Destiny Abounds (Starlight Saga Book 1) (11 page)

She rolled to her feet, ran to the edge and looked down, scanning back and forth across the surrounding streets. At first she thought she’d need a taller building, but saw the individual in question an instant before she would have decided to abandon this perch for one with more altitude.

There you are! Too easy.

286 connected herself to the point in the alleyway she needed, slamming into the ground an instant later like a falling meteor. Using her Kinetic ability, her body didn’t take the backlash of force from the impact; her surroundings did instead. The shock of her arrival sent a sharp ripple of sudden force through the area, a deep, audible crack rolling through the distorted air. Her erstwhile quarry stumbled, route cut off by her sudden appearance, but he managed to catch the side of a building with a quick arm and kept from tumbling headfirst to the ground.

“So, hey. That thing you took?” 286 commented casually to the thief, running a hand through her hair. She felt a mild sting of disappointment that the game was over so soon. “You might wanna give it ba—”

He took off down a side alley, legs churning the air as he dead sprinted from her view as if… well, as if their life depended on it. Which, maybe it did. They’d both know in a minute. Prisoner 286 laughed, an amused chuckle rapidly growing to a rolling guffaw. And only when she was done did she take off down the alleyways after the thief, her prey.

Altairan residential layouts were just as predictably structured as any other part of their cities, with a dense grid of alleyways and walkways providing the necessary access points to every building. There were literally hundreds of routes one could potentially take in a densely populated area like this one, and it’d be easy to lose someone you were trying to follow if they were smart about it.

But 286 severed most of the runner’s lead when she snapped abruptly to the end of the next alley, almost slamming into him outright as she bounced off of the brick-covered structure right beside him. She felt no pain from the impact, having transferred all of the energy into the building, leaving it the worse for the meeting instead of her. She glanced around as she reoriented, and saw him turn another corner nearby, still at a dead run.

She was laughing again.

She knocked some brick off the outside of several of the next few buildings she slammed into, but her mark was a quick thinker, repeatedly turning corner after corner, keeping her from getting a visual “lock” on him and even using her magnified momentum against her. Several twists and turns later, constantly chasing right behind, but not quite catching up with the thief, 286 decided to change the game again.

286 noticed her best opportunity a few moments later, as he turned into a particular alley and she spotted a way to cut him off. Three quick charges and three heavy impacts later, she turned the corner ahead of him, intercepting him before he managed to exit the alley.

And the thief wasn’t there.

For a moment, 286 scratched the shaved part of her head, furrowing her brow and wondering if she’d actually taken a wrong turn or missed an alley and let him slip from her grasp. But then she heard and felt the echo of a vibration as something scraped above her and sent tiny pieces of stonework trickling down into the alley to her left side. She grinned and looked up, just catching sight of the exposed edge of a foot as its owner clambered lithely over the edge and onto the roof.

Gotcha
.

She locked her gaze onto the edge of the rooftop and, like every time before, used her Kinetics to generate a corridor of very low mass in front of her, warping local space and connecting her to the desired focal point and target destination. In the brief instant that the warped corridor existed, she allowed its forces to draw her in; little measurable time passed before her body snapped forcefully into the building’s overhang, smashing straight through the carved stonework rim of the rooftop and arcing over the side in a spray of tumbling masonry shrapnel.

Her point of contact shattered before she could transfer all of the charge’s built up energy into it, so she tumbled a few feet with the excess, feeding the remainder it into the flat, cool brickwork as she rolled. But once on her feet, she saw him again, jacket hood thrown back from either air resistance or exertion. She could admire how fleet of foot he was as he darted for another rooftop, one a decently jumpable distance away, only giving a single quick glance back to gauge her pursuit.

He was too late now, of course. She smiled, taking a couple of deep breaths, and waited until he jumped for the next roof to catch him. Casting out her hand, she
stopped
him, using her Kinetics to annul all the energy of his motion and leaving him floating in midair, helplessly suspended over an eight floor drop, completely at her mercy. 286 took her time and strolled casually up to him as he slowly spun from the momentum of struggling, panic plain on his face.

She flipped him upside down and pointed the thief’s face toward her as she approached, wavering energy darkening as it rolled and thickened down her outstretched arm. Able to see his face decently at last, the package-snatcher turned out to be a man in his mid twenties, with, she thought, a roguishly handsome appearance. His eyes were wide, alarmed and wild, and he still clutched that ridiculous little treasure chest to his… well, chest. Walking nonchalantly right up to the edge of the rooftop, she moved her arm to manipulate him until he was nearly face to face with her, albeit upside down and still hanging over a forty meter drop.

She grinned at him and tossed her head curiously, and he finally met her eyes, alight with an eager intensity. The man stared for a moment, then promptly panicked, tossing the ornate lockbox toward the distant ground as hard as he could, a motion that set him to slowly spinning once again. 286 just shrugged, rolling her eyes with vague exasperation as she simply reached out her other arm and stopped the little box dead.

She
pulled
on it until it arrived, thumping solidly into her extended hand, perfectly safe. Still holding him with a casual ease, she carefully bent and placed the box on the roof, then straightened and looked him in the eye. Her other arm dampened the light around it as she gathered energy into her hand; a physics threshold was crossed and with a snap, a sphere of space in the palm of her gloved hand
warped
in on itself, creating a distortion that pulled lightly on his dangling clothes and hair.

She’d barely gotten out, “So, how about some questions?” before he fainted.

