Therapy Bits

The neon washed city stretched endlessly behind her, but Vexa didn’t turn to look. She never did. The lenses strapped across her eyes—the ones with the glowing green rings that pulsed like breathing circuitry—didn’t show her the world the way most people saw it. They peeled it back, stripped away the noise and grime of Rygate Sector, and replaced it with lines of code and signatures of heat. For her, the streets were a series of shifting probabilities, an endless cascade of decisions waiting to be made.

Her short crimson hair burned against the city’s cold palette of smoke and steel. People had told her once that it made her look like a warning sign. She never disagreed.

The goggles whispered softly, a stream of encrypted chatter rippling into her thoughts. Targets, contracts, betrayals. Vexa was a ghost-runner, a courier of forbidden data, and tonight the air was thick with the hum of surveillance drones. The Corporation—always just “the Corp,” like it was too large to deserve a proper name—had tightened its grip on Rygate. No one slipped past its eyes anymore. No one but her.

She adjusted the dark turtleneck hugging her frame and stepped forward, the scarlet glow of the city’s emergency signage painting her in a violent halo. The datachip hidden at her collarbone wasn’t just information—it was rebellion distilled into kilobytes, proof that the Corp wasn’t invincible. It contained names, hidden labs, the architecture of the surveillance grid itself. And if she could get it past the western barricades, she’d light a fire that even Rygate’s endless rain couldn’t drown.

A flicker pulsed in the goggles. Green rings flared brighter. Motion. Heat signature. Three blocks away, a squad was sweeping toward her position. She smiled, lips curved like a knife. They hadn’t learned yet. They never did.

With a whispered command, the goggles shifted to combat overlay. Pathways lit up across rooftops, highlighted with green veins of possibility. She launched forward, boots striking wet metal. The city blurred, glowing red against her acceleration.

They thought she was just another fugitive, one more spark to be crushed in the machine. But sparks, she knew, could set entire worlds aflame.

And tonight, Vexa intended to burn the sky.

Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge #335 – Mom With a Blog