The Innocent 00-Prologue（文稿）

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Prologue
She moved in a crouch, blade between her teeth, all four limbs connected to the earth. 
She cocked her head, listened, and then continued on again, through the undergrowth and past the body at her bare feet.
Along the jungle floor, shadows cast against shadows, playing tricks with light, 
and unnatural stillness replaced the buzz and chatter of the canopy, as if nature held its breath while bearing witness to the violence.
She paused at the whisper of air that alerted her to movement from behind.
They’d been smart to track so silently.
She shifted, ready to face them when they came.
And they would come.
The knowledge brought with it a surge of adrenaline.
Euphoria followed.
Two emerged from the verdure, dressed in shoddy camouflage and rubber shoes, carrying no firearms, only knives. 
They came steadily, circling, hunting, eyes glazed with bloodlust, lips turned up in snarls. 
They wanted her dead, and so they must die.
She breathed deeply, focus pure, measuring the strength of the threat. 
Awareness came in waves, a feral instinct that returned nuance with radarlike clarity. 
Understanding their weaknesses, she launched forward for the first strike.
Connected.
A scream shattered the calm.
Off balance, the first attacker toppled, and in a fluid movement she twisted, pushing off his body to propel herself into the second man.
He shifted to avoid impact, and the twist of his neck met the slice of her outstretched blade.
He fell.
She landed in a crouch and without pause returned to the first. Hand to head. Knife to neck. Swift, through tendons and sinew.
The fight had taken only seconds, and now in the silence the kill was finished. 
She stood over the bodies, the sound of her own heartbeat loud in her ears, and after a moment of hesitation she swore. It had been too fast. Too easy.
Her chest heaved in hatred of the skills that kept her alive, skills that drove her to win, skills that inevitably brought death.
She dropped to her knees and there, for the first time, stared at the face of the nearest hunter. 
A vise of recognition gripped her heart. She fell forward onto the body.
His open eyes were green. His hair was blond, his face longingly familiar.
Her soul pounded a rhythm: Please not him. Not him. Not him.
In death, his eyes fixed a piercing accusation. 
She gaped in mute horror at the liquid of life that had, in seeping from his neck, painted her skin crimson.
She couldn’t breathe. Dizzy. Suffocating. Nausea.
She found air. 
It came as a burning rush into collapsing lungs, a scream that started from the depths of her soul and ripped through her vocal cords, shattering the stillness, sending a flurry of beating wings through the canopy.
Head tilted upward, and with the primal shriek of rage and pain still rising, she opened her eyes. 
Not to the jungle roof but to her bedroom ceiling, patterned, whitewashed, and tinged with the color of dawn coming through the window.
Vanessa Munroe gasped. Curtains in the room rustled lightly. 
The call to prayer sounded from minarets across the city and her hand was still gripping the handle of a knife plunged into the other side of the king-size mattress.
Awareness settled, and she let go of the knife as if scalded, rolling off the bed in the same movement.
She stared.
The blade had struck twice and stood in silent witness to the increasing ferocity of the nightmares. 
The sheets were soaked with sweat. She glanced at her tank top and boxers. Drenched. 
And Noah, had he not left for work early this morning, would have been dead.