Just to stay safe, Helen decided to take an alternative rote flying home, going further north and taking extra twenty minutes of flight time. It proved to be a good choice as the air was free of any traffic.

There was another reason she wanted to go different rote.

"Those damn wint turbines had to be taken someplace. I bet when I find them, I will find my father." But no matter how hard she looked around, there were no traces of them.

As exciting as it all was, she was very happy when she landed, her flyer still forty percent powered up.

“Mom, you can’t be so scared,” she told her mom after she embraced her so hard, almost not allowing her to breathe. Helen wanted to add how that fear is rubbing on her and how that is possibly making the whole thing even more dangerous. But then she stopped herself, feeling how much her mom really needed her.

Just stay calm and rational. Tell her nothing of the f-v trailing me. Be selective. Calm her down, that's the best thing I can do.

“Well, you have recorded the whole trip, did you?” her mom asked after Helen was not very eager to offer details.

“Yeah, but…” I do not want to lie. “What we need to analyze is the time when I arrived in the city.”

“And the trip there?”

If she knows, she might not even let me go out again.

“The trip there…” Helen blinked her eyes, trying to find words, not to lie but not to reveal what happened either. Not that she was sure of what happened. Were those bandits, some criminal groups? Or someone just looking for a human company? Impossible to know. And if they want a human company, they can do it through radio. Better not say anything, not to worry her too much. “There were just snow-covered fields,” Helen said in the end. Could not see any rooftops of homes, no windmills, nothing.”

“Hard to imagine there would be no survivors. Might have been camouflaged well.”

“Probably.”

“If there were homes camouflaged, why would they be doing that? Must be dangerous out there. Sure wish we could communicate with people outside. That radio, I think, nobody knows how to use anymore.”

“I know, mom. I will look into it."

“Maybe you flew too high.”

“Maybe. But, when kids go to sleep, we can look over the videos of the city of Dove and the Semstron Corp Building.” Knowing her mom, she will probably want to see the whole trip.

Just edit out a few minutes when you noticed those people trailing you. You don’t need to worry her. Don’t need to freak her out.

“How did the city look?”

“Just like we expected. Everything three stories down is covered in snow. There seemed to be some pathways people use. It seems people still live there. How many, I can’t tell you.”

“And the open market?”

“It’s a flea market, Mom. A very limited flea market. But I need to go back. You will see and we’ll decide what to do. But, you have to stay rational. Can’t be so scared, mom.”

The whole week, Helen spent training and planning. She finally was able to see why the exercises that her father made her do would make sense. Train your hand to pull out the gun in less than the blink of an eye and shoot the target right in the middle. To cast a single glance and see everything that there was, noticing the smallest of details.

“You don’t need to see things twice to know what they are. A single glance is enough. Trust your eyes. And your judgment. You may not have the luxury of being insecure and to second guess yourself.”

From watching the videos from different cameras, a lot of things became clear.

“Nobody was parked on the top. It might be because it is not secured. I don’t think those people came in walking. So, I need to find an alternative place. Seems everyone had a place where to leave their vehicles. They carried a lot of stuff with them. Where are there f-vs? “

"How about here?” her mom asked and pointed to three floors down. “There seems to be a few flying vehicles there.”

“Magnify. Yes. You are right,” Helen said. “I will lower the flyer five floors down and park there.”

The flyer could easily take extra hundred kilos of supplies, but just to be on the safe side, Helen decided to pack only eighty kilos, splitting it between 2 15-kilo bags of rice and salt. She added a 20-kilo bag of cornflour.

“I think that’s smart,” her mom said. “That way he will not think we have ceiling-high piles of these supplies here.”

“Yeah,m he is ready to cut the deal, he’ll take it,” Helen said with confidence.

“So, that is what you do. You see that he has supplies first, then you make him take that supplies to your flyer. Make sure you are not followed. Then just drop the things out and loud the gear in and get out.”

“Relax, Mom. You’re starting to freak me out.”

“Offer a possibility of future trade. That may-”

“I know, Mom. We already went through all of that.”

Besides the trading supplies, the only other additional item Helen decided to add to her carrying inventory was a multi-use long-range plasma rifle. With that thing, she could shoot down any engine in a three-mile radius and would not need to worry about close air combat.

