As the Moon Climbs

Sunlight glints off cars
creeping down the black highway
Empty azure sky

Delilah lay in the same spot for three days until the whispered call finally came through her earbud.

“North, two thousand meters, moving southwest.”

Slowly, calmly, Delilah took up her position behind her sniper rifle. Below the bluff where she crouched, the forest stretched for miles, dark and old and wary of intruders. She looked through her scope and tilted the gun, stopping when she reached the right distance, then rotated it to face north. From there it was simple to track southwest until she found the target.

Forty-two kills and she still wasn’t sure if she was doing the right thing. She always told herself it was for the greater good, but after every kill she went home and showered for an hour before collapsing into a nightmare-plagued sleep.

Get it over with, she thought, watching her target. She ignored the kind brown eyes, the radiant white hair, and squeezed the trigger.

“Assignment complete.”

Delilah felt cold as the recovery helicopter flew in to pick up another dead unicorn.

“Damn burglar-proof doors,” Calliope Cervantes muttered as she kicked at the metal slab and, instead of flying into the apartment, it acquired a hoverboot-shaped dent and scorch marks.

Maybe he didn’t hear that, she thought. Inside, the sound of a tasegun powering up told her otherwise.

So, plan B. Calliope pulled a SCID off her belt and slapped it on the dent, then ran for the end of the hallway. As the explosive blew the door off, she dove out the window and powered up her boots, flying around the corner toward the man’s apartment.

He was hiding behind an overturned table, firing wildly into the smoke. Calliope grinned. At that rate, his weapon would jam in a few—

The shots stopped and the man frantically shook the gun as if that would help. Show time, she thought.

Calliope flew at the window, powering off her boots and twisting feet-first before impact, letting the momentum carry her inside. The man never knew what hit him. It was her fist.

“IRS, bitch,” she crooned. “Your indenture starts now.”

Steve reminded himself that she had killed his father as he followed Paul’s instructions on how to dispose of her body. The whole house reeked as the chemicals dissolved flesh and bone into thick fluid that oozed down the drain.

Elena stood outside the doorway. “How much longer?”

“Few hours,” Steve replied.

“And then we do Gillis the same way?”

Steve nodded.

“Fucking gold digger.” She laughed humorlessly. “He thought we were going to let him take everything.”

“It wasn’t ours yet,” Steve said.

“It was going to be,” Elena snapped. “Don’t defend him.”

“I’m not. Just… clarifying.”

“You’re not developing a conscience, are you?”

He rubbed his eyes. “You make it sound like we did something wrong.”

“We killed two people.”

“They deserved it.”

Elena nodded. “Damn right. They killed Dad.”

Steve bit back a reply. She had never even met their father; he had gone off to war when she was a baby.

“Let’s wait in the kitchen,” he said. Elena nodded.

Steve eyed the disintegrating body warily. “Goodbye, Mom.”

You can train a horse to handle a lot of things, except robots, I thought sadly, my head bouncing off another rock. What had possessed me to try to ride one?

“Get back here, you coward!”

Oh, right. The guys with the arm cannons and the sunny dispositions. Of course, my brilliant escape plan hadn’t accounted for the horse bolting and flipping the saddle, leaving me hanging upside-down and eroding to death. Worse, it was a male horse.

I heard the whine of a pulse rifle and then a shout. This happened a few more times until suddenly I felt someone grab the horse’s reins and pull it to a halt.

A large pair of hover boots stomped into view, attached to a pair of muscular thighs, which in turn were connected to the rest of the shapely Calliope Cervantes.

“Callie,” I said. “Long time no see.”

“Edison,” she said, leaning on her rifle. “Hard-headed as always.”

Then the horse tranquilizer kicked in, and I discovered that the only thing worse than being under a runaway horse is being under a sleeping one.