No, I couldn’t stop running. I was still too close and would definitely be caught on either his bodycam or someone’s drone footage. Privacy laws forbade police from using their own for surveillance, but it didn’t really matter since they had access to the pollinator cams. I had the tinted CDN map pulled up and was avoiding most of them, but it wasn’t just like we were out casually hitting a house and my biggest concern was just winning the foot race.
A police car began crossing an intersection a few blocks ahead of me, but it slowed when it was halfway through. My insides clenched and I whipped into a neighboring yard, but the sound of peeling tires and a gunning engine signaled I’d been too slow.
Neurons fired like depth charges and all at once the new world began to implode. Noise was cancelled out. Bone plating shook, loosened, and twisted inward. Bolts popped like champagne corks. I ducked and weaved but had nowhere to go. What I’d been floating on moments ago came rushing in from all sides like a broken kaleidoscope, lapping at my knees and freezing me in sunlight. The thrill gone. It only being an adventure when you thought you could return back to the surface. When you thought you were going to make it, and the color wasn’t up to your chest, neck, seeping into your mouth. For a lingering moment I bobbed higher, gasping for air, and then I plunged back, deep into the void, knowing my shot at the park was gone.
“———— —-p running. ————- on the ground.” The loudspeaker from the police car was garbled in the background.
There were rows of dark windows, doors, screened-in porches. I should’ve hidden before. I should’ve broken into a house that looked like it didn’t have an alarm and waited it out, hoping they’d miss me when they started combing. The park had been too far away. Too much open space. Now I had to stick to backyards and pockets of tree-lined public areas or they’d get me for sure.
I swung my leg over a wooden fence and dropped to the grass in a lurch, hearing nearby voices. “Oh my God.”
“David look at that—he’s in our yard.”
A couple was having a drink on their patio and both of them shrank backward as I ran past. “Sorry,” I muttered, not slowing and not loud enough for them to hear. I leapt at a second fence and scrambled up one-armed. When I got to the top and swung my legs over, I caught a glimpse of two officers running into a backyard two houses down, looking wildly from yard to yard. They spotted me just as I let go and collapsed into a bush. Since there wasn’t any chance of getting to the park now, I needed to double back, to try to do the opposite of what was expected.
Keeping my head low so they couldn’t see it over the fence, I broke right into a driveway and then back south the way I came. As I crept behind a minivan it struck me that stealing it would be the surest way to clear the area. Without hesitating, I reached for the handle and it opened. Once behind the wheel, I scrolled through a menu of instructional videos from a link search on my film, but they were all too long—two minutes, three minutes, when those cops would be here in seconds. I leapt back out.
Frantic, I looked everywhere at once. I thought about crawling under the Mercedes next to the minivan and hiding out, but I couldn’t risk getting trapped, waiting there, pinned, while more and more police showed up. I had to do something. I had to move. The two cops in the backyard had to be getting close now.
I broke across the street in a sprint and a patrol car that had just turned sprang to life, sirens whooping, racing toward me.
I got out of its line of sight immediately like I’d done with the last car, but things were happening faster this time. Car doors slammed. I heard officer’s keys and handcuffs jingling as they ran toward me. More colors had flown on top of the CDN overlay, as if a giant pitcher had tipped somewhere, filling the sky. No air pockets. No place to hide. There was a twinkle of darkness sparkling on the surface, but it was like looking through a telescope at a remote star.
I bulldozed my way across another patio, hearing the far-off sound of a ceramic potted plant shattering into a thousand pieces. In addition to the oxygenating nanobots, using a Cas9 nuclease complex and a synthetic guide RNA, Dr. Griswald had edited my genome to produce more EPO, but my lungs still burned and my heart still strained. And even though I couldn’t feel it, my arm kept turning darker purple.
Looking back, I glimpsed the police officers already sprinting through the backyard I had just exited, their blue jackets and badges catching the sun. They shouted into their radios, telling their colleagues where to cut me off. Options were fading, and I knew I couldn’t just keep running—that I had to do something drastic. That I should’ve hotwired the van, and now the only thing left to do was flag down a moving car and force the driver out.
Just then a green frame wove its way into view as if embroidered onto the grass. My eyes passed over the shape without seeing it, judging the lines, thinking only of the sharpened points of the pickets beyond and how much height it would take to clear them. Only a second before lifting off did the contours sum with the spokes, the wheel, and the protruding black handlebars, to form a complete image.
For an instant, hesitating, I saw blue wisps of dragonflies streaking their way through plants in the neighboring garden, before my leg caught on the fence and the light blue turned to green, red, and then solid black as I crumpled into the ground. Had the grass not been made soft and swollen by the sprinklers, I might’ve broken my other arm instead of just being knocked breathless, but I rolled to my feet and, gripping one picket with my right hand, I pulled my knee to a bend and heaved myself back over the top.
