Maris Fero
Riff-raff, Street Rat.
A mile into her circuit and the runner had yet to slow or show any discomfort in maintaining her pace. Each long stride the running woman took was matched to the rhythm of the music that played in her ears. She negotiated the crowded streets with effort spent to weave through the groups of bodies without drawing more attention than was necessary. Another faceless civilian, using the street as her gym.
On the approach to the barriers which were meant to keep pedestrians away from the Magrail bridge ahead, she showed no sign of breaking stride, vaulting with expert precision to clear the obstruction. Her actions betrayed no sign of concern for the trespass and she carried on into the dark of the narrowing platform.
Even if her features hadn’t been obscured by the hood of her jacket, the runner was certain she would not have been recognized here, if anyone had the focus required to have spotted her passing at all. The training she had practised coupled with talents she had been gifted at her birth had honed her skills in the art of movement, and the challenge of remaining unnoticed.
The empty platform was in shadow, the last transports to service the station were terminated until the coming of dawn. Undaunted, the silhouette form proceeded as she had been, venturing further into the dark toward the far end of the walkway, before skipping lightly onto the slender balancing surface of the magrail supports and onward out over the skeletal steel framework and over the glimmering city below.
Spread out before the figure was a vista of bright colour and movement, this city shared her homeworld’s taste for garish neon expanses, but the scale of the urban environment was far less imposing, this place had not been built to house billions. No underslums, no caverns of works or cloudscraping spires.
But the water, that was something. She paused, daring to stop briefly to drink in the view offered in this new place. The river was a rippled mirror, streaked with the bright reflections of the city that lived upon its banks, darkly shadowed boats were ebon voids on the liquid’s surface and streetlights on the opposite shore gave the impression of strings of brightly glowing pearls lining the water’s edge and stretching off as far as she might see. There were no rivers in her city.
Moving again, the figure stalked silently along the narrow beam of the service rail, eyes falling to regard the lights of buildings and speeders moving below, far enough to look like toys from her perspective. There on the exposed structure of the bridge, the wind was considerably stronger, but the daredevil who walked this tightrope act had lived on the edge of such vertiginous drops for most of her life and simply enjoyed the feeling of the air on her face.
Soon enough she was over the centre of the water and, with a deft manoeuvre, she hooked a leg around the edge of a rail and let her body roll off and under the bridge structure, hanging with her leg hooked over two struts. Upside down, the view was different again, the river was a sky now, or perhaps she was deep underwater already and submerged in this night-land, maybe breaking the river’s surface would reveal another world above?
She suppressed her wandering imagination for the moment, rolling her head around and feeling the satisfying clicks as she straightened her posture and loosened any tension. A trio of blackened objects, intricately machined metallic discs, were retrieved from a pouch at her waist and carefully positioned against the first couplings in reach. Each disc snapped into place with a reassuring magnetic thunk and held firm. She checked the positioning and the fitting once before tensing to pull herself back onto the correct axis again.
It was a good view, she considered as she moved on again, pacing out another interval to continue her task. It was a shame they would have to spoil it soon enough.
Business is business.