7 Days, 7 Stories: Day 6 & 7 — April 26th and 27th

🕮 Day #7 on

getyourwordsout.

My three-beat outline turned into four and a half thousand words of short story, of which I wrote over the course of two days. Since I was breaking the rules anyways, I decided to go ahead and edit it a little, too. Please enjoy!

Neon Gothic

Azi relished the moment of weightlessness, mid-leap, before the impact of Gir’s hitting the edge of the roof jarred her nearly off his back. She clung as Gir lurched, snarling, stone scrabbling against stone. Cloud lighting lit the entire sky, illuminating both of them and the roof that he was trying, and failing, to gain purchase on. Thunder surrounded them in a heavy blanket that rattled her heart in her chest.

Breathless with desperation, she said, “C’mon, c’mon.” Her kinesis holding Gir together crackled with sparks of pale blue as he struggled, echoes in miniature of the electrical storm currently doing its best to drown the city.

Just as Azi was about to try and shove him onto the roof and hope she didn’t lose her kinetic grip, Gir’s hind legs caught purchase and he heaved up and over the low guard wall and onto tar paper. Grimy water splashed beneath his paws as he staggered into the shadow of one of the roof’s statues. Lightning flashed again and cast the sword-bearing knight above them in stark relief.

Gir braced himself upright and tipped his head to angle one bat-like stone ear back toward her. He pointedly tried to twitch it, but a flare of blue kinesis-fire prevented the fine movement. That probably had not helped him whatsoever with his landing.

“Shit, right, sorry,” she said and eased her too-tight hold.

Gir huffed and rolled his shoulders. They shifted smoothly, with greater freedom of movement.

Flexing her fingers on Gir’s vestigial wings, she peered back the way they’d come, tugging the hood of her raincloak further over her face. They were too exposed, the route they’d had to take too obvious, one tall gothic skyscraper to its neighbor, all the way from the roof access of Aspirilam. She just didn’t have the juice this deep into the job to boost Gir to unlikely roofs, not and also keep his structural integrity. If Aspirilam’s Security people were following them—

This time when lightning lit the sky, it revealed a pair of alicycles rising above the roof line. The sleek black machines carried no insignia, nor did the helmeted riders. Where the wheels would be on a street motorcycle came only the low orange glow of mechanical kinesis, the kind that were eighteen kinds of black-market and dangerous to even breathe near.

Aspirilam’s guys. AspSec. She’d bet every scrap of tonight’s payload that both were ID-clean, too, from retinal scans to prints, just in case she was willing to turn her kinesis lethal.

And Aspirilam wondered why she’d been trying to turn down all their join-or-die ultimatums to “work” for them.

They hadn’t spotted her and Gir. Yet. The knight statue was not much of a hiding place, not when one of the cycles was already starting to circle the roof they’d just left.

“Get ready,” she whispered. “Bank building. Then gargoyle building.”

Gir flicked his ear at her in acknowledgment and prepared to leap.

The nearer AspSec cycle rider rose high enough that he could look the various statues in the eyes and began his own circuit. Water sizzled where rain hit his kinesis drive’s casing.

“Almost. Wait for it,” Azi murmured.

The instant that the knight statue cut off line-of-sight between the guy and their exit route, Azi thumped Gir’s shoulder in a short, rapid tattoo of go, go, go. Gir launched himself forward and galloped for the other end of the roof.

Their head start was short-lived. A massive stone quadruped was anything but silent. The AspSec cycle whipped around in a flare of brilliant orange and shot after them.

The edge of the roof came too soon, and Gir flung himself into open air with far more trust than Azi deserved. His leap landed them on the next building with only a minor stumble before he was running again. The second AspSec cycle joined the first too soon for comfort.

Far below, near street-level, sirens wailed in counterpoint to the two near-silent pursuers.

