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She was running for her life, exerting every ounce of strength. Her pursuer was right behind her. His footfalls on the plas-crete sidewalk beating themselves into her consciousness as they steadily caught up to her. She had no time to look back to see but had reached the place to which she was fleeing. It was a rotten gaping hole in the mortar foundation of a massive tenement building. One of thousands of such entrances throughout the ghetto that let into the old sewers below- now known as the warrens.

Tanya jumped straight into the opening with the footfalls of her pursuer right behind her. She slipped and slid, gouging out a long deep patch of meat along her lower thigh on the rough edged opening. She hit the ground within and instantly turned with the scrap of carbon to slash at the hand reaching in for her through the opening.

Her pursuer had not expected the beautiful, frightened, filthy slip of a girl-child to turn on him. Nor had he expected the razor sharp scrap of carbon. He had not expected the raggy street urchin to turn and attack, like a crazed animal rather than a human being.

Tanya was a thirteen year old ghetto-vagabond who had already seen the worst life had to offer and clearly understood what this one wanted with her. She’d seen him before, with his girls, and now apparently he had seen her. There was no law here in the tax-free zone, so whatever could be taken and held was property. To be sold or bartered to the constant stream of those who frequented this place.

Whatever could be taken and held was the property of the holder. That was the only law of the ghetto, the tax-free zone. That was the only law Tanya knew, so she would struggle just as ferociously to escape the jaws of a predatory lizard as she would this man, or the many others like him who thrived in these places. The outcome in both cases would be the same.

Showing the coordination of a trained gymnast, the ferocity of the gladiator, or maybe it was only her utter terror which drove her. Tanya spun as her feet hit the ground, slashing at the hand reaching in for her. The piece of carbon was sharp, its edge only one atom thick, but of this or anything else which would be learned in an educational institution Tanya was unaware. She knew there were places where people lived normal lives, but of those place’s inner workings she knew nothing. She could neither read nor write nor even spell her own name.

Tanya knew only that the merest touch of the scrap would sever anything of flesh and bone. She took off the last three fingers of his left hand with a desperate stroke. The fingers left the hand to flip almost as in freeze-frame through Tanya’s vision. Before the first squirt of arterial spray left the severed ends of newly shortened fingers, she was running again while he screamed his agony and despair.

Then she was gone into the darkness of underground passages she knew better than the streets above. Better than she could remember her own mother, now seven years gone, and a killing ground for anyone foolish enough to attempt to follow her. Many followed. They wanted the credits she would earn. Many just wanted her alone. They wanted her blond hair and her blue eyes, because she was different and because she was beautiful.

She stood out in a nearly homogenized race. Her mother and father came here from someplace else, but hadn't survived long once they got here. Her father simply failed to return the last time he went out, the victim of a violent social structure he had not been able to adapt to quickly enough. Tanya understood intrinsically what had occurred, her father’s sad but smiling face still in her memories. He was tormented with the knowledge of his failures but trying to put a brave face on it for her.

Her mother had worked as a prostitute at the end, but there was little else she could remember of those times. They had not been good times. As a thirteen year old girl, Tanya was now well acquainted with the lusts of men. Those who had pursued her recently met death in the underground warrens, the scrap of carbon flashing out of darkness too Stygian to comprehend, then Tanya fleeing like a ghost while the predator turned prey pumped his blood onto the thirsty plas-crete.

.………………..
Those old memories faded away even as Tanya came to understand what she was remembering, and then her target walked into the cross-hairs of her scoped flechette rifle and her thoughts returned to the business at hand. There were better weapons for this type of sniper work, but this job wasn't work. This was personal. Tanya took a brief moment to note the hand; it looked to have been repaired to perfection, as well as his youth restored through Rejuvenation, but she knew that these were recent changes. That he had climbed the ladder of success and he had been just recently able to afford it. She had thoroughly researched him, and she had learned everything there was to learn. What a shame for him that his success was to be so briefly enjoyed!

The flechette rifle was merely her touch. It would shred him like hamburger. They would have to pack his body into sandwich bags. He was walking out of a restaurant with three of his girls. Not the same girls he'd had then. All of those and many more had died along the way working for him, that life a brutal and short one for the girls caught in it.

