FREE STORIES 2012(93)

The thing was—there were burner indentations on the side of the wall towards the fields. He’d made them and climbed up them just an half an hour ago. There were none on the other side, where fifty feet below, the flyers on the zipway were coming to a stop.

Normally descending towards the zipway and running across would have meant death. Just the friction of heated air in the space beneath the flyers was enough to kill. But as the flyers stopped there was just a chance . . . Only it had to be done before the authorities got there to check people in the flyers. He had to be across and up the other wall, and over the side, into . . . He wasn’t sure what was on the other side. Other cities and fields, he imagined. But what wasn’t there was Freiwerk. Freiwerk was on the same side of the zipway as Hoffnungshaus, which meant it would be the side of the highway that escaped mules—without burners or the agility to scale the walls of the zipway—would roam, and where their pursuers would scour.

He bit at his lip and frowned. His gray attire would be conspicuous as he was descending the wall, and people in the stopping flyers might call the law on him. On the other hand, the night was dark, there was snow, and the light of the suddenly unreadable holographic advertisements above would cast a pattern of light and shadows on the walls anyway. Moving light and shadows. It was just possible, in the confusion, he would pass unnoticed. If he could be fast enough. Fortunately, he’d been bio-engineered to be fast. Among other things.

Getting to the other side of the zipway would get him stranded away from Hoffnungshaus, and he would still have the trouble of being an escaped bio-engineered artifact, proscribed on his own and acceptable only under supervision of the authorities. On the other hand, it would keep him alive past the night. He could always get back to Hoffnungshaus, if he survived. He could always steal a flyer. He’d done it before.

His body had already made the decision for him. He bent sideways, pointing the burner at a point down the zipway wall, melting an indentation deep enough for a toe hold. Then he swung down, holding on to the top of the wall, setting his foot in the indentation, and thinking fast.

The problem was he usually did this going up—not coming down. Going up, he made toe holds and hand holds, and then toe holds again, all the way up. Coming down, he’d need to make handholds, and rely on his cold fingers to hold him up. Difficult. Not impossible.

Working quickly, he melted an indentation for his hand, waited a few seconds for it to cool in the December air, and, holding onto it, melted an indentation further down.

He scrambled, hand over hand down, sometimes rushing it and getting singed fingertips, feeling as if he were going incredibly slow but knowing he was faster than any normal human. The sirens still sounded down the zipway, and the flyers below him were still moving, though slower, as the central control slowed them down so it could stop them.

By the time Jarl was near enough that the wind of normal zipway traffic would have knocked him down, the flyers were going slower and it was a mere stiff wind. He waited there, poised in the area of darkness below the light cast by the holographs and above the lights of the flyers below, hearing the sirens come ever closer, feeling the wind die down.

He could hear his heart beat loudly. The sound of blood rushing in his head made him near-deaf. His fingers felt numb with cold, and he wished the flyers would stop before the sirens got any closer. But he couldn’t change either rate. He could only hope it would work out for him. He could only stay there, suspended halfway between the top of the wall and the zipway, and wish would all come out all right. He’d taken a gamble, and sometimes you lost gambles.

He felt more than saw the flyers stop, and he dropped down the remaining meter and a half to the surface of the zipway. The flyers, in stopping, had come to rest on the zipway. It was something he hadn’t counted on, which was stupid. Parked flyers always rested on the ground. But he’d counted on that space of darkness beneath the flyers, to run to the other side of the zipway. Stupid Jarl. So much for bio-engineered for intelligence.

Now he faced nine rows of flyers, side by side, with their lights on in an endless traffic jam extending way back, completely obstructing the zipway. He had to run among them, somehow, without getting all of those people on their links, calling the authorities.

The only thing he could think of—the only thing he could do—was what he used to get out of trouble at Hoffnungshaus, or at least to keep his trouble as limited as he could. Look, he told himself, as though you have every right to be here.

He added a minor flourish, by rounding a flyer in such way that for people of other flyers, it would look like he had come out of it. Why anyone should come out of a flyer in these circumstances was anyone’s guess. But people did things like that. At least Jarl thought they did. He’d read about them doing things like that. Truth be told, other than books and holos he knew precious little about what real people outside Hoffnungshaus did or why. But he would pretend he came out of the flyer, and walk sedately across.