He grasped the doorknob and pushed again — maybe his mom had left a message inside or something. This time the door took his guest code and unlatched with the familiar, heavy clack, so it must not have been reset for a new tenant yet.
The apartment was empty. Not a single box or piece of furniture was left.
In the distance, a siren wailed, maybe an ambulance responding to someone the streeters had left behind overnight, but its wail just added to Mason’s feeling of loss.
He wandered through the apartment for a few minutes, noting that someone from building maintenance had already been in and patched the holes in the walls from their pictures, readying the place to be repainted for new tenants.
There was no paper, no notes, nothing at all to tell him where his mom was now.
The siren was closer — no, sirens, there was more than one of them — and Mason’s stomach dropped.
Mrs. Long — the old lady must have had her explant calling the flashies before her door was even shut.
He couldn’t blame her for that, either. Not calling them would get her kicked out as quick as talking to him would.
He rushed to the window and looked down, twelve floors below three aircars were setting down and the flashies rushed the building. They’d be up to his floor in minutes.
Fifteen
“Give me a best-time route to the spaceport, Seymour,” Rosa muttered.
Now that the kid wasn’t weighing it down and jumping all over the place like a spaz, the bike was more responsive and she whipped it around another corner at speed, rolling it up on its edge and reveling in the little dip her stomach gave when the lift slipped.
Here you are, Miss Fuentes.
“Thanks. Reinstitute auditory overlays while you’re at it,” she said. Trying to read the plant’s text while she was driving like this wasn’t the safest thing to do.
“Thank you, Miss Fuentes, I’ve missed talking to you.”
Rosa threw the bike through the next turn and dropped it to pass below an oncoming walkway. There was definitely something wrong with the plant, and she planned to look into it just as soon as she had time. For now, she had a few hours to kill before she needed to be at the spaceport, so she’d just enjoy the bike.
She had a long straightaway ahead, but that was boring, so she opened it up and ran a vertical slalom between walkways, seeing how fine she could cut each one.
“Miss Fuentes?” the plant sounded in her ear.
“Yeah, what? I’m a little busy here.”
The next walkway loomed ahead of her.
“I have been monitoring police channels.”
“Shit!” Rosa yelled. The plant distracted her enough that she’d barely missed a light panel hanging open from the bottom of the walkway and it had nearly taken her head off.
She evened out her path for a minute and the import of the plant’s words struck her.
“You what? How?”
“I have been upgraded with a full suite of antennae,” the plant said.
“I know — I paid for them. Well, I handed over the credit account that paid for them, anyway.” She slowed the bike and sat up straighter. “Flashy broadcasts are encrypted.”
The plant was silent.
“Like, good encryption,” she prompted. “Not military, but good.”
“Yes, Miss Fuentes, they are.”
“So …”
“I was bored.”
Rosa blinked. She was going to have to have a very long talk with Seymour very soon.
“Uh, so what are they saying?” she asked. If it was important enough for Seymour to interrupt her, then she should probably know.
“An alert has gone out that Mason Oliver Guthrie has been seen at his former home.”
Things just get worse and worse, Rosa thought. The flashies were onto the kid already and her plant wasn’t just crazy it was taking the initiative in ways no plant should. She hadn’t said or thought anything about monitoring the flashy broadcasts, much less figuring out how to decrypt them.
That was some serious offense, if they ever found out. She was already facing a lot of time if she was caught, but that was all about money. The government took their secrets a little more seriously than that. Decrypting official transmissions was secret-camp lockup stuff.
Was she liable for what her plant did on its own? Would she be able to convince anyone that the plant was acting on its own?
And there was a decent chance she might be caught. If the kid gave up Schena, and he gave up her new ID, she’d never make it past the orbital. But would he give her up? The kid had guts, at least in some things. She thought he might not — he might just take whatever they piled on him and let her get away free.
Which would leave him holding the bag for the whole thing — not just the escape, but the missing billion credits.
Well, the dumbass wanted to go home, why shouldn’t he face the consequences of his stupid decision?
“The authorities have arrived at Mason Oliver Guthrie’s residence,” the plant said.
Rosa let out a string of curses.
“None of those things are remotely possible for me, Miss Fuentes,” the plant said. “Perhaps if I were to control a robotic body, but that would only enable thirty-seven percent of your suggestions.” A pause. “Forty-two percent, provided the body has removable parts.”
“Shut up!”
I am not active at all.
Rosa spun the bike end-for-end and laid it nearly on its nose to reverse course, trading altitude for speed until she had a chance to gain some back.
“Give me a least-time route to the kid’s building, Seymour!”
She had no idea what she’d be able to do. The kid was probably already in cuffs or stunned. If he wasn’t, though, if he had any sense — any warning at all that the flashies were coming for him — then he’d run.
Here is your route, Miss Fuentes.
Rosa jerked the bike to the side as the message appeared.
“Damn it! I told you to turn on the auditories!”
You said to shut up — should I —
“Turn them on!”
