Sixty-seven

 

He wasn’t going to make it. Flint had been fighting with his aircar from the moment he got in it. He’d taken off most of the fail-safes long ago, but he never thought to take off a maximum speed fail-safe. Yeah, he’d set the maximum speed fifty kilometers per hour higher than it was supposed to go, but that wasn’t enough.

He never thought he’d have to go faster than that.

And he needed to now.

He was half a kilometer away from the Aristotle Academy. For some reason, he thought the dome section was a kilometer closer. When he got into the aircar and realized his mistake, he’d tried to punch the speed, and he wasn’t able to.

So he was driving too fast and he was trying to reprogram his aircar and he was trying to stay out of the way of other vehicles because at this speed, the automatic pilot did not work, and he was only a few meters away from the dome divider when the links opened.

“This dome is going to section right in front of us and we’re going to crash,” he said out loud to his stupid aircar, hoping that at least an emergency—a proven emergency—would break the vehicle’s stranglehold on speed.

He was afraid the aircar would brake, but apparently, they were too close for that and going too fast, because the aircar shot forward. He lost control.

The automatic pilot was back, taking care of things at a speed so fast the buildings around him were blurs. The aircar ducked and swerved and slowed down.

And as it did, Flint looked behind him. The section had dropped.

He hadn’t felt it because he’d been in the air.

He couldn’t see if anything—or anyone—had gotten caught in the sectioning. And he wasn’t going to go back to help.

Not with a Peyti lawyer on the grounds of Aristotle Academy.

Not with the links back up.

He sent to Talia, I’m coming. I’ll be there in just a few minutes, but she didn’t respond. He didn’t know if her links were back up yet or if she couldn’t respond.

Half a kilometer wasn’t much at this speed. But it still seemed like it would take too long.

He set his message to Talia on repeat, and hoped to hell he would hear from her any second now.