Excerpt from the documentary, Corialisana: Ivory City
Corialisana is the second largest city on Selba Prime, ground was first broken in the summer of 2649he, with no time wasted in its construction. The several hundred square-mile plot of land to the south of Hojo City, the capital of Selba, is already a bustling metropolis.
What makes Corialisana different than most cities, even most cities owned by a corporate dynasty, is that it has several tenants set on its citizens for visual effect. The first thing you will notice when exiting the slingstation will be the lack of color. Corialisana has strict dress, building and vehicle color codes demanding grays and whites only.
Most citizens work for Coral-Cor, the benefactor of Corialisana, in some regard. This gives a sense of peace, prosperity, and orderly bustle to the movings and shakings of the city. Construction is constant, but Coral-Cor plans shift changes, traffic flows, and often housing arraignments in advance, making the city move like clockwork.
The structures themselves are even more interesting, in our next segment-
“Open your eyes.”
Last opens her eyes wide.
“Not that much.”
Last almost closes them, her mouth pouting.
“Less pouty.”
Last pulls her head back slightly, pushing air through her teeth. Hissing sexily.
“More arch.”
Last pushes the small of her back, her head turning to look over her sternum at the camera.
“Flip your hair a bit.”
Last whips her hair left while attempting to keep her face in a solid state, not moving even a molecule unnecessarily. Holding her breath.
“Now dive down.”
Last whips her head forward, her legs sliding back as her shoulders fall forward. Last extends her left hand and catches herself into a highly angled pushup, keeping her head up and her face angled towards the lighting rig.
“Fantastic. Go grab some water.”
Last gets up and walks to the craft services table for a bottle of water. She blinks, and her mind turns back on. She has been trained for years to just shut down and obey commands, pose when told, drink when told, and on occasion, fuck when told. The shoot is somewhat blasé; a hyper violent scene is literally dripping on the set, dead bodies, model burning buildings and holo-projections of running people and a destroyed city. Last is wearing a black leather jumpsuit, tight, her breasts almost bursting from the open zipper. Siren surviving or causing the apocalypse, a traditional shoot set up for the streaming videos. Torch flipping the bill for an ad campaign for some shit clothing line created by someone who won a reality show by making a shit clothing line on a show about developing shit clothing lines. Honestly, this douche-cannon wouldn’t even get his trash released, let alone promoted, except that he was the only person releasing something the week before the Race and the people who hired Last needed activities for her to do between 11am and 5pm while Cirrhosis is with his ‘friend’.
“Are you okay?” Last eS's Cirrhosis, not quite sure what answer she is prepared for. If he is fine, great, but what if he is running. Last still isn’t sure whether she would go with him or not. Last has to keep eating, looking around the set, keeping her breathing steady. Her thoughts are her own, but her emotions are being fed to people. Are being picked apart on cable news channels. Are paying her rent for next month, and next year in all honesty. Last isn’t sure what she would do if he asked her to come with her, and that if she did go if she would be going out of a sense of fealty or for monetary gain. Sensivise programs always make these decisions seem natural, that two people who have barely met are most definitely in love if they share more than fifteen minutes uninterrupted screen time. Regardless of whether they met in a plane, on a train, or on the surface of Sol.
“Yeah.” Comes a good thirty minutes later. Last is already getting her makeup durabrazed off. She gasps, and the makeup person sort of steps back.
“Sorry. Must have gone a little too deep.” She mutters, fiddling with her sand gun and going back to it without another word. Last could get used to this sort of life, even if luxury doesn’t really suit her style. Not to say that she doesn’t desire to be rich, but more so that people like her don’t generally become rich. Last thinks highly of herself, but has been reminded enough times to know her place. She will never be a supermodel in the traditional sense, but she has always thought of herself as something a bit more interesting than that. A galactic woman of interest. What would someone like that do?
“What now?” Let him decide. Better than flipping a coin, because you can’t blame change on change. That and Last only uses full bills, because she only ever has physical rico for drugs and she only gets it from prostitution.
“I gotta go.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Oh.”
“Look. I... don’t know what this is that we are doing.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got things to do that I cannot… I’m not sure if I can protect you.”
“From what?”
“I’m not sure. That is part of the problem.”
“Aren’t I already involved, or whatever?”
“Probably, but I think you would be safer here.”
“Really?”
“I won’t be here. So, yes.”
