The Rising Dawn

Chapter One - The Queen of Fourth Segment

The chair wasn’t a throne but it only wasn’t a throne because she wasn’t a princess. Besides, thrones tend to have more gold leaf and mother-of-pearl inlay and rubies encased in diamond. Thrones tend to show off. The chair didn’t need to.

 It was a tall-backed wooden chair with the back shaped almost like a chess queen. It had wooden arms, over which the occupant often slung her legs since, as she was not a princess, good posture was not a law. Yet, in a strange way, a princess she was.

 She might have been fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. She didn’t know and didn’t care. Age was unimportant except when defined by the basic terms of “infant”, “child”, “adult” or “dead”. Small children don’t keep track of their ages and parents don’t tend to last.

 She was tall and narrow, with a straight nose and fierce eyes and a wide mouth. Her limbs were strong and supple, her body built with one aim in mind: survival. She was of the breed that can run without losing breath, climb without caring for the pain, go days without food and weeks without sleep. She was designed to live at all costs.

 Her hair was long and dark, hovering uncertainly between brown and black. It matched the colour of her eyes, almost eerily. It gave the impression that her entire being was concentrated, reduced to piercing eyes, long hair and a knife.

 The way she dressed could only be called a costume. Her clothes were dark, nondescript and yet somehow defined at the same time. They had been stolen, of course. Such things always are and that very fact gives them something inexplicably more than they would otherwise have.

 Her boots were the kind that run lightly but look as though they could kick through walls and can certainly kick through people. There was a hat perched on her head at all times. Nobody had ever seen her without the hat.

 She carried two knives, her preferred weapon, which she had once enterprisingly named Kindness and Forgiveness, though they were often anything but. She knew them well – their styles, their speed of kill, their weight and shape in her hand.

 Kindness was a long, thin-bladed knife with a leather grip moulded to her fingers. She wore it openly, a warning to a would-be challenger. This was the knife she used most, for quick kills and deep wounds. Kindness was instant death in her hands.

 Forgiveness, who perhaps would have been better named Revenge, was triangular-bladed and designed to cause pain. She had acquired the knife at some point and practised until she was skilled enough to know that anyone who deserved it would suffer lasting and fatal agony at her hands. Forgiveness was unforgiving.

 With these knives, a sense of where the wind was blowing and the knowledge that she had little-to-nothing to lose, she had fought her way up the social ladder of the shadowy streets. Where charm failed, weapons did the trick. Slowly, bit by bit, she had come to be here, at the head of one of the most powerful gangs in the city.

 Her name was Nika Fiella, in truth. Yet her surname was at the back of her mind, an irrelevant and long-buried part of her being. Nika didn’t want to know who her family had been. They were gone. What mattered was her family now.

 To her family now, she was Nika Lionheart. Like the rest, her name was a title, a symbol of who she was. She had earned it aged seven in a daring rescue that should have claimed her life. It nearly did.

 She was parent, ruler, administrator and sister of the gang that belonged to Fourth Segment. They were all young. One might even say that they were all children. In a world like this, those who lived to adulthood weren’t those who burned bright and strong in their youth. Nika was one of the firebrands and she would burn out before she reached twenty-five, like all the rest.