dark lady

"Do you repent?"

The words took her by surprise, like a punch to the stomach, taking the wind out of her so that she couldn't speak. Her eyes, widened in horror, stared down the barrel of the gun in her best friend's steady hands. "What?" she asked in a breathy whisper, the loudest she could get her voice.

"Do you repent of your sins?"

"Have you been home too recently? I told you to stop reading those fairy tales."

The woman with the gun calmly gripped it by the barrel and slapped the captive across the face with the handle. "Those who mock the word of God shall be smote into the deepest depths of Hell!"

"Wow, way to go with the melodrama." She looked up at the woman who had once been her best friend, the woman she suspected was changed forever. "You're serious, aren't you? You actually believe all this. You never did before, but you do now. What happened?"

"I saw the light. You too can be saved, if you embrace God and the American government. Repent! It isn't too late!"

"Bite me."

The woman with the gun leveled it and took a shot right at the other woman's heart. She knew that her shot was true, and the thrill of victory captured her so that she didn't see a tan-skinned hand reach for her, or the life ebbing from dark eyes. Nor did she hear the curse thrown in her direction with the other woman's dying breath.

And in the city of the mad, Kristen was worshipped as the Lady, the temple of her vengeful followers sitting in the center of Brooklyn and drawing rebels like flies to honey. They gave no quarter, as angry and merciless as their patron had been in her moment of death, forever keeping the city seething and stirring in bloody rebellion.

role reversal

Bouchard gestured towards the entrance to Suite 25. "And lastly, our best computer hacker, from Israel..."

A brunette with attractively bobbed hair stalked into the room, wearing a tan turtleneck sweater, black pants, and black boots. Todd took one look at her and drew his gun. But as he aimed at her, he saw the barrel of her gun pointing right back at him. "Nice setup you've got here," he said. "I didn't think Britney could use her puppets so effectively."

"Call me one of those again and I'll put a bullet between your eyes. I'm not Kate. My name is Esther. Kate used to be my sister Eva. She was on the team that was supposed to hack into Britney. They got in. They never got out. Eva is dead to me, and if I ever see Kate, I will be the first to shoot her."

Todd nodded his understanding and went over to the window to empty his gun.

Terrell, on the other hand, remembered seeing Kate on the morning show that day, wearing the same sweater with a black skirt and black boots, and wondered how much Esther really believed that her sister was dead.

two-for-one special

Shulamit Levy looked over her unit. "All right. We've got an interesting mission here. Seems that the Americans have come up with a new operating system, and it's more dangerous than the CARTER system. Our mission is to find out what it's like on the inside. Notes from the preliminary group indicate that the systems are very easy to hack. Still, be careful. We've already lost a unit to this system."

She walked around the room, handing out notebooks. Some of the members of the unit looked sickened at the doodles and scrawlings. "Don't become them," Shulamit warned them. "As much as their notebooks are here for research purposes, they are ALSO a cautionary example. Naomi, you've got Tovah's notes on the youth systems. Ruth, you're on the advertising mainframe with Hila's notebook. Mila, the educational mainframe is yours- be very careful with that one, it took down Shoshana Baum, and you know how she was. Zipporah, take the entertainment matrix. Dvora, you're the most tech-savvy hacker in this group- work from Leah's notes on the internal workings of the system. Yael, you and I are going to work on the military systems and see if we can find who the next opponent will be. Rivkah, you're the money woman here- take the economic systems."

As the women of the unit started leafing through the notebooks, Shulamit's second-in-command looked at her in puzzlement. "If you're sparing me because of-"

"No. I can't afford to, and even if I could, I wouldn't. I know you wouldn't let me. You have the best intuition of us, and the most experience in America. I want you on the bleach project. You may have enough detachment to understand it before it's too late, unlike Rosenthal." Shulamit refused to use the American-born hacker's given name; it grated on her last nerve. "You're too stubborn. You won't give in. I know you can do this."

"I appreciate your confidence," Eva Cohen replied, thinking of the last time she had heard Esther speak to her in their native tongue. 'It's too strong for us, Eva. I have to call your unit in before it's too late. I don't want you involved in this, but I have no choice. You and Shulamit may be the only ones who can save us.' The desperation in Esther's voice had nearly defeated her before they even started.

