When flying normally, Amy considered the traffic and pedestrians far below her as something abstract. She only flew along ground level if she had a need to.
Now, seeing the ground rush up at her and hearing the sounds of traffic, Amy remembered what it was like to fall.
She closed her eyes. Fly, she told herself. Fly.
Her hair whipped around her face. Her cape tugged at her shoulders. Her arms and legs had gone limp, and she kept her eyes closed.
Fly.
Amy heard a woman scream. Someone spotted her plummeting toward the street. Amy wondered how much damage she would do. Would she leave a crater? Could she even survive a fall from this height?
With her eyes still shut tight, Amy didn't know how close she was to impact.
She kept falling.
Fly.
Still falling.
I said, fly.
More falling.
Are you going to prove your mother right about you, or are you going to fly?
The sound of roaring air stopped. Amy's cape fluttered down against her back, and her hair flowed down onto her shoulders. She took a moment to appreciate the familiar feeling of her hair against the back of her neck.
She opened her eyes to find she was not falling or flying, but floating a few feet above the street, once again free of gravity.
A truck's honking horn brought her out of the sense of relief. Traffic had stopped all around her. Pedestrians looked at her in shock, and a pair of teenage boys shot photos of her their camera phones.
"Hey, handsome," she said, playfully smiling and winking at the two of them, knowing they would forever debate among each other which one she thought was handsome.
Feeling better, Amy shot straight upward, knowing that, from the five gunmen's point of view, it had only been about a minute. She slowed before reaching the top of the building.
"Fan out," one of them said. "She's around here somewhere."
Amy flew up and over the side of the roof and the nearest gunman. She delivered a punch right across his face, feeling the plastic-glass substitute of his goggles bend and crack at the impact.
Amy moved onto the second man, knowing the first would face minor injuries at most. She grabbed this man's rifle and threw it out of his reach. With her other hand, she punched him in the stomach, sending him hurtling backwards, disoriented.
The next two gunmen spotted Amy and flew toward her with their guns raised. She sped in between them and reached for their jetpacks. She wasn't an expert on how flying jetpacks worked, but figured punching them would do what she expected. Sure enough, both men flew out of control. Only one them screamed like a little girl. Amy had hoped for both.
The fifth man was the one who had barked orders at the other four. Amy flew at him, grabbed him by his neck, and flew straight downward, slamming him onto the nearest rooftop. She knew his body armor would absorb most of the impact, giving him just enough pain to knock the fight out of him.
"What's this about?" she said. "What is the Temple?"
The man didn't answer.
"It's unmasking time," she said. She gripped the bottom part of the man's helmet, ready to pry it off, when she heard a now-familiar humming, much louder than it was before.
Another 40 men, at least, in body armor and flying jetpacks hovered up from below and surrounded the roof. Each one held a rifle. Amy figured they must have been hiding inside the building and that the man in front of her had called them somehow.
The opened fire. Amy flew off to her left, with some of the slimy ibuprofen bullets hitting the roof below her, but several more splattering all over her. One of them hit her right in the eye. Amy dropped back down to the rooftop – better that than to fly around blind.
Amy pulled the goop off of her eye, tearing off a few eyelashes with it. More and more pellets hit her from all directions. Most stuck to her cape, but enough glommed onto her uniform, hair, arms and shoulders. She could feel the cold wet bullets break apart and seep through her uniform, and onto her skin.
Amy dug her fingers into the concrete rooftop, feeling the weight of it was a massive chunk broke away from the building as she lifted upward. In a continuous move, she tossed the piece of concrete at the jetpack men nearest to her. They parted, letting the debris fall between, giving Amy an opening.
She took off, hoping to fly between the men and away from there, but, after hovering in the air for a few second, she fell back onto the rooftop. The ibuprofen was kicking in again, she knew.
All around her, the men in the jetpacks landed on the roof and approached her, weapons drawn. They, too, must have seen that the drugs were having an effect.
# # # #
Next: Still got some fight in her.