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elleleuthold · 8 years ago

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Exit Arc (6k short story, sci-fi)

This is a sci-fi story I wrote last year, submitted around, edited over and over, etc. I learned a lot writing it, and editing it, and I think the best thing to do now is share it! Many thanks to @laireshi for holding my hand and being a terrific beta through my first shaky steps into original fiction. Comments and critique are welcome, and I hope you enjoy reading! If you don’t want to read it on tumblr, it’s available on wordpress here.

Up on a spire, hanging by her pilot line and magboots, Skip could pick out a delicate spray of starlight above the lurid glow of the sunset. With the solar arrays stretching out to the south and east, wind towers soaring above them and dew catchments spiraling away to every corner of the city, it was easy to feel like she had the whole world at her feet. Like she was already up in the black, watching the city fade away like a bad dream.

Just one more night. Get the bounty, get her ticket, get out.

She toggled her comm.

“Fell, you coming or am I doing this skate by myself?”

“Got cut off by a parade and had to detour around the whole club district,” he reported. “ETA, two minutes. You got our target?”

“Did a flyby an hour ago,” she told him. “Been charging on First Spire since with no sign of trouble. Should be good to go.” She hauled herself up level with her seat and hooked herself in, starting pre-flight checks. The Phoenix’s solar batteries blinked green, the propellers cycled smoothly, and the wing joints clicked through their tests without snags or jams. It was a tiny rebellion, getting her charge for free up here, but it still gave her a fierce sort of satisfaction. One last act of defiance.

The navcom flashed percentages at her: balance ratios, weight and capacity, wind speed, altitude. All systems ready for launch. She locked her boots to the runners and transferred the navigator feed straight to her visor. Fell would be coming up from the southeast, pushing too fast if she had to guess. He always pushed his bird too fast if it’d been a while since their last flight, and it’d been months this time. Long, dreary months of drudging through cheap engines in second-hand light and scraping together every credit she could come by. A proper flight was just the send-off she needed.

“I’ll meet you at the border,” she told him, and disengaged the parking lock.

The glider fell away from the spire smoothly, and Skip let the momentum build for a moment. This was the best part, really. The biggest thrill she got anymore. That little frisson down her spine as the city rose up before her, sparks grounding in her elbows, her wrists, the joints of her fingers. She leaned to the left and fed the engines more power, pushing the nose down and around for the right angle with one hand and easing the wingtips out with the other. A clean sweep-and-roll maneuver and she was soaring back toward the rising moon, the bulk of New Tarel sprawling beneath her.

Fell caught her in the ribbon of airspace between First Spire’s reach and the legally convoluted domain above the commercial district, his own bird a blue-and-white flicker in her peripheral vision.

“Ready when you are,” he reported, slowing a little to match her. “So, where we going?”

“Darbinian solar arrays” she said, “They’re well ripe for harvest.”

Fell whistled, high and sharp enough to make the mic crackle on the edge of the sound.

“Darbinian? You got a premonition I should know about? Someone give you a lucky charm with your lunch today?”

“We can do it,” Skip insisted. “Low and fast, like the old days.”

“I ain’t saying we can’t do it, Skip, but you know that’s Karga territory. They catch us, it won’t matter what we did four years ago. Those punks don’t care who’s in their airspace, they make ‘em all dead.”

“So we won’t let them catch us then,” she squeezed the controls and flipped into a tight spiral, then snapped her wings out broad again: let ‘em try.

“You’re a regular thrill-chaser tonight, aren’t you,” Fell grumbled, but he dipped his wings in agreement.

“I learned from the best.”

They came up on the sky fields quickly. The panels gleamed in the twilight, each one steadily and efficiently collecting power for the busy offices, shops and homes below. Or they would be, once she and Fell cleared out the leeches.

They’d been beneficial, once. Fist-sized artificial mechanics to make sure the supports stayed stable, the power lines stayed undamaged and the arrays stayed free of any debris that made it up this high. The Coalition had made millions of the things. But a machine needed power, didn’t it? And some clever programmer or engineer, or maybe some not-so clever budget balancer, had looked at the little things and said, “Well, why don’t we power them from the array? They’re up there anyway, aren’t they?”