Roof to roof, Azi and Gir fled. AspSec drew as close as they dared, their cycles built for aerial pursuit, but not close enough for Gir to wield his jaws against them. Neon streaked past on all sides, too-vibrant and unique to every overdecorated rooftop. First green, then orange, then blue. On a roof washed in lurid red, Gir shoulder-checked a gargoyle half his size into pieces, and Azi risked his next landing to fling chunks of crumbling statuary.

She regretted it almost immediately, despite it gaining them a little breathing room. Gir couldn’t tire, but Azi’s fingers trembled where she clutched Gir’s wings.

Beneath the stormlit sky, the world began to pass in exhausted flickers, single frames of a stuttering film. One moment the neurodisruptors each AspSec carried at their waist remained holstered. The next, the static splash of a missed shot skittered off the brickwork where her head had been an instant prior.

Even a glancing disruptor shot would send her unconscious and Gir to pieces. Her heart beat, sickening, in her throat. She tried not to clamp her kinesis down on him lest she rob him of speed.

Another shot, another dodge, and Azi swore.

Blessedly, the bank roof loomed out of the pouring rain, wrapped in scaffolding and the drape of plastic sheeting. Deep under construction, the city-block-long roof was a maze of half-completed masonry and metal piping holding up dozens of walkways in tiers.

Gir hit the wooden planks on the uppermost tier and his weight snapped right through. AspSec couldn’t follow them in; their kinesis drives would destroy everything but the stone. Under cover, finally, and protected from the disruptors, Gir wrecked his way toward the far side of the bank’s rooftop. Azi helped the destruction along, just a little, just enough, to make it that much more dramatic.

An easy trail to follow.

A third of the way across the wide roof, Azi thumped Gir’s shoulder. He turned in the direction indicated, ripping through plastic, but at Azi’s subsequent hiss of, “Quietly,” he dropped his speed.

Panting, she used her kinesis to continue “their” loud traversal of the roof in the direction they had been heading. Her hold on Gir wobbled as she did, and the trail faltered for what might be a damning instant, but despite that, AspSec didn’t pause at the deception. The two continued shadowing their supposed quarry toward the far side of the roof, trailing steam and the too-bright afterimages of their kinesis drives.

The instant their kinesis-fire grew blurry through the curtain of rain, Gir slung himself out from the cover of the bank’s construction and onto the rooftop of the gargoyle building.

A cathedral-roofed monstrosity, their destination had been built by a corporation long since gone out of business, and each subsequent occupant had added another set of gargoyles to the roof. Azi couldn’t remember the name on the side of the building now, but two decades and who-knew how many sales had left behind a forest of grotesque stone creatures in various states of snarling protection. Each of the roof’s many arches and ridges were lined with the things, and Azi, breath short and sharp in trying to keep up the false trail as long as possible, pointed at a gap in the lineup.

Gir slid into place under the soft glow of the neon pink stripes that lit the cathedral-esque spire above them. He did so delicately for all his bulk, her split concentration making him too fragile for strong movement. Once he’d hit his mark, however, he hunched over, one paw up and claws extended, and let himself settle into stillness. Azi dropped from his back and wriggled around to where he could curl over her, tucking herself beneath his heavy lantern jaw, up against the stone of his chest and shielded from both sight and the downpour.

With a wobbly breath, she released her false trail just before it would have reached the far side of the bank roof. Then she slumped against Gir and reinforced him so he wouldn’t fall to pieces if they had to run in a hurry. Electric blue kinesis-fire crawled his limbs briefly before dying to a quiescent glow.

That complete, she folded her hand over her mouth to muffle her breathing, and together they waited for AspSec to circle back to check the roofs surrounding the bank. The spark of her telekinesis in each of Gir’s joints could be mistaken for the glitter of neon on rain-slick stone, and the light in his eyes for superstition in the dark. When AspSec passed overhead, he was only one gargoyle among many, his distinctive traits shared across dozens.

