There is a throng of people moving in a street ahead of her, and she approaches them and then shrinks back. She quickly wishes that Halim or someone was with her, then just as quickly is angry at herself at wishing that. She has made it for a very long time in this city on her own, and there is no reason to start relying on anyone else now.

  There is a tangible heat coming from the people in front of her, the warmth of their bodies and the anger on their breath adding to the air all around. There are people in the crowd, she can pick them out one by one, who are looking for prey; their eyes glow with a red tint that may or may not be the dust in the air, and their heads swivel back and forth, slowly, looking for any excuse to lash out. They will strike, they will be violent, and they will not care much for their own well-being. They are the mines in the city’s battlefield.

  She has one advantage, and that is that her entire PAN is still working. She learned long ago that waterproofing is not just a mere luxury, even if you spend the vast majority of your time on dry land and cannot conceive how you would ever be submerged in water. You never know what could hit you, and you always want that PAN working.

  There is no structure to the AR Groovetooth can see, no overarching framework to give it order. On a normal day, there would be a few merchants, here and there, displaying something in front of their stores, but this is one of Those Days, and so they have turned the AR off and gone into hiding, likely lurking in the back of their shops in case the crowds decide to turn their energy to looting. So it is a jumble, a mass of many people without any PAN at all and a few people with one, some broadcasting a little more information about themselves than they probably should, others not giving away anything. She takes in as much as she could, because everything she knows about this crowd, every bit of information she takes in, might help her get through it. There are words and images flying around, many of them middle fingers or upraised thumbs. The public messages people are sending are not pleasant, but some of them—like “There’s a piece of shit UE behind me with a too-big gun”—are very helpful.

  Groovetooth has a faint moment of hope that the “UE—”useless element”—nearby might be the oyibos, Cayman, but she does not think he is dumb enough to wave a gun around in a crowd. From what she has seen, he does not draw a gun until it is time to fire it.

  So she avoids this UE and moves into the crowd. It already seems clear that she will not be able to find a clear route south, and she wonders if it might not be best to move back to the north end of the Third Mainland Bridge. She saw a trideo once where there was a family, and the parents told their child that if they got separated the child should return to the last place where they were all together. That seems like sound enough advice to Groovetooth, so she resolves to head north.

  She merges into the crowd and no one pays her attention, because what does some not-even-1.2-meter-tall dwarf matter in this throng? She makes progress, and it is not slow, but it is also not fast. It is movement, which in any circumstance is better than stasis, even if it is movement in the wrong direction. Groovetooth, though, can only enjoy the movement for a moment before ideas leap all over her mind like army ants swarming over a Goliath beetle, and those thoughts tell her all the things that could go wrong if she does not meet up with her team. The packages have to make it to Lagos Island; she has to be with them. She is not carrying any of them. She does not know where they are. And the others, she cannot be confident that their communications equipment is watertight.

  She quickly attempts to call each of them, hoping some miracle of jerry-rigged technology brings her message to their ears. There is nothing from Agbele Oku. Nothing from Cayman. She thinks maybe X-Prime has a connection open, but he is not responding to anything at the moment. And nothing from Halim, though that is par for the course.

  But Akuchi is out there. She cannot locate him, the Matrix infrastructure is not detailed enough for her to pinpoint him. But she can tell he is there, and he does not seem to be far off.

  She calls him on her comm, and he answers quickly.

  “So the mouse can swim,” he says. “Good job.”

  “Thanks. Where are you?”

  “Just a little east of the go-slow. Wave carried me in a ways, people carried me farther. Looking for a way to make up some speed.”

  Groovetooth looked up, hoping to see some signs of the freeway near her. But she had never been able to see much when she was in a crowd, and the buildings on the next block, let alone the concrete pillars of the freeway, are far beyond what she can see.

  “I’m going to head to the north end of the bridge,” she says. “What about you?”

  “Makes as much sense as any place else,” he says. “I’ll try to see you before then.”

