Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  The flyers on my left and right were shouting at me to desist or something, and I did the full Sienna and just ignored the hell out of their intelligent, reasoned shouts to not leap off a building to certain death.

  Mostly because I had plans to make sure it did not turn into certain death.

  To my left, the flyer was waving me off, a slightly panicked look in his eyes. Maybe they did still want me alive, because he didn’t have his rifle pointed at me. Or maybe he just personally objected to someone committing suicide in front of his eyes. A main thoroughfare ran beneath him, another nice long gap between my building and the one past him.

  That was out.

  The flyer to my right did have his rifle in hand, but he was a little farther out and less panicked than the left-most guy. These two were out in front of the pack, presumably to herd me, though a look over my shoulder confirmed there were more following after them. If they really wanted to end it, a storm of bullets from those rifles they were carrying would do it in a hot second.

  Yeah. So I wasn’t under death warrant—yet. Maybe Krall’s orders didn’t actually include murdering me.

  Well, I still didn’t intend to go gently into this not-so-awesome night. To my right, there was a much narrower gap between buildings, but the one beyond mine was taller, too. A story or so, a leap I could easily make, but …

  I was so sick of the running and jumping thing.

  Veering right, I charged toward the flyer, who did a dodge of his own, trying to maintain distance between us. I poured on the speed, my legs numbly pounding as I went at him. He soared backward, trying to cover me, drawing a bead—

  And slammed into the building behind him, hard.

  I grimaced as he hit; it was not the sort of hit you’d see someone survive without injury unless maybe they were in full football pads. He was not, and took the full brunt of the impact, thumping hard and going limp, dropping into the alley.

  “Shit,” I said as I reached the edge and leapt, but gently, heading down. I caught him with one hand, getting his sleeve as I kicked out, hitting the building’s stonework with a foot and arresting my momentum—and his—freezing in mid-air for a split second.

  Then I turned, kicked off and did a little drop about ten feet, the flyer’s wrist clutched tightly in hand. It was a manageable drop, and I landed a foot on a windowsill, turning my ankle just a little in the process. I did another spin, a one-eighty to face the opposite wall, and pushed off, taking the next stage of the fall in a twenty-foot increment and bouncing off a section of solid brick.

  It took me about five bounces before I landed in the alley, the flyer’s arm clutched limply as I delivered him to the ground, unharmed except for what his dumb ass had done to himself in crashing into the building. “Sorry,” I said to his insensate form as he stirred in response to making landfall on the alley floor. I started to rip his rifle off his shoulder but a round of gunfire peppered the ground around me and I was forced to break for it, cursing madly as I bolted for the mouth of the alley.

  There was no cover in the alley, I realized as I burst out onto the main road ahead, and I must have subconsciously decided that going for cover by reaching the corner of the building was the best option. These were the decisions that ran through my head, so many years of training driven in and reinforced to the point where they were written into my programming.

  A concrete and grass park waited ahead, spreading out over the block to my right, tall, old trees sticking out every fifty feet or so providing some cover. The other three corners of this intersection were all spanned by tall buildings, not a door in sight. The gunfire behind me had stopped, the army flyers apparently enforcing a dictate to keep me from becoming armed by shooting at me. Well, it had worked, but I was not exactly excited at being chased by them without any way to respond or get them off my back.

  I needed a moment to breathe, a moment think, a moment to plan.

  And then I saw it.

  Past the park, rising up out of the ground, was the Dauntless Tower, lights within giving me a little sparkle of hope in what was otherwise a dark and hopeless night.

  It wasn’t the best cover I’d ever seen, but when the flyers overflew me, shouting, I realized I was running short of great options. Try and find an entrance to any of the residential-looking buildings on the other three corners, or make a break for the biggest building in town?

