Modus Vivendi

PROLOGUE: deus ex machina

ONE YEAR AGO.

SOMEWHERE IN THE FOREST

✷

Nobody asked to be born.

This much, Sabine knew. Nobody wanted to be the hunted, constantly looking over their shoulder, but growing so tired of carefully existing in that horrible way, the price of respite one step into the line of fire.

She never imagined it'd come to this.

They came in the last dregs of dawn, hours ago, dozens strong, dropping down from their colossal helicopters to siege and storm the house in the middle of the forest. From the moment their boots made contact with the ground, the moment Sabine had spotted the sheen of their visors and the guns in their hands from the corner of their kitchen window, the game was up. They were closed in. There was nowhere else left to run. They were here to raze everything to the ground.

Branches whipped at her face as she tore through the underbrush, the distant shouts of her pursuers echoing through the night, her footfalls light, fleet around the underbrush leading further and further into the heart of the forest. Gunfire sniped at her heels, the smell of smoke singing the crisp air, spurring Sabine on. In the pounding heat of the moment, she could hear their radio chatter, the static bursts of feedback and commands circulated through their splinter group following her deeper and deeper into uncharted territory.

A spray of bullets pelted the snow, drawing a line of death up against the trees. A shower of bark burst in her periphery, sharp fingers of splinters raking down her cheek. Sabine spat up the residue, but she didn't stop. Didn't dare falter for a second.

Her father's desperate voice crackled over the communications device, urging her to keep moving as he tried to buy more time. But Sabine knew the truth. They were spread thin, their threadbare crew of four; her sisters in the house awaiting capture, her father vanished into some other corner of the forest, sealed away, despairingly out of reach. He'd warned them. There would be no turning back. One misstep could cost everything.

This was what the Agency did. In their sole mission to protect the fragile fabric of the multiverse, to maintain order across countless dimensions, they had to cut off the root of the rot, immolate the virus snuck through the gaps. And she was one third of their greatest mistake, their most coveted error.

She was alone now, the sole target of the Agency's relentless manhunt.

They would stop at nothing to bring her back into the fold, whatever it took.

Adrenaline coursed through her body, a trickle of fear slashing through her veins. Always the rabbit, never the fox. Always forced to watch her own six, never allowed to let her guard down for a second. Her inventory of weapons consisted of the knives buried in her sleeves, at least twenty of them, varying in different sizes and functions, soldered to her hand by years of training. She knew fifty different ways to take down men twice her size. Still, the reality was that she was outmatched, that her knives amounted to nothing in a gunfight.

But she had something they didn't.

Their night-black uniforms strove stark against the heavy snowfall, and as Sabine ducked under low-hanging branches and leapt over the winter-ravaged carcasses of shrubs and snarling roots, she could feel the herd thinning. One by one, the agents went down, stuck by branches, snared by a bush, their vision tunnelled by the target on her back, and in their relentless pursuit, they'd failed to remember the first rule of the forest.

For fifteen long years, they were fugitives, hiding from the elusive agency her father had once served, their most esteemed engineer, until he blew it all apart. For fifteen years, this desolate wilderness had been her home, her prison—a life sentence of hiding from the agency that'd sanctioned her existence.