.

“What was that?” Aaliyah asked, a genuinely confused expression overcoming any mask she could have bothered to throw on. Ajax stiffly rose his muscled form from lying on his back, managing to sit in an upright position after a moment.

“What was what?” He asked, curious and worried tones in unison. He looked from Aaliyah’s bewilderment and to Mirah’s completely stoic, relaxed form.

“Nothing.” Mirah said succinctly, though that only confused Ajax further.

“What do you mean nothing–” But his sentence was cut off by Aaliyah as she walked towards her other teammates, a sigh of exasperation exhaling from her lungs.

“No, she literally means that nothing happened. Actually, nothing happened, they just stood there and talked or something.” Aaliyah turned from Ajax to Mirah, ignoring the stunned, strangled noise that came from his throat, “What’d he say?” Aaliyah demanded, putting her hands on her wider hips, using her height to bear down on the other girl.

Mirah remained as blank as ever, looking back at the other girl’s soft intimidation tactic with total unconcern, “He wasn’t the same as the others.” She said finally, and Aaliyah pounced.

“Did he say that or did he–”

“He isn’t the same as you.” Mirah said, her soft voice cutting through any words Aaliyah had prepped to interrogate Mirah with.

“Woah, woah!” Ajax said, struggling to his feet as his muscles complained and screamed in a slowly diminishing pain, “There’s no need for that, Mirah.” Ajax moved to stand just off to the side of the two girls, ready to stick out his arms and restrain Aaliyah if she decided to throw a punch, even if she’d never done so in the past.

Aaliyah’s face flinched; the subtle flicker was so stark on her face that even Ajax could see it clearly. Her expression was usually so tightly controlled, the picture of neutrality or genuineness. Ajax had learned to ignore the woman’s face and look for small other tells, though he’d found none. Regardless, her face was the most tightly controlled thing about her, and for the unintentional flinch to be visible at all…

“And I am?” Aaliyah said quietly, her eyes glazing over as she stared into the younger woman’s jade-coloured eyes, feeling the strange, captivating power they had. Mirah blinked slowly a few times before responding, almost like she was intentionally drawing out the atmosphere of the situation.

“A snake.” She said finally, making Aaliyah’s nostrils flare in anger, “A predator.”

It was the first time that Aaliyah had seriously considered punching Mirah, the rage bubbling to her skin in splotches of a raw, bright red. Though, even with the colour of her anger showing right on her skin, the other girl’s eyes never wavered to do so much as check, holding Aaliyah’s gaze with a steadiness uncharacteristic for the girl.

“I see.” Aaliyah ground out, her jaw almost bound shut with anger, her muscles making the bones of her jaw creak and her teeth complain under the stress. They looked at each other squarely for a while, but Aaliyah was the one to break it, turning and pacing out of the waiting room without even pausing to address Ajax or talk about the matches further.

She hated this.

Aaliyah walked through the corridors, through the almost entirely barren Gym, through the path towards the elevators, and immediately rising to floor eight. A few seconds later she was in her room, throwing off the still sweaty protectively padded suit and rushing into the shower. She’d have to return the gear later, something she probably should have done as she had walked past their private training area.

But Aaliyah was… not angry. It wasn’t anger, not truly. It hurt her to even admit that the other girl’s words had actually affected her in any way. She had been impervious from it for so long, any insult just sliding off an armour she had built for so long, memories of what she’d done and why she’d done it galvanising her against any of those worthless words.

But this wasn’t that, Mirah didn’t even know. None of the group knew that she was a Flinn, she doubted that Walter would even know who the Monarch was, and she gave Ajax a fifty-fifty chance. Whether Mirah would know was a mystery even to the girl herself.

Aaliyah was haunted by those eyes, the same ones she sometimes found staring back at her from the mirror. It was something born of pain and sorrow, a deeper depression and hurt than she could even possibly imagine, just the same as Mirah could likely even imagine Aaliyah’s own pain. But Mirah wearing those eyes so openly at all was enough to tell that she was telling the entire truth, without fear or malice, or even doing so much as entertaining a spiteful thought.

Aaliyah was a snake. A predator.

How long ago was it that Aaliyah had prided herself on the label? It had been a mark of victory over the others who would make her their prey instead, the cutthroat nature of the life she had lived was rife with those who had wanted to harm her, no matter the cost. They’d all failed, but all it had taken was a few soft words from a girl just as broken as her.

That’s what they were, broken dolls, left behind and forgotten, forced to find their own purpose. Aaliyah had found her purpose and she had carried it out, leaving her the remnants of the person she’d sacrificed to the alter of revenge.

Mirah, though, was finding hers now. She’d found something, a reason to build herself up from the pile of parts she’d been when she first got here, an image of a being that never really had the chance to become someone at all.

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Aaliyah turned off the shower, having done little more than let the steaming hot water run over her slowly bruising skin from the asshole’s tentacle limbs. She stood in front of her mirror, looking into the reflection of a starkly different Aaliyah than she’d pretended she was all this time.

This Aaliyah wasn’t the snarky but ultimately milquetoast thing that she’d tried so hard to cultivate, even in the presence of Mirah, who could so clearly see through the act, having pinned her as a ‘predator’ from the moment they’d met.

The Aaliyah that stared back was ugly and dead, like a corpse left out to decompose for the amusement of the viewer. She could feel the deep, inky black rise to the surface of her skin, the colour of the horrific depression she pushed down so deep inside of her. Today, though, the bubble she’d forced the emotion into had been popped, a knife having been jammed ruthlessly into her gut by a blank faced girl telling the truth.

The truth, that’s what had hurt her most. She knew she was a predator, just like her father before her, and she had even taken pride in it. Now, as she stood in front of another victim, one who was neither truly prey nor predator, she found herself unable to justify herself anymore.

