Run for the Skyline

by Rambling Writer

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe, Thriller, Rainbow Dash, Science Fiction, Crossover
Length: 5768

When you live your life on the razor's edge where steel meets sky, you know who you really are.

Lives are controlled. Communication is monitored. Anything deemed improper is censored. If you want to send messages in private, you need to do it physically, with couriers known as Runners.

Rainbow Dash is a Runner. It's not the greatest job, but it's for a good cause.

The government is hunting Runners. If they think you're carrying information they don't want you carrying, they'll come after you with everything they've got. They have nigh-limitless resources at their disposal: enforcers, vehicles, surveillance. Your life will be on the line until you submit. They will find you and they will hunt you down, and your only defense will be your wits and your ability to run.

Now it's the greatest job.

An experiment in atmosphere, entered in the Science Fiction Contest II because it inspired me to finish it. A thematic crossover with Mirror's Edge; no non-pony knowledge required.

Published 2023-03-19 16:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-03-19 16:00:01 UTC

Warning Call

One of these days, Running will be the death of you.

Twilight has a point. But if she has to die, Rainbow Dash thinks as her hooves pound rhythmically through the stairwell, that wouldn’t be such a bad way to go.

“This is your final warning!” a loudspeakered voice calls from a floor below. “Drop the bag or we WILL open fire!”

Metal groans as Rainbow swings herself around another landing and rolls her eyes. “Final” is a bit much; “second” would be more accurate. But “final” looks better on the transcripts. It lets the Blues pretend they aren’t hyperaggressive thugs.

Her hooves don’t fall quite as surely as usual. Of course they don’t; stairs are too jagged. It’s not like slopes, where you just need to reorient yourself a little and you can run. Another reason Rainbow doesn’t like stairs. But she needs to go up, and these stairs go up, so stairs it is.

Something phftoonks down below and the feeling drains from Rainbow’s feathers. A drone slightly larger than a tennis ball hums up the shaft and sticks to a point just too far away for Rainbow to swipe at. Sheesh, they’re deploying the suppressor drones indoors? Paranoid, much? Or just inept? Nah, both. Well, she doesn’t need flight yet anyway. (Granted, it’d be nice. But she doesn’t need it.)

Up and up and up, floor after floor after floor, ignoring camera after camera after camera. The Blues don’t gain on her, but they don’t fall behind, either. The paint job of the stairwell streaks past her, for a given value of “paint job”. Plenty of ponies use these stairs, yet it’s so clinical, so machine-precise, so… soulless. It isn’t even cold; there are times when you want something cold. This feels like it’s been designed by a cheapskate robot. What’s that? Ponies like colors? Eh, just slap some orange on there and they’ll be fine. Just orange, though; can’t spend a hundred bits on a few more buckets of different-colored paint when that money could go to another gold-plated airship! But that’s high-castes for you. They’d leach the green from the plants and the blue from the sky if it made them money.

Speaking of the sky…

Finally, Rainbow reaches the top of the stairs. The lock on the door is flimsy and she smashes through it like smoke. Immediately, her eyes are assaulted by the glare from the City, all shiny and chrome and neon and glass. As much as she hates to admit it, it’s beautiful, in its own way, with its towering spires and soaring skyways. It’s like a modern forest. Just one without a fraction of the freedom a forest needs.

She spares a single second to savor the atmosphere. It has its own flavors, good and bad, and it’s a million times better than the processed crap of interiors. It was even better, once, in a time gone by. Then the law enforcement arm of the reason that time is gone by reaches the landing just below her and she bolts across the roof.

Rainbow doesn’t run. She moves her legs and the world rockets backward. Physics says otherwise, but her movements are so smooth that if she closes her eyes, she might as well be standing in front of a fan. She’s a good Runner. She’s a very good Runner. She’s an even better flier, but with that stupid drone still buzzing after her, that’s not an option.

The courier bag bumps at her side, tugged this way and that by the wind. In a way, it’s funny. This is an age where your phone can talk with your computer can talk with your car can talk with your coffee maker, but some certain ponies still prefer to send letters in the old-fashioned dead tree format, which requires other ponies to physically run them from place to place.