“Is that what you want?” Last’s heart is beating harder, she tries to breathe slowly and grimace. Attempting to play it off as pain as the makeup person starts working on removing the blood from her chest.
“Is that what you want?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Look. I’m not alone. I want to… Okay.”
“What?”
“Meet me at the finish line.”
“Where’s that?”
“It is supposed to be a secret, so don’t book your flight too early or the Captain will fucking gut me. Crystal Plaza.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I kind of planned our trip a little.”
“Heh.”
“Is it a date?”
“Don’t forget about me.” Last texts, her eyes watering slightly. Apparently it didn’t go the way she wanted, not that she has any idea what the fuck she had wanted. Perhaps an exciting trip filled with guns and mystery was it. Maybe the sand is getting in her eyes.
“Sorry. I’ll turn down the spray.”
“Yeah. You do that.”
A small circle appears in Last’s vision, a new session. Her life moving onward. She opens the channel, and allows the ansible software to record it for the World to see.
“Miss. I hear your boyfriend is leaving the station.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” Last is unsure of who she is speaking to now. She knows that her handlers would never talk to her like this, knowing what it could do for ratings. Last is done being sandblasted, and she takes to her feet. She is about twenty paces from a bathroom and the World-block, hopefully nothing happens until then.
“Don’t play stupid you fucking cunt.”
“Wow.” Last grunts aloud and via eS before stepping across the threshold of the restroom. What now? Last is alone on Torch, could she even go to her handlers with this? Could she go to the cops without getting Cirrhosis in trouble? Could she catch him before he leaves? Last can’t bring herself to try contacting him. Not after he left her here, what he is dealing with must be worse. This could just be a crazy fan.
“Don’t play clean you fucking whore.”
“What do you want?” This isn’t a fan. Last has been hacked, her icons are acting weird, and she doesn’t know what to do. She isn’t sure if cutting World-connection would even make it go away, or just result in whoever this is just coming to meet her.
“Where did he go?”
“What?”
“He left Torch. Where. Did he. GO?”
“How the hell should I know, he just fucked me for publicity. Our deal was ov
er.”
“Bitch.”
“Right.” Last mutters into the mirror, her face looking more weathered than usual. Stress, the redness from the sands, who knows? Last wants to cry, but doesn’t know the reason. Being in charge of her own security isn’t Last’s bag. She’s too dumb to be terrified, but not dumb enough to be oblivious. She is stuck in rut of indecision that lasts for a good forty-five minutes before some assistant something something comes in to snort illegal baggies and notices her sitting on the bathroom floor.
“What are you doing there?”
“Panic spiral.”
“Crashdown?” She brandishes a baggy of white powder in two fingers. Last’s mouth waters.
“Can’t make it any worse right?”
“Fuck if I care.”
“Okay then.” Last dips in a finger, puts the finger under her tongue and is out like a light in less than thirty seconds.
“Seriously. I got seventy thousand rico for this?” Baby Doll Judah Stardust says accusingly at Last Chance’s inert mass, while adjusting her wig in the mirror. Having to work an entire day as the assistant to some peon bullshit in charge of, maybe, hair? He wasn’t really doing anything in particular, but when he made Stardust work it was doing hair. Presumably that means he was in charge of that, in at least an indirect sort of way. All of it seems like a waste of money and time, something that could be done with at least half the number of feminine men and starving women.
“There is some fish swimming out there, a deal I’m not getting a cut of.” Stardust says to her own reflection. She finishes her adjustments, and grabs Last Chance by what she had assumed would be a wig. Getting traction, she lugs Last to her feet and attaches a small gravlifter to the drugged woman’s waist, making her noticeably lighter to carry. “This is like that fucking beet missile all over again, someone is hiding my money from me. And you, my gaping dripping cunt, are going to take me to it.”
Fifty minutes out of Olm-tok on a train leading out to Noulanto, the shit water little town Sunshine had locked in her LJ until she hit planetside, just to insure safety. Fifty minutes of peaceful quiet, well as much quiet as you can get on a packed train leading to the middle of nowhere on a backwater planet where everyone is actually HEADED to the middle of nowhere. Truckee managed to doze off, Sunshine was busying herself with a note to her mother (not that she could actually send it without giving away their position), Big was playing with himself (also known as ‘the usual’), and Epic was making some headway on the decoding.
