Rust

<2 FLIGHT>

Shiloh cursed as her sneaker nudged an empty glass bottle, the noise now reverberating around the squalid building floor she was currently crouched in. 

In what can only be described as perfected fervor, her hands flew over the keyboard of her laptop in an attempt to ping the last location of her fallen drone.

Falcon had crashed.

Not only did it crash, but the drone had eaten it in the field. From her tracking station at home, where Shiloh had been monitoring the drones route and condition, it had seemed like something big took it down. She could only stare in shock as its head and camera received damage upon its collision into something, then one by one its other parts began to fall offline.

"Found you." Finally, Shiloh had tracked its location down by triangulating the last energy fields it had triggered. In this case it was between a cell tower, car, and abandoned SynTac. 

She snapped her laptop shut and was about run over to the adjacent building when the noise of shuffling feet stopped her. 

Her breath shuttered as she dove under a rotten, wood desk, hoping that the group would just pass through to the next floor.

It was them. The ones who took down her scuttler.

Who else would it be? They were the only people she could detect for 300 square kilometers, she reasoned. 

Swallowing her ragged breath, she willed her stuttering heart to cease its rapid movements. And with eyelids clenched shut and hands holding her equipment tightly to her chest, she listened as the footfall paced steadily around the room. There seemed to be two, three - no two - bodies scuffling around. Shiloh had made out at least four on Falcon's footage, so there were two unaccounted for, moving around the rest of the building. 

The soldiers made their way around the room, kicking piles of rubble and maneuvering around the cubicles of the abandoned office space as Shiloh sat their, stock still and terrified. There was simply nothing she could do.

It had looked like luck had finally been on her side as she heard their fading steps into the hallway again and up the stairs.

After waiting a moment to ensure that the visitors had gone, Shiloh stood up from her position and spotted the side of the building where a portion had decayed and crumbled away. In its place stood a gaping hole, where ten feet across stood the balcony of the room she needed to get into. And under, only 5,000 feet of free fall and a million chances of fatality. Shiloh just needed a decently-timed jump as well as all the luck from earlier and more to clear the railing into the room. Shiloh winced as she watched a piece of pebble tumble down the gap, thinking to herself that she would also need a hell lot of bravery too.

After backing up a couple of paces, breathing in and out with each step, laptop clutched and digging deep into her side, Shiloh bit the inside of her cheek before taking the first step of a full sprint.

Her feet had left the floor beneath her, and for a split-second, with her arms coming away form her body, her fingers and toes looking for anything to cling to, and her hair being brushed back by the wind and the momentum of falling, she had questioned if she would make the jump.

It was only momentarily though, and relief flooded her as she cleared the balcony and rolled into the apartment directly across, thankful she was not surrounded in a mess of her own bone and viscera. She checked the monitoring screen on her wrist that was hooked up onto her laptop, tracking the signal into the unit's study when -

"There you are baby! Someone or something did a number on you." Shiloh bent down and picked up the bot from the ground. It resembled the metal carcass of a fallen falcon now more than the majestic drone she sent out into the night. That was something she could deal with back home though, and she quickly began strapping it to her back. Its weight would definitely slow her down, but it was bearable for the time being.

As she stepped out of the apartment's front door, her mind was on returning to her home base and extracting the video intelligence her falcon had sacrificed itself for. What she was not expecting, though, was the barrel of a rifle to place itself into the nape of her neck once her foot breached the door frame.