wind it any faster with the roads so choppy and the K-Rail canyons so tight.
The sky overhead was flat blue like cheap turquoise. A pall of dust showed burnt sienna, the inversion layer trapped inside the ring of mountains that made her horizon in four directions.
The freeway opened out once she cleared downtown, the overpass Patch had warned her about arching up and over, a tangle of banked curves, the crossroads at the heart of the silent city. She bid the ghosts of hotels good day as the sun hit zenith, heralding peak heat for another four hours or so. Harrie resisted the urge to reach back and pat her saddlebag to make sure the precious cargo was safe; she’d never know if the climate control failed on the trip, and moreover she couldn’t risk the distraction as she wound the Kawasaki up to one hundred seventy and ducked her helmet into the slipstream off the fairing.
Straight shot to the dead town called Beatty from here, if you minded the cattle guards along the roads by the little forlorn towns. Straight shot, with the dosimeters clicking and vintage rock and roll jamming in the helmet speakers and the Kawasaki purring, thrusting, eager to spring and run.
There were worse days to be alive.
She dropped it to fourth and throttled back coming up on that overpass, the big one where the Phoenix to Reno highway crossed the one that used to run LA to Salt Lake, when there was an LA to speak of. Patch had said overpass’s down, which could mean unsafe for transit and could mean littering the freeway underneath with blocks of concrete the size of a semi, and Harrie had no interest in finding out which it was with no room left to brake. She adjusted the volume on her music down as the rush of wind abated, and took the opportunity to sightsee a bit.
And swore softly into her air filter, slowing further before she realized she’d let the throttle slip.
Something—no, someone—leaned against a shotgunned, paint-peeled sign that might have given a speed limit once, when there was anyone to care about such things.
Her dosimeters clicked aggressively as she let the bike roll closer to the verge. She shouldn’t stop. But it was a death sentence, being alone and on foot out here. Even if the sun weren’t climbing the sky, sweat rolling from under Harrie’s helmet, adhering her leathers to her skin.
She was almost stopped by the time she realized she knew him. Knew his ocher skin and his natty pinstriped double-breasted suit and his fedora, tilted just so, and the cordovan gleam of his loafers. For one mad moment, she wished she carried a gun.
Not that a gun would help her. Even if she decided to swallow a bullet herself.
“Nick.” She put the bike in neutral, dropping her feet as it rolled to a stop. “Fancy meeting you in the middle of Hell.”
“I got some papers for you to sign, Harrie.” He pushed his fedora back over his hollow-cheeked face. “You got a pen?”
“You know I do.” She unzipped her pocket and fished out the Cross. “I wouldn’t lend a fountain pen to just anybody.”
He nodded, leaning back against a K-Rail so he could kick a knee up and spread his papers out over it. He accepted the pen. “You know your note’s about come due.”
“Nick—”
“No whining now,” he said. “Didn’t I hold up my end of the bargain? Have you ditched your bike since last we talked?”
“No, Nick.” Crestfallen.
“Had it stolen? Been stranded? Missed a timetable?”
“I’m about to miss one now if you don’t hurry up with my pen.” She held her hand out imperiously; not terribly convincing, but the best she could do under the circumstances.
“Mmm-hmmm.” He was taking his own sweet time.
Perversely, the knowledge settled her. “If the debt’s due, have you come to collect?”
“I’ve come to offer you a chance to renegotiate,” he said, and capped the pen and handed it back. “I’ve got a job for you; could buy you a few more years if you play your cards right.”
She laughed in his face and zipped the pen away. “A few more years?” But he nodded, lips pressed thin and serious, and she blinked and went serious too. “You mean it.”
“I never offer what I’m not prepared to give,” he said, and scratched the tip of his nose with his thumbnail. “What say, oh—three more years?”
“Three’s not very much.” The breeze shifted. Her dosimeters crackled. “Ten’s not very much, now that I’m looking back on it.”
“Goes by quick, don’t it?” He shrugged. “All right. Seven—”
“For what?”
“What do you mean?” She could have laughed again, at the transparent and oh-so-calculated guilelessness in his eyes.
“I mean, what is it you want me to do for seven more years of protection.” The bike was heavy, but she wasn’t about to kick the sidestand down. “I’m sure it’s bad news for somebody.”
“It always is.” But he tipped the brim of his hat down a centimeter and gestured to her saddlebag, negligently. “I just want a moment with what you’ve got there in that bag.”
“Huh.” She glanced at her cargo, pursing her lips. “That’s a strange thing to ask. What would you want with a box full of research cells?”
He straightened away from the sign he was holding up and came a step closer. “That’s not so much yours to worry about, young lady. Give it to me, and you get seven years. If you don’t—the note’s up next week, isn’t it?”
“Tuesday.” She would have spat, but she wasn’t about to lift her helmet aside. “I’m not scared of you, Nick.”
“You’re not scared of much.” He smiled, all smooth. “It’s part of your charm.”
She turned her head, staring away west across the sun-soaked desert and the roofs of abandoned houses, abandoned lives. Nevada had always had a way of making ghost towns out of metropolises. “What happens if I say no?”
“I was hoping you weren’t going to ask that, sweetheart,” he said. He reached to lay a hand on her right hand where it rested on the throttle. The bike growled, a high, hysterical sound, and Nick yanked his hand back. “I see you two made friends.”
“We get along all right,” Harrie said, patting the Kawasaki’s gas tank. “What happens if I say no?”
He shrugged and folded his arms. “You won’t finish your run.” No threat in it, no extra darkness in the way the shadow of his hat brim fell across his face. No menace in his smile. Cold fact, and she could take it how she took it.
She wished she had a piece of gum to crack between her teeth. It would fit her mood. She crossed her arms, balancing the Kawasaki between her thighs. Harrie liked bargaining. “That’s not the deal. The deal’s no spills, no crashes, no breakdowns, and every run complete on time. I said I’d get these cells to Sacramento in eight hours. You’re wasting my daylight; somebody’s life could depend on them.”
“Somebody’s life does,” Nick answered, letting his lips twist aside. “A lot of somebodies, when it comes down to it.”
“Break the deal, Nick—fuck with my ride—and you’re in breach of contract.”
“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”
She laughed, then, outright. The Kawasaki purred between her legs, encouraging. “There’s always time to mend my ways—”
“Not if you die before you make it to Sacramento,” he said. “Last chance to reconsider, Angharad, my princess. We can still shake hands and part friends. Or you can finish your last ride on my terms, and it won’t be pretty for you”—the Kawasaki snarled softly, the tang of burning oil underneath it—“or your bike.”
“Fuck off,” Harrie said, and kicked her feet up as she twisted the throttle and drove straight at him, just for the sheer stupid pleasure of watching him dance out of her way.
Nevada had been dying slowly for a long time: perchlorate-poisoned groundwater, a legacy of World War Two titanium plants; cancer rates spiked by exposure to fallout from aboveground nuclear testing; crushing drought and climactic change; childhood leukemia clusters in rural towns. The explosion of the PEPCON plant in 1988 might have been perceived by a sufficiently imaginative mind as God’s shot across the bow, but the real damage didn’t occur
