Aurora

If I could write down everything I’ve ever done to overturn the orders of the globe and change all that you know, I will have rewritten history. Put me in a strait jacket and lock me away for as long as you want for what I’m about to tell you. Read quickly, because they’ll burn my book as soon as they can. That’s how governments keep secrets.

I tapped on the Amplifier attached to my arm, which was a variety of mechanical pieces held together by two bands around my wrist and elbow. Most importantly, it was a communications device that kept me in tune with my running mate. The rhythm was a Morse code call to my partner, who never had a name. Got him, I told her. My hazel eyes slid across the night time sky and I drew the pistol out of the holster on my leg. Turning back to man I had extensively bound, I unlocked the safety.

I never had a signature to write on the line except maybe a blood splatter, but sometimes she called me Zeke, Dathan, Kaleb, and about twenty other call signs to keep anyone listening confused. I was the guy who pulls apart continents and divided the hemispheres. I’ve carved the world into the disfigured sphere as we know it.

“You’ll never get anything out of me,” the man spat from within the bag I’d thrown over his head.

My eyes slanted and I frowned when I clutched a handful of fabric and tore it off. He saw me for the first time and his chocolate eyes from a soft life glimpsed at me, another masculine figure, with a gun. It was just him and me up there and no one to hear him scream. For now. This had been way too easy. All I had to do was falsify some records that I was a part of his political party, attend a convention, and I had him.

“You seriously think I care at all what you know?”

His eyes flicked from me to the gun. I’d only tied his hands, knowing that he wasn’t trained, for the fact I wanted to enjoy this. He was going to attempt an escape, and that would be my fun. “You’re with them,” he shouted conclusively, “The Marxists. Those senator snakes who think that fairness actually matters. A world where everyone can choose is the only way this country will survive! You’re a traitor!”

I pressed my lips together, shook my head, and took the shot. Bam! I struck him in the leg, not wanting to listen to anymore of his ignorance, and he staggered back. Now, he had to fight me if he ever hoped to see the sun rise. When he tried to get past me, I turned him back and threw him on the ground with a few simple motions that pushed him closer to the edge. I liked stretching out the wings.

During the physical combat, he managed to grab the gun out of my holster and pointed it at me. “Stop!” He ordered with fear shearing his courage into splinters, “I’ll shoot!”

“Go ahead.” With that, I saw his eyes harden and he pulled the trigger only to hear a click. No ammo. He tried it several times while I stood there in front of him. Wobbling on his wound, terror overtook the bravery of a rebel leader while endless traffic passed in the sky highways behind us.

“Only needed one shot,” I told him.

“One shot?” He cried, “Then you’ve wasted it! That shell didn’t kill me!”

“You’ve got a lot to learn.” With that, I attacked with what I had been planning all along while he had been distracted by my alternate weapon. Sinking my knife into his abdomen and dragging it up, blood leaked out all over my hands. His eyes were wider than eggs and the gun clattered to the ground as nothing but the intimidation it was. I explained how the world really works in that moment.

“That shot in your leg is in an artery. You’re going to bleed out and die, but I wanted to have a little fun first. You were looking at the distraction and not me, which is the real threat.” I jerked out my knife, which was a specially designed blade called a falcón from the southern hemisphere. “You can’t commit treason if you don’t care who wins or loses. In the end, it’s about getting paid.”

I took a step back and saw him push his hands into his wound in attempts to salvage whatever flesh was still there. He dropped the gun. The candy for me was seeing him bare his teeth, stagger to keep his balance, and look back at me. “I’m still not dead.”

“Oh, I know,” I sheathed my blade and rolled my shoulder, “they’re going to hear you all sixty four floors down.”

With that, I drew back my leg and kicked him in the chest. Already off balanced from the shot to the leg, he stumbled back and I saw him glimpse at me one last time before he fell off the edge of a mountainous skyscraper. I didn’t even flinch despite the absolute horror that radiated off of him and turned my shoulder to tap on my arm again.

Mission complete, I drummed on the Amplifier. I heard a single scream of a revolutionary echo against the nearby buildings as his descent continued. Picking up my gun and jacket, I made my way back down.

On the first floor, I saw people mob outside and sirens in the distance. With my weapons concealed, I walked through the atrium cluttered with souls. This was the Nationalist Party’s home in the capital where Comrade One lived. And so many beautiful bouquets and flowers for such a corrupted convention of pigs. Several people ran past me while I looked at the lilies that I had seen when I came in and sabotaged the democratic-republicans plan to kill Comrade One. Snapping several stems and strolling outside, the cool evening air ran through my lungs once more. Shifting along the outskirts of the crowd, media and authorities came in from all directions and I walked away from the cardiac arrest of a revolution.

Down on the ground floor with highways buzzing with cycles, transporters, and autos, I kept trekking and heard a vocal reply on the Amplifier. “Nice job, Zeke,” I heard her commend me, “That took you ten minutes and sixteen seconds.”

“Oh,” I chided, “It wasn’t that long, Pheobe.” I knew that she was where you would never find her. “I got you something. Do you see it?”

“Yeah, I see them. Tiger lilies are my favorites!”

I smiled knowing that I knew how to make her happy. “Hit it.”

With all of the Marxists leaders drawn up into one place and the demons of democracy derailed by the death of their president, Pheobe hit the last part of the plan. I walked into a park full of trees while she played with the laws of the universe and disengaged the gravity infrastructure underneath the main street buildings. This was a floating city in a region prone to earthquakes, but when the power was cut off, the suspended edifices hovering in the higher layers of the city crashed back down. Physics couldn’t hold them up anymore as long as the power was disengaged with an engineer of destruction in the city.

Boom! Towers dropped from the air and the power went out like a wave across the capital that put everything in a blackout. Behind me, towers that had been floating fell to the Earth and knocked everything out of place like building blocks. I heard the horns, the sirens, and the explosion while I stood in the middle of a natural landscape unaltered by science. I watched the light show with flowers in my hand and waited.

The sewer grate next to me was lifted after the symphony had gone on for some time, and a red-headed scientist gripped her hand around the last ladder rung until she swung her legs to sit next to me. She’d made her escape that way, underground, from the city’s power center.

“There you go,” I told her and handed her the flowers.

“Yay!” I saw her smile and lower her engineering goggles from her head to neck. Squeezing the surprise with delight, she glanced at me. “You’re my hero!”

The edges of my mouth turned slightly upward and I looked up to see the constellations light up above us. Evil seized society’s pulse while the fire, smoke, and terror smoldered in the darkness. “You ready?”

With grease all over her and a toolkit of anarchy strapped to her body, she nodded several times and smiled back at me.

“Alright,” I answered watching the blazing fires against the horizon like a sunset, “Let’s go home.”