Her almost silent footfalls echo in the dark, foreboding alley, where buildings of aged brick tower at either side. This is Old Chicago.

The woman's dim, moonlit shadow dances upon the wall as she runs, casting itself on grimy, broken windows, rusty, dangerously hanging fire escapes and other decorations of an alleyway that not only time forgot.

Another shadow is cast across the dark brick. His hands swing with the burden of two large rifles --one in either hand-- and his feet splash in muddy puddles as he runs the length of the passage. His target has been outrunning him so far, but he can tell she’s getting tired. As she disappears behind a corner, he removes the safety and brings out his tranq. It’s all hide and seek now. He rounds the corner and fires into the air.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are..." he yells gutturally.

There is no response and he brings out the body scanner device. He thinks he can hear a quiet "shit" somewhere and points the scanner in that general direction. His eyes trace shadows in the alley while his device begins picking up signals. It chirps, and his eyes flicker to it, his eyebrows unexpectedly raising. It was his turn for profanity.

"Shit," he breathes. The scanner shows more than 40 sources of heat in the cold, quiet alley, only one the size and shape of a human. The others are small, pulsing. Detonators. This is not a place he wants to be. He turns and runs doggedly away, his device and rifles left forgotten on the wet, crumbled pavement.

A lithe, almost undetectable shadow climbs arcanely towards the forgotten items from a lilting, ready-to-fall fire escape. Staying close to the wall, eyes searching the narrow passageway, she creeps toward the device. Flattened against the brick, she bends her knees and reaches a hesitant hand toward the thing. An inch away, it chirps, slow at first and then quicker. Her hand snatches it up and anxious, sleep deprived eyes comprehend the reading within the space of a second. She freezes visibly for a minute, and then comes to her senses. Her thoughts scattered by the rapidly beeping device, whose beep has now dissolved into one long alerting siren, she jumps to her feet, pulling out her PDA as she clambers up the rickety, gilded fire escape. She might be able to block the signal. Also, it could be possible that her pursuer had placed the detonators so that she would be flushed out of the dead ended alley and right into the barrel of his gun. Just in case that’s true, she’s taking precautions.

Most bounty hunters think out of the box, but not many can be said to be as creative as her. At the top of the fire escape she mounts the building’s roof, and with her feet, she can tell it couldn’t hold a grown man’s weight. But it can hold her. She dashes across the top of the building, pieces of roof falling through seconds after her weight is removed. Maybe she should have reconsidered running across the roof of a fragile building filled with explosives, but it isn’t on her mind at the moment.

With a leap, she flies over the expanse of two buildings, praying to God, Allah, Jesus, and Buddha that it will hold her. She hadn’t thought about the landing part, and she figures that it might just be the end of her.

With a splintering crash, her feet are forced through the moldy wood and the whole roof crumbles in. Her high pitched scream rebounds off the brick, and chills the blood of half of Chicago. Falling, she grips at something to stop her, but things keep hitting her, ripping at her body. She can taste her own blood in her mouth as she rolls to a stop at the bottommost floor, wooden beams, plasterboard and debris raining down on top of her. She waits desperately for things to still before she risks opening her eyes.

Sprawled painfully on her side with the bottom half of her body trapped under debris, she watches as the swirling dust clears away. Blinking away blood so that it doesn’t drip into her eye, she looks up. Through the hole in the roof and upper floors, she can see the large white moon behind a dark cloud of pollution, as well as 5 pulsing red dots among the dark frame of what’s left of the building.