“If those guys come at me again, I might shoot a warning shot first. But then, I might not. What if they have one of them as well? If they shoot me first, I’d be gone. So, no, no warning shots. Better be safe than sorry.

Victory loves preparations. It was a motto she later heard on Earth that could have best described her upbringing up to that moment of her life. But after that second trip. Helen had a few other phrases that seemed equally true, like ‘Expect unexpected,’ or ‘Humans plan - gods decide’, or the best one yet, ‘shit happens.’

And the shit started to happen even before she took off. For one, her flyer would not start. It was dead cold. The battery was full, the conductors all warmed up. In frustration, she tried to find what is wrong, but everything seemed to be fine. Except, the engine would not start.

“If you don’t find what is wrong, maybe it’s best that we delay the trip,” her mom told her after Helen spent half an hour trying to figure out what was wrong.

“Maybe the circuits on Mainboard got busted.”

“Do we have a spare one?”

“Yes. I will install a new one, and see if that works. If not, I would have to take the engine all apart and see what gives. That would take me a whole morning.”

Luckily it was a mainboard. And with the new one, Helen finally made it out of her compound an hour late.

She originally planned to go twenty miles to the south and fly a different rote, but the sky was so clouded that she decided to try and make her time by climbing up and flying directly to the city.

But that did little to make up the lost time. Almost the whole way, she flew against the wind and punched the power of her flyer to 90 percent, and it still took over an hour to make it to the city.

Her heart pounding with excitement, fearing she was too late, she decided not to circle the area a few times but went directly to her targeted landing spot, two floors down from the flea market.

She rushed up the stairs, too excited to realize the presence of the eerie silence that had engulfed the whole place.

She rushed all the way till she saw red footprints at the entrance. The paint? Or the blood? She looked back at the stairs she came from and realized they were going down, looking paler every few steps. Three old f-vs and two flyers, one of which was smashed broken on a floor below, she remembered. Nothing and nobody else was there. The footprints must have belonged to someone who has already left. And there was more than one.

She took deep breaths, trying to calm down, and instinctively unzipped her jacket, placing her right hand at the handle of the holstered pistol at her hip.

Listening for any noise was not productive at all, and she debated whether she should take her helmet off to hear better.

“What if it is nothing?” she thought as she ducked her head inside and saw the flea market scene. The place seemed more packed than the week before, with about two dozen selling tables. But no people.

Only red-painted footprints.

She ducked her head in and again saw nobody there, but only old trinkets and a whole case of red tomatoes that someone had placed on a stand in the middle.

That’s weird, she thought and stepped inside to follow those weird footprints.

It took only a few small steps for her breath the freeze and hand to shiver. A dead body in a pool of blood, with a head blown to pieces, was behind the first stool.

She steadied her hand and pulled the gun out, looking around, now seeing traces of violence everywhere.

Can’t freeze, move on. See if anyone is alive.

She went down the market, seeing only dead people. The fat man that promised to trade with her was among them. There was a blood pool around his stomach, his eyes opened in surprise, his hand still holding a useless handgun he pulled out to try and defend himself.

An alternator, a pack of magnets, copper wiring, rolls of wires, metallic plates… almost all she requested.

She could just take it.

Think.

She looked around again, trying to listen to the noises, finding only dead silence. Tried to make sense of what was the best thing to do next.

Whoever killed everyone had done so and left. She saw only a few tables that seemed to have been cleared, mostly those that seem to be selling food items.

There were not many of them. They took with them what they could carry. But they are coming back. Whoever did this, is coming back. If for no other reason than for those red tomatoes. Or were they just a bait for people to come here?

And that smashed flyer… it would have been fixed up if it was smashed a long time ago. No. That happened now. They were trying to break into it, take it away. Will be back. I need to go. My ride is locked but not safe either. Good I parked a floor below, but still, I need to run.

She looked at the vending table next. The skinny woman with sunken eyes lay there on her side, blood still flowing from underneath her. It took a long moment to take her eyes away from her.

Need to go! An alarm ran inside her head.

This happened only minutes ago. If I was not late, who knows if I would be among them? They’ll be back. And who knows how many> So, take the stuff and run.