The tire was turning slowly when I landed and gave a grated, circular frame to the officers as they emerged around the edge of a nearby drainpipe. I ripped the bike’s handlebars from the grass and ran parallel to the fence toward the gate, pulling it behind me. They were so close, and I knew it. I fumbled stiffly with the metal latch, but I couldn’t get it to turn, the panic beating inside my ribcage louder and louder, wishing more than ever that I still could use my left arm.
There was a fizzle and spark just to my left, electric against the late afternoon air. I yanked at the gate again, hard, and got it open, pulling the bike through then closing it just as the second stun shot landed with a crackle. I got a running start and hopped on, but the uneven grass wouldn’t let me build up any speed. It was only as the gate behind me was flung open that my front tire finally reached the granite path.
My legs heaved, spinning the pedals faster with every rotation, twisting with the walkway, yet the footsteps behind me got nearer and meaner. I could hear the cops breathing—high pitched, wheezing pants squeezed out in staccato exhalations, in time with every step.
“Get down! Hands on your head!” The voice was so close, two arm’s-lengths away maybe, but then three, four, five, as I gathered momentum reaching the road. Their steps slackened, and I knew they must be fumbling for more cartridges to load into their stun guns.
Sweat streamed into my eyes. Nearby sirens mingled with the squawks of hundreds of blackbirds migrating for the winter, their formation like gunpowder thrown against the horizon. So close now. Hunching down against the frame, I whipped around the corner just as a neon blue charge brushed past, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I’d be out of sight by the time the officers made it around the turn, but the sirens were getting louder, not more than a street away now. I half-expected to see rows of police cruisers lying in wait around the next bend, but when I flew past it there were only parked cars and nets and sticks from a forgotten hockey game. I breathed unevenly, feeling like the air had turned to syrup, trapping me in slow motion. If there were fewer flowerbeds and drones and the houses weren’t as spread out, I might’ve still been able to slip through, but as it was I’d probably hung myself by doubling back one too many times.
Yet just as I was starting to truly panic again, an alleyway materialized to my left and I swerved into it, pedaling madly over an emerging rise. At its crest I glimpsed the chalky outline of our school in the distance, and I re
alized where I was and how close to Michael’s house I must be.
“Dial Michael,” I gasped, tapping my right ear. Somewhere far overhead, I heard a helicopter.
“Hi Dorian, you won’t believe what—”
“Are you home yet?”
“Yeah, I just got here . . .”
“Open your basement window.”
“What?”
“Your basement window. I need you to open it. Please!” I tried to speak clearly, but it was as if each word had its own sail attached and my exasperation was blowing them off course.
“Sure—are you sending Syd over?”
“Maybe later.”
“But you want me to open it now?”
“Yes, just do it Michael—please just do it!” I didn’t want to rattle him, but I couldn’t help shouting. No drone had seen me for a couple blocks and, for the moment, there was an all-green path right to his house.
“Alright, alright. I’m walking down the stairs right now.” He paused, and there was silence on his end for a moment. “Are you okay, Dorian?”
I hesitated, shifting my gaze forward again so I could trace the alley down to where it collided with the next street a couple hundred feet away. “Yeah.”
“You don’t sound like it,” he said, as sounds of him struggling with the window filtered in from the background. “Dude, it’s weird here. There’re sirens everywhere outside.”
“I know.”
He paused again. “How do you know?”
A patrol car passed behind a cluster of shrubs and I hurled myself off the bike and onto the grass. “Because I’m right outside,” I panted, and started crawling through the close-cropped lawn, dragging the bike alongside me.
“Then why don’t—”
“Just hang on, okay?” I plunged into the hedge and succeeded in wriggling through, but the bike snagged on something that wouldn’t give way. I saw the reflection of another patrol car in the wheel rims and I pressed myself further back, trying to disappear.
“Dorian, what’s going on?”
“Hang on,” I repeated in a whisper.
“Alright, it’s open.”
“Thanks.” My voice was so soft it was a wonder he heard me at all. I caught the glow of a red taillight as it fragmented behind a clump of young maples in Michael’s front yard. Once it was gone, I stepped out and ripped the bicycle free from its tangle.
“Holy crap, is that you?”
I might as well have been lit up neon, sprinting across the yard—knowing that if another patrol car passed at this moment, they would see me, and it would be over. I skittered around an oak and slid onto the ground beside the basement window, rolled over, and twisted my way through.
Michael was standing inside, wide-eyed. “Does this have something to do with what’s . . .” he started.
Ignoring him, I lunged back out and tugged at the bike, but the front wheel caught on the window frame. I readjusted and heaved with all my weight, but it was just too wide, and either the handlebars or the wheel caught depending on the angle. Michael put a hand on the front rim and tried in vain to ease it through. “It’s not gonna fit,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes cloudy with confusion.
I knew I should be climbing back out the window right then, leaving him safe in his nice little room, but instead I was giving it everything I had, pulling and pulling and pulling so hard that the window frame cracked and splintered.
