The day has come. Mask donned, Timelet holstered, knife sheathed. The silence of Bec’s mask relaxed her as she waited for Scarlet’s debriefing. A screen with a map of factions, known hazards, and projected paths stood there telling Bec of the plan to be.

“Alright! Bec! I will explain this as many times as we need to, so show me what you know. How will we start this journey to the City?”

Bec straightened her back and, in her mask's electronic voice, shouted, “we will run!”

“How long?”

Bec hesitated for a moment. “Until we can’t run anymore!”

“No. Until you can’t run anymore. Take it easy, too. We don't need to deal with an exhausted child in the Suburbs.”

“Right…” Bec frowned, but she knew it was a valid distinction.

“What happens if you lose sight of me and/or Black?”

“I continue on one of the projected paths. Do NOT look for you or Robert!”

“Good, but please stick to the codenames when we’re out in the field. How long will it take to run on foot to the City?”

“Minimum 50 hours”

“How many days is that?”

“2 full days!”

“What will we do when you need to sleep, eat, or expel waste?”

“Find a basement, determine the human presence in said basement, claim the basement as ours using barricades and sensor arrays. We all have two sets.”

“Wrong. You haven’t considered something.”

“What?” Bec furrowed her brow trying to remember when Al interrupted her train of thought.

“She didn’t mention it before, but couldn’t animals be a threat as well?”

Bec nodded. “I forgot to look for animal presences.”

Scarlet shook her head in disapproval. “Right… however, are you going to use your AI to bail you when you make errors in the field, Bec? I would hope you were faster than that.”

Bec shook her head in response. “Al and I are a team; you’d best remember that.”

Ms. Scarlet sighed. “So, the Timelet hasn’t given us an update today?”

“No.”

A new presence, one Bec had been tracking as it approached the briefing room, decided to make itself known. “Great, I love surprises!”

Robert, or Mr. Black as the Mountain Border called him, had finally decided to show up to the briefing, indifference painting his face. He was pretending though. Bec could hear his heart racing. He was ready. Ready for a fight, ready for anything. Bec could only really hope she was as well.

“You know better than anyone that you will get them. You’re the one most likely to die out there.”

“From how Bec characterizes it, you two aren’t exactly immortal in any sense of the term.”

“Yet you are exactly mortal in every sense of the term. Be careful, Black.”

“I will be.”

~~~

Black, Scarlet, and Gray stretched and gathered focus as the vault door began its opening procedures. Bolts disengaged as hissing filled the air like a flock of flying snakes. Bec took in deep breaths as she prepared herself for the threats that laid before her. This was a race. For an average HunGa, there was approximately .3% chance of death in every hour they spend in the deepest parts of the Suburbs. That mean that there was a 16% chance of death for an average competent individual for this particular excursion. Bec understood she ranked far below that average in many ways.

There were things she may excel at, and she needed to leverage them if she hoped to survive at all. Her perception was acute in multiple ways. Sharp vision and hearing are something that could help her discover threats sooner. Her sense of sight functions differently from most.

Her attacks, while immediately devastating, can also cause hidden damage over time as she can essentially dose people with radioactive poison with each strike, maybe even slowly dose them from afar. This did not help, as Bec had no intention of having a prolonged fight with more experience foes. Anyone who chooses to scavenge regularly in the Suburbs is a dire threat. Al will help to help track her destination and catch things she would have missed. Urh, I guess my cardio is good these days.

“That’s very important, Bec. Scarlet said so.” Al interjected.

“Scarlet says a lot of things…”

“I do! Very important things!” Scarlet interrupted with a smile. “You’d best remember that.”

The large barrier lifted, and they began their long trek towards the City.

~~~

The long grids and winding streets of the Suburbs were something haunting to Bec. As she jogged, she really had time to think about this odd enigma. Almost completely empty, these streets were the aftermath of a battle so grand that the scale made her head spin.

There were no winners in the fight that left the Suburbs on the face of Dust. It had been months, but the presence of this massive ghost town, no city, frequently crossed Bec’s mind. On one side of the mountain was pristine meadows and forests, and the other side, was a remarkable concrete jungle. The Suburbs were the dying wish of a revolutionary man who, with his last breath, begged his drone swarm to make sure every human had a home. It complied.

The red, black, and gray squad ran for hours without seeing a single sign of humans. It was best that way. Bec did see some cats leaping and floating from roof to roof silently to all but her sharp ears. It was an endless march and, as the hours ticked by, she couldn’t help but think about how it was all but certain that there was someone, relatively nearby, fighting for their life. Almost all businesses had to work through the Suburbs, or else they would remain limited to the City. It seemed to Bec that most would be content with that, but if a person wanted to expand, they would need to conquer the empty streets.

Fifteen hours passed without so much as a bump on the road, so they stopped to let Bec catch her breath. Held up in a barricade shopfront, she felt like an idiot, huffing and puffing, while Robert and Scarlet barely broke a sweat. Ms. Scarlet had tubes and bags all over her body, which Bec found intriguing. Typically, Ms. Scarlet had nothing on, as she seemed to be able to conjure whatever she needed out of thin air. Well, not out of thin air, but out of similarly sized things.

Al was a fan of mulling over these sorts of issues. Bec had spent hours and hours trying to figure out Robert’s word with him. It was fun. This was why it didn’t surprise Bec in the slightest when he started to talk to her about this Scarlet issue. “Do you think she has a limit to her range? Didn’t Robert say the people with teleportation skills could move things at ‘great ranges?’”

