It felt nice to run, even if no one believed her.

Even Jackie's doctors were skeptical, which she considered to be the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard in her life. Running made her happy. It made her feel good. It reminded Jackie how nice it was to live while she still had a chance.

So to have some white-coat ask her if she was sure she wasn't faking it just boggled her.

"Why would I lie?" Jackie asked as the ground flew by under her feet.

She adjusted the earpiece, waiting for Dr. Tom to answer, making sure her communicator was still online. It was quite a thing. Jackie was on Terra, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains – and Dr. Tom was on Mars. It made for one hell of a long-distance call, ludicrously expensive, but Jackie didn't care. Saving money didn't make sense in her condition.

"I don't know," her doctor replied tersely. "You tell me. Every other patient with your diagnosis and symptoms has preferred to rest. There are some very high-quality spas near you, Miss Hooper. And I hear the Gori Facility has a new opening. They've offered it to you. The staff there is used to cases such as yours, they're exceptionally well trained in making a person's last days more comfortable."

"I'm not going to die in a hospital," Jackie replied firmly.

She considered shutting off the communicator on her belt, just cutting Dr. Tom from her life altogether like she'd done to most of the civilization after saying her goodbyes. The second Jackie had heard the diagnosis, she'd known that was how she wanted to do it. If she was going to die, she wanted her family and friends to remember her as Jackie. Not some wrinkled, bald woman that she inevitably would be if she reached the final stages of the disease that was killing her.

Dr. Tom had shown her pictures.

They'd made it much simpler. And when Jackie's father, Senator Hooper, had heard the news, she got her final confirmation that self-imposed exile was the choice for her.

She'd never seen John Hooper so pale. To see the old man sit down, wringing his hands, asking all the terrible, gut-wrenching questions that Jackie had known were coming, had broken her heart. Would money help? Could the Senator call in favors? Could he do everything in his power to save his little girl?

It had been too much. Jackie had told him a firm "no" and let her father pull her into a crushing hug, feeling his warm tears seeping through her blouse. The man had never cried in front of her.

The road was splitting in two in front of her, literally at the moment as she came to a brief stop in her jog.

One was shorter, easier, less steep and considerably better kept. The other was the "adventurous" one, intended for hikers and mountain-climbers more than runners, but Jackie chose that one without a second's hesitation.

There was a smile on her lips. It had been a while since that had happened.

"Jackie?" Dr. Tom asked, his voice wavering a little as he switched to the less formal option of calling her by her first name. He tended to do that when she got stubborn with him. "Are you still there?"

"I'm here," Jackie answered, checking her heart rate on the small monitor on her arm. "Is there anything you wanted, Tom? We've had this conversation before."

The doctor sighed and Jackie felt a tinge of pity for him. She had wanted to be a healer once, when she'd been a little girl. Eventually she'd chosen to be a politician like her father, but the small dream had never left. Except that one thing she definitely didn't wish upon herself – to be powerless in the face of death.

"I'm worried about you," the doctor said, his raspy voice sounding genuine. "Rovecolis is a new find for us. We know practically nothing about it, except for what it does. I just wish... I wish you'd give me time, Jackie. Don't burn through what energy and stamina you have left just to prove a point or something. If you'd follow my instructions, keep to your diet, stop running – I could maybe help."

Jackie felt a smile tugging at her lips.

"There is no helping me and you know it," she said, breathing heavily now as she sprinted up the steep path.

The view to her left where a great canyon lay was spectacular, truly breathtaking. That was the beauty she'd been looking for, the thing that had made her settle on the Ellora Resort, the finest hotel for people who had no upper cap to their spending.

For Jackie, the cap was certainly there, somewhere, but she knew she'd never reach it.

"I don't want you to give up, that's all," Tom sighed and Jackie stopped on a cliff overlooking a vast, lush valley.

Somewhere in the distance, the true span of the Rockies filled most of the horizon. Once it had been a much smaller mountain range, just one of the many on Terra. Then it had grown, artificially and geologically. Now the tips of the mountains touched the skies and there were said to be chasms so deep no one would hear the screams of the person who was clumsy enough to fall.

"I'm not giving up," Jackie panted, resting her hands on her knees and looking down, feeling the natural twist in her guts.

She really had come up too high. Time to move down, but the adrenaline in her veins didn't want to go just yet. Neither did Jackie, for that matter.

