Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
A face behind a desk.
Someone chasing down virtual leads.
Again, after some time, it would be enough for her.
Life would come rushing in, stealing her focus, smoothing the edges of her trauma.
She didn't want smooth edges.
She wanted to be sharp enough to cut anyone who got near.
She wanted to rip men like the men who had sneered at her in a basement to shreds. She wanted to bathe in their blood. She wanted to make it so that other girls could go home, could be embraced, could get their edges smoothed, could recover.
She knew that—given enough time, given enough guidance, given enough hard work—she could be the one to make that happen.
And that the only way she could accomplish any of that was to leave.
Leave Navesink Bank.
Her friends.
Her heart-swelling crush.
And her family.
That's not to say it was an easy choice.
What sixteen-year-old girl wants to leave everything good and warm and safe behind to pursue a life of hard and ugly and dangerous?
She cried through several of her bus stops.
She ignored the curious eyes of strangers, the occasional question if she needed help.
She did. Of course she did. But not in the way they were offering.
Something deep inside Ferryn understood that the only way she could truly help herself was to help others who weren't as fortunate as she was, who didn't get away before it was too late.
She didn't want to do it.
Yet she had to do it.
Given enough time, she hoped to hell she could find a way to explain all of it to her family.
She hated the idea of leaving them behind, of them worrying about her, or them moving on without her.
But she knew it was the only way.
They had all been good teachers to her. Each and every one of her aunts and uncles who had taught her their specific form of martial arts. Krav Maga. Systema. Taekwondo. Street. Sambo. Kendo. LINE. MCMAP.
They hadn't gone light on her.
They had pushed her to her limits. Even over them at times. Just so they knew she could handle herself in a sticky situation.
And it had worked.
But only just barely.
Ferryn knew that she was one extra man or one bad move away from failing, that she didn't have what it would take, that she was still at a disadvantage.
Because while her loved ones would push her, they wouldn't break her.
She needed to be broken.
She needed to know she could live through that, could keep fighting, could become the victor.
It wouldn't be easy.
Or fast.
But she knew that was the plan.
And she even knew where she was going.
See, her Aunt Lo—well, she collected people. People with skills. People who could offer her team something. Hailstorm did a lot of things. A lot of illegal things. And they got paid well for it. But as the years went on, Aunt Lo seemed to take even more pride in finding the damaged people, bringing them in, helping them adjust. She especially did so with many battle-scarred ex-military men and women. The ones who couldn't seem to acclimate to normal life again. The ones who ran away from their families. The ones who could barely function. She found them, brought them in, gave them a safe space. And they, in turn, helped out when they could; they used their special skills.
It was rare that her aunt found someone that she couldn't help.
But there were some.
Men and women like Case File: 34691.
Ones that were so damaged, so fucked up—they were bent in such a way—that they were nearly unrecognizable as humans anymore. The kind of people whom women and children and grown men alike shrank away from on the street, crossed the road to avoid.
They could never be brought in, retrained, reprogrammed.
There was no way to reprogram men like 34691.
Their entire source code was corrupted.
Ferryn remembered hearing her aunt talk to her next-in-command about 34691. About what had happened when the small team she sent out tracked him down, got close to him.
Apparently, what had happened was complete and utter decimation.
As in, they were lucky to leave with their lives.
Their pride? Yeah, that had to stay behind.
Along with a lot of their blood.
And maybe a tooth or two.
This was a team of three large men and a woman.
And they'd all been taken down by this one man.
At one time.
Well, we are going to leave him alone from now on, her Aunt Lo had declared, shaking her head before handing Ferryn the file to go put in the cabinet.
Ferryn, well, she'd always been a bit nosy. She liked to say she was a sponge for any and all information. And that was true to a point. But she was also nosy. You could ask her mother who had learned years before to hide any and all presents in a storage unit two towns over, then had to bury the key for said storage unit because her daughter was too damn nosy for her own good.