PROLOGUE
Prologue: The Crucible of the Chosen
The sky over the Haidian District was the color of a fresh bruise—a deep, swirling purple that threatened rain but only delivered a suffocating, “relentless” humidity. Inside the iron gates of the Lóng-Wén Academy, the atmosphere was even more pressurized. This was not a school for the average; it was a finishing school for the world’s most formidable young minds, a place where the elite sent their children to become the architects of the future.
But tucked away in the subterranean levels of the East Wing, far beneath the mahogany-clad libraries and Olympic-sized pools, lay the Sector 9 Initiative.
Four students stood in a line. They were outsiders, transfer students from different corners of the globe, brought together by a secret government scholarship that promised “infinite opportunity” in exchange for “absolute service.” At seventeen, they didn’t yet realize they were being forged into weapons.
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At the far left stood Czarrina Mist. She had arrived from London with nothing but a charcoal-stained sketchbook and a gaze that felt like it could strip the paint off a wall. In the academy’s high-altitude training room, she was currently holding a heavy recurve bow, her breathing so shallow it was almost non-existent.
“Focus, Mist,” the instructor barked, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. “Justice isn’t blind. It’s precise.”
Czarrina let the string slip. The arrow didn’t just hit the bullseye; it split the previous arrow in half with a “relentless” mechanical crack. She didn’t smile. She merely adjusted her stance. To her, the flight of the arrow was like a brushstroke—a singular, irreversible line that defined the space between life and death. She saw the world in compositions, in shadows, and in the “Vivid” truth hidden behind the facades of the powerful.
To her right, Danika Jones—Dani—was hunched over a terminal that looked like it belonged in a spacecraft. She had been plucked from a tech-haven in Seattle after she accidentally bypassed the security of a major bank at age fourteen, not to steal, but to prove their encryption was “insulting.”
Her fingers moved with a “relentless” speed, a blur of motion that translated into cascading lines of green code on the monitors. While the others trained their bodies, Dani was training her mind to inhabit the city’s nervous system. To her, every lock was a riddle, and every firewall was a challenge to her digital sovereignty.
“I’ve bypassed the academy’s internal server,” Dani whispered, her eyes reflecting the blue glow of the screen. “Just to see if I could. It took me forty-two seconds. I’m getting slow.”
Next in line was River Desmond, or Red. He was a transplant from the gritty streets of Detroit, a boy who could speak to machines in a way others spoke to people. He was currently standing over a dismantled motorcycle engine, his hands covered in grease, his movements a study in “relentless” efficiency.
He didn’t care for the bows or the computers. He cared for torque, for friction, and for the way a machine screamed when pushed to its absolute limit. He was the one who understood that justice needed a vehicle—something fast enough to outrun the consequences of their actions. He looked at the others and felt a strange, unspoken tether. He knew that when the time came, he would be the one to carry them out of the fire.
Finally, there was Victoria Woods. Tori had come from a line of diplomats in Geneva, but she had a “relentless” tongue that got her into trouble more often than it got her out. She was currently engaged in a mock debate with the academy’s head of law, her voice rising and falling in a rhythmic, persuasive dance.
She was the master of the “Vivid” lie. She could change her accent, her posture, and her very personality in the blink of an eye. She understood that sometimes, the only way to catch a monster was to wear its skin. While Arin was the bow and Dani was the eye, Tori was the silver tongue that would lead them into the dens of the corrupt.
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The Headmaster, a man known only as The Curator, walked down the line. The sound of his polished shoes on the stone floor was a “relentless” rhythm of authority.
“You four are the rejects of your societies,” he said, his voice cold and devoid of empathy. “The brilliant, the broken, the discarded. But here, you are the Shadows of Beijing. You are being trained because the law is a blunt instrument, and wealth has made the powerful untouchable. You are the Astraea—the star-maidens and the keepers of the balance.”
He stopped in front of Czarrina. “Mist, what is your purpose?”
Czarrina looked him dead in the eye, her grip tightening on her bow. “To find the truth where they’ve buried it.”
“And you, Jones?”
“To dismantle the walls they build to hide their sins,” Dani replied without looking up from her screen.
“Desmond?”
“To make sure they can’t run when the truth finds them,” Red grunted, wiping a wrench.
“And Woods?”
Tori offered a sharp, dangerous smile. “To make them believe the lie until the moment the trap snaps shut.”
The Headmaster nodded. “Today, you are students. Tomorrow, you are the ghosts of the city. You will lead normal lives. You will be artists, leads, mechanics, and lawyers. But when the red moon rises, you will be one. You will be the ‘relentless’ hand of justice.”
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“We don’t do this for the academy,” Czarrina said, her voice barely a whisper against the wind. “We do this for the people they’ve stepped on. We do this because no one else can.”
She reached out her hand. One by one, the others placed theirs on top of hers.
“The Red Cloak,” Dani said.
“The Iron Grip,” Red added.
“The Silver Tongue,” Tori finished.
“The Silent Arrow,” Czarrina whispered.
In that moment, the Queen of Thieves was born—not a thief of gold, but a thief of secrets. They looked out at the city, a “relentless” sea of lights, and for the first time, Beijing felt like it belonged to them. The hunt was about to begin.
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© 2026 by LEEIN
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in reviews or scholarly works.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
