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Vault (Part 1 of 2)

By D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Chenguang hikes up her sleeves before vaulting over the pile of fuzzy moss and greets Lukas with a nod. The chloropolyurethane fabric flaps in the slight breeze and the double suns beat down onto her arms.

Lukas fishes in his bag next to his tent for a bottle of sunsoak and releases the spray, running it generously over his solflex-covered arms, torso, and legs.

“Your head,” Chenguang says and he smiles, as if he hadn’t been doing this for years.

“Can’t reach,” he says, lying and Chenguang knows he just likes the attention. She grabs the spray and discharges that exhale of mist, covering his football-shaped clear helmet. She even sprays some on the clear hard arc under his bearded chin. She turns the mist onto herself, bringing down the spray over her exposed transpandex inner layer, the foam frothing up at her arms before becoming clear, encasing the invisible solflex pores of her fabric.

Lukas watches her as she sprays down. “That’s probably enough,” Lukas says. “You don’t want to drown yourself and run dry tomorrow’s supply.”

“Cheapskate.” But, Chenguang knows he’s right and slides it back in his sack. A coin catches the light. His comm. She grabs it. “You almost forgot this.”

“Like I would. And risk not being able to talk to you when we’re apart?”

“Very funny. Put it on.” He does, affixing it to his chest.

“I don’t know how you have it like that just dangling from your neck.” His voice comes through his piece and projects into her pendant.

“It feels nice. Plus I hear you loud and clear.” She stretches now, getting ready for the run. Her pendant chain slides about near her armpit. She holds it to her chest, reaffirming a silent promise to her sister.

“Won’t feel so nice getting snagged on a branch.”

Chenguang gestures out as she pulls up her leg. Near his tent, Lukas brings his head to his knees, arching his back and groaning. They wrap up the tent sheet around their legs, its fibers assimilating into their pants, attaching itself to their uniforms.

Chenguang kicks up her legs, feeling the lightness of the tent. She hitches the bag with the rest of her limited supplies onto her back. “Come on, old man. You see this wide expanse? Not a tree in sight.”

“Doesn’t mean there won’t be one.”

“I’m not too worried,” Chenguang utters before she starts off on a sprint. Lukas follows at her heels, his shoes sinking into the foamy terrain in rapid strides.

 

They jump, leap, roll, wind up, and do it again. Their legs traverse the terrain of Sugue, picking up speed like a vacuum picks up dust. Chenguang feels the wind in her hair and sprints past a tangle of mossy vines. Out of her peripheral vision, Chenguang sees Lukas next to her jumping over a mound and kicking off a verdant growth to spin into a roll as he keeps going. He’s showing off, telling her he can keep up even doing spins. She picks up the pace.

When the wall arises before them, she leaps up and attaches herself like a cat, her transpandex fingers reaching over the top. Her body sinks into the wall, as like everything else, its façade is full of moss. Her right leg kicks off and she reaches with her arm, throwing herself over the edge. Her hand slips.

Lukas is right behind her and his geneblazed thigh muscles have no trouble leaping up and perching on top. He offers her a hand. She grimaces, lets Lukas’ hand dangle, and picks herself up.

She feels the solflex suit, covered in spray, picking up the heat of the sun. She takes a second to catch her breath, as Lukas adjusts his helmet. The sun warms her and at the corner of her helmet, the hololight shows the power’s at half capacity, filling up notch by notch. She needs to be faster.

“Mine’s saying two-thirds full,” says Lukas, as if reading her mind.

“Yeah, mine too.” Chenguang’s not lying, she tells herself. If she squints, it kind of looks like the bar’s higher.

“You think we’ll meet quota before the suns set?”

Chenguang’s mouth beats her brain. “Yes, definitely. Or else you can have my thermal blanket.” She shuts her eyes, wishing she hadn’t promised that.

Over the wall, the hills fill their eyes. Beyond that is the industrial wasteland.

 

They only stop running and leaping after their feet, backs, and arms map out their jaunt through the hilly stretch.

Chenguang’s muscles ache, but she doesn’t want to admit it. She shakes out her legs, pulls back her neck. There’s a change going through her. She used to be able to run for days without pain, but then again, she used to be able to jump twice the height Lukas jumped earlier today at the wall. Today, she barely got past it.

“Hey, you okay?” Lukas looks genuinely concerned. Probably for himself. He knows he can’t do this alone.

