The fire racing up the outside of my safety suit acted like a possession. It stuck on no matter how I twisted and thrashed. My only thought was to get out of the jumpsuit before the gnawing combustion ate through the shielding layer.

I stepped in behind the wheel. The seat was always warm, and I hated the feeling. It ruined the experience of a car to have it feel so recently used. My uniform held me back as well. On the farm, before the drought, I used to race shirtless in a pair of ragged jeans. That was the only way to really drive a car.

I stepped in over the balcony wall with my other leg, inched inside, then gently closed the door. The sheer curtains drifted softly. It smelled like toast, and I froze. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone inside. I heard a knife scraping butter onto bread. As long as they stayed occupied in the other room, I would be fine.

Now that I was sitting astride this monster machine I realized that it wouldn’t be an issue to get it to mow the lawn. Getting it to stop would be the problem. I could tell that the inertia and rage of the thing would carry forwards far longer than I might need it to go.

The true marvel of beans is that such a powerful source of flavor and nutrients can remain dried for so long without losing hardly any of its particular and excellent qualities. Try drying a tomato and report back with what you get; it won’t be pretty. Beans are a perfect balance of water and fruit (in the technical sense). Their chief offering for me is their protein density.

The cliffs rising on either side of me hedged me in and protected me from the wind. Its calls and cries echoed around the whole mountain region. It needed more attention than I could give it. My legs were burning, my back was bending and pushing me forward, my arms ached and protested with every thrust of my twin walking sticks.

I was beneath the surface, looking towards the edge of the pond and admiring the fact that even the stems of the water lilies were sturdy and well-formed without being overly thick or ungainly. I let out a stream of air from my mouthpiece, and the bubbles jostled upwards, scattering on the surface and disappearing into the air above the water. From below, it seemed like the bubbles were merely bouncing out and would return soon enough.

The mountains were coming apart so that everything looked like an ocean of slow-moving stone and dust. The bombs struck the ground so hard that the shoulders and angles of the peaks were melting beneath their weight and fury.

These waves were the biggest. The water was choppy. Add on to that the storm coming in and you had a recipe for the most delicious riding in the world. I had been out here every day. As the storm got closer, I started waking up earlier in the morning. I was out before the sun rose, watching the tides change, smelling the air, breathing in the chaos that fed my appetite for forward motion.

Now, twelve hours later, the mood had changed. The plane was going to slide at any time, and we were of the same mind: get out before it slid and dashed us to pieces on the plateau below us.

In the middle of them all, unaffected by her surroundings, a short woman with silky bleached white hair was standing perfectly still. She was staring at me. Both her hands were under her dark jacket. I blinked, and she was gone.

I hadn’t seen them yet either, but every shot they fired told me more about where they were. The dappled light made it hard to see anything in these woods; it was to both of our advantage. Night would come eventually, then the silence and darkness would keep us both alive until morning.

My feet were wet from the puddles I hadn’t dodged, and I had sadly torn and lost half of the front cover when someone’s umbrella raked across the paper. It would have been easily avoided if I had been looking, but as it happened I was in the middle of a car chase through a deserted village high in the mountains.

The engine sputtered and died. I ran a quick calculation as I floated along in silence, and the math assured me that I would end up many miles short of land.

We knew there would be a rescue dig to get us out, but it wasn’t clear when that would be. None of us were worried, strangely, but sitting in the dark with nothing to do had worn us out. We sat listening to the stillness, hoping for the sound of a drill, hammer, or the distant thud of explosives. And, naturally, for the scrabbling sound of rodent feet nearby.

I stood on a beach now, waves, boats, everything just so. The sand was arranged perfectly and the tide was auspicious. Even the land and the air were supportive: I had never received such clear signs that the deed was meant to occur than I had on this day.

Nearby, a solitary cyclist was bumping her way across the cobblestones, concerned that her frail machine would break down and leave her to walk through the city at night. She glanced up as a light went on, surprised that anyone was rising at this hour.

There were two safe passes through this area, and I was gambling that the shorter, steeper way would be navigable by the time I got to it. So far, there had been rain every day for the past month. I would inevitably slip and fall to my death if the rain didn’t abate before I was through the foothills.

Normally when you run a shutoff op you drop in hot and strike fast, but with this monster of a digger moving so randomly it was going to take a careful strategy to get inside. We had spent the last 20 minutes plotting trajectories and figuring out the safest way to get inside the perimeter.

The outside, however, glistened with cold metal. I always thought of it as icy, with memories of ice back home on Mars, but obviously there wasn’t any moisture in the gaseous mix above Jupiter.