Believe, she thought, and drove Nelson straight at the bottom of the entranceway where the stucco hadn’t yet fallen. Another crackling pulse singed her pigtail. She hoped Ambrose still had a face and yelled, “Elbows in!”

She hit the entranceway fast and didn’t slow down. The sides of Nelson’s handlebar scraped the wall, igniting a shower of sparks. If the alley narrowed, they’d stop short and sail forward without the scoot. She nosed up over a pile of greasy clothes that might have been a dead man.

Up ahead the alley widened and emptied onto the street behind Dita’s. Almost there! Except now a dark shape blocked the exit. One of the cops, silhouetted against the relative daylight of the street, bobbing up and down on his idling scoot. How did he get there so fast? She could just barely make out the outline of his—

“Hat!” yelled Ambrose.

Mistletoe slammed her thumb down on a red button marked HL for the first time ever, praying for enough leftover hyperlift fumes from Nelson’s former life to power the jump.

There turned out to be plenty.

The scoot roared straight up as the cop fired, his pulse crackling beneath them by several feet. Mistletoe’s stomach felt like it was being sucked down into her legs. She gritted her teeth and tried to steer as they cleared the top of the alley and kept rising. Sliv must have tweaked the hyperlifts, too. She wondered if she’d made a huge mistake, then Nelson slowed and seemed to freeze in the air at the very top of the jump. As they hung, suspended, she looked out across the rooftops, jagged and tightly packed like a mouth with too many teeth, and caught sight of the swirling black smoke that had been Aunt Dita’s house. Above them the canopy stretched endlessly toward oblivion.

Then they fell.

Ambrose squeezed so hard, Mistletoe feared he’d crush her ribs. She tried to steer toward a flat-topped hut, but the hyperlift had transferred power from the ion lifts and without them, Nelson was dead weight. She gave the side of the scoot a swift kick like she’d done so often careering down her own shanty-stack. They were going to hit hard.

Another heel-bruising kick.

The lifts engaged. The scoot bounced off the static cushion just before they hit the roof. Instantly, she considered their next move. Her brain was moving in a series of rapid-fire jump cuts, her actions controlled by something other than conscious thought.

Go up, it told her. Always up.

Behind her, Ambrose let out a huge breath.

“Bet you wish you lived down here,” she said over her shoulder as she jumped to the next roof.

“You do this a lot?”

She shook her head. “First time.”

She weaved through the maze of clotheslines, doghouses, and low-grade signal boxes that littered the rooftops of Little Saigon, winding ever upward. A few blocks from the top of the stack, she rode the slope of an A-frame hut down to the street, tucking in behind the gypsy cart they’d seen earlier.