Aaron waved his arms. “Is everyone ready? Remember that we changed tonight’s final rendezvous to that frozen yogurt place. If you’re not going to stop by, text me, so we know you didn’t die.”
Everyone laughed. Shay didn’t. Bouncing around the city at night at high speed was dangerous. She could never understand why no one else seemed to think that.
Aaron and Lana ran toward the edge of the building. Shay ran after them.
Tonight’s the night. I keep coming in third or fourth, but I’m gonna go all-out.
The tomb raider sprinted full speed toward the edge of the building and leaped, soaring into the night sky. A stream of yellow and red lights streamed beneath her. LA night traffic.
The flight lasted only for a few seconds before she landed on the next roof with a smooth roll that brought her back to her feet with almost no loss of momentum. Lana appeared at her side and rushed past her.
Oh, the chase is on, huh?
Shay grinned. She picked up the pace, sprinting after the woman. The thud of Aaron’s footfalls sounded right behind her.
Lana jumped over the side of the building, but Shay’s heart didn’t speed up. She’d studied the course as thoroughly as she might the background for a tomb raid. No surprises tonight, just a chance to prove her skills.
The tomb raider followed the other woman over the edge. Lana had landed on metal stairs and was already halfway down them. Shay jumped over a handrail and fell toward the bottom. She caught another rail about six feet above the street while the other woman hopped back and forth using a less dramatic strategy.
Shay hit the street and ran toward a nearby alley, now in the lead. She didn’t sprint through the alley. They still had many miles to go on the course, and exhausting herself in the few first minutes wouldn’t help her prove her skills.
I need to win tonight. I need to show them my determination.
A jog brought her out of the alley and toward a fence. Lana and Aaron were a few yards behind her on either side. She spotted a USPS mailbox and ran toward it. With a clean vault off the box, she cleared the fence. Lana and Aaron both hit the fence directly and scrambled over it.
A grin broke out on the tomb raider’s face as she ran from the fence toward the darkened multi-level parking garage. Another quick vault over a gate sent her inside, the other two close behind, and the rest of the club much farther back.
The runners followed the spiraling concrete structure up for two stories before Shay broke toward an open space between a large truck and an obnoxiously yellow Porsche.
Someone’s overcompensating.
Shay jumped onto the railing and pushed off without a second of hesitation. She’d long since learned that was the difference between her and the others like Lana or Aaron, or even Lily and her friends. Some part of her mind was always running a tactical scenario and trying to convince her brain not to put her in unnecessary danger. The briefest hint of hesitation meant she wasn’t achieving the speed and momentum she needed to beat Lana and Aaron.
Tonight, she didn’t care about falling. She risked that every time she hit her obstacle course in Warehouse One. No. It’d taken a while and many parkour runs before she finally realized the truth.
Parkour was just a type of exercise and movement to her, but that wasn’t what it meant to Aaron, Lana, or the others. It wasn’t what it had meant to the men who had created parkour.
Free-to-Move. It was right there in the name. Free as in freedom. That was what most of the club members were striving for; a near-religious experience where they pushed their bodies to the limit and appreciated every single second as a fully-examined sensory experience.
Shay had started training in parkour as a tool at first, frustrated over her humiliation at the hands of Marcus. It was just like everything and everyone else in her life: something to make her more dangerous in her job. Joy had played little part.
As she caught a ledge from an office building across from the parking lot and pulled herself up, she understood that was no longer true. Like many other things in her life, things had changed.
Another quick pull moved her up, followed by another until she rolled onto the roof.
The occasional drone whirred past in the distance, but she didn’t care, being too far from them for a good look. She’d just end up as Parkour Penny on the net again.
Shay allowed herself a grin as she launched from the edge of the building and caught a pipe on the next taller building. She shinnied up the pipe as she surveyed the grand glory of Los Angeles at night.
The city stretched out on all sides, an ocean of light and movement in the deepening darkness. From the top of a building at night, there was no detail to take in, just silhouettes. Enemies could be walking or driving beneath her, and people she’d never meet.
She didn’t need to be concerned about a sniper or an assassin. With the cartel defeated and her criminal days moving farther and farther into the past, the sun might be able to shine on her dark life soon.
I’m hanging out at barbeques with cops now. Yeah, definitely getting softer. Ironic, considering my boyfriend’s pretty much a living natural disaster and helped me destroy a cartel.
Freedom. Not fear.
Her new life had started because of fear and ennui. She didn’t want to die in her kitchen, murdered by someone who could smile at her but didn’t care about her. A couple years before she would have laughed at lecturing students and caring about people as absurd dreams or even signs of weakness.
Shay held no illusions that the parkour had changed her life. It’d taken time, effort, and new relationships, not to mention a death
