Without another word, she walked briskly toward Nelson, gingerly patting the soft fur atop Patricia’s head between her horns. She scooped up the sticky baton, made a face, and carried it between her thumb and forefinger.

“You’ve made your point, Anna!” Ivor called after her. “Now listen to me: you’re making a mistake!”

She pulled the scoot’s handlebar free of the microwave pile and wedged the stunner into the tiny compartment beneath the seat.

“Don’t be stupid,” Ivor continued. “They’ll hunt you down, be sure of that. You think Martin Truax will simply let this go? You and Ambrose are his prized experiments. He will never rest.”

She kick-started the scoot.

“You’re throwing away your only chance! When he finds you, he’ll—”

The engine sputtered and revved, drowning him out. The cushion of energy expanded beneath her. Nelson smelled like her musty old shanty, like roasting street meat, like a thousand close calls and tiny scrapes. Nelson smelled like home. She sped past the long rows of pre-Unison machinery, hopped off to open the iron door, and shot a glance back to the wire trunk, haunted by the secret life she shared with the boy she was leaving behind.

Back on the scoot, she crept through the living-room glow of the brothers’ hallway and into the dim, sour-smelling train tunnel. Nelson responded to the tracks with rattling bounces before smoothing out. She brightened the headlight and stalled, surprised. The tunnel was much wider than she thought. The tracks were just one of several sets that ran parallel in places and split off in others, descending into darkness. Each track was separated by a series of vertical beams like the hallways of a half-finished building.

She had no idea how to get back to the silent zoo. Little Saigon seemed impossibly far. She was about to pick a track at random when a gentle and expansive rustling sound caught her attention. She eased off the throttle and cupped her hands behind her ears to form little noise catchers. The rustling was louder now, an unseen thing headed straight for her. Bending forward, she pressed her chin against the handlebar and flattened herself against the scoot, just in time for the mad rush to come screaming out of the darkness.

Bats, she thought, but as the first bunch flapped chaotically past, she saw that they were tiny white birds no bigger than her hand. They swirled in clusters while solo birds orbited like electrons, thousands of them surging forward through the musty air above her head. Mistletoe wrinkled her nose at the feet smell they dislodged from the upper air of the tunnel. She held her breath and watched, fascinated, as one of the birds lost its aerial balance and spiraled down through the beam of Nelson’s headlight to land on the tracks in front of her.

The little creature was covered in immaculately groomed white feathers, except for a tiny smudge of red between its eyes, which ran down the front of its white beak and ended in a sharp black point. It peeked up at Mistletoe (she could have sworn she saw it squint in the glare), jiggled its head, opened its beak, gave a tiny cheweeep! and flapped back up into the jet stream with the others.