AspSec circled. After several interminable minutes with the thrum of the kinesis drives sending her heartrate sky-high half a dozen times, their pursuers did eventually move off. The tight band of fear around Azi’s lungs eased and she sucked in air like she’d been drowning.

Gir shifted, wrapping his foreleg across her torso, his claws gentle on her opposing shoulder. With the low rumble of stone-against-stone that was his only voice, he made an inquiring noise.

He was probably asking if she was okay, but she couldn’t not be okay right now, so she just said, “We need to go to ground.”

After a pause, Gir rasped an agreement.

First, however, she laid a hand against her zippered hip-pocket and checked to make sure it was still properly sealed. The datastick inside was wrapped in three kinds of waterproofing, plus the hip-pouch itself, but if that had failed—

Still intact. She allowed herself a sliver of relief.

The info on the stick was her ticket out of Aspirilam’s grasping hands, plus her only chance at some kind of psychic training. The rain had been more of a complication than she’d hoped, but with the seals intact, she could probably free-dive to fifty feet before losing data integrity. Still, fuck, she wished she’d had time to take more precautions.

Just—if nothing else, Gir deserved a more permanent kind of life than what she’d been able to cobble together for him with her amateur kinesis, and training should make that possible. And maybe she was putting too much pressure on someone she’d never met, but all she could think was that she now had the name of the one person that, for the first time in her life, might actually be able to help.

She needed to believe that the datastick in her hip-pocket could change everything.

She also needed to get herself and Gir the hell back to their nearest safehouse. Aspirilam might have lost her for the moment, but wretched experience had taught her that they didn’t like letting go of her specifically if they could help it. She and Gir needed to regroup.

“Waterfront safehouse?” she asked, like the only other safehouse they had wasn’t on the other end of the city, out of any kind of reach. “Via the hotels?”

The dark and the rain hid all but the silhouettes of the surrounding buildings. Further out, towards the waterfront, there remained only a neon-lit sketch of thirty, fifty story buildings and a couple of massive construction cranes: abandoned high-rise hotels that had never made it past the concrete and rebar stage. The project to line the water’s edge with them had failed right in the middle—though why, she had no idea—and left a row of framed-out, but not filled-in, towers. The perfect place to descend to street level in privacy.

Barring a tactical free-fall, though, she didn’t see any other way to shed hundreds of vertical feet that wouldn’t be too slow, too horribly exposed, or end too abruptly. Or all three.

Gir huffed an agreement. Then he let her go so she could clamber onto his back. Once she had settled astride, he stretched, spread his vestigial wings, and folded them again to allow her to grab hold.

The waterfront, unfortunately, was back the way they’d come, and the route they’d taken in the first place was just about the only safe traversal this far above the ground. AspSec wouldn’t have found them so easily if it hadn’t been. She hadn’t counted on them having alicycles, though with how less-than-legal their interest in her had always been, she really should have.

They headed back. With stealth now a priority, however, Gir couldn’t use momentum to make his jumps, and Azi was forced to boost him more and more to clear even the easiest. Her kinesis tank was starting to run on fumes, and she knew she was borrowing against burnout, but it wasn’t like they had any choice. The rain hadn’t let up, either, though the light show had tapered off to the occasional flash-and-grumble, and she became very aware that running for their lives had at least kept her warm. She began to shiver despite her raincloak. Gir wasn’t exactly warmblooded.

They reached the Aspirilam roof without getting caught, which was honestly a minor miracle, if a miserable one. An AspSec gal was tucked within the roof access corridor, ostensibly watching the roof, but mostly peering out into the dark with the brightly lit stairwell behind her ruining her night vision. The door that belonged in the doorway she guarded was kindling swept into a soggy pile, and the deep gouges from Gir figuring out how to gain traction on the wet roof told the story of which way they’d gone in the first place. Stellar. No wonder they’d been found so fast.

