Mech pilot Kira's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Kira hid the stolen mech behind the grand hotel with the brass trim and glowing windows. She crouched in its shadow and studied the road to the tournament grounds. The facility had posted a reward for her. Now hunters watched every route in. She counted three of them on the far corner, scanners in hand. If she rolled her mech onto that road, they would spot the strange power signature at once. Her wolf growled low. Kira pressed a hand to its neck and thought. The hunters tracked her by the charge her machine gave off. She needed to hide that signal, or split it into pieces they could not follow. A scrabbling sound came from a drain at the hotel's base. Tiny metal rodents poured out, a dozen of them, their eyes bright and their bellies leaking oil. They swarmed a spilled crate of tournament rations. Kira watched them scatter in every direction. Each one carried a small power cell that pulsed like a tiny heartbeat. An idea snapped into place. She caught three of the rodents in her jacket. They squirmed and bit at the cloth. She pried open her mech's cockpit and wired her spare charge node into their tubing. The pine current fed into their little cells. Now each rodent hummed with the same signature the hunters chased. Kira set them loose down three different roads. The rodents darted off, dragging false trails behind them. On the far corner, one hunter's scanner flared. He shouted and pointed. All three took off after the scattering rodents, away from the hotel. The road cleared. Kira climbed into the cockpit and drove the mech out slow, engine low. She kept to the shadows the tall hotel threw across the ground. The wolf ran at the treads. No scanner turned toward her. She reached the tournament gate as the last hunter vanished down the wrong road. A gate tech scanned her frame and waved her through. "Bay nine. Inspection at dawn." He did not look up. He had no reward posting on his screen, only a check-in list. Kira parked the mech in bay nine and sealed the hatch. Her hands still shook. She had a slot in the tournament now. She had beaten the hunters at the road. But the false trails would die when the rodents ran out of charge. The hunters would circle back and report three fake signals near the hotel. The facility would know their thief had reached the grounds. Inspection came at dawn, and the same guard who saw her face worked these bays. She had gotten inside. Now she had to survive being seen.