I flung the folder in the air, and the suddenness of it froze Kirkorov for a moment. In that second of hesitation, I pulled the drawer I had been looking through fully out of the cabinet and slammed it across his face, sending him flying into another one and smashing to the ground, crumpled in a heap. I reached down and grabbed the papers from the folder I dropped and rushed out of the room.

“What was that noise?” a soldier with a machine gun shouted.

“There’s a criminal inside that room,” I shouted in broken, harried Russian.

I knew it would only buy me a moment, but that’s all I needed to reach close enough to attack. I leaped off one of the walls and cracked the soldier across the face with my knee. She fell to the ground, and I pulled the machine gun off her shoulder as two more soldiers rushed into the hallway.

I jerked the unconscious soldier against my body to use as a shield as the others peppered the body with bullets trying to reach me. I pulled her gun over my shoulder and fired back at them. A moment later, the gunfire stopped, and I looked to find the soldiers dropped to the ground, riddled with bullets.

I rushed to the door and up the stairs as the alarms blared around me. The woman who let me into the building screamed as I jumped over the turnstile and rushed out the door. The whole base was on high alert, and when I crashed through the front door, a half dozen soldiers drew their guns on me.

“Stop!” one shouted in harsh Russian.

“Halt!” screamed another.

I kept my momentum moving forward and turned the corner to the hole in the fence at the rear of the complex while emptying the rest of my clip into the ground behind me.

When I reached the back of the building, a soldier slid into view from behind the wall, ready to fire. I dove forward and tripped the soldier, cracking him with the butt of the gun when he fell to the ground and tossing the gun away beside him. I pushed myself to stand and pushed through the hole in the fence, scrambling up into the trees as the soldiers fired behind me.

I was nowhere near safe yet. Not only were the soldiers giving chase, but the ones on patrol were now on high alert. I couldn’t be nearly as nimble as I had before with so many soldiers hot on my tail. I dared not turn back into the child who could move quietly. She had small legs and would easily be overrun by the soldiers at my back.

“Put your hands up!” a soldier shouted as they shot into a tree I ducked behind. I didn’t have time to wait. If I let them pin me down, I would be overtaken in moments. So, I had no choice but to run between the trees and hope it gave me enough protection to avoid getting shot.

I took a deep breath and sprinted between the trees as they exploded behind me. I felt a bullet bite my leg, and another dug into my stomach, but I didn’t stop. The adrenaline hid the pain as I bolted and weaved through the trees.

In front of me, I saw the black car I drove from Berlin sitting on the road. As I rushed forward, three soldiers chased me through the woods, and I shouted at Maksim.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Start the car! Start the car!” I tumbled onto the road as the car started, and I pulled open the back door. “Drive!”

The tires spun, and she turned the car around, moving as fast as the little car could down the road. “What happened?”

I looked down at the wounds in my body. They burned and stung with incredible pain. “Well, everything was going great until it wasn’t.”

“Shit!” Maksim said from the driver’s seat. “They’re following us.”

I pulled myself up to see two trucks barreling down the road toward us, flanked by two motorcycles on either side.

I screamed out in pain, pushing the bullets out of my body and sealing the wounds. It hurt like the dickens, but the benefit of being a changeling was that you could manipulate your whole body, inside and outside, repairing it like new if you had the will. It was incredibly taxing, though, and I felt exhaustion fighting with adrenaline as I worked to keep awake.

“Keep driving!” I shouted, rolling open the window as two of the motorcycles rocketed forward toward us.

I dipped my head out of the window and fired behind me. I wasn’t a perfect shot, but I was better than most even with the blurred vision of tiredness, and I clipped a tire on one of the motorcycles after firing a flurry of bullets, sending the driver flipping over the handlebars. It crashed into the other one and sent them both careening off the road.

As the other two motorcycles rode forward, I pulled the trigger again but only heard a click from the chamber. “I’m out of bullets!”

“We’re not going to outrun those motorcycles. They’re too quick. You better come up with a plan, or we will die this day.”

The motorcycles pulled up on either side of me. The one closest to me leveled their gun. I grabbed it from them and yanked it toward me with one hand while jamming my empty one into their back tire, causing them to pop ten feet into the air and smash back into the ground.

I slid over to the other side as the gunman went to fire, and unloaded a clip into them, causing them to scream out in pain as they doubled over and careened into a tree.

“Now it’s just the trucks!” I shouted.

“I have a very stupid plan to outrun them.”

She spun the wheel, and we drove off the street into the woods. I looked back to see the trucks skid to a stop. They couldn’t join us. They were too big to fit through the closely packed trees.

“That’s brilliant!” I shouted.

“They would have set up a roadblock ahead of us anyway. It was the only way.” She looked at me momentarily through the rearview window. “Did you get what you were searching for?”

I nodded. “I got it. Now I need to get to Egypt.”

“I know a pilot. If anyone can get you out of the Soviet Union, it’s Alexi.”

Maksim was an old pro at zipping between the trees, and the car was small enough to navigate the gaps between the trunks with ease. Eventually, we popped out of the woods into a field, and she drove through it back onto the road. We didn’t go far before we turned off the road again, this time onto a small dirt road.

At the end of the road rested a small airstrip, with a tiny, rusted shack at one end of it. Maksim stopped the car in front of it, and when we were both clear, she pulled a tarp over it. Once she was satisfied, she grabbed my hand and dragged me to the shack.

“Alexi!” she shouted.

An average-looking man with a scruffy beard and bloodshot eyes stumbled out of the shack. “Maksim! What are you doing here?”

“I need to smuggle somebody to Egypt.”

Alexi turned to me. “You get in some trouble, da?”

His accent was thick, and it was hard to understand him, but I got enough to nod. I barely had the energy to keep my head up. “Something like that.”

Alexi turned to Maksim. “Won’t be cheap. I don’t have another shipment going out for a week.”

“We have the car.” I pulled all the money Dimitri gave me and placed it in his hand. “And this much. I can get you more when we land, but we need to go, now.”

Alexi counted the money and furrowed his brow. “It’s going to be double this just for the gas.”

“I’m good for it.”

Alexi looked over at Maksim, who nodded. “Dimitri told me her boss is very rich.”

“She better be,” Alexi growled to himself. “I’ll gas up the plane.”