Amy shrugged. “Come on, guys. Anybody can see she’s too old to run the strips now.”
“I’m old, all right,” Shakira said. “I’m nearly twenty-one.”
“Lewes isn’t scared,” Luis muttered then. “Amy is.”
Amy’s cheeks burned. They were all watching her now; she even imagined that the crowds passing by were looking at her, witnesses to her shame. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “Make your run, Shakira Lewes-you won’t lose me. From here to the Sheepshead Bay localway intersection-unless you’re too old to make that long a run.”
Shakira was silent.
“Now! Or are you just too old and tired to try?”
The woman’s large dark eyes glittered. “You’re on. I’ll do it.”
A boy hooted. Even Debora, who would never run the strips herself, was flushed with anticipation. Amy was suddenly furious with them all. She wasn’t ready for this run; she realized now that she had been hoping Shakira would back down. If the woman actually beat her, she would never live it down, while if Amy won, the others would simply assume Shakira was past her prime. She had risked too much on this challenge, and still didn’t know what Shakira wanted with her.
“Let’s go,” Amy said.
“Just a minute. “ The woman raised an arm. “This is one on one, between you and me-and I still want to talk to you later.”
“Talk to me after I beat you,” Amy said without much conviction, then followed Shakira toward the nearest strip.
Shakira strode along the gray bands, moving to the faster strips at a speed only a little more rapid than usual. Amy kept close. Most of the boys and girls had already headed for the expressway; they would greet the victor at the Sheepshead Bay destination. Luis and two of his friends were following to study a little of Shakira’s skill before joining the others. There were still some gaps between passengers, but the strips were already getting more crowded.
Shakira showed her moves, increasing the pace. She did a side shuffle, striding steadily, then moving to an adjacent strip without breaking her pace; Amy followed. She did a Popovich, named after the runner who had perfected it, leaping from side to side between two strips before bounding from the second one to a third. She even managed to pull off a dervish. Turning to face Amy, she leaped into the air and made a complete turn before landing gracefully on a slower strip; a dervish was dangerous even on slow strips.
She was good, but Amy knew the moves. Show-off, she thought; the woman was only trying to intimidate her. Flashy moves were more likely to draw attention, as well as wearing out a runner too soon. She followed Shakira onto a localway, then swung off after her, leaving the boys behind. She had caught Shakira’s rhythm, but remained wary and alert; some runners could lull a follower into their pace before doing the unexpected.
They danced across the strips toward an expressway. The crowds were thick on the strip next to the expressway platform. Shakira reached for a pole and swung herself up; Amy grabbed the next pole. The woman’s long legs swung around, never touching the floor and barely missing a passenger, and then she was back on the strip, her back to the wind as she grinned up at Amy.
Amy gripped her pole, about to follow when a few people suddenly stepped to the strip just below her. She caught a glimpse of startled faces as her legs swung toward them; there was just enough space for a landing. A woman swayed on the strip; a man grabbed her by the arm. Amy knew in an instant that she could not risk a leap. Shakira turned, ran past more commuters, stepped to her left, and was gone.
Amy hung on to the pole; the wind tore at her legs. She hauled herself aboard, numbed by the abruptness of her defeat. She had lost before they even reached lower Manhattan; tears stung her eyes.
Someone shoved her; passengers surrounded her. “Damn runners!” a man shouted. Other riders crowded around her; a fist knocked her to the floor. “Get the police!” a woman cried. Fingers grabbed Amy by the hair; a foot kicked her in the knee. She covered her head with her arms, no longer caring what happened to her; she had lost.
A plainclothesman, a C-6 with seat privileges on the expressway’s upper level, got Amy away from the crowd before she was beaten too badly and took her to City Hall. Police headquarters were in the higher levels of the structure; Amy supposed that she would be turned over to an officer and booked. Instead, the detective led her through a large common room filled with people and desks to a corner desk with a railing around it.
She sat at the desk, feeling miserable and alone, as the plainclothesman took her name, entered it in the desk computer, called up more information, then placed a call to her father on the communo. “You’re in luck,” the man said when he had finished his call. “Your father hasn’t left work yet, so he’ll just come over here from his level and take you home. “
She peered up at him. “You mean you aren’t going to keep me here?”
The detective glowered at her. He was a big man, with a bald head, thick mustache, and brown skin nearly as dark as Shakira’s. “Don’t think I haven’t considered detaining you. I shouldn’t even be wasting my time with you-I have a very low tolerance for reckless kids who don’t care about anyone else’s safety. You could have started a riot on that expressway-maybe I should have left you to the tender mercies of that mob. Do you know what can happen to you now, girl?”
“No,” she mumbled, although she could guess.
“For starters, a hearing in juvenile court. You could get a few months in Youth Offenders’ Level, or you might get lucky and be sentenced to help out in a hospital a few days a week. You’d get lots of chances to see accident victims there.” He pulled at his mustache. “That might do you some good. Maybe you ‘II be there when they bring in some dead strip-runner who wasn’t quick enough. You can watch his parents cry when the hospital makes the Ritual of Request before they take any usable organs from the corpse. And you ‘II have deep trouble if you ever misbehave again.”
Amy squeezed her eyes shut. “Stay here,” the man said, even though she hardly had a choice, with the common room so filled with police. She sat there alone, wallowing in her despair until the detective returned with a cup of tea; he did not offer anything to her.
He sat down behind the desk. “Will you give me the names of any runners with you?”
She shook her head violently. Much as she hated Shakira, she would not sink that low.
“I didn’t think you would. You’re not doing them any favor, you know. If they meet with accidents or end up hurting somebody else, I hope you can live with yourself.”
The detective worked at his desk computer in silence until Amy’s father arrived. She glanced at his pale, grim face and looked away quickly. The formality of an introduction took only a moment before the plainclothesman began to lecture Ricardo Stein on his daughter’s offense, peppering his tirade with statistics on accidents caused by strip-runners and the number of deaths the game had resulted in this year. “If I hadn’t been on that expressway,” the man concluded, “the girl might have been badly roughed up-not that she didn’t deserve it. “
Her father said, “I understand, Mr. Dubois.”
“She needs to learn a lesson. “
“I agree.” Ricardo shook back his thick brown hair. “I’ll go along with any sentence she gets. Her mother and I won’t go out of our way to defend her, and we probably share some of the blame for not bringing her up better and supervising her more. You can be certain there’ll be no repetition of such behavior. “
“I imagine you’ll see to that, Mr. Stein-a solid citizen like you.” Mr. Dubois leaned back in his chair. “So I’ll do you and your wife a favor, and let Amy here off with a warning. She’s only fourteen, and this is her first offense-the first time she’s been caught, anyway-and Youth Offenders’ Level is crowded enough as it is. But she’s in our records now, and if she’s picked up again for anything, she goes into detention until her hearing, at which point she’ll likely get a stiff sentence.”