Marni looked, then she looked again.

There it is

Her camera was out of her bag before she even got halfway to them, practically sprinting over. She stopped right in front of them and held up the camera.

"FREEZE!" she shouted, and brought the camera up, and took a picture, grinning like an idiot.

​Marni was currently up a tree. This was her absolute favorite part of a wedding: capturing the candid moments. People always showed their truest emotions when they didn't realize a lens was pointed at them.

​It wasn't a large wedding—only fifteen guests, and they had swung for Chick-fil-A for the catering—but the energy was perfect.

​She snapped several pictures in rapid succession: the groom smiling at the bride while she wasn't looking, the parents laughing over an inside joke, the groomsmen doing something spectacularly stupid by the buffet table.

​Spotting a better angle through the leaves, Marni abruptly shifted her weight along the branch. Her foot caught the thick leather strap of her messenger bag, which she had precariously hooked onto a nearby notch.

​She didn't realize what she'd done until she heard the heavy, sickening thud of thousands of dollars worth of glass and a Steam Deck colliding with something below.

​"Oh shit," she muttered, immediately abandoning her perch and swinging down the branches.

"Please don't be dead."

Marni had been out for three hours, and her legs were starting to feel it. She had to find somewhere to rest before she tried to jump another building and died.

She stepped onto the raised wall of the roof, peering through the darkness at the building directly across from her.

She spotted an open window on the fourth floor and made a decision in about half a second. The fire escape was right there, and the building looked empty—dark windows, no noise, the kind of quiet that meant vacancy. She was across the gap, down the iron steps, and slipping inside before she'd fully committed to the thought.

Standing in the dark room, she straightened her beanie. She could just make out the faint outline of a couch.

Nice.

It was warm, at least. She unshouldered her bag, setting it down carefully, and rolled her shoulders out with a groan. She pulled out her Steam Deck and dropped onto the couch. A very comfortable couch.

She was halfway through booting up a game when she noticed the TV.

Then the TV remote.

Oh.

She looked slowly around the room, Steam Deck still in both hands, arriving at the obvious conclusion about four seconds too late.

"...Huh," she said aloud.

Marni jumped over a duct and climbed a fence. She cleared the gap between buildings, holding her bag close.

It was late at night, and most of the city was asleep.

She slid under a row of pipes and banked left. Launching herself across the alley to the next building, she hit the roof and rolled with the impact of the fall. She kept her bag pressed securely to her person, barely breaking her stride as she pushed back up to a sprint.

She rounded the blind corner of a rooftop stairwell housing and... ran right into someone.

The impact knocked the air out of Marni's lungs in a violent, dusty rush.

She hit the bottom of the concrete drop hard, a sickening crack echoing through the dark shaft. For a long, terrifying second, she couldn't even draw breath. When her lungs finally seized a gasp of cold air, the white-hot agony in her left leg fully registered.

But her hands didn't go to her leg. They flew to the heavy leather bag strapped across her back.

Gritting her teeth to swallow down a scream, Marni dragged herself backward until her shoulders hit the damp wall. Her hands were shaking violently as she fumbled with the brass buckles. She pulled the camera free. The chassis was crushed, the lens a jagged spiderweb of shattered glass.

No. No, no, no.

She flicked the power switch. Nothing.

She didn't care about the camera itself—metal and glass could be replaced. But the shots from the rooftop... the ones she had just risked her neck to get...

A drop of blood from a gash on her forehead dripped onto the cracked screen. She squeezed her eyes shut, her breathing ragged and uneven. Her hands were covered in grease and dust as she desperately tried to pry open the bent memory card slot with her thumbnail.