Chapter Text
Chapter I: Icarus' Flight
Location: I-75 Highway, inbound to Detroit.
Date: October 24, 2015.
Unit: JTF Convoy 166623 / SHD Squad "Falcon".
Status: En route to Michigan Central Station.
The darkness inside the trailer was almost tactile, broken only by the rhythmic blue and orange pulses of the ISAC systems. The AI’s hollow, mechanical voice echoed off the metal walls, reporting the agents' biometric statuses. To most, it was the sound of safety. To her, it was an irritating drone—a constant reminder that she had become just another cog in the machine.
"Hey, you still mad at me for what I said back at HQ?" The agent in the black trench coat cut through the silence.
He glanced at her, adjusting his cap. His modified SCAR-L leaned against the rear doors, clanking rhythmically with every pothole on the ruined highway.
The woman didn't answer. She sat huddled in her blue parka, wrapped in a scarf so thick it hid everything but her eyes. Under her white hoodie’s cowl, she concealed her greatest act of rebellion. Instead of the mandatory tactical audio feed, a single earbud was tucked into her right ear.
As she slammed a fresh magazine into her suppressed MP7, the roar of the engine and the static of the JTF radio were drowned out by Amy Lee’s haunting vocals.
Wake me up inside...
Racheal (Athena) pressed the last 4.6mm round into the magazine. The mechanical click of the weapon synced perfectly with the drum hit in her earbud. It was her anchor—the one thing keeping her tethered to normalcy. Her MP3 player was a forbidden luxury, a violation of SHD combat protocols, but in this cold, steel coffin on wheels, only Evanescence reminded her that beneath the layers of Kevlar and technology, the heart of a chemistry student still beat.
She knew Detroit wasn’t New York. Here, the shadows were deeper. And she, like Icarus, was flying straight into the heart of them.
On one hand, the thought that she would soon leave this cramped space and be able to roam the streets alone once more filled her with a strange sense of optimism. On the other hand, her finger never strayed far from the trigger. She wasn’t the only one feeling the weight of the night silence, broken only by the occasional jolt of the suspension as the truck hit a protruding slab of concrete or a pothole in the road. Several of her comrades shared the same unease. It was hardly a surprise; they had been trapped in this tin can for nearly a week, driving almost non-stop, without time for a proper rest.
One of the agents sitting next to Athena—a burly, bald Black man in a heavy gray tactical jacket—realized there was no chance for a pleasant chat with the girl. To kill the boredom and thin out the heavy atmosphere, he decided to break the silence. "I heard our guys really gave 'em hell in New York," he said, full of forced enthusiasm. "Those Cleaners must've forgotten who they were messing with."
His words hung in the frigid air of the trailer, immediately met with sharp, almost hostile glares from the other passengers. Mentioning New York, while they were heading toward the unknown, alien, and supply-starved wasteland of Detroit, filled them with a profound sense of dread. The memory of New York—decorated for the holidays, with the SHD base’s main courtyard still glowing in their minds—stirred a painful nostalgia. For many of them, New York was no longer just a battlefield against gangs and paramilitaries. It was home. And they were leaving it behind to chase ghosts in the ruins of Michigan.
Just as the chorus of Bring Me to Life hit its peak, time fractured. The explosion wasn't a sound—it was a violent jerk that ripped the world off its hinges. When Rachael opened her eyes, she felt weightless. It was a haunting sight: her fellow agents floating like ragdolls, suspended in mid-air alongside shards of concrete, white-hot metal, and shattered glass. Her head slammed against the roof of the trailer before gravity reclaimed her with bone-crushing force. Everything went black.
She came to on the grass, slick with fuel and oil, but it didn't matter. She was alive. In the distance, the truck burned—a brilliant, jagged orange flare against the night. It looked like a crushed soda can. The freezing air was now filled with the staccato rhythm of heavy gunfire.
Suddenly, her watch flared to life, spitting out a barrage of terrifying alerts: — Agent 322 Bradley: critical injury. Medical assistance required. Agent 567 Filo: critical injury. Agent 2009 Tomahawk: deceased. Agent 4756 Colman: deceased.
With trembling fingers, she tore out her earbud and switched to the squad channel. "We're pinned down! It's an ambush! Get to posi—" The commander’s voice cut to static. — Warning: Rogue Agent Detected. Agent 890 Tit: deceased. Agent 543 Walman: deceased.
Racheal stared at the sky, the agony in her leg pinning her to the mud. She sat propped up, forced to listen as her unit was dismantled, piece by piece. Suddenly, a violent tug at her tactical vest dragged her backward. She let out a guttural scream of pain. — Warning: Elevated heart rate. Stress levels critical. Agent 44 Athena requires immediate medical assistance.