Gir crept around the edges of the destruction they’d left behind. The whir and thrum of the many environmental units covered the thump of his paws well enough. Any other noises were hidden by the door guard keeping up a steady stream of chitchat through her radio. Innocuous little comments and all-clear updates, easily heard through the rain, easily noticeable if they suddenly cut out.

Beneath the rain, sirens.

Converging, rising sirens, accompanied by brightening red and blue flashing lights.

Motherfucker. Aspirilam had called the cops.

“Gir,” she whispered urgently. They needed to go.

But several squad cars had already peeked over the rim of the roof, along with at least two vans that there already disgorging a swarm of jetpacked officers. They were all soaked instantly, but rain did very little to the gravitech that ran every jetpack and vehicle beginning to circle the building. One of the officers was directing the others, and what she could catch sounded like search patterns. The other officers spread out toward all quadrants.

Of course they’d start at the scene of the crime. Of course. Logical. What wasn’t logical was Aspirilam calling them in the first place. The company would have to pay out the nose if the cops actually caught her. And eying the amount of cops bobbling through the air, she couldn’t even pretend for an instant that it was an “if they caught her” and not a “when they caught her.” There were too many to keep track of. One of them was bound to catch at least a glimpse, just based on probability.

She was proven right before her next breath. An officer she hadn’t even seen called, “I found them, ma’am!” and shone a hand-held right at her face. Which was probably why Aspirilam had risked cops at all. Numbers. They’d be listening to the police radio. Shit.

Two seconds later, she and Gir were spotlighted by one of the squad cars and a dozen more hand-helds.

“Fuck,” Azi swore, and Gir took that as go.

Gir dodged through the rows of environmental units and off the edge of Aspirilam. The cops couldn’t stop him, not with his mass, and he nearly took out a trio who’d looked at a massive stone beast flying through the air and forgot everything they knew about physics. Nobody seemed dead after he’d scattered them, at least, and as soon as he hit the next building, he took off along their rooftop route toward the waterfront.

All of the cops’ lights remained trained on them as, one after another, officers gunned their jetpacks and the whole sorry lot pivoted to converge. The squad cars, with their greater masses, lagged in their wake.

Or at least pivoted to try to converge. There was a reason AspSec used the illegal stuff. Just about all anyone could say about gravitech was that it rarely exploded and didn’t require a great deal of ethical dubiousness to create. If she and Gir were lucky like they hadn’t been all night, the one-legged-zombie speed of all that law enforcement would let Gir leave them all far enough behind to matter.

Three roofs over and Gir dodged the last of the cops who’d made headed in that direction before their quarry had been spotted. Six roofs over and Azi started to have hope that they’d make the waterfront and vanish into one of the empty hotels. They were already halfway, maybe a half a dozen more buildings between them and the possibility of freedom, and that was with taking a more roundabout route that didn’t have Gir leaping further than she could support.

Azi’s flicker of hope died immediately. Like demons rising from the depths of hell, the two black AspSec alicycles rose from between the roof they were on and the next. The firelight glow of the kinesis drives flickered across wet glass and stone, and the reflected light cast the rain into droplets of fire.

Gir skidded to a stop, sending a wave of standing water over the edge, and flung himself to the side when both riders started taking disruptor potshots at them. Behind them, the cops were catching up. Their shouting became audible again, though half of it seemed to be about the sight of two unrepentant kinesis drives.

“Shortcut,” Azi gasped. “Take it. We have to.”

Gir rumbled and spun, his weight not suited to cornering at full speed, but he managed to lumber towards one of the impossible leaps that she absolutely did not have enough juice for. She gritted her teeth; they would be going to ground one way or the other.

The AspSec alicycles zipped after them, circling around to cut them off, and placed themselves between her and the too-far building on the other side of a wide avenue. She ducked another disruptor shot as the cycles lined up just where she wanted them to be.

There was no way that Gir could make the jump.

Without hesitation, he jumped anyway.