“Yeah.” She stares at the industrial wasteland. The two suns are waning now, Solah closer to the horizon than Soloh. Lukas’ hazy shadow lengthens against the concrete at the hill land’s edge. His green eyes glint in the pink of the dual-sun evening light.

“You have the Eazslap?” she says.

Lukas undoes a pocket at his triceps and pulls out a few blue-glowing stickers, disengages them from each other. He selects two, hands them over to Chenguang.

“It can’t be that bad, can it?”

“It’s not. It’s just preventative. Besides, the sticker will provide some light, now the suns are retiring on us.”

“Barely,” says Lukas, under his breath.

Chenguang keeps her eyes bright and open as she slaps them on, even as the telltale searing pain reaches her knees. She’s not going to give in with any wince or reaction. The stickers release inflammation inhibitors; the burst of prickling tells her that much at least.

“What’s your charge say?” Chenguang asks. She feigns nonchalance, ignoring quivering knees.

Lukas’ pupils veer right and his hands twitch, moving phantom controls. Chenguang watches as he waits for the bar graph in his view to convert to a figure.

“93%. I figure we’ll be in the sun for another ten minutes. Not running and leaping, so it’s not going to climb exponentially.”

“It’ll probably get up to 95%.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty safe. I’ll be in the clear all night. How about yours?”

“89%,” Chenguang says. She grits her teeth. More like 72.

“That’s pretty good,” says Lukas. “Well, 95’s not 100 but it’s pretty close. I guess I won’t be needing your thermal blanket. I’ll do okay with my own.”

“You can have it. I promised you 100%.”

“Nah, it’ll just get too hot.” But Chenguang knows that’s not true. The blankets optimize for perfect temperature, no shivering and no sweating, no excess heat or cold. With two blankets, once the batts run out for the night for the first, the second one would take over. Without it, they’ll just have to do with the dire chill. Negative fifties or so degrees Celsius chill.

They bask out in the sun, drinking up its energy. Lukas just lays back, but Chenguang’s arms and legs scissor open and closed. Jumping jacks to accelerate absorption. Any movement prompts magnified absorption rates, but running, leaping, and gaining ground does it most. Something to do with your heart rate, acceleration, and even psychological thrill all interacting with the inner solflex machinery—amplified, too, by a generous coating of spray.

She huffs, scissoring her arms and legs, as she watches their shadows get longer and longer until they merged with the dusk that surrounds them.

 

Dinner goes by without a word. There’s really not much to say chewing on vaprabars. Can’t really comment on the taste because it’s just coagulated nutripowder. Chenguang grabs a second but Lukas’ hand comes down on her wrist. “There’s too much iron in it,” he says. “It might interact with Eazslaps.”

“Really?”

She gives him a look like she might bite his hand and he pulls back.

“Suit yourself,” he says, but she’s already tossed it towards her pack. It clatters against her helmet and tumbles to the ground. The bright sleek wrapping stands out against the dull, dark concrete, reflecting the artificial light emanating from the ray fabric, slung up against a ledge.

There is no natural light tonight. Clouds have completely enveloped this planet’s one moon. They rely on the ray fabric and its harsh white light.

Lukas whistles as he sets up his tent. Chenguang remembers the song as she starts to emancipate her tent fabric from her legs and spread it out before her.

“Clear, the White Waters,” she says.

“Where I was from, it was ‘Cool, the White Waters.’” Lukas says. He pulls off his coin comm and drops it into his upturned helmet.

“What it would be like to get in,” she says. She sits down under her half-pitched tent, waiting for it to inflate. She stretches out her legs. “To envelop in water.”

“You are enveloped in water. Made of it,” says Lukas. He’s un-creasing every bit of his tent with his transpandex-covered hands.

“You know what I mean,” she says. “I remember when we had water. Trickles to splash on your eyelids. Mist to clean off your skin, your elbows.”

“That was years ago and worlds away. Better to focus on the project at hand.” Lukas was systematic in his manual un-crinkling. Even if it would be done by the inflator anyway. His thoroughness reminds Chenguang of how he runs and leaps, methodical, making sure to cover the ground and air, checking for sharp edges with the heightened instinct of his body as they’re trained to, even in his lightning speed. She sees that concentration all day running through his aerodynamic mask, in that focused look in his eyes.

“You think the capballs will really generate enough power?”

“It’ll make a lot more than we can.”

