Chapter 9

The wind roared in Jonesy’s ears. Her mag-grapple howled as wire raced off the reel. Balconies and bridges flew by in a blur, too fast to count.

She tried not to scream, but she couldn’t help it. While she screamed, though, she wrestled with her duffel until she could reach her grapple’s control-grip and squeeze the brake button. The winch shrieked and her duffel tried to rip straight out of her arms, but she just screamed louder and held tight.

In a few moments she wasn’t falling nearly so fast, so she stopped screaming. The atrium echoed with shouts from the police station high, high overhead. Then her grapple braked to a stop, and she slammed into the wall between two levels of balconies.

“Ow, ow, ow!” she gasped. “Um. Um—?”

She looked around frantically as she swung back out into the atrium. People on bridges and balconies were pointing terminals at her and shouting. As she swung toward the wall again, she thumbed the brake and dropped enough to swing in over the railing of the next balcony down.

Luckily, she remembered just in time that she wasn’t racing Trace through a station with no gravity, so instead of disconnecting at the perfect moment to launch herself headlong into a crowd of people, she feathered the brake and burned off enough speed for a half twist into a decent running touchdown. Somebody even clapped.

Jonesy deactivated her grapple’s head and started the autoreel winding it back in, but she’d only been waiting a few seconds when the atrium rang with a deafening BOOM—almost like a gunshot, but she listened to enough boomstep to recognize it as the crack of a sonic boom. A few grown-ups around her screamed, but the sound didn’t scare her. The gray umbrella-shaped blur that swooped in from the atrium did, though, because it did an origami trick with its airbrakes, folded itself back into a triangular gray drone, and headed straight for her.

Her grapple was still rewinding, but she didn’t even bother checking to see how much longer it needed. She just unclipped it and took off running as it slid the other way and clanked over the railing.

She’d had enough jumping out windows for one day, anyway.

The balcony she’d landed on was in a big, crowded shopping area, or maybe a mall. Store signs flashed and vending-bots shouted and colorful holo advertisements glimmered, all clamoring and scrolling and blinking in dozens of languages.

Jonesy pelted into the nearest corridor, clutching her duffel to her chest and bumping into people’s shopping bags without even saying excuse me. She could see the gates clearly again, gleaming urgently in the dark place. She wasn’t about to make the mistake of trying them now, but she couldn’t get them to go away like before, either.

Just like she couldn’t get away from the drone. It was right there every time she looked back, trailing her like a little gray kite over all the people she had to dip and dodge between. She ran as fast as she could whenever she found a break in the crowds, but it didn’t help, and soon she looked back to see three gray drones trailing her instead of one.

Jonesy realized running wouldn’t work by itself, because running without a plan was really just panicking.

She tried to think without slowing down. The gray drones knew where she was, so she had to lose them before the gray marines caught up. And hiding from them with her gates seemed like a bad idea without knowing for sure why it hadn’t given her away to Captain Norcross the first time, so she had to lose them on her own.

“Okay,” she panted. “Drones fly. Jonesy doesn’t. Not fair.”

She kept thinking as she struggled across a crowded food court, ducking lunch trays loaded with everything from stir-fried noodles and curries to hot, gooey cinnamon buns. The three gray drones followed along behind her, weaving around signs and through advertising holos like they were in no hurry at all.

“Not fair if Jonesy’s running through crowds,” she cried. “Okay!”

Now she had a plan, but it needed doors—lots of doors, the smaller the better—so she started paying more attention to the stores as she ran. Through the confusion of voices and newsfeeds and music and advertisements, a familiar voice rang out for the first time: “LIVE FROM SISYPHUS FOUR, PROGBOOM, BOOMSTEP, BOOMCORE, AND MORE—”

Jonesy followed the voice to a store named TODSCHIC that was just what she’d had in mind. She ran in, past manikins in ragged orange jackets and pants scorched with laser burns.

