“Not this friending thing again,” she said, and darted around a corner.

Ahead of them in the road was Red, idling and scanning the crowd.

Who are these guys? she thought. How do they know all the shortcuts?

“Behind!” screamed Ambrose. She turned to look as Hat popped out from around the corner. He’d been right on their tail.

“Keep going up,” Ambrose urged. He was right: she’d rather take her chances with Red than with Hat and his arm cannon, even if his aim was a little poor. They’d been lucky so far.

She gunned Nelson up the middle of the street. Pedestrians dove to the side. Red turned to face them and held his metal baton out straight. Mistletoe yanked Nelson to the left, knocking a kid off his pedal bike. The baton seemed to extend in a series of quick flashes, and an unlucky woman in the place they’d just been fell instantly to her knees, hands behind her back, head bowed in peaceful submission. Mistletoe sideswiped an absynthium cart and the neon green liquid splashed Red in the face. He dropped the baton—a police-issue stunner—and slapped his palms over his eyes, wobbling on the scoot.

That’s gonna burn like hell, she thought with a surge of glee as they zipped past him toward the upper road.

“Other one’s still behind us,” Ambrose said.

She couldn’t have told him how the plan formed in her mind, or why she didn’t immediately think of a more reasonable one. But there it was, laid out like something she’d been planning for days.

“He won’t follow us where we’re going,” she announced as they left the edge of the crowd and cruised onto the upper road.

“Where?”

“In here,” she said, aiming straight for one of the empty windows set into the wall of the thirtieth floor.

“I thought you said—”

But the silence was so abrupt as they entered the building that Ambrose choked back his words before they could echo. Darkness engulfed them. She eased up on the throttle and spun around, waiting, panting. The bustling world on the other side of the window seemed remote and hazy, as if they’d passed through several distinct airlocks. After a few seconds, Hat’s silhouette appeared in the window and bobbed as he idled his scoot. She held her breath and shrank back into the darkness. Ambrose tightened his grip on her aching ribs. Hat bobbed there for so long she wanted to scream, and then he disappeared.

She crept farther inside, aware that even the quietest scoot would sound like an earthquake in here. Nelson didn’t exactly purr, but she couldn’t abandon him.

Far below, something rumbled. The building seemed to shiver, its plasteel guts rattling like bones.

The Scourge.

She cut the engine. The noise stopped. Too afraid to turn on the headlight, she pried herself out of Ambrose’s grip and hopped gingerly down onto the hard floor. She felt around until she came to a wall, or one of the huge plasteel beams.