[Hey RoyalRoad, this is the same CKMo.]

Lucy dashed down the hallway, the building’s alarms blaring red. She rounded a corner, sliding on her knees as she sprinted past a confused guard, swiveling to snatch his phone along the way. A bullet ricocheted off the wall, sparking down the walls of the hall.

She zigzagged her way up the wall, running towards the ceiling before vaulting back down onto a trolley, kicking it forward with her weight as she angled the platform up onto the frontal wheels. After glancing down the hallway to make sure it was as long as she needed it to be, she lowered herself behind the angled platform to use it as a barrier while she punched quick numbers into the phone.

The call connected as soon as she hit send.

“Hello! You’ve reached the hotline for Redaction Runners—”

“GET ME RYAN,” she shouted into the phone before the ceiling above her sparked. She could not react in time. The bullet tore through her thigh and she yelped as the red hot pain shot up her body. The resulting injury ruined her balance, causing her to crash painfully forward.

The world turned upside down as she tumbled onto the ground.

“— where your history is private history,” stated the phone.

Fucking. Ryan. The two word answer echoed in her mind as she spied the four more bullets headed her way. Fucking. Ryan. Metaphorically. Figuratively. Literally. Fucking. Ryan.

Lucy reached back in time, finding the moment where the confused guard had come chasing down for his phone and fired the shot that hit her leg. No one else had seen it, so there were only two witnesses. She erased that from his memory, then her own. The headache would be relatively cheap.

Lucy blinked, wobbling on her legs as she stabilized herself away from the trolley, trying to not fall down the stairs. That headache.

Something had happened. She’d been forced to redact from time.

“Hey, you!”

She looked up. The shout came down from the hallway where red sirens flashed and blared. A confused guard was approaching her, gun drawn.

I can figure out how I fucked up later. Lucy dove down as bullets tore through the wall above her, landing with a grunt onto the trolley. The headache was manageable, at least. That meant she’d only done it once, and it had been a cheap cost.

There was a phone laying next to her face, and the numbers on it were ones she recognized all too well. The Redaction Runners.

“While you decide, do note that there will be an extra upcharge for any events we consider inconvenient to redact in the name of justice,” Ryan’s pre-recorded voice echoed from the phone, but Lucy knew she wasn’t really hearing it over the gunshots. The message was just an ingrained part of her memory now. “This will, of course, be entirely based on our discretion.”

Fucking. Ryan.

Lucy kicked against the floor, pushing her body onto the trolley and hurtling it towards the end of the hall where the full-length window waited.

She crashed painfully into the window. The pane cracked, but did not fully break. Lucy pounded her fist against it in vain fury, but the glass did not give.

Bloody hells, this sort of building would necessarily have a safety inspection on the windows, wouldn’t it? Should she redact the last inspection or go further back?

“PUT UP YOUR HANDS!” came the voice from behind her. Lucy turned around to see a guard aim down his sights. He fired. The bullet seared through Lucy’s arm, and she reached back in time. The last inspection had been two years ago. The serviceman. The inspector. One to realize the window hadn’t been fitted correctly. The other to install the correct one.

Two memories. Lucy redacted them.

Lucy blinked, woozy from the headache. At least this time she remembered what had happened since she wasn’t forced to redact her own memory. Her senses overwhelmed her nauseous head, but the ones demanding the most attention were her sense of movement, weight, and balance. She was hurtling through the air, a thousand broken shards of glass around her as a trolley cart fell from beneath her.

In the air next to her, she saw a phone with a familiar number. She snatched it.

“Please leave a message and tell us what information you would like to redact from time, thank you!” sang Ryan’s voice from the phone as Lucy looked around in an attempt to survey her surroundings, desperate to understand how things had gone this poorly if she’d already been forced to redact so much she had this headache.

She was thousands of feet up in the air, sailing over a river.

Bloody hells, she recognized it. The Seloma’ne River. That was on the other side of the country.

Someone had redacted space.

“Beep,” came from the phone gravity began taking over.

“RYAN, REDACT THE DAY,” Lucy shouted into the phone as she hurtled down, curling into a ball so the wind wouldn’t tear at her eyes and mouth. “I FOUND THE SPACE GUYS, THEY’RE AT THE HOSPITAL. SO DON’T LET ME GO TO THE HOSPITAL TO GIVE BIRTH THIS MORNING. AND YOU BETTER FUCKING REMEMBER YOU AGREED HER NAME IS JORA.”

But it would be a recording, and Lucy knew this fall would be fatal. There would be no time for Ryan to redact the day in time to stop the impact.

She closed her eyes as she hurtled to her death.

Lucy startled awake.

Ryan hovered over her, a look of concern from his brown eyes. She gripped his hand, looking around her surroundings. She was in a familiar, comfortable bed.

“My head hurts,” she whispered, struggling to touch her head. “And it isn’t from the baby.”

“I think you already know why,” Ryan said, his voice soft as he turned up the lamplight near their bed. He handed her a cup of water. “Are you ready to hear it?”

“Mhm,” said Lucy, accepting the water gratefully. “Wait. Wait.” She stopped him, putting a gentle hand on her bulbous belly. “You must know about the birth then. Everything will be okay, right?”

“Well, the birth went perfectly fine,” replied Ryan, caressing her face with a tender hand. “You brought a wonderful, healthy little girl to the world. And,” he added with a slow grin, “you agreed to name her Karen. The problem is what else we found at the hospital. The ones redacting space.”