“—ALL THE SOUND TO POUND YOUR SKULL OUT OF ROUND—”

The only people inside were a teenage boy in a shredded TODSCHIC shirt at the counter and a pair of teenage girls in a lot of makeup. The girls looked about as old as Jonesy’s sister Cass. The boy shouted something she couldn’t hear over the boomstep station’s DJ. Then he looked past her with his mouth open like an O. Jonesy glanced back to see all three gray drones swooping in through the entrance.

“—AND IF YOU THINK YOU CAN HANDLE IT, YOUR SYSTEM AIN’T BIG ENOUGH!”

She ran straight for the EMPLOYEES ONLY door at the back. She’d never even considered going through one of those before, but this was an emergency, and that made it okay.

“BUT ENOUGH TALK! GET BRACED FOR THE NEXT ROUND OF BOOM—”

The DJ’s voice out in the storefront wasn’t even muffled after the door slid shut behind her, so she didn’t wait to see if it would stop the drones. She dashed past autotailor machines and stacks of vacuum-bagged textile stock and reached the back exit just as the opening booms of 2Zeus’s Tectonic Suite began jolting the store. She slapped the exit’s lock screen to open it, then slapped it again to start it closing and ducked under.

Now she was in a harshly lit corridor lined with other stores’ back exits. The air smelled like heavy-duty air scrubber chemicals and stale food, and the walls were plastered with a hodgepodge of graffiti and weird animated stickers that flickered and jerked around her as she hurried to try the lock screen on the next door down.

It blinked red and didn’t open.

She ran to the next one. That didn’t open, either, so she gave up and just started running. Behind her, she heard a door slide open and the pounding echoes of boomstep.

At the same time, another door opened ahead of her and a man in a stained white apron stepped out.

“Excuse me,” Jonesy shouted, and ran straight into him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she added as she pushed off him and darted through the door.

“Oy!” the man yelled, clutching his stomach where she’d hit him with her shoulder.

“I’m really sorry,” Jonesy said. She hit the lock screen twice to close and lock the door as the man cursed at her in what she thought might be Russian. The door had a shield logo that said HI-SECUR TI-GRA MAX, which seemed good. She could hardly hear the man pounding on it as she turned on her heel and fled.

She’d let herself into the back of a restaurant, as it turned out. The back rooms and kitchens were full of busy grown-ups, but she stuck to her new strategy of simply running past before anybody realized what was happening, and it worked again. She didn’t even get yelled at before she’d slipped through some swinging doors and into a crowded dining room. Half the diners were on their feet cheering at a full-wall display that was streaming a wootball match—Arsenal Delta had just won a penalty against MDX Osiris—and Jonesy reached the exit without attracting so much as a second glance.

She looked all around as she darted outside and into the crowd, but for the first time since she’d landed on the balcony, she didn’t see any drones, or at least not any triangular gray ones. That was good, because she seriously needed a breather. She fought the tide of grown-ups who knew where they were going until she found a small, deserted side hall under signs for restrooms, vending machines, and—her heart leapt—a public drinking fountain. She lurched down to the fountain, leaned on the button, and drank as fast as she could without quite drowning herself.

“Oh, that’s better,” she panted, wiping her chin. “Okay. Lost the drones, check. Time to figure out what’s next. Stage two, let’s go.”

She’d said it quietly, but the nearest vending machine heard and flashed a scan-light down her face. A holo of a cool-looking girl popped out. “Hey, check this!” she shouted, waving a bottle in Jonesy’s face. “Have you tried the new EARL HYPERSHOK from TWININGS?”

“No!”

“Then what are you waiting for? I’ve got a free sample with your name on it! Just say YES to release your biometrics for AllPass—”

“No!” Jonesy repeated, aghast. If she’d lost those drones, the last thing she needed was some vending machine accessing the station network with her face and retinas to tell the bad guys exactly where she was. She hugged her duffel tight and fled past the rest of the vending machines and back out into the crowds as fast as she could.

“Hey! Jonesy!”

