Modus Vivendi

"It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same running from something larger than yourself story, shoving money into the jaws of a suitcase, cutting your hair with a steak knife at a rest stop, and you're off, you're on the run, a fugitive driving away from something shameful and half-remembered. They're hurling their bodies down the freeway to the smell of gasoline, which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so. Yes, you did dear.

Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you're left to your own devices."

— Richard Siken, Driving, Not Washing

"It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it's nothing so simple, any more than a letter's reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don't always resemble our means."

— Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

✷

Sabine, Serenity and Saint do not exist.

Once, they were a part of PLEXUS, a covert pilot programme, wherein infants were enhanced and encoded with abilities to regenerate, rendering them virtually immortal. Such are desirable qualities in operatives of the Agency, a clandestine time-security organisation sworn to maintain order within the multiverse. Until Altan Li, former operative of the Agency, escaped with the girls after the death of his wife and their creator, Isolde Li, cracking the operation wide open.

As a result, the programme was axed and buried in an effort to contain the breach, and all the children terminated.

All except Sabine and her younger sisters. Raised in the middle of the boreal forest, Sabine, Serenity and Saint are trained by their father to become the assassins they were always meant to be, awaiting the day the Agency comes for them.

It's only a matter of time.

The clock's ticking.

          Sabine got to walk away from all of it. When the Agency finally breached the forest, Sabine escaped through the Anti-Door, a portal to alternate dimensions, created by their mother before her execution. Two years later, the past demands to drag her back in the form of one relentless Grayson Madani, operative of the Agency, sent to clean up loose ends. Armed with a sword that may be a conduit between worlds and a list of names to cross off, Sabine must work her way back to her family—even if it means slashing through the multiverse one body at a time.

          Serenity remembers the day her sister walked away, leaving both her and their youngest sister, Saint, for capture. Now that she's back with the Agency as one of their operatives, Serenity knows she has to play the long game or risk termination. When she uncovers a hidden agenda buried within the Agency and its intentions with the newly resurrected PLEXUS programme, Serenity knows she must follow in the footsteps of her eldest sister and defect. She must find Sabine before the Agency does. At any cost, she must find a way to save Saint before it's too late.

         Saint knows abandonment. She'd tasted its bitter kick to the teeth when she watched her eldest sister abandon them to the Agency, and again when Serenity, who'd promised that she'd never do the same, went back on her own word and did exactly that. When the Agency sends her after her sisters, to bring them back to base at any cost, Saint must obey. It's her chance to enact her own vengeance. It's her chance to show her sisters what she's become without them.