His now opulent lifestyle was financed by dozens of whore-houses in several ghetto locales, which was why Tanya was here. She had seen him by accident only, but instantly remembered him with a flash of knowledge like a stab of brilliant light from the blackness of a childhood forgotten. Amnesia, she had been told, though why she suffered it and knew nothing of her childhood was a mystery. With sight and surfaced memory had come the first glimpses into her forgotten childhood- the first that she had ever received. She then studied him and learned everything about him- far more than the government records showed- as well as his quasi-legal ghetto activities. She learned everything, and now she was here.

Though he actually never harmed her, other than the deep scrape, and conversely she had harmed him, the fact remained he had tried. He tried to catch her, and if he had caught her he would have beaten and raped her, strung her out on drugs and then prostituted her until the end of her days. If she was stronger than most and survived until she became too worn to draw even the worst dregs of those who purchased such things, she would be cast aside as the useless flotsam she had become and then to die a quick death of starvation on the cold streets.

Tanya didn't forget such things. Tanya didn't leave enemies behind herself, even if they would never know who she was. Even if they would never recognize her with the years gone by and she grown and changed! Tanya didn't leave enemies behind herself, and maybe just a little vengeance for all the girls, though that was hardly the primary reason. Tanya wasn't interested in correcting the wrongs of the Universe. There were far too many for that, had she cared about such things; her concern in this matter was entirely personal.

Tanya's finger slowly depressed the trigger as she exhaled a slow even breath. The cross-hairs were rock-solid steady on her target. The flechette rifle sighed in her hands. She held the trigger depressed, not letting up, the cross-hairs remaining centered on his body even as he was flung back into the building behind him- Tanya anticipating the reaction with the precision that only an expert could know.

Pleased by the remorseless spray of flechettes, thousands upon thousands of micro-thick aerodynamic flying razors tearing through his body, literally shredding him as the girls leapt away from the silent death assaulting him from nowhere, screaming in silent horror through the magnification of her scope.

When she had expended the magazine Tanya quickly slid back from the edge of the roof-line and rose to her feet. Still wearing her gloves and the weapon clean, she spun like a discus thrower and launched the weapon out into the air towards the roof of the next adjoining building. It sailed through the darkness invisibly and landed with a clatter. She ran towards the opposite edge of the roof from which she had been firing and when she reached it simply dove out into a swan dive and began the twenty-one story drop to the plas-crete street below.

The wing-suit didn't have lift and wouldn't hold her in the air long, but four blocks away Tanya pulled the rip cord of her parachute and came to a rough landing in the small park she had already designated during her planning. She rolled and came up, quickly disengaging the harness and simultaneously scanning the park for witnesses, but she had seen no one as she was floating in and there was no one here now, lucky for them.

Tanya was wearing a ski-mask and no one would be able to identify her from a description of a black wing-suited ninja that floated out of the sky, but she wouldn’t have hesitated to terminate any who had been unfortunate enough to be here when she arrived. She would neither be stopped nor later identified by anyone, and that was a rule Tanya did not break.

She left the parachute where it lay and made good her escape, the ground car exactly where she had left it, and no one yet the wiser.

Chapter 2

Tanya ran through the twisting warrens still fearful she was being pursued. Running and fighting, had become her existence. Her feet were hard and thick with calluses tougher than shoe leather. She had no shoes and didn’t need them. She could not remember ever having any. After running in the wrong direction and after making sure she hadn't been followed, she turned and made her unerring passage through the consuming darkness.

She couldn't see anything- there was no light trickling down from above at all- but she didn't need to visibly see to know where she was going. This place, a monstrous derelict building, and the old sewer systems that ran under it and under all the ruins here, had been her home since her mother had died, some six years ago. A worthless measurement, as time had ceased to have meaning for her. Existence was hand to mouth and that was what Tanya knew.

The squeak of a rat was the call of the sentry. Tanya returned the call.

“Come in.” The sentry whispered.

Tanya moved forward until she was standing beside the sentry. She couldn't recall his name quite yet although she remembered now who he was. Perhaps the name would come to her, but for the moment it remained elusive within her newly resurfacing memories. She was beginning to remember a great many things since she had seen, recognized, and assassinated the pimp.

