He leant into a corner just above the speed limit, just fast enough that he wouldn’t trip the speed cameras. Low-profile, they’d said, and he listened, because he was good at keeping his head down. This package needed to get there safe. If there was a scratch on it he’d get hurt, they’d said, the air in the smuggler’s tunnel at the edge of the bandcity stale even with the low murmur of an oxygen scrubber by the portable heater. And if he was too slow… well, that was another problem, because they weren’t the only ones who thought the thing in that box was valuable. Exceptionally, valuable. Valschei had put his hand on his shoulder for that. “Exceptionally fucking valuable,” he’d said, the profanity hanging in the air like the acrid smell of oil burning. And he always listened, so he’d made extra fucking sure the green and blue striped bungee ties attached the locked box firmly to the bike’s rack.
His flip-phone buzzed against his chest from the pocket of his coat. He pulled over, offering a brief nod of apology to two pedestrians as they edged around him, and tugged it out with the casual deftness of someone who had places to be but would not say so.
It was a single text message.
[some corpo hit squad just busted the drop site. looking for the package. do not deliver.]
Another blinked in below it.
[they are here run]
He stood on the curb.
The drywall he had carved a hole into was burning and the first whiff of smoke had just reached him.
Phone snapped at the hinge in his hands, boot slamming down on glass and plastic and circuitry, reverb running up a titanium leg from the rubber sole of a synthetic leather boot from the brittle crunch, fingerless gloves on hands gripping the handlebars of a motorbike that hummed as the glyph regulator set the acid-etched, thaumaturge-blessed kinetic innards of the engine into glowing preparation for the benediction of the sparking plug which lit, pistons juddering to set wheels moving, stainless steel grips over rubber sparking against concrete even as his second boot hit footpad and the machine pushed against him, polymuscle flexing in his arms, his calves, his neck, the artifice of his physiology in perfect balance with the machine while in the meatbag pit of his stomach the nerves churned and his brain spattered thoughts like rad interference or static or ocular haze.
Engine jolt. Heart lurch. Breathe.
Bike into the streets, not thinking of his apartment, his scant few possessions, because he would not be coming back, never coming back, leaning into turns, sparks flying because these chain-rimmed tires were for the highway out, out to the surface, where the trucks brought ice from the wastes on the rims of their wheels and turned the tarmac to frozen sludge, back-street after back-street, routes he knew well from the course of a half-lifetime of doing the trade and doing it well, highway in five, four if he moved, really moved, lean in, turn, legs and shoulders and skull teasing the belt-sander of the road as he adjudicated the balance between centrifugal force and gravity and the twinned gyroscopes of the wheels, eyes not scanning but observing all at once, the road a puzzle scrambled and solved at a speed that built failure out of an explosive bloom of metal fragments and wet innards.
But he did not crash. He was fast. He kept his enemies close, so close as to be almost a part of him, and the bike was just that, an enemy, determined to fail, determined to break a cylinder or skid out or buck him off as he dug fingers deeper into that powerful place but he had made his sacrifices and prayers in oil-rags and chemical cleaners and replaced parts and lubrication. The machine was as much of a traitor to him as his own heart. He had heard thaumaturges talk of magic like that and though he had more microplastic in his blood than the gift he knew they were strangle-holding the same creature, inner calm against a beast that thought not, and willed not, and wanted not, but offered power and took lives all the same. Fingers digging onto the same imagined flesh, casting-hands or not. Glyph-rider. Motor-mage. Motorcyclist.
A speed camera snapped round to track him. Another infraction to be logged against a file just clean enough to work with.
No matter, he thought. They had always wanted him dead. Since his first shoplift. First time he’d shown up on a mugshot with blood on his lips and distant eyes. Before he’d learned to hide, and obey just enough, and disappear.
Needle-threading between two cars onto the motorway proper, up a twisting ramp up to the next level, gaining in his peripheral vision a blurred snapshot of the city below as he rose, concrete monoliths of housing blocks rising into the haze, scratching at a ceiling that repeated the same view a level above. Unescensi. The city of a million lights. Ten million shattered reflections of himself.