A year later, half the city was living in rolling brownouts and two districts barely had power at all. A good-size leech could drain a fully charged private grid in a day, suck up a speeder’s reserves in less than an hour, and stars help you if they latched onto your glider. Dead propellers and the weight of a few leeches in the wrong place could take an unwary pilot all the way down to real dirt-and-sand ground. But the Coalition bounty was a powerful lure. If you were fast enough, smart enough, lucky enough, you could make a salary-plugger’s monthly pay in a night. More, if you hit the right places.

She and Fell were careful; tempered glass storage pods, protective paneling, armored flight jackets. And they used the old hooks, wide, curving blades on the end of a meter-long stick. You could go faster with one of the new sticky-net scoops, but the overhead was higher, and Fell was afraid the leeches would adapt to the things in another month or three. Better to be slow and careful than fast and dead, he said. Taking things slow wasn’t one of Skip’s talents, but life under the Coalition’s strictures had taught her a deliberate wariness that worked well enough for circumstance.

“You sure this is what you want to do tonight?” Fell asked as they lined up on the narrow corridors between two arrays. “Poach Karga hunting grounds?”

Skip slid her hook out of its holster. The computer highlighted the closest targets, little bundles of pulsing energy in corner struts or clinging tight in the middle of a panel.

“You got a better way to get green-fresh credits before morning? Besides, I’m quicker than lightning, remember?” She couldn’t keep her grin out of her voice. “Just try to keep up.”

Fell sighed, low and long-suffering, but he didn’t argue.

The first leech came easy: sting, scrape, scoop. A rattle of metal on glass and a swipe of her glove and the capture pod sealed shut. The second settled beside it, then a third. At the end of the row was a stubborn one, larger than average and scrunched in on itself, rooted securely to the array

Skip took a few breaths, resettling her grip. It was no good stunning the thing if she couldn’t get it off its perch; any leech that fell would just latch on somewhere else, maybe somewhere that didn’t get its power renewed every day, or every week. And the Coalition only paid for whole leeches delivered in person.

She jabbed, missed and jabbed again. The leech hung on, waving a sparking bundle of wires at her and she twisted her hook, arm aching with the motion. She had to bob down a breath to catch it when it finally popped free, but she managed to get the seal on just before the leech reached the lip. She gave it a good glare to match its malevolent scrabbling and nestled it with the others. The next two were simpler, and she fell back into the rhythm of the job, moving from corridor to corridor methodically. Every filled pod was another handful of trapped sunlight pushing her name higher and higher on the waiting list.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” The corridor ahead was just as full as the previous one, and Skip leaned back to check her supply of storage pods. The horizon looked clear.

“That.” Fell angled his bird away and flashed his wingtips, pointing deeper into the solar fields. Skip looked closer, prodding her visor to magnify.

Movement, she could make out that much. Vague shapes her navcom gradually identified as other flyers, moving with purpose.

“We should—”

“Yeah,” Skip agreed, but it was too late. The Karga crashed over the arrays in a wave of orange and violet neon, the scream of tortured engines riding with them. Their gliders ranged from top-market single-jets and faux-flash kites to older bike-bird combos like Skip’s own. Some pilots didn’t even have helmets, just gas masks and the sort of manic keenness that spelled ruin for anyone else in their airspace.

“Go, go!” Fell shouted, making the radio crackle and spit in Skip’s ear. She turned and dove, folding the wings in close to minimize visibility. The glint of starlight off glider wings was a dead giveaway, and that wasn’t an exaggeration with New Tarel’s gangs. If they were lucky, they hadn’t actually been seen. She risked a glance back for Fell, but if he was there he was doing a good job of hiding.

Two orange-lit riders had broken off from the pack. They were gaining on her.

Thrice-crashed sons of a cud-chewer. She changed course, weaving through arrays as closely as she dared. No luck. Her pursuers were close enough for the navcom to pick up now, and from the look of it their gliders were fresh-charged and flash-modded. She’d be lucky to make it to the edge of the field.

What was down below over here? Offices? Apartments? Shops? She prayed for shops. They had the best parking balconies, and she was going to need one.