That’s when their train derails. Some sort of explosion in the forward end, the room dips backward. Epic grabs Sunshine by the waist and trusts Truckee to hold Big. Luggage scatters everywhere as the train pushes past its end and flips slowly onto its back. Fire spreads in the forward section of the train, their car continuing to slide along the tracks.
“Are you okay?” Truckee says with several commoners pushed against him. Big kicks a woman in the face, which gets her to screaming. Truckee is only slightly too worried about the crash to be disgusted. Only slightly.
“Just fantastic.” Sunshine grumbles, a woman's arm is in her face.
“If you have time to be sarcastic you have time to climb out of this burning wreckage.” Epic says, pulling arms away.
“Can’t argue with that.” Truckee grunts, pulling himself along the rungs on the luggage rack. The train has mostly stopped, of course mostly is relative when a train is going a thousand miles per hour, but the screeching noise continues. The automatic brakes on the other cars are slowing the crash, but their car is still being pushed along the tracks decelerating with a burning aftertaste.
“But we haven’t stopped, how are we going to get out of this?” Sunshine half screeches, looking out of windows covered in smoke. The bottom of the cabin is bending and gnashing at the friction with the tracks, fire retardant foam is gushing from the floor/ceiling which is making slippery work of climbing against traffic to exit the train.
“From the windows and the geosynch footage I pulled, we are in the outskirts of town.” Epic says, kicking a window open while holding a pole for support.
“So farms then?” Truckee says, pushing the screaming woman behind him. She plummets down the car, which Truckee does his best not to think about.
“There is a bit of a warehouse district near here. We need to get somewhere with some coverage, I can’t defend anything from a fucking burning pedestal.”
“Again, another good one.”
“But how are we going to get out of here?”
“That is a good question, as whomever did this is probably waiting outside of the train for us to show ourselves.”
“I was more talking in a, without getting my face ground off on the tracks, sort of fashion.”
“Just shut up.” Epic yells forcefully, grabbing Sunshine around the waist and tossing her out of the window.
“What?” Truckee screams.
“Come on.” Epic grins over his shoulder as he jumps after her.
“What?”
“HE WANTS YOU TO JUMP!” Big shocks Truckee mildly, using some sort of personal defense tazer built into his tiny palms. Truckee instinctively listens and is rolling out of the train onto a foam cushion before he even understands what has occurred.
“What the fuck is this?” Truckee laughs hysterically. They were just going very very fast, wait.
“Sides of the train deploy this foam thing, it’s like shitty wings.” Epic yells over the wind, they are still attached to the train. An accident mitigation device, the foam wings deploy on emergencies, allowing passengers a chance of rescue should something pretty terrible happen. However, this is a bit worse than that. Many of the passengers are in full panic, and Epic really can’t think of a way to blame them. They are all truly fucked, these wings do not fly and eventually someone is going to fire rocket (?) number two. Well, not as fucked as the people in the first five cars (victims of rocket [still not sure on this] one).
“So we are still going-“
“Two hundred miles an hour and we’re on fire.” Epic points at the corner of the wing, which is ablaze. The train itself stops with the car in front of them. The cars before that had either exploded from whatever hit them, or had already been pushed off the side of the track.
“Holy shit.” Sunshine screams, noticing that they are most definitely on a rail about three hundred feet off of the ground. Buildings are passing by quickly, some shorter, but many a bit taller. Businesspeople looking at them stream by, with a mix of confusion and terror. It is nice of them to stop filing paperwork and at least observe the train’s demise.
“Okay. Listen VERY carefully.”
“What?” Truckee yelps.
“Lis-sten TO ME.”
“What?!” Truckee is looking at the fire, at the ground, ahead at the slag. People around him are huddling by the train as if it would protect them in ways the first five cars were incapable of doing to the people ahead of them.
“Seriously?” Epic looks at Truckee quite sternly, and that manages to at least trigger his upper mental functions into some sort of order.
“I’ll come closer.”
“We’re going to have to jump.”
“WHAT?!” Both Sunshine and Truckee say. Big is unfazed, which is expected as he probably would have survived a rocket hit car let alone a slowly-burning-and-possibly-falling-from-300-feet-in-the-air car.
“I’m going to blow off a corner of this wing, which we are going to plummet with. Then I’ll throw a grenade at that building about four up. We’ll ride the concussion and probably survive.”
