She spent seven years hunting for her father, only to find a twenty-thousand-credit bounty waiting on his head.
Writer’s Prompt
The rain in Sector 4 didn’t wash anything clean; it just made the grime slick. I’d spent seven years chasing a ghost, filtering through bad dental records and forged transit passes. Now, he was sitting across from me in a neon-drenched diner, pouring three sugars into a cup of lukewarm chicory.
Arthur Vance. My father.
He had my sharp jawline and the same nervous habit of tapping his left thumb against his index finger. He looked smaller than the monster my mother used to whisper about, his trench coat frayed at the cuffs, smelling faintly of cheap ozone and regret.
“You look like her,” he said softly, not meeting my eyes.
My hand rested in my pocket, fingers curled around the grip of my matte-black snubnose. But it wasn’t just the gun weighed down by gravity. Inside my jacket lining was a encrypted datapad. An hour ago, a local syndicate posted a fresh bounty on his head. Twenty thousand credits, dead or alive. Enough to clear my debts, buy a clean transit pass out of this suffocating city, and finally open a real office uptown.
“You’re a hard man to find, Artie,” I murmured, the word Dad catching like glass in my throat.
“I had to go dark, Roxie. They’ve been hunting me.” He finally looked up, his eyes milky with cataracts but desperate. “I never stopped looking for you.”
A classic con? Or a broken man’s truth? If I turn him in, I buy my freedom with his blood. If I let him walk, I’m stuck in the mud, waiting for the syndicate to realize I found him first.
He reached across the Formica table, his wrinkled hand open. An invitation.
How does Roxie’s story end? Does she choose blood money or bloodlines? Drop your ending in the comments.