“Enough to rent all the tech? The hydrogen harvesters, transporters, and hydro-generators for Claris?”

“It’ll do some. But, you might not want to hold your breath on that liquid immersion.”

“A bath. They called it a bath.”

“Yeah, well, the best you can do is dream about it. We’re about to enter wasteland tomorrow. And the specs say that’s as dry as bone.”

“Bone? But, that’s us. I thought we’re made of mostly water, you said.”

“Bone, desiccated, nothing but bone, bone. Pinch dry. Like everything else in this sector.”

Chenguang massages her knees, looks out into the wasteland, the geometric shapes of a past civilization, now all dried to stone.

Before she can duck into her tent, Lukas walks over, fishes in his bag, passes her a package with an attached flexstraw. A sippee. About a cup’s worth of water in a bag. “Won this years ago as a medal. Parkour championship. Been holding onto it, weighing me down.”

She looks at it, feels the weight. It’s liquid, all right.

And Lukas has been running with this strapped to him this whole time? She looks up at him, but he looks down, veiling his expression.

“I can’t take this—”

“Take it. It’s dragging me, slowing me down. And you need it for your knees.”

“No, I’m fine—”

“Then do me the favor of helping me get rid of this. I don’t have what it takes to appreciate it. To me it’s all the same. Whether liquid’s shot-fed through skin microhydro-generators from tiny spurts of hydrogen and oxygen or if I gulp it down in one go through my esophagus. Makes no difference.” He looks up and gives her a nod. Chenguang sees a hardness in Lukas’ eyes, a stubbornness that won’t back down.

“But you’ve never tried gulping it.”

“I have. I’ve won more than one medal. A pretty good sprinter and leaper before you. Please, as if they’d send anyone less than a champ to work with you.”

Chenguang stares at Lukas who’s doing squats, with a huge grin on his face, as if to prove his point. His eyes, though, belie something. Regret, possibly.

“Alright, thanks, Lukas. But, no more favors.”

“It’s not a—”

Chenguang ducks into her tent, swipes on her thermal blanket as the chill settles in. She pulls the squishy package of water onto her chest, and watches it rise and fall underneath the blanket.

Water, she thinks, as her eyes fall to a close. She’s never had so much at once, not since twenty years ago, when she was eight and her grandma splurged on a pack. She remembers sharing it with her little sister, Xinyao gobbling most of it up and leaving her with only a mouthful.

 

In her sleep, she dreams of broken legs. Broken legs mean no levers for that fulcrum hip of hers to move, little heat generated for the night, and no work for creds to pay for her relocation debt. She calls out in her sleep.

She dreams of her mother and father, selected to fight the fires so rampant in her homeworld, never to be seen again. She dreams of their voyage, sent off for a better home. And Xinyao, orbiting with the Civ, still caged in a temp cell, waiting for enough water on Claris to emerge from the hive.

She thrashes about, in her half-lucid state. Her mind fixates on the sheer ingenuity of that tech borrowed from the High Institute, funded through expending collected resources of their homeworld. Their last big hurrah for their best and brightest. The journey, the rocket, glorious things the High Institute owns. She’ll probably never see interstellar tech like that again. Only capballs. Efficient, good for short distances. Sensitive old scrap low tech for low-end space riffraff like her. Low tech she has high hopes for. She dreams of it zipping by her, beating her in speed and grace, though she would be off planet by then. Once the capballs make enough energy for hydrogen tech rental, as they all hope, the zapping for water will be a cinch.

With a start, she remembers there is water balanced in a package on her chest.

Her leg aches.

Water.

She dreams of tasting it. It tickles her tongue, dapples in specks of moist cohesion on her lips, washes down in a surge.

When she awakes, she starts, thinking the package has broken and all its treasures have leaked out and seeped into the parched concrete, but she feels no wetness. It is still there. Intact. It’s warm.

She’s cold.

She realizes she awakes not from the nightmare of disappearing H2O, slipping away from her, but the reality of chill. She didn’t collect enough sun.

She breathes out. Sees her breath, precious heat and humidity escaping. She puts on her helmet and she feels immediate warmth, the last dregs of power still caged in there. But she can’t rest her head back onto her pack, not without the helmet’s aerodynamic wedge getting in the way.

That leaves her chilly body. The pack, at least, is warm against her skin. She remembers that water is a good conductor and the packaging’s got heat tech. She rubs the pack around her body, shivering. She pushes it under the blanket, willing it to stay warm under the covers as she swipes the pack around her.

