Chapter 23

The drive from Alicia and Amaya’s tower to the Mosely hideout took about 45 minutes. On the return trip, however, De’Ante got them back to the tower within 30. With just Alicia in the car, De’Ante held nothing back as he zipped in and out of traffic, even flying over and under cars when their adjacent air lanes were blocked by other vehicles.

Alicia was sure at one point that he was going to kill them. He only diverted around another vehicle at the last second as it seemed certain that they would impact in the air. The other driver blared a loud horn and Alicia could see his arms flailing as he gestured a series of obscenities from the cockpit of the transport. The terrified face of the driver’s passenger looked out from the rear window of the vehicle, no doubt to make sense of the sudden jolt they’d experienced.

“Careful with that shit, D!” Alicia yelled from the passenger seat. “You gon’ kill us ‘fore we even get a chance to get caught, yeah?”

“Aww chill out, sis,” De”Ante said. “You ain’t ridden wit’ me in a while; I learned ‘tings. I ain’t gon’ kill us, promise,” he assured her as he sped around another vehicle and slammed them up and around a third transport that Alicia hadn’t even noticed. His driving was impressive, no denying that, but now was not the time to get them killed in an accident, or worse, picked up by the pigs.

“Just get us there in a single piece, please?” Alicia begged. De’Ante’s driving was good; that of a practiced getaway driver. Alicia was pretty certain that the best Jurisdiction detectives would have trouble keeping up with him. Shit, maybe they already have, she joked. That didn’t mean that an accident wouldn’t happen, though, and De’Ante seemed to enjoy keeping them in death’s crosshairs.

The towering complexes zipped by at breakneck speed, the lights of the sun reflecting off of the surrounding vehicles as Alicia and De’Ante weaved through the organized chaos of the skyway. Finally, they neared the residence tower that, until only a couple of days ago, Alicia was proud to call home.

“Here, pull up top an’ let’s scope out the pigs on the roof, then maybe we’ll whip down to the fire escape,” Alicia instructed. She moved to position herself for a better view out of the front and side windows of the transport. If there’s too many cops up there, this is gonna’ be tough, she thought anxiously. She desperately needed her things from her apartment, and the idea of just leaving them in their concealed storage areas, waiting to be inevitably discovered by pigs or by the next tenants, was giving her a stomach ulcer. She was pretty certain that the cops hadn’t found her stash because she’d been monitoring the vitals of her machine remotely and nothing had been fired up yet, but it was only a matter of time.

The vehicle crested the top of the tower and they circled the docking bays to survey the rooftop traffic. “I dunno, sis,” De’Ante balked, gesturing to the rooftop. Alicia directed her gaze and clocked the source of his concern: several squads of Jurisdiction officers were checking residents as they entered or exited the docking bays. “We definitely ain’t parkin’ up top, and if your fire ‘scape plan goes south, we gon’ be in the shit. Heard?” De’Ante slowed the transport and looked like he was preparing to turn them around to go home. He’d patiently gone with her this far out of a brother’s loyalty, but now Alicia could sense that this was as close to the authorities as De’Ante was willing to get.

“Bro, just chill. Ain’t no one know who we are, we ain’t hurtin’ nothin. Just swing us down and let’s look at my window real quick, kay?” Alicia said. De’Ante frowned and looked wistfully through the rear-view mirror. Alicia was fairly certain she heard the switch flip in his head as he finally chose to pilot the craft over the back end of the building and down to Alicia’s old fire-escape.

A chrome line of exhaust ports, standing like a line of Gargoyle Sentries, puffed a thick cloud of fog over the metallic skirts and down the side of the building as they swept over the edge. Once through the fog, Alicia began scanning the side of her tower to find her window. “Little lower, bro,” she said. She was having trouble locating the window, but then again, she’d never had to break into her own apartment from the fire escape.

Alicia thought she could have counted down to her floor from the roof, but from this angle the magnitude of the building struck her full force and the numbers wouldn’t compute in her head. They were hundreds of floors from the nearest greenspace walkway, but the tower appeared to stretch for 20 or 30 blocks of streets of greenspace, and now she couldn’t calibrate where her apartment was in the huge complex. She tried to remember the internal path from where she would walk from the rooftop lift down to her floor, but now she wasn’t sure they were even on the correct side of the building.

