Seeing the motorcycle vanish into the night a split second before the smoke grenades swallowed the entire driveway, Zack’s face darkened with fury.

"FUCK! THEY ESCAPED!"

Zack clenched his fist, tendons standing out under his skin.

The bike tore through the city road, slicing between streaks of neon light and blurred headlights. The night air rushed past them as buildings flickered by in broken reflections.

The coastal road unspooled ahead in a long black ribbon, the city falling away behind them under starlight. Wind tore past them at speed, sharp enough to sting the eyes and steal sound from the world.

Maya twisted around on the seat, and her breath caught.

Three clear dents bloomed in the back of Stan’s jacket, the fabric puckered around them like flowers that had bloomed too fast.

"Your back..."

"Bulletproof vest, ma."

"You could’ve..."

Stan didn’t let her finish, "Stay tight."

He rolled the throttle harder. The bike surged, the speedometer crawling steadily upward, the white lines of the road blurring into one continuous streak. Maya gripped him, jaw setting, eyes sharpening. She pulled her phone from her jacket with one hand, thumb already flying across the screen.

"I’m hacking their comms," she said into the wind. "Give me sixty seconds."

"You’ve got thirty."

....

Back in the control room, the smoke had begun to thin into pale curls. Zack stood in the middle of it, still as a statue carved from ice. His suit was streaked with grey. Around him, four armed men sat their bikes in perfect formation, engines idling, waiting on his word.

He looked at the gun in his hand. Then at the empty road where they had vanished.

His phone rang. He then looked at it, it was Senator Holt...

"Shit!" He cursed as he hesitated for a second, letting out a low sigh he answered the call...

"Zack." The voice was filtered, tight as wire. "Tell me they don’t have the files."

"They have them."

A long silence stretched across the line. Long enough to feel.

"Then get it back from them, get those implicating files back from them no matter what! Do you understand me?!"

Zack ended the call without answering. Slid the phone into his pocket. He rubbed his temples as if feeling a headache rising...

Then he turned to his men with eyes that had gone past anger into something colder, something patient.

"Send message to block every route out of this coast. Every road, every bridge, every back alley." His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. "These bastards aren’t leaving this city tonight."

....

The wind howled as Stan drove Maya through the road at full speed. Maya’s fingers danced across her phone, lines of code reflecting in the lenses of her goggles.

"I’m in their comms..." Her voice spiked. "This route ahead, it’s blocked!"

Stan was already seeing it.

Six bikes emerged from a side road ahead, fanning out across the asphalt in tight formation, armed riders silhouetted against the headlights of vehicles forming a wall behind them. A trap. Neatly sprung.

"That came a bit too late," Stan said.

"I’m sorry..."

"No. Eyes forward. I’ll need your calls."

He threw the bike into a sharp U-turn so tight the footpegs scraped sparks off the road. In the same fluid motion, two smoke grenades left his hand, one, then another, blooming behind them in great mushrooming clouds. Then a third, smaller, darker, hitting the ground between them and the oncoming bikes.

Tear gas.

The pursuing riders scattered, coughing, visors fogging, bikes wobbling as their riders clawed at their faces. Maya slapped a pair of tactical goggles over her eyes. Stan clicked his helmet visor down to sealed.

The alley swallowed them whole.

It was barely wide enough for the bike. Crates exploded off the walls as they passed, splintering into the dark. A delivery truck slammed its brakes with a hydraulic shriek, they scraped through the closing gap with centimetres to spare, the side mirror clipping past Maya’s shoulder.

Three pursuing bikes stayed with them. Fast. Smooth. No amateurs, these ones.

"Three behind. Armed."

"I know." Maya’s thumbs flew. "I’m redirecting the traffic grid, trying to cut them off at the interchange..."

A shot sparked off the brick wall inches from her head.

"Less talking, more routing."

"I need ten seconds..."

The bikes closed in. One pulled alongside, the rider stretching out a gloved hand toward Maya’s suitcase, fingers grasping...

WHOOSH!

Maya swung the suitcase hard.

The reinforced corner connected with the side of his helmet in a sound like a hammer on a bell. He wobbled, clipped a lamppost in a shower of sparks, and went down in a tumbling skid that ended somewhere off-camera.

"That’s one."

"Not bad," Stan said, and there was something almost like a smile in it.

He cut through a roundabout the wrong way, civilian cars spinning out of his path in flashes of white headlights and blaring horns. Every traffic light at the next intersection went green at once, Maya’s doing, and the chaos opened like water around them, swallowing another pursuer in a four-way collision.

The last biker was good. He stayed tight through every turn, mirroring Stan’s lines, gaining inch by inch.

Stan glanced in his mirror, calculating. Then he hit the brakes for exactly one heartbeat.

SWOOSH!

The pursuer overshot him. And just like that, Stan was behind him.

One small device, released onto the road. It unrolled like a strip of black ribbon and caught the streetlight in glittering teeth. Razor wire.

PAH!

The front tire blew with a sound like a gunshot. The bike went sideways. The rider rolled clear in a controlled tumble, alive, but done.

The bike climbed the rise to the peninsula junction and stopped.

Below them, every road into the city was a moving river of headlights. Cordons. Vehicles. Organised. Sealed.

Stan’s breathing was measured and steady as he sighed, "They’ve sealed everything."

Maya wasn’t looking at the roads, instead she was looking at the beach as she said calmly, "...I have something."

"What?" Stan followed her eyeline down the cliff face. The dark line of sand. A water sports rental station shuttered for the night. And moored at the dock, gleaming dully in the moonlight...

Flyboards.

Stan stared at them. Then his gaze tracked along the coastline to the glowing glass pedestrian bridge half a kilometre away, an elevated ribbon of light cutting across the bay, connecting to the mainland.

"You’re not serious."

Maya was already swinging off the bike.

"We launch from the water, use the fly boards to gain height, land on the bridge’s pedestrian deck. They can’t follow us on bikes. By the time they reroute..."

"Maya."

"The network is blocked, The footage uploads automatically the moment we hit open network on the other side..."

"Maya."

She looked at him.

"...how deep is that water?"

"Deep enough for high elevation."

A long beat of silence descended between them. The distant wail of sirens resounded in the silence. The wind rolling in off the sea.

Stan put the bike into gear and started rolling it down the hill.

"You owe me a drink after this."

...

A/N:

What do you guys think of Maya’s movie script and the story so far?