Jonesy skidded to a stop. The shout had come from ahead of her, and a moment later, a blue-haired woman in a black pilot’s jumpsuit burst from the crowd and looked right at her.

Jonesy let out a little scream and ran into the closest store.

“Hey!” the woman shouted behind her. “Stop, wait!”

Jonesy didn’t stop or wait. She plunged through a holographic colonist who popped up to welcome her to DEEP TERRITORY OUTFITTERS and kept right on running, pelting down aisle after aisle of survival gear and outdoor clothing.

She needed to figure out her next move, now, and fast, because without that she was back to running without a plan. Captain Lee’s suggestion to hide seemed doubtful with so many people around. Detective Garcia had mentioned a naval base in Three Ravens, though. If she could find the docks, maybe she could find a ship to take her there. If she got to the Navy, she was pretty sure the gray marines couldn’t just walk in after her there.

Through an obstacle course of camping displays and a dizzying flurry of Immersive Media demonstration zones, she burst from another exit onto a balcony overlooking a huge shopping concourse. More balconies opened on the concourse, too, both up and down, with lifts and escalators between. She spotted signs for ACCOMODATIONS and DOCKS over an escalator going down, so she hopped on that and started making her way down, taking the steps two at a time and chasing the signs past one level after another.

Jonesy’s terminal beeped as she was riding the escalator off the last shopping level. She stopped skipping steps and pulled it out to find a message from Julia Kilson. She’d gotten it a few minutes earlier, but she must have missed the first beep while she’d been running:

Jonesy, sweetie, please message me right away if you’re okay! ∼JK

Jonesy rolled her eyes at Julia’s pink kittens-and-flowers message background and closed it to check her queue, hoping Captain Lee or Detective Garcia might have messaged her with another hint or two about what to do next. They hadn’t, so she tried messaging them, but both contacts returned errors and said her messages were UNDELIVERABLE (BAD ADDRESS).

Her heart sank. She hoped they hadn’t gotten in trouble for helping her, but their accounts suddenly being disabled wasn’t a good sign.

As she was putting her terminal away, another message arrived from Julia.

Jonesy, you’re heading the wrong way. The lower levels of the station aren’t safe for a little girl. I’m waiting for you on M Deck in front of the Kapuseru Capsule Hotel, so get off there when your lift stops and I’ll meet you, okay? I know you got scared before, and I’m sorry. You don’t have to worry this time. It’ll just be me waiting. ∼JK

“I’m not even on a lift,” Jonesy said, grinning. Then she stopped grinning. Maybe Julia didn’t know exactly where Jonesy was, but she was pretty close. “Oh, shoot.”

Her exclamation startled the woman beside her on the escalator, who had red cat’s eyes—real ones, not contacts—and looked like she’d been in a fight, with one sleeve torn halfway off her GEN PRIDE T-shirt and a fresh bandage on her neck. They stared at each other, equally wide-eyed, then both mumbled apologies and turned back to their terminals.

Jonesy could have kicked herself. She’d been so focused on escaping the drones when station security had probably been tracking her terminal all along. When she checked, though, she found it was still in Silent Running privacy mode like she’d left it for the last three years, which maybe explained why they couldn’t pinpoint her. She turned it off anyway to be safe. She hoped they couldn’t track her dad’s, because all she could change on that was the volume—but it had stayed bug-free on Canary without her help, so she supposed its security settings were probably fine.

The deck at the bottom of the escalator was M Deck. Across the concourse on the far balcony, right by the lift tubes, she saw a glowing blue sign for the Kapuseru Capsule Hotel. Julia was standing by the lifts with her terminal out, watching for messages.

And flanking the lifts, huddled where they’d be out of sight of somebody getting off, were two squads of armored police and drones.

“I knew you were a liar,” Jonesy muttered.

The next escalator sign didn’t say ACCOMMODATIONS or DOCKS. Apparently those were both on M Deck. She got on anyway and kept going down.