Because all that interconnectivity creates a problem: what if, when your phone talks with your computer talks with your car talks with your coffee maker, one of those says something you wanted to keep secret? And, of course, those gossips just have to go and blab about absolutely everything to the government. The government claims that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from constant surveillance, so stay in line and you’ll be comfortable. (What’s that? No, you can’t know our internal procedures. You don’t need to, and it’s dangerous letting ordinary folk know that, anyway. What are you, a subversive?)

Paper, on the other hoof, is nice and diligent and quiet. It keeps its mouth shut. You can’t hack paper. You can’t network into it. Fold it up, and you can’t scan it. You can copy it, but you can’t Ctrl-C it. If the worst happens, you can completely destroy it simply by eating it. (And as Rainbow knows from experience, it doesn’t even taste that bad.)

When you need privacy, you need privacy. Rainbow and the other Runners help safeguard that privacy. The fact that the horseshoenet gives her an excuse to live on the adrenaline-inducing razor edge between gloss and reality, in perpetuity, is pretty neat, too.

Reality chooses that moment to intrude. “You’ve got a clear shot! Take her down, mares!” Rainbow jinks to one side at the warning and sunblasted SMG fire peppers the roof near her hooves, bits of debris bouncing off her legs. She doesn’t even flinch. These gals could shoot Tartarus out of a helpless piece of cardboard, but a target galloping at full tilt? Ha. Try again.

The edge of the building looms before her, but Rainbow’s not worried. She knows this part of the City by heart. She simply vaults over the railing, killing just enough of her momentum to plummet down in front of a billboard with only a foot of clearance. She lands cleanly on the service walkway in front of it, so surely and precisely that the inch of spare room she has next to her hooves might as well be a mile.

One of the Blues, defter than most, reaches the railing and sprays gunfire down, but Rainbow is already gone, proving her last name isn’t just a fluke. She speeds along the walkway with the insane confidence of a tightrope walker, sure to fall to her death if she slips and yet so convinced she won’t that she has trouble comprehending the very idea. But all too soon, the walkway ends, even as the wall continues onward. Still keeping her speed up, Rainbow shoves herself up the billboard and angles her wings so that the wind pushes her against it.

The City crazily tilts ninety degrees as Rainbow runs along the billboard, her hooves pounding against LEDs as easily as if they were asphalt. For one brief, shining moment, the neon façade of the world obliges her style of transportation; it’s everything else that’s out of joint, not her. She can’t resist a little grin. She lives for moments like this.

Some days, it’s all she can live for in this cage of gilded rot.

The edge of the building approaches and Rainbow begins slipping as gravity reasserts itself. Ground stops being the surface beneath her hooves and returns to being the surface to her right, far below. Rainbow just keeps running, even as her path arcs ever more downward.

She reaches the end at the worst possible moment, right at the corner. But she just sticks out a hoof, idly hooking an outcropping pipe. Momentum swings her around the corner, slams her back into the wall, lets her continue her run. For Runners, it’s all about the flow: focus on what’s ahead of you, get to it as smoothly as possible, hope it all sorts itself out. It usually does. She couldn’t see her current route just a second earlier, but she keeps moving like she could. After all, if she stops now, she’ll fall to her death.

There’s nothing for her to grab on the wall ahead, but the crane from a construction site on the opposite side of the street is poking its arm near her. At exactly the right moment, Rainbow kicks off the wall and soars over the street far, far below. She lands smack dab in the middle of the arm and skids down it like it’s a playground slide, doing a gymnastic flip off the cab just because she can. The site itself is a mess of piping, crates, stored equipment, discarded pallets, and workers — a Runner’s paradise. Rainbow flows through it, arcing gracefully over and under obstacles like water. She never slows, not even a tick, and she wouldn’t forgive herself if she did. If she must be grounded, it should at least be in a place where she can flex her physicality. She does it all so smoothly and swiftly none of the workers notice her, but at least the cameras provide her with an audience.