  I headed for the tower, hauling ass across the empty road under the cover of the trees in the park as I headed for the tallest building around, not really sure what I’d do once I got there.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Dave Kory

  “Wow,” Caden Chambers said, voice soft across the crowd. They’d all just watched the descend-off-the-walls drop of Sienna Nealon down the alleyway in Bredoccia, a couple of flying meta soldiers in hot pursuit. “Why don’t they just shoot her?”

  Dave stirred in his chair, glancing sideways at the click counter for the LIVE UPDATES post on the website. It was climbing steadily, people probably sitting on their couches and reading their phones as they watched this live, seeking context. “Add that question to the piece, Steve,” Dave said, looking back to the screen. The shot had changed; now it was overlooking a city park, and Nealon disappeared between the boughs of some tall trees, running at a superhuman clip. “If you’re asking it, our readers are asking it. What’s the answer?” This he asked aloud, crowdsourcing it to those in attendance rather than bothering to divert his attention from the click counter and the Sienna Nealon livestream playing out on the TV.

  “Well, you said it’s her grandfather running the place—” Holly Weber said.

  “Great-grandfather,” Steve said.

  “Whatever,” Holly said. “So maybe he doesn’t want her dead? Maybe she just … snuck out of her room to hang out with a boy or something, and he’s really hacked off at her.” That prompted a wave of snickers.

  “I’ve got a better question,” Mike Darnell said. “What are they going to do when they catch her? Because they may have shot at her, but it doesn’t look like they’re aiming to kill.”

  Dave shrugged. The click counter was still moving up, though a little less swiftly than before. It made sense; everyone was watching live rather than surfing the web. “Can we stream this on our site?” he asked, looking for assurance from someone in the technical side of things. “Pick up a live feed somehow?”

  Caden blinked a couple times. “I’ll see if whoever’s doing this is putting it out on any of the major sites. If so … yeah, we can probably just jack it. It’s a pirate feed onto these channels anyway, broadcast without their consent, though they’d obviously run it voluntarily if they could. We could probably get it going on flashforce.”

  “So this is definitely a pirate broadcast?” Dave asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Caden pointed at the corner of the screen. “No network logo.”

  Dave frowned. How had he not noticed that? Too much on his mind. “Right. Well, get it up on the site, however you have to. We might as well get the traffic if people are going to watch it anyway. Probably a lot of cord-cutters out there that’d like to see it and can’t, for now.”

  Caden nodded. “On it.”

  “So why aren’t they shooting her?” Dave asked, turning back to the discussion that had been going on while he was working on the tech question. “Why not just end her once and for all? Bullet to the head, boom, no more Sienna Nealon problems, bye-bye world?”

  “Gotta be that grandpa doesn’t want her dead,” Holly said.

  “Great-grandpa,” Steve said.

  “Get laid, Steve, you incel prick,” Holly said. “Great-grandpa. Whatever. The point remains.”

  “Hm,” Dave said, rubbing his chin. He looked over the crew; everyone was kinda nodding along with what Holly had said. “Love, then? That’s the angle we’re pitching? He’s not having his army kill her because he loves her, she’s just pissed him off? Or is running and causing chaos in his capitol for the fun of it?” His gaze fel
l on Mike, who wasn’t nodding, who was just … watching the screen. “What do you think, Mike?”

  Mike stirred, hand on his chin moving. “Hard to say. But you wouldn’t think a guy who was once called the God of Death would have a lot of warm spots in his heart, even for his own blood.”

  “Dude, it’s his great-granddaughter,” Steve said.

  “Who he hasn’t ever tried to talk to up to now, near as we can tell,” Mike said. “He’s apparently run his own country for a while, she’s been on the lam for years, and just this week he decided to invite her over?” He shook his head. “Something’s fishy here. Too much going on, lots of dirt to sift out to find the nuggets of truth in this mess.”

  “What do you mean?” Dave asked. Suddenly he was glad he hadn’t fired Mike. That feeling probably wouldn’t last, but for now … there it was.

