Broken People (Serial)

Thirty-Nine

The cannon sent Fei Lin soaring towards the sky and, for 4.6 seconds, she saw only the bright face of the moon. The wingless flight reminded her of the time when her robo-suit could actually fly, but her anti-gravitational field wasn't working, and Rake and Spinner hadn't been able to fix it yet. So, for now, she was confined to the ground, walking among regular people and flying only when they put her in that cannon and turned her into Rocket Girl. She despised that name, along with all of these cheap, western thrills.

As the descent began, her body instinctively reacted, preparing the robo-suit for landing. She'd done it in training countless times. Never during battle, though. She hadn't made it that far. Sometimes, she wondered what her life would have been like if that storage facility she was in hadn't exploded. What if the circus crew hadn't salvaged a pile of scrap metal, finding her inside?

The ground shook under her feet when she landed. She missed flying already. The flip she'd performed turned her around so she was facing the tent. Inside, the aerialists had to have started their act already. The robo-suit's internal clock said so. One would think they had a lot in common since they were all passionate about flying, but Fei Lin didn't feel any connection with them. It was difficult to forge any when she only spoke a few words in their language. The translation module had been disabled, along with other functions. For obvious reasons, she couldn't tell Rake and Spinner about it. After all, she was the enemy.

The crowd cheered and yelled something she understood to mean "more". There were four more charges in the cannon, enough for the rest of the night. To the delight of the kids, she did a little victory dance. She picked two faces in the crowd her database had identified as having been there before. To the horror of their parents, because she stood a half-meter taller than everyone else, she high-fived them. Her helmet was unable to convey emotions, but light flashed on the breastplate of the robo-suit.

It was all part of the show. They had trained her well. Granted, she had to earn her keep somehow. No one would feed her—or, in her case, provide the required nutrients—for doing nothing. Once she'd been discovered in the junkyard, she was lucky no one had cut the robo-suit and sold it by the ton, although it had come dangerously close to that. Of course, it could have been worse. They could have delivered her to the army and let them torture her until they extracted all the information she had. So, in the end, being fired from a cannon each night wasn't such a bad place to be.

Fei Lin danced her way back to the cannon and positioned herself inside the long barrel. Around her, the clowns burst into the crowd in their colorful costumes and made a big fuss out of firing the cannon with lighters borrowed from the audience. They refused to return them when people failed to produce papers proving their ownership. In the middle of the debate, one of the mimes dressed in black-and-white, with reflecting lines along the arms and legs, climbed on top of the cannon, straddled it, and pulled the switch, releasing her.

She couldn't feel the wind brush against her skin, but the sensors told her it was cold. The robo-suit kept her well-protected from the outside world. While she flew above the circus, she checked the activity on the ground as part of her payment for being rescued. See if anything out of the ordinary is happening. Spot the intruders. Prevent any casualties. Well, the last part was the enforcers' job because they didn't think she was capable of such violence, a fair assumption if you saw what poured out of the robo-suit in the rare occasions that she left it.

The food kiosks looked all right. It helped that they kept the alcohol in the beverages to a minimum. It was enough to give a faint buzz, but no more. The game area was another place that could experience a disturbance if people got too excited. Her optics had no problem adjusting to the distance to the big wheel and the machineries surrounding it. Nothing there, either. A quiet night, as usual.

Only that the usual monotony had been interrupted the past week by some brave and obviously insane burglars who wouldn't make the same mistake again. It was only by accident she now glanced past the train. No one else would have spotted those shadows. Nobody had any business on the other side of the tracks. What to do? Land first. She couldn't fly all the way there, but she could run.

Fei Lin took off through the crowd, her motion sensors informing her the enforcers were sprinting after her already. She was not supposed to leave the fairground, either.

Taking a five-ton bot across the fair during the peak hour without crushing anyone in the process was not an easy task. Her systems were able to predict people movement patterns, but it slowed her down. There was no time to make it around the train. So she jumped.

The suspension held.

She hadn't realized she had been holding her breath until an alert flashed at the edge of her visual field. The oxygen level in her blood was getting low, and her heartbeat reacted accordingly. The robo-suit provided her all the oxygen she needed, but it couldn't force it into her lungs. Fei Lin inhaled deeply and rotated her head in search of the enemy. The target display locked on the two shadows fifty meters away from her. Patched sheepskin coats. Cheap, old prosthetics. Obviously locals.

They hadn't heard her land. The stealth module had activated by default, and she hurried to turn it off. It didn't matter anymore. They couldn't escape. The enforcers would catch up soon, and it would be better if they didn't know about the stealth unit.

She ran towards the men, switching on the lights on her shoulders to blind them. They were too stunned to oppose any resistance when she grabbed them by the neck and pinned them to the ground. The tactical module worked, too. She hadn't had a chance to use it since joining the circus. This wasn't war, but if these men had come after the Nightingale, it was now. Big Dino had made that clear to her.

"Don't kill them! Don't kill them!"

Fei Lin understood the words "kill" and "don't", but there wasn't any danger the intruders would escape, so she waited for the enforcers to arrive.

The gray masks waved at her to follow them back to the train.

She had to drag the men, since she'd slammed them against the ground so hard, she'd knocked them out.

One of the enforcers opened a door, and she tossed the men into the empty car.