Hundreds of thousands of people must have lived here and she felt a growing dread that she might not find her window after all. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing, dragging De’Ante’s reluctant ass all the way here just for me to not remember my own damn window.

De’Ante brought the craft a few hundred feet lower and Alicia felt a momentary relief as she spotted a familiar bit of patchwork - a newer flash of steel than the century old dark metallic gray that surrounded it - on the side of the building. She remembered watching them fix up an impact from a loose part of a transport vehicle that impacted the tower a few months back. She’d pinched a nerve in her neck trying to see what was going on from her window and had watched the repair with an uncharacteristic hypnotic magnetism. She traced a path from the brighter metal down and over to what she believed was the series of ladders outside of her window, her finger leaving an evaporative trail of oil as she drew along the window. Her heart almost burst from her chest when the trail ended at her window. “There, D!” she exclaimed, tapping the window excitedly with the tip of her fingernail.

De’Ante dropped the craft another hundred feet and another 10 floors flashed by them as he swung the craft around and positioned Alicia’s seat adjacent to the window where, only 72 hours before, he’d extracted Amaya, Andre, and Alicia from a fatal firefight that left the three of them as fugitives.

Alicia gulped, suddenly nervous that the apartment wouldn’t be empty when she broke in. She looked over at De’Ante and smiled. De’Ante’s smile, as forced as it was, was all the assurance she needed. “Go on, then. I’ll be here for ya,” he said.

Alicia grabbed De’Ante’s forearm and squeezed. “Thanks, again, little brother. Just be a minute.” She opened the transport door and stepped out onto the scaffolding outside of her former apartment.

The wind raged and blew her hair wildly across her face and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away and quickly took a couple of steps to the window and, hoping against hope that it would be unlocked, tried to open her fire escape window from the outside. She gripped the metal window frame firmly with both hands and pulled up. To her shock, the window came up with ease and she slid the window as open as it would go before crawling into her former bedroom.

The first thing she noticed was the absence of the scent she’d worked so hard to cultivate in her bedroom, a special lilac and lavender blend. Then, it hit her: the bedroom was empty. Her Coalition King Size bed, her prized gaming terminal she’d spent years perfecting, her colorful closet of garments that Amaya used to try on during their weekend sleepovers; all all of it was gone. She didn’t expect to be able to take much, but she thought that someone would have given her the benefit of the doubt and allowed some time to pass before they disposed of her things.

She wanted to cry. She’d built that terminal from scratch with refurbished parts that she’d re-soldered herself to make more effective than the most expensive market parts. Her clothes were items that she’d finally been able to afford after years of living on the run and in poverty during her childhood. The bed was a constant reminder that she wasn’t trapped or cramped anymore.

“FUCK YOU,” she screamed at the open room. Everything she’d done to claw her way up, and they could just take it? Fuck that, fuck that, fuck that, Alicia raged in her head. What was it that her dad had always said when she left home? You go and play your hardest, little girl, but remember: the house always wins. Maybe he was right. Maybe it didn’t matter how hard she worked. The house always wins. This round, maybe. But, babies, I’m gonna’ burn the motherfucking house to the ground by the end of the game.

She did her best to swallow the rage for now and focus on the more important items that hadn’t been taken. Her other items may have been gone, but no one had located her clandestine stash of electronics she’d hidden away in a false panel of her closet. She rage-walked to the closet and tore it open, ignoring the noise as the faux-wood door slammed and splintered against the bedroom wall. She knelt down and crawled over to the corner and knocked out the paneling to reveal a hidden cubby that was overflowing with plastic electronics, copper wiring, rubber tubing, and other materials that she’d used over the years to keep her less than legal terminal setups operational.

She pulled the monstrous tangle of cables from the cubby and began to sort everything out with savant speed, and in a matter of minutes everything was packed and ready to return to the Mosely family hideout. She slipped the collection of items into her pack and replaced the false paneling before leaving the closet. The door had broken off of one of its hinges, so Alicia closed it as much as she could before turning and making her way back to the open fire escape window.

She braced for the cold wind and climbed out of the window and turned around to close it. As she heard the final click of the window locking back into its closed position, someone burst into the bedroom - a corporate security enforcer, maybe, from what Alicia could see of his clothing.