“As you wish, Miss Fuentes. It is very hard to anticipate your wishes when you keep —”
“Just do what I say!”
“I thought I did.”
Rosa ground her teeth and tried to twist the bike’s throttle past its stops. What floor did the kid live on? How long would it take the flashies to get there, assuming he was in his apartment? What the hell did she think she was going to do about it?
“When I have a minute,” Rosa shouted, “we’re going to have a long talk about what the fuck is wrong with you!”
“I will make a note to remind you, Miss Fuentes. The authorities have reached Mason Oliver Guthrie’s apartment and he is not there. They are searching the building.”
One more turn and she was there. Rosa slowed the bike before the corner, then turned at a reasonable speed.
Three aircars, lights flashing, sat parked on the street in front of the building. Their doors were all open and a single flashy stood around watching the building’s door. He glanced up at her as she steered the bike overhead, but around the cars, not going directly over them — the flashies didn’t like that.
Rosa swallowed hard, forcing herself to not gun the engine and get out of there as fast as she could. The flashy looked away and Rosa cruised down the block to the next corner.
“An officer is reporting loud footsteps in the building’s rear stairwell,” the plant said.
Rosa accelerated around the corner.
“When would you like me to schedule our talk, Miss Fuentes?”
“I’ll let you know!”
There was an alley up ahead that backed the kid’s building, would a rear stairwell exit there?
“Very well. Pursuing officers are on the fourth floor of the stairwell and reporting that Mason Oliver Guthrie is nearly at the bottom — they sound very out of breath. One has collapsed in the stairwell and others are
shouting their plans for Mason Oliver Guthrie when they catch him. They are expressing their displeasure at being made to run.”
Rosa took the bike into the alleyway and accelerated, scanning ahead for some kind of exit door.
“We’re going to talk about you committing felonies from inside my head, too, Seymour!”
Sixteen
Mason was just short of falling, taking the stairs three at a time, one hand on the rail. His breath was ragged and loud in his ears, along with pounding blood, but not enough to drown out the sounds from above him. Heavy footsteps on the stairs, the occasional clatter of equipment knocking against the railings, and, above it all, the nearly constant shouts to stop and threats of what would happen if he didn’t.
Well, they’d started as threats and worked their way to promises — none of which Mason wanted kept.
“You’re gonna resist so fucking hard when I catch you, you little shit!” echoed through the stairwell.
He got to the bottom and plowed through the stairwell door running — not into the building, but the emergency exit. The one with the bright red alarm warning that he’d always wanted to open just to see what would happen.
He rushed out into the alleyway and there was no alarm, which was oddly disappointing.
Then a hoverbike dropped out of the sky, braked so hard that its rear cowling scraped the alley’s surface for a few meters before it slammed forward and popped into a hover again.
“Get on!” Fuentes yelled.
Mason flung himself at the bike, grabbing Fuentes about the waist as she gunned the fans and the bike rose. He glanced back toward the stairwell once as incoherent shouts sounded. The flashies were out, chasing them down the alley on foot, as though they had a hope of catching up. Then they stopped and raised their hands to point at the fleeing bike.
Something pinged off the bike’s rear cowling, leaving a jagged scrape in the paint.
“They’re shooting at us!” Mason yelled.
“I know!”
The bike surged forward down the alley. More shots rang out, pinging off the bike’s rear cowling and bottom, but they were safe from being hit as it tilted forward. They were out of the alley and away from the flashies in seconds.
If Mason thought Fuentes had driven the bike recklessly before, he was truly terrified now. He was pretty sure she had the throttle all the way to the stop and the bike was tilted almost fully forward, forcing him to look at the street below as they sped along.
“Get me a route out of here!” Fuentes yelled.
“What?” How was he supposed to do that?
“Not you!”
“What?”
“Shut up! I’m trying to — No, not you! Goddamnit, Seymour, wake up!”
“Who?”
“Kid, be quiet — Seymour, route me around them!”
The next few minutes were the most confusing and terrifying of Mason’s life.
Sirens alternately closed in, then faded as Fuentes threw the bike into turns, lifted nearly to the mids, then dropped like a stone before skimming along just above the street. They ducked through alleys, sped between walkways, and barely stayed on the bike after clipping a cable strung between two buildings — it was only that the cable caught on the front cowling and snapped that kept them from disaster.
Still, the sirens grew closer and louder.
A flashy’s car pulled around a corner ahead of them and Fuentes leaned hard to make a turn to the right only to find another flashy ahead of them on that street. Fuentes never slowed, she drove straight at the flashy, only dodging below it at the last minute, but two more appeared ahead, pulling in from side streets as the one they were on ended in a T-intersection.
“Hang on!” Fuentes yelled.
Mason was pretty sure she was talking to him this time and he saw why.
The T-intersection ahead of them faced two buildings with a narrow alley. A very narrow alley that wasn’t really growing larger as they sped toward it.
Rosa clenched her jaw and stared at the narrow opening of the alley ahead.
