1 Red

The night sky was ripe with embers as Akane's bike imploded underneath her.

She felt something like a vice clamp around her right leg. Its hungry jaws wrenched it from her hip, ripped flesh and bone out of her torso. Akane has torn away from the bike—launched into the sky by the proceeding explosion—then landed on the Kiloway and tumbled for a few meters. Her detached leg rolled along just to the side, but it bounced over a concrete barrier and plummeted fifty stories to the underworld.

"Missing her right leg..." a ghost in the backdrop had whispered. Akane could hear its ragged whispers and drawn out syllables while the flaming pieces of a bike blinked past her visor.

Sliding with her back on asphalt, the sturdy leather of her jacket somehow managed to prevent any degloving of her skin. Bad luck kept her from a painful death. Instead, fate turned cruel as a glowing red circle—a rim from her wheels—sparked across the road and spun through her side.

"Left arm..."

She hit a barrier—felt her back turn to dust—and came to a violent stop. Moving her leftover fingers became an impossible task. Her body wouldn't budge. Slowly the pieces of her precious motorcycle came to a dead halt in front of her face. Another inch and she would have been impaled by one of her handles.

"Spine… salvageable." the voice would state.

Akane opened her eyes. She smelled gasoline and chemicals pooling around her. Where was that odor coming from? Her bike didn't run on gas that she knew. She was unable to move her neck and look—away from the hundreds of Christmas lights in the sky—towards the source of that strange smell. A loud noise sputtered and whistled towards the side, and she had a pretty good idea of what it was. Fairies—or demons at this point—danced around in the corners of her vision.

"Burns over 40 percent of her body."

The city they called "Hell" took on a neon aura. The megastructures and space-scrapers blinked thousands of times as a live feed of the fire began to spread. Advertisements flickered—igniting in a sudden and violent manner—as red and orange flames invaded their screens. The sidewalks and streets raged with the horns of vehicles and the shouts of pedestrians. A collective voice—the sound contained within the deepest chambers of Hell—died like the last flames of a candle.

Cameras had come faster than the medics and police. Drones—skeleton builds outfitted with dozens of bug-eye lenses and fluttering wings—swarmed the area.

For a moment, Akane wondered if her helmet was still on. Her eyes were closed now, but she could hear the buzzing and lenses snapping. Trapped within a dark room her consciousness receded deeper inside of it. She did not see her life flash before her eyes. She did not see a white light at the end of a tunnel.

Instead, she saw a satchel floating away. It went so far away that it became a small circle, then a dot in the shadow, and then became nothing.

Time had not passed for Akane when she woke up in the clean room. She did not need to register the beat of a machine or the smell of lemons to tell where she was. Wasting no time, she focused on the sight of her left big toe.

A Messenger always ends up in a hospital. Akane did not intend to stay very long.

The girl raged against an unknown enemy; her limbs fought entropy as fingers twitched and toes wiggled. Blood—warmth returning with it—flowed once more through her veins.

There was a click—mechanical whirs and shrieks—as the tubes attached to Akane's spine detached. She felt the skin on her back twist and crawl as her spine calibrated itself. They fell off the side of the bed and spilled clear fluids and IV juice across the floor tiles. With a firm grip on the nearby railing, she rolled off and fell on the puddle with a splash.

It took another minute, but standing there in the fluids was a distorted figure. It was a girl who was no longer human, and it walked a few steps before slipping on its unfamiliar feet.

As she fell, Akane managed to grab the edge of a table and stop herself. The flowers laid in a vase standing on the table shook from the sudden contact. The girl watched as the expensive looking vessel rolled off the top and cracked into a million pieces. A helmet—red ribbon taped on top like it was christmas—rolled down on top of the broken ceramic and crushed the remaining pieces.

She grabbed the helmet and stuffed her head into it. A screen inside turned red before flashing the symbol of a black cat across the interface. A red line blinked across the heart monitor next to the bed, a terrible beep—sounding like a chorus of computerized mice—went on in the background without end. A nurse walked into the room and nearly dropped her tray full of red, drug-filled needles.

Akane grabbed a fistful—her appearance seemed to freeze the other woman in her tracks—and she stumbled out of the room not long after.