Shit shit shit, Alicia panicked, frozen in a fateful stare with the guard. The corporate security officer drew his firearm and was aiming it at the window now, shouting something that she couldn’t hear over the wind out on the fire escape. Suddenly, an arm was pulling her up and over the railing and into the transport vehicle that was waiting for her.

“The fuck you doin, sis? He about to ice yo’ ass!” De’Ante screamed as he closed the transport door closed behind Alicia and scrambled back over to the cockpit to pilot them away. As he slammed the door closed, though, the glass from Alicia’s bedroom exploded and a bullet smashed into the transport. Steam began hissing from the bullethole and a warning light flashed on De’Ante’s pilot readout. “Hold on A, this is gonna get really rough.”

De’Ante pressed a series of buttons and the transport shuddered to a decent height before zipping away from the building. Something was wrong, though. The bullet had damaged the engine and the car wasn’t going to make it all the way back to their hideout.

“She’ll make it, don’t worry,” De’Ante said, sensing Alicia’s anxiety. Alicia saw De’Ante’s eyes darting back and forth between his view of the lanes and the rearview mirror and knew what their real issue was. “Bigger problem is ‘gon be if -” De’Ante slammed his head back into the headrest of his seat. “Awww shit.” Alicia turned to look at what De’Ante had seen and the real panic set in. A jurisdiction cruiser had popped up over the side of the residential tower and was now speeding down to the window they’d been hovering next to. It was only a matter of seconds before they would be spotted and apprehended.

“Buckle up, A,” De’Ante said sternly. Alicia buckled herself into her seat and De’Ante, as soon as he heard the click, kicked them off the main lane and into a narrow gap between two buildings on the other side of the lanes from Alicia’s old tower. Through the jostling of the sudden change in momentum, Alicia turned her head to look behind them and felt her fear intensify. Not only was the jurisdiction cruiser following them down the building and across the lanes, its lights were on. It was pursuing them.

“They comin’ after us, D!” Alicia shouted, the panic in her voice made her tone shrill and her voice cracked. She’d broken into a cold sweat and could feel a nervous tremble beginning in her hands.

“They can try,” De’Ante said, “but I still got a few tricks to pull here.” He threw the controls up and the vehicle dipped into a dead drop as the Green Space walkway below rushed up to meet them. “Hold on, now!” he screamed over the alarms sounding on his pilot readout, no doubt warning him that he had sent the vehicle into an unsafe descent. He pulled up sharply and the craft barely missed an impact with the tops of the streetlights over the promenade. They’d closed a lot of height, but jurisdiction cruisers were built to pursue. She looked up and, to her dismay, the cruiser had closed more than half of the distance between them now.

“They gainin’ on us, boy!” she shouted over the growing number of alarms sounding on the read out. “I don’t think this thing’s gonna take us much farther, either!”

De’Ante didn’t respond, but his white knuckles on the control wheels and the way his eyes were scanning the ground near the buildings, presumably for places to land, told Alicia everything she needed to know: they were about to crash. As if on cue, Alicia and De’Ante heard a loud bang and felt the vehicle shudder as the cruiser fired at them and a second hole, this one much larger, about a foot and a half in diameter, appeared across the front of the transport. Bulls-eye, I guess, you fuckers, Alicia mused to herself.

The vehicle began to descend and soon they were only 15 feet from the ground. The pedestrian traffic was fleeing in terror as their transport skimmed closer and closer to the promenade. “Alicia?” De’Ante said. He didn’t call her that - she was A or Sis, but never Alicia. “I’m gonna’ do something here, and we might get hurt, but I think we can make a run for it if I do this right.”

“Wha-” She remembered trying to shout back, but De’Ante steered the transport sharply into a crash course with the siding of a nearby towers and they suddenly slammed into the glass and down into the floor of the lobby of a commercial office tower.

De’Ante shook her awake, his face was bleeding and there was fire burning on the front of the transport. Alicia could hear groaning, crying, and shouts from the residents and workers of the building they’d just crashed into. Her whole body hurt and the vision in her right eye seemed fuzzy. She could smell an electrical fire starting up somewhere nearby.

“Alicia. Get up. We have to go NOW.”