Alas, all good things must come to an end; she springboards off a railing and pulls her hooves up to clear the barbed-wire fence pretending to be security at the edge of the site. The drone is still hovering after her in a straight line, not being interested in any sort of flair, but that’s an easy fix. She runs onto the roof of a skyway between two buildings, yanks open a vent cover, and drops into the hallway inside, to the ignored shock of several pedestrians. She can almost imagine the drone trapped outside, seething with anger, but her being stuck inside takes some of the fun out of it. She needs to get up. Where’re the stairs? (Sigh.)

She scrambles into one of the buildings. It’s an office building, and although it’s heavily trafficked, the “paint job” is just as sterile as the one in the maintenance stairwell. If the high-castes want you to work a soul-crushing desk job, couldn’t they at least make it a pleasant crushing? Survey says “no”. Not many ponies seem to care much, either. But those that do employ the Runners. The content of Rainbow’s bag is… relevant.

She has a hard time remembering interiors, but she remembers this one. Left, right, straight, left, and she’s at the elevator bank; one of the elevators is closing just ahead of her. Excellent. She bolts inside, waves at the camera, and jumps up to kick open the emergency hatch. She’s almost relieved to be in the shaft; it’s dark, grungy, and noisy, but at least it’s honest. Unfortunately, it’s also too narrow for her wings to be of much use. But that’s what the maghook is for.

She points one of her legs up and twitches her hoof in just the right way; a neat little doohickey attached to her fetlock shoots out a length of superstrong cord, an electromagnet head at the end. It soars up into the darkness and out of sight, slows as it comes to the peak of its launch, and gets yanked to the side as the magnet gets suckered to a steel support strut. Another twitch and she’s being reeled upward like a fish on a line. She’s considerably harder to catch than a fish, though.

As she’s whipped up, Rainbow pushes away from each wall when it gets too close, superballing up the shaft. Darkness and speed blur the struts into an indistinct haze; Rainbow listens to echoes and the rushing wind to know when to kick off. She could close her eyes and do this perfectly.

Almost as soon as it began, it’s over, and Rainbow vaults over a railing onto a maintenance catwalk. Jink, jink, jink through a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare, and she smashes through a door back into the day. Once again, she’s on the roof of a skyscraper. Her target, this time. She orients herself based on the skyward needle in the distance that is the Shard and runs to one of the edges.

Across the way, nearly twenty stories down, Rainbow spots an orange-colored blob on the next tower over. She waves; the blob spots her and waves back. She taps her earpiece. “You alright, AJ?” You’d think having an earth pony bouncing across the skyline like a caffeinated rabbit ODing on amphetamines would be a bad thing. But Rainbow once saw Applejack leap down ten stories, land on a solid roof, and run away. Maybe that earth pony endurance comes in handy for more than just rototilling.

The response is ragged static, thanks to the techniques keeping it secure, but it’s intelligible. “Sure as sugar. You?”

“Package intact. Catch.” Rainbow pulls the courier bag from around her neck and tosses it down.

It takes over three seconds for the bag to fall the distance, but Applejack catches it just fine. She loops it over her neck and salutes to Rainbow. “Package secure. I’m gone.” And she is.

Rainbow doesn’t leave just yet. She finds the nearest camera (not hard) and begins making faces at it. The more attention she draws to herself, the less attention Applejack will have. If she’s offensive enough, the Blues won’t even notice she doesn’t have the bag anymore. And, in its own way, being childish like this is supremely offensive: You’re not good enough for my REAL insults. At least, that’s what Rainbow tells herself. It attracts the Blues all the same, though.

As she points and laughs, Rainbow’s ears are swiveling in every direction they can. All she needs to hear is a single hoofstep, the creak of a hinge, and she’s gone, but not until then. If she leaves too early, the Blues won’t be drawn into her conga line of a chase, and they might go after Applejack. Also, it won’t be as fun.

It’s not long before her ears prick up. Whutawhutawhutawhuta…

That thumping, mechanical sound makes her heart flutter. They’re bringing in a raptor? Just for her? How thoughtful! She’s been wanting to match wits with one of those again. She sits and waits, just in case she’s wrong.

