“Not every mission will be perfect,” Rebecca said in a kinder voice, placing a hand on her daughter’s armored shoulder. She knew Kiera was the stoic, rule-following perfectionist she never was.

"But they should be!" Kiera shot weakly, her jaw clenched. "Unnecessary risks - to anyone - should be avoided. We could have calculated our path more, increased the torque in our suits-"

Rebecca withdrew her hand and folded her arms. "Enough, Kiera. You're no longer talking about this mission. You’re talking about the expedition. I need my best pilots focused, not arguing ethics on the battlefield."

Kiera didn't need to ask which expedition.

Their world had been under siege from the portals known as Gashes that opened erratically, swarming cities across the world with zombie-like wolf creatures known as Jackal-Wolves.

These days, people called them Jawal.

For the last thirty years, companies like her mother's Interceptor Technologies had crafted advanced suits modded with flight, energy beams, and specialized equipment to fight the invasion head on. The United States Army would cause too much collateral damage, and the normal police force would be unprotected against infection. Specially trained 'interceptor pilots' and rigourously designed suits would allow them to be precise yet lethal against the Jawal invasion.

After decades as the leading interceptor company, I.T. was planning its biggest gamble yet — exploration into the unknown source of the Jawal. Earlier technology had not been capable of withstanding signal and gravity disruption from the portals before. They were going to fly a ship into a Gash.

"I don't like it," Kiera stated with candor. "It’s too dangerous. We should send a drone, not a manned crew."

Rebecca’s voice softened. "That's why I'm leading it, Kiera. Signal interference doesn’t give us a choice - it's still an unsure thing. The only technology we can send through is tech we can monitor ourselves."

Kiera sighed, “I just don’t understand why it has to be you.” She carefully picked up the child who was crying. He clung to the Daybreaker suit.

As Peacekeeper and Daybreak lifted off towards I.T., leaving the New York city Jawal-attack cleanup crew to their work, Rebecca replied jokingly, “You know me, I always have to be the center of attention.”

And she was the center of attention a few hours later. As calculated, a massive portal shimmered over the Atlantic. Rebecca, commanding the heavily armored ship dubbed Peacekeeping, stood in her Interceptor suit, helmet under her arm. She gave a final wave to the crowd on the shore before closing the ship door.

Underneath her Daybreak suit, Kiera gulped. Her heart was racing with both fear and anticipation. She hated her own reaction.

“You, okay?” A young man’s mechanized voice sounded from outside her suit. “No, Jason, I’m not.” She answered candidly. Jason Torres was a childhood friend and fellow pilot at Interceptor Technologies. He piloted the Vermillion Destroyer, a flight-capable suit with heavy artillery. He was five years older than her, but two years her junior when it came to piloting.

She was so nervous about the exploration that she felt like her fifteen-year old self on her first mission.

The metals of their suits touched when he bumped his shoulder to hers. “Your mother knows what she’s doing, Kier-” He started, but the reassurance was lost to deaf ears when the Peacekeeping moved.

The Peacekeeping hummed. It's platinum silver hull was streamlined and sharp the two hundred foot vessel pulled into the portal. Then the ship was gone and their were cheers all around. Kiera held her breath, afraid to celebrate too early.

Her insticts were right, as cacophony of distorted noise and light erupted from the Gash. The red portal looked angry and volatile as the Peacekeeping reappeared.

In pieces.

Hundreds of shards of burning metal rained down from the Gash.

No one could survive that. Kiera thought, horrified.

The crowd screamed in panic as the pieces fell over the ocean and shore.

Like white blood cells fighting an infection, the massive Gash vomited the greatest flood of Jawal ever seen in New York.

The battle was a desperate, bloody blur. Backup had been called, and every interceptor pilot available had joined the fight. Kiera fought with reckless abandon as Daybreak, thinking of her mother. She couldn't go after her until Jawal had been cleared from her path. Jason in the Vermillion flanked her, the bulky red and silver suit blasting hordes Jawal to bits.

Further away, a black, yellow, and white blur delivered her own furious justice to the enemy.

Taking advantage of an opening, Daybreak plunged into the wreckage, shouting orders at the rest of the near interceptors. She found her mother in the tattered remains of the ship’s bridge that had yet to be breached by the seawater. Her figure was an unrecognizable mess of white metal and blood.

They interceptors eradicated the Jawal, but the victory was one of great sacrifice.

Kiera rushed Rebecca to IT headquarters hospital wing, where their resident doctor, Dr. Hannah D’Silva, a stout adn warm Indian woman received Rebecca’s body with a serious face. 

She barked orders at the other nurses and doctors, and Kiera stood paralyzed for the first time in her life, her mother’s blood on her suit as they rushed the maimed body behind closed doors.

It was a gruesome twenty minutes before D’Silva returned. Kiera still stood there, hardly hearing the hallway TV playing the breaking news of what had transpired earlier. 

Kiera knew when she picked her mother up from the wreckage that she wasn’t breathing. That the white metal from the half-destroyed suit had pierced vital organs. Kiera knew that too much blood lay on her, and not in her mother. 

Hearing Dr. D’Silva say she was dead didn’t hurt any less.

Dr. D’Silva murmured to Kiera. "We tried, but the suit damaged almost every vital organ. We couldn't patch her up fast enough... I'm so sorry." The woman held back a sob.

She stood before the window, watching the emergency clean-up in the distance, the constant flashes of light confirming the world's desperate reliance on them. On her mother and Interceptor Technologies. 

