They said her mother died smiling, even as the blood poured out like a red prayer over white hospital sheets. Evelyn Blake was born to grief. Born to stillness. Her cries were the only sound in the delivery room when her mother's eyes glazed over, her final act, birthing a storm in human skin.
Her father, Malcolm Blake, was a gentle man with haunted eyes and violin fingers. He loved Evelyn with a desperation that scared the nurses. For five years, he made her laugh like the world wasn't already dying. He sang her lullabies and told her bedtime stories about wolves with crowns and queens made of smoke.
Then the cancer came. Quietly, then all at once.
Evelyn watched her father shrivel. The hands that once lifted her became bones wrapped in regret. On the last day, he placed a knight piece in her palm and whispered, "You'll never need to be saved, little fox. Just... stay sharp."
Then he was gone.
At five years old, Evelyn Blake disappeared from the grid. No relatives. No records. No one asked questions. They never found her. Or maybe they just didn't look.
She lived in the gaps between systems: shelters, temporary homes, forgotten corners of cities that didn't bother naming their shadows. Her names changed with each foster: Eva, Elira, Nox, Melody, Rue. She never repeated one. She never stayed more than a few weeks.
The day she found a rusted chessboard in a shelter's basement, she stayed up for thirty hours straight. No opponent. Just puzzles she made herself. Patterns that danced in her mind like ghostly waltzes. She solved ten thousand games in her head before she ever played a real match.
By age eight, she'd climbed to the top ten in the world. Not that anyone knew. Her accounts were banned endlessly, Fair Play Violation, they always said. "Impossible Precision." "Bot Behavior." She laughed every time. Laughed like glass breaking underwater.
She didn't want the trophies. She wanted the game.
By nine, she was the third strongest chess player alive.
And no one had seen her face.
Fighting came later.
At first, it was a release, her fists the punctuation to a sentence of loneliness. But she learned quickly. Learned how to read a stance like a chessboard, how to feint like sacrifice, how to cut from the inside out.
She had a taste for blood, and soon, she needed more than taste.
Her weapons were twin karambits, curved, spring-loaded blades that danced in her hands like living things. The reservoirs beneath the grips could inject neurotoxin or let the venom bleed freely into a slash. She never used both at once. She didn't have to.
She started with petty gangs. Local trash.
By ten, she was carving her way through syndicates. Underground cartels. Street mafias.
She didn't leave names. She left symbols.
A carved fox. A broken ribcage. A trail of silence.
They called her uncatchable.
The government didn't interfere. Her footprint was too light. Her kills too clean. To most, she was urban myth. To the elite intelligence level, she was a "low-threat, high-potential anomaly."
They kept her file locked. No surveillance. No pursuit.
Let her dance in the dark.
By the time she resurfaced, she wore a fox mask made of brushed metal, and her laughter echoed through grainy, late-night fight streams buried in the darknet. Her videos were surreal, slow-motion brutality, bodies hitting pavement like punctuation marks, screams muffled beneath synthwave music.
No one knew her name. But a name formed anyway.
Sable.
She never claimed it. But it fit. Like blood fits a blade.
At eleven, she was no longer alone.
She drew others like her. Drifters. Predators. Broken angels that didn't belong in society's narrative. She didn't lead them, they followed. Like instinct.
She named them:
The Pale Choir.
They weren't a gang. They didn't do heists. They didn't want money.
They just wanted the world to stop pretending.
Together, they moved across cities like wind. Invisible but everywhere. Broken windows. Missing warlords. Quiet fires.
Each one had a purpose.
But Evelyn... she was the blade.
That night, the rain fell warm.
She stood atop a rooftop, the city blinking beneath her like a patient on life support. Her mask dangled from her hip. Blood smeared her collar. Her lip was split from a fight she barely remembered.
Then, he appeared.
No sound. No warning.
A man in a sleek black coat, soaked in blood. Not wounded. Soaked, as if he'd crawled out of someone else's nightmare.
"Miss Blake," he rasped.
Her hand went to her blade.
He raised a hand. "Don't. I'm not here to fight."
"Then why are you bleeding?" she asked, eyes narrow.
"I came from a place you'll never find," he said, coughing. "A place buried beneath continents. We tried to stop something. We failed."
His pupils were blown wide. His voice trembled like a dying violin string.
"He's not human. Not really. We thought he was just... gifted. Another prodigy. But then he rewired a satellite from inside a prison cell. Turned an entire intelligence agency against itself without touching a key. When he was nine, he orchestrated the death of a general using a breadcrumb trail no AI could solve."
Evelyn tilted her head. "What's his name?"
The man hesitated. Then whispered:
"Omni—"
That's when his body exploded.
From the inside. Like his blood turned to napalm.
The shockwave launched Evelyn backwards, skidding across the rooftop, her ears ringing, vision fracturing.
She rose, bleeding. Dazed. Laughing.
For the first time in her life...
She looked up to someone.
Not because he was stronger.
But because he was unseen.
Because he was the only game she hadn't solved.