Flight

For a moment, Molly felt like she hanged in the air like the smog that curtained the towering city through which she raced. Mercifully, that moment passed quickly enough and she was falling, missing balconies, billboards and lights of every shape and color by only a few centimeters. Exuberance and adrenaline rushed through her body, giving her added power when she threw out an arm and grabbed an overhanging balcony.

The impact of the metal skeleton in her hand on stone sent a thunderclap through the street that vanished into the distance and darkness below her and jarred her arm almost out of place. She could feel the artificial tendons in her arm adjust to the stress where human tissues would have snapped and swung herself onto the now cracked concrete.

She felt her arm shiver as a high-frequency ray grazed it. So she had not lost them yet. Molly grinned and leaped onto the neighboring balcony eight meters away. A ray grazed her thigh, causing muscles, human and artificial to falter in the middle of her next leap, sending her careening downwards.

This time when she met stone, it was not by choice. Molly ricocheted off a landing with her left shoulder and kept falling. Another ray penetrated her right side, making it numb as she fell. Anger flooded her. This was not how they were going to get her.

Twisting in the air, Molly threw out her hand and gripped a girder on the building, letting her body swing through the window. The force of her body smashed the glass and sent her soaring through the huge, abandoned room over heavy machinery. The metal glowed as the last bits of light filtered in through the grimy windows behind her.

Landing on the floor smoothly, Molly ducked behind a towering compressor that had dozens of gears sticking out of it and waited for her heart to beat more regularly. A hum filled the air and figures started flying into the room through the broken window.

“Molly, where did you go?” a voice called out. The figures now hovered and zoomed around the room like a swarm of giant insects. “I just want to talk. You know, maybe make another business deal?” It was Andre, the man who sent blood coursing through her body and rushing into her muscles. Several of the men on the hovering disks laughed.

The right side of her body tingled with an unpleasant tightness but Molly now felt herself again. Getting hit by the ray was careless. But this carelessness fit with her overall mood. Glancing around the machine that hid her, Molly could see Andre drifting near the broken window with two goons beside him as the others glided between the towering machinery. Molly felt power flow to her legs as she crouched, then let her muscles propel her through the air straight towards him.

The goons could not have reacted fast enough unless they knew what was coming. In the blink of a human eye, Molly had one arm around Andre’s neck, while with the other she swung herself back through the shattered window and into the night.