pushing through them, leaving them to turn and gesture angrily.
“Hey.” Petrovitch slid the shotgun off his shoulder and into his hands. “Hey. You.”
He chambered the first shell and started after him. Within a few steps, he was jogging, and so was the man. At least it looked like a man: tall, athletic, dressed like an athlete even, an all-in-one body suit with nothing flapping. A courier would have had a courier bag. This man had nothing.
Petrovitch speeded up, gauging a loping gait that would close the distance between them. The man responded in kind, and it quickly turned into a chase.
They were both running as fast as they could. Petrovitch reached the line of people and they scattered before him, taking in the state of his face, the big gun held across his body, the aura of utter blind rage seeping from every pore of his filthy, smoke-scarred skin.
Suddenly, he had a clear shot. He snapped the stock to his shoulder and his finger spasmed on the trigger. The recoil nearly tore his arm off. He spun and fell, the fresh pain serving only to stoke the fire inside.
He got up with a growl and started over again. The man was further ahead now, moving in fast, clean strides. Then he just seemed to disappear.
Petrovitch raced to the place where he’d last seen him. A road to his left went under the railway station—a deep long tunnel made wide by the pillared supports for the structures above.
He took a chance and took the turn. The colonnades either side were home to the homeless. They stared at him as he ran by, but moments before they had all been looking down toward the small rectangle of daylight at the far end.
Framed in it, just for a second, was the man. He hesitated as he looked behind him, and Petrovitch fired again. This time he leaned in hard, and though the butt kicked back ferociously, he didn’t screw up.
The road sparked just in front of his target, who clasped at his shin before running off again, going to the right, heading north.
Petrovitch kept going. Arms, legs pumping, coat streaming out behind him, heart spinning like it had never spun before. His breath came in rhythmic spurts, in, out, out, in, out, out. Trying to remember everything Madeleine had taught him: stride length, balance, keeping his head up even if he felt like hunching over, even if he felt like sinking to his knees and burying his head in his hands.
And he was gaining. He’d wounded the man, forced razor-sharp chips of road surface at his leg: even if they hadn’t penetrated, the impact of them slowed him down. Whereas Petrovitch’s cuts, grazes, that stabbing sensation in his face that felt like an electric shock every time his feet hit the tarmac, spurred him on.
The further they got from the site of the explosion, the more people were on the streets. They were looking up at the black cone of ascending smoke, or sometimes not even that, just out, just happening to be on the route of a man head to toe in black, sprinting by with an uneven step, and a few seconds later of a slight man with white-blond hair and a face streaming with bright red blood. The shotgun was almost incidental.
Petrovitch saw the man glance behind again, caught a glimpse of a wide mirrored band over his eyes. Hatnav: he was using hatnav, and knew precisely where he was, and where he needed to go. The case for Petrovitch’s own overlays was in his pocket, banging up and down against his thigh, but he couldn’t afford the time to put them on.
The sirens that had been converging on the yard behind King’s Cross shifted subtly. They were coming up behind him.
The man he was chasing knew that as well. He had hacked feeds from MEA control center. He barreled right into a vast office building, squat and dirty, windows jagged and doors shattered.
Petrovitch went in too, blue and red lights flickering at his back. The dim foyer, the hanging ceiling panels where lights and wire had been ripped down, the skeletons of partition walls. It was a stupid place to be, where ambush was easy and hiding easier.
He brought up the gun and tracked its sights across the expanse of destroyed fittings and bird crap.
He heard a noise above him. The barrel jerked up and he let rip with another round, blowing a hole in the remains of the suspended ceiling and putting a crater into the concrete slab above.
MEA militia were right outside. He didn’t have long before they stopped him.
Up the stairs. The man was heading for the roof. Even as Petrovitch pounded the steps in the stairwell, he realized that it didn’t make any sense. If it’d been him, he’d have stuck to the ground floor. The area was vast, the cover good. By going up, he’d be trapped. MEA would just have to wait for him to come out.
So there had to be another reason, another plan, unless the man was a
There was sound on the stairs. A door popping open, a flash of daylight, then the door swinging back shut: he’d reached the top, and in a few seconds, so would Petrovitch.
He shouldered the door, and tumbled out onto the great plain of the roof. The black figure was really limping now, but still moving at a speed that put him halfway across the gray-green surface.
He could shoot and miss. He could force him up against the edge of the roof and make certain. He kept on going.
The man ahead jumped up onto the parapet and leaped. There was no hesitation, no momentary stall; a fluid up and over. Petrovitch’s waist slammed into the barrier. He looked. A lower roof, and the man still running, still favoring his left leg.
It was at the limits of what Petrovitch thought he could hit, but he’d do it anyway. He took a deep breath, held it, and looked down the length of the gun. He had no heartbeat to bounce the sights, and he was, all of sudden, brutally calm.
Squeeze the trigger.
And the man jinked sideways. The roof where he’d been pocked and insulation fluffed out.
He had real-time satellite data. That cost money.
It was a long way down to that second roof. The man had done it, so Petrovitch was going to do it too. He landed in a heap, and he managed to hurt his wrist trying to roll with the blow. He got up, and restarted the same monotonous beat of one foot after another. He needed to keep his quarry on the move and not give him a moment’s rest.
Ahead was a half-finished building, looking like it had been half-finished for a long time. It wore a shroud of tattered plastic around its open floors and suspended beams.
If Petrovitch got his prey inside, his spy-in-the-sky would be useless.
The man seemed to be obliging. He jumped over the railings and onto the scaffolding tied to the side of the construction site. He hung on one of the crossbars, then started to slide downward, going hand over hand, slowing his fall.
As Petrovitch reached the edge, the man stopped and ducked into the building’s shell, three stories lower, across a three-meter gap.
Petrovitch slung the shotgun over his back, climbed up and over and braced himself. If he fell now, he’d die. More to the point, the man would get away. He bent his legs and pushed out.
He flew across the distance, arms outstretched. The first level flashed past his eyes. His momentum carried him onto the platform below, slamming him down on the wooden boards laid across the scaffolding.
The whole structure shook. Someone had been borrowing pieces of it from the ground floor. But the building itself looked sound enough: no walls, no duct work, as empty as a car park. He picked himself up and shrugged the gun back into his cold grip.
He ghosted through the hall of pillars to where the stairwell was. No stairs, just a black pit all the way down. He’d come too far to give up: but that was just like him, always going too far when a saner mind would have called a halt.
He threw the gun down to the next slab of floor, then lowered himself off the edge until his fingers turned white and his feet dangled over the abyss. He swung his legs and let go.
He landed badly. Again. This time he jarred his back all the way from his coccyx to his shoulder blades. He looked around, saw nothing and repeated the process. Gun thrown. Body suspended and dropped. Spine-crushing impact.
Still nothing. The man had been on this level, and Petrovitch had arrived too late. He jumped to the next floor: the air was forced out of his lungs and he was left gasping.
A shadow came straight at him out of the gloom, with that injured skipping run. Petrovitch snatched up the
