There’s a lot of ways to die.

  Alex isn’t in the right headspace to list them all out, but she’s pretty sure that getting blasted in the cranium’s pretty high up on the fatality charts. Is that a thing? It should be a thing. Isn’t that right mister?

  Alex nudges the corpse with her foot. There’s no response, but that’s not a surprise. He doesn’t really have a brain anymore, involuntarily donating it all to the floorboards. She didn’t know her scrawny ass could do so much damage but adrenaline’s a hell of a thing.

  At least she assumes it’s adrenaline. Only thing that makes sense. She’s still weak as a motherfucker so it’d be surprising if she could perform blunt force brain surgery without it. Damn did she fuck him up.

  The top portion of his skull is just viscera and bone. She…may have hit him a dozen or so more times than was necessary, but it was just to make sure. Can’t afford to let him get to her, that was a mistake she won’t be repeating.

  Alex coughs out some blood. He shot her like…six times in the chest? She should probably be coughing up a lot more but she’s no flesh maestro.

  Just gotta roll with the punches. That’s the cadence of her life now. Get a weird ass notification that alters reality and suddenly everything just kinda happens. Maybe she’s some kind of chosen one? That would be funny.

  Hopefully her praying will someday glean an answer.

  Ah, fuck. She forgot to pray today.

  Welp, no time like the present!

  Alex clasps her shaking hands and closes her eyes. She tries speaking but all that comes out are hoarse coughs. Damn, she’ll have to do a mental one. That’s no good, she doesn’t know if whoever gave her this shit can read minds.

  Well, they did send her something impossible. Maybe it would be weird if they couldn’t? Yeah, that sounds like it makes some sense. Kind of. Probably going to need to check her logic when her head isn’t-

  A bang on the door interrupts her train of thought.

  Alex stares at the glorified board of wood, wondering who could possibly want to come towards gunfire. Probably someone dangerous. Or someone stupid. The knocks continue and Alex doesn’t really want to contemplate that without her gun.

  She picks it up off the floor and ejects the magazine. Her hands shake violently as she grabs another and feeds it to the gun. Alex racks the slide to place a bullet in the chamber and points her firearm at the door.

  There’s some yelling on the other side but Alex can’t really make out the words. Weird, they’re speaking English. Why doesn’t she understand?

  Alex tries to form a word and…can’t. It just doesn’t make its way to her mind. Like something essential is missing. Has she been defaulting to Arabic since she got shot? Fuck, losing linguistic capabilities can’t be a good sigh.

  Can’t think about that now though.

  Have to…mmmm.

  Are there colors floating? With every bang on the door hues of red jut into the air and slowly dissipate. That’s pretty cool. She likes red, that and black are her gang’s colors. The Anubis Road. A cool ass name for a cool ass gang.

  She’s cool too, that’s why she’s here. Badass mercenary standing over a corpse instead of being a corpse. Because being a corpse is for losers and Alex is a winner. Always a winner.

  Eventually the knocking turns into slamming, forcing Alex to refocus on the very real threat in front of her. Right, danger. Can’t forget about the danger.

  With a crash the door swings open and a middle-aged man barrels through the doorway. He looks up at Alex’s gun and his eyes go wide. He raises his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

  He says something in English but Alex’s brain hurts. The words just don’t parse no matter how hard she’s trying and-

  “Be quiet,” Alex hisses in Arabic, and it seems to cross the language barrier as the man clamps his mouth shut. Good, she’s tired.

  Really tired.

  She sways a bit but the man doesn’t move…she needs to move though. Right, there’s a phone. Her target was using it.

  Does she have the necklace?

  She checks her pockets. Ah fuck she left it in the bedroom. That’s not good. She needs that to prove she’s a reliable merc. But she can’t leave this dude to get it. She did that once and it went badly.

  She shuffles to the side where the bedroom door is and signals at the man to follow. He does, because Alex is just that fucking good at communicating without language. Hooray for her. He almost trips on Damian's body, and his reaction to the corpse is pretty funny.

  Alex lets out a chuckle-cough. This seems to terrify the man.

  Rude.

  She shuffles over to the necklace. She doesn’t have to shuffle but it’s something familiar and she needs some familiarity right now. Also it keeps the pace slow, she doesn’t think her brain could manage going faster.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Everythings so bendy already that it seems like a bad idea.

  Eventually she reaches the necklace crouching down to grab it with the other hand keeping her gun pointed at the man. Have to be careful, can’t not be careful. That’s how you get shot in the head. A bunch of other places too but the head’s what matters in this context.

  She hears a bunch of yelling from the entrance and her instincts are telling her she needs to get the fuck out of here. The man seems a little panicky as well, staring at her then…a window?

  Why’s he staring at a window?

  Ooooh, escape path, smart going oldie.

  She doesn’t make it to a window before a bullet blasts off her foot at the ankle. She crashes to the ground, head hitting the floor hard enough to knock her out.

  Consciousness is funny when you have severe brain damage.

  Alex goes in and out multiple times, each in a different place. She’s a bit surprised she’s not dead. Maybe they want to know who sent her here? Who sent her here? She has to push hard to remember but the name comes back eventually.

  Good, her brain isn’t a total loss.