  That’s good, then. She’s connected with one person, the one who can move the fastest. Her odds of not being cut out of anything are now better.

  When she thinks this, there is not a moment where she stops and considers that perhaps one of the team members will try to do something on their part to make sure that she is not cut out of the job, that she will get her cut no matter what happens from this point on. That is not a thought that occurs to her.

  She slips and worms her way through the crowd, grateful for those brief moments when she has a clear path and can walk normally, shoulders squared, steps fast. Those openings close too fast, and she is back to moving like a viper, or perhaps more appropriately, like a mongoose chasing a distant viper, wriggling and twisting.

  There is one twist when she is facing west and a gap in the crowd opens and she thinks she sees the white-grey of the go-slow a few blocks away. That does not mean she is near Akuchi, there are lots of places that are near the go-slow, but she hopes that since they rode here in the same wave, maybe they are about in the same place.

  Then she hears a buzz, a whine like a very big mosquito. It rises, falls, rises. She knows the sound. She activates her comm.

  “Akuchi?” she says.

  “I’ve gotten a little faster,” he says.

  “Rev your engine.”

  “You got it,” he says. She hears a whining over the comm that rises and falls, but the whining near her does not change.

  “That’s not you,” she says.

  “What’s not me?”

  “Never mind,” she says. The whining is coming closer and will require her attention. Then it takes a certain bend and curves toward her. It still has to rise and fall, because he cannot keep up any regular speed, but soon enough Groovetooth sees the crowd jumping and bumping, moving out of the way of an object she still cannot see.

  She sees the tire first, narrow and dark and quite smooth with age. The cycle is primitive, without so much as racing lines in its AR overlay to make it look fast. But it does not seem complicated, and it has a functioning engine. That is all that concerns her.

  She wishes she had a pipe, or even a stick, but all she has is the crowd and a hope that the rider has a basic sense of decency. This being Lagos, there is perhaps a one in three chance that this is the case.

  The bike comes closer, and Groovetooth grabs the arms of people near her and first pulls them toward her, then leans forward. They are stumbling with her, cursing and yelling, and then they see the cycle and that they are in its path and they scream and jump. Groovetooth lets them go. The cyclist’s eyes widen, and he sends his bike into a skid to avoid this sudden logjam. Groovetooth is already running, moving toward the back of the cycle, so that when its wheel swings by her she is able to give it a swift, sweeping kick. The lean of the cycle becomes more drastic, and the cycle goes down.

  The slip catches the driver off guard, and he lets go of the bike. He stops on the pavement, and the bike scoots a meter away from him. He is on his side, Groovetooth is on her feet, so she has the advantage. She leaps forward, bending, grabs the cycle, picks it up, and runs ahead with it. The cyclist is getting to his feet behind her, but the engine is still running and Groovetooth leaps on it quickly. She pulls the throttle and the cyclist yells, but he is left behind.

  She still does not feel like she is moving fast enough, but there is an undeniable charge when she sees an opening and is able to leap half a block forward in a single lunge. She also enjoys seeing people leap out of her way, diving, scurrying for cover, scared. She has never seen people avoid her—at least, the meatspace her—out of fear before. It’s a sensation that she assumes she should not be enjoying as much as she is.

  Then she reaches a block that is a mess. The blocks where people were mostly moving one way were hard to get through, but this one, here the people are moving two ways, there is one group trying to get north, and another group that seems to be trying harder to get south. The ones coming south, their mouths and eyes are wide, their limbs are flailing, they are pushing people out of the way or down to the ground to get to where they want to go. Whatever is happening ahead is bad, but Groovetooth has no other place to go.

