Home, COVID, and WIP of Stormweaver side short story I couldn't get out of my head

Hey yall. As most of you know I very rarely post material that is truly in the middle of being written, but flying yesterday with what I can only believe is COVID (negative tests, but everyone else is positive and I feel the sameish) exhausted me in a way i've never experienced. For that reason, and the fact that I'm still pretty much laid out, I genuinely don't know if I'll finish this this weekend or not, so I wanted to let you guys check this ongoing WIP of a side short that's been banging at the walls of my head for weeks, at least to give you something while I get better.

Let me know what you think, and talk soon!

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CHAPTER ?????????

With her son sobbing in her arms, Shauna Krane ran like she’d never run before. The bouncing flashlights of her three escorts were all she had to see the woods by, leaving her half-blind as they sprinted through the dark. Every breath was a cold burst of mist in the winter night. Her feet hurt. Her legs burned. Her arms ached from carrying Shay tight to her chest.

None of it mattered. She had to run. She had to.

“This way.” At their head, Ueno Jasper’s light accent was hardly noticeable over the sounds of their flight. The woman shifted course slightly, ducking under the heavy body of a fallen tree, its slick bark dark and heavy with ice and browned moss in death. Shauna followed without hesitating, nearly doubling over to get beneath the trunk, causing Shay’s screams to redouble in momentary alarm.

“Shh-shh,” Shauna hushed the boy as best she could, pressing his blond head closer to her and trying not to let him hear her gasp between words. “It’ll be… all right. Hush… Hush now.”

A lie, she feared, but that didn’t matter either. She’d lied to him before, lied to him often, in fact. Even at only 5 years old Shay was a perceptive child. Too perceptive. For nearly a year now he’d always noticed when she was limping, always asked about the bruises when they were too dark to hide beneath her makeup. She’d lied to him then, wanting her son to live without guilt, without fear.

If Shauna prayed for anything, it was to have enough time left to show him a life in which lies weren’t the entire basis of his reality.

At her whispered words, Shay quieted down again, though he continued to cry into the crook of her shoulder, small arms around her neck. For the dozenth time one of the guards following slightly behind her—the woman, introduced to her only as ‘Velshi’—offered to take him, and for the dozenth time she ignored the question. Yes, the Users were both faster and stronger than her—by magnitudes—but she didn’t care. She didn’t trust them, just like she didn’t trust the woman at their head who’d organized the entirety of this mad dash for freedom.

While their lives might indeed be in these stranger’s hands, Shauna would be damned if she didn’t hold onto her own child until her dying breath.

“The flyer…” she wheezed out after a minute’s more wild sprinting through the woods, including several stumbling trips. “Is it… Is it much farther?”

Ahead of her, Ueno glanced back. Her black hair was tied into a tight bun behind her head, which might have revealed the nape of her neck were it not for the grey-black mask covering the lower half of her face, the topmost part of the skin-tight suit all three of them wore. As she took in Shauna and Shay, her blue eyes glinted in her companions’ bobbing lights.

“Not far,” she answered simply, sounding like she wasn’t even breathing hard. “Bare with us.”

As the woman looked forward again, Shauna once more couldn’t stop herself from checking her wrists, still not believing the lack of bands there. The fixer wasn’t a User, and yet she’d trained or augmented her body to the point of maintaining this inhuman pace apparently without breaking a sweat, and likely both. The only reason Shauna hadn’t collapsed already was the adrenaline, she was sure, and even despite being fueled by fear she could feel herself start to slow down.

A memory flashed across her mind. A fist. A strike. Blood spilled from her mouth. Blood spilling from her nose…

No, Shauna thought. No. Run. RUN.

And she redoubled her efforts, ignoring the burning in her chest, ignoring the screaming in her arms and legs and the sounds of Shay’s sobs.

They would make it. They would.

Whatever price they had to pay in the end.

Despite Ueno’s assurances, they ran for another several minutes, Shauna slipping and sliding in the snow and mud of the forest floor and refusing twice more to hand her child off to one of the escorts. At one point the other User—‘Billings’, Ueno had called the man—instinctively grabbed her by the arm to keep her upright as she stumbled over a root hidden beneath the slush, and Shauna had to fight not to be sick at his touch. He must have noticed the look on her face—and cared enough to act on it—because he let go the moment she she found her feet again. She grimaced fighting exhaustion, pain, and self-hate all at the same time as she continued after Ueno. She’d never told the fixer explicitly why they were running, but either the woman had figured it out, or Shauna was worse at hiding her fears than she’d thought. For all their attempts to carry Shay, after all, neither of her escorts had offered to pick her up, which she suspected either of them could have done with no more effort than they might have one of the wet twigs cracking beneath their feet.

That was a point in their favor, Shauna supposed begrudgingly.

