A drop of faith always felt like it took forever, yet upon landing it all felt too fast. He didn’t manage any kind of real roll; just fell on his side from the force of the impact, and stumbled over himself for a couple of seconds before coming to a stop.

You’re not broken. Get up.

He did get up, through quite a lot of pain, and the protestations of lungs that wanted some time to recover. The pistol was still in his pocket, and he checked the ammo count. He had four full-strength shots left.

The boxy car continued on, losing altitude in its death throes, and passed beyond the edge of the roof and out over a ten-storey drop. Gaylen looked back for the pirates. He didn’t know if their engine was giving out faster than expected, or if they didn’t want to risk landing on the roof, but for whatever reason they were dipping low, and vanished from his sight before he could consider drawing a bead on them.

They sure weren’t giving up, though. Not someone like Horruk. He’d long since gotten to know the type.

Gaylen took out a little flashlight and shone it around, checking for holes before he started moving. He spotted a couple of sections; the roof was about 80 percent finished. With that in mind, he started moving.

He hadn’t gotten far before there was a loud hiss and something fast and bright shot up into the sky. It came from the direction the pirates had vanished into, and travelled in a bit of an arc. He flinched and looked for cover, half expecting it to explode, guide itself straight at him, or both. But it just started spewing bright sparks, illuminating the roof with a stark, flickering light.

They were coming, and they would be able to see him just fine.

Gaylen stepped up to one of the unfinished sections, toying with the idea of dropping down as they came up on the roof, maybe even reaching their car and finding it abandoned. But from what he could tell the drop was just too high, and he wasn’t enough of an acrobat to make it onto any of the metal beams that were closer by.

The flare was loud; effective but crude technology, the kind of thing one could expect from Scorchspace, and it was probably covering the approaching footsteps. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the scaffolding setup while drifting to the roof, and just chose to get as far away from the pirate landing spot as the roof allowed.

He peeked down over the edge, and didn’t immediately spot a hatch or a set of stairs. But he did spot one of the poles that held the whole thing together, and he was acrobatic enough to make his way down one of those.

He pocketed the gun, stepped over to the pole, and swung himself around to the scaffolding exterior. A shout from below served as his warning, and he swung himself back a moment before a bolt shot through the night. There were more shouts, answered by another set on the other side of the building, half-heard through the noise of the hovering flare.

They were coming from at least two directions.

“Shit…”

More shots came, punching through the roof from below. They were blind-firing and hoping for the best, so there was no real point in being evasive. Gaylen just ran in a straight line, back to the rough centre of the roof. A set of building materials had been abandoned for the night, hanging from a crane. A huge set of materials.

Gaylen did the hardest thing to do in a crisis: He waited. He waited as disaster got ever closer. Until he could pinpoint the direction the groups were coming from. Then he ran a few steps to reposition, putting the materials between them and himself, and aimed upwards.

Necessity had at times forced him to take some unlikely shots. Practice and being able to stay cool had seen him land them, which was why he still lived. But taking long odds wasn’t a thing to do repeatedly. The odds were bound to catch up, and bring an end to his story.

But not this time. His single bolt hit the crane cable perfectly, and the tons and tons of materials came falling down. An angry voice was raised for a moment, from on top of the roof itself. Then it all landed, with a terrible noise, and the unfinished roof caved in.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The concrete shattered into relatively large puzzle pieces. Gaylen found himself on one that clung to the side via metal supports, but only barely. He found himself on an extremely sheer slide, and could do nothing but ride it for two seconds before a harsh landing.

His hearing was the first sense to return, as the echoing boom died down, and most of the things that were going to fall finished doing so. His vision had a harder time, through all the dust that had been kicked up.

He moved his limbs.

Still not broken.

He forced himself up, again, and swayed on his feet, again. The dust was everywhere, in everything, battling with the light from the flare, and holdings its own for now. He had been hoping to just create some cover, but this worked too. He got going.

The risk of falling through an unfinished bit of floor felt more real than ever, not helped by all the stumbling over bits of shattered concrete. Still, with angry pirate voices getting ever louder as the bastards reported in to one another, he opted for speed over caution.

His shin hit what felt like rebar, his head banged into he knew not what, and one hand had a full-time job of rubbing dust out of his eyes. He stumbled, he hurt himself, and he coughed, but he made progress, and even had a rough idea of where he was. And he spotted the figure before they spotted him.

Their back was partially turned, and he put one hand around the person’s right arm, and swung the pistol down with the other. The butt of it connected with some sort of head protection, doing far less than he’d hoped. His target struggled and pushed against him, and after a couple of seconds of that they did tear loose, only to stumble back. Then they vanished, down an opening in the floor.

Oh.

The sound of the impact, and the pained screaming that followed, gave him an idea of the length of the drop, and he decided to risk it. He hopped over the ledge, aiming for the screams, and hit perfectly. The pirate, or whoever they were, cushioned his feet just fine.

The screaming turned into gasps, but now angry screams were approaching from above, drawn by the earlier noise. The dust wasn’t quite as bad down here, and Gaylen looked around for his cushion’s dropped weapon. He didn’t spot it within a couple of seconds, and that was all the time he was willing to wager

Gaylen ran, and heard a gathering form up by the opening. He went across a thankfully solid floor, and arrived at an empty window frame, leading out onto the scaffolding. It seemed like a lowest bidder kind of thing, and made plenty of noise beneath his feet, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to find a way down, but then spotted the second-best thing.

It turned out the scaffolding setup included a bridge across the street below, into another building that was also under construction.

He started across it. The light of the flare didn’t reach the bridge to quite the same degree as it did the bridge, so perhaps he would go unseen, and he’d just barely finished the thought when the first shot went by. It came at a downward angle, and of course passed right through the cheap metal. Gaylen wasn’t about to waste his last three shots on suppressive fire. All he could do was run.

The shots came, first one at a time, then two as someone else joined the original shooter. He heard the stomping of feet and the rattling of metal as the pirates gave chase, and he was almost to the opposite roof when a bolt hit home. It struck between his shoulder blades, and burned more fiercely than the last one had. Gaylen’s breath caught and his footing faltered. He stumbled forward and almost fell on his face, but his balance stayed just level enough to keep moving.

He made it onto the roof. The building in process was much longer and narrower than the one he’d just abandoned, and there were higher parts of it up ahead. More building materials and machinery had also been left in place on it, providing some blessed cover at last.

He ran around the first man-high crate he saw, and just before he did he allowed himself a quick look back.

Horruk was leading the pursuit, with something in his right hand and something attached to his left arm. There were four others right on his tail, two more back near the other end of the bridge, and the plasma bolt that struck the box meant at least one remaining shooter in an elevated position.

A bolt flew, and it took Gaylen a moment to realise that this one had come from above and ahead, and that it had missed him by a mile. He heard confused yelps behind him, and then another bolt flew, and it turned into frightened, angry screaming.

A shot flew from that elevated spot back on the scaffolding, going in the general direction of these new incoming shots. The new arrival fired back, and there were no more return shots.

Gaylen thought of Herdis, and how she’d proudly boasted of the improvements to both her rifle and her marksmanship.

Still, this was no time to be standing around. He kept on going, weaving between cranes, drone stations, construction printers and materials pallets. The pirates were still following, judging by the sound of things, but he was pretty sure the gap was actually widening, as they tried to avoid a shooter they couldn’t see.

Gaylen went around some sort of work shack on his final stretch to reach the higher portion of the building. He was hoping for stairs leading up or down, a work ladder, a hole with a short enough drop, or just a plain doorway or window to duck through. Instead he arrived at a solid wall.

“Shit.”