Thoughts exploded. Sirens blared against my skull, making everything fuzzy and bleed together as memories of childhood unspooled across my mind’s eye. I shuddered and tried to shut them off, but there was something holding me, as if a hundred cold fingers had slipped under my skin and were squeezing my organs, digging with their fingernails. I grabbed my chest, trying to pry them loose, but as soon as I got one hand out another one would replace it.
I pushed the bike back and wormed out of the window. For a moment the hands were gone, but once I was on my feet, running again, there were even more. Everything was upside down, spinning as I flew across the yard, bike in tow, jolting and scraping the ground behind me like a half-attached bumper.
Flashing lights leapt through the dusk that had settled over the front yard, dusting the evergreens and spraying the neighbor’s garage with a blue-and-crimson-lit graffiti. A loudspeaker crackled somewhere down the road, but what reached my ear was only atonal feedback that made the distance back to the cypress row feel twice as long. I forced the bike as deep into the foliage as the branches would permit, their leaves blending almost uninterruptedly, and then I was back to running, bobbing and weaving between the trees.
Michael stared at me as I slipped back through the window. “They’re after you, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, they’re after me.” Wheezing, I croaked “Off” and the overhead and desk lights went dark. Then I shut the window and the blinds.
“A mask,” he muttered. “You’re wearing a mask.”
I patted the fabric, damp against my face, then tore it off. “Yeah.”
Michael started saying something but stopped. Weak sunlight seeped through the blinds onto his face, like kindling through the grate of some ancient furnace, making his quiet features look eerie and bleached.
“Are you the only one home?” I asked, panting and stepping back from the window.
“My mom’s upstairs.”
I winced.
“But she’ll be okay.”
I had to think quickly. My eyes darted around the room. I walked three steps toward the door, pivoted, and walked back. “Pretend I’m not here. Just go upstairs and pretend you didn’t see me.”
His eyes were unflinching. “I did see you, though.”
“Well, pretend you didn’t.”
“I’m not good at that.”
I tried not to shout, but couldn’t help myself. “Well, I need you to try, goddammit! I’m in a fucking bind here!”
“Okay.” A cloud hiding most of the sun must’ve passed because Michael’s face brightened, turning strange and fantastic in the surroundings. His room was less a bedroom than a science lab, lined with microscopes, sequencers, flasks, gels, and pastes of all different colors—tidy, clean, and carefully stacked. There was a ceramic miniature of the Mars colony set to scale on a table in another corner, slideshows of great thinkers and inventors on the wall-screen (Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Archimedes), and a Rube Goldberg machine that Michael had built throughout high school snaking playfully along the walls.
In a much quieter voice I said, “Sorry, Michael, I’m just . . . I just might be in a lot of trouble.”
“I’ll help.”
I stopped pacing and sat down on the edge of his bed. “Don’t you want to know what happened before you say that?”
Michael looked over at the ski mask dangling off my finger as if it were only just now occurring to him that perhaps the police had actual cause to be chasing me. It never ceased to fascinate me how someone who saw the world so clearly for what it was as a whole could be so terrifically delinquent in recognizing its smaller pieces. “They think . . . they think you took, you took something?”
“More or less,” I whispered.
“Did . . . you?”
“Yes,” I said even softer, after a long pause.
“Why?” He asked with bewilderment, looking first at the floor, then at the ceiling, then at me when there was nowhere else to look. I wanted to help him the way I used to, but clearly I couldn’t. Now I was the problem.
“So I could Revise.”
“Oh . . .,” he said, seeming stunned, the word trailing off into oblivion. “I thought you’d been sounding more sophisticated lately but figured you would’ve told me if you’d . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Michael’s face contorted further. “Who were they? Who were the people you stole from?”
“Uhhh . . . they were just . . . people.”
“Did they deserve it?”
“Deserve . . . deserve to be robbed?”
“Yeah.”
The sound of sirens bled through the window.
“No one deserves to be robbed.”
“No, but some might more than others.”
I considered this for a second. “Well, sure, but these weren’t those people.”
“Why didn’t you at least rob bad guys?”
“It was hard enough to get into the houses in the first place. There are pets and alarms and sensors to think about . . . and most really bad guys are suspicious enough to have the best alarms and sensors and—”
“So you chose them because they were trusting?”
“We were going to pay them back later.” I frowned as the words echoed, trying to think of a more palatable way to package this.
“We,” Michael repeated. “So, Ethan too, then, right? Ethan helped you?”
Where the fuck was Ethan anyway? I hoped that he hadn’t gotten caught, obviously, but at the same time he deserved to—leaving me hung out there exposed like that. The least he could’ve done was given me a heads up. “We helped each other.”
“And I helped you both.”
He waited, probably to give me a chance to answer. But I didn’t, and some tightly held belief seemed to liquefy, spilling into his words. “I made Syd smarter and you needed her to get in.”
The accusatory note in his voice made me blush.
“I’ve been the third guy all along and I didn’t even know it. These cops are right to be outside my house.”
“You didn’t. I told—” I started, but he talked over me.
“And it’s not the first time either, is it?”
I hesitated. “No.”
“How many?”
“A few.”
“And how does it feel?” he asked.
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