The rubbing generates more heat and her hands are methodical, making the pack move in strategic ways, as strategic as the two of them, Lukas and Chenguang, like a pair of lone coyotes, traversing the landscape. They are mapping out the best course, the one that gains the most sunshine and surface contact with least amount of risk, so when the capballs are dropped, the tech will interact with the atmosphere and topographical elements of the landscape and accelerate with so much collected sun energy, multiplied by the mechanics of their whizzing speed and ground synergies, they’ll be priceless, chock full of power, when harvested.

Lucky so far that they’ve patched the sharp edges. The capballs fly fast and accurate, but one touch at a point and their vulnerable surface gives, puncturing the irreplaceable tech borrowed by the Civ at great cost to them. Even if it was belittled low tech, a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth and potential of the High Institute. When it comes to the High Institute, they’d find a way to collect for any broken rented tech, no matter how minor. Should the capballs touch an edge, they’d snap. Like apocryphal soap bubbles popping, childhood dreams of water gone.

Unable to sleep, Chenguang stretches as her parkour and acceleration trainer has taught her. She hears her trainer’s voice now, as she reaches over to her ankles: “Prepare the muscles, sharpen the mind. As a human you have an edge—instinct and corporeal sense. You’ve got a gift that no bot could ever replicate—somatics—an organic impulse that lies deep behind the geneblazed muscles and uniform-enhanced speed. There are phenomena on planets we can’t anticipate to program into bots. You’ve got the skills, the training. Don’t waste it, whet it like a knife. Focus. Breathe. Keep your eye on the goal.”

Chenguang rests the package of water in her lap. Pulls in her right arm, braces it in the elbow of the other. Her triceps draw taut, making her suck in a breath. She never thought she’d be a cartographer, using her somatic experience to create the map for sensitive tech, but sometimes she can’t think of any other job that would make her feel so alive.

She wonders how the other recruits are doing. Ayesha and Jayesh, her two best friends. Are they doing okay in Tilna? They volunteered together, unlike her, who volunteered alone and got placed with a stranger: Lukas.

Lukas. She held onto her warm water bag. He’s fast. Maybe she should’ve been paired with someone slower. She was once as fast as him, maybe even faster, but something on this planet’s pressing on her. Changing her.

Her eyes fall on the swirling inflator at the top of the tent, a tiny disk generator that pitched air along the inner surface tent. Rotating, it looks like a planet. She imagines it swarming with tiny beads, all charging along on its surface. There are dozens of planets in this solar system, all to be filled with accelerating capballs. All to be gathering energy for rental tech for hydrogen capture and water production.

For Claris. Their only hope.

She pulls in her toes, flexes her calves, then peels off the Eazslaps on their knees. They no longer glow, their medicinal blaze exhausted. She sticks it against the side of the tent, too tired to deal with it now.

She removes her helmet and tries to think of the hearth, snap noodles, and other hot things from home. Her fingers run along her pendant, with her comm on one side and a picture of her little sister, Xinyao, on the other. She falls asleep again, as the heat of the water pack penetrates her transpandex and warms her abs.

 

Chenguang shivers as she wakes to the break of dawn and the breaking of Lukas’ voice as he attempts to sing her awake.

“Stop.” She can hear him both through the tent and through the comm. The scraggly high-pitched pentatonic tune falters and grinds to a halt.

The water pack has chilled and she looks at it through the light of the morning. She can’t drink this now. There needs to be the right time, an occasion. Basking on concrete in the middle of Sugue, at the brink of wasteland, is no way to celebrate with a cocktail this precious. H2O, she slips it in her pack, glides out of her tent in a swift slide, and wraps it all up.

Once they wrap, strap, fold, and tie, they’re ready to set off.

This time Lukas jumps out first, his bound energy as taut as coiled springs, and he rockets forth as if pumped on juice, an old homeworld expression when juice once existed.

She follows behind, the twin suns already opening up the world with light.

They bound across the abandoned industrial landscape like two fleas on a bear, except instead of fur, stained concrete meets their lattice neoprene soles.

For all the time this place has been abandoned, no plant life breaks through the hardened cement. There’s a dispossessed feeling in the air.

“What happened to these people?” Chenguang breathes out as she runs.

“You didn’t take a look while you were stopping by base before the new assignment?”

