Something had caught his eye peripherally to his right. He went over to it, looked down, squatted for a closer inspection.

There was fresh blood in the dirt. Not a lot, but a few scattered droplets. He kept looking at the ground and saw one or two more drops farther to his right. Each smaller than a nail head. Then another tiny splash at the edge of the sidewalk. And another beyond it that was actually on the pavement and about the size of a dime.

Carmody stood up quickly, turned right on the sidewalk and ran in the direction of the blood trail.

Lucas shook his head and sighed with his hands on the controls. His HUD readouts were blank. The sidewalk might as well have swallowed Malkira. Obviously, he’d done his homework. The 7 line was one of the busiest in the city, and its eastbound trains would have poured thousands of people onto Main Street at rush hour. Despite having him in their sights when he’d made for the station, they had been unable to take him out in that close crowd.

He glanced over his shoulder at Dixon. He had shut the door and was packing up his WinMag.

“Fucker lost us,” he said and blew more air. “Those trains run every four, five minutes this time of day.”

Dixon looked at him. “You know how wild dogs and wolves go after their prey?”

Lucas shook his head.

“They aren’t built for speed,” Dixon said. “They’re persistence hunters. They’ll track an animal for miles until they wear it out.”

Lucas looked at him. “Carmody?” he asked.

Dixon nodded and closed the rifle’s hard case.

“I always tell people,” he said.

Carmody stopped among the swarm of pedestrians on Main and looked up. He had spotted Dragonfly in the air immediately after rounding the corner a block back. Now, minutes later, Lucas was pulling off south and west toward Manhattan.

He lowered his gaze. People moved past him like water around a boulder. Like he was too massive an obstacle to budge, so they naturally split left and right to get around him.

Grigor Malkira was gone. Carmody hadn’t had a chance once he got ahead of him on this street. It wasn’t just the moving bodies. There were too many places to duck out of sight. Too many escape routes. Buses, cars, a subway station.

Carmody turned back toward Thirty-Eighth Avenue and then walked toward the hill behind the cul-de-sac. His arm felt like dead weight, but climbing it was his best shortcut to the house. So he would climb.

He wanted to see how Musil and his girls were doing. And he wanted a look at that GoRide car in the garage.

Grigor changed trains several times. He was confident he hadn’t been followed. But he wanted to be as cautious as possible.