Azi eased her hold on him mid-air, allowing him to come apart just enough to leave her the power to shove hard, in a desperate burst of kinesis, against the nearest alicycle and push it into position at the midpoint between buildings.

Gir came down on top of the alicycle like the avalanche he was, and the driver yelped and bailed even as Azi scrambled to put Gir back together. Then, as the other AspSec cycle rider swooped to catch his falling fellow, Azi jammed the half-crushed controls with a flicker of kinesis-fire. The alicycle spun drunkenly before she succeeded in steering it towards the far building.

The instant they were close enough for Gir to finish their shortcut, he leaped. The alicycle flipped midair, and Azi didn’t even have to encourage it to slam into the side of the building below. Upon impact, the kinesis drive overloaded like it had been waiting to do so, erupted into a ball of fire, and the subsequent shockwave broke dozens of windows. Shards of mirrored glass joined the rain in falling the last few hundreds of feet to earth.

The waterfront was just ahead. One more building, and then they’d be at the half-built hotels which, Azi realized with despair, were no longer going to cut it as an escape route down.

From the renewed commotion from their uniformed pursuers, most of the cops had gotten a front-row seat to the pyrotechnics, and while a good number of them dropped back to deal with the carnage, it wasn’t enough. As alluring as wafting plastic sheeting, the cranes that nobody had yet paid to move to a new site, and stacked piles of rotting construction materials were, they’d lost enough time that the cops would be able to surround whatever building she and Gir tried to lose them in.

Plus, the remaining alicycle, now carrying double, managed to swing itself back up and around to join the pursuit once more. The AspSec guy riding pillion had better aim now that he wasn’t steering. His shots began to land close enough to make Azi dizzy. He and his buddy certainly weren’t going to fall for the same trick twice.

Gir ran out of roof. The two of them were about to have no place to go but straight down fifty stories into the river.

The skeletal corpse of the hotel groaned as Gir slammed onto it, but it was sturdier than the bank building’s scaffolding. Since he hadn’t been able to make his own hole, he headed for the nearest roof access hatch at a heavy sprint.

Azi cast around for something that would give them any kind of chance at all, gaze skating over graffiti and sodden piles of garbage. Her attention caught on the massive construction crane and she had a terrible idea. The crane was built with an interior walkway that ran from the cantilevered rear, through its cockpit, and then all the way up the arm to the very tip. Right now, it was tucked close to the building, its crane arm parallel to the side, but she could change that.

“Wait! Crane! The crane, up the center. Controls, then go.”

Gir swerved and, several bounds later, heaved himself through the crane’s girders onto its central walkway. He fit, but only just, and Azi had to hunch close to keep from getting scraped off. The lattice of steel that then surrounded caught and dispersed the next few disruptor shots until AspSec stopped taking them.

Shouldering his way into the cockpit, Gir paused just long enough for Azi to cast out with the very smallest amount of kinesis she could get away with. If she put leverage on just the right—

An internal component snapped, and as soon as it did, another component buckled, and then the entire arm of the crane was swinging ponderously out over the water as she and Gir continued to flee up the walkway towards the crane end.

Gir could only run so fast when he was being careful of his passenger. Between that and the slow swing of the crane, the cops caught up. The AspSec alicycle hovered for a moment and dropped one of its riders who raced up the arm’s walkway as well.

By the time Gir reached the end of the crane, he and Azi were well and truly cornered.

One of the cops was on a bullhorn, shouting something about coming quietly, but Azi only had eyes for the AspSec guy and his disruptor. He wasn’t currently shooting, and why not was easy enough figure out. She glanced down as the crane finished its pivot, now fully out over the river, where the tip she and Gir were standing on now stretched a good ways from the shore. There were an awful lot of holes in the crane lattice that an unconscious young woman like herself might fall through.

Azi leaned forward to press her forehead against the rough stone of Gir’s giant head right between his ears. There, she whispered, “It’ll be alright,” and let her kinesis go.

Gir fell apart.