“Didn’t get a chance. Was checking up on my sister in the hive at Civ.” Chenguang slips over a railing and Lukas vaults over it and lands on two feet.

“Oh, the hive. Sobering place. So, this here was Tneshtown. When I checked back on base, this industrial park long ago was the production center of kenophrane, the textile coating that housed the smart fabrics made to filter toxic chemicals.”

“Kenophrane? Hasn’t that been outlawed?”

“Yes.” Lukas jumps ahead and puts his hand on what looks like a smokestack before swinging his legs over it

“Let me guess, making kenophrane also involves releasing toxins.” Chenguang merely skirts around the smokestack-like protrusion before jumping over a gap.

“Yup, one of those pollute to get rid of pollution deals.”

“Guess they lost out.”

“Kind of. Depends who you look at. Many did lose out. There were mass deaths of workers, at least according to the base briefing. Violent stuff. First you get a rash and a cough, pretty innocuous. But then your hands turn red and bloated and you can’t work. You slowly go blind and your lungs lose function. Those were the common ailments.” Chenguang rolls from a jump as she listens.

“Pretty awful.” She sees Lukas hopping from one cement circular vat to another. The vats look like places for drying some liquid.

“That’s not even the worst stuff.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Limb detachment and there’s more.” He pretend cuts his arm before using it to pivot over a gate. Then he runs and leaps across to the next building over.

“This is why I don’t like to read the briefings. It’s never ‘They all had perfect health and beautiful descendants and happiness.’” Chenguang follows suit but has to attach herself to the wall like a cat, barely clearing the ten-foot gap.

“If they did, we wouldn’t be here, staking out their derelict remains, mapping out their territory.”

“True.” Chenguang’s back met roof in an impeccable roll and she gets up without stopping. Her helmet cuts through the air as she leaps again.

“The unfortunate ones are the ones that didn’t survive long enough before the big move. But, they took all the able workers out of here once they created enough fabrics. They thought the fabrics they created would fix this place up. But, the fabrics couldn’t filter these toxins. They only did Grade C and the ones released here were some of the chemicals under Grade E.”

“Too bad. They did a pretty good job building these structures.” She swung her legs through a gap between a vat and what looked like a drying lattice.

“Yeah, they’re pretty sturdy.” Lukas tapped on the cement before doing a spin off a wall and onto another neighboring one.

“Good call. I think we need more spins.”

“Yeah, quadruple the solar intake.”

Chenguang pulls a 360 as she kicks off the ledge of a roof. She feels the rays coursing through the chloropolyurethane hitting the solflex absorbers and a ping goes off in her helmet alerting her of high intake rate achieved.

“I don’t know, Lukas. Some of this is pretty sharp. I think we’ll have to go through this again and note where the patches need to go.”

“Too bad we can’t just tear it down.”

“Historical planetary code. You know we’d be indicted by the High Institute in a hot second.”

“Yeah. But, I have to say. There’s something charming about this place.”

“You just like how the concrete feels against your legs when executing your spins.” Chenguang pulls another spin off, her spiral unwinding from her legs, when she missteps. She stumbles and catches herself right before a roof edge. She slips then.

Her heart jumps as Lukas grabs her arm.

It starts to slip, the transpandex of his fingers and her inner arm garment sliding past each other.

“Whoa.” Lukas pulls her up. His fingers slip again. Chenguang reaches with her other arm, pulling on the chloropolyurethane sleeve of his jacket, finally latching on to something with slight traction.

“Whoa is right.” Chenguang kicks up against the side of the building and pushes herself up. She looks down at the side as they catch their breath. That would’ve been a twenty-foot fall. Though a protrusion from the wall might have saved her a broken spine by breaking something else.

“You, uh, okay there?” Lukas does some jumping jacks, trying to maximize the solar intake.

“That was weird. I felt like something pushed me off my spin. You know spins aren’t so hard to control. Once you’re moving, you’ve got momentum.”

“I’d say. Some momentum. You nearly spun yourself out to a multiple-story drop.”

Chenguang sat on the side of a vat, her eyes shifting left to right and her fingers moving, calibrating the fabric to her nerves.

“It’s fine. They’re attached. But, just in case, I reconnected and connected them again.”

“You want me to check it? I mean, not to be forward, but I can usually feel the incongruities.” Lukas pauses in his jumping jacks, raises a brow.