  “We’ve got a war that looks like it’s about to kick off,” Mike said, ticking off points on his finger, “we’ve got a prison break, we’ve got Sienna Nealon, we’ve got the return of Hades, we’ve got Revelen becoming a nuclear power. That’s a confluence of an awful lot of stuff. There are things going on in the background we’re not seeing. Have to be. So … there’s a lot to sift through. Who’s doing what and why?”

  “At least we know the where and most of the how,” Dave said, trace of a smile flaring up. Even a broken clock was right twice a day, and on this, Mike seemed right. “But you’re spot on, man. We don’t even know what we don’t know. Someone should write a piece on that. You want to?”

  Mike shook his head. “I’ve got some other stuff I’m working on. Waiting on a call.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dave said, and nodded at one of the raised hands, someone volunteering. “Make it a listicle, will you?” He glanced at the click counter. “Our traffic is sagging with this going on. Need to take advantage of every click we can get until we’ve got it going live.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Sienna

  I sent a rock crashing through the glass doors of the Dauntless Tower and came following a second behind like soccer moms charging into a 50% off Lululemon yoga pants sale. The flyers were right on my trail, and my little maneuver had forced them to swoop low to follow me into the glass lobby of the crown jewel of my great-grandfather’s burgeoning city. It was all done up in steel and chrome, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any major American city.

  “No, no, no,” I muttered as I charged forward, looking for a direction to go. The lobby was ten stories high, dominated by a set of elevator banks that spanned the entire height of the place and disappeared into the ceiling where the upper floors began. A flash of motion behind one of them told me that the army flyers were already circling the building, establishing a perimeter now that they’d bottled me up.

  Which was fine. Not actually fine, but rather the kind of “fine” a girlfriend is when she’s about to unleash hell on her boyfriend. Or so I’m told. I have totally never done that kind of thing to Harry.

  “Well, okay,” I muttered and broke for the elevator bank as someone flew into the lobby behind me. The squeal of tires outside heralded the arrival of the rest of the army, and that wasn’t good, either. “This is like a metaphor for my last two years.” I bolted for the nearest elevator and when I hit the button, it instantly dinged. “No Muzak, no Muzak, please don’t have Muzak—”

  The first strains of “The Girl From Ipanema” in Muzak form reached my ears as I dashed into the elevator. “Damn!” I hammered the button for the top floor, because—well, I didn’t see any other viable alternatives. Then I hit the button for the floor three below the top. That was where I’d get out. And swiftly press the elevator close button as I did so.

  Wait. No. Even better, I’d climb out of the elevator now and leap out in the shaft, then force my exit from one of the middle floors, then—

  “Aw, shit,” I said, and the real truth of my predicament came hammering down on me right then. Because this really was a metaphor for my last two years.

  I’d run and run and run, mostly without thinking, and now here I was, in an elevator, heading to the top of the tallest building in Bredoccia, the entire Revelen army on my tail.

  What the hell was I going to do from here? Leap off and hope to survive by dint of the legs of my capris ballooning out to save me? (They weren’t that spacious, to be honest.)

  I bumped against the back wall of the elevator as I tried to tune out the irritating sound of the Muzak. Man, everything had gotten so muddled. The elevator box was not dissimilar to the one my mom used to stick me in. The parallels to my life abounded. At least there was symmetry.

  I needed a moment to think about what I really wanted. A moment to plan so that I could extract the best possible outcome from all this. A moment to just … breathe.

  The elevator dinged on the third from top floor, and as the doors opened I saw three soldiers with guns standing out there, waiting, a shattered window looming behind them.

  No time to breathe.

  No time to think.

  No time to plan.

  As per usual, I wasn’t going to get anything from my wish list. I rolled some of the tension out of my shoulders as I locked eyes with the lead one, and reloaded my fists Henry Cavill-style as I stepped out onto the floor. A moment later the elevator door slid closed behind me, and I let out a quick sigh.

  Yeah. This whole thing was a metaphor for my life.

