Fast and Free

The city below glowed in muted tones, its lights smudged by the drizzle that clung to the windows like breath on glass. Evening crept in slowly—lavender, then violet, then the murky blue of early night. Edna sat perfectly still in her wheelchair, her hands folded neatly in her lap. To anyone passing by, she looked empty, expressionless, as if she were simply watching the rain slide down the building.

But inside, she was nowhere near this room.

She was running.

Bare feet pounding through warm grass, arms spread wide to catch the wind as it rolled across the fields like a living thing. The sun hung low, orange and full, and the air buzzed with insects and the soft hum of life. She could smell the earth, feel the heat on her skin. A farmhouse stood in the distance, paint peeling, screen door rattling with every breeze. And there—faint but unmistakable—her mother’s voice carried across the pasture.

“Edna! Supper!”

She turned, grinning. She was young. She was fast. She was free.

The memory shimmered like heat rising from asphalt, then wavered… then bent. A raindrop streaked down the window in the present moment, and the field blurred into a watercolor wash of childhood she struggled to keep in focus.

She blinked.

The city lights became fireflies. The distant car horns became her mother’s soft call. The sterile smell of the nursing home morphed into the warm scent of cornbread cooling on the windowsill. Edna reached for it—mentally, physically—her hand twitching slightly in her lap as if she could grab hold of the memory and anchor it in place.

But it slipped.

The farmhouse faded. The field shrank. The summer sun dimmed. All that remained was the drizzle tapping at the window and the cool hum of the room’s fluorescent light.

Edna exhaled slowly, a whisper of breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

She knew, somewhere deep inside the fog, that the fields were gone. That her mother had been dust for decades. That memories were tricksters now—flickering, teasing, offering her only the edges before dissolving. But part of her didn’t mind. Part of her was grateful for even the fragments.

She lifted her gaze again, watching the city blur and scatter beneath the rain.

For a heartbeat, she was back in the field, sun on her shoulders.

For another, she was simply an old woman in a chair, staring out at a world she no longer recognized.

The drizzle softened.

And the past, like the city lights, drifted in and out—glowing faintly in the dusk before dimming once more into the quiet darkness.

 

On the Hunt

Above ground, the storm had settled into a bruised, ugly sky—low clouds swollen with heat, lightning flickering behind them like an animal pacing inside a cage. The ruins of Los Angeles lay smoldering beneath it, shards of skyscrapers jutting up like broken ribs.

And moving through the wreckage came the troops.

They were not soldiers in the old sense.
No flags, no insignias of a once-proud nation.
These were the reassembled forces of what remained of the collapsed regime—commandos clad in matte-black armor, their helmets lit with thin, red scanning lines. They moved with the rigid precision of men trained to obey, not to think.

They swept the streets in tight formations, boots crunching over shattered glass, burnt asphalt, and the brittle bones of former civilization.

“Thermal sweep again,” the lead officer ordered, voice crackling through static.

A soldier raised a handheld reader.
A grid of heat signatures pulsed and danced across the screen.

Nothing human within twenty meters—only cooling ruins and the occasional scurrying creature brave enough to exist in the open.

But they knew she was out here.

They knew both of them were.

Maren.
Silen.

Two names whispered through the ranks like specters—rumors tied to rebellion, unexplained resistance pockets, encrypted signals the troops never fully decoded. Every commander had a different theory:

They were fugitives.
They were symbols.
They were dangerous.
They were illusions.

But the higher-ups, the remnants of the same bureaucracy that had sleepwalked the nation into collapse, believed the two were linked by a kind of underground myth—or worse, that they were catalysts capable of reigniting rebellion across the wasteland.

And so the troops hunted.

Through dead intersections.
Through the hollowed-out carcasses of malls.
Through the rubble-packed canyons of skyscrapers burned black by time.

The storm above growled again.

A drone whirred overhead, sweeping a spotlight across the wreckage. When it passed over a crumbling freeway column, the light caught for a moment on something faint—subtle footprints in the dirt and ash leading away from the city.

Fresh ones.

A soldier knelt, brushing a gloved hand across the track.

“Two sets,” he whispered. “One light. One heavier.”

The officer’s visor flickered with the reflection.

“Maren and Silen,” he growled. “Close.”

He raised a clenched fist, signaling the squad.

Weapons powered up with soft, predatory hums.

“Move. Quietly. They can’t have gone far.”

As the squad advanced, lightning illuminated the sky in a harsh, electric flash.

And for a half-second, the light cast a long shadow on a distant ridge—too tall, too still, watching them with an understanding they hadn’t yet learned to fear.

But by the time the soldiers looked again, the shadow was gone.

Only the storm remained.

 

Counting Cars

The morning arrived wrapped in gray, as if the sky itself had pulled a blanket over the world. Rain tapped against the nursing-home window in a steady rhythm—soft, persistent, familiar. Edna sat where she always sat now, her wheelchair angled just enough so she could see the road beyond the parking lot.

She squinted through the watery blur.

“One… two… three…” she murmured, her finger lifting slightly with each car that passed. Some were dark shapes, some bright blurs, all sliding through the rain like ghosts in a hurry. She counted them because it gave her something to hold on to—something that didn’t slip away as fast as the rest.

Four… five…

Any one of them could be Henry.

Any one of them might stop, just outside the entrance, and he’d step out with that sheepish grin he always used when he knew he was late. She could almost see him shrugging his shoulders, saying, Traffic, Ed. Terrible traffic. But I’m here now.

A car with headlights too bright glided by. Edna leaned forward, hope flickering across her face—then fading when the car didn’t turn into the lot.

