Later, she would say it had been a bad job from the start.
A woman was walking through the middle of the city. Nothing strange about that. She was tall and handsome, and she wore a brown cloak with frayed edges that had a hood. Blue eyes with gold in the centre glinted out from under the hood, darting from left to right, up and down at the faces of the people she passed.
The city was almost uniformly built out of the same grey granite stone that also dominated the landscape around it, which made one building hard to discern from the next. Alleyways and bridges, textures and shapes, all seemed to blur together to the woman. Faces, on the other hand, she was hyperfocused on. The particular cast of the eyes here, the shape of the mouth there. All full of a million little clues. Answers to the most important question on her mind.
Are they on to me yet?
A pretty woman in a pale blue smock smiled nervously as she passed. Had she figured her out, or was she just intimidated as anyone might be by an unknown traveller who hides her face? Her robe was a little bulky on one side where it should have fallen against her body. A squarish object, hanging down from a loop on her belt, about the size of one of the heavy stone bricks that the city seemed to have been entirely constructed of. The case. Payday.
She looked down sharply. A bridge she had entirely missed had just swam into view, and one of the chain-mailed city guard was now surveying the street. Had he seen her? She walked a little faster. Maybe she had been lucky. Maybe he had been distracted-
“Somebody get her!” went up the cry. Damn.
She broke into a run, throwing off the rough cloak as she went and revealing a black garment that hewed close to her well-shaped form. Her long legs strode a practiced rhythm borne of experience as people went scattering sideways before her. An iron crossbow bolt sang as it flew past her head and shattered against the cobblestones. She ducked reactively and heard the clk of another bolt being locked into place and darted sideways down an alleyway that opened up before her.
Feet behind her, running. The heavy boots of more guards. She put her head down and sprinted for the light at the other end, so that she had a chance at losing them in the crowds of the street.

One hundred thousand miles above her, another woman watched her run, fingernails digging into her palm.
“Come on,” she hissed. “Just get out of sight.” She expertly manipulated the camera’s control stick, and it whizzed ahead of the woman in the alley and into the street. This would have been a massive violation of every anti-interference protocol in the book were the camera, and the antigrav unit it was attached to, not roughly the size of a hummingbird and nearly invisible to boot.
The camera view spun rapidly, taking in all directions. The woman sucked in air through her teeth and blew it out again in a rapid sigh.
Rattling up the street were half a dozen chain-mailed city guards. They barged past a shopkeeper who was showing off rolls of cloth to a customer, sending him sprawling into his own wares. She couldn’t hear from here, but the words they exchanged were definitely not friendly.
The other woman emerged from the alley while the argument was developing, the customer shoving back a guard who tried to manhandle her. Staggering back, he grabbed the hilt of his sword and started to draw. Big mistake.

She watched as the big man in the rough garb of a builder picked up a bolt of cloth and swung it at the guard, sending him tumbling into his comrades with a crash like a truckful of cymbals. Recognising a golden opportunity, she didn’t wait to see how the fight went down. She glanced down the alley, saw guards coming towards her that way, and took off up the street.
She heard a roar behind her, and a cry went up, and she felt a sort of twang of satisfaction. This had been too close for comfort from the start. Too much sneaking around, too many close calls. But the chase she understood. This was primal, the basic unit of human interaction since time immemorial. She had been running her whole life up to now, and it had worked every time.
Of course, it only needs to fail once, she thought. As if summoned by the negative energy, another crossbow bolt ripped through the air and skimmed her thigh, tearing a red line across the black that stung like hell. It was times like this she almost wished she carried a weapon. Still, the guards were held up now.

After a few minutes of running, she allowed herself to limp to a halt and look back for a second. No sign of her pursuers at all. She smiled to herself and started walking.
As the adrenaline left her system, she gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. A brief check of the wound after taking a knee in a doorway yielded only the information that it was deeper than she had thought, and that it hurt like hell. No time to do anything about it now. She stood up, felt the sting shoot up and down her leg, and got going.
Turning a corner, she realised getting out of the city was going to be harder than she anticipated. The gatehouse was locked down like a fortress, guards swarming around it and engaging passers-by with question after question.
She turned around and started walking down a new road.

It was no use. All the ways out of the city were shut, and the pain in her leg was becoming a violent ache. She didn’t look down, knowing she wouldn’t like what she saw. Matter of time before the blood loss got too much to ignore. She sat down on a stone bench and closed her eyes, tilting her head back against the wall.
She had always known someday this gig would catch up to her. And for what? A paltry fistful of chip? To the people of this planet, the lump of precious metal and stone hanging from her belt was worthy of killing or dying for. To her client, it was a mantelpiece ornament. A dinner-party conversation starter.
Something told her to open her eyes. She did, the gold wiring in blue irises seeming to radiate from within where the light struck them.
Of course! She smiled toothily. That would work out just fine.

The hummingbird camera followed the woman as she strode with new purpose down a side street that the other hadn’t even noticed was there.
“Where are you going, Lu?” she whispered, nudging the joystick to avoid a real bird that was taking an interest in her as the woman led her through the maze. The little pigeon-thing hovered in front of her view, dipping to the side to stay in sight of its large silvery eye.
The woman on the screen continued up the street as she continued to try to escape the attention of the pigeon-thing, which seemed unusually territorial for a city bird.
“Get off!” she hissed, diving down on the gravity wing and pulling up on the other side of the bird. The other woman was nowhere to be seen. “Oh, nuts,” said the operator. She flew the camera down the street at top speed – faster than any human could run – to the crossroads at the end and quickly scanned each direction. No sign of her.
In the centre of the square was a tall clock tower.
“Oh, not this again…” she said, twirling the altitude controller clockwise and holding the camera steady on the tower as she ascended. “Are you this determined to kill yourself?”
There it was – a window, right at the top. A little something to let some air in for the maintenance man. More of those pigeon-things were using it as a combination bathroom/singles bar right now. All there was left was the waiting.
Sure enough, the woman arrived before too long waiting. She was out of breath, and for the first time the operator noticed her leg. She leaned forward, drawing in breath. It looked bad. She looked bad, winded by the climb and about the same colour as the clouds that hovered over them constantly – white, the same as at home.
Quickly, she opened up the secondary control panel as the woman on the screen lifted up one leg. Amid a litany of muttered curses, she set the arcane controls of the machine, keeping the reticle of the hummingbird squarely over her charge’s centre of mass. She was standing on the ledge now, on the other side of the handrail. She looked down the sixty or so metres to the grey stone below, and felt a sudden lurch as her leg gave way, so that the only thing holding her up was the white-knuckled grip of her hands behind her. She closed her eyes, bent her knees…
And jumped.