But the sight of the woman with Esther's face and mannerisms, the woman who spoke in American English and called herself Natalie, had frozen her heart like ice. She could not, did not care about anything outside the mission. To take her sister back, she would have to become her sister, focused and determined and practical enough that she would kill if there was no other choice.

lone wolf

Consciously, she remembers nothing of the last ten years, none of the photo shoots, none of the denial, none of the honeyed words that Britney whispered in her mind so that she could say them aloud to girls who needed guidance. She cannot recall the two lovers she had and drove to suicide, the self-hatred that nearly drove her to the same fate, the confusion that overcame her whenever she thought too hard about the message she was supposed to believe. Her illustrious professional career may as well have never been, along with the women whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed when she pointed an accusing finger at them, claiming that they had touched her in ways she loathed.

She had her choice of colleges when she was a high school senior; all the big names were pursuing her avidly. She chose the greatest of them all, eager to prove how talented she was, how willing she was to listen to the truth. There, lost in the woods, she learned how to divide herself, to be who she truly was behind the locker room door and who everyone else expected her to be when she was outside. And that was where she lost herself, falling under the coach's spell and from there coming under Britney's sway.

Basketball was her life and her dream. It was all she had ever known, all she ever dreamed of. She wanted it to be pure and good, and so she did what she could to purify it. But no matter what she did, it wasn't enough for Britney, and so Britney took it away from her. She snapped. Without basketball, she felt useless, like she had nothing else to give, and it made her crazy enough to commit violence. They called her crazy and sent her to New York because she wasn't worth the trouble of trying to cure; even if they made her sane again, she was still a lesbian, and therefore unworthy of their aid.

In New York, she was closer to the place she had once called hers, and she heard its siren call again. They came for her, and brought her into the wild lands where no one, American or New Yorker, dared tread. They gave her a home and a family, safety and a way to coddle her insanity.

The old man is a father figure, to her and to the rest of them, ready with a quip and a well-hidden kind word. The lady in red mothers her shamelessly, makes sure she doesn't hurt herself when her dim memories remind her of what she has done, cuts her beautiful blonde hair whenever it gets long enough to be noticed. The dark beauty is her fierce protector, her older sister in psychosis. The tall former writer is at once older and younger sister to her; there is something childlike and naïve in the silent woman's demeanor, but at the same time bitter knowledge and hard-earned wisdom hide behind dark eyes, and her silence makes her the perfect confidant. The lovers are her lovers as well, taking her into their bed when any or all of them feel the need. It is strange and dysfunctional, sadistic and psychotic, but it works for her.

Running with the wolves in Westchester, hated blonde hair shaved off at every opportunity and otherwise shorn, memories of her past lost or disregarded, Helen McCoy has never been happier.

woman scorned

Kira Lane looked up from her morning paper as her younger sister stumbled into the kitchen. "Morning, Kel," she called.

Kelly made a vague hand gesture that indicated her state of semi-consciousness and that she would have something more intelligent to say after a mug and a half of coffee, but for the moment coffee was the only thing she could think about. Only after she drank her mug of black coffee did she reply, "Morning, Kira."

"I would have thought the Army would have trained habits like that out of you. Don't you have to be instantly aware of everything the second you wake up?"

"What, and deprive you of making fun of me? I'm awake, I just like to pretend I'm not. Remember when we were kids and mom used to have to throw us out of bed before we'd finally get up?" Kelly giggled.

"I only got thrown once. You were the one who hid under the blankets every Wednesday because you hated going to math class first thing." Kira turned the page of her paper. Something about the ad on the page jogged her memory. "Oh, hey, Kel, what's the name of that boyfriend of yours? The hunk you met in the Army?"

"Todd Carter," Kelly said dreamily. "The man who's going to marry me."

"Well, you might want to tell him that." Kira opened the paper to page 3 and turned it so that it faced Kelly. "'Cause he seems to have forgotten."

Kelly stared, ashen-faced, at the exclusive wedding photos of Todd and Dee Carter. "No. No, this isn't right. He said he loved me! We danced all night after he captured Bin Laden! How could he do this to us? How could he hurt me like this? We shared a special bond from Iraq. That little skank can't understand him the way I do. No one does! He's mine!" She ran out of the kitchen in tears.

Kira chased her, since leaving her sister alone at a time like this didn't seem to be a good idea. "Kelly Marie Lane, what are you doing?"

"Getting my old service revolver! I'm gonna teach that homewrecking bitch some lessons! No blonde bimbo is going to steal my man and get away with it! She's dead! SHE IS DEAD!"