The sentry gave the signal of the day, a complicated series of knocks on the old carbon door and a small slot in the door opened, allowing a shaft of pale light to spear out into the darkness of the plas-crete tunnel.

“It's Tanya.” The sentry said, though that wasn't really her name. That was the name they gave her when they found her, though of that original group six years ago only a few remained, and only children who had been younger than Tanya at the time she had been taken in. The door was unbarred from inside and Tanya entered. The door closed softly behind her and the makeshift bar was thrown back in place.

When the door was closed they allowed themselves a small bit of light, the lamps coming on once the door was sealed and there was no chance of the light betraying them. Their only light sources were several old but nearly indestructible crank-lamps that were used by many who lived in these places where there was no electricity. Tanya moved over to the room's one table as the children all gathered around her. From the folds of her rags she produced the treasure she had procured and set it reverently upon the table.

“Rice!”

“A whole bag.” They chorused in their astonishment and surprise. A whole bag of rice would feed the twelve of them for a long time. None had large stomachs.

“How did you get a whole bag of rice?” The second oldest asked. Malcomb. His name was Malcomb. She suddenly remembered the only true friend she had ever had, he asking vocally even though he knew she wouldn't answer, because he knew she couldn't. He always spoke vocally to her anyway, never giving up on her and hoping that one day she would respond. Tanya couldn't utter a word no matter how hard she tried. She could make sounds, the calls they used to communicate, but she couldn’t speak a word. It was as if her throat would just seize when she tried, a terror she could not understand seemed to grip her throat and nothing would come out. She didn't know why, what trauma she had suffered that so devastated her sense of self-confidence, but she just couldn't. Not since her mother had gone. Not a single syllable.

The Tanya of now swallowed the memory and forced herself to concentrate on the business at hand. The strange memories had come again. Brief flashes of her very own life if she could believe what she was remembering, these the first such hints Tanya had ever received of even having a life prior to what she now knew. Not until now and so far only the two brief flashes. The first glimpses of her forgotten past. She put those thoughts aside for the moment and looked through the scope of the laser rifle.

The target would be visible through the dia-glass bay window of his high-rise condo as he opened the curtains in the morning. It was the only routine Tanya had been able to find in his schedule, this fifty-fourth day of her surveillance, which also forced her to extremes of action she would rather have avoided. But he was a careful man and Tanya had to make necessary allowances.

Six days in a row she watched through video surveillance feeds as he opened his curtains every day at roughly the same time, and now she waited. The couple who owned the condo where Tanya was now lying prone on the carpeting of the living room, her laser-rifle propped with a monopod and steady in her hands, were at that moment lying dead in their beds. Tanya did not leave witnesses.

The memories rose again suddenly from nowhere and flooded her mind, trying to wash away her concentration, but she could not allow that to happen and forcibly changed what she was thinking, subduing the memory from repeating itself, at least for the moment. She had replayed the first remembrance over and over again, attempting to dredge up more memories, but nothing had come, until now. Possibly the stressful situation, Tanya thought, though it wasn't all that stressful. This was her job and she was more than just an expert. She was the best in the business. Cool, calm and collected, she waited.

The curtains began to open, the mark now coming into plain view. He was walking across his living room when Tanya took her shot. With the cross-hairs centered on the back of his head Tanya depressed the trigger. The laser-rifle was held rock-steady in sure hands, and the shot took him in the back of his head. He was dead before he was falling to his floor. Still, Tanya was thorough and put in four more shots as he went down. It would be a closed coffin funeral.

She left the rifle where it lay as she got up and went into the bathroom to check her appearance in the mirror. Her disguise was still in perfect order as she had known it would be, but she liked to check it anyway. It was a good one with tight black curls, olive skin set off by even darker brown contacts, puffed out cheeks to ruin computer recognition and a few more kilos than she normally wore around her midsection. Altogether making it entirely impossible to recognize her once the disguise was gone. She couldn't escape the security cameras of this building, but this had been one of those jobs where extenuating circumstances drove her to do things she wouldn’t ordinarily do. Walking past a security camera after a hit was a bad deal, but there were no other options in this case and they would never find the person they thought they were looking for.

In her business suit and briefcase in hand, carrying all manner of weapons, Tanya walked out of the building and disappeared into the crowds. No one gave her a second glance.