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Flintstock

“It’s one of them glory runners. Girl,” Sergeant Gneiss said, his far-eye focused on the jeep. He tapped the side of his head once to activate the range finder. “Make it, uh, three thousand five hundred thirty meters.”

“Kin I shoot, sir?” Sandstone asked.

“Sure, you better. Get ‘er while she’s still, best chance. Polly, get the shells up, maybe she’s stupid enough to wait for us. Eyes up, those with arms for it can fire at will.”

Charblock Company needed no further invitation; not only was it good fun, but glory runners were a real danger on the rare occasion they got close enough to use ley-flare and disrupt the ley-powered interface between soldiers and their prosthetics. It was the only real weakness of Flintstock arms; not much use to have the best and most finely calibrated prosthetic sensoria and integrated armor when they were suddenly melting your eyes and boiling your skin from an Arrower’s leyflare oversurge.

“Here she comes…holy corrosion!”

Sandstone had paused his firing to let his arm cool a moment, but at the sheer panic in the sergeant’s voice he jerked his head up to see what the glory runner was doing. At first he couldn’t make out what was happening; the whole far side of the Front seemed to be boiling with the dust kicked up by shells. Then he picked her up, and swore involuntarily himself.

Nothing human could move that fast. She was doing it right, changing direction quickly, no big leaps that would let you calculate a trajectory, low and erratic, which was all bad enough, but she had already covered half the distance to their position and it had been, what, twenty seconds? If she were really that good she could kill the whole company, more or less, since the higher-ups would probably end up using artillery on their own position to kill her. It had happened before.

Calibration was worse than useless, but overriding to use base sights was going to be a waste of precious seconds. Grimly, Sandstone began to fire long bursts without aiming, just keeping the barrel down and the lead coming. It was the only thing to do—fill the air with bullets and hope one of them went home by dumb luck.

The ley energy was starting to ripple as the Arrower got closer—a thing Sandstone had heard about but never felt before. It was making him dizzy, and he realized he probably should have started the override process but it was too late now, and then, for a shocking moment, he sensed more than saw a face framed in wild hair and brilliant amber eyes, and then she was past their position.

She hadn’t even bothered to deliberately use a leyflare on them, but the leylines were so unsettled after her passing that half the company was incapacitated for several minutes. Fortunately the Arrowers were too stupid—or too surprised themselves?—to take any real advantage of it.

But Sandstone never forgot those eyes, even when he learned that Arrowers never have eyes that color.

SONIA

Bullets never flew so slow—or it could have been a trick of the light? A streak of prison green against the landscape almost disappeared in the glare of the afternoon sun. Could it be a girl? It was more like an antelope—but faster. Too fast to aim and hit, though many aimed their weapons and fired at the blurry form ranging across the battlefield.

Ultimately, the blur and Sonia’s disappearance were consigned to story. After all, no witnesses could honestly say they’d seen it happen. No one ran that fast.

Bodies got lost all the time. Sonia Edge’s body almost certainly had fallen among the casualties of the battle front. And that was the story the Green Guard set down. It was the narrative the media printed and then broadcast all over the country.

Later, the jeep driver read the official account of that day’s events in the Daily Sun. He recognized almost none of it, though he’d been the report’s only source. The leadership obviously had decided against releasing his uncertain personal account. Nothing like uncertainties to fuel a martyrdom.

In the end, the driver couldn’t swear Sonia Serrated had lived or died, but his own survival was a miracle he had some trouble reconciling with the facts. He’d dodged more bullets that morning than all his years at the front combined. Could he swear that Sonia had died? On the record, maybe, but not to his own mind. She’d lived. The traitor had lived.

When he returned to the city, he waited a week, and at last took a bus to the Lupine Concessions and the dark alley she'd described. He dug around u until he found the loose bricks at the back and, sure enough, found the gold bracelet, caked with soil and fine gravel. The value of the piece would feed his whole household for at least six months. He put it aside anyway, against his wife’s approval. Knowing its source, there was obvious luck in it, and no amount of money could pay for luck that good.

SONIA

Bone weary, Sonia couldn’t bear to look at her feet. They were her last asset, now spent beyond utility. She’d worn through the soles of her shoes three days prior. Blisters had formed and broken and bled. Her callouses had cracked and hardened into scabs only to be broken once again. Her faltering footsteps stained the rocks and sand with a trail of blood, leaving an infallible map for any predator to follow from anywhere within a ten-mile radius.

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Sonia pressed into an arid gust as she traveled over a windswept plain as barren as it was wide. The ley energy which had delivered her on the battlefield was gone now, and in its absence, she withered like straw. Just reach that patch of sand in the distance. Just get yourself there. Then you can stop. Then you can rest.

Reaching it, she collapsed to her knees upon on the sandy earth. The patch of ground was soft. A decent burial spot, but there was no ley energy in it.

She thrust her hands into the black soil and pushed it up around her feet. Better to cover them over. They’d been better than serviceable, and had more than earned their rest. She buried her calves, her thighs. The sand was surprisingly comfortable.

She lay upon her back and let the sun beat upon her face. She stared at the cold, merciless blue of the sky above. A shadow passed over.