He should have cut his losses and run last year, a month ago, a week ago, yesterday, this morning, back as a child when he had first been sent running packages. But he was running now. If he went fast enough maybe the tail-lights would invert, start chasing their own glowing trails. He’d follow the motorway back to that moment when he needed things that nobody would give him and, at the slow instant a small box wrapped in brown paper was held out to his young hands, slam into the side of Erkhen Valschei and take them both to the After. His sister would die from that organ bag rupture, but she had died anyway, hadn’t she? Maybe he’d get a job at a plant, a factory, after that. Cleaning the sewers. Switching out air scrubbers. Selling trinkets to tourists. Maybe he’d die in an industrial accident at age twenty-two, lungs full of lead, arsenic, asbestos that the filter augments hadn’t scrubbed out, head crushed by a falling crate, chest branded straight through with a red-hot pneumatic hammer. Maybe he’d have told someone his story, really told it, before he died. Been held in someone’s arms and wept.
But this was his last act. If he did not make it out he would write his story in a ten-metre smear of blood and oil and metal filings on the S4U motorway from Unescensi to the surface.
The interchange was before him. The motorway, a long, long tunnel sloping upwards in a geometrically perfect line, lay to his left. He ignored the traffic lights, because of course he did, needle-treading between a truck and a crawler, the fat rubber wheels of the thing descended to keep the horrible weight of its tracks of the tarmac, wind whipping at his arms as he passed and sending shivers into the pulsing threads of his nervous system. He shot out and through the traffic, narrowly avoiding being blindsided and sending his back wheel spinning round on the salt and grit before the ice-mesh gripped and pushed him forwards, forwards, the concrete arch to the tunnel just in front of him-
And then they locked eyes. Her gaze was cold, empty, but not calculating. There was an animal behind the dulled white ceramite that crouched above the archway. Glassy lenses lit with dead fires.
Outsourced help. Bounty hunter.
And, as she dropped, he saw the lightless shine of kinetoglyphs spin outward from her fingertips, and realised that he was dead.
Time did not give him the decency of a long moment to find a way out. He saw only a lane ahead too narrow to avoid her, a concrete wall to his right, and on his left a space with neither.
He screamed a curse that made no sound and dove into the oncoming traffic, senses ringing with the blaring of horns and the panicked eyes of drivers through thick insulated windshields as the frightened rat slipped between the rushing weight of picoseconds. He was whip-point-fast and half as thin, a paper man flung on the currents of an atmospheric riptide between the spaces of a dogfight barrage of spinning brass rounds, unharmed by atom-sharp chance and reflexes two flickers ahead of the curve. Behind him some fuckwit swung on the wheel and sent the ordered lanes of traffic into primordial chaos and, as the order ahead began to twist and warp and threatened to trap him he leaned into a pinpoint turn and punched through the closing gap between a truck’s tailgate and the bumper of a hauler lugging a mining mech, six hazard-orange legs lying inert as the mangled drills of its manipulators slumped, awaiting repairs, back into the traffic heading out of the city. But where, where the fuck was-
She vaulted over the top of a truck three metres in front of him, forearms trailing cables, kicked off the loading doors and angled a foot directly at his head. He swung off his seat and clung to the side of his bike, air spinning off the wheel grazing his lips as the thaumaturge passed through the space his cranium had been, already twisting in the air, eyes and oculars seeking the thinnest part of his skull. He swung back onto the seat, leaning into a turn around the truck, just in time to feel a shtunk as one of those cables caught on the back of the motorcycle, and-
The jolt nearly sent the bike slamming into the ground and he fought with the handlebars as the back wheel span uselessly, violently fishtailing as something pulled at the back of the bike. He whipped his head round and saw his pursuer bridging the gap between the side of the truck and his bike with her cables, fingers spinning mesmerically as they cast the clamping glyphs. Biceps shuddered. Bottomless eyes glistened. And, as the bulb of her mouthguard hinged open at the seam to reveal a strip of pale flesh bearing a pair of thin, bloodless lips like a wound, her face darkened into a smile. He read them by their peeling cracks. What are you, errand boy, now you cannot run?
But he could always run.
The engine shunted the roar of its engine two notches down the tar-stained chrome of its throat and his tyre bit into the sludge of the road, jolting, slipping, tearing, rubberstench and dieselfumes, engine pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, each movement of the cylinder under the pressure to break, each beat of its heart a risk, each breath he took under strain, breather-filters hissing as his diaphragm fought to send scant oxygen to a body, to a mind that had reached the human limit, grabbed it by the throat and headbutted it in the nose.