“No, no. I think it’s fine. You know what it felt like?”

“Scary?”

Chenguang shakes her head. “Like someone pushed me.”

“There’s no one here but me, Chenguang. And you know I know enough not to pull any pranks.”

She gets up, looks over at the rising twin suns, and starts doing jumping jacks herself. After the chill of last night, she knows enough to try to osmose as much sunlight as possible.

They run again.

She’s feeling pretty good. She got in five vaults and three good rolls. She’s starting to forget about the strange feeling in the air, like being jerked off a trajectory when her foot slips at a jump. It doesn’t slip per se, it feels like it’s being pulled.

Helmet hits concrete as she bangs into a raised structure in the shape of a cone. Her head reverberates in the football-shaped piece of clear armor. She sidesteps and avoids falling over as she experiences a wave of nausea.

“Okay, that’s it. We’re stopping,” says Lukas. “Second time today.”

“No, no, I can go on. It was just a tug on my leg.”

“I think it’s time for a bar break.” Lukas sits down right where he is, onto the rooftop ground. No vat or raise-up to park his rear on in sight. The smokestack to his left comes up over his head and is simply too high, though he could probably scale it.

He looks like he’s contemplating doing so as he focuses his eyes in that way. Then, he tugs off his helmet, pulls out a bar, and chomps on it.

“Air’s not too bad now,” he says, in between bites. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Dry. The briefing said all those abandoned years finally cleaned it out. But, it took a long while and still the toxins might be stored in the moss.”

Chenguang ignores her own stomach growling and approaches the site where she felt the tug. She’s looking at a structure that has a concrete panel up top and one below and just a window to slide through. This is where she tripped, trying to vault between the two panels through the three-foot aperture.

She kicks it. “What do you suppose this is?”

“I don’t know. A place to hang something? Or maybe a shrine or something. They had a crude religion back then.”

She peers at the shadow of the structure the dual suns make, a dark slat on top and bottom, like an enlarged sandwich of the homeworld, and notes the fuzziness of the penumbra. There’s something off.

She accelerates to try to vault through the aperture again, but the space between the two concrete panels seems impenetrable and again she hits concrete.

“That’s weird.”

“You hurt yourself again?” Lukas approaches her.

“No, I’m okay. I was kind of expecting it. Come and check this out.”

Chenguang tries to pass her hand through the hole in the two slats but meets a resistance. Lukas tries and his hand slides right off.

“An encasement?” Chenguang asks Lukas, wide-eyed.

“No, their tech wasn’t advanced enough for that.” Chenguang places a note into her mapalog of the anomaly. “This’ll need more than a patch. If the capballs hit this—”

“You’re right. They’ll have to get rid of this. It’s altering the flow. But, they, not us. We’re not being paid for reconstructions, just mapping and patch-noting. Plus, we’ll let the higher-ups handle all the historical planetary code red tape.”

Chenguang removes her helmet and pushes against the space.

“What are you doing, Chenguang? Just set it aside, let them handle it later. You need to take your bar break and we should get going.” She sees Lukas standing up, holding his helmet akimbo in his right arm.

She feels a sucking feeling at her hands and legs and she’s pulled in. A pop at her back ends the vacuuming whoosh and all is dark.

(Continued in Part 2…)

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was part 1 of Vault, by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, narrated by Rebecca Wei Hsieh.

About this story, our author says:

I teach a dynamic weapons-based martial arts system and have trained in a number of styles of martial arts to various degrees. I wanted to include a protagonist in a speculative fiction story that relied on her spry physicality as well as her mental prowess to problem solve. I conjured up someone constantly in motion (running and running and moving about) and how this movement would fare in an alien world and be a part of this person’s profession. I landed on parkour as an expression of this dynamic movement and drew from my background in intense training in martial arts: terrain navigation, situational awareness and safely doing rolls and falls.

And about this story, I say: 

Oh, I loved the parkour in this story and thought it fit so well with the alien landscape. It gives this story such an interesting texture–you’re being introduced to the world in a falling, running, leaping sort of way. Instead of first learning about how the world smells or sounds, we’re primarily being introduced to the way it feels under your feet as you run and leap along it.

Well, part 2 is next week, so we will wait on further thoughts till next week so as not to give you any spoilers. So come back and see where the leaping journeys take us.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that try to meet quota before the suns set.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Christopher McDougall in Born to Run, who says: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle- when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.