One of the riders was almost above her now. Nothing else for it.

The wings strained as she plummeted into sharp dive, and she cinched them even closer. Speed, that was the key. Get just enough of a lead to slip out of navcom range.

She eased the wings back out as late as she dared and skidded to a stop under a penthouse garden overhang. A moment later the Karga enforcers streamed past with a roar of over-juiced jets. She counted back from a hundred in her head, listening hard. When she reached 25 without seeing or hearing any more flyers, she ducked into open air again and jinked between buildings, dropping levels and merging with traffic where she could. After 5 full minutes with no signs of pursuit, she picked out a more deliberate course.

Fell was waiting for her at the bounty drop-off, polishing a wingtip and trying to look as if he hadn’t been tracking her approach.

“Worrying over me again?” she teased as she gathered her packs. Fifty-two leeches. Enough to put her in the running, maybe enough to push into the top percentages.

“Just wondering how long you were going to keep me waiting in the cold,” he shot back, hefting his own haul. “My bones aren’t as young as they used to be, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, suck it up old man,” she grinned at him. “Come on, let’s get you into the warm.”

The Coalition reps didn’t talk much, which suited Skip fine. She was always on edge at the drop-off, jittery in the presence of those green uniforms, sure someone would call her out even after the pardon. She pulled up the colony lottery feeds to distract herself. Fell settled beside her.

“You’re really going up.” His voice was tight and low, a reminder of the days when he’d still been her sergeant and she’d still thought New Tarel held a future she wanted.

“You know I am.”

“They could kill you, up there in the black.”

“They got no reason to. Not anymore.”

He hunkered lower, pressing their shoulders together.

“You’re the best thing here, you know? Without you, I might as well pack up the kid and Nadine and move in with her parents like they’re always asking. Get some corporate net-spider job down in the lower levels and forget I ever touched real sky.”

“You could come with me,” Skip said. “All three of you could. They like families. You’d be a sure thing.”

“No such animal,” he said. “Not in this lifetime. You and me, we know how fast that sure thing turns to vapor, don’t we.”

“Not this time,” she said. She grabbed his arm, staring intently at the numbers on her visor. Their pods must’ve been processed; there were new credits in her account. Shiny green energy credits, straight from the Coalition coffers, buoying up the pale, recycled ranks of her savings. On the passenger list her name flickered, then flashed green and started moving. Up and up, higher and higher, pushing right to the top of the waiting list. Giddy hope swelled in her chest.

And there it was. An actual ticket with her name and reservation number. Boarding time: 0600. All she had to do was grab her bag from the spaceport storage locker and show up. She tried not to hug herself too obviously. Months of planning, paperwork and interviews and she was finally, finally getting out. Away from crowded airspace and choking power restrictions. Away from shadows and smog, away from stale, recycled water, away from everything that’d been dragging like weights on her neck these last four years.

“It’s really happening,” she whispered. “Fell, I really—”

A flicker at the corner of her vision. Orange and violet lights, sweeping the byways above them. Getting closer.

Shit.

“Eyes on us,” she muttered. Fell squeezed her shoulder and stepped away. Go to ground, he signed, and she nodded. If they dropped a few more levels they’d be in Duster territory: risky enough, but safer than trying to dodge a dozen Karga at once. She slipped into the Phoenix in the half-focused state she’d run most of her old missions in. The tremble of the engine between her knees matched the buzz under her skin, the wings stretching out restlessly like extensions of her fingers.

She took the first gap in traffic she saw and didn’t look back, let her instincts take over. A left turn here, right turn there, down two levels and left again, some part of her brain tracking the flashes of orange and blue in her peripherals, flying by sight alone because the navcom made too much digital noise to go unnoticed forever. Fell would catch up, or he’d find her after. Take a few days to lie low in one of their old haunts and—

She didn’t have a few days, the glowing dream of the future reminded her. She had to be at the spaceport in a few hours.

She snapped back to full awareness. Karga lights were closing in on her left. She dodged away, climbed a few levels, dodged again and broke out of the old byways into a corridor she’d never seen before. Streamers and neon danced on every side, gang-signs scrawled over building after building.