WHUTAWHUTAWHUTAWHUTA-

She’s not wrong. The raptor climbs into view, its red spotlight already trained on Rainbow, its cannon pointing directly at her. It’s sleek, slim, black, an armed and armored flying razor exuding menace so intensely it actually loops back around and becomes tryhard. That image isn’t helped by the impotent boilerplate announcement: “Stay where you are! You are in direct violation of City laws!”

Attention: drawn so exquisitely you could sell it as art and make a killing. She must’ve really ruffled some feathers. Next order of business: escape. She loves this part. No target, no conditions, no limits. Just go fast and get the Blues off her tail. And go fast is her special talent.

Rainbow smiles her winningest smile at the raptor, just long enough for it to get a clear picture so they can know who’s schooling them. Her mane whipping in the wash of the twin rotors will be especially dramatic. Then she turns around and legs it.

“Do not run! Repeat, DO NOT run!”

Good thing Rainbow isn’t running. She’s Running. Biiiiiig difference.

Raptors have their own built-in suppressors, but this one spits out another drone anyway. Oh, very nice — they’re pulling out all the stops to catch her, as if that means something. Applejack will absolutely get away.

Through a combination of maghooks, luck, and dangerously-long falls, Rainbow has descended from the peaks of the City to the middle slopes: still high up, but there’s plenty above you if you raise your head. It’ll be harder for the raptor to maneuver around the skyscrapers.

But the building she’s running across now is broad and squat, a veritable pit surrounded by crystalline towers. The raptor has plenty of space for the moment and there’s nowhere for Rainbow to hide. Not that she wants to; her eyes are locked on the skyscraper directly ahead of her. It’s a convention center, for silly galas and the like, and among its amenities are wide outdoor decks in case high-castes want (gasp) fresh air while they mingle. Like the one she’s aimed at, the one that will give her a path into the building to further evade her purser. She can’t jump to it; it’s several stories above her and the street is too wide. That’s what the raptor’s for; since the government has deemed the pilot a Good Boy, he’ll follow protocol, which in this environment means-

The raptor slides into position ahead of her, right in the middle of the street, just below deck level. “Stay where you are! You will NOT be warned again!”

Oh, no. Whatever shall she do?

Rainbow fires her maghook right at the raptor; before it can move, it’s booped by a high-speed electromagnet. She reels herself up onto the top of the raptor and scrambles across, the twin rotors whistling a foot on either side of her. At the rear, she bounces herself up between the tailfins and leaps up to the deck; her grip on the railing is loose and her hooves scrabble against the smooth glass wall before she’s able to vault onto solid ground and run through the entry door. The drone’s still on her, but she’ll have an easier time evading the raptor on the inside, as long as she’s not chased by Blues.

Like the armored squad staring at her just a few yards away, already raising their guns.

Right. Convention center means Important Ponies. Important Ponies means “elite” security. Rainbow flashes her most punchable grin and bolts in the opposite direction.

Something tickles the back of her mind and she throws herself into a slide along the neatly-waxed floor. Half an instant after she does, the Blues’ guns screech and bullets whistle right through her afterimage, without a single bark of wannabe control. Sometimes, guns and their range seem unfair to Rainbow, but then she reminds herself that she needs some challenge now and then. That current challenge: break their line of sight.

Evading another burst of gunshots, Rainbow smashes through a door and is confronted with an atrium for this part of the skyscraper, a good several stories tall. Interior balconies line one side of the room, while the entire opposite wall is taken up by a colossal window, giving a spectacular view of the City beyond as sunlight streams in. Just outside the window is a balcony, for those who want fresh air. Corporate stooges, bribed government officials, idle rich, and other high-caste ponies mill around, inanely chatting about trite topics while wearing clothes that cost piles of bits to make and no sense to design. There must be some event going on. It’s hard to read posters while legging it from the Blues.

The raptor swings around the corner of the building and hovers just outside the window. The pounding whutawhutawhuta of its rotors draws the attention of even the high-castes. One by one, they turn to gawk at the machine outside. Rainbow takes that opportunity to dash across the open space and into the crowd. She’ll stand out, sure, but the Blues won’t risk hitting some socialite when they try to shoot her and drawing the ire of their higher-ups. (Highers-up?) Ponies protest in that passive-aggressive rich way as she shoves past them, but who cares what they think?