  She makes her way forward and comes to an especially broad intersection, a plaza where three four-lane roads come together. There is lots of space here, and most of it is in use. People are coming into this square and then trying to get out, most of them doubling back to avoid it but a few thinking that they can rush through the chaos and get to the other side. In the middle of the plaza are the things trying to stop them, people that look mostly like people but with a certain slackness about the jaw and eyes, along with a tendency to have messy hair and dirty clothes. These things might be enough to identify them for what they are, but the fact that a few of them are sitting on the ground and feasting on body parts they have claimed from people who have been trampled by the crowd make it clear who has taken over the plaza. This is now shedim territory.

  There are shots echoing around the square. Someone is firing something. A shedim falls, so that means someone is firing at the right party. When the shedim goes down, Groovetooth briefly sees someone standing over the body, holding a gun, until the crowd closes and takes him from her view. But she saw the graying hair, the camouflage vest, and she knows that Cayman is ahead.

  The gap in the crowd closes and the people shift, pushing Cayman away from her. But she knows the right direction to travel, so she goes there, avoiding the swipe of an arm with ropy muscles and long, sharp fingernails, and the arm might belong to a shedim or it might not. But it misses her, she dodges around it, then leans right to turn back toward where she thinks Cayman is.

  She does not find Cayman, but there is Halim, his loose, light robe flowing around him as his sword blurs, creating a sphere of light silver around him that Groovetooth knows she should not approach. She waves to Halim, tries to get his attention, but he is absorbed in what he is doing. He makes a series of moves—a downward sweep to the right, a step with the left foot and a pivot, a wheeling motion with both hands that sends the sword into a circular motion and raises it, then a chopping motion then brings it down into the chest of a shedim with blood around his mouth. He leaps, flipping over the shedim and driving the sword deeper into him, then pulls the sword out after he lands, creating a grievous, tragic rip in the creature’s chest while bringing the sword over his head and down to meet another foe. All his motions are of a piece, and they are graceful and hypnotic.

  Groovetooth keeps herself from staring at him. She tries to get closer so that she can signal him, but the shedim recognize a threat when they see one, so they are closing in on him. He does not seem to mind.

  There are more coming into the block. Some of them seem to be shedim, but there are too many metahumans of various types in the square, and Groovetooth cannot be sure who is what. Whatever they are, many of them are heading toward Halim, and many of them are spoiling for a fight.

  She has to get them out of there, but the cycle is not big enough. She could make a pass by them, buzz them, but that wouldn’t accomplish much. The cycle is far too small to pick up one of them, let alone both.

  Cayman is turning to Halim, yelling something, but Groovetooth cannot make it out. There is something about ammo in what he says. Perhaps that is why Halim is relying on his blades, and Cayman is firing his handgun only sparingly—they do not have unlimited supplies of ammunition, and they cannot afford to waste much on a side battle with shedim.

  But this is turning into more than a side battle, as more shedim pour into the square and some of the few living humans left find a way out. This is now the largest gathering of shedim Groovetooth has ever seen, and the sight of them puts a twist in a part of her gut that she did not know could move like that. It is not a pleasant thing to learn.

  She knows she has to get out of there. She could make it on her own, but she has been helped enough by Halim that she owes it to him to try to bring him with her. She knows that he might refuse any offer of assistance and stay in the square and keep fighting shedim as long as they keep coming, but if he does that then it will at least be his decision to stay. He deserves that choice.

  She guns the engine, dodging a shedim on the left, then one on the right who resides in a corpse whose left arm was mauled into hamburger meat before it died, and it swings this arm at Groovetooth, and she pivots so it hits her leg as she darts by, and she takes a piece of the arm off as she passes. The shedim screams, and she knows it is yelling in frustration, not pain.

  She is clear for a moment, so she starts looking around without knowing what she is looking for. Something, anything, that might help, whatever that might be.

  There is an alley that is full of things, but they are broken and useless. They are rusted metal tubs, they are broken planks and shattered crates, and they are bottles and wax paper and other refuse that blew for kilometers before comfortably settling in the dead air of this alley.