  There’s a lot of words that she should understand but doesn’t float around between the moments of consciousness. Real confusing shit, and worrying. Very worrying. Can you lose a language from brain damage? She’s never heard of that before but she doesn’t really know how else to explain this.

  Maybe she made a discovery in cranial science! Unlikely, but it’s a funny thought so she keeps it until she loses consciousness again.

  “Sabah el nour!” someone says in electronic arabic. “C’mon brat, time to get up. We have plenty to talk about and I’m not a man with infinite time.”

  Alex blinks her eyes open to stare into the singular eye of a man without a face. The eye glows a pure white as the metal of his body is painted with so much…stuff. She doesn’t really know how to describe it. It’s just weird. He has spikes on his head.

  “You need a different hairstyle,” Alex slurs.

  The robot-man seems taken aback before letting out a loud laugh that hurts her brain. “That’s the first thing you say? You’ve got balls kid, considering your situation. You know where you are?”

  “Mmmmm, not really. Torrun sector?”

  “Bingo kido. Too bad we don’t got any prizes here besides killing you. Though I don’t think you’d consider it that much of a prize.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Alex nods.

  “Thought not,” robot-man chuckles. “You know who I am kid? Or why I might be here of all places?”

  “Um, no? Interrogation maybe?”

  “Sort of. The name’s Rain.”

  It takes a moment for Alex’s brain to piece together what he just said. “Bullshit, what would he want with me?”

  “A few things, but you don’t get to know what they are unfortunately. Though I would like to know how a girl with MD managed to bash in a full grown man’s skull.”

  “How do you know that?” Alex blinks.

  “The dystrophy? Seriously girl you should know that we know who you are by this point. Considering you’re still alive and all that jazz.”

  Alex blinks again. That…makes enough sense. He’s also been speaking entirely in Arabic so clearly he had a talk with the oldie that tried to help her. Why did he try to help anyway? She was literally pointing a gun at him.

  She kinda hopes he’s okay.

  The man snaps his metal fingers, creating a kind of ringing sound in the warehouse they’re in. “Pay attention girlie, I know your brain’s a bit scrambled but zoning out is just rude.”

  Wait, a warehouse?

  Alex looks around and sure enough they're in a warehouse with plenty of goons and plenty of turrets. Alex blinks a third time, when did she get here? That’s strange. Why is she talking to robot man again? Hmmmm…why indeed.

  There’s a clap in front of her face and some words. But the words kind of slide off her brain like a slippery ball of ice. Every try to squeeze one of those? Great way to get a broken nose if you’re unlucky. Didn’t happen to her personally but she did get to witness Omar make that mistake a few years ago.

  It was pretty funny.

  There are more words and she just doesn’t listen to any of them. She doesn’t really want to be here anymore. She gets up from her seat and-

  Falls, head hitting the ground giving her a splitting headache. Why did she fall?

  She looks at her feet and…one of them is missing.

  Alex lets out a blood curdling scream at the sight of gore cutting off where her foot should be.

  Disoriented delusion is an apt description for what follows her revelation. She laughs a lot. Cries a lot, and ignores a lot of words that she should probably pay attention to. Not the best first impression, but she doesn’t really give a shit.

  These fucks took her foot!

  She needed that!

  She needs all her limbs and digits because they’re important for her body and she likes her body and her body likes her and-

  She’s hyperventilating. That’s not good, there are bullet holes in her lungs. Those should be filling the sacs of air with plenty of blood but she’s not coughing any. Strange, add that to the list of weird shit to investigate. Maybe when she gets home she can shoot herself in the lung and see what happens.

  Alex doesn’t know if these jackasses’ll give her back her gun or let her live at all but it’s a nice enough thought to think beyond her missing foot. Fuck. Fuck.

  Hysteria is an understatement for what follows Alex’s state. She thinks her father shows up at some point but that doesn’t make any sense. Though how did she get into his car otherwise. She turns her head.

  Yup, that’s her father.

  He does not look happy.

  That gets a laugh, of course he isn’t happy. After what she fucking did? She’d curse Rashid but this mission was probably an intellectual test to see if she had a brain. Bet she woulda passed if she refused. Wouldn’t that be funny?

  Ah fuck, she doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. Something metal grabs her and lifts her up, taking her out of the car and into a parkade. The man of much chrome walks through a door that hisses open into a familiarly sterile atmosphere.

  He talks with someone and the words don’t register because she can’t understand English anymore. Fuck, she lost a whole ass language. That’s not good, that’s really bad.

  She starts thrashing in his grip but he just tightens his hold.

  It gets a little painful.

  Eventually she’s placed on a stretcher and taken away from her father. She holds out a hand to him and sobs but he doesn’t follow, just talking to the clerk with a fury she hasn’t seen on him before.

  She cries some more.

  She’s taken off her stretcher and plopped onto a bed like a delicate maiden. Alex does a little thrashing but she’s weak so it isn’t hard for them to keep her still. They put an IV into the veins of her fist and push some kind of clear liquid through it.

  Alex has exactly three seconds before she passes out again.

  ***

  Index:

  Sabah el nour: Good morning (not direct translation but same meaning)

  Sabah el khear: Optional response to sabah el nour.