She counted it anyway.

Six.

The nurse on duty, a soft-spoken woman with kind eyes, paused at the doorway. “Good morning, Edna.”

Edna didn’t answer. Not out of rudeness—just out of distance. Her mind was somewhere else entirely, peering through the veil of rain for a shape she longed for, a shape she couldn’t quite remember clearly but still needed.

Seven.

She could feel Henry, somehow. As if he existed just outside her field of vision, slipping between the raindrops, almost stepping into view. Some days she remembered he was gone. Other days the memory evaporated the moment it formed, leaving behind only the ache of waiting.

Eight.

The nurse gently adjusted the blanket on Edna’s lap. “He’s not coming today, honey.”

Edna nodded as if she understood.

But her eyes never left the window.

The road shimmered beneath the rain, each car scattering water into silver spray. She imagined Henry walking toward her through that curtain of rain, waving, calling her name like he used to across parking lots and grocery aisles.

Nine.

“Just running late,” she whispered to herself, comforting the ache without knowing why it was there.

And outside, the rain fell steadily, each drop a small, fleeting memory sliding down the glass—memories she could almost touch, almost recognize, before they slipped away.

Still, Edna kept counting.

Still, she kept waiting.

 

Drifting from Reach

The rain threaded itself down the glass in thin, shimmering rivers, each droplet carving a path that disappeared as quickly as it formed. Edna watched them with a soft, vacant fascination. Every tiny bead of light—reflected streetlamp, passing car, hallway glow—seemed to flicker like a memory trying to rise, then slipping away before she could catch it.

She sat very still.

Her wheelchair felt like an extension of her now, something she could no longer separate from herself. The blanket tucked around her legs was warm, though she barely noticed. What she did feel was the pull behind her forehead—the faint ache of thoughts struggling to assemble themselves, only to dissolve before they reached language.

Outside, a neon sign flickered in the dark, its glow diffused through the rain-smeared window. It reminded her—just for a breath—of a jukebox. The diner. Henry selecting a song he claimed she loved. Did she love it? Did that even happen?

Edna blinked.

A speck of light slid down the window and she followed it with her eyes. She felt a soft pang, like a missing note in a familiar song. Each raindrop looked like a tiny lantern carrying a piece of her past—faces, voices, rooms, colors—drifting downward, vanishing at the window’s edge.

“Henry?” she whispered, unsure if she meant to call him or simply say his name to keep it real.

The room answered with silence.

But for a moment—one fragile moment—she imagined him standing just behind her chair, the way he used to when he wanted to see what she was drawing. His hand on her shoulder. His breath warm against her cheek. She could almost hear him say, You’re still here, Ed.

But the reflection in the glass showed only her own thin face, dimly lit, eyes hollowed by time and confusion.

A nurse walked past the open door, her footsteps soft. Edna didn’t turn. The rain had grown heavier now, tapping insistently at the window like a thousand tiny fingers demanding entry. She wondered if the memories trapped inside the raindrops were trying to come back home.

She closed her eyes, letting the rhythm lull her.

Sometimes the sound was enough to summon a spark of something—Henry’s laugh, the smell of ink from her drawing table, the warmth of a night that may or may not have happened. But tonight, the sparks were faint, drifting farther from reach.

Still, she sat there, staring out at the rainy world with a quiet kind of longing.

Each speck of light faded.

And Edna, drifting inside her own mind, felt herself fade gently with them.

 

Fragmented

Maren staggered, one hand pressed to the cool stone as her balance slipped in and out of sync with the world. The blue cathedral pulsed around her—like a lung inhaling and exhaling light. Her vision flickered again, turning grainy, then sharp, then smearing into streaks of drifting pixels.

A low, resonant thrum vibrated through her feet.

She blinked—and the world stuttered.

And then they appeared.

Two hooded figures.

Not quite standing.
Not quite floating.
More like imported, inserted into her perception as if some unseen architect had dragged them into her mind’s eye.

Their silhouettes were tall, borderless shapes draped in fabric that seemed to be made of smoke and shadow. Their faces were voids. Their edges glitched, flickering between sharp outlines and dissolving static.

They did not move.

They simply existed, impossible and silent.

A whisper—no, the shadow of a whisper—crawled through Maren’s skull. Not language. Not sound. A feeling. A suggestion.

She tried to step back.

Her foot didn’t respond. Her breath didn’t either.

The hooded shapes tilted their heads slightly, as if studying her across time, memory, or code. For a heartbeat, the blue cathedral dimmed to darkness, leaving only the hollow glow outlining them.

Maren’s pulse hammered.

Who are you?
Or perhaps—what are you?

One lifted an arm—or the glitch approximation of one—and reached toward her. Its hand dissolved into strands of light, like threads unraveling in slow motion.

A tremor shook the ground.
The humming surged.
Her vision fragmented into squares.

The figures flickered.

Once.
Twice—

And vanished.

Gone. Deleted.
As if they had never been there at all.

The cathedral flooded with light again, the strangers resumed their silent march, and Maren stumbled forward, gasping as control returned to her limbs.

She pressed a hand to her temple. The ringing inside her skull slowly receded, but the impression of those figures lingered—like fingerprints left on glass, invisible but undeniably present.

Were they memories?
Warnings?
Projections from something watching her?
Or echoes of something deeper in this fractured reality?

Maren steadied herself, heart pounding.

One thought cut through the haze:

They knew me… or wanted me to think they did.

And the doorway ahead—still glowing, still waiting—felt suddenly much more dangerous.