She blinked. No. Not that. She shook her fist weakly at birds gathering above her and muttered to herself. For pity’s sake, let me die first.

A condor lit on the ground beside her. It wasn’t just any condor.

It was immense. A mutant colossus. A giant among giant birds. It couldn’t be real, but the figment of her imagination teetered forward, as if taking a better look at her, then turned away in rejection. “I wouldn’t eat you. Even birds have standards.”

She blinked at the immense creature. “Birds have what?”

The condor turned its large bald head backward. “You looked like you’d taste good from a distance, but I can see from here, you’re as tough and stringy as a shoe leather.”

Sonia sniffed. “Good. I didn’t want to be pecked to death.”

“Sensible talk for a lunatic.”

Sonia rolled her eyes at her own hallucination and almost laughed. “I’m surprised I want to defend myself to a figment of my own brain.”

“That instinct is your will to live. You’ve given up too easily.”

She waved at her broken feet. They were half buried beneath the sand. “What’s easy about this?”

“Yes, well. Who said dying was easy? It isn’t most of the time. It’s a strange road to take for someone so obviously spent. You’re clearly not up to it.”

If she’d had a boot, she’d have thrown it at the condor. “I’m not just overflowing with choices right now.”

“If I offered you food, would you eat it?”

She snorted. “Scavenger carrion would clinch the whole deal.”

“You see. Your survival instinct is magnificent. You’re not ready to give up.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Follow me.”

“I can’t. My feet are ruined.”

“Look at them again.”

Sonia brought one foot up out of the sand. Marvelously, the foot was perfect, whole and very thickly calloused. “This is a hallucination,” she said.

“It is and it isn’t. Follow me,” the bird said.

Sonia followed on not only good feet, but sturdy legs. She followed the giant condor over many miles and difficult terrain. Running, always running to keep the soaring creature in sight. Her miracle feet held up, but she did fatigue. And when the condor brought her to the edge of a freezing river, she paused for the first time.

Finally, it circled around and lit on the ground next to her. “Why have you stopped?”

Sonia stared into the icy water. “If you can restore my feet so instantly, why not build me a boat?”

“What good would a boat do you if you can make this swim without it?”

Sonia blinked. “I’ll almost certainly drown in water that fast.”

The bird paused as if considering. “Let’s chance it.”

Sonia stood slack jawed on the bank of the river. She could feel the wild beating of her heart, even in her hands and feet. Jump! She willed herself. You have to jump! She took one breath. Two breaths. Three! A surge of adrenaline poured into her blood as she leapt into the icy water. Mind numbing cold hit her like a punch to her gut. She roiled in pain at the bottom of the river. Swim! Swim! She kicked hard and surfaced with a gasp. Casting her gaze around, she heard a faint screech in the air above.

Sonia pulled toward the opposite bank, fighting a death-current carrying her fast downstream. The river pulled her under, and she gulped back water, coughed it up and gasped for air. She lunged for a boulder. Pulling herself up on top of its broad surface, she breathed blessed oxygen while the same cruel air stung her wet and exposed skin.

Then, inching her way over the boulder, she threw herself over its far side, and the current caught her up in a whirlpool eddy. She stretched out her arms, but she couldn’t free herself from the heavy, insistent current. Exhausted, she glanced around for a lifeline. A branch. A log. Something to hold onto. There! A piece of tree branch rooted at the river bottom just breaching the surface of the water. She grasped it, and with a kick, launched herself out of the current’s deadly grasp.

At last her feet graised the river bottom, and with her last ounce of strength, she dragged her frigid and tingling carcass onto the far shore. Collapsed upon hands and knees, she gasped and coughed river water. The condor screeched and she glared at it hard. Sonia begged him no more favors.

Over mountain and plain, she followed the condor and survived.

Found clean water.

Caught bounding rabbits with her bare hands, then skinned them and ate them by her nightly fireside.

The condor ate its own find and never bothered Sonia for a nibble of hers. Invariably, it sheltered in the trees above her camp, awoke her at dawn with its wretched, harrowing call, and led her ceaselessly southward.

Sonia supposed she was being led toward what had once been Grater Barren, and whatever the bird’s intentions, she couldn’t resist the instinct to follow. Whatever the stories were, she harbored a deep well of curiosity about the enemy state whose eyes she bore, though for all she knew, not a soul had survived the horrific event that had sunk the city years ago.

In ten days, she reached the summit of the dividing border. Strange to see how utterly the terrain changed between the two countries. Trees retreated from the face of the land. Great, craterous scars pocked the landscape. Green vanished from the ground, replaced by a scape of red and purple. Salt flats, white and pink-flecked with minerals stretched outward in a cracked and barren plane to the horizon. A perfect waste of earth as far as she could see. Almost. Miles in the distance, toward the red and purple horizon, loomed a blotch of green. It was a mountain—not quite a mountain. Its face was shear on all sides, and its top was flat, and it looked as though it were fed from the gods with some secret source of water, because green grew thickly toward the top and even half way down the sides. She could not see a way to get up to it, or she would have ignored the condor and headed straight toward it. No, only a bird could get up there.

She stared at the barren earth all around and whispered the words that came to her, “Who could survive in a place so devastated?”

“You’ll see,” came the bird’s answer as words to her mind.