Chapter 2 The Boundary #2
She spotted a kid loitering at the corner, maybe ten, maybe younger.
No shoes, hands tucked into the sleeves of a coat five sizes too big.
He eyed her, then the alley behind her, then vanished into a crawl space like a rat.
Shadera clocked the move—informant, or spotter for a micro-gang.
The predators out here ate their young. Most didn’t live past their twenties on these streets.
A couple blocks on, she slowed as the city’s noise dipped—a silence that always meant trouble.
Two men hunkered by a barrel fire, backs to her, their voices pitched low.
She caught the shape of a knife in the first one’s hand, the glint of a cheap gun on the other’s hip.
Daggermouth wannabes, from the look of their patches.
She moved past them without breaking stride, projecting the unspoken threat that the only thing they would receive if they messed with her, was a shallow grave.
The men shrank away from Shadera as she passed by and slipped into a narrow alley.
She reached up, pulling down a rusted fire escape ladder, and watched as it descended in front of her.
She hoisted herself onto the wobbling metal, climbed to the top of the abandoned warehouse, and pulled the ladder up behind her, locking it into place.
Shadera paused to scan the horizon and sucked in a deep breath.
The skyline was jagged, teeth of concrete and glass rising above the smoke. In the distance, the twin towers of the Heart glowed bright and white, a fixed star above a dead planet. She ground her teeth together as she stared at them.
She remembered the night they came for her parents.
Remembered the live stream, the screaming, the way her mother’s body hit the platform and didn’t get back up.
She remembered what it felt like to pick up the knife afterward.
How easy it was to carve out the soft parts of a man’s throat if you kept your hand steady.
They’d called her a monster for what she did to that first Veyra. She didn’t care. Monsters were the only ones that survived this fucking city.
She turned away from the skyline, letting the memories burn in the back of her mind. The utility door on the roof of the warehouse sat underneath a battered metal sign she’d drilled into the concrete.
Kael Recycling—she let her eyes glide over it. It was the only physical evidence left in New Found Haven that her parents ever existed.
To the Heart, she no longer existed. To the Heart, she had died the night of the raid.
Shadera keyed the code into the lock, listening to the whirl of the mechanisms behind the door before it popped open. The stink of oil and hot metal was a comfort here, a private ache that belonged only to her.
She stepped through the door, closing it at her back and waited until she heard the click of the last lock before moving away from it.
Her lair was larger than it looked from the outside—a forgotten warehouse, once belonging to a logistics firm, now honeycombed with her own custom upgrades.
Mismatched lamps shed pools of yellow light on the concrete, illuminating the walls covered in Heart blueprints, topographical overlays, and mug shots.
The centerpiece of it all was the sprawl of the Heart itself, mapped in lines of red and black tape, every guard rotation, every checkpoint, every secret maintenance crawl noted with obsession.
Dotted through the charts were faces—masked and maskless, pulled from black market feeds or captured by her own hand.
The Serel family’s masks dominated the wall: the President, his wife, daughter, and two sons.
Every face of that family was punctured by a knife, a dart, a sharpened bit of rebar, and in the eldest son’s case, a thick red X.
Brooker Serel had been murdered. No one in the outer rings knew how or why, but one day he was on-screen completing live executions, the next his funeral was being broadcast. It didn’t take long for Greyson to step up and take his brother’s place as the Heart’s Executioner, which didn’t surprise Shadera.
She knew how deeply the Serel family enjoyed the shedding of innocent blood.
Her lips curled into a cruel smile as she stared at the wall and chucked another dagger toward Greyson’s masked photo. Soon, both sons of Maximus Serel would be dead, and he would have no male heir to run his poisoned little kingdom, when Shadera killed him next.
She crossed to the wall, traced the path from the Cardinal’s service tunnels up to the base of the Heart, and marked a fresh access point she’d scouted months ago on the map.
If the patrol schedules held, the tunnels would be dead from midnight to three a.m. More than enough time for her to get in unnoticed.
Once she made it into the Heart, she’d climb the elevator shaft out of the maintenance tunnels, then split for the Serel residence tower.
It was a suicide run for anyone else. For her, it was the only kind of job she accepted.
A heavy sigh passed over Shadera’s lips as her tattooed arms slipped from her jacket, the black metallic ink shimmering against her brown skin. She shrugged out of the leather and draped it over the metal chair that sat in front of the desk pushed against the wall.
Her eyes dropped to her skin as her fingers slid across the ridges of a newly healed scar on her forearm.
She had a lot of new scars, but this one she earned lifting a package scanner from a Veyra officer.
The job had been easy enough, she just hadn’t expected him to be so quick with a blade.
In the end she got what she needed, and his body was slowly decomposing underneath chemical waste in the Cardinal.
Next, she moved to the set of six lockers in the corner of the large space as she unsnapped the holster wrapped around her waist and thighs.
She never left home without both her favorite guns strapped to her body.
A CZ 75 and a Sig P320. Both had been used to try and kill her, and both Shadera had used to kill their previous owners.
There was a beautiful kind of poetry to that, she thought.
Her fingers wrapped around the lip of the first locker and pulled it open, setting both guns on the first shelf, and hanging the holster on a hook.
She reached into the locker and snapped out the backing to reveal a hidden compartment, and a grin spread onto her lips.
Her fist clamped around the handle of a slim black case.
She pulled it out, walked to the desk, and set it on the surface before unlatching it.
Inside, nestled in black foam, was the newest member of her arsenal.
A Veyra-issued nine-mil, with the Heart’s insignia etched along the barrel.
Shadera had been waiting for the moment she could use this gun.
Waiting for a contract she could make look like an inside job.
The beauty of Greyson being the one that would receive its bullet, when he’d put the very same bullets into hundreds of those from the Boundary, was a special kind of karma.
She would make him kneel, she thought to herself, as she began to strip and clean it. She would say the same ritual words to him that he’d said hundreds of times before murdering innocent men and women.
Greyson’s father had used the very same make of gun when he put the bullet in the back of her parents’ heads, when she was only ten years old. And in the twenty years since that day, she’d been waiting for her moment to take something from him.