The door she passed through bangs open and gunshots boom throughout the room. Somepony screams; for a second, Rainbow thinks she miscalculated and the cops aren’t going to give a flying feather about collateral. Then: “Everypony on the ground, NOW!” Another burst, and the crowd manages to shriek daintily and drops quicker than a house of cards. Ah, threats of physical violence. A pretty universal language.

Rainbow bounds over the prone bodies, evading getting caught on some of the more idiotic hats and “accidentally” knocking a few off. Her eyes are locked on a staircase spiraling up next to the balconies. She slows by slamming into the railing at near top speed. It knocks the wind out of her, but she’s Rainbow Dash; it’s not even a second before she’s recaptured her wind and is heading up.

The spiral of the stairs is tight, the stairs themselves steep. It makes Rainbow feel almost interminably slow as she climbs them; the only condolence she can offer herself is that the Blues chasing her are even slower. They’re all piling on, making the entire structure rattle with their weight. It shakes more with every landing she passes, up and up, more and more.

Finally, the spiral comes to a stop as Rainbow reaches the peak, the highest balcony. She risks a glance over the railing. The high-castes are still cowering on the ground, even though the last Blue has made it onto the stairs. It’s what she wants to see, but that second has cost her and the fastest Blue pokes his muzzle around the central pillar. Her pursuer close on her tail, Rainbow scurries up the last set of stairs-

-and jumps back towards the atrium at the last moment. The balconies were never her target.

The Blue right behind her comes to a stop as she plummets downward, tries to turn around, and runs right into the pony right behind him, still ascending. The cavalcade chasing her is already in disarray by the time she lands back on the atrium floor. Her spread wings soften her landing slightly, but not enough to fully insulate her legs from the tingling shock of impact. Good thing Rainbow likes the buzz.

The stooges continue their routine on the staircase as Rainbow scrambles through the crowd to the exterior balcony. When she bowls through the door, the sound and downwash of the raptor slam into her like an anvil. “Give it up!” somepony shrieks through a speaker. Actually shrieks, in that peculiar breathy high pitch of desperation. “You’ve got nowhere to run!”

They’re right, technically. There are no other doorways off the balcony and no safe roofs to run on.

Rainbow never believes any sentence that contains the word “technically”.

Without a pause, she vaults the railing and lands on the roof of the convention center, a barren plain of glass that slopes down at a forty-five degree angle. It’s utterly flat, planar; once you start sliding, you don’t stop until you fall off, several hundred feet away, down into a sixteen-lane highway forty stories below.

Rainbow is in control. She doesn’t slide. She angles her wings and runs down.

Above her, the raptor’s gun roars to life.

Time slows.

One of Rainbow’s hooves is on the roof. The glass undulates beneath her like ripples in a pond, gently massaging her foot up and down. A thousand tiny storms roll over her body, play with her mane, affectionately ruffle her feathers. Thanks to the angle of her wings, those storms press her down better than gravity ever could. Only idiots think flight interdiction renders wings useless. Her muscles burn, not from pain, but like a roaring furnace in the middle of operation. A good burn. A burn she’d never feel if she’d gone along with the government.

The ripples of glass grow into minute waves as the shockwaves from the bullets reach her, shards nick her legs. Too close for comfort. Time speeds.

Rainbow rockets down the slope faster than she could ever run on level ground, too fast for the raptor’s gunner to track. How fast is she going? Fifty miles an hour? Sixty? It’s not flight, but it’s close. The world around her streaks away and blurs until all she can see is the glass and the swiftly-approaching edge. That’s fine; those are all that matter, anyway. Somepony yells something from the raptor, but thanks to the gunfire, Rainbow wouldn’t have understood it even if she wasn’t tuning it out.

Hundreds of feet are crossed in seconds. Rainbow doesn’t slow; she does her best to speed up. She’ll need that speed. She reaches the edge, spreads her wings-

-and jumps.

It doesn’t feel quite right, of course. It never does without magic. She’s too heavy, too ungainly, too ballistic. But she’s got the wind beneath her wings and no hooves on the ground. It’s close enough, for now.

