They were that way, to his left, inside the building, moving, talking to each other, not to Rangan. He was picking up their leakage. They were just barely at the limit of his range, honestly they should be beyond his range, way beyond his range, and they were moving far faster than he could right now.

He threw everything he had into one mental yell of longing at them.

HELP!!!!!

He sent them a sense of himself, hurt, nearly blind from the teargas, wanted by the cops, trapped by the police lines, needing them.

PLEASE!!!!

He felt them hesitate. They stopped moving. Data flowed fast and fierce between them, disagreement, argument.

Then they were moving back towards him. One stopped inside one of the buildings, and two of them dashed out. They were dressed in drab colors, with industrial looking boots on their feet; round black goggles over their eyes; respirators whose vents moved back and forth over their mouths and noses; and headbands with what seemed to be antennae, among other things, projecting from them. A mass of black dreadlocks sprawled out above one headband. Short, spiky blue locks projected above the other.

They each got under an arm and took some of his weight. The one with black dreadlocks was solidly built, muscular. The other was shorter than he was, and slighter of build.

A teenager?

MOVE, ASSHOLE! the big one sent him.

Rangan grunted, put everything he had into hauling forward, and suddenly they were moving at something close to a jog. Another explosion went off behind them. Another scream. Another sound of broken bone.

Off to the side Rangan caught a glimpse of more police vehicles arriving. Armored vehicles now, not just ordinary cruisers. Another teargas canister erupted before them, obscuring the view and forcing corrosive gas into his eyes and lungs. Rangan coughed, stumbled, but by then they were almost to the building, and then they were pushing in through the shattered glass that was once a store front, and he thought surely they could stop here, but instead they kept moving, kept penetrating deeper into the shop, and then through a door, and out of the shop, and into a darkened inner hallway, and then through another door, and into an elevator that took them down.

The elevator opened into a cellar, and then his two saviors dragged him out to where the third, dressed a lot like them, was waiting. Rangan could definitely feel all three of them now.

The two holding him slowly lowered him to the concrete floor, and Rangan caught himself on his knees, still gasping.

“Thank you,” he said, when he could catch his breath.

The third figure, the one who hadn’t come out to him, shorter than he was, with a mass of red curls above his headband, reached forward and stuck a small rectangular object against the side of Rangan’s neck.