  “So …” I asked, staring down the barrel of three rifles, “… who wants to go first?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Passerini

  “What does that look like to you?” Passerini asked. They were watching the satellite imagery of the big building in downtown Revelen, the one Sienna Nealon had just disappeared into. A load of army trucks had pulled up just after her, and now the soldiers were swarming the place, disappearing into the lobby like ants into an anthill.

  “Well, they’re establishing a perimeter,” Graves said, peering at the screen in concentration. He was still at his console, making minute adjustments to bring the satellite picture around a little here and there, switch the lenses to infrared for a second. All this, projected on the big screen so they could stare at it while Passerini waited for the army and air force to finish dickering about their part in the Joint Task Force. Navy, of course, was done.

  “A pretty flexible one, but yes,” Passerini said. He had his arms folded in front of him; he’d already decided what was likely to happen next based on what he was seeing. “You see that thin thread running from the truck on the east side to the building itself …? And the guys working around it?”

  Graves stared at it for a second, then did a double take.

  He must have seen it, Passerini figured. “That’s detonating cord,” Passerini said, enjoying the chance to spell things out for the younger man. He was army, he probably hadn’t worked demolitions at any point. Passerini’s family had a construction background, and he’d spent a little time hanging around the SEAL teams. As much as a pilot could get away with.

  “They’re wiring the building to blow,” Graves said, almost a whisper.

  “That’s right,” Passerini said, noting the sudden, dramatic paling on Graves’s face. “You’re not getting emotionally involved in this little chase drama, are you, son?”

  “Maybe just a little,” Graves said, and hell if he didn’t sound like he was about to choke.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Sienna

  “I am going to kick the ever-loving asses off you and everyone else who comes at me,” I said, talking a lot of shit but not really sure how I was going to back it up given I was pigeonholed on the top floor of a freaking tower, being held dead to rights by three guys with guns who could fly—

  Oh. Duh. Obvious answer.

  Kick the ass of a flyer and make him fly you away. Obvious, really. How did I not see that before?

  Right. No time to think, breathe or plan. Running on minimal sleep and maximal beatings th
e last few days. Actually, had I gone to sleep naturally without being pounded into unconsciousness any time these last few days? The last time I could remember achieving natural sleep had been the night before my “trial.” And that had followed a pretty brutal night in which I’d passed out sitting upright in Ariadne’s kitchen for all of an hour or two before …

  Whatever. Before I did what Sienna does. What I was about to do now.

  Kick ass. Take names. Beat the shit out of a flying man and make him take me away from this horseshit country to a possibly slightly less horseshit country where I’d be welcome. There had to be an African republic somewhere that could find some use for a sarcastic, superpowered enforcer.

  “Okay, boys,” I said, raising my hands and stepping out of the elevator as they closed on me, rifles leveled, “looks like you got me.”

  The first of them did the stupid thing that I hoped one of them would and stepped closer to poke at me with the barrel, as though getting closer would somehow make the bullet kill me faster. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that five feet of distance wouldn’t make a difference in the velocity, but it would make a hell of a difference in what I could do to him.

  One of his compatriots seemed to realize it, too, shouting just a little too late.

  First rule of getting shot at: don’t get shot at.

  Second rule of getting shot at, to be used if you fail rule number one: get out of the way of the bullets, if possible.

  Don’t ask me for a third rule, because it’s pretty dicey if you get to this stage.

  My strategy was to work hard on rule number two, because I was forever failing rule one in my life. I’d just sort of accepted that I was going to be shot at, it was part of the “being Sienna” package, and I was just trying to cope with it in my own way. Which was to grab the barrel of the rifle and get “off-line” or “off-axis,” meaning the hell out of the way of the bullets.

  I locked my elbow and pushed, and shoved the gun barrel away as the soldier let loose with a few rounds from sheer panic at having someone grab his gun. He still had control over the trigger and stock, but he wasn’t going to be able to shoot me, which was kind of a bonus for me since I really didn’t want to get shot right now.