“They are still making attempts to shut down the vehicle,” her plant told her.
“Keep them off us, Seymour!”
“I have successfully thwarted three-hundred seventy-two shut down commands since this chase began … they are not very good.”
Rosa edged the bike a bit left, the end of the street and the T-intersection was coming on fast.
She thought about what her plant said. If it hadn’t been blocking the shut down commands, the hoverbike would be on the pavement right now — every vehicle was supposed to accept the flashies’ orders and land when told. Every flashy car around them must have been sending those commands, but Seymour’d managed to keep the bike running.
No time to think about that now, though, only to thread the needle of the alley ahead.
“Miss Fuentes, that opening is —”
The sounds of shredding metal, plastic, and carbon fiber overcame the sound of the bike’s fans as they sped into the alley. The fan combings on both sides came apart, bits and pieces trailing behind them and being flung into the air as they hit the fan blades themselves.
Rosa’s eyes were on keeping the bike level and dead center of what space they had, with only a little attention spared for the map the plant projected in her vision. The map had dots for all the flashies’ cars Seymour was tracking and they were all converging on the intersection behind them. Once through the alley, they’d have a couple minutes before the flashies could circle the block and catch up.
If they made it through the alley.
The space narrowed in the middle, but Rosa kept the bike centered. The tips of the fan blades shredded and one snapped off entirely, flying out ahead of them and ricocheting from one wall to another. Then the bike was through and out into the street of the next block, with the fans damaged but still providing a little lift.
Rosa gave a sigh of relief a bit too soon, as something came off just as they exited, flung high into the air in an arc that came down, in a perfect example of her luck today, right in the bike’s forward fan.
That shredded all the blades and the bike plummeted. It was all she could do to keep it mostly level with the lift of the rear fan.
They headed for the street in a steeply sloping glide — at least she thought of it as a glide to keep from screaming.
The front skids hit, screeching across pavement and sending up sparks, then the rear slammed down. The drag and the curb stopped the bike and sent Rosa over the controls, the kid close behind.
Seventeen
Mason closed his eyes as he flew through the air. He figured he was going to die in the next few seconds, smeared across the pavement or mashed against the building’s wall. Even if he didn’t die, the flashies were going to be on them now that the bike was wrecked and he’d wind up in a prison hospital until some uppie needed his liver. He’d already lost his grip on Fuentes.
It was almost peaceful for a moment, until he landed on something soft.
Maybe that was death — you just fell into it like a soft bed and —
Something rolled him over onto hard concrete and he opened his eyes.
Fuentes was beside him, already on her knees, but gasping for breath.
“Get … up … run …” she heaved.
He struggled halfway to his feet before Fuentes was on hers, grabbing his arm and pulling him along as he tried to get his balance. Sirens were getting closer. The back of her jacket and skirt were white with scrapes and concrete dust and blood flowed down her leg.
“You’re bleeding!”
“Come on!”
“But —”
She yanked on him, dragging him through the building’s doors. The wall ahead of them was lined with lifts. Fuentes hurried over and pressed the up button.
“We have sixty-eight seconds,” she said. She started pressing the button over and over. “Come on … come on … forty-two …”
A set of doors slid open with a ding.
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Fuentes dragged him in and pressed the button for the top floor, then furiously pounded the button to close the doors. They slid together with glacial slowness, but eventually met and the lift started up. Fuentes leaned against the rear wall of the car and closed her eyes.
“You’re bleeding,” Mason said. The trail of blood ran down the back of her leg and wrapped around her ankle.
“What?”
“Your leg is bleeding.”
Fuentes looked down, then stepped away from the wall. Her leg buckled and she would have fallen if she hadn’t grabbed on to Mason.
He eased her back to the wall where she could steady herself with the hand rail and crane her head to see the back of her right leg.
Mason winced at the sight. She had a piece of glass several centimeters wide lodged in the back of her thigh and blood streamed down her leg.
“Shit,” Fuentes said. “It hurts now.”
“What should I do?”
Fuentes closed her eyes again and took a deep breath.
“Nothing, never mind, we’re done,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Was she giving up? They’d gotten away, hadn’t they?
Fuentes reached back and touched the glass in her leg, wincing. She took a grip and started to pull it out, but stopped, drawing in air between her teeth.
“Flashies all around the building,” she said. “I thought if we could get to the mids then we’d have a chance — there’s a mall between the lows and mids in this building, right at the top — but they’ll see what floor we stop on and close in. Flood the mall with flashies and check everybody.” She gestured at her leg. “We’re not exactly inconspicuous anymore.”
Mason frowned. “It would be better if they didn’t know where we stop?”
“There’s a hundred floors in the lows here — if we could be on any one, then they have to spread out more. Maybe even ignore the mall, because they know we’re lowlies and can’t go above the mall. Our new IDs are middies, though, so if we could get into the mall and up even one level —” She shrugged and sagged back against the wall. “We’re done.”
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