“What the fuck kind of bodyguard kind of bull shit is this.” Truckee mutters, walking behind Epic to the corner of the wing, knowing at this point that going with it is just about his only choice, and seeing as how he is going to die anyway, might as well have someone to blame it squarely upon.
“This is so not going to work.” Sunshine half yelps while she we
dges her legs into the flame retardant padding, which nicely has hooks and what not to hook oneself into should whatever the fuck sort of accident they were actually planning for were to occur.
“Probably not. Well, here we go anyway.” Epic says with a smirk and shoots the wing off, clipping a man in a suit who seems somewhat angered by the shrapnel. He glares at Epic as the four of them plummet from sight. Epic has his feet hooked into the padding; his right hand is holding an edge of the wing. The piece is triangular, a little long on one side and a little jagged in the hypotenuse area. He had Truckee and Sunshine sit near the middle, Big is by the far left corner pointing a small grenade launcher at the closing building.
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Fuck.” Truckee chimes in; his eyes clenched, his teeth clenched, and his asshole clenched. Epic and Big fire simultaneously (or as close as possible) ahead at an angle, and the explosion crumples the top of the building inward. Pieces of concrete and burning tar paper spiral everywhere, taking chunks of the wing with them. Sunshine and Truckee are screaming, but you can’t really hear it over the concussive wave blowing through the building as they approach. The blast slowed the wing a good deal, eliminating most of the lateral motion, but gravity is still happening everywhere and the building below is just getting unstable when a giant piece of shit with four people vaguely attached drops on it.
The wing plummets through the roof easily, breaking beams and wood floors, shards of granite from countertops and composite porcelain from bathtubs scatter amongst fake wood, bits of crystal monitors, cords from random devices, the fluff from inside beds, and other random shit people have in a house. Everything happens in instants, with floors breaking beneath them like boards in a dojo. No resistance, just carnage. A core sample sixteen floors deep is made before the wing breaks in half. Epic has to jump to end up on Sunshine’s side, trusting Truckee to Big. Epic’s half creaks through two more floors and lands precariously wedged between a central beam and some plumbing for the floor below.
“Omigodwhatthefuckinghellshitfuckingcrap.” Sunshine is looking straight up at the wake of their fall, pieces of flooring, half beds, tendrils of meat that are most likely human dangling from thirds of couches mangled beyond only the most creative imagination.
“Yeah yeah. Don’t seize out on me.” Epic grunts, his position somewhat tenuous as he had never fully grabbed on, and now is sort of half hanging by one foot. He swings his weight a bit left, in an attempt to grab a nearby rung, but that gives the whole wing-shard an awkward lurch.
“Whatthefuckarewegoingtodo?”
“Fucking take a downer, shit. I’m the one who’s about to die, and it would be nice if I could at least do that in some fucking peace.”
Sunshine looks down very briefly, not a girl who’s afraid of heights per se, but riding an ultra-coaster is not exactly the same thing as plummeting through a building after being in a train crash. An extremely loud explosion happens to Sunshine’s right, Epic’s left.
The wing twists in the pipes below, water spraying Epic’s face, which is dangling over the edge of the wing. Epic attempts to pull himself up, but the water makes his hands too slick to catch purchase on the thin foam. Sunshine is screaming again, and then the wing starts lurching forward (Epic’s backward). The water starts to gush; gallons of cold water threaten to drown Epic. He turns on his head as much as possible, to see the four floors open to him. The one at eye level is about half above him, without the water (which is making this somewhat difficult to even see). Sunshine is two floors higher, but it doesn’t look particularly sturdy. Below, the wing is half tangled in the water main of a floor below him. If he let go now, maybe…
“Sunshine?”
“The train exploded.”
“Obviously. We need to get out of here.”
“The train.”
“I hear you. I’m going to need you to do something for me before we both die here.”
“Exploded.”
“SUNSHINE!” Epic is starting to lose his patience. Okay, he never really had any patience. Sunshine looks down briefly at him, her eyes all crazed.
“I need you to slide down the wing. We’re going to try and get to the floor below me before the wing falls.”
“Right. I’m just going to slide down four stories.”
“It’s that or wait to fall a hundred.”
“You really are romantic.”
“You should see me on Valentine’s Day.”
“I’m letting go.” Sunshine closes her eyes and pulls her feet out of their wedges. Dangling for a brief moment by her hands, she sucks in breath and opens her hands. Sliding down the wing slowly, but picking up speed as she gets to the wet part. “Holy shit!”
