Yaya didn’t look at the man. Her eyes shifted over one shoulder, back to the Elm intersection, where cop tanks formed black outlines beneath a glaring red stoplight. “I don’t,” she said, nudging past his hand.

“No harm, no harm,” he said. “Sorry to bother.” His withdrawing footsteps sounded loud in the cold air.

Yaya focused again on the Green Street intersection. Its loving blackness

promised she could disappear, and both cops and ABP would be none the wiser.

Magenta still quaked. Yaya didn’t know how to tell her the man had meant no harm.

She was two-thirds of the way up the block when a putrid yellow eye opened at the Green intersection. Another opened beside it, and then another. A series of yellow lights climbed a panel formed of steel piping. Grease dripped from every surface. With the vehicle alight, Yaya now made out smokestacks to one side, enormous gear-like tires underneath, and the suggestion of a shaft that grew from the machine’s front and glowed with sickly amber light.

A horrible metallic horn roared across the night. This vehicle was in pain. It would unleash that pain on anything it touched.

Yaya had never seen anything like it, but she doubted ABP had kept this thing a secret. Likely she hadn’t paid attention to media about it, having accepted this monstrosity as a normal thing that would never affect her life. That sounded like her.

She turned around, slower this time, to head for the Elm intersection.

Blue and red lights flickered at the block’s end. The cop tanks were crossing the intersection, and there was no traffic to stop them. They crawled because they were in no hurry. The cops inside had to know she was here with no way out. Bruen Street’s buildings pressed together on this end, and she would have to run toward the cop tanks to reach another alley. They would see her.

Cops had likely already closed off the area.

Yaya turned around again and faced the ABP abomination. No blue and red lights danced nearby. The powers that be sent this one vehicle to block the Green intersection.

She could get around it if she dared get near. She took a step.

A ring of amber light shined at the base of the machine’s shaft. An electric whump pounded the air. Another ring bloomed to life above the first, and then another. Each climbed narrower than the last, and each hummed with power.

The hairs stood up on the back of Yaya’s neck, and the rest followed down her body. Static laced the air and climbed her skin, a storm ramping up for violent lightning as if bolts might shoot from her fingers.

But she didn’t think that would happen. Only ABP’s machine would fire.