Subtropolis: Shadow Theatre - 8/13 (Original; ~30k words; 15+)
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"Seriously," Katrina laughed. "You've lived here how long that you don't know this?"
They'd found a local Coffee Bee, all black and yellow striping, and Katrina had ordered for both of them and then stared at him pointedly until he rolled his eyes and offered to pay for her.
"How do you know all this?" Boston complained.
"Everybody knows this," Katrina insisted. "The Common moves. It helps keep things neutral -- you know, not spending too long in anyone's territory."
"Do they teleport?"
Katrina grinned at him. "Sometimes they compete over who can put their stalls up and bring them down the fastest. It's pretty awesome: woosh!" She made little 'poof' movements with her hands before going back to picking the chocolate chips out of her muffin.
"They sell them without," Boston said.
She shrugged. "I like it this way. So, the thing that attacked you--"
"We're not calling it a thing."
"I'm calling it a thing."
"Then I'm not talking about it at all," Boston groused, sipping his coffee. It was sweeter than he usually took it, nutty and a little frothy, like someone had got confused in the middle of making it and tried for a milkshake for a bit. "Can we get back to the part where the guy lurking at a crime scene shows up watching me and then runs off to a place full of the very people who are getting harassed and killed?"
"Do you think this witness is important?"
"Okay, see?" Boston pointed at Nylar as he took a seat. "This is what I'm talking about. The ninja entrances. You both have to stop that."
"I told you to pay more attention," Katrina said, waving the remains of her muffin at him. "You've got to listen to your instincts, Red; that's the universe communicating with you."
"The guy's clearly following me," Boston said to Nylar, "and he's just as clearly connected to something. If the harassment and the murders are all the same thing--"
"Everything is connected," Katrina said sagely, taking the lid off her coffee so she could shovel in the extracted chocolate chips.
"Yeah, I wasn't so much thinking philosophically as actually connected. And," Boston added to Nylar, "I am not on the take."
"Mm," Nylar said.
"If you were on the take, you'd say the same thing," Katrina said, "so let's go get him!"
"I, you, what?"
"Your guy!" She waved a hand vaguely. "Suspect/Witness Number One!"
"I'm actually pretty down with this plan," Boston agreed. "I just don't get how it relates to if I'm corrupt or not."
"If we catch him and he points at you and goes 'Hey, my illicit cop partner, what is this not murdering and harassing people thing you are doing', that'd be a big clue," Katrina said.
Boston stared. She stared right back, smiling, just a little.
"You're not right in the head," Boston said, and then yelped when she kicked him in the shins. "Okay, okay! Sorry!"
"You should be," she groused, shaking her leg. "That hurt my toes."
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have kicked me, then."
"Maybe I should've put my boots on first."
"You'll use yourself as bait?" Nylar asked, sipping at his coffee thoughtfully. Boston nodded. "I have other lines of enquiries to follow; Katrina--"
"Whoa, whoa, no," Boston interrupted. "She's not a cop. Frankly, I'm barely sure you're a cop, but at least you have a badge."
"I have dozens of badges," Katrina said cheerfully.
"I am filled with confidence," Boston said wryly, and wasn't at all surprised to find Nylar had vanished when he turned back.
*
It turned out he hadn't left them entirely empty-handed; a Manila file full of copies of notes by Angelina about the harassment problem. Not having a MDT to hand, and with Katrina insisting she never used maps, Boston had to make do with a tourist leaflet. By apologising repeatedly, he managed to get more information out of Louise and, between her and Angelina's notes (and with Katrina helpfully pointing out the right spots on the map) he soon had a pattern of incidents marked down. It didn't help much: he'd already surmised 'every poor neighbourhood' as being the ones under threat.
"He's following you," Katrina sighed, shifting restlessly in her seat. "Does it really matter where you are?"
"It has to be somewhere he might be that I would also go to," Boston said, "and I can't believe he'd come back to Angelina's or the crime scene."
"Which one?" Katrina asked, drumming absently on the steering wheel. He gave her a quizzical look. "More than just Matthias died, remember?"
