Part I: The Birth of a Hero

"What? Why? Did you get it?"

"Now, Cam."

She folded her telescope quickly, shoving parts into their compact form violently when they didn't click together fast enough. Cameron tried to squint around the wall, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. A street vendor's trolly hissed angrily across the street, A man in too many coats stood very very close to a taller man in a shiny hat, talking fervently, a woman wrapped some sad, wilting, colorless flowers in brown paper. Everything seemed very... boring.

"Sasha, what's going on? What do you...?" Sasha barely registered the high-pitched squeak of surprise that interrupted her brother's sentence.

"Stupid... dumb... thing!" She finished shoving the telescope into its heavy metal case and looked up just as the mercenary spoke.

"See anything exciting, little girl?"

He was huge. Giant. Larger than possible. To Sasha he had to have been at least twelve feet tall and as wide as a train--one of the older, square-shaped ones. He had sharp-edged pauldrons on both shoulders, mismatched and furrowed with deep scratches. His dark metal helmet covered one eye, and the harsh streetlight glinted off the glass buried where his socket would be. Her brother wiggled in one of his telephone-pole arms, a crude hatchet held perfectly still near his eye.

When the man smiled at her he was missing several teeth. She screamed.

Sasha had heard of the mercenaries--killers hired by the rich to do the dirty work the poor couldn't afford to shove on anybody else, people trained and paid to take the lives of their employers' enemies using any means they found convenient. And Sasha knew very well what killers did--she'd seen it, she'd held her hands against her uncle's chest to stop the bleeding. She didn't know if it actually ever worked or if she was just really bad at it.

She didn't want to have to test this theory on Cameron.

She didn't want to die.

The barrel of his huge, sharp rifle looked very, very dark inside.

"Use only in emergencies," her aunt had told her when she gave the small, unassuming package to her. Fifty million times.

Cameron's scream almost drowned out the mercenary's harsh attempt at a gentle and convincing, "now come along with me now, kiddies, and no one will get hurt..."

And she dropped the bomb.

Cameron's screams were now interrupted by coughs, pleading, her name wailed in a pitch she didn't know humans could create. The mercenary was yelling too, curses so confusingly colorful she'd only dredge them up on accident, years later, when the shit hit the fan so hard it broke the damn thing entirely.

She just wanted to stay alive.

So through the smoke and the screams, the coughs, the random bursts of fire, she ran away as fast as she possibly could. She hadn't gotten very far before the huge man shouted one last frustrated obscenity and Cameron stopped screaming just as suddenly. She couldn't even think about turning back. She could only run.

She knew then she was a failed soldier after all.

Real rebels never had to clean their pants.

Real rebels left no one behind.

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