Fiona was in uniform, laying on a dusty rock, watching some tangos through her scope. She in Afghanistan, or was it Iraq or Syria this time? She took the point as they crept up on a small house, colorless and sandblasted. She kicked open the door and then was in a luxurious study surrounded by antique books.

She looked down and was in a respectable suit, looked up and saw the Shroud was on her face. The client she was with now had a lizard head and was sucking on the blood of a Chinese woman in a maid uniform. A pistol was in her hand, barking loudly as she tried to put the thing down, but it took sawing at its neck with her combat knife to do it, she had to twist the handle over and over.

Then she was twisting the throttle of her jet-black bullet bike, firing a SMG one-handed at a van in front of her, the open door filled with armed thugs. The sound of the bullets was drowned out by the roaring of the vehicles. She caught two with a burst and they fell forward onto the blacktop. Just two left.

A glowing "2:00" floated in front of her. She was in bed, at home, laying on her side. Just a dream. All the things she'd seen and done over the years have just sunk in deeper, the newer stuff compressing the older ones, a palimpsest of trauma. The Shroud was laying next to the phone dock... she put her hand on it... and the compact Glock 43 pistol underneath it. A bit of solid reality after another night of bad dreams. Something crinkled under it though. She pulled it off (and onto her face without a second though), saw the folded paper that was definitely not there when she went to bed, scanned over the text... and picked up the gun in a flash, throwing off the comforter. She was on her feet in a flash, covering the four corners of the room. Nothing there, whoever did it had come and gone, and had to be something weird.

Before she could think twice, she was creeping down her hall to Mei Ling's room, pistol in a two-handed grip until she let go with one to work the knob. The small woman was still there, dispelling visions of her having been taken, or left in pieces. She sank down the wall to sit on the floor and read the note again. A threat? An oblique one. "Well, you have my attention..." she said to herself.

One would think there'd be no going back to sleep after this much of a jolt, but after checking the doors and windows, Fiona managed.

She went about her business normally, not letting on to Mei Ling about anything more than a meeting in three days. She drove by there the next day, taking a look, and did some online research, reached out to a contact in the police, another former brother in arms to see if there was anything noteworthy about the location or its owner, if it was in anyone's turf.

In any case, it wasn't Fiona Johnson that showed up at the designated time and place, but the masked vigilante known in whispers as The Shroud, a small arsenal under her knee-length coat.