The omni chimed a quick acceptance of the dictation, and he tucked it away. “Get him swaddled up. We can’t risk the carrier being seen.”
She obeyed without thinking about it, tucking the cat’s head through the neck of the shirt in his carrier before wrapping the rest of the cloth around him. Part of her was thankful the drugs were still in the cat’s system; he’d have never complied so easily otherwise. Her pulse rushed in her ears. “I don’t understand, why are we stopping?”
The answer came from the modulated voice of the autocab’s onboard computer. “This cab is being pulled over for lawful apprehension of a declared bounty.”
“Yeah,” Layth said sharply. “That.” He scooped up Collins from her arms and tucked him into an over-the-shoulder bag. “You stay quiet now, okay?”
The cab rolled to a stop, and the doors clicked with an ominous sound. “Vehicle doors have been secured prior to apprehension of—” Whatever else the computer was intending to say was drowned out by Layth shattering the window with the corner of the carrier. He wrapped his jacket around his arm and knocked out the remaining glass before pulling himself out through the window.
He leaned back in to grab the bag with Collins in it. “Wait here and keep your head down.”
Her heart thudded and cold sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She had a brief flash that this could all be a ruse, a way to claim all three cats for themselves, but it would be an absurdly complex way to achieve what they could have done by spacing her at any point along the journey. She squeezed his forearm. “Be safe.”
He offered a grim smile. “Hopefully. Now stay down.”
She crouched into the footwell of the cab and hoped no one thought to check inside the vehicle for her. She counted her breaths, forcing her pulse to slow.
“Step away from the cab, hands on your head.” It was a woman’s voice, one that was used to giving orders by the easy tone of it. “We want the girl and the asset.”
“It was a bit of pickpocketin’, nothing more. You all need to lighten up.” Layth’s tone had dropped into the clipped annoyance of the wealthy, with a heavy Burbidge accent. She barely recognized the sound of him. “S’hardly my fault if she can’t keep her omni on her.”
“If that’s the case, why are you running?” A second speaker, a man this time. “If you’re innocent…”
“Who exactly gets to decide that, right? You two? Just because you don’t have a bounty on me doesn’t mean I should wait around for someone who might.” Layth’s argument made sense, enough so that she checked to see if he actually had stolen her omni when he’d reached into the cab, but it was where she’d tucked it after paying for the cab.
Which was how they tracked her. It suddenly made sense.
“Look,” Layth continued. “I can steal another omni easy as I did this’un. So how about I let you have this one, and we can all go home winners. You should be able to pull a hundred, maybe two, pretty easy before she locks it down.”
The woman scoffed. “As if we’d sell out for such a low bribe. Anton, check and see if he’s got a bounty on him.”
She winced. So much for fast talking them out of a solution. Though maybe they’d let him go once he showed up without a bounty on him. If there wasn’t a bounty on him. As a smuggler, she realized there might well be.
Of course Collins chose that moment to meow. Loudly.
“Hands up! Put the bag on the ground!” The ominous whine of small arms weapons charging accompanied the woman’s order.
“Which is it? I can’t well put something on the ground with my hands up.”
Meja put her hands in her pockets and brushed the butt of the tranq pistol. It wasn’t perfect, but their situation was rapidly becoming a disaster. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” she whispered, then popped up in the window and fired.
The man, Anton, was almost exactly where she expected him to be. The dart caught him in the hip, and he looked stupidly surprised before lifting his gun to return fire. The woman tackled him, knocking the gun out of his hands. “No, you fool! You might hit the asset!”
Meja squirmed out through the broken window and fired another dart toward the woman before tugging on Layth’s shoulder. “Time to run, I think.”
He nodded, his gaze somewhere between confused and amused. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“How long do we have?” Layth half-followed, half-led the way deeper into the honeycomb of streets that made up New Lemnos. Even here, well off the tourist-soaked main drag, the buildings were covered in lights, and fountains hid in every alcove. It was lovely, or would be if they weren’t also running for their lives.
“Not long. They’re probably up already.” Meja looked behind them to see if they’d been spotted. “I had the darts calibrated for a three-kilo cat, not an eighty-kilogram human.”
They’d have to have a talk later about her borrowing his Emerson. But for now he was thankful she had.
“Shut your omni down.” They were probably tracking her as she pinged the network nodes throughout the city. Her paying for the cab only made the job easier. The question was how much else the bounty hunters knew or had deduced. And how much Zuniga had told them, since the chances he hadn’t turned them onto her were near zero. If they’d traced him back to the Sentinel— He forced himself not to think about that possibility.
She tugged his arm suddenly, and he followed her into an all-night coffeehouse open to the street on two sides. The murmur of voices washed over him; no one in the place looked up as he and Meja drifted through. The crowd seemed to be a mixture of couples and threeples, plus a healthy number of students studying late into the evening, not likely to pay much attention to the two of them.
Meja pulled her omni out and initiated its shutdown as they walked through the shop. As they passed by a singleton table, she grabbed the occupant’s hoodie from the back of the chair and casually kept walking out the far side of the café. Once they were out of the shop’s line of sight, she shrugged into the jacket and pulled the hood over her too-pale hair. “How’s that?”
The jacket was too large for her by half, but somehow she made it look fashionable without also coming off as waifish. “Clever. You done this before?”
“Nope. I saw it in a vid once. Glad it worked.”
He blinked, uncertain if she was joking or not. He decided she had to be. “You’ll stick out less, so it’s great.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she replied, and he thought he’d actually hurt her feelings until she smiled. “God. You’re always so serious. You need to relax a little. Think of this as an adventure.” She turned down another street seemingly at random. Just as well; they could lose the hunters first and then worry about getting back to the shuttle.
Collins shifted in the bag over his shoulder, and Layth found himself thinking again about why he’d decided to help instead of make the obvious choice. He had the cat, and there were two more back on the ship. That alone was plenty of funding to keep the ship and the med bay stocked for a decade. It would have been an easy thing to leave Meja high and dry, then sell the cats on himself.