She rode escalator after escalator. Soon she wasn’t in the open concourse any more. After L Deck came two decks of offices, then seven decks of apartments and parks. Jonesy would have stopped at one of those, but they were all blocked off by security gates with biometric scanners.

After the last deck of apartments came B Deck, which had plastic sheeting up over naked beams and UNDER CONSTRUCTION signs—although for some reason a lot of people seemed to be living in the spaces behind the plastic. She decided not to get off there, either, but the cat-eyed GEN PRIDE woman did.

That left Jonesy almost alone on the escalator, and everybody left looked like a mechanic, pirate, or the kind of person in a movie that jumped out to sell the heroes something in a scary voice so you knew they were in the bad part of the station. She ended up running back up before she reached the next deck down, squeezing as politely as she could past the handful of mechanics and hopefully-not-actual-pirates behind her.

“Ex-excuse me?” she called as she stepped off on B. “Ma’am? I was—just wondering, is this a good place to hide?”

The GEN PRIDE woman was just ducking through a slit in the plastic sheeting, but she heard and paused to look Jonesy up and down. She shook her head. “Not for you, kid.”

“Then—could you maybe help me?” Jonesy asked. “I have to hide. Or get off the station. I’m not from here, I don’t know—I need help—”

“Then here’s some free advice,” the GEN PRIDE woman interrupted, turning back to the plastic with a lurch, like her leg hurt. “Ask somebody who’s got less troubles than you do.”

Jonesy felt her face flush. “Um, okay. Sorry.”

She turned for the next escalator and almost bumped smack into a fat man in a business suit. “Are you lost, young lady?” he inquired, bending down.

A sudden jerk at Jonesy’s backpack pulled her away before she could reply. “How about you get lost?” the GEN PRIDE woman snarled. She was a lot stronger than she looked and quickly steered Jonesy away and around a corner. “You got money, kid?”

That sent a chill down Jonesy’s neck. “No,” she said anxiously.

“Can you do anything useful?”

“Um, I’m good at fixing computers. And salvaging stuff. I have my own suit.”

The GEN PRIDE woman rolled her strange, red eyes and reluctantly pointed down a plastic-lined corridor leading away from the escalators. “If you’re dead serious about getting off,” she said, “go that way til you hit the Pylon Seven lift cluster. Take a lift down and get off at G-Minus. That’ll be the docker market. There’s job boards. Crew postings. Understand?”

Jonesy looked that way and swallowed. “I think so,” she said. “Okay, thanks. And—and I hope you feel better soon.”

That got her a weird, worried smile. “Don’t mention it, kid. And don’t talk to anybody who talks to you first, got it? Now scoot.”

Jonesy almost didn’t get off the lift when the doors opened on G-Minus Deck, because the people outside looked just as scary as the ones who’d made her so nervous on the escalators before. Then a bunch of them piled into the lift with her, so she got off anyway and started looking for the job boards. She had some idea of how that worked, because three of her favorite shows had started with Down-On-Their-Luck Captains assembling Unlikely Crews from job postings in places like this, and two of them had (reluctantly, of course) hired Plucky Kids with Hidden Talents. If those shows were any indication of real life, she reflected, then she probably wouldn’t get anywhere near a naval base like she wanted until maybe the middle of the second season, but it wasn’t like she had a better plan.

She didn’t see any signs that said docker market, but she didn’t doubt she’d found the right place. Half the stores didn’t have signs, either, and not one looked like it might sell cinnamon buns or fashionably torn clothes. She saw scrap vendors and gun brokers, chandlers beckoning passersby to browse their walk-up ship component catalogs, secondhand drone sellers with captive machines straining at tethers like anxious oversized bees, and even a pet shop that didn’t have a single creature she recognized on display—or, for that matter, a single creature that looked safe to let out of its tank.

If she’d been in a movie, she decided, this definitely would have been the bad part of the station.

