Fate of the Legacies

Chapter Four

Susirnak Sutekh realized that she was being followed as she walked along a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima.

There were several men keeping their eyes on her as she strode nonchalantly down the street, grasping tightly onto the tall staff manufactured by her people that was disguised as a walking stick, a veil that belied the danger of its weaponry—within seconds with practiced movements of her hands, she would be able to locate tiny triggers on the staff's surface to activate an electric charge to envelop the weapon, spikes on either end, or even use it as an energy canon with the few blaster charges stored inside it. Susirnak had never been much of a fighter herself before the invasion, but, being the wife of one of the most decorated Mogadorian generals, she had been encouraged to learn some measures of fighting and self-defense. She had always taken rather well to fighting with staffs and polearm-styled weaponry, and, because she had no intention of being detained against her will, it was a skill she had been keen to hone after being left in the lurch in the aftermath of the invasion. Perhaps she was too confident in her abilities, but as soon as she got in touch with some of the others who remained free from the oppression of humanity and got her hands on her new weapon, she hadn't felt seriously nervous or scared of being captured so long as she stuck to the shadows. It would take a far greater force than a disorganized band of street rabble to pose a threat to Susirnak Sutekh.

She knew why they had homed in on her: like all Mogadorians, her skin was so pale that it would almost seem unnatural on any human. Normally when she went out in public, she wore modest clothes to hide as much of her skin as possible and makeup on what still showed to make her appear darker than she truly was. Today, though, she had no intention of hiding. She had seen a news report that a small contingent of her fellow Mogadorians in hiding in a remote area of the Czech Republic—a contingent containing several of her close friends—had been attacked and obliterated. No survivors.

Now, Susirnak wanted to hit someone. She couldn't get to the Czech Republic to pay back those who had killed her friends, but she could punish others of humanity. She could make them realize that, so long as Mogadorians were being hunted like animals, there would never be rest or mercy for their oppressors.

Susirnak strode along unfazed, confident in her abilities. The men were slowly surrounding her, forming a loose circle around her, ready to attack her as soon as she turned off onto any less-populated area. For now, she was protected by the crowds of rowdy kids playing football in the streets and the parents and grandparents that watched over them as they shared stories and gossip off to the side. Susirnak doubted that any of these people would protect her if the men decided to attack her right then, but she assumed that her pursuers simply didn't want to create any sort of major fuss or drama.

Susirnak had taken a calculated risk by coming to such a populous city. With so many people around to be suspicious of or curious about her, it would be difficult to keep up a façade of being a fellow human for very long, but she had an incalculably important reason for being there: it had been rumored that Monvos, a Mogadorian scientist who had found a promising—perhaps successful—cure for the fertility issues that plagued trueborn Mogadorians, had been onboard the warship over Lima during the invasion. The great Mogadorian race had been mostly rounded up and subjugated after their tragic defeat in the invasion by the grotesque Garde and their allies and placed in a concentration camp in the United States. Their numbers had been severely cut down in the fighting, and they were threatened to this day with genocide, making the Mogadorian fertility issues all the more pressing. If she were able to find the remnants of whatever research or technology Monvos had been working on, she could change the future of their race forever.

First, though, she would have to get rid of the men tailing her.

Susirnak turned off the street she was on, down a more populated road of mostly foot traffic with market stalls lining either side and a crowd so thick that the few cars that tried to go through them were given barely any room at all to maneuver. She had been marked as a Mogadorian before early in her attempts to remain hidden amongst crowds—back before she was good at masking her skin tone, but even then it was easy enough to slip into large crowds and lose a tail. Now, without her disguise, most people who saw her gave her hard, suspicious looks or shied away from her, making it impossible to truly blend in. She missed the days before the invasion, back when anyone would look at her and simply think that she was just some noticeably but unremarkably incredibly pale white woman with sharp features. Now, the hysterical racism against the Mogadorians had festered so much that Susirnak had heard stories about people who were legitimately just incredibly pale humans being targeted, hunted, and assaulted—and sometimes murdered—out of suspicion that they were rogue Mogadorians.