But she couldn’t just leave him.

She backed up and revved the scoot.

“Okay, Nelson. Sorry about this.”

She gunned it, kept the nose down, and aimed for the bottom slit. Time slowed. Believe, she thought. At the last second before her head smashed the wall, she threw her weight down and back, pulling the handlebar with all her strength and pointing the lifts toward the opening. She disengaged them as she slid sideways through the hole.

The handlebar scraped the sides, shrieking.

She closed her eyes.

When the tunnel spit her out, Nelson spun from her grasp and she sprawled out on the garbage-strewn floor of the airshaft. She cringed as Nelson slammed into the opposite wall beneath a boarded-up window.

She caught her breath and tested her limbs: nothing broken.

Her heart was pounding as she waded through knee-deep trash to examine her scoot. A sickly sweet rotten fruit odor made her eyes water.

The ends of the handlebar were raw and jagged. The tailpipe was bent and slightly flattened. There was a thin scrape in the seat where a bluish gel oozed out. Temperfoam innards? Hyperlift juice? She didn’t know and hoped it wasn’t important.

She righted the scoot and sat down. She got her bearings: four brick walls rising straight up with makeshift balconies—wide planks stretching from one open window to another—crisscrossing until they overlapped to block her view. Lamps dangled from the planks, casting long, oval shadows down the walls and spotlighting sections of the garbage pile.

She knocked on the board covering the lowest window. It was pulpy and rotted.

“Sorry again,” she said, and gave Nelson a swift kick start. He jolted once, then sped forward, splintering the board nose first.

She was once again inside the empty foundation of an atmoscraper. She weaved through the plasteel beams, hopped Nelson through an open window, and emerged into the diffuse glow of a subcanopy evening. It smelled like cheap cigars and humid sweat.

An hour later she ditched him in the dark space beneath an abandoned shanty’s porch. She popped off her riding goggles—they tugged at the skin around her eyes—and hung them from the handlebar. She hated leaving Nelson alone and unattended, but she didn’t want to come screaming toward the junk shop, which was most likely being watched. As an afterthought, she tapped open the compartment and grabbed the stunner, sliding it up her sleeve.

She made her way down a winding road, past a silent procession of black-robed monks. The junk shop was just down the block, sandwiched between a hair salon for old ladies and a long-defunct florist with a faded bonsai tree ghosting the cheap fiberglass sign. It was completely unmarked. From the outside it looked like the home of a hoarding madman. The two small front windows were blocked by piles of disorganized odds and ends, all of it for sale. She smiled when she thought of how Jiri could eyeball anything in the store and instantly bark the price to a shell-shocked customer. She crept up to one of the windows and peered between a small gap in the merchandise. The overhead light was off, but the store was always bathed in the pinprick sparkle of tiny red and green LEDs.