Ryllen agreed because he had no choice. Kai was shutting down the conversation. Just as important, Kai was an expert in hair; he changed his own colors and styles weekly.
“If there’s anything I can do, Kai, please tell me. I’d like the opportunity, if it becomes available.”
Kai flexed his brows then kissed Ryllen on the cheek. As he turned to leave, Kai hesitated. Ryllen’s stomach roiled in the momentary silence. Had he said too much?
“RJ, have you heard the nickname my friends gave you?”
“Sure. They’re not subtle.”
“Do you know why they call you the Idiot of The Lagos?”
“I haven’t asked, but I assume.”
Kai reached into the chest pocket of his yellow, double-breasted jacket and revealed a cylindrical pipe, packed with poltash weed.
“A misfit, they say. Off-worlder passing as Hokki, stupid enough to leave the shield of his family. Worse than an immo. They don’t see courage. They see idiocy. It’s a good thing you have me, RJ.
“But I worry. How much longer can I do this? The worst word in all of Engleshe is idiot.” He tapped his pipe, and the end glowed blue. He inhaled. “I’ll see what I can do for you. In the meantime, be patient. Work on your rifter. Stay within the narrows.”
Which is precisely what Ryllen did over the next nine days, with no hint of what was to come. He awoke to a prerecorded bicomm message from Kai, who left for work prior to sunrise. The hologram rose from his wrist before he stepped into the shower.
“I told him about you,” Kai said. “He thinks you have promise, but he never makes a decision like this without looking a man in the eyes. Meet us, RJ. You only have this one chance. If you’re not there, he’ll force me to do something I’ll regret.”
The rest of the message included the time and location.
Ryllen spent the day in an emotional frenzy, each eighty-minute hour dragging without mercy. He laid out a full-proof plan to arrive early, charted the simplest course, picked out a suit from among Kai’s ensemble, and refined the accents in his braids the way Kai showed him. Naturally, because the universe had no use for idiots, Ryllen jumped into his rifter and discovered an ignition failure.
He needed forty minutes to repair the system, just enough to set him into a war against time and traffic.
Dodging larger vehicles without incurring FD detection, Ryllen allowed anxiety to cloud judgment. No chance he’d make the rendezvous in time at this rate. If he left the UpWay at an early OutPass and hit the flat lanes too soon, he might encounter stifling congestion among slower, more cautious ground traffic – not to mention burgeoning crowds filling the streets for Ascension festivals.
Soon, the city’s domes and curvaceous glass towers rose on either side of the UpWay. He was passing the expansive corporate cluster, where the offices of Hokkaido’s greatest seamasters demonstrated their economic might. Far to the south, his destination awaited.
Suddenly, he entertained an absurd notion.
Maybe …
He grabbed the rifter’s steering arms and prepared to take a chance.
“I’m not moving back in with Mother.”
He nose-dived into OutPass 10. The binding fields drew him onto Nantou Boulevard. The key was knowing how to time his violation of the city’s traffic laws. If he was right, the streets within the corporate cluster would be more open. The seamasters would have allowed their employees off early to join families and festivals. All he had to do was know when to accelerate and leave the proximity police helpless.
“OK, RJ,” he whispered between heaving breaths. “You wanna be a criminal? Show Green Sun what you can do.”
He programmed his guidance web for maneuvers he wasn’t sure the rifter could handle. The instant his machine hit street level, he took stock. Motorized luxury carriages – the wheeled variety – and a few proximity police drones filled his view along with a smattering of citizens crossing the narrow streets. The titanic headquarters of the seamasters blocked out the sun, the moon, and the rings.
The guidance web leaped into a hologram and showed him the fastest route through the business district. If this worked, he’d cut his time in half – still, no guarantees of making the introduction to Lan Chua. One way or the other, this was nuts.
At the first intersection, Ryllen turned off velocity controls, dropped his steering arms in a suicidal maneuver, and allowed the guidance web to do the rest. He held tight as the rifter rocketed skyward parallel to the headquarters of Nantou Global. Forty floors high, the rifter banked hard left, skirted within ten meters of Nantou’s glass façade, banked right at the tower’s northeast corner and chased south toward the destination.
Ryllen heard the klaxons of the proximity police drones. His gambit rested on the unqualified assumption the drones had neither the velocity nor legal standing to pursue him. However, if they backed off from the chase too soon, their retreat might signal a greater problem: namely, that anti-terrorist laser beacons were being unleashed to bring him down. These nasty buggers were rarely seen – like rooftop snipers – and known only to have been fired from the corporate towers twice in the past ten years.
Were they effective? No one ever talked on the record, and any “debris” was cleaned away before the public stumbled upon it. Yet the law was explicit: Any private or commercial vehicle flying more than one hundred meters high or beyond velocity limits without ITD clearance was subject to immediate retaliation by Pinchon’s automated defense shield. Ryllen knew the law by heart – he was tested on the regulations before receiving his personal-vehicle license. If he survived this stupidity, he would save nine minutes.
After a fourth hard bank, the rifter emerged from the corporate cluster unscathed,
