Impact

The drop is two hundred and eighty feet.

Alyona tries to calculate the distance of the fall, of the cliff face, then makes her choice and takes a running leap.

For a split second she hears a noise, her brother Sergei’s voice, but it’s alright, it’s okay, there’s a plan. There are always plans, even if they’re made on the spot, made in seconds, reconfigured as the situation develops and new information becomes available. The world sharpens around her into clarity, a target in the blurriness, her hands curling into the fabric of the shooter’s outfit, a dead grip sustainable only if she doesn’t lose focus.

He’s someone from one of the enemy factions, one of the more recently formed ones since the United States collapsed. She doesn’t pretend to have memorized all of them or understand all of their ins and outs. What she does know is that they’re human and she knows how to break humans, was taught velocity and the physics of combat by her government as the Cold War threatened to grow hot. Most people have no idea what distance they can fall from where death is certain. Alyona does.

Admittedly there were other factors than mere height; pushing someone off a building was not a surefire way to kill them. This, what she’s done, the sea rushing up towards them, is even less definite. Which part of the body makes an impact first is an absolutely critical piece of the equation. It is a difference she learned was important in Anadyr when she was young and the one she’d tried to kill then had to be drowned afterwards; even with broken legs the human body has an inherent desire to flail for air, to cling to life.

Riding someone else’s crash means the surface is going to be marginally less like concrete. This she also knows from bitter experience. This is what she uses as the rationalization for the impact she know will leave her senses shattered as she grits her teeth and her hair is blown into her eyes, a flash of chocolate brown disrupting the glaciated blue below her. She doesn't have any illusions about how this will end

Sergei may be the leader of the Russian Far East Defense, but he is not immune to shots. The shooter had a sniper rifle, calloused hands that indicated experience using a long range weapon at short range, and no mercy in his eyes for two people trying to make a living in the vast wasteland of coastal Siberia. His hands had been tilted at just the right angle to destroy the only person Alyona has allowed herself to admit matters. And Sergei matters more to this struggling defense initiative as a trained sniper in his own right than his little sister, a run of the mill combatant, ever will. He is the future of their country if there is to be one. She is a single grain of rice in a bowl by comparison.

One of them is necessary and worthy of protection, one of a kind, a leader impossible to recreate. One of them is a weapon that can be rebuilt in the form of another girl, any girl at all.

Air whistles by and then the impact blows every thought from her mind except one, the one she accepted when she made the jump.

Two hundred and fifty feet is a lethal fall in water.