by Adelaide Song on 2025-07-21.
Tags: sprint
Today your watch starts sixty stories above street level. Your barrettes are fighting to keep your bangs out of your scope and losing, badly. With wind chill it’s minus fifteen—on the ground, of course, this high up it’s kissing minus thirty. Someone who didn’t know this gun better than their hand would have frozen their eyelid to the optic an hour ago. It would take ten years to explain to an adult the impossible geometry used to connect the rifle’s receiving mechanism to its barrel. You were able to successfully recite the topologies eight days after your eleventh birthday. If prompted you could describe, to the millimeter, every single dimension of the weapon, as well as each foundry responsible for the manufacture of its components. You used to be able to dream of horses once. It is difficult now to even remember what they look like. Worth it, in the end, for expanded anti-aerial capabilities; for hypersonic interdiction batteries you can legally fire in residential areas. With every passing year the nation’s effective horizon is growing. One of the underclassmen could sit at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and not even break a sweat. When she’s in your shoes—code-standard leather flats, that always pinch at the toes and give at the arch—there will be a hundred more girls like her, and all of them will do things that will keep her awake at night for years and years to come, and all of them will look up to her. Look up. Look up. Your earpiece, barely audible over the endless wind, low flier, high speed, crossing airspace in ten seconds. At 100x you can see the frayed ribbons trailing behind her petticoat, the hand-painted squares of night-sky camouflage splashed over skirt and face. The chevron finds its way between her eyes as they look down to meet yours. They burn her wand with the rest of the body. It smells like Earl Grey in the streets for months.