“Okay. Log a downer program, I want you limp in like thirty seconds.” Epic grunts as he lets go, intending on catching the model when they both hit the bottom floor. Their weight should be relatively inconsequential to the overall weight of the thing they are on, but with any balance situation, one should not take the importance of any bit too lightly. As if to agree, the wing begins to lurch forward as Epic slides down.
“-elp.” Sunshine gargles as she gets hit with more water. The mains are rupturing from the weight, pressure, and now increase in torsion. Epic gives their slide about fifteen seconds until it spins far enough forward on its axis to fall farther into the building. One shot.
Epic rolls onto the floor below, managing not to injure himself on the shards of plastic flooring or the jutting pipes. Sunshine is right behind him, but the wing is falling towards him, and she is definitely going to land either on a pipe or down the hole the wing is making into the next floor. Epic runs towards her, jumps and grabs her. Luckily she is quite limp, and practically unconscious. He leans back and hopes his feet don’t slip. Hitting the wing with both feet extended, he dips into a crouch very quickly and pushes as hard as he can backward. The wing finishes its turn and slides downward as Epic lands with Sunshine in someone’s destroyed living room. Epic knows it isn’t quite over yet, the creaking above says that much. He grabs Sunshine under her shoulders and pulls her to the front of the apartment, managing to get to the front door before the top of the wing breaks through the ceiling above them.
The door behind them opens suddenly, Big and Truckee stand on the other side. Big grabs Epic by the ankle and pulls him backward with a force that causes him to trip forward as he flies backward through the opening. His face misses getting taken off by about a centimeter. Sunshine is thrown back against the door behind them in the hall, she grunts but no one can hear her over the destruction. The hallway starts reorienting towards the center of the building, the doors creak and crack. Pieces of the ceiling crackle and fall to the floor.
“Fucking shit.” Epic smirks as he pushes himself up to his feet.
“We’re probably all going to die this time.”
“How did you guys?”
“I don’t even know. We need to get out of here now. That guy with the rockets might know we are here.”
“Shit. Right. Okay, I’ll grab Sunshine.” Epic stutters as he gets his legs beneath him on the slowly shifting floor. The building is going to collapse altogether soon, the trick is going to be getting out of here before that happens.
“Eh?”
“Sunshine, get up.” Epic yells, pulling her up by the shoulders. Big is looking for a way out, generally the stairs should be the safest. Epic drags Sunshine, her feet barely working; he attempts to eS her eButler. Her eB throws some stops into the downer programs, and her legs at least start mimicking walking motions.
“Stairs look stable. We should hurry.” Big yells over some not so reassuring explosions. The elevator shaft appears to be keeping the nearby staircase sturdy, but the building doesn’t have more than four minutes before it collapses entirely.
“Those stairs aren’t going to hold. We are too high.” Epic says, half to himself. He pulls Sunshine to the w
indow, or the hole where the glass cracked out of at least. Shards crackle under his feet as he looks out to see the surrounding area. Another building is near, but not near enough for anyone other than Big to get to. By being thrown.
“Which way do you think the building is going to fall?” Epic asks Big.
“Why are you asking him that?” Truckee says, getting a bad feeling.
“The wings pushed in two directions…” Big says, ignoring Truckee, who is not enjoying this line of questioning. Big's processor is running through scenarios based on the masses involved and the local net’s knowledge of the structure of the building.
“The building will fall outward from the center slightly and then straight down.” Epic halts the decoding for a second, thinking his survival might be a priority at this point. His icons go bold; he accesses Threat Assessment™, pulling through possible escape routes to the best of his ability. One of his bone amps seems to be offline.
“Sounds right!”
“Great. The stairs are out, we won’t make it down. We need to get as far away from the center as possible.” Epics says to himself.
“You have to be fucking kidding me. We’re jumping to the next building aren’t we.”
“Help me kick down this door and you’ll find out.”
“On three.”
“Three!” Truckee yells, tired of waiting already. They kick the door down to find a woman and her child huddling under the aggregate of their furniture. Truckee salutes the child as they barge in unannounced.
“Sorry.” Epic mutters, shooting out the window with his gun. The next building over is only across an alley. He eases Sunshine onto the unsteady fire escape, before following her outside.
“Hey!” Sunshine points at a pull-tab attached to a metal slab on the side of the composite brickwall. Some sort of high speed escape slide.
