We fishtailed as the bike lurched forward, then sputtered, then found its own trajectory that rocketed us through the upcoming barrage of parked cars, which flew past us—six of them in succession—barely missing contact with us before the fender of the seventh nicked my leg as I then leaned the opposite direction to balance us out. Just get to second gear, Adam. That was all I lived for as I stared at the speedometer written in kilometers, not miles, knowing that if I could shift to second, I could get us to 40 mph, which would be enough, which would be inhumanly fast in the twisted Parisian maze that lay ahead of us. This town was one giant, crooked grid with every intersection bent in one of six gruesome angles on the compass: left, more left, hairpin left, right, more right, hairpin right. There wasn’t a stretch of even two consecutive blocks where you could go straight. The train station out of Paris was called Gare du Nord. Fifteen minutes away by car, ten minutes by bike. Northeast of us. That was our destination.
“You good?” I yelled to her.
I’d driven us three full blocks before I took the risk of glancing back at her. You simply can’t take your eyes off the road for more than a millisecond. I lightning-quick peeked back and happened to see behind her what we were contending with. Two cops. On motorcycles. Lights lit. Coming fast.
“We need a route,” I yelled.
She didn’t say anything.
She also didn’t say to give up. She also didn’t say I couldn’t make this work. Her eyes were useless. She had my chest gripped so tight, her fingers were knifing me. How the hell would we walk into the train station with bike cops behind us, bike cops who were gaining on us, who had me thoroughly outmatched in skill?
“Hey! We need a route,” I yelled.
I couldn’t slow down for any turns. I couldn’t because I didn’t trust that I’d be able to clutch back up to second gear again. The parked cars lining our way were impossibly obtrusive, nipping at us left and right, at both my mirrors. You can’t imagine the claustrophobia you feel when you go triple the speed limit in a place where the slightest spasm of your wrist alters a destiny.
“Hard turn coming!” I yelled.
We banked sharply. I kept the front wheel aimed slightly away from the turn—counterintuitive, but that’s what does it. I was going to get her killed. I knew it. I opted for whatever choice of streets had the most gradual, most open-angled intersection—anything under ninety degrees spelled doom, anything wider gave us a chance. At 60 km/h on the dial, I’d taken us way past my personal threshold. If even a pebble hit us wrong, we’d flip. If someone opened a car door wrong, we’d flip. I caught sight of a cop car, blue lights flashing one street over from us, heading down a parallel course. The driver was on the verge of finding the optimum alley to cut me off, so I dropped down from 45 mph to 35 mph—all speculation, those numbers, I divided the metric gauge by point-six—then turned left again. The fastest route to the Gare du Nord would require using boulevard de Magenta, an insanely high-volume street where morning traffic routinely comes to a crawl. I rounded the bend to catch sight of just how tightly its vehicles were stacking up in front of me.
“Fuck it.”
Those cars were slowing down to a stop-and-go speed but the lanes had just enough room in between those cars for us to keep going, so I steered through that traffic, lane-splitting it at full speed, slicing our fate wide open. I never slowed down. This would become my one weapon against the cops.
How do you defeat superior competition? You change the rules.
Katarina never questioned it. Survival was no longer our central objective. My priority was to outpace them to the train station at any cost—any. Every car up ahead was coming at us ferociously fast, every ten feet represented a new opportunity for pulverization. I felt my stomach drop. The cops in my mirror stayed visible but their size began to shrink as their distance grew and my insanity paid off. Another stagnant clump of stopped cars ahead had formed a massive barrier in front of us with the two lanes in my direction both coming to a standstill. A bus had crossed in front of us and stopped, gridlocking everyone in our direction. The only way to keep going would be if I did what was inhuman.
“Katarina . . .” I said.
I felt a swelling deep inside my chest, my father’s rant about me never amounting to much having reared its ugly head.
“I need you hold still,” I said to her on the remote chance she might shift her weight and send us tumbling.
She didn’t budge. She gripped down. The bus was looming fast, lodged in the middle of the intersection along with everything else that had come to a halt as I swerved left into the opposing traffic.