After the disastrous expedition, without Rebecca Moss, the confident and charismatic face of IT, the company would probably... go bankrupt. Her mother would be proud she was thinking of the company’s fate amidst the day's tragedy.

She thought of her mother's words earlier that day. Her selflessness wrapped in charisma and humour. Of the joy she brought the child. Of the lives she had saved through her innovations.

I can’t let her legacy be destroyed.

The thought came as clear as day, with a conviction that made her fists clench.

She needed to be somewhere safe from listeners. Despite the world being under seige by monsters, competition between interceptors was fierce. Her mother's office had always been an unhackable, unbreachable fortress despite it's sleek walls. Kiera called Dr. D'Silva and Pierce, her mother’s humorless secretary, to Rebecca’s mother’s office. It was modern, grey, and featured bold art on the wall. She had finally taken off her helmet, and it sat heavily on her mother's desk.

"My mother died protecting us," Kiera said, her voice flat. "But the world still needs the Peacekeeper." 

Pierce nodded, a tinge of sorrow present. She stepped forward and placed a smooth compact device in Kiera’s hand. 

She looked down at it, an advanced cloaking device that was at the end of its experimental stage. "And this company still needs Rebecca. So, I’m going to play her.” 

If Pierce or D’Silva were surprised, they didn’t show it. She was committing six different types of fraud. The world would forgive her later once the Jawal had been defeated. Or it would never know.

”We keep it between us - until I can stabilize this company." Tears streamed down her face no matter how hard she blinked them away.

"Then I'll let my mother rest."

The next day, Kiera, cloaked as her mother’s, sat in an I.T. hospital bed. The chin-length blonde cut was gone, replaced by the long blonde hair of Rebecca. Kiera’s brown eyes were now Rebecca’s striking blue.

The doors slid and two figures entered timidly. Jason smiled warmly upon seeing Rebecca in the bed. Layla jumped ahead of him and shoved a bouquet of flowers into Rebecca, a.k.a., Kiera’s face. 

Layla was a Chinese woman who was close to Rebecca and the pilot of the blur she saw earlier today - Queen. She was typically stationed in the Antarctic, but had come to New York for the Peacekeeping’s departure.

"Ms. Moss," Jason said, his voice deep and concerned. "You scared us."

"You can stop using the honorifics, Jason. I told you it makes me feel old, especially now." Kiera-as-Rebecca stated, trying to mimic her mother’s playful and familiar verbatim. Tears threatened to pour.

"Maybe after you heal, you can get some Botox!," Layla joked. 

She was practically hanging off of Kiera’s arm. Kiera felt immediate regret. Layla and Rebecca almost had a mother-daughter relationship. When the truth came out, it would hit her the hardest. 

“Be careful, Layla-” Jason started, always the mature one. In the nick of time, because D’Silva came in and shooed them away after a few minutes, to “give Rebecca rest”. 

“Thanks.” Kiera said once they were alone. The doctor only nodded. 

Her mother would always wear white, sharp business attire. A combo demanding hope and respect, according to her mother.

"- it was an anomaly. Since then, I have sustained significant injuries, with great regret, I will be retiring-” camera flashes went off, and the flurry of predatory reporting began, “-soon. I will recover, mind you! But I will pass on the torch to my daughter, Kiera." 

She looked around the room. It was time for a closing Rebecca-Moss-joke. “Kiera is hard at work fulfilling my role as interceptor - our eccentric scientists demand their quota of Jawal every week.” 

A small laugh went through the room.

Would Mom have laughed? 

Kiera’s eyes watered and she made quick work of waving and fleeing off the podium on her crutches.

How was she supposed to pull this off when every reminder of her mother made her want to curl up into a ball?

Limping into the shareholders meeting that followed did nothing to make her it easier. It was brutal.

Someone thought the damage to I.T's reputation and stocks would be fixed with a win.

The assurance that Kiera, Rebecca’s twenty-one year old daughter, was the next heir to the empire did nothing to calm their nerves. She refused to feel offended at that.

Kiera, sitting at the head of the table among many faces on screens and fewer in the room, deflected their anger with confident quips and carefully crafted rhetoric.

As she rebutted the shareholders, she thought, The audacity of these men to critizise my mother's handlings when she's the only one in this room that makes sacrifces as an inteceptor pilot. Made sacrifices.

The longer the meeting went, the harder Kiera's resolve became.

Kiera was reviewing damage reports in the hangar when Jason approached. His hands were shoved in his pockets, feigning nonchalance. Kiera new him well enough to realize something was up.

"Hey, Kiera," he said, his expression carefully guarded.

"Jason." She almost continued with a Rebecca-like quip.

Leaning close, he fiddled with the Daybreak helmet sitting beside Kiera. Only he would dare reduce her battle suit to a fidget toy.

"How’s your mom? D’Silva keeps shooing me away to let her rest. Apparently keeping your mom here instead of at home to recuperate is best. Visitors are the worst... Are her injuries that significant?”

Kiera nodded. There was no reason to be nervous. This was Dr. D’Silva excuse to make sure Kiera spent little time as Rebecca. 

"She's become crippled, lost her crew, failed a mission - it's more than just broken bones she's dealing with," Kiera looked down. “Something she built, the Peacekeeping, failed her. Maybe she felt safer in Dr. D’Silva’s hands than on her own at home.”

Jason studied her. "...You're right. I just thought she seemed ...robotic, you know?" 

"She's probably recovering from all that morphine." Kiera joked. They shared a laugh.

Jason turned to leave but stopped, “...Kiera, maybe you can convince her to go home? She wouldn’t be on her own. She’d have you.”