As she was propped up against a burnt-out wreck, she saw him. The burly man who had tried to joke in the trailer. He was alive, but the world they knew had ended. She looked down at her right leg—a rusted rebar rod had skewered through her calf, anchoring her to the ground.
Racheal tried to pull herself up, desperate to get a line of sight on the highway above the overpass. Every movement sent a jolt of agony through her leg as the rebar scraped against bone. The man who had dragged her out lunged toward her again, drenched in sweat and blood that clouded his eyes. "You got your gun?! Fast, I need ammo! Give it to me!" he rasped, clutching her shoulder.
Athena instinctively reached for her side. Her trusty MP7 was still there—the tactical sling had held through the impact, keeping the submachine gun pinned to her vest. With a trembling finger, she triggered the Pulse. An orange wave rippled through the debris, and her watch immediately highlighted four jagged, red silhouettes lurking above them. — Warning: Rogue Agents detected. — ISAC’s voice was relentless.
Realizing the desperation of their position, she ripped her sidearm from its holster and tossed it to him. "Take it! Deploy your ballistic shield; it’s the only way to hold them at close range!" she yelled over the roar of the fire. "I’ll set up a turret... Dammit! Ahhh!"
She tried to heave herself up to place the device on a stable piece of asphalt, but the pain lanced through her like a lightning bolt. She collapsed back down, clutching her skewered leg. "This is bad... I’m out of medkits. How about you?" the agent asked, frantically checking his pouches.
Racheal looked at herself. Her backpack, containing her medical supplies and grenades, was likely crushed under the overpass or incinerated in the trailer. She was left with nothing but the music she could no longer hear and a weapon she could barely aim.
Then, from above, piercing through the crackle of the burning wreck, came a new voice. Calm, almost amused. "We see you... and we hear you. Why are you hiding? It’s not very polite to sit behind that truck like that..."
A single, crisp crack of a sniper rifle cut the voice short. — Warning: Agent 564 Dan—deceased.
"Hey! Listen to me, you piece of shit!" the Black agent roared, leaning out from behind the wreck, Racheal’s sidearm gripped tightly in his hand. His voice shook with a mix of adrenaline and pure fury. "You so confident?! Then show your face! I’ll blow your fucking head off!"
The response wasn't another gunshot, but laughter—quiet, dry, and utterly humorless. The echo of the voice bounced off the concrete pillars of the overpass, making the attacker seem like he was everywhere at once.
"Really now?" the voice from above sounded closer, almost intimate. "And what exactly do you plan to kill us with? Her pistol?"
Racheal felt the blood drain from her face. She glanced at her watch; the Pulse sensor was still throbbing with a jagged red light. They weren't just up there. They were scanning them.
"We see everything," the voice continued, now with a distinct edge of contempt. "We see that you’re out of ammo. We see that you have no medkits. You have nothing. You're just two corpses that don't know it yet, and those watches are nothing more than expensive trinkets on your cooling wrists."
Toro snapped. The pressure and the knowledge of being watched like prey broke something inside him. Instead of covering Racheal, he lunged at her, clawing for her MP7. "Give it to me, you hear me?!" he hissed, pure terror burning in his eyes. "It's my only chance to get out of here! I'm not dying in this hole because of you!"
They struggled in the mud and ash. Athena, anchored to the spot by the rebar through her calf, stood no chance. She fought back, but the burly man’s murderous grip pinned her down, tearing her wound even further. Finally, seeing the madness in his eyes, she let go. She felt nothing but choking shame and agony.
Toro ripped the SMG from her hands and, without a word, bolted from behind the cover of the burning wreck. He tried to close the gap, desperate to fight—or perhaps just to run. He only made it a few steps.
A single, booming sniper shot sliced through the air. There was no exchange of fire, no struggle. Just brutal precision.
Toro’s body slumped lifelessly onto the asphalt, the stolen MP7 clattering into the darkness. The watch on Racheal’s wrist, illuminating her blood-stained face, issued a dispassionate alert: — Warning: Agent 4564 Toro—critical injury. Bleeding out.
Racheal was alone. In the silence that followed the shot, she could only hear the crackle of the flames and her own ragged breath. And then, she heard footsteps. Someone was descending from the overpass. Calm. Deliberate. Slow.
Racheal looked around frantically, her pulse skyrocketing. Her watch was malfunctioning—the orange interface pulsed a steady, aggressive red, screaming warnings of critical stress levels. Gasping for air, she began to crawl, ignoring the searing agony of her torn calf. She shoved herself halfway under the chassis of a burnt-out truck, seeking any shred of cover from the predators' gaze.
She still had one ace up her sleeve. The very last one.
Her fingers, slick with blood and grease, curled around the cold casing of a frag grenade. Her mind raced: did she want to go out on her own terms, ending it all right here, or wait to be gunned down like the rookie she still was?
