Corridor 23

Prologue

Inara sits in the commercial shuttle, feeling for the first time that she is completely safe. Her mother sits next to her reading a magazine and pretending that she could still fit into one of those skimpy little bathing suits. Well, not she's not actually Inara's mother she's just posing. Inara is glad that this will be the last time anyone has to pose as anybody in Inara's life. Inara does have parents, but they are long gone. Inara yawns and rests her head on the headrest. None of the movies are any good, just as Inara is figuring out how to turn the little tv off the intercom crackles to life. Inara cringes of memories of the same kind of intercom telling her about the little black pill that it still in Inara's jean pocket. Inara shudders at the memory and turns her attention back to the woman who is speaking into it.

"We will be landing in ten minutes, at Air Expo National in Dunn Loring, New Coven." Inara closes her eyes and pretends to fall asleep so people will quit staring at her eye. It;s the one thing all the government's money couldn't fix. Her eye was the reason there was a pill in her back pocket. It couldn't forget anything, completely photographic, video recorder. There were many names she could slap on it. She'd seen too much, she was lucky the President, Victoria Hatcher was letting her go free. But if she slipped up, only once, she was as good as dead.

The shuttle landed and Inara plus a small group of middle-class riders rode the hover pad down to the port sitting next to the small aeroport, Air Expo National. Inara twiddles her thumbs as she leans against the glass wall of the hover pad. Hover pads make her nervous, and the screensaver view makes her nauseous. Inara can screensave any beautiful view or moment. Not that she's had many chances to. She was raised to three in a test tube and then she underwent mutation during her childhood up to nine. From there she did training with female Army units until she was twelve. At age thirteen she was admitted into the army as a spy, a secret weapon. When she was eighteen she asked to be discharged and she waited an entire year before she was granted permission to escape the enemy family she was assigned to. She served for six active years, and now she hoped to serve two inactive years that would complete the transaction.

Inara waves her fake mother goodbye and leaves in a scheduled transport with shaded windows to take her to her new home. In unsuspecting suburbs. Inara chose it, it's a gray, brick craftsmen with white shutters, a garden path, and a red door. It also looked like every other house on the street, only different colors, and a garden path. Unsuspicious, less likely to house the reason why the Moroccos kept losing and why they're now going to suffer crushing defeat. What? Inara was good at her job.

Inara gave a generous tip to the transport and bid him farewell after he carried her unsuspicious old leather bags to the front porch. Inara searched her pockets for the key, as her fingers brushed the pill she shivered and yanked her hand out of her pocket producing the key and the black pill. Inara chose the keys and shoved the pill as deep as she could get it, reaching for the door.

"When I open this door I'm going to walk into a new life, become someone new. Am I ready?" When Inara is nervous she likes to narrate her life in a series of soap opera dialogue. Someone next door hears her and peers out the window at the pretty dark haired girl struggling with too many bags, trying to fit them all through the small door at once. 

"Can I help you?" Kaiden Riddick stuck his muscled arm out for Inara to shake, but Inara froze rather than shake his hand, believing that he was a government spy or something. He didn't look suspicious in his greased down hair but neither had Inara when she was living with the Morocco family.

"Sure I guess," Inara says in a shaky breath, fingering the dog tags around her slender neck. She looks up into the green eyes over her head, staring deep Inara sorted through his memories, discovering that he already had two girlfriends and three flirters. "How's Oriola, or perhaps Pippa? What are Ashlyn, Lark, and Verity up to these days?" Inara asks with an innocent smile.

"Woah, how did you do that!?" Kaiden is terrified and in awe of this beautiful girl who just appeared out of nowhere. Inara milks his reaction for all it's worth;

"Oh?" She says turning around to pick up her bags. "They're all friends of mine." Kaiden thinks she's lying and Inara knows it, so instead, she changes the subject and asks him where he works because anybody who's a respectable adult and twenty-one has a job. Kaiden helps her with his bags as he should and leaves her be in her little home sweet home.