“Fucking shit! Truckee, call that bitch out here.”
“Miss, you should bring your son out here. This building is going to collapse.”
“Oh.”
“I’d recommend you weren’t here when that happened.”
“Coming.” She says, dusting herself off.
“Okay. Looking at the instructions, we need to have everyone fold their arms and go.”
“Right.” Sunshine says pulling the lever as the residents come out onto the crowded fire escape. Truckee throws the grill off the side of the building, not liking how it is crowding him. A neon yellow plastifiber chute shoots towards the ground powered by some sort of small explosion. Small nails attach to the concrete on the ground, and a whirring noise can barely be heard over the building’s creaking.
“One at a time. Sunshine go first.”
“O-okay.” Sunshine says. Just like at the waterpark, she crosses her arms and hopes her top doesn’t fly off. Okay, not accurate, she hopes that the top half of her body isn’t severed or something. She screams as she goes down, which does not make the kid going second work as well as time would recommend.
“Big, grab that kid and go.”
“Come on, son!” Big grabs the kid by the waist and hoists him over his head, throwing the kid down the tube and jumping after.
“Eric!!”
“You’re next.” Epic points at the woman, who doesn’t have to be told twice.
“Truckee.”
“Right.”
“If I don’t make it…” Epic mutters.
“Neither do we. Hurry behind me.”
“Heh. Right.” Epic is focused on the icons and graphics cluttering his vision. Ten seconds. Maybe twenty. Vector analysis isn’t pretty.
The building starts lurking sideways as Truckee is sliding down the chute, small gravlifters keeping the plummet to acceptable levels. He lands with Sunshine still standing near the building. He grabs her by the arm and pulls her across the street.
“We need to get the fuck out of here.”
“But Epic.”
“He’s coming now. Run straight away.”
The woman grabs Eric, Big jumps on Truckee’s shoulder; Sunshine looks over her shoulder and starts to sprint with them. The top three floors slide inward, the center of the building buckles outward making a horrible grinding noise. People screaming can be heard over the implosion that marks the beginning of the end. Windows shatter throughout the building, everywhere that it hasn’t occurred already. To their right, towards the tracks, two more buildings are also in the process of collapse. Fire is spreading in several more. Everywhere people are either running (intelligent) or standing and gawking (not-intelligent), hovers are zipping away in every direction, terrestrial cars clogging the streets as detritus clogs everything up where traffic doesn’t.
The building they were in collapses seconds later. Truckee gulps for air, not looking back. He knows where they are going. That will not be enough, but at least he’s got a goal. If…
“Is he coming? I can’t see through this dust.” Sunshine says, breathing heavily. Again happy she wasn’t wearing high heels like usual. Sunshine is considering attempting a revival of steel-toed combat boots when this is over, not exactly kosher with a micro-mini, but little is anyway.
“Electricity and World Access are down!” Big yells over the car horns, and the obscenities shouted by their cars of origin. The dust chokes everything, visibility dropping from blocks, to block singular.
“Great. Woman, do you know where we are?” Truckee yells to his left, but the woman is no longer with them.
“I think she tripped at the last intersection.” Sunshine yelps, she cannot keep this pace too much longer. She has two adrenaline programs going, but her body can only produce so much naturally.
“So we’re two people with huge bounties, who are lost on a strange planet. Fantastic.”
“I have geosync access, I can get us there, son!”
“I knew I didn’t drop you for a reason.”
“Turn left at the next burning car.”
“Okay.”
Another explosion, dust blasts from behind. Tiny stones crackle across everything, giving open skin painful abrasions. Sunshine winces but keeps running. Epic is dead, she’s sure of it. Hell, she’s pretty sure the woman and her child are dead too. Sunshine looks over her shoulder a split second, and sees nothing behind her. A wall of gray smoke and the occasional glow of fire, some people staggering out of the deluge blinded.
“He’s dead isn’t he?”
“Probably.”
“Who is?” A man standing on the burning car states plainly. Truckee slams to a halt, dropping Big on his face. The man is tall; leaning back on his hips awkwardly, like his lower back has a couple too many vertebrae, his hands to either side. Holding large pistols with strange muzzles. Truckee has no knowledge of guns, but can judge from his posture and the size of the weapons, that this man is the rocketeer. Truckee knows him, and it takes about three seconds for him to pull it together, because he never thought he would meet this man anywhere ever.
“Vii Ariable.”