SECOND DRAFT: Hard Bank Left

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Celeste blinked and the WindSong, her other body, was gone. Her worst fear was that they had been caught in the blast, that the wreckage of her body was down below, burning along with her family. It wasn't till that moment that she'd really thought about it like that. The WindSong had been, in many ways, her original body. She had used it to accomplish tasks, travel, learn, connect with the people in her life.

Celeste folded herself over the guardrail at the edge of the roof, letting her torso hang unprotected at the chance of seeing her own decaying corpse. No red envelope, no rigid frame. They weren't down there.

A sound behind her caught her attention: a hatch being shut. Celeste pulled herself up, using her momentum to whip herself into a crouch. The nearest bit of shelter was twenty feet away at the base of an antenna. Aside from that the rooftop... was clear? No one... and yet she had certainly heard a hatch close. So someone had to have gone down, leaving the roof, alert others of her presence.

If they knew she was here then she had two choices: proceed with caution until she made it to the platform and cleared it, or draw as much attention to herself as she could and take them out early. She felt drawn to the second idea, she'd never been one for stealth anyway.

The hatch flew off its hinges when she lifted it. She hadn't intended to, and the wind didn't help, kicking up and catching the hatch like a sail. As she let go it clattered to the floor, dancing as it went, rolling in the wind. A ladder slid by her as she dropped through the opening. Twelve feet below her she landed in a crouch on a tiled floor. Chips of fractured tiles with a soft tinkling beneath her toes as she stood. The dark and empty wall she stood in terminated behind her. A door stood before her, she opened it, feeling the residual heat of the last person to have very recently opened to door as her hand hit the pommel.

Throwing up the door she leaned around the corner, checked both directions. The dark hall she stood in seemed empty. No signs of movement, no skittering footsteps of someone running from her. Then again, the person that had run from the room could have been hiding in one of any number of door running in either direction.

Her best bet for downward movement was to find a set of stairs. In buildings like this, particularly in Chicago, stairwells could generally be found near an outer wall at a juncture. All she had to do was follow this hall in either direction until she reached the estimated outer wall. Glancing to the left over her shoulder, and moved in the opposite direction, to the right. It just gave her a good feeling. At a run, Celeste expected to overtake someone at some point. No one. Nothing. The emptiness of the top floor made sense, though, when she thought about it. This floor was most likely reserved for maintenance, all the more reason to find the stairs. The hall truncated at an intersection nowhere near where Celeste calculated the far wall should have been. Left would take her closer to the westward wall, so she turned left. This hall terminated much closer to the wall, meaning there was a room between her and the wall. If she could find a door...

The first door she opened lead to a janitorial closet, the second to a large room filled with electronics, but the third? She'd hit the jackpot: the stairwell went down fifteen stories. She only needed to go down ten. As quickly as she could, Celeste scrambled down the stairs, her feet sliding in quick succession from one stair to the next without moving her upper body. When the stairwell switched back, she clenched her hand around the inner corner railing, using it as a pivot. At the base of each switchback she made an effort to check the door windows for guards or staff or anything. Nothing, no one, for seven floors.

Eight stories down she spotted what looked to be an orderly. She hammered on the glass, trying to attract his attention. He glanced over his shoulder, saw her. His eyes went wide. He was visibly shaking... and he ran. Alright, so maybe orderlies weren't the best people to attract the attention of if she wanted to start a fight, but maybe he'd alert someone, let them know she was there. Maybe she'd run into someone further on.