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Fourteen- I

I'm REALLY not an artist, as you can see, but drawing my characters helps me better visualize them and keep my descriptions consistent. Here's Juliana in her suit!

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"Can you fly? I obviously can't." Juliana leaned forward in her seat in the carcopter- every time anything touched it, her back exploded in waves of agony. She forced herself to keep a straight face, but the beads of sweat dripping down her forehead gave her pain away. 

"Well, I've flown the PROBJet and driven a car... just gotta put those two together, right?" Chase chuckled softly, but his attempt at a joke did little to hide the fear behind his voice. Juliana was tough, but she was only human, and the deep red color of her suit made it difficult to tell exactly how much blood she had lost. "There's a first-aid kit in the compartment up there if you want something for your back."

"It looks a lot worse than it is." Juliana reached for the first-aid kit as the carcopter lurched forward, speeding down the street. Chase pulled the joystick and it began to rise into the air. The noise of the blades above their heads wasn't quite as deafening as that of a full-fledged helicopter, but it was still enough to preclude a conversation at normal speaking volume. 

"They're deploying the drones! I need to get the window open!" Juliana yelled. 

"What?" Chase responded as he veered to the right to avoid a charging drone. 

"Window! Open!" 

Chase looked down at the complicated console in front of him to see four buttons with car windows drawn on them. He pressed each multiple times until he came to the one that controlled Juliana's window. "Don't do anything stupid," he warned, remembering that she'd jumped out of a helicopter window on the day they first met. 

Juliana turned her neck as far to the side as she could without straining her back and stuck her hand out of the window. The force of the howling wind against her palm was much greater than she anticipated, and for a moment, she felt like her hand would snap off her wrist. She tensed up the muscles of her forearm and tried to hold her aim steady as she pointed her palm at the nearest drone and fired. The laser blast bored a hole through its metal exterior, momentarily stunning it and giving Chase time to speed ahead. Juliana could see Adrian's face behind the wheel of the closest carcopter, but two unmanned copters were quickly gaining on him, releasing more drones the closer they got. Adrian's copter dove, pulling some of the drones away from Chase and Juliana, but a few remained on their tail. 

In some aerodynamically impossible way, the drones were turning out to be faster than the carcopters themselves. One nearly slammed into Juliana's hand, but she quickly retracted it just enough to punch one of the drone's cameras out. The disoriented drone spun rapidly in place and Juliana delivered a laser blast to its wing, watching as it made a failed attempt to hover in place before plummeting to the ground. 

"Where are we going?" Juliana questioned as Chase angled the carcopter upward and began to drive toward the clouds. 

"Does it look like I have the slightest idea!?" Chase yelled back. "I'm just trying to get away from them." 

"To the Alps!" Juliana ordered. "We need to get out of the country. At least we'll be relatively safe somewhere Nelson has no political authority." 

"What? How am I supposed to know where that is?"

"It's a giant mountain range that goes across our entire western border. Pretty difficult to miss, even for an American." 

As usual, Chase chose to ignore her jab at his nationality. "Hold on. I'm going to take these guys for a ride." He pushed the joystick as far down and to the left as it would go, and Juliana felt a momentary weightlessness as the carcopter rapidly changed directions. 

"What was that for?" Juliana winced.

"These things have sensors that respond to movement- that's how they're chasing us," Chase explained. "There's gotta be a processing delay. I'm trying to figure out exactly how long it is." 

"You can calculate that in your head while piloting a carcopter?" Juliana raised her eyebrows in disbelief. 

"Aptitude, baby," Chase grinned as he carefully watched the line of carcopters in his rearview mirror. They were copying his movements, following him to the ground. As they left the cloud cover, the small town beneath them began to come into view, its buildings and dirt roads growing larger with every passing second. Juliana watched a horrified Adrian break away from the formation and head back toward the sky when it became clear that Chase wasn't going to correct his course. 

"We're going to crash!" Juliana protested as the carcopter continued its uncontrolled descent. 

"Nope," Chase shook his head. "They are." Juliana's back cried out in protest as the carcopter's wheels made contact with a poorly-maintained road, sending gravel flying into the faces of shocked passers by. Yet, the impact wasn't nearly as terrible as it should've been. Wondering why, Juliana turned her attention to Chase, who had pulled the joystick upward with so much force that she was afraid he would break it. Their carcopter only momentarily kissed the ground before it began to climb once more toward the sky. The other copters, however, weren't so lucky. The first few nosedived into the concrete, and the rest crashed into those in a horrible cascade effect that left a two-story-high pile of smoking metal in its wake. 

"Processing delays suck," Chase declared, smirking like a little kid who'd just beaten a hard video game. 

"You're absolutely insane, Numbers," Juliana laughed in relief, unable to look away from the scene in the carcopter's mirror. She kicked off her boots and pulled her feet up to her chest, an intense fatigue washing over her as the adrenaline began to leave her system. 

"I love you too, Angel."

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