She’d been herded into Karga territory. Idiot. She should’ve never let herself go on automatic. An orange glow off to her right was getting closer. She switched on the navcom, swept through a side corridor and banked up and left at the intersection, heartbeat loud in her ears. The navcom beeped: eight flyers, and Fell running before them.

She’d never shake them all down here. They knew the byways, they probably had traps at every corner. She needed proper sky. She gunned the engines and pushed straight up. Nine more levels to open airspace.

She made it four levels before they caught up, mocking whoops and roaring jets announcing them. Skip dodged around a modified Falcon and ducked as its rider swiped a hook over her head. Still she climbed, eyes fixed on the faint glow of moonlight ahead. Another glider swept towards her, a collision course, and she gritted her teeth and swept to the side, her climb slowing. The rider hefted a storage pod, grinned, and threw it just as she swept past. Glass shattered, and she caught a whip of wires and clinking aluminum plates in the corner of her eye.

No, nonono.

She toggled to autopilot and reached for her hook. The leech was the largest she’d ever seen, at least as long as her forearm and as wide as her splayed hand. It scrabbled over the wings, knocking out p-v panels and jamming up joints as it moved toward the power hubs. She jabbed at it, missed, took the hook in both hands and jabbed again.

“Use your damn eyes, Skip,” Fell growled down the line. She jerked around as he blew over the space above her, two Karga in his wake.

They’d stretched a sticky-net up ahead, a leech trap for the windfields but just as deadly to the average glider. And unlikely to show up on the navcom as an obstacle. She swept the stunned leech off her wing hurriedly and grabbed the controls, twisting into a spiral and pulling the wings in close. Just a little further…

Clear.

The power display dipped, red flashing across her visor. The leech, it had to be. The navigator flickered and went dark, the wing joints stiff and unresponsive; she was falling, uncontrolled, the glider little more than weight pulling her down. She toggled the controls, reached under the front cover and flipped the hard reset switch. Nothing. No power left at all.

“Skip!” Fell swooped back, circling toward her. “Try to steer for the apartments.”

“You always did have shit plans,” Skip retorted, but she was already shrugging out of her harness. No navigator. None of the delicate magnetic arrays that controlled the wings would respond. She reached down to pop her boot locks. The only way to right a falling bird without power was weight dispersal and manual control.

“Give me a heading?” she asked, pulling herself up behind the seat.

“2 points south, southwest, try to keep the Spire in sight.”

“Wind-blessed miracles, that’s what you’re asking for,” she muttered and pushed herself back over the storage pods. Her feet found the right positions and she stomped hard on the elevator pedal. The nose soared up. A little too high, but she’d drop again when she adjusted the wings. Her fingers curled over the wing-joint switches. She extended the tips and tugged on the flaps, fighting for every hint of drift and lift. The Karga were closing in again, a spiral of blurred masks and streaming lights.

She missed the first platform.

“Hold on Skip, I’m coming!”

She flexed her hands, breath hissing between her lips. She had to make the next one. She could see the warning lights of an abandoned landing pad. It was lower than she’d hoped, but if she kept falling she was definitely dead. Better a climb than nothing.

It wasn’t graceful. Even with the lift she’d bought and further slowing by snagged wing panels, the impact still flung her across the platform, screaming metal echoing in her ears and the coppery taste of blood on her tongue.

For a moment she just lay there, curled around her middle and running mental checks: toes still wiggled, fingers still waggled. Her whole right side hurt with the kind of deep, aching pain that stuck around for weeks in big dark bruises, but she could breathe. She leaned on her elbow to lever herself up and fell back as stars exploded behind her eyes. Her right shoulder was definitely in trouble. She took a few breaths and tried again, using her left hand instead, and made it to what could technically be called a sitting position against the guardrail.

Her hook lay just in front of her feet. She tried to clamp it under her boot and drag it closer on the vague idea of using it as a crutch, but had to give up when the attempt left her breathless and light-headed, sweat dripping down the side of her face as white-lightning pain crawled down her side. Stars and frostwinds, she was definitely in trouble now. If they came after her again…

A whirr of engines, broken messages streaming over her cracked visor. She held as still as she could, eyes half-open and unfocused. Her jacket should block most scanners. If she was lucky, an unmoving target would satisfy them.

