Outrageous Fortune-Errant Freight Book One

Chapter 20

John's "only a few blocks" increased by several dozen, mostly because Nike's streets teemed with street drones, all armed and all scouring the city for someone who, to all appearances, had upset the wrong people.

"They can't be after us," Jagati whispered as she and John ducked for cover. Again. "Or, not all after us."

"I'd like to think not," John murmured, his breath warm on her ear. "But we have annoyed at least two different parties tonight." Then he pressed his hand over hers, where it was flat against the cold stone pavement (their most recent hiding place being underneath a parked rickshaw).

Out on the street six boots—one with a loose sole that flap-splashed its way through the puddles—continued on toward Carroll Square.

As soon as the street was clear, they crawled out from under the rickshaw, just in time to see the driver emerge from the tea shop before which it had been parked, wolfing down a scone and slurping from a tin cup.

On spying the bedraggled pair stumbling out from under her rickshaw, she swallowed a lump of scone and tilted her head. "Most folks prefer to wait inside the cab," she pointed out.

"Ah," John said. "Well..."

"Donne Street, 4th District," Jagati said, climbing into the hooded cab and landing with a squelch. "And don't spare the batteries."

"Yes," John said, climbing in after her, "that."

The driver rolled her eyes, dumped the remains of her tea into the gutter, slid the tin cup into one of her capacious pockets, and jumped astride the cycle.

* * *

She didn't know what she was expecting when they got to 18 Donne Street, but it certainly wasn't this elegant, inner-circle town home.

At least the rain had eased to little more than a reluctant spit, making their current position, huddled in the box-elders that lined the cobblestoned street, less uncomfortable than it would have been a half hour earlier.

They'd settled in the bushes as soon as the rickshaw driver, who had taken Jagati at her word and not spared the batteries (or, John pointed out, any missing cobbles) rounded the corner onto Canterbury.

The curving street, third out from Nike's city center, while close enough to smell the parliamentary must, boasted only a few estates, spaced widely apart. It wasn't the Keeper-recommended standard for urban dwellings, but ristos had a way of working around little things like residence-to-natural-growth-ratios; ways like keeping one's own private forest, if 18 Donne Street were an example.

Anyway, the lack of urban density was good for them. No houses meant no neighbors looking out their windows to see the two wet, grungy aeronauts lurking in the shrubbery, scoping out the mansion on the other side of the street.

And quite a mansion it was. Even in the rarefied environs of inner Nike, the place stood out. No solemn Avonian granite here, but rather the smooth curved plaster of the West, tiled in red and with arched windows from which light speared like lances into the clouded night. "I haven't seen anything like this since I took liberty in Tendo," she said.

"It is impressive," John murmured.

"Well, you said she had money." As she spoke, Jagati's searching eyes spotted an apiary to the right and a stable to the left—both good cover for someone keeping watch on the house.

"Money, yes, but...this doesn't seem to fit her."

She looked over to see him studying the house, his eyes troubled. "Why not?"