  She goes to another alley and it looks as unpromising as the first. She looks over her shoulder every few seconds, waiting for some shedim to emerge at the other end of the alley, but they do not appear. Cayman and Halim seem to be sport enough, for now. There is more garbage here, more junk that has been picked over several times by scavengers desperate for anything of even the most remote value. Her only hope is that Lagos, with its great strength in producing new junk, may have dumped something here recently before the scavengers had a chance to find it.

  And then, lo and behold, there it is. A large paper blows to one side as she passes, and underneath it is a thick plank of wood, and it is connected to another, and there are four altogether, and they are on four casters. It is a furniture dolly, and if it is intact it will hold the weight of both Cayman and Halim—though how they will both sit on it is a thing that she does not much want to ponder at this moment.

  She leans over, grabs it, and guns out of the alley, back toward the square. She is fortunate, for Cayman looks at her when she approaches the square and makes eye contact, and she lifts the dolly up to show him. He nods. Then shedim close on him, and she cannot see him.

  She guns the engine and races toward the melee. Shedim hear her coming and turn to her, and some of them bare their teeth and snarl, and one of them has quite nice teeth, in fact, white and even and well maintained, and they simply do not look right in the mouth of a creature who is growling for the taste of flesh. She has the dolly in her left hand, and she swings it up, and it cracks soundly into one of the shedim, who falls as she goes by. She runs toward another, then turns at the last minute and gives it a kick, and it falls backward. She guns the engine, turns again, and she can see Cayman again. He is waiting for her.

  She pushes the bike forward, dropping her left arm toward the ground, getting the casters level and then letting the dolly go. It rolls alongside her only briefly before it starts to slow. Then Cayman is near her, and he is holding something practically in front of her face, and instinctively she grabs it as she whizzes by. It isn’t until she is ten meters or so past that she realizes she has his grapple gun. She nods. He had known what to do the moment she showed him the dolly.

  The gun is letting out cord as she drives—and a quick look over her shoulder tells her than Cayman is tying the hook end around the dolly while Halim holds the shedim at bay. She looks in front of her to make sure she has room to drive, then looks back. The dolly is secure.

  She wraps the grapple gun around the bike’s handlebars, yanking on it three times to make sure it is set, then she presses the button that stops the cord from unwinding. There is a small tug behind her, and the dolly is on the move.

  She slows the cycle, and now she is looking almost entirely behind her, hoping nothing suddenly pops up in front of her. She sees Cayman and Halim break into a run as the dolly starts rolling, Halim’s blade moving in a flash, Cayman’s gun finally firing and opening a path for the dolly. Then he runs and dives, belly-flopping onto the dolly. The sudden addition of a hundred kilos or so to the dolly could have put an abrupt strain on the cycle, but Groovetooth is ready. She lets out some slack on the grapple gun, in fits and starts, so the bike keeps hitting a brief wall but then moving again, jerking forward. The dolly starts moving, its inertia is overcome, so each jerk on it becomes easier.

  Bracing his arms on the sides of the dolly, Cayman pushes his torso up, then slings his legs underneath him. His feet hit the front of the dolly, and he sits his ass on the back. Now he is sitting up, able to both look around and move his arm to fire at anything he needed to.

  Halim is running beside the dolly, blade flashing, waiting, and once Cayman is sitting, he moves. His strides become faster, and then he leaps, and one foot lands on the side of the dolly. Cayman quickly grabs his leg, holding him, as Halim stands, knees bent, balanced, like a terribly outsized and misplaced hood ornament. Then he lifts his other leg over Cayman’s head and drops it on the other side of the dolly. He squats and leans forward, almost sitting on Cayman’s chest, his sword at the front of the dolly. They may be terribly awkward, but they are also mobile.

  Groovetooth starts winching some of the cord back in. There is a jerk on the handlebars, bucking them under her hands, but it is not bad, and she does nothing more than trace an awkward swivel on the pavement before getting straightened up. She accelerates, knowing she will have to push it over thirty to get away from the shedim, wondering how fast the dolly will be able to go. She hopes she can stay straight as long as possible.

 

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