A blur of orange and blue hovered at the edge of her vision. Her visor buzzed again, fragments of a freeze warning, but she held still, not looking, not blinking.

A shout, and what sounded like laughter, and the glider lifted away. She kept her breaths slow and shallow until she was sure they’d moved out of visual range.

She took stock again, widening her range of focus to include her Phoenix. The initial inspection was not promising. Both wings stuck out at strange angles, the photo-voltaic bands hanging loose or scattered over the floor. The armor plating was half-peeled off the nose and one of the propellers dangled from the tail shaft, cracked to reveal the wiring inside.

Something clinked. There was a screech of metal-on-metal and Skip realized something was moving. She scrabbled for the hook, heedless of the pain in her shoulder. The leech. It couldn’t be anything else.

A sparking wire snaked out of the wreck, closely followed by more clinking taps of metal legs and the dull glow of the main body itself.

Skip braced the hook against the corner where wall met floor and hauled herself to her feet. Her visor still had power, broken as it was. Her jacket had a battery. Her boots, too. And there were stories. Bodies found with a leech hooked into skin and bone. Unlucky mechanics and stupid kids taking stupid risks with bad equipment.

That wasn’t going to happen to her. She had her ticket. She was getting out.

She’d wounded it, at least, in their first scrabble. It was half-dragging itself along, not as fast as before. She jabbed with the stinger and it curled away, but a hook couldn’t kill a leech. She’d have to smash it. There were enough broken bits of Plastech and metal around, she’d find something. Something heavy enough to pin it down, or sharp-edged, for preference. Something she could wield one-handed. The running board. It was solid steel, as long as her arm. It had torn half off its mounting, held only by the last screw.

It took three more stinging jabs for her to cross the platform, and another before she could claw her multitool out of its compartment. She got the screw out just as the last sting wore off, and as the leech lunged she batted at it, knocked it skittering to the side and flipped it onto its stomach. She chased, bringing the bar down again and again, ignoring the twinges in her side until all the little parts were scattered and there was nothing but crushed rubber and spattered slime left.

Then she threw off her visor and toggled her wrist radio, rubbing at the gritty feeling behind her eyes.

“Fell?” she whispered, as if that would keep the transmission off monitors. “Fell, you out there?”

Silence.

She dragged herself back to her Phoenix and slumped against the fuselage.

“Fell, you better not be dead, you hear me? You are not dying on me now. Not today.”

She closed her eyes and waited, listening for anything but the sound of her own breath rattling in her throat and faint buzz of static. Nothing.

The medkit in her pocket was bare-bones basic but it had painkillers and antibiotics, and she needed both. The pain in her shoulder spiked when she reached for it, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through.

The timer display blinked as she peeled two doses of each off the squat blue and green stacks. 0400. Two hours to get herself to the shuttle launch on the other side of First Spire. The Phoenix was trashed. She wouldn’t be flying anywhere. She probably had an hour of leeway, maybe two before they gave her ticket away, but with miles of stairs and bridges to cross she’d still be walking then.

And she couldn’t leave without making sure Fell was okay.

She dragged herself to the navcom, the meds bitter on her tongue. If he wasn’t on comms, maybe she could still track him down.

“Perks of colony life, Fell, listen close. One, there ain’t no Karga there. Next best thing to getting disappeared for hiding, a whole new planet. Two, they got jobs with benefits. Retirement plans and that. They got me a shop all ready to go. Get to set my own hours, too, long as the work gets done.”

She took the back off the navigator and wired her boot batteries into it. It wouldn’t last long, but she didn’t need it to. She set the search grid to 1000 meters and settled in to wait.

“Three, the summer’s warm and lasts seven whole months. None of this snap-change weather like we got to deal with.”

Nothing. Not even a blip. Maybe the oncoming freeze was fritzing out the signal.

