“Jesus loves you,” the woman said, her eyes bright. “Are you ready to accept Him into your heart?”
Pita glanced at the paper money. It was an old UCAS dollar bill. Not even enough for a basic burger at McHugh’s, “At the moment I’m more interested in accepting some food into my stomach,” she answered. “But thanks for the…”
Pita’s eye fell on a man across the street. He was a dark-skinned elf with copper-colored dreadlocks that had flexible glo-tubes braided into them. A baggy jumpsuit, patterned with rainbow slashes, hung loosely on his gaunt frame. In one hand he held what looked like a small glass sphere. The fingers of his other hand brushed over it lightly, as if feeling its smooth texture. He seemed completely focused on the sphere, oblivious to the falling rain. Then he looked up and his eyes locked on Pita.
The elderly woman stepped closer to Pita, cutting off her view of the elf. “Do you believe in God?’ she asked. “Have you heard-”
A faint yellow glow washed about the woman’s head like a halo. For a moment, Pita almost thought she was witnessing some sort of religious miracle. But then the woman staggered, blinking heavily. With a sigh, she collapsed onto the sidewalk.
Pita could see the elf again. He stood rigid, one hand extended. Then his other hand shoved the sphere into his pocket in a gesture of frustration. With a heart-wrenching shock, Pita realized that the elf was a mage, and that the spell he had just cast had been intended for her. She saw movement up the street. Two burly humans in suits had broken into a rapid jog and were heading her way.
The mage touched his fingers to his eyelids in what Pita guessed was some new spellcasting gesture. She didn’t wait to see what would come next, but plunged headlong through the front door of the nearest shop.
She could see her two pursuers through the windows, on the sidewalk outside. One was heavyset, the other slender. Both were Asian. As the shop clerks shouted protests, Pita hauled herself back to her feet, tipping over a rack of expensive jackets. She didn’t think she’d been hit by a spell, but there was no time to wonder about either that or why people were suddenly after her. The two men were at the door.
Bolting for the back of the shop, Pita swept her arms right and left, knocking over other racks of clothing. One of the men chasing her tripped, landing in a tangle of dresses and hangers. The other leaped the rack like a hurdle, pulling something from his suit jacket. A bright spark crackled just above Pita’s shoulder and she smelled the tang of ozone. The taser wire had just missed her.
As Pita skidded around the corner of the counter that separated the front of the store from its stock room, one of the clerks hit a PANICBUUON near the credstick scanner. A shrill siren filled the air. Pita bolted through the stock room toward its back door. It was held open with a wedge of plastic. Through the crack, Pita could see a store clerk, cigarette in hand. He was just reaching for the door, a puzzled expression on his face.
Pita slammed into the door, kicking away the plastic wedge. Before the startled clerk could react, she spun and pushed the door shut behind her. Electronic locks clicked into place. Until the siren was deactivated, the door would be sealed. But there was no time to heave a sigh of relief. The two men were temporarily stalled, but sooner or later the dreadlocked mage would figure out she was in the alley at the back of the store. From inside the stock room, someone pounded on the door Pita had just run through.
The shop clerk, a moon-faced boy in his teens, watched Pita fearfully. “I don’t have any credit on me” he said, backing slowly away into the rain. “My credstick’s inside the shop.”
Pita ignored him. Her heart was pounding. Which way to run? She stood in a narrow service lane between two buildings. At either end of the block it opened onto wider streets. Cars slid along these, their tires making hissing sounds on the wet pavement. At one end, traffic stopped for a light. Pita saw the distinctive markings of a Lone Star cruiser. That decided her. She turned and sprinted for the other end of the alley.
Pita ran easily now, in long, loping strides. Fear sharpened her senses and gave her a burst of speed. Soon she’d put several blocks between herself and the store. She slowed to a rapid walk, glancing nervously behind her.
Who was chasing her, and why? Were the two men in suits off-duty cops, coming back to button up the only witness to their crime? Neither of them looked anything like the male Star who’d confronted Chen, Shaz, and Mohan the night they’d been caught patching in to the apartment’s trideo feed. But it could have been a different pair of cops who’d gunned her friends down. The dark, uniformed shapes Pita had seen bending over the bodies of her friends had their backs to her. All she could tell was that they were human. She had no idea what they looked like.
And who was that dark-skinned elf with his magic globes and who knew what else trying to hit her with spells? Why would he do that? Was he with the Star? From the way that woman had gone down she knew he had to be a mage. Pita hoped his aim wasn’t any better next time.
She glanced again over her shoulder, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were stinging, but she told herself it was rain on her face, not tears. Why couldn’t the cops just leave her alone? Were they so afraid she’d tell someone what really happened that night? Fat chance of anyone believing her. The reporter at KKRU hadn’t. Nobody else would, either. Except…
Except Chen’s brother Yao. His crew would broadcast the story in a millisecond. They would give a lot of air time to a story about Lone Star Security trying to disguise the killing of an ork as the work of Humanis Policlub. Yao would see to it that his brother’s murderers were put in the spotlight.
But only if Pita could find him. Yao and his friends were pirate broadcasters, always on the move. It was hard enough for Chen to find his brother on trideo, let alone in person. The pirates used a different frequency each time, hopping from one unused channel to another or cutting in on a regular station while it was off the air, ghosting over its test pattern. The few times they’d broadcast live from a recognizable location, they’d only stayed on the air for a minute or two. By the time Chen and Pita hopped the monorail across town in an effort to track Yao down, he was long gone. But that only made sense. The Orks First! broadcasts were an intense scan, literally slinging drek at the windows of corporations that refused to implement affirmative-action hiring programs, or cutting into legitimate station’s newscasts and using graphics to distort the images of anyone who made a disparaging comment about the Underground. They slotted the networks off, and more than one had probably sent out its corporate security goons to deal with the problem. If the professionals couldn’t track Yao down, what chance did a lone Street kid have? Still, she had to try. The best place to start would be the Ork Underground.
Reaching Madison Street, Pita turned right and headed down the hill, toward the overpass that crossed the highway. Seattle’s downtown lay on the other side of the freeway. There, in the shadow of the Renraku Arcology, was one of the many entrances to the Underground.
The orks had claimed the Underground years ago. gradually renovating and expanding the network of tunnels that crisscrossed the city’s waterfront. They’d tossed out the dwarfs in the early 2020s, and had turned the Underground into a city within a city, with its own shopping malls, city ball, and security force. Lone Star Security occasionally entered the Underground to make a bust, but almost never patrolled there.
Pita gave herself a mental kick for not thinking of going to the Underground sooner. Not only was it the most likely place to find Yao; it was also the least likely place for Lone Star to find her. She shrugged and blamed it on the Mindease. She’d been doing entirely too much of the stuff since Chen died. This was the first time in two days that she’d been completely straight.