She forced herself to put her gun away and took the box with the alternator, magnets, and copper wire.

That’s at most twenty kilos. Not bad.

She tried to pick the other box up at the same time, but it was heavy.

Too heavy. Two trips to be safe on the stairs, can’t afford to fall down, she said and left the other box behind, rushing with the box to exit and stairs, down to her ride.

She opened her trunk and took out the supplies. There was a back seat empty, and she had at least twenty kilos of free capacity to carry and no time to lose. But she still stood there, almost frozen, looking and thinking if the food supplies should go in the trunk or should she just leave them behind.

Definitely, leave the corn behind. That much corn, you can grow in a few weeks, no problem. Maybe keep the rice.

She thought about just flying away, but, she still could use the other supplies.

No fear. But I need all my senses, she thought and took her helmet off, threw it inside the flyer, and raced up.

She stopped at the entrance to take in a long breath and heard a noise. First the footsteps, then the caught, and then the voice belonging to a middle-aged man.

“Razor will not be happy about you not finishing the job. He’ll be back in a minute, so you better take care of them now.”

“But there are just kids,” said a younger voice, probably belonging to someone in his late teens.

“The boss gave the order. So, tell me again, what was that order that Razor told you to do?”

“Kill everyone.”

“And?”

“I guess…”

She thought about just turning around, slipping down the stairs, and just flying away. But then she remembered the woman’s kids. They must have found them someplace, and if she was to leave now-

The thought did not need to be completed as she instantly stepped through the gate.

Two men stood twenty meters away, both with rifles in their hands that pointed at the kid she gifted the honey a week ago. Her baby sister was there, trembling in his arms.

“Hey, you too,” Helen called them but did not wait for them to turn around as she fired rounds into those men, into their long, dirty coats.

The impact of the bullets threw them over the dead woman’s stand and spun them around.

Helen scurried to them, hand extended, remembering she fired six bullets already.

“Too many,” she said as she leaned over their bodies. “What my father said, one to the gut, and one to the head,” she said and fired two more rounds into men’s heads, just to make sure they were dead, the words ‘kill everyone’ still resonating in her mind.

“Are there more of them?” Helen asked the boy, looking toward the stairs going to the top floor, realizing she did not check that floor at all.

The boy just shook his head, staring at Helen with his big eyes.

“Good,” Helen said and put the gun away, going for the box.

“But Razor is coming,” the boy said.

Helen stopped reaching for the box and turned around to look at the boy.

“Do you have anyone to take care of you?”

The boy did not say anything just shook his head and continued to stare at her with his big eyes, his hands pressing over his little sister trying to hold her safe next to him as if her mom’s instructions to take care of his little sister were now permanently engraved into his personality.

“Come with me!” she heard herself say it. “I’ll take care of you.”

“We have a baby. Baby brother.” His gaze was lost behind the stand and carton boxes that stood there, probably the place where he hid with his sister when Helen came a few minutes ago.

“I see,” Helen said and moved the boxes around to find a small toddler, rocking in a baby’s seat, sucking on a pacifier and looking at her.

She took him and place him on the box to carry, but it was heavy.

“We need to go,” she said and decided instead of carrying the box to push it along the floor. It made noise, but it permitted her to reach for her gun easily.

At the stairs, things needed to change. So, she decided to carry the baby in her left hand, while her other hand pushed the box with the supplies, down the stairs, the boy pushing it and helping along as well.

“You sit in the back and hold your little sister, okay?” “I’ll worry about your baby brother upfront.”

She encapsulated the flyer and without wanting to know if someone was coming, fired it up and took it out of the building, going for the clouds and trying to lose her flyer there.

And then things went blue. For the first time.

A blue screen popped in front of her, temporarily blinding her completely. She squinted her eyes to read what it displayed.

Lives Saved: Three

The System Status: Initiated for the First Time

Do you accept the system initialization: Yes or No

"What the hell is this?" she asked.

Does this have something to do with the new mainboard I plugged in? Some vehicle options I was not aware?

Do you accept the system initialization, sign blinked again.

If I say 'no', would that mean that the flyer would stop working and I would drop dead down?

"I guess I better say, yes. I accept the sytem initialization."