NOVEL NEXT Chapter 134: In Real Life
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Claire: There's never better than a half-and-half chance of her taking her purse with her when she leaves. It's a good thing the portable is mounted to her bones or she'd forget that too.
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November 29th, 2090, about 8:15 pm MST, Montana City
It was nighttime in the city. One of her favorite times, generally, after the sun had gone down just enough for the temperature to drop, but still long before the deep freeze of midnight. The concrete released the heat it had soaked in during the day: warmish concrete, cold wind, clear sky. Her breath came out in puffs of white and went in like fire.
She vaguely regretted leaving her jacket, but it wouldn't have helped much. What she had left in her closet was mostly late-summer and fall leftovers, and, as Claire had pointed out, Karen ran hot anyway.
Karen tended to kick off her shoes whenever she entered a building, if she could get away with it. Karen wore mock tops everywhere she went. Karen did all this because she was a sweaty beast and found it extremely embarrassing when other people noticed. It was much easier to decrease the amount of outerwear and run cold sometimes than to freshen up in a public restroom and hope for the best.
She'd done that before: whore baths in the sink at a Barnes & Noble, using paper towels to dry off her armpits just enough to get the antiperspirant to stick. She'd hated it. It was absolutely undignified. And when she started to smell? No, that was beyond the pale, and could not be allowed to happen.
Thus: the barefoot bus rides, the crop tops, the mocktops. It was all about breathability, in the end. During the fall, near late summer, as August turned into September, she could use the excuse that there were still warm days ahead.
So, she had bought a spectacularly impractical crop-top jacket: denim, a great match for her eyes, with a little brown leather panel showing a fox family in a woodland setting. It'd be waiting for her in her dorm closet. That extra layer on her arms wouldn't hurt, for the way back. She'd have to head back to get her keys eventually.
On she ran through the night in the cold November air, her bare midriff pebbled with gooseflesh.
Her behavior felt reckless, but she'd needed to get away. In a sudden moment of horror, a sharp-edged thought had cut through her adrenaline: was she even still enrolled? Had she been dropped from financial aid? Had she just gotten kicked out of her dorm?
If she had, would she owe back an entire semester of dorm fees? She cringed at the thought of the thousands of dollars that would be. She imagined the letter: fifth-class mail, no signature, a passive-aggressive font. Then the room key changed. All her stuff dumped in the hallway for her classmates to pick through.
She knew that wasn't reasonable. It wouldn't be legal. It hadn't happened.
But knowing and feeling weren't two sides of the same coin. They were two different coins. In two different piggie banks.
She ran. The adrenaline made her heart pound, her temperature spike. Everything felt too warm for a November evening, which was vaguely worrying. Probably adrenaline. She had to get away.
She'd stop by later and apologize to Claire. Not that Claire would need it. Claire would understand. So would Harry.
She'd poured all her work, all her life goals, everything she'd cared about since she was a teenager into this project. The bracelet. Perfect the bracelet. Gordon wrote the firmware. Now she needed trials, then human testing, and one of humanity's oldest evils would be that much closer to being beaten.
Or someone had said the wrong word to the wrong administrator, and she'd just be kicked out of college. That worked too.
She was so mad. And scared. Bad things probably happened to girls who keyed billionaires' cars, so she'd maintained control by leaving her keys on the counter.
She didn't regret leaving. She probably would've regretted staying. But it was cold.
Headlights caught her from behind—high beams—throwing her shadow across the Montana asphalt. She moved to the side to let the vehicle pass.
It didn't.
It slowed down, keeping pace. Its lights lit her up like a target. Then it turned on its signal—like it was going to turn into the empty verge beside the road.
She slowed down, keeping a safe distance—thirty feet—as the car pulled over and came to a stop.
A tall figure stepped out.
She recognized him instantly from the silhouette: the bigger of Hiram's two bodyguards. The one almost tall enough to meet his principal eye to eye. He walked toward her with quiet confidence.
"You need to get in," he said. "The boss would like a word with you."
"I'll pass," she snarled.
He laughed, a short grunt with no respect in it at all. He looked her up and down, not like a sex object, but like a fridge he was about to pick up.
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"I'm afraid that's not how it works," he said, laughter still in the back of his tone.
He stepped forward.
She ran.
He pursued.
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She sprinted past the empty church parking lot and ducked down the side street. No sidewalks here, just gravel and patchy snowmelt. The houses were mostly dark, porch lights off, blinds drawn.
Her breath steamed in front of her. Every inhale stabbed at her throat.
She veered toward an office center, but even that was closed. Dumpsters on the side. A short wall. She vaulted over it, dropped hard, and used the gap between the trash bins to crouch, listening.