“Four—” she coughed over the crack in her voice, wincing against the throbbing in her side. “Four,” she repeated. “Four is, is I’ll be there, Fell, and I know it’d be better with you, okay, so you better answer me before I track you down in whatever mess you’ve—”

A crash, something heavy hitting something fragile, and the guide-lights on the landing pad blinked out all at once. The door at the other end of the pad shivered, then popped open.

“Skip? That you?”

Fell’s dimly lit face peered at her from the corridor. His jacket was torn and his boots scuffed, but it was definitely him and he was definitely alive. If anything, he looked better off than she was.

“Still kicking,” Skip said, the words half-strangled by the tightness in her throat.

“Sorry for the wait,” he said, tossing aside what looked like a piece of rebar. “I busted my radio, couldn’t get it to pick up more’n static. You alright?”

Skip nodded, swiping at her eyes surreptitiously. “Just waiting for you to get over yourself so’s I don’t have to be getting any angry comms from Nadine when I’m finally free of this place.”

She could see him chewing the inside of his cheek, nothing but friendly concern in his eyes.

“Skip…”

“I’m going,” she insisted. “I’m going if I have to walk the whole way and carry you besides, I am.”

��Okay,” he said. He sighed and dragged his hand over his scalp. “Okay. Well, staying here’s a no-go anyway. Temperature’s dropping fast; in a few hours we might not be able to fly at all. How’s your bird?”

She gave him a look. As if he had to ask, the way she’d crashed. He sighed again.

“You got any good propellers left? A few wing panels? Your navcom alright? I wrecked pretty good but we might be able to get her limping if you’ve got the parts.”

“I got…” she scanned the wreck again, looking for anything that might still be whole this time. “Yeah, I think I got all that.” She didn’t mention that trying to scavenge anything useful in the near-dark was going to be frustrating at best. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d made do with so little.

“Where’d you crash?” she asked instead.

“Old shopfront one bridge over. I had to scrape a wing and blow the nav to make it convincing, but they didn’t stick around too long after.”

She nodded. With a solid freeze on the way even the Karga would get in the warm. “Guess we better get started then.”

She wedged her helmet back on for light and started dismantling the navcom while Fell wrenched at the propellers. It was slow work, and the creeping chill slowed them further. The third time her tool slipped and she was left cursing at cold-numbed fingers, Fell took over that task, too.

“You’re just gonna hurt yourself worse,” he said, waving her away. “Tell me how you got on all this. What’s up there you’re so eager to get to?”

Skip grudgingly took a seat on a broken chunk of concrete.

“Ren sent me a message, said she’d drop my name. Must’ve been a good drop too, ‘cause it didn’t take them more than a week to process my forms. Part time security, part time mechanic. And she found me a little place to stay. It’s got real trees and a real river and she says there’s glider access less than a klick up the road.” She’d even had a permit for the Phoenix, but that was hardly important now.

Fell’s forehead scrunched up. “Well, it certainly sounds nice,” he said.

“But?” Skip prompted.

His hands waved denial. “You don’t need to hear it.”

“What else am I gonna do? You got something to say, tell me.” She squeezed her multitool tight against her palm, the edges hard even through her glove.

“Just keep talking, Skip,” he said. “You already know what I want to say.”

She did. He was going to say it sounded too good to be true. Her own personal idea of paradise, specially packaged to catch her eye. Too good. Too perfect. Nothing that nice ever happened in New Tarel. Not anymore. Not for people like them.

“They took Ren,” she pointed out. “She says no one up there cares what you did in the war. Just what you do now.”

Fell just shook his head and pulled the memory bank from its slot.

“Carry this,” he said, holding the jumble of computer bits out to her. “I’ll get the rest.”

He kept her talking all the way through the dim corridors, trudging onward with a stack of wing panels under one arm and two propellers slung over his shoulder while she did her best to paint the icy air with her words, giving all her hopes color. The shop, the open sky, the spread of farmland instead of skyscrapers.

“You really should come with me,” she tried as he shouldered the last door open, revealing his own crashed bird. It wasn’t as bad off as her Phoenix, but it wasn’t pretty. If they got her off the ground it’d be a wobbly flight at best.

Fell set down his load and stretched, rolling his shoulders.

“I got responsibilities to think of,” he said.