She got away from the lifts as fast as she could. It wasn’t easy. Although the crowds here weren’t as thick as before, they were way meaner. Here, almost everybody she bumped into swore at her and sometimes shoved her instead of letting her pass, but that still seemed better than bumping into anything else, because, instead of big soft shopping bags of clothes, it was mostly carts of engine parts and knobby sacks of batteries and other stuff just as unforgiving.

She found out pretty quickly that she’d have been much better off not bumping at all. The third or fourth time somebody shoved her, she spun around and hit her face on the handle of a Ganrat pistol on somebody’s belt and fell down. When she looked up, the somebody with the pistol was a giant man with a black robotic arm and the letters FPC on his vest. Jonesy hadn’t watched much news with her parents, but she still knew FPC were pirates. And he looked really unhappy with her.

She was in the bad part of the station for real.

She tried to apologize, but all that came out was a squeak. Then she screamed, because inside, in the dark place, the gates had shuddered with a tremendous pulse of light, like somebody was trying to blast them open from inside.

The giant pirate snatched her up by the collar with his mechanical hand. “You—” he began, but he stopped and jerked his face toward the lifts. “RAID!” he bellowed.

The three gray drones had caught up.

Everybody started shouting and pushing to get away from the lifts. The giant pirate dropped Jonesy and began shoving through the crowd, knocking down anybody who didn’t get out of his way. And because the only place that wasn’t crammed with people was right behind him, Jonesy scrambled after him.

Gunshots shattered the air behind her, then screams. She stumbled, squeezed, and elbowed to keep up with the giant pirate, but she hadn’t made it far before one of his trampled victims grabbed her leg. She screamed and kicked him in the face until he let go, then took off again, crying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over her shoulder—but not only had she lost the pirate entirely, the drones had spotted her.

Then came a long, horrible kaleidoscope of pure, panicked running. She bolted through a dozen interlinked shops and got screamed at in at least as many languages by their owners. The drones seemed determined not to lose her again, though. They were right on her heels when she popped back out into the corridors, exploding from the shop behind her in a blizzard of wrappers, cartons, and blister packs.

Jonesy was exhausted and terrified and didn’t know how to get away, but she kept running. And as she ran, the gates in the darkness inside her were clearer than ever. We can, they seemed to say. We can.

She shook her head in frustration, but she was out of ideas. Captain Norcross would know, but he wasn’t right behind her. The drones were.

“Okay,” she gasped. “Okay, fine.”

She focused on the gates as best she could while also squeezing around people and panting so hard it hurt. She concentrated on how badly she needed the drones to not see her. She felt the glow around her hands. She was going to be safe. The gates were about to open.

But this time they didn’t. She got the unplugged-bathtub feeling like before, but the gates stayed closed.

Then she got so dizzy she tripped over her own shoes.

She felt twice as tired as before. You tricked me, she yelled at the gates, but they didn’t say anything back. They just faded away.

People started screaming ahead of her. She forced herself back up and saw gray marines plowing toward her through the panicked crowd—smashing through stalls and bashing people aside, moving even faster than the giant pirate had. A huge shopkeeper stepped into their way with his hands out, trying to protect his displays, but one of the marines picked him up like a stuffed animal and hurled him through a window across the corridor.

Jonesy was so tired she forgot to run for a second.

She was surrounded by people, but she suddenly felt totally, overwhelmingly alone. Worse than alone. Like she’d fallen out the bottom of the world by accident and landed somewhere she didn’t belong. And for a few moments, watching those marines coming for her and demolishing everything in their way, Jonesy felt herself crumpling under the same helpless terror she’d felt three years ago when she’d seen that cracked pressure door and realized Canary Station—her home—had been turned against her.

Except this time the whole world had been turned against her. And this time Rook wasn’t there to swing in and save her with a clever plan.

Her friends still needed her, though. And if the last three years had taught her anything, it was how far she could push herself using that and nothing else.

