No stranger to spring storms, I sling my pack over one shoulder and duck my head against the downpour as I dash down the clay alley. Dark puddles boil in the rain, stained by smears of pale gold color before my soaked sneakers shatter them. Rickshaws and autobikes drift like sailing ships across the muddy avenue ahead. Pacing me step-for-step, a distorted reflection joins me in sprinting past the glass front of a local Innovator’s tech-supply shop; tawny skin and white hair surging with internal light. Just before I reach the alley’s mouth, the image twists. Shuddered as my knees tense. And transforms into a bolt of light that shoots skyward with a stutter-clap of thunder, searing a smoking-hot trail into the air.

I arc out of Akena’s surfside district, fly a quick loop around a highrail metro crossing above the rice fields, and burn hard for the sky. My JOY flaps wildly on its belt tether. I’m alone in the torrential downpour, a solitary spear of cometlike energy piercing through the weather of the night. The other locals with flying classes know better than to contest storms in this season. But they can’t fly like I can.

Sheets of rain sting my face like microneedle jabs, splattering and steaming off my skin where they don’t outright evaporate from the heat of my aura. The sheathe of ethereal fire gushes outwards in time with the beat of my heart. I push the energy to an even brighter intensity as I leave behind the rain-smeared streets of the coastal village. Alleys and avenues fuse into rivers of lantern light that flow around groves of adolescent neighborhoods. Thunder threatens with a warning growl as I draw near its territory.

Let it growl. Even the sky knows better than to strike.

Squinting through the storm, unable to see more than the blurriest strokes of the world below, I give up fighting the buffeting winds and let them rip me from my flying rhythm, casting me back towards the earth. Gravity takes hold like a riptide. Like they’re suspended in zero gravity, the falling droplets around me begin to slow as my speed matches theirs. I reach out and caress one of the droplets in my metal palm before letting it fly free. Glowing hair whips through my vision as I rotate over-end till I’m diving towards the city headfirst. The scream of the wind deepens to a waterfall roar. Through the standstill downpour, I finally spot my target.

The beacon-spotted radio tower spearing out of the heart of the fields is a spindly relic of an older era. Bare metal crisscrosses in a dark lattice that funnels from its needle-point summit down four long legs, wrapped in leaves of radar dishes and moss of data transfer cables. It’s massive. Taller than anything else in the coastal villages. More a natural feature of the land than a man-made construct, like some giant metal tree. Even the animals think of it so.

In the Electric Town, it would’ve barely scraped the M’s twentieth floor.

I fall on it like a knife from the dark, cutting off my aura just before landing atop a thin, rail-less metal grate ringing one of the pylons atop the radio tower’s summit. Storm and night smother my light as I cling there for a harrowing moment. Battered by the torrent, I pull out my JOY and get to work.

My metal right fingers slip against the battered, spherical device. A cone of rain-disrupted, electric blue light cascades from the projector iris when I put it in scanning mode and start sweeping up and down the pylon’s interface ports. I climb ladders of thin metal rods and hook my heels into bare grating to dangle dangerously for upside-down scans. The tower’s old metal groans in the wind. Goosebumps stipple the back of my neck as thunder ripples through the clouds above.

No dice on the first pylon. Nor the second. The storm’s picked up by the time I pull myself to the third, fingers crying out for rest while I wrap them around metal grating and haul myself up another deck. Gales batter and tug at me like the hands of warring giants. Sheets of warm rain slap without mercy. The drenched pack weighs down my back like a weightlifting plate, straps digging into my shoulders. Sopping wet, panting from the exertion, I smear aside a slop of glowing hair and finally sweep my JOY’s cone of light over a port that rouses a familiar bwah-bwah sound from the little sphere.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Bingo.

I kneel and secure the sphere back on its lanyard; a faded red strap woven with the words REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. Out comes the holotablet stored in my pack. There’s a hose-thick cable jury-rigged into its com slot through some electrical alchemy. I jam the prongs onto the target port on the radio pylon and let it worm its way inside.

The screen flickers through a stripped-down boot sequence. Hacked tech, barebones. Cyan light flashes against my irises. I blink against the brightness, lost in a different night, a different city, a girl’s hand pawing around in the darkness of the shooting range we’d holed up in. Then the program activates and I blink back to reality, focusing on the screen.

My hope melts away over the course of long seconds. A long exhale escapes my nose. The tablet’s screen stays empty. Again.

I knew it would be. Still hoped it wouldn’t. That there’d finally be some salvation on the radio waves, instead of a silence that makes me wonder just how long I can keep doing this. Running, hiding, and fighting to keep my head above the water while the most powerful man in my world uses every tool he can to see me brought to his throne in chains.

Heavy water drips down my face, my nose, my chin. My JOY buzzes with an incoming text. Another hard breath leaves my chest, warm breath making faint steam in the air.

The tablet crackles as I activate the mic.

“If you’re out there, Auntie… I need a sign. I know you’ll find a way.” A hushed roar of rain fills the silence as I waver on cutting the transmission there. Something in me, some overboiling defiance against the world that’s tried so hard to silence me, spurs me on. “And if you’re listening to this… I’m not dead yet, Cal. I’m coming for you. No matter what.”

Knees aching, I rise to my feet. My ears perk up as a great human roar emanates from the nearby village; the brightly-lit arena sparkling in its center. Gripping the pylon with my damascene hand, I lean out dangerously over empty air to get a glimpse of the ongoing fight, lit from below by the glow of the city. Eyes soft. Face quieted by that special breed of exhaustion and contempt that only comes when seeing someone else enjoying the life you should have had.

How I got here instead is a story all its own.

Foreign land, packed street, crowded bar, friendly face. Hand outstretched, electric town, sleeves rolled, crooked grin. Black and white, loud and soft, smirking smiles, golden eyes. An uptown Stradivarius who could have had any symphony or maestro she wanted. But she only wanted me.

My name is Tetsuka Taylor Mons: nineteen-year-old loose end. I used to be the daughter of the greatest hero my world has ever known. But for the past three years and three months, I’ve been the Section’s most-wanted ghost instead. There’s a lot of people out there who want me dead. Just a few who want me alive. Lucky for me, one of the latter was a professional assassin with a soft spot for thorny personalities. Her older brother, my ex, is another one of those used-to’s- in his case, used to be the dark apprentice of the Champion Gami himself.

Now he’s topping the most-wanted leaderboards right alongside me. Small world.

The town below is still a long way from home, but it’s the closest I’ve been since I had to leave my homeland behind. From the radio tower, I can spot glimmers of the other archaic villages dotting the coastal outskirts of my Section. Sandy towns of humble warriors who speak with drawling accents, wear proud tans and long robes, and have a reputation for being stonier than Lungracian trees. My kind of people.

I’d almost forgotten what the world looks like from this high up. If I squint, I can almost imagine where my old house would be, somewhere out in the vast stretches of darkened farmland closer to the eastern mountains. Then another twist of the gales sends fresh curtains of rain misting across my vision, obscuring the view, and I pull back.

Somewhere in the faraway capital of my Section, an Innovator high in the ranks of the Champion’s agents will see the rogue signal originating in the farmlands halfway between me and the capital. They’ll trace that signal through a dozen scattered radio towers redirecting and masking its origin until, just as they have for the last three months, they’ll finally manage to follow it here. But I won’t be sticking around to see them.

By the time they track that signal down, I’m already long gone.