Mirah had stood in that Arena, in front of a man with a link, and had assessed that he wasn’t a predator. That he wasn’t like her, or the other men in Jeremy Baxter’s group of borderline psychopaths.

Aaliyah wouldn’t have done that. She didn’t even think it’d be possibly for her to resist the urge to assert her own dominance over the opponent. Prey was weak; thus, the only solution was to be a predator instead.

“Oh, how distraught you’ve become over something as small as this, Aaliyah Flinn. Is this all it took?” She asked the self she saw in the mirror, and they only smiled back morbidly, the depression too thick in her expression to possibly pretend to smile.

She towelled herself off half-heartedly and walked out into her bedroom and sat on the bed without even bothering to dress into the bare minimum. Today, she’d do what she did whenever she felt things she didn’t want to feel.

Research.

It was something Aaliyah was good at, one of the things that her father had taught her, and one of the things that had helped her bring him down. She placed her own laptop in the nooks of her crossed legs, balancing it on the curled in limbs. She couldn’t trust the AASAU’s laptops to not be wired a million different ways. She had her own process for checking over her laptop, to make absolutely sure that no-one without significant skill had tampered with the thing.

After the preliminary checks, she went into the computer, imputing a long and frankly ludicrous password into the login screen that she changed at least once a week. She entered the almost entirely barren desktop, there being strictly no personal items on it at all, nothing identifying and at least a few layers of protection before someone could get into the sensitive information on the machine.

She’d had a hyper cognitive customise the operating system for some drugs a few years ago, totally discrete and without any glaring backdoors. Of course, it wasn’t entirely safe, but it was leagues more protection that she’d get from some piece of junk they sold on the open market, or even stuff from black market dealers.

Techtron would be the next best bet, but unless you were a massive client willing to spend millions of dollars for their engineers to build an operating system from the ground up in incomprehensible alien code, you were shit out of luck. Anything they sold even remotely retail had basically been reversed engineered by every hypercognitive and their scientifically enhanced rat.

After the lengthy login process, Aaliyah made it all the way to her preferred browser QSearch, along with a totally different search engine. Whiz, while excellent at finding things, was just about as secure as your back door; full of glass windows and a fifteen-dollar lock.

The searching process began with trying to find more on the Order dickheads. She found references to Baxter pretty easily, the foppish asshole and his father were rich as all get out and he’d been bailed out of prison a few times for minor offenses. The really serious ones never got to the papers, or even some of the social media sites. Much of the local media was owned by High Order members, something that Aaliyah had first learned from a public whistle-blowing post on a more underground forum she frequented in search of information security stuff.

They owned a majority share in some of the big players, who owned shell companies to fully own and operate said media companies. The web of corporate bullshit had kept Aaliyah awake for hours just to verify the information in her saved copy and, of course, it was about as legit as you could get.

It was a major deal in the info-sec circles, and even managed to leak out to the savvier publications, though they committed the cardinal sin of actually finding the man behind the leak using industry ties.

The man, who is only talked about with his username—Ties—out of respect, was murdered only hours after the identity leak. No points for guessing who did it.

She looked up the others, ones she’d had surprising difficulty actually pinning down. After a long time, she’d managed to find a picture of someone who looked suspiciously like the Asian man in some reports of linked gang member activity. It wasn’t super helpful, but it did affirm that had been around in the area, making messes.

Her next try was to look through a collated list of known High Order members, though none of them were Asian, so he was either adopted or his family had managed to fly under the radar. Aaliyah leant back into the air behind her, staring at the ceiling and looking for some idea to go after.

“Late childhood deaths.” She said suddenly, returning her eyes back to the screen and began to type rapidly, spamming the words into the search bar, trying to pull up extremely specific results. It was only thirty minutes of looking, an extremely short period of time for this kind of word, before Aaliyah found what she was looking for.

An article, written almost two years ago about a woman who’d lost five children and her husband in a freak car crash. Her sixth child and herself had lived only because they’d left the car to go into the service station.

The further that Aaliyah read into the story, the more it sickened her. She knew the truth behind the story, what’d really happened.

The woman, Binh Nguyen, was the owner of a massive department store chain, spanning across the entirety of Australia and some other countries. She had the power and influence to be in the High Order, and it seemed that she was just as psychopathic as all the rest of them. The recorded interview played, depicting Binh as she cried crocodile tears over her dead children and husband, then switching to the picture of the crash, where another car had somehow driven so fast into the side of the family’s vehicle that it’d mangled the side of the other car.

There was no camera footage of the incident, nor any witnesses who could report seeing the car crashing into the family’s vehicle, but Aaliyah knew it as soon as she saw the back of the car that had collided with the Nguyen family sedan.

The bottom of a gigantic palm was imprinted into the back of the car.

They switched frame again, showing a picture of the family that had been taken not a few hours earlier. Five teenagers, standing in front of their father, posing sillily for the camera, and at the edge of the pack was a muscled teen and his mother, standing with one hand on his shoulder.

Aaliyah looked into the eyes of the teen and saw it. She saw the death and darkness in his eyes, and the psychopathic glee in his mother’s.

She had blooded him with his entire family.

Aaliyah closed the laptop, slamming the plastic lid, unable to stomach looking at the article any longer, the name ringing in her ears as she heard her laptop whirr—deleting and refreshing any information that may or may not have made its way onto her computer, giving her a fresh slate aside from what she’d consciously saved.

Terrence Nguyen. A man likely tortured into culling his entire family, and his mother, Binh Nguyen, standing by his side with glee as she was finally rid of the man, she’d used to create a child with a link.

The black spots only grew on Aaliyah’s skin, lending a sallow look to the rest of her skin all the same.

Aaliyah wasn’t going to sleep tonight.