Disrupted by Claire Vale

diagnosed me with Quitter Syndrome (to this day, I’m sure she made that up) and brought up the ballet lessons every time I protested. Now had I had yet another reason for regret.
    We jumped Lines so many times, I no longer knew my east from north. All I knew was my chest was about to explode. My lungs were on fire. I had to push harder and harder just to keep going. I was more afraid of losing sight of Chris than actually being grabbed from behind.
    But my body was protesting in earnest now, my limbs heavy and uncoordinated.
    Next thing, my feet tangled in a mass of voluminous robes, bringing me down on top of the owner. I stayed down, fighting to catch my breath. The sudden pain in my side was so sharp and deep, I thought my victim had aimed an angry kick. He hadn’t. In fact, he wasn’t moving at all.
    I groped my way free of his robes, trying not to breathe as each breath was a new stab in my side, and leaned over him. His hair was silvery white, his face a web of powdery crinkles.
    Oh, God, I’d killed an elderly.
    I reached out, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. Don’t ask me what for, maybe to feel for a pulse or something, but his wrist was so frail, so lifeless in my grasp, I just held on, willing him to open his eyes.
    “Hey! What happened there?”
    “Kid knocked someone down.”
    “Move aside. This man needs help.”
    The voices floated above me. I was about to move, it made sense to let an adult take over. But just then his eyelids flickered. The wrist in my hand tugged weakly. When his eyes snapped open, I jerked guiltily.
    The three busybodies closed in, bumping me aside with nasty retorts as they helped the man to his feet.
    “Bloody young’uns.”
    “Rush, rush, everywhere. One would swear the Razoks were at their tails.”
    “No respect, that’s the problem.”
    I decided on a hasty retreat, before the mob stopped muttering and started lynching.
    Besides, the elderly man was standing on his own, and only swaying slightly. And there’s a good chance he’d been cross-eyed to start with, wasn’t there? Like one of those ageing things. You know, first the hipbones went, then eyeball control?
    I used my severely dented reserves of oxygen to spin about and run, straight into Chris. Face first.
    Chris grabbed me by the arms and un-plucked our faces, ejecting Gale from his armpit as he did so. “I thought they had you.”
    “You came back for me,” was all I could wheeze.
    My limbs were misbehaving again as well, although I suspect this had more to do with my brief encounter with second-degree murder than serious fitness issues.
    “Don’t mind me,” whimpered Gale, using Chris’s leg to pull herself up from the ground where she’d landed.
    “Well, come on then,” said Chris, sounding far too healthy and actually looking ready to take off again. His cheeks weren’t even slightly flushed. And his eyes were all wide and silvery, as if he were fuelled on plutonium or something and they were the source.
    “No, no more,” I puffed, eyeing him warily. Maybe this whole save-our-hero thing was actually a save-our-super-hero thing?
    Yeah, and maybe I really shouldn’t have starved my brain of that last oxygen molecule, I thought, as I watched him go up onto his tiptoes to anxiously peer over the sea of heads.
    “I can’t run anymore,” I told him firmly. “I’m done. Shattered. Pooped.”
    And that’s how we ended up in a lob bar.
    Because, apparently, there was a 73.5% probability our men in black had returned to stake out Drustan’s apartment. There was also a 65% probability they were still chasing after us. And an 88% probability they’d split up to cover both of the aforementioned probabilities.
    By Gale’s calculations, we were 226.5% doomed.

 
     
    Chapter 8
     
     
     
    T urns out a lob bar is nothing more sinister than a shabby themed bar (I was not above imagining a clinical basement where frontal and rear lobotomies are carried out for fun.) This particular one had a Wild