5.1
- Sirrah

Sirrah looked up as the crowd parted with a ripple of murmurs, the press of people obviously eager to keep their distance as Prisoner 286 strolled back up, several minutes later. She was casually tossing the valuable lockbox up and down in one hand, and in the other… Oh, dear; she really, really hoped that 286 wasn’t carrying a dead body slung over her shoulder. Sirrah was relieved as 286 tossed the still form down onto their face, because he let out a vague groan when he came in contact with the ground. She looked back at the arrogant Kinetic just in time to barely catch the lockbox that 286 tossed to her.

“There. Got your box.” 286 grinned a toothsome grin, obviously rather proud of herself.

“Are. You. Insane?” Sirrah closed the distance to Prisoner 286 in a single smooth step, lowering her voice into an emphatic, quiet intensity and looking up at where the Prisoner loomed over her.

“You sound like my numerous Altairan-appointed psychiatrists. What? I caught him. Like you asked. Got your box. It’s all good. Didn’t even eat him. You still got those fancy cigarettes?”

5.2
- Prisoner 286

Prisoner 286 sat alone in a little red carpeted waiting room, in a thickly upholstered chair that kept trying to convince her it was comfortable, though she still didn’t agree with it. She sighed deeply, feeling bone-numbingly bored; it felt like she’d been in here for
hours
, though her personal datapad said it had barely been twenty minutes. She’d had a couple of magazines to entertain herself with at first, but she’d gotten tired of them pretty quickly, and had ended up tearing them into long strips and setting them on fire with her lighter. To her disappointment, however, the carpeting in here didn’t appear to be flammable. So she sat there, thought a bit, planned a bit, and then just flexed her Kinetics over and over, exercising them relentlessly.

She was just getting bored of that and considering finding out whether she could throw the coffee table out the window when Kala Sirrah Nazai swept back in, expression stormy. Now that they were in private, her eyes were alight with flickers of emotional intensity.

“What? You still mad about something?”

“Of course I am!” Sirrah exclaimed, pointing an accusatory finger at 286 as she closed the distance. “You injured eight people when you went through the crowd earlier. One of them was a child. Emergency medics had to come take an older woman away because you pushed her so hard the impact broke her pelvis!” She stared down at 286, pausing to take a deep breath and reign herself in. “You crashed a transport into one building and damaged several more, and managed to accumulate a
couple hundred thousand
credits worth of damages. In about two minutes! And you don’t see what’s wrong with
any
of this?”

286 looked up at Kala Sirrah, now standing almost directly over her, and leaned back with a shrug, apparently unimpressed. “You said to go get the box. I got it. What’s your problem?”

“My problem? My problem is that you
injured eight people
, damaged several buildings, and crashed a transport. Or did you miss that part? You rampaged through the city. You caused an incident that I, as a Kala, should have had nothing to do with. You managed to turn an opportunity to prove that you are capable of co-existing with other people outside of a prison world into a fiasco that resulted in the Altairan Government nearly pulling the project!” Sirrah’s voice had risen steadily throughout the rant, going well above the typically serene level that 286 had come to expect from the Kala’s composure. Sirrah closed her eyes for a moment, smoothed her ruffled dress, and took another couple of calming breaths before opening her eyes again. “If I hadn’t beseeched them to give me more time, you would be bound for Urebai, once again, as we speak.”

“Yeah, right.” The scorn was obvious in 286’s voice as her temper began to lightly simmer in her voice and eyes. “Besides, I don’t see how
any
of that is my fault.”

Sirrah stared at her for a moment with her eyes disbelieving and her mouth just barely open, despite all those years of discipline and training she was so proud of. “How is it
not
your fault? You’re the one who did it! You
broke
an old woman’s
pelvis
!”

5.3 - Sirrah

Prisoner 286 just blinked at her, to all of Sirrah’s observations, devoid of any understanding or guilt. Or care, for that matter. “
They
didn’t move out of
my
way. And that is somehow my fault? I didn’t fucking put them there.”

Sirrah stared at her for a few long seconds in shocked silence. “You… don’t actually understand what is wrong with this at all, do you? You don’t even see how… utterly
wrong
that way of thinking is…”

“Look.” To Sirrah’s surprise, 286 seemed to calm herself down, leaning forward again on her elbows and interlacing her fingers. “When a building collapses on someone, or they fall off of a roof and die, who do you blame? The building? The ground? The sky? Me? Or is it
their own damn fault
for being there and fucking up?”

Sirrah looked away for a moment, her smooth young brow furrowed ponderously. After a few seconds, she released a breath audibly, and her tension along with it. “It’s no wonder they never made any gains with you.” She said it quietly, as if almost for her benefit alone. “They never understood you at all. They have no idea how you think.” She frowned deeper as she considered the ramifications of that realization. “You never even had a chance…” she whispered at last, eyes wide.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” 286 announced in reply, sitting up straight. “But if they want me to take responsibility for all those people having a run of shitty luck, they can just fuck right off.” Her hazel eyes were Kinetic-reinforced steel.

Sirrah sighed as she turned her face toward 286 again, and stared for a moment as she considered her. This woman had been on the wrong side of the law for as long as Sirrah, or anyone else, knew. She was infamous for being a thorn in the side of not only Altair, but of anywhere she ended up, even beginning with her native Urzra. But looking at it now, she wasn’t sure anymore that this woman was entirely to blame. With all of Altairan society’s regulations and failsafes, with all their attention to doing what is right and just, how had this woman fallen so neatly through the cracks?

She took a step closer to 286, moving to stand just in front of her, then lowered herself gracefully to her knees. She lifted her delicate hands and gently wrapped them around the rough, scarred hands of the most dangerous criminal in the cluster. Then she softened her tone, her burnished chestnut eyes, her expression and her approach. “286, I want you to have a chance. Can’t you see that? Don’t you understand what I am risking in order to help you? Please don’t make it more difficult than it already is. Please, don’t fight me. I only want to help you be free.”