Erinnia’s rocket bit the blue day from black orbit.

The rocket swung under her gimbol of white aluminum and yellow leather as clouds feathered and spat her dart.

The rocket’s fins were talons hunting after the fox of plasma that faked and tricked.

It dropped like a tear toward the helixical rivers called Bangledash.

 A lightning storm was allowed to graze up into the North.

When the aluminum barret of Dhaka focused out of the river’s tresses her parachutes popped.  Three bluebird drags.

When she could see the colors of the cars driving down into the sea toward Mekarraopolis she broke the ribs of the chutes like an umbrella in a typhoon and cranked them in.

She didn’t see the pirhana first.  The pirhana painted on her rocket pad.  It was because of the long shadow over it.  The long shadow pointing from the bronze and yellow dart that stood upon her pad.

Erinnia kneaded the armrest and WASeD her rocket away, floated on the angel’s robe of flame to Dir’s fire ant pad.

She felt rather than saw in her left monocle screen the oddness of other rockets parked on the other side of the angle bracket space ranger building.  Noses of rockets in blue and white, black and white, and her childhood color scheme--apple and apricot.

Erinnia’s rocket landed on its sharp fins, the engines  shut off, and it stood there like a ballerina on point.

In her one porthole window Gewndolyn Hopscotch’s blond face rose against the glass like crematorium fires.  Her solar blue eyes gusted with want and myth, held aloft with crow wing eyelashes, and double ported behind eyeglasses seated with stout black frames.  Her orange-red lips pouted and gasped together.  Then her face sank away like a broken buoy.

The jacob’s ladder dropped dangled.  The magnets came on to make it hard, and it lifted out to a nice angle.

The door three stories up slid open right.  Erinnia stood at the top of the steps.  Gwendolyn stood at the bottom, her face in praise, and the breeze trying to dust her brown corduroy shirt off her pale skin.  Just two pearl snaps mated together below her breats kept Gwenolyn confident.

Gendolyn’s hands burst like butterflies at her sides.  "Good-time Girl!  Where have you been!"

The soles of her brown suede boots clanged hard on the first three steps up, then the brass canisters of her jet pack caught fire and she spurt to the top and gulped Erinnia up in a hug fanged with arms.  Erinnia’s arms settled on Gewndolyn’s shoulders like dust.

"How dare you be gone for so long!"  Her voice was like water on hot coals in Erinnia’s ear.

Gwendolyn’s voice went back to pastel when she deparked her face from Erinnia’s neck and tried casting bright halos from her eyes into the dark depths of Erinnia’s.  "What happened to you on the Moon?"

"Come down," said Gewndolyn.  "Come see everyone."  She backed down the ladder with her hand on one of Erinnia’s.  "It’s your first day back at work."

Like badly planted shrubs stood three others outside the headquarters.  Legacy Cole and Dieter Maaz she named simultaneously.  Both looked a tired that happy faces couldn’t wash away.

Legacy coated her in hug first.  "Welcome, Miss Bestshot."

"Legacy..." chastized Gewndolyn.  "She isn’t some Bestshot.  She’s THE Bestshot."

"How do you know that?"  Asked Dieter while he unlovingly settled his arm on her shoulders and patted the back of her head.  "We’ve been through this before."

"It’s her rocket, Dieter."  said Gewndolyn.  "The one she went to the Moon in."

"Just because our Erinnia left in it doesn’t mean our Erinnia came back in it."  His  face reminded everyone of icebergs and the ocean.  His right foot stepped back and flared little in a bow.  "Miss Bestshot.  Please come with us and let yourself be reintroduced to our big wide world."

Gewndolyn made a slight, "Um."

They had all turned toward the doors and were in full sail toward the headlands of the only other Ranger that stood outside.  Tara Goodwrench.

The redwood haired woman decided to take her turn with Erinnia.  She made forward with swinging legs that put one black boot in front of the other.  A razor walk.  And her eyes diagnosed Erinnia within those strides.

"It’s her.  It’s the original Erinnia."  She held Erinnia.

"How do you know?"  Wonder in Dieter’s question.  A permission to mysticism.  Then he knew what he sounded like.  So asked, "Are you a psychiatrist?"

"I can see it in her face.  Her eyes.  There’s no confusion as to where she is, how she got here?"

"Yup," reinforced Gwendolyn.

"It’s too early to make decisions, Officers,"  said Legacy.  "We will let Mak and his people determine all this and recomend what to do about these things."

They brought her into the building and immediately flushed her down odd hallways and side corridors where few walked and only had to.

Quick and sneaky suggested directions made her feel like a dead celebrity on a a gurney.

Legacy pushed open a door for Dieter and Erinnia.

"Got another one, Mak,"  Dieter warned before she turnd on into the room.

Mak’s eyes were typewriter ribbon black punching out the word WHOA! above the spilling haystack of his brown mustache.

"Where did you get this one!" he shouted with pleasure.

"Came here on a rocket," told Dieter.

"Are you shitting me?"  Mak asked.

"Came down in Erinnia’s original like the second Coming of Christ."

"The babe reborn!" said Mak with jazz hands.  "You’re shitting me."

"No," said Dieter, impatient to the skepticisim.

"The one you people left on the Moon."

"That one or one just like it."

"We need you to run a physical," Legacy pushed in.  "Tell us if all is prim and proper."

"There is no way to tell if she belongs here.  You know that."

"Look to her, Doctor."  Legacy pushing to go.

The soft maulings came first: of rubber, and plastic.  Of metal and of paper.  Done in librairian silence.

A flight of starlings in the form of black wires and needles.  Mak made out questions that left behind the answers.

Between tacky pieces of machine she was pressed, lifted, and ironed.  To which she would not have minded a harder squeeze.

In another she was tumbled.  And perhaps, she thought, too safely.  She wanted to be dribbled and pulled apart.

Questions about her comfort came from specialists and technicians.  Examinations for lucidity.  Challenges toward her orientations.

Then the bald interrogation.

From all the humming, constrictions, tossing and baking she ended up spanked lose as a lasso.  As her hair spread over her face her voice exhausted without humiliation.

These frozen words sublimated first.  "I lost."  Erinnia’s eyes closed to stop the confessional.  "I lost so bad."

"First day?"  Her eyes flared.  They curved.  They were like the horns of the bull.

"I am not an alien.  This is the real me.  Truley, Erinnia Bestshot.  Don’t treat me like this, people."

"We’re sorry, Erinnia," a woman said.  But Erinnia was already on her way into the story about her mission to the Moon to stop the poacher Tindow.

"Just give me six bullets and a horse and I"ll ride into the Mayan Empire myself to put those Baptist bastards six feet under."

"Why a horse?" asked Mak.  "Why a gun with six bullets?"

"It’s all we have," she stated.

Lastly she was guided to a pool to dive into.  Water chilled pink but swirled around blue and warm by her strokes and kicks.  She eeled around at the bottom for thirty minutes, splashed to the surface, laid her arms on the concrete edge and asked a technician, "How long have I been here?"

Next Chapter: Third Chapter:  Patients is a Virtue