"Tom," she said, sighing. "I'm not going to lie to you. Running is a damn pain for me. My legs hurt afterwards like they've been put through a tumble dryer, my lungs feel like they're on fire and I breathe like a ninety-year-old who's been smoking since the cradle.

"That's not the point. And I know what you're afraid of as well. This is not me hoping I'll accidentally fall off a cliff, die quickly and spare myself the suffering. There is a very deep one right in front of me and I assure you, I have no desire to see if I could learn to fly."

Jackie took a deep breath, looking around all the wonder she was surrounded by and smiled.

"It's just good," she told Tom who was sturdily silent, letting her speak and vent. "Not in a nice way, sure. Not in that pseudo-comforting if I just stay positive maybe a miracle will happen crap. I have no faith in miracles or destiny. If I did, I'd expect to see a Nayanor raiding ship up in the sky, coming to take me away. I could meet my soulmate or fated like they call it and spend the last month of my life getting fucked into the next week."

"Don't you even say that," Dr. Tom chided her angrily.

Jackie laughed.

The raider species of Nayanors were a constant and seemingly unbeatable plague in the daily life of the Galactic Union these days. Their distant, elusive home planet somewhere on the other side of the galaxy had apparently ran out of women, so they had jumped some logical hoops and decided to take some from other planets.

They especially seemed to favor Terra.

Jackie knew that Tom could tell she was joking – who on earth wanted to end up in literal sex slavery on some alien planet – but she would have bet good money that the doctor put it down to her deteriorating sense of humor.

"Of course not," she said, taking a deep breath and running along. "Bad joke, forgive me. I'm in a weird mood, as you can imagine. What I meant to say is that I like the freedom running gives me. It's not good in the traditional sense.

"It's raw and real and liberating and everything I want from life right now. I get back to the hotel every night with my limbs on fire, but I'm smiling. I'm too tired to be sad, to think about all the things I'll never get to do. To remember loved ones or even notice the other pain that comes with the disease. It's just... all-encompassing. Do you understand what I mean?"

There was a long pause, during which Jackie kept running, waiting for Tom's response without any particular one being more desirable than others. That was the thing with deadly illnesses. It made Jackie care less about what other people thought of her choices in life. She valued her doctor and his opinions, but there was too much at stake for her to follow his rules.

I don't think there's ever been a human born who thinks that they should have abided more by the regulations that ended up being as futile as all the treatments.

"I understand," Tom said and Jackie could hear the sorrow in his voice. "If that's what makes you happy, I'm all for it."

Happy, Jackie thought. That is not the word I'd use.

"Thanks, Tom," she said. "That's good to hear."

"So what are you going to do now?" the doctor asked, interested.

"I heard about this awesome new thing," Jackie said, a note of excitement slipping into her voice. "The Palians have come up with a great new invention. Pity they can't cure me yet, but hey, you can't get everything in life.

"So anyway... there's this simulator. I ordered one for myself. It should be here in a few days. It's like those old treadmills with a virtual reality room around you where you can run "across" other worlds. But the tech is all Palian, so instead of looking like you're running in front of a green screen, it's almost real. The ground imitates the surface, there are sounds and smells and lights. Maybe I'll run to you on Mars."

"Yes," Dr. Tom said, unable to hide the sadness from his voice. "Yes, you do that, Jackie."

She kept running, panting heavily as the path kept climbing up a gorgeous ridge, but the top was already visible and Jackie wanted to see the view before heading back down.

"Don't worry," she said, taking the last few steps with big strides. "I'm fine, I –"

The words got stuck in her throat. The second Jackie stepped on top of a lower hill near the foot of the mountain range, her mouth dropped open and her poor heart shivered. For a second she thought that the shock was going to be too much for her tormented body.

There were sleek, damnably fast raider ships in the sky. Heading straight toward her.

"Jackie?" Tom asked. "Jackie!?"

"Nayanors," she whispered, not believing her eyes. "Gods, Tom, they're here. They're actually here. I don't understand. There are supposed to be alarms, sirens, warnings... Where are all the defense turrets? What are the orbital stations doing?"

The questions were pouring out of her mouth. In truth, there was only one thing that mattered.

"Run!" Tom yelled at her. "Run, Jackie, now!"

She ran.