I think she has a range limit. Clearly, or else she’d just teleport us to the City herself.

“What’s stopping her from jumping us a bunch of times until we get to the City?”

No clue… Al was right. There were many odd things about this whole situation. Bec had no choice, but to mull this stuff over until— Her ears perked. She heard movement. Human sounds. Sneaking human sounds. All around them.

“Ambush!” She passed the message to the ears of Black and Scarlet and they… started running faster! Bec could barely keep up with them as they just buckled down and started sprinting. Were they just hoping to outsprint them? Insane! What about guns and bombs and wild superpowers?

Bec watched as the gait of her two leading party members changed. Black’s strides were perfect, like a marathon sprinter. Scarlet bounded and pranced like a gazelle, with long strides between her feet touching ground.

Black bolted like a cheetah, dashing like an Olympic sprinter in perfect form frighteningly low to the ground. Bec was snapped out of her moment of awe when she noticed that she was slowly losing them. Panic rose in her throat which made her completely miss the fact that a man far ahead popped out of an alleyway.

He seemed to be preparing a trap as he began to throw out what looked like a spike strip when two gunshots rang out. Bec winced as the man fell in a slump on his device and promptly exploded.

As Bec ran by the scorched alleyway, she felt a slight coolness on the wind as atomized blood hung in the air. Black had executed the man with swiftness, without even breaking his pace.

That was it. There was no chase, no follow up. The ambush was routed so quickly that there was no chance for the ambushers to follow up. Surely, they expected to at least slow the party down.

Bec chewed on the idea of how quickly this ambush turned sour for the people who planned it. Surely, they didn’t intend to be down a man so fast and with nothing to show for it. That can’t be normal. Maybe it was? Maybe it was just the cost of doing business in the Suburbs. Maybe it really was just an average day for them.

~~~

The running just never stopped. It never stopped. Bec would have been on edge if that were possible when she in full sprint for…

“17 hours.” Al implanted the thought in Bec’s head. This was a lot of running for Bec something kept her going. She was reaching a kind of meditative focus that let her from slowing down. The sun was nearly set beyond the mountains and shadows began to form across the street.

Lamps using some kind of bulb Bec wasn’t familiar with cast lights on the street and the street alone. Bec noticed how there seemed to frequent scans of infrared light that would coat the street. To her senses, it was like a quiet flashbulb that lit the dark corners of the alleys.

The bulbs seemed to frequently readjust, never allowing the brightest parts to strike the building facades. Was it perhaps to avoid letting light into the buildings after night began? Raising her hands to the sky just for a moment, she marveled at how the stars seemed to be so clear. Little pricks of light danced across her perception as she ran her fingers across the starry firmament above.

Bec smiled behind her mask. It reminded her of home, although the stars were configured in ways that she knew betrayed the alien nature of the ground beneath her feet. No north star, no big dipper, no constellations she knew. Sure, they were there, just a little different from the perspective she stood. The sky was as alien to her as the sky of the ancient Romans. Nearly the same, but just different enough. She wondered if any of the stars she could sense were the Sun.

More hours passed as Bec almost stopped thinking. 19 hours. 21 hours. 23 hours. Bec just… relaxed. She took in deep breaths and let them out. Her legs were sore, and Al had informed her that he could no longer counteract the lactic acid production in her muscles. But she kept running. The pain was nothing. Her head was thrumming with a runner’s high. She hadn’t ever felt so focused, so—

“BEC!” Scarlet’s voice rang out.

Bec nearly jumped out of her skin.

“We need to stop. You’re exhausted.”

“No, I’m not! I can keep going.”

“Let’s stop for just a minute and re-evaluate.” The group stopped once they bolted inside what looked like a bakery.

Bec was miffed. “What the hey? I was doing fine!”

She took a seat at a diner-style booth and yawned. “Yeah, I’m sleepy, but I could keep going.”

Mr. Black yawned back. “Bec, learn your limits. It’s not totes rad to get yourself killed.”

Bec was confused. “I, uh, haven’t gotten killed. Black.”

“If we got in a fight, you would have died.”

“You don’t know that!”

“If you can handle a fight, let’s spar in the basement.”

“Fine! I will!”

“Okay. Let’s go!” He said in a mocking tone.

“I am!” Bec echoed back.

“No, you aren’t!” Black retorted.

“I—” Bec stopped when she realized she couldn’t move. Her legs were dead. She couldn’t move them in the slightest.

“You pushed yourself way beyond your normal abilities. We were both waiting for you to call it, but you didn’t. You can barely move. The second you stopped; your body caught up with you. Shame you couldn’t tell.” Black walked up and flicked Bec on the nose. Bec tried to swat at him, but her arms were also insanely weak, so she just flopped her noodle arm in his direction.

“Hey!” Bec lost all energy in an instant, the fatigue hitting her like a crashing wave. “I get it. I get it…” A moment lingered in the silence between all three of them. Scarlet yawned.

“Here, honey, I’ll help you into the basement.” With an outstretched hand, she gave Bec a reassuring smile. Bec reached out and touched nothing. Seat suddenly gone from under her, she plopped onto a gravelly floor, painfully. Confused for a moment, she sighed. Must have been her kind of joke. Teleporting me into the basement instead of actu—

Bec’s train of thought was cut off by the realization she was surrounded. Completely surrounded by men.