For a moment, speed overcomes weight and Rainbow is able to swoop. She glides over the highway in a long, smooth arc, eyes shut, savoring the glide. But after only a moment, she opens them back up and scans the building before her. She’s looking for something. Something suspiciously convenient.

Twilight once said something about the spirit of the City. Its tutelary. (Why does Rainbow remember that term?) It’s alive and aware on some magical level, with its own mind — not a pony mind, by any stretch of the imagination, but a mind nonetheless. It’s aware of what’s happening to it, like how a pony is aware when they get sick. And according to Twilight, it very much likes what the Runners are doing. It shapes itself in small, subtle ways to help them fight the good fight. Nothing anypony could notice, nothing blatant, but long strings of design flukes and connected coincidences that result in the Runners getting away from the Blues every time. It’s not a theory unique to her, not even confined to the Runners; it’s appeared in prominent journals of arcane theory, the thick ones Rainbow uses to keep her table from wobbling. But the government claims that genii locorum have been well and truly disproved.

No, you can’t see the research. It’s classified. But it’s very, very convincing, trust them. You don’t want to look into it anymore. It’s a waste of time. Seriously. Don’t.

Personally, Rainbow would always trust Twilight with egghead stuff over… anyone else, really. But more than that, there being a tutelary of the City would explain certain things. How the infrastructure is always set up in just the right way to lose her pursuers. How the layout of the streets is designed for cars far below, yet she can always find a way to cross the gaps between buildings. Why so many buildings have convenient balconies so high up. Why there’s a random pipe jutting from the building in front of her.

Even at this distance, Rainbow can see it like it’s red on a white background, protruding in an ugly manner from the wall and going straight up to another convenient balcony. Rainbow isn’t sure what it could possibly be for, but regardless, it’s also her way out. She angles her swoop towards it. But she won’t make it; without magic, gravity exerts its inevitable hold on her once more. She flaps, straining against down, but is still fifteen feet below its lowest point.

Good thing her maghook’s rope is far longer than fifteen feet. She whips it up and it connects to the pipe like they’re long-lost lovers. She spools her way up so quickly momentum carries her over and onto the balcony without even touching the pipe. She spins slightly in the air to re-orient herself, turns it into a flip to annoy the Blues, and is away. The raptor is ungainly, still ponderously turning to face her when she reaches the door. The drone is still after her, but she knows how to deal with it. She knows where she is.

The second she’s inside, she legs it to the closest skyway and gallops down the concourse, ignoring cameras and annoyed titters from high- and mid-caste pedestrians. Some particularly “important” complexes, such as this one, are linked directly to transportation hubs by walkways that go from building to building to building. From here, it’s a straight shot to the maglev station and she’ll be away.

It’s not that easy, of course. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun if it was.

She’s not quite there when she spots the Blues in front of her, pouring from a security checkpoint. One of them yells something, and like good, obedient little ponies, all the peds shuffle to the sides and get up against the wall. It only gives Rainbow a clearer view of her “opposition”.

Five Blues. Three earth ponies, one pegasus, one unicorn. All lightly armored, no weaponry beyond short-range tasers. And right beyond them: escalators heading down and a sign for Concord Plaza Station. Her goal. As if she needs any more motivation to beat up some Blues.

Rainbow lowers her head and charges at the point mare, an earth pony. The Blue braces herself and Rainbow immediately changes direction. She hits the wall, bounds off it, freight-trains into the Blue. She extends her hoof to catch the Blue in the head before the impact, stunning her out of her stance. The two roll together. Rainbow lands on her back and quickly flares her wings to push herself up. She catches another Blue in the neck, keeps going, and bodily introduces him to the Blue behind him.

Something hums; a taser is being swung at her. Rainbow ducks and gives the Blue’s leg a light slap to redirect it at the first Blue; sometimes, it’s the only way to keep an earth pony down. She jumps off Taserhoof’s body, tossing her across the hall in the process, and angles her wings to turn her momentum into a slide, where she kicks the last Blue’s hooves out from under him. Unbalanced, his head hits the ground hard. Real hard. He doesn’t move as Rainbow gets back up.

Five Blues down. Eleven seconds. Not her best time, unfortunately. At least the escalators are right in front of her.