She forced her legs to move again. She scurried around the closest corner, ducked a couple of yellow CRIME SCENE: DO NOT ENTER signs, and pushed through a vapor barrier into an empty, blackened corridor of burned-out shops. The air past the barrier reeked so harshly of old smoke and suppressant foam that she almost gagged, but she picked a direction anyway and started running just as another group of gray marines burst around a corner ahead of her.

“STOP RIGHT THERE!”

Jonesy stopped so fast she slipped and fell on her backside, but she scrambled to her feet again, sidestepped the drones as they zoomed out behind her, and ran the other way.

But the other way wasn’t empty, either.

“Get behind me!” yelled the blue-haired woman in the black pilot’s jumpsuit from earlier.

Jonesy froze and stared.

The woman’s eyes were glowing—and it was the same neon-magenta glow Jonesy had seen around her own hands.

“LOOK OUT!” the woman shouted, and snapped her hands together like she was about to clap. Jonesy gaped to see them glow neon magenta, too.

“You—” she started to say, but something invisible grabbed her and moved her like a human chess piece, sweeping her around behind the woman just as the gray marines rushed them both with guns leveled and gray drones flying in above.

Jonesy screamed as they started shooting.

For every gunshot, though, the corridor strobed neon. A cluster of black canisters tumbled to a halt in midair, then popped and blossomed into glue nets like thick amber spiderwebs and flew back at the marines. The drones dodged over the nets, but neon flared again and they rocketed back up the corridor, smashing into the marines and interrupting their efforts to tear themselves out of their own glue grenades.

The woman hunkered lower with her palms still together. Her hands glowed brighter and brighter. The glow went out, and neon lightning crackled across the floor in front of her.

She swept her hands out and up, like she was tipping over an invisible couch, and the floor between her and the marines rolled up with an earsplitting SCREECH, blocking the corridor right to the ceiling.

Jonesy opened and shut her mouth a few times. Broken wires crackled and shattered pipes hissed where the floor had been torn up. She wasn’t even sure she believed her eyes until a spark hit her shirt and left a smoking hole. That seemed real enough, so she backed away.

The blue-haired woman, meanwhile, wasn’t done wrecking the place. She pointed her palms downward. Neon flashed again and punched a hole in the floor, then wrenched aside beams and crushed pipes until it broke through to the next deck down. Then she aimed her finger at a ceiling-mounted security monitor nearby. It popped and let out a puff of smoke. She did the same thing to the next one, and the next, and didn’t stop until she’d popped every monitor to the far end of the corridor.

The woman turned her neon-glowing eyes to Jonesy and grinned just as there was a huge BOOM and her impromptu barricade buckled across the middle. “Crap,” she said, grabbing Jonesy’s hand. “I knew I should have dropped a couple of shops on those guys, too. Come on.”

Jonesy stared at the hole. “I have to jump down there?”

“Nope! But we need to get somewhere else quick while they aren’t watching. Time to run. Run.”

Jonesy did her best, but the woman with the glowing eyes was fast, and half the time she was just dragging Jonesy behind her. Soon, though, she stopped at a plain gray hatch labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She pulled out a small black terminal, muttered to herself, and pushed buttons until the hatch unlocked, then pulled Jonesy through and closed it behind them. It was completely dark inside, except for the two neon-magenta eyes looking at Jonesy. “The name’s Ghost Hawk.”

Jonesy knew she should have had about a million questions, but she couldn’t think of any. “You—you’re a Fluxer,” she said instead.

The woman laughed. For some reason Jonesy felt like she’d heard that laugh before. “Sure am. And you’re not dead. Day of surprises, right?”

The neon eyes winked out. “Ghost Hawk’s just a code name, by the way.”

A light clicked on. The woman with her finger on the light panel had lots of freckles, and bright, normal blue eyes, and a blue wig in her hand. Her real hair was red, and although it was pulled back tight with a clip, a few strands had escaped to hang in red coils beside her face. She grinned at Jonesy.

“Heya, kiddo.”