“Think on ‘em then,” she insisted. She dumped her tangle of parts into his pilot’s seat. “Think hard. If you see a future for little Eri here, you tell me, ‘cause I’ve been trying for four years and all I can see anymore is walls closing in. And I need to breathe, Fell, I need sky.”

He shook his head and didn’t answer for a while, slotting the propellers and p-v panels into place with half-muttered curses. Skip set to work on the shattered navcom, keeping her silence. Sometimes Fell needed time to stew over a thing, and opening her mouth too early never made him think any faster.

“The world won’t change if you run away from it,” he said finally, and for a moment Skip was plunged into memory: her old shop, five years ago, their roles reversed as he tried to convince her the future was worth fighting for.

She’d learned a lot since then. She’d learned nothing would bring back lost soldiers, or lost ideals, or a way of life that had died choking on dust and blood and the burning bile of betrayal. The world had changed.

“My life might be better,” she said, half whisper. Then, stronger, “How long do you want to spend pretending you don’t see the cage? We tried to change things. I don’t remember that going so well for us.”

Fell grunted, clamping the last panel into position.

“I’m tired of beating myself bloody against this place,” she tried again. “Maybe it’s time we changed something else.”

The engine cranked, sputtered, then settled into a low, familiar hum.

“You’re the only thing I got left here,” she said. “I need this.”

“You need your head checked.” Fell pulled on his helmet and started system checks. “Strap in,” he ordered. “We better get on, if you’re gonna make that shuttle.”

“You’ll take me to the shuttle port?”

“If I don’t you’ll just rag on me forever, won’t you?”

“Thank you.”

Skip settled her helmet for a better seal and clambered up behind him, making room for herself among the storage packs. Her boots wouldn’t get a solid lock, but she strapped her legs down and wound her arms though the tether loops.

“Ready,” she told him, nudging his elbow with her toe in case he couldn’t hear, and his head bobbed in acknowledgment.

The flight was a tenuous one, the wings vibrating through turns and the propellers buzzing. Fell was careful, dropping down layers at any hint of a nearby flyer and taking the warmer squirrelly corridors with grim determination while Skip tried not to flinch when the tethers dragged on her shoulder, tried to keep herself still and her weight well-balanced.

They reached the shuttle port approach just as dawn broke over the horizon, a muzzy glow through the clouds highlighting busses and larger hovercars ahead. The admissions area teemed with travelers and well-wishers, all moving in the complicated Brownian motion of farewells and checkpoints.

Fell slowed to a stop in the drop-off zone, engine still running, and Skip half-climbed half-slid to the slick pavement. She pushed up her visor and the wind stung her eyes with grit and cold. Frost-sharp air stuck in her lungs.

“So I guess…” she bit her lip. There was a jagged snag of guilt and fear in her belly, like an open wound. She hadn’t thought about this part, in all her planning. Somehow she’d forgotten that leaving meant saying goodbye.

After a moment Fell shut off the engine and shrugged out of his harness. The solid hand on her shoulder, she was almost expecting. The rough hug he pulled her into, his helmet bumping hers and the bitter smells of grease and sweat and charred rubber in his jacket, she wasn’t.

“You take care of yourself,” he said, eyes bright, and she nodded, wound her arms around his back and held on a moment longer.

“You too.” She took a long breath and stepped back. “I expect to see pictures of Eri’s birthdays,” she said. “And your bird, you gotta show me how you fix her up, alright? Take whatever you want from the Phoenix. And I still got some credit at the junkyard, if you need parts.”

He nodded, jaw tight, and she took another step back, and another, and finally stepped toward the storage lockers.

“Skip.”

She swiveled back.

“I’ll talk to Nadine. You get up there alright, you tell me there’s something worth doing there, I’ll try.”

It’d be two years in the black at least before she could start of offer any assurances, and another year after that before the next recruitment, but she clung to the chance anyway.

“I’ll see you there,” she said, trying for a smile. It probably didn’t look like much, but Fell smiled back anyway.

“Go on then,” he said, and she turned her back on New Tarel, nothing but glittering possibilities lining the path ahead.

#original fiction #original writing #original sci-fi #short story #writing by me #exit arc #text post

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