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thready and the grey mist edged in around her thoughts and her vision. Could she even remember what she heard, if she wasn’t caught?
    Be smart. Run away.
    Mickey ran. Down to the basement, where the lights seemed dimmer—or the grey mist crowded closer. She bounced around the hallways, past pipes and electrical boxes and phone relays and inexplicable blocky structures jutting from wall and ceiling, and then eventually—she wasn’t quite sure how—she found herself a way out. Out into the bright daylight.
    She should have been paying more attention. She might not have run into the over-muscled, neckless man in his perfectly tailored suit. As it was, she didn’t see him until she slammed into him, finding out for herself just how hard those muscles were and just how well that suit hid the gun that dug into a soft, tender spot she had to keep herself from reflexively grabbing in public. But luck stayed with her—because she bounced right off him, and she had the space to turn on her heel and bolt.
    She heard his curse—and she heard him bark something into a hand-held radio. If they hadn’t known about her escape before …
    Mickey ran.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Chapter 2

    Heat. White hot summer sun in dry air. Mickey ran into someone, blurted an apology, and ran onward, unsteady and drawing offended shouts. No doubt people stared. At some point she crossed a river, clutching the railing of the bridge pedestrian lane and fighting the impulse to simply jump right in, embracing the cool wetness. The chest pocket of her stolen, blood-spattered scrubs yielded a few folded dollar bills and she lurched past a gas station vending machine, hesitating long enough to buy an iced tea. Somewhere else she got an apple … she wasn’t sure she’d paid for it, but she ate it to the core.
    She didn’t know if she’d been followed. She thought not, that she’d grabbed that instant of opportunity between discovery and enemy mobilization and actually made it. But she didn’t know. They could be using teams, they could be hanging back, they could simply be waiting for an opportunity to snatch her up when no one would notice.
    When she hesitated, knowing she’d hit the end of her limited resources, she found herself beside a high, ratty chain-link fence. She laced her fingers through the diamond links and held herself steady. In the distance, long hills rippled up into mountain ridges, parched brown formations that made her long for that river. More immediately, she found herself surrounded by city formations—buildings of brick and block crowded together in a variety of tired store fronts, their line-up broken only by narrow alleys and fenced, junky lots like the one she’d stopped beside. A few cars parked along the curb, most of them looking as though they’d stopped here only because they couldn’t go any further. Just like me. Broken glass seemed to be the major decorating theme, but in this particular lot, used condoms ran a close second. Garbage crowded into the corners of the fence, blown there and left to decompose at its own rate. Rather like the stiff, flattened body of the rat sticking out from beneath a crushed six-pack carton.
    Mickey swallowed hard against a sudden faintness. All that running … I went in the wrong direction. She should have gone the other way. Any other way.
    A silver-grey tabby looked out an apartment window, paw poised to snag the lilac-colored curtains stirring in the breeze.
    Mickey blinked. What—?
    She blinked again, hard and deliberate, and refocused herself on this grey-edged street. At the end of the block, a signal light went from yellow to red. A shop door swung open with the chime of bells, then slammed shut in a way that spoke of a malfunctioning automatic closer. Scanning to find it, her gaze fell on the building across the street. Glass storefront with a giant hand-printed schedule of some sort, a few flyers spotting the glass, but nothing in the way of professional lettering. Above