She heard bootsteps in the pea gravel, slowing. He was listening too..
She slipped out the back, cut through a yard. Chain-link fence: at least that was easy. Cold metal bit her hands, but she was over fast.
Somewhere behind her, motion lights flared on. Not from him, though, just from someone's garage. Wrong yard. Wrong angle. She didn't wait to see if it helped or hurt. She ran.
A barking dog started up somewhere.
She crossed a small field, the grass brittle and rimed with frost. Ahead: the dump. Low walls, scattered trailers. And beyond that, a gravel service road. If she could just get there—
She skidded on a patch of ice, recovered, and vaulted a plastic barrier.
Behind her, he cursed, growing louder.
He was gaining.
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Ahead, half a block away, something glowed in the dark.
OPEN.
Neon red.
Her potential salvation was a squat building with fenced-in tennis courts, a pair of automatic doors that whooshed open as she drew close. A 24-hour gym.
It had an empty parking lot, but the lights were on inside—brutal fluorescence washing over treadmills and weight machines.
She didn't overthink it. She just ran.
Surveillance. Safety.
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She broke into a sprint.
Behind her, he did too.
No hesitation. No slowing.
Just the sound of boots pounding after her, closer now. Her breath froze in her lungs.
Her heart spiked. Not from exertion, now, but from fear.
He wasn't going to stop.
Even for cameras.
That was the moment panic hit.
Real panic. Full-body, animal-brain panic.
She threw everything into the sprint, arms pumping, lungs burning, shoes slapping against the pavement as the gym doors slid open ahead of her with a blessed automatic hiss, light flooding outward like a spotlight.
Just one plan, in her terrified brain, had floated to the surface.
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She planted her left foot on the mid-height frame of the automatic glass door.
Her right foot rose up in a hard stomp against the firm, metal frame.
It launched her upward, spinning.
Her body rotated forward, tight and fast,seven feet off the ground, now.
She brought her hands down, spine curled, legs tight.
Landing in a front-leaning push-up stance, arms bending deep to absorb the fall.
Then the rebound, hips locked, legs jack-knifing downward, like a plank.
Her feet, with all her body's momentum, missed.
She missed.
Her heels hit him just above the knee with everything she had.
CRACK.
He didn't even have time to react.
His leg folded wrong, around the new joint, then his whole body pivoted around the impact.
Momentum carried him forward, his upper half whipping around uncontrollably.
His head smashed through the glass.
The door buckled.
Safety glass exploded into glinting pebbles and crazed cracks.
Karen landed hard, hitting her shoulder, then her hip, a stitch of pain blazing across her side.
But she was breathing. Heaving, gasping breaths, but she was doing it.
He wasn't moving.
But how long would that stay true?
Karen pushed herself up. Every limb screamed. Her hands were shaking so hard she couldn't tell if they were cold or if she was just terrified.
She doubled over and threw up, right on the rubber mat. Choking up burning bile, her body shuddering, she groped for paper towels and tried not to think about what she was doing.
When she could breathe again, she fumbled for her portable, then gave up and voice-activated it.
9. 1. 1.
Her voice sounded like she had a frog in her throat.
"Someone's hurt. Someone's down. He—he followed me. He—he crashed through the glass. I don't know if he's breathing."
She turned to look back.
The call dropped. Maybe her fault?
She didn't care.
She had to get home.
She stepped around the blood and glass, not even looking at the body now. Just a lurching movement, half-limp, half-run. One of her shoes felt funny: a bent sole. Her shoulder was useless. Her mouth tasted like acid.
Cold air slapped her face as she left the gym. A breeze, dry and biting, cut deep now that her adrenaline was wearing off. Her stomach was cramped. Her vision was greying at the edges.
She left the gym on muscle memory alone.
One shoe kept dragging. She knew she should stay. Wait. Talk to someone. Hit and runs are bad. But her thoughts were fuzzing out, words sluicing off the sides of her brain.
She'd meant to call Claire. Or maybe Harry.
She hadn't eaten. Hadn't eaten since what? Breakfast? It had been something small.
The cold made it worse. Her body burned hot, then too cold, then nothing.
She walked through another crosswalk without seeing the light.
The tingling in her fingers was sharp now. Her head pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
Hypoglycemia.
She recognized it, dimly. She knew what was happening. She'd felt it before, but this time she had no energy drink, no Claire.
One more block.
She turned the corner.
And the world just fell away.
Her legs crumpled under her. Her shoulder hit the pavement. Somewhere, someone shouted her name—but maybe that was just because she'd been thinking about her.
Then: silence.