As she pressed her hand to her chest, she felt her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The image of the street, Toro’s corpse lying in the firelight, and the concrete pillars of the overpass began to blur and spin. The air grew thick, searing, impossible to swallow. She knew what was happening. A panic attack. The same paralyzing dread that had nearly disqualified her at the training center had returned with a vengeance.
,,Breathe, Pace. Just breathe..." she repeated internally, but her lungs refused to cooperate.
She knew one thing: she couldn't make the same mistake she did during training. Back then, the stake was being sent home. Here, the stake was whether she’d even live to see the dawn.
She felt her body failing her. Her control was slipping, and the world was growing dark and suffocating. She couldn't do this. Then, in a surge of pure desperation, she reached for her final lifeline. With a finger that refused to stop trembling, she pressed the Mayday button. In theory, a single signal—one short pulse into the ether—should have been enough, but Racheal wouldn't let go. She held it as if that button were the only thing tethering her to existence.
She wanted it all to end. She wanted the fires to burn out, the agony in her leg to vanish, and for ISAC to stop reciting the names of the dead.
She made the hardest decision of all. She had to hear that song. Just one last time. She needed the one thing that, through the long months in New York spent shifting piles of paperwork in a dusty base, had kept her from losing her mind. It was her only true escape.
With a slow, almost unnaturally calm movement, fading in and out of consciousness, she reached for her earbud. With a shaky hand, she tucked it into her ear. The outside world—Toro’s dying gasps, the crackle of burning fuel, and the footsteps of the approaching executioners—suddenly dimmed.
The music was back. Racheal Pace was back.
Through the soothing music, a foreign voice suddenly breached her comms channel. "Hey, you there? We see your vitals... we know you're alive. Don't worry, kid, we're coming for you now."
The watch on her wrist, stained with Toro’s blood, kept spitting out the same mechanical verdict: — Warning: Rogue Agent Detected. Warning: Rogue Agent Detected.
She knew one thing. If this was the end of the road, if the chemistry student from Detroit was going to die beneath the wheels of a burnt-out transport, she wasn't going quietly. Her hand tightened around the grenade’s pin. If she was going to die, she was taking them to hell with her.
Just as her fingers tightened around the pin, the world exploded once more. Racheal felt a colossal force—a massive shockwave that ripped her from beneath the chassis and launched her a dozen meters through the air like a ragdoll.
For a split second, she saw the spinning sky and the leaping flames before slamming into the ground. The soft earth and grass of the embankment soaked up the impact, knocking the wind out of her but sparing her bones from the shattering hardness of the asphalt. She didn't even have time to scream before a deafening roar shook the air. The truck wreck she had been hiding under just moments ago flew over her and slammed into the dirt. The steel frame stood vertically for a heartbeat, then, with a groan of twisting metal, collapsed to the right, missing her legs by a mere inch.
The ground was still trembling. Racheal lay in the dust, stunned and deafened, while in her ears—despite the roar of the blast—the muffled, almost surreal voice of Evanescence still lingered. She was completely exposed.
Blood pooled in her eyes, blurring the world until all she could see were the fiery glows of smoke dancing above the wreckage. Racheal turned her head. Above the inferno of the highway, she saw a beautiful, deep blue sky and silent stars. "I could die like this," she thought with a strange, dreamlike peace.
But her body had other plans. Survival instinct, fueled by the last embers of adrenaline, sent one final, primal command to her brain: Kill them. Or run.
She began to crawl toward the nearby treeline. Every inch was a battle; every movement tore a raspy breath from her lungs. She was weak, exhausted to the breaking point, but still alive. She heard them. Their footsteps were steady, unhurried—the gait of predators who know their prey has nowhere to go. Every few moments, a single gunshot shattered the night silence. They were finishing off the wounded JTF soldiers, clearing the battlefield of "waste."
Suddenly, the cold, metallic slide of a weapon being drawn hissed right above her. "No! Leave her," a deep, commanding voice barked. "She’ll still be of use to us. I want her alive. We’re taking her—that’s an order, Hondo."
Before she could react, a heavy boot pressed her skewered leg into the dirt. Racheal screamed, the sound tearing through the night air, drowning out even the music in her earbud. — Warning: Critical injury. Stress levels critical. Medical assistance required immediately! — ISAC wailed on her wrist, but no one was listening.
Her vision failed, and the agony became the only thing she knew before the world finally surrendered to the black.
The looks on the Rogue Agents' faces when they realized she was lying on a live grenade was something Racheal would remember for the rest of her life. For a heartbeat, their predator-like confidence vanished, replaced by pure, human terror. One of them, clad in a ballistic helmet and a winter combat jacket, lunged forward with desperate speed. He snatched the grenade and hurled it as far into the dark woods as he could.
An explosion ripped through the night a second later, but Racheal didn't see it. Blinded by the piercing beams of tactical flashlights, she squinted, feeling her life steadily draining away.
