Page 61 of Deathless
"Not yet. Wait until—"
Gunfire cracked behind us.
The back window exploded. Nevada ducked. Mr. Nobody turned his head slightly like a bullet had just passed six inches from his skull and kept that same calm expression he'd been wearing since Casablanca.
I cut my eyes to Jasper. Still steady. No holes in him.
"Now?" Rhadamanthys said.
"Now."
He fired through the broken window. Patroklos swerved but kept coming. The motorcycle engine screamed, and he closed the gap we'd barely opened.
The construction zone came up fast. Orange cones lined the road, exposed rebar stuck up everywhere, and an overpass loomed overhead that might collapse if you breathed on it wrong. I threaded between the concrete barriers doing eighty. The mirror clipped the concrete and exploded. Glass and plastic went everywhere, but I kept my foot down.
Patroklos went around. He cut through some gap I couldn't see and came out ahead of us. Mierda, he knew these streets. The sickle on his back caught the streetlight as he leaned into the turn.
"He's flanking," Vihaan said. "This guy's running some kind of local nav overlay. He's got the whole grid mapped."
"I see him."
Jasper shifted forward in his seat. "Want me to lean out?"
"You are not leaning out of a moving vehicle."
"Diego—"
"That's an order, guapo." I shot my hand out and locked it around his knee. "You get shot leaning out a window and I'm gonna be pissed."
He grunted and I left my hand there one second longer than necessary before I had to shift gears.
The intersection came up. Patroklos should've had the angle, but some auto-rickshaw pulled out at exactly the wrong second. He had to brake hard. I shot through the gap doing ninety.
The smell hit me then. Burning rubber and hot metal mixed with the sweet rot of open sewage from a drain we'd just blown past. The whole city smelled cooked down to its essentials. My abuela used to say God protected fools and smugglers. I gripped the wheel tighter and asked Him for both.
"Okay, good news, bad news," Vihaan called. "Airstrip's three-ish kilometers, a straight shot through the industrial district. Bad news, I'm losing cell towers and if I can't maintain uplink, we're navigating by vibes."
"How comforting."
"I live to serve."
Patroklos recovered and fell back into pursuit. Every turn I took, every burst of speed I squeezed from this thing, he stayed locked on. I kept waiting for him to drop back, to cut his losses. He kept coming.
The streets got wider. Traffic thinned. I opened it up, and the engine roared. This thing rattled like it wanted to come apart, but I'd driven worse in worse shape with worse odds.
Rhadamanthys reloaded. Spent shells hit the floor. "He's not falling back."
"I know."
"Any bright ideas?"
"Working on it."
Jasper locked his eyes on mine. The heat crawled up my spine and spread into my shoulders. I'd never figured out how to breathe normally when he looked at me. Then he turned back to the windshield without saying whatever he'd figured out.
I started to reach for him. I needed to touch him, to make sure he was solid, real, still mine. I curled my fingers into a fist around the gear shift instead.
The headlight got brighter.
