New author's note: you are free to read this, but there is an extended remix of this story that I think is much better. Look for it in this book. This is the version that got through round two of the Smack Down, however.

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Albert Rao's gun barked four angry curses, spitting metal into the rain-soaked dusk. In reply, the neon sign above them exploded, and glass and sparks showered down. A bullet cracked into the concrete inches from his arm, ricocheting into the alley. He ducked back, reloaded.

'They've found us,' he shouted behind him.

'No shit,' replied Yonca. 'We're ready to move again. Cover us for ten, and then follow.'

Albert nodded; and then he crouched and fired another two shots across the dim road. The street lights flickered as if in sympathy, their ghostly reflections shimmering in the puddles.

There were more corpsec goons piling out. They were taking cover behind cars and bins, bringing bigger guns to bear. They wore black flack jackets, shouted orders at each other, spat onto the pavement. Above it all was the sound of a flyer, high above the dim city and bright adverts.

He finished counting, dropped back and sprinted down the alley towards the open manhole. Wei was waiting; Albert climbed down as quickly as he could, the wet metal rungs cold and treacherous; Wei followed him, pulling the cover back in place. What little light had been falling from the surface was blotted out like an eclipse.

Albert tapped his head torch, and the concrete blossomed yellow, the streaks and stains glittering with a bleak beauty. He forced himself to move methodically, foot after foot, hand after hand, the rain plunging around him. Luuk was muttering and Wei was silent, their breathing loud in the narrow space.

It was supposed to be easy. A raid on the tech building, break in, bust out Albert's little sister, run away. They knew there would be guards, corporate security thugs with arrogance and guns; but they hadn't expected this much resistance, this much firepower. Something was very wrong.

But Tina was worthwhile, and so far the plan was working, despite it all.

It must have been minutes, but it felt like a lifetime; then he was standing in the sewer, flexing his cramped fingers. The darkness was absolute, a wall that fled when they aimed their torches at it but sprang back when ignored, a plotting demon that hovered just out of reach.

Yonca pulled out a box, pressed a button. Even down here they could hear the crump as their van exploded.

'I'll miss that van,' said Wei.

'Wait until you see Donald,' said Luuk. 'It's incredible.'

Yonca waved them to be quiet. They started off down the sewer, going as quickly as Tina could manage.

Albert hadn't seen her since they had pulled her out of her cell. She had been enmeshed in wires, bound in a cradle of electronics that had bleeped and screeched as they unhooked her; red disks from the electrodes were still visible on her shaved head.

He hurried up to walk next to her, hugged her briefly. She smiled, gently.

'Hello, Bertie,' she whispered.

She didn't have a torch. She didn't need one; her eyes were just white orbs, no iris or pupils marring her perfect sclera. Her sight was external, a vision that swept around her, ahead and back through space and time, touching on the mundane and the divine. She had once told Albert that she could taste a raindrop as it fell, knew the smell of neon lights, could hear what the future said; but he still had to help her find socks that matched because they all felt the same.

They reached a junction. Yonca paused, hurried down the left tunnel; but then, she ducked back, and threw the detonator as far as she could down the right, and it splashed into the wastewater, another tiny misdirection.

It was starting to smell now; they were not far from the city boundary, and the poisonous air was leaking up the sewer pipe. They pulled out their breathers; Tina's hands shook so much that Albert had to put hers on for her.

Far behind them, shouts echoed through the tunnel.

They travelled for another fifteen minutes, the noise of their pursuers slowly growing. Eventually, Albert picked Tina up, and threw her over his shoulder like when she was a child. He was amazed at how light she was; her skin was dry like paper, and she sighed gently.

'They won't stop, Bertie,' she whispered. 'I'm important.'

'Yes you are, Tina. You're important to us.'

'No, you don't understand.'

'Hush,' he said, like she was little again. 'Tell me when we're safe.'

# # #

Eventually they reached the yawning surface, where the wastewater spilled lazily onto the stony ground, the stars trembled in the winter sky; and a foul wind, cold and heavy with toxins, bullied them as they stumbled over the ash and rocks.

Wei rigged the trap, more explosives hidden under the boulders at the pipe end, black wires in the black dirt.

Donald was hidden under a camouflage mesh, grey and jagged like the ground; and when Luuk and Yonca uncovered it, its blunt dark lines looked alien on the wasteland, too ordered for the ruined world around it.

'I thought about painting him on, like the old-time warplanes,' said Luuk, as he clambered into the cockpit, started the engines whining. 'But then, I thought, conspicuous is bad. So he's just named Donald.'

'Who is Donald?', asked Albert, climbing in behind him, helping Tina up the ladder.

'Donald Duck, dumb-ass. This flyer is called Donald Duck, because...', he pressed a button and the roach guns whirred out of the wings, '...Donald Duck don't give a f...'

He was cut off by an explosion, a savage roar from the pipe entrance: Wei's trap had already been tripped, and the ferroconcrete pipe mouth was suddenly blocked with slag.

'How did they get here so fast?', shouted Yonca, frantically. 'Luuk, get us away!'

Donald's engines switched from a whine to a roar, and the flyer shivered as it lifted up into the night.

Tina's blank eyes flicked open.

'They know your plan,' she shouted, as the flyer banked away. 'They know where the hideaway is. We can't go back into the city.'

'What should I do?', shouted Luuk.

She reached up through the cramped vehicle, touched his forehead. He shuddered, eyes unfocused; Yonca grabbed her stick in the copilot's seat, stopped the flyer from spiralling from the sky until he regained his senses.

'I know where to go, Lucid Seer,' he said.

And so, like that, Luuk was a believer.