"She doesn't look good. At this rate, she'll bleed out before we get her back," a low, rasping voice muttered from somewhere above her. "Then what the hell are we still doing here, Lurker?" a woman shouted, nervously adjusting her rifle. "Grab her and let’s move! She definitely called for backup; that Mayday is all over the airwaves!"
The man called Lurker leaned over Racheal. For a moment, the beam of his flashlight aligned with the ominous red glow of his watch. "Don't worry," he said quietly, almost soothingly. "No one is coming. She’s at our mercy now. Ours... and her loyalty's."
Those were the last words she heard. The heavy butt of a rifle struck with calculated force, and the darkness that followed was thick and sudden. At the exact moment her consciousness faded, the final, dying notes of the song echoed in her ear.
The darkness that followed the blow from the rifle butt was not empty. It was heavy, damp, and smelled of stagnant water and the acrid smoke of training flares. For a fleeting moment, Racheal no longer felt the cold rebar impaling her leg; she no longer heard the roar of the burning JTF transports. Instead, she heard a scream that had haunted her dreams since the day she was activated.
"Move it, Pace! My children’ s crawled up the Walmart steps faster than that!"
She opened her eyes, but she didn't see the stars over Detroit. She saw the leaden, suffocating sky over Camp Hudson. She was twenty years old, the youngest in her entire cycle, and she was drowning in her own personal hell. Mud forced its way into her nose and mouth as she dragged herself under the low-slung jagged edges of concertina wire. Every movement was an agony—her slight frame was never built to haul the full weight of a tactical rucksack, which felt like a tombstone strapped to her back.
Above her stood the instructors, clad in heavy, waterproof jackets. Their boots were mere inches from her fingers—the same way the Rogue Agents' boots had been just moments ago.
"Come on, 'Athena'!" Sergeant Miller jeered, spitting tobacco juice into the dirt right beside her face. "You wanted to be the Goddess of Wisdom and War, didn't you? Then show us! Right now, you just look like a drowned rat pulled from a gutter!"
Behind her, the muffled laughter of her peers drifted through the rain. She could feel their stares—older, stronger men and women, veterans of police forces and military units. To them, she was just a "soft" chemistry student with "intellectual potential" but zero grit. They watched her struggle with a mixture of pity and condescension that stung worse than any physical wound.
"What would your father say, Pace?" the instructor’s voice dropped, becoming low and venomous. "I’ve seen his file. A hero, wasn't he? If he could see you now, he’d be rolling in his grave, ashamed that his blood turned out so weak."
Those words sliced deeper than the barbed wire tearing at her jacket. Racheal grit her teeth so hard she tasted copper. It was there, in that cold mud, that she first felt the crushing weight in her chest. The beginning of a panic attack. The world began to spin and blur, exactly as it had under the burning truck on the I-75.
"I won't... quit," she had croaked into the mud back then. "I won't give you the satisfaction."
The memory began to flicker and fracture. Sergeant Miller’s barking orders started to bleed into the low, composed voice of Lurker. The filth of Camp Hudson transformed back into the cold dirt of the highway embankment. The "Goddess" was falling again.
Racheal had no idea how much time had passed since the rifle butt had extinguished the light. When she regained a fractured sense of consciousness, the world was nothing more than a tangle of agony and confinement. Her wrists, raw and chafed, were bound tightly with heavy-duty duct tape; she could feel its cold, synthetic smoothness biting into her skin. A rough cloth gag choked her breath, and a thick blindfold severed her from the sight of the burning highway. Yet, she still saw them. Under her eyelids, the shadows of her captors danced, the red rings of their watches burned into her memory like brands on cattle.
She was spent. Back there, on the I-75, she had left everything behind: her optimism, her weapon, and every last spark of her combat spirit. She felt hollow, like a spent shell casing rattling on the floor.
As she tried to shift her position on the hard, vibrating floor of the vehicle, it lurched violently over a pothole. Her limp body slammed against the metal paneling. "Oh, my bad," Hondo’s rasping chuckle echoed in the cramped space. "I’ll be more careful next time, kid." "Just focus on the road," a woman snapped. Her voice was low, authoritative, and clearly irritated by her partner's lack of professionalism. "We don't have time for jokes."
Racheal felt someone leaning over her. Then came a scent she had learned to loathe in the chemistry labs—the sickly-sweet, suffocating aroma of chloroform. The cold plastic of an earbud brushed against her temple. "Easy now..." It was him. Lurker. His voice was close, almost a whisper against her ear. "Sleep. You have a very long day ahead of you. Just relax."
She felt him gently tuck the earbud into her left ear. The first piano notes of Bring Me to Life began to pierce through the hum of the tires. A damp cloth settled over her nose and mouth, and the world, along with the music, began to drift away into a soothing, chemical void.