He felt something give.
“You’re dead,” she screamed, arms shuddering with exertion, and with a ptang of tension freed she cut the glyph holding her to the truck with a sudden clenching of her fist and he was free, wheel catching ground, engine breathing full-throttle, gears shunting and the red-hot moments from here to outside fed like chain-gun ammo into the thumping chamber of the present. He stole a glance behind him in the hollow gap between instants and saw her, ceramite armour spraying fountains of sparks and chips of AP-resistant paramaterial as she was dragged along the frozen tarmac at a speed that would have turned an organic into paste. A hand grasped the cable. She pulled herself closer. Closer. He swung the bike right, flinging her bodily into the wall, but she wheeled and kicked off the rushing concrete without losing her grip on the cable. Her eyes were black. Pupils like pits. Synthetic biomaterial. Made for the dark. Expensive. What was in that package that someone would pay for someone like this to get it back?
That hand came another palm’s-breadth closer. Weapons? He had the bike and a pistol that could barely punch a hole in an organic. He fumbled it out, hand shaking, clutching it as he jackknifed through traffic, tried to swing his passenger under the wheels of a mobile crane with a sudden turn only for her to push off the tyre, taking up the slack in the cable with a wild snatch. He fought for another gram of force from the engine, another hiss of breath from lungs emptied by a long exhale, but there was only so long he could be past his limit. His limbs stung. Lips cracked from the beating of airborne grit. Eyes held open for too long, and there was too long to go before he could find the safety to blink. Exhaustion. Phantom pain in his synthetic muscle. Brain running lizard-like on adrenaline and cortisol. He was a creature of the temporary falling into the long-term.
Wind in his ears. The road ahead. The bike below.
Seeing the exit nearly stopped his heart. Thirty seconds away. The bounty hunter knew it too. A border checkpoint. No hope of stopping but the heavy door stood open, a hauler lugging a shipping container marked Meior Industries in high white letters slowly squeezing through a gap just wide enough for it, no space for his bike, no time to think, but-
He made a choice and resolved to live with the consequences as he gunned the throttle. The checkpoint guards yelled, raised guns, but all was blown away in the roar of the motorcycle and the churn of the rubber as he jackknifed under the closing safety barrier, angled his momentum against the truck and did the one thing every motorcyclist fears most.
He let himself fall.
The tipping point passed with a sick jolt in his stomach as the bike went into a slide under the truck’s trailer tires-first, sparks flying off the chassis as he felt his left leg meet the road in a distant mangling of plastic and precision engineered cyberthaumics, the pipes and shafts and oil-blackened metal of the truck's undercarriage passing by in a monochrome blur above, hearing the thaumaturge curse in a screech that was half unintelligible, animal noise as she tore her cable free and flipped, launching herself up the trailer's side, and then his tires hit the wall as he emerged into the bitter white light of the floodlights on the other side of the blast door. He fought to get the bike to pivot onto its wheels with the dregs of his momentum, polymuscle in his thigh tugging at connective tissue that wasn’t there, fighting to get the gears down, to get that back wheel moving again as the bounty hunter bounced off the roof of the truck, one fist encased in the spectral white of a cutting kinetoglyph, and just as she fell he raised the gun, aimed without thinking, without seeing, and watched as the lens of her left eye burst open with a crack like ice splitting.
The bounty hunter collapsed, eye socket seeping horribly expensive black gunk onto the permafrost and gravel.
His wheels hit true ice as he left the road, the lights of Unescensi’s topside already distant. The horizon yawned, infinite. A loop with no terminus. Where to?
Away, he thought. For now, all I have to do is run.
The smog tasted like freedom.
Out of the exit and ignoring the tentative calls of the checkpoint guards the bounty hunter staggered to the exit and, dropping onto her knees, split open her mouth guard and spat a thin string of vomit into the sludge, watching it freeze even as it dropped from her lips. She looked out into the swirling clouds of grey and saw, for a second, a shape tearing over the ice, before the patterns of the smog closed around him. Like a throat. Like the city.