It had been just the five of them to start with. Well, actually, it had started off just Albert and Tina, surviving on the edges of the city; but that was too painful to remember. So, no, it had started as the five of them, tight-knit feral kids full of fire and cunning.

Tina had been strange even then, bristling with other-worldly perception; but there were others like her, living around the margins, although none quite as delicate, quite as strong. One by one, though, the others without pupils started deferring to her. She is our prophet, our Lucid Seer, they said. She will bring about the end.

It became a cult which became a religion. People would push gifts into her hands, beg for benedictions, weep for forgiveness. Five street punks couldn't get the resources for a heist like this. But an entire underclass, suppressed and suddenly given hope? Here were guns, explosives, a flyer.

Up until now, his little family had been immune from this; Albert didn't understand it, just rode it, hoping it would somehow end.

Now, he realised that there was no stepping back.

Tina picked up her music player. It had been hers since she was tiny, an escape from reality that Albert had found in a ruined house. He had stashed it into the flyer to give to her. When she touched it, the sad ghost of a smile flickered across her lips.

Instead of putting her headphones on, though, she pulled a cable out and plugged it into the player. Suddenly the vehicle was full of Elvis Presley, singing about heartbreak and loss.

They listened, lost in their own thoughts.

# # #

He woke with a start. Donald was landing, kicking up a storm of grit. Elvis had long since left the building, and Tina was cradling the player, headphones around her neck.

They bundled out as quickly as they could. Albert turned, expecting to help Luuk with the camo mesh; but the pilot hadn't left his cockpit. He waved to them, and the blunt flyer peeled up and away again.

Yonca looked exhausted.

'There are flyers coming. Luuk's going to try and stop them,' she said.

'He won't buy us more than ten minutes,' said Tina.

They hurried across the barren land to a huge dome. It had been silver once, but grime had smeared it the same colour as everything else. Tina led them to an entrance, barely distinguishable from the walls.

In the distance, they could hear the staccato shriek of roach guns.

The inside was strangely sterile. It felt clean and old, a combination that Albert hadn't thought possible. Everything was muted colours, stencilled signs, lights that clicked on automatically, concrete and steel.

They ran along corridors until they reached a stairwell.

Yonca took her rifle out, started preparing a barricade. 'This will do. Get it done as quickly as you can.'

Albert wanted to ask questions, find out the plan; but no one would meet his eye. He wondered what secrets they had whispered while he had slept on the flyer.

Wei nodded, and started climbing the steps. Albert was about to follow, but Tina stopped him.

'We go down here, Bertie.'

He shrugged and followed.

They climbed down for six flights, featureless except for stencilled floor numbers. As they walked, Tina talked.

'When they took me, they did something to me. They broke something in my mind, some barrier. Now I know everything.

'They are after the street kids like me, the ones who have my sight. But, when they broke that barrier, I was able to reach into them, too. I know our story, Albert.'

They reached the bottom of the steps. At the bottom was a huge silver ball, unsullied by age. Tina started unscrewing a hatch.

'We always thought that this world was broken, that we grew up in an old dirty Earth. It's not. It's a new, young world, supposed to be a paradise. It was supposed to be turned into a place we could live.'

She pulled open the hatch and clambered in.

'But they found that this world does strange things to people. It makes people like me. And the company who ran the terraforming thought they could make money out of that. So they stopped the process. They sabotaged the terraformers, and told Earth that the process had failed and we'd all died. And that meant they could keep the world like this.'

She was inside the sphere, fiddling with something. He couldn't see what.

The sound of Yonca's rifle firing startled him.

'What are you doing, Tina?'

'This is the primary reactor for the terraformers. If we restart it, Earth will know that the company lied. Wei has already keyed in the ignition sequence. I can reverse the sabotage if I stay in here.'

'But...'

She smiled. 'Yes, I'll die. I don't mind. I can see everything so clearly now. We won. Bertie...', as the machinery started to hum, Tina turned to him, '...they don't need another hero. Enough people have died today. Remember me and make this world shine.'

The hatch slammed itself shut and a noise like an angry god came from the sphere, thundering and hissing. Albert backed away, while around him the building started to wake up from its long sleep.

# # #

When the corpsec guards found him, weeping and alone, they didn't treat him too badly. They knew the game was up and weren't paid enough to care.

And so, when he returned to the city, he lit a single candle. He sat on the street corner; and to the people who came and asked, to the believers, he told the story of how the Lucid Seer shone like a light and saved this world.

And the children, the punk kids from the gutters, realised that they were home.

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Author's note. This isn't part of the story.

You might be thinking that this is not taking the prompt very seriously. Yes, Elvis and Donald are there (although Elvis got cut: more on that later); but the song? One throwaway line and a terrible pun?

No. I promise you the song is there. You just need to look closer.

Go and look up the lyrics to 'We Don't Need Another Hero'. When you read them, try and forget Mad Max and what the words mean in that movie. Just read them as they are written.

And then remember Tina, waiting to die in the reactor core, what she discovered, where she was, what she achieved.

That's right. The story *is* the song.

Now that's sorted, yes Elvis has a walk-on part. It's a pity because there is a longer version of that scene where the kids are sitting in Donald as it flies over the grey ruins of this unnamed planet; Tina's head is on Albert's shoulder, and they are listening to Heartbreak Hotel. There's a movie of Elvis singing, scraped from some ancient computer, projected onto the wall of the flyer; and beneath them the ground is corroded farm equipment and ash, which just scrolls, seemingly forever, under the twisted grey sky.

But I only had 2000 words. So we'll never know about that.

But look. Luuk dies listening to Jailhouse Rock; and his last words, screamed over the roar of the engine and the whine of roach guns are:

'Bring it, fools!'

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