One of the Blues is struggling to stand, but he’s not worth Rainbow’s time. She jumps onto the barrier separating the escalators and slides down in a rush. Various species riding them give little yelps of shock as she whips by; she ignores them. She fights to keep her limbs pulled in as she speeds up and the wind whistles past her. She can hear Blues yelling at the top, but they’ve no chance of catching her.

The slope spits her out at the bottom. She rolls, gets to her hooves, and keeps running without slowing. In front of her sitting at the platform is her target: a commuter maglev train. Perfect.

No, wait. Not perfect. The train behind it is closing its doors to leave. That’s even better.

A voice, hoarse with rage, yells out something from the escalator shaft. As if that would change anything. Rainbow stampedes through the crowd, leapfrogs off the back of an unsuspecting pony, and alights leaflike on the roof of the maglev. The far train is moving, picking up speed with slow inevitability. Rainbow gallops along her train to match speed, bounds across the gap, and suckers her maghook to the roof, ducking beneath a sign as she passes out of the station. The Blues are fruitlessly yelling; at what, Rainbow can’t say. “Fruitlessly yelling” is more or less their default state of being. If they want to stop the train, that’s the wrong way to do it.

The drone is still following her, still doing its best to keep her magic under lock and key. But the maglev has left the station; losing the drone is only a matter of time. It’s only a robot, not even artificially intelligent, not even monitored by a living sophont at the moment, but Rainbow turns around and blows a raspberry at it. After all the trouble its ilk have caused her and will continue to cause her, it seems appropriate, and she doesn’t have long before-

The bracer of the maghook digs into her fetlock as the maglev’s acceleration really kicks in.

Maglevs are fast. Very fast. Perhaps too fast, given the winds they produce in their wake. But time is money, rich folk want to save money, and so they save time by having the maglevs be perhaps too fast.

Certainly too fast for the suppression drone. You can only fit so many thrusters in something that small. It does its best to keep up, but as the maglev keeps accelerating, all it can do is fall further and further behind. It’s almost pathetic, in a way. It’s not the drone’s fault it was assigned to keep pace with somepony who has “dash” in her name.

Rainbow doesn’t need to look to know this; she’s seen it plenty of times already. She keeps her eyes forward, willing the train onwards, willing the train faster. The City rushes by, becoming less and less distinct. The wind pounds her, straining the cord of her maghook in an effort to throw her off. Even the fastest raptor couldn’t keep up. Rainbow doesn’t need to wait for long before she’s out of the drone’s range and her magic comes rushing-

-back.

It happens in an instant drawn over a minute. Vim bleeds back into Rainbow’s wings. She can feel the wind dancing between her feathers even though feathers don’t have nerves and she shouldn’t be able to feel anything in them. The clingy film of suppression is burned away and she starts cutting through the air like a knife. She feels stronger, energized, ready.

So she opens her wings, detaches her maghook, and outpaces the fastest thing in the City.

With Rainbow’s magic boiling over and her wings pumping, the City melts into neon indistinction. One skyscraper canyon looks just like another as she tears through them. She knows she’s lost the Blues like wisps of smoke in a wind tunnel; still she flies faster and faster. She screams with joy, a scream she can’t even hear before it’s smashed and scattered by the wind. She doesn’t care. It’s an expression of pure emotion that she’d never be able to keep down if she tried.

Not that she wants to try.

For a moment, Rainbow coasts along at ludicrous speeds, humming in time with the thrumming of mana within her pinions. Then her earpiece crackles. The notification is general, not for her specifically. There’s a package that could use delivering over on Regatta Bay. It’s time-sensitive, very fragile, and sure to attract the worst sort of attention. Only adrenaline junkies and the foolhardy need sign up.

Rainbow’s heart pumps even harder as she grins and veers toward the coast. If she’s lucky, she’ll get there before anypony else.

One of these days, Running will be the death of you.

Perhaps Twilight is right. Perhaps tomorrow, Rainbow will die. Perhaps tomorrow, something worse will happen to her.

But tomorrow’s tomorrow. What Rainbow has to worry about is today. And today, Rainbow is still alive.