Several dozen stones of varying sizes bounced from the crane walkway and off into open air. Azi shoved the rest so that none would be left behind and threw herself off the crane behind him. She plummeted.

The remaining alicycle tried to catch her, but now that she was no longer holding Gir together, she was able to rip into the casing of the kinesis drive and send the whole thing spiraling off towards shore. There was a smear of yells coming from above, but mostly she could only hear the wind in her ears and the snap of her raincloak trailing behind her as she fell. Below her, bits of Gir sent up splashes large and small from the rain-dappled river’s surface.

Just before she hit water, she balled up, arms around her knees, and wrapped herself in her kinesis. She arrested herself midair, just for an instant, a few feet from splashdown. Then took one last deep, deep breath.

With all her remaining might, she kinetically slammed herself down into the largest, splashiest cannonball she’d ever attempted in her life.

Underwater, the rain, the shouts, all muted. She nearly took a breath in relief.

Disoriented, she found herself drifting toward the riverbed, her clothing dragging her down. The raincloak was choking her, and she clawed at the clasp until it ripped away. She needed Gir.

Between the night and the rain, she couldn’t see anything, barely knew which way was up, but when her knees hit the silt of the riverbed, there was no mistaking the curve of Gir’s head where it lay detached from the rest of him.

With burning lungs, she dug inside herself for the last dregs of her kinesis and spread its blue fire over the only aspect of Gir she could put her hands on. Her kinesis-fire crawled across the riverbed, seeking out the rest of her companion’s stone body, drawing them together to assemble him. Paws to legs to torso to wings to head to jaw. From the largest chunk to the smallest pebble.

The instant the light returned to Gir’s eyes, he grabbed her sleeve in his jaws. She choked out bubbles, her body convulsing, one hand over her mouth as if that would keep her from breathing muddy river water, and then Gir was dragging her with him as he clawed his way across and down the riverbed. She didn’t fight, she barely thought, too focused on making sure she didn’t take that last, desperate breath. Too focused on making sure she didn’t pass out and leave Gir so much rubble as her body floated away.

All she had to do was hold Gir together as he held onto her. As her chest spasmed and her vision dimmed, she concentrated on that one all-important task. Holding him together.

When she broke the surface, rain harsh on her face, she didn’t understand. It was only when Gir heaved her half out of the river and out of the rain that she realized there was air again. Then she gasped, sucking oxygen deep into her lungs, laying with her lower half submerged in swift-running water. Above was some sort of overhang next to a drainage pipe flush with runoff. She couldn’t see the sky. Nor any cops. Nor, above all, AspSec.

“Gir,” she croaked when she’d caught enough of her breath not to feel like she was still drowning.

Gir shoved his head beneath her arm like a puppy one tenth his size, rumbling. All she could do was laugh. He did his best to curl around her, to prop her up and out of the water, and it felt good place her hand on the stone between his eyes and let her kinesis fire crawl over him to make sure he was all there.

He was, he was. She didn’t know what she’d do without him.

He nosed at her ribcage, grumbled, and then shifted to do so again at her hip. It took her a second to realize what he was asking.

Muscles limp, she patted at her hip-pocket, checking the seal, and laughed again.

Good for free-diving to fifty fucking feet.

Just like that, they had a chance.

I know my influences on this are terribly blatant, but I had an incredibly fun time writing it. It's essentially a chase scene through a bunch of worldbuilding. Gir is one of my oldest characters without a home universe, and Azi was peeled off of a science fantasy thriller that I'd half plotted out before I realized it wasn't viable. I had no idea they'd work so well together. Gir also has some delicious horror potential, because his original stub of a short story started with him generating a great deal of blood (not his) in a jailbreak.

This is my last 7Days7Stories entry, and I think it's safe to say that I've learned an immense amount from the challenge. It was a proper challenge, helped me figure out what I can create that's short enough for a single day's writing, and it has helped get me back into writing short original stories.

Thank you for reading!

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