And then, all of a sudden, they were crashing out of the woods, rushing out of the trees into fresh, ankle-deep snow. The wind was the first thing Shauna noticed, its rough course nearly buffeting her sideways. The sound of water was next, a subtle rush that was less than a waterfall, but more than a river.

Then she saw the cliff, and Shauna came to a stumbling halt.

“Wh-where’s the flyer?!” she demanded in a stuttering gasp, clutching Shay to her as she stared at the stone ledge just ahead of them. They’d come out onto a clearing at the edge of an overlook, about a hundred feet across and half that as long. It was more than enough space to for a getaway vehicle to land, to be sure, but there were no lights waiting for them, no sounds of whirring engines or blasting air to fight against the wind. There was nothing but darkness, in fact, an empty blackness devoid of anything but the sounds of what had to have been stony rapids somewhere far below. The light of the flashlights stone anything else, making even the trees behind them and the stars above disappear, until Shauna felt like she was standing at the edge of bottomless voice.

Ahead of her, Ueno too had come to a stop, though only after moving to the very edge of the cliff to peer down as though looking for something. When she spoke, it wasn’t to answer Shauna.

On the contrary, the question had her stomach suddenly jumping into her throat.

“Billings,” she looked around at the two Users, “he still on our tail?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Billings answered promptly, and through her sudden horror Shauna was alarmed to see the man’s frame live in his eyes. “Drone’s got him about 4 minutes behind us.”

Ueno looked less than pleased at that, but shrugged. “Not ideal, but I’ll take it. Still with company?”

“Just the two. No Users. Both armed with rifles. Barrets. 96A2s according to analysis.” The man appeared to smirk under his mask. “If they brought guns then they really didn’t know what they were up agai—Ah.” He broke off with raised eyebrows. “You called it. They’ve just broken off from him. Probably trying to find decent lines of sight.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” Shauna started to choke out, clutching at Shay tighter than ever as she took a step back from the trio.

Ueno spoke like she wasn’t there.

“I did warn him to come alone,” she grunted with just a hint of annoyance, but she nodded at Billings. “Take care of the snipers. Quick and quiet. We’ll handle the bodies after our other business is done.”

Shauna felt her gut turn over, retreating another step. It wasn’t the mention of bodies, though. She’d hardly registered that, just like she hardly registered Billings vanishing back into the woods in a blink. 

It was what the woman had said first.

“You… You told him?”

Her voice was a broken whisper, worn by the running and made cold by desperation.

Ueno Jasper’s eyes could have been made of ice as the fixer turned to her. For a moment there might have been something like pity there, glimmering in the cold.

For a moment.

“Velshi. Take the kid.”

Before Shauna could so much as think to react, there was a low whoomph of pressurized air, and Shay was torn from her arms so violently she felt something tear in her right elbow. She screamed as he son did the same, lashing out in an attempt to grab him, to take him back. Velshi, though, held him at arms length from her back the back of his shirt and jacket, having appeared and ripped the boy from her in a flash. With a grunt that had to have been more annoyance than effort the user shoved Shauna back. It was like getting pushed by a bull. Shauna spilled over her own feet into the snow, tripping over the uneven ground to collapse onto her back. She was all adrenaline, though, and despite the fire in her right arm she was scrambling back onto her feet even as she screamed.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” she howled through tears, rushing Velshi, who still held Shay’s small body, kicked and screaming, 4 feet off the ground with one extened hand without so much as wincing. “THIS ISN’T WHAT WE YOU PROM—!”

A shadow stepped between her and the User. Despite having no CAD, Ueno’s movement were fluid and powerful. The open palm of the woman’s right hand truck Shauna in the shoulder, then immediatly looped up around the side of her neck. At the same time, her left snaked underneath, gripping the wrist of a desperate hand that had been extending towards Shay.

With a practice, twisting pull, Ueno slammed Shauna to her back again, hard enough to make her see stars this time.

“All you were as that I’d get you out of your situation,” the fixer said cooly, standing over Shauna and watching her clutch at her chest and gasp for the breath that had been knocked out of her. “I never said how.

SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING!

The material below is jotted thoughts and dialogue regarding how this short will end. Read only if you want to know what kind of person Jasper really is before, i get the full short done.

SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING!

"In two days, your arm will be found on beach by a young couple enjoying an afternoon walk under the cliffs of dover, bracelet still attached. Cut will look like it got sheared off by a propeller. In six, Shay’s shoe will be hauled up in a fishing net six miles off the coast. It’ll be tricky, but law enforcement will be able to pull at least a few skin cells out of the inside to confirm they’re his."

"These two?" Ueno glanced over her shoulder at the two User still hovering a the mouth of the cave. "You can trust them. Some people in the this line of work come from... difficult cirumstances. They won't give you away, At the least because they know what would happen to them if they did..."

"Remind me never to piss you off, Jasper," Billings told her with a laugh before following the others out of a the gave and into the growing morning light.