"Good point," Boston said. "But I don't know--"
Katrina leaned right over him, digging under his seat and coming back up with a scrapbook, waving it triumphantly at him. It had gotten dark enough that she had to turn the car lights on to show him the articles on the other murders.
"This one is the closest to us. Rhonda Gaye, twenty three, pink-haired belly-dancer, tries to take a short cut home -- you know how that ends." She shuddered. "People should just take cabs. It's statistically safer and it keeps the economy going. And if you're smart about your fares, it's even better environmentally. Hey, don't be giving me that eyeball. I can show you the numbers."
"Okay, okay." Boston raised his hands in surrender. "Show me the crime scene."
She did; or, rather, she drove him to the spot, kicked him and handed him a phone. "What? I like it in my cab. You're the police officer here."
It was Matthias all over again. An alley in a built-up neighbourhood, just far enough off the street, out of the line of sight of working cameras, out of the light of working streetlamps. And like people said, only tourists looked up. Boston looked up. Nothing. Whole lot of nothing. He crouched, examining the floor, trying to see old blood stains and finding only dirt and trash.
First button speed-dial got him Katrina. "You see anything from back there?"
"Some dumbass crouching in dirt, talking on a phone."
He sighed. "You're real funny." She laughed agreement. "...you know what Stone said to me?"
"Mayor Stone," Katrina said chidingly.
"Whatever. She said Nylar speaks for the dead."
"I sure hope the dead aren't speaking for themselves."
"You're not dead."
There was a pause at the other end of the line. He resisted the urge to look back towards the darkened cab, to try and see inside it.
After a long moment, she said, "If that was supposed to be a question, the answer is 'none of your business' and also, 'I can drive off and leave you here, asshole'."
"Leaving me to die would be a bit of waste of that time you saved my life."
"What the lady gives, the lady can take away."
"I just want to know about the guy," Boston said. "You don't have to be detailed."
"We met at a crap time in my life, he was nice, he helped out," Katrina said sharply. "What more do you need to know?"
"Anything." Boston wandered further down the alley, stepping carefully through the shadows.
"It's been one day," she complained. "Can't you just wait for you guys to bond? These things don't happen instantly."
"Rate he talks, I'll be dead of old age before we have a proper conversation." Boston stopped at what he thought would be a great place for someone to go for him, and stood about trying to be all 'innocent, easily accessible victim'. Nothing much happened. "Maybe we should try one of the other crime scenes."
"It's your money," Katrina said. "By which I mean, you're paying me for the gas."
"Fair enough." Boston snapped the phone closed as he returned to cab, opening the door instead. "Where's the nearest?"
"Skin-flint."
"It's more efficient to do them in geographical order," Boston said, bracing himself.
Katrina pulled away with pointed smoothness. "Just because two spots are closest doesn't mean the over-all journey will be the smallest. There might be a better optimal path." He gave her a look. She shrugged. "I'm just saying. Obvious assumptions are not always right, and sometimes the simplest solutions aren't the right solutions."
Boston snorted. "In my experience, it's pretty much always the obvious solution. The guy most likely to have done it did it ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the time."
"That's still one in a thousand. These things accumulate. I'm just saying," she added, "that maybe we're going about this wrong. If he's following you, then why does it matter where you are?"
"Because both times I've seen him before, I was at or investigating--" Boston broke off, frowning. There was something else, something he'd missed. "Nylar."
"You were investigating your boss?"
"What? No, I mean, Nylar was at the scene, the guy was at the scene; Nylar was at Angelina's, the guy was at Angelina's. What if he's not following me at all?"
"I know where Nylar is," Katrina said, and whipped the cab around in a tyre-squealing one-eighty.
Acceleration slammed Boston back into his seat and held him there as the city became a blur outside; the street sign strobe left him barely caught glimpses of gaping faces, of ignored stop signs. Horns sounded and were lost way behind in the same moment.
"Did you learn to drive in the Grand Prix?"
"Formula One is for chickens," Katrina said. "Love me some rally-cross -- whoa!"
As she slammed on the breaks, the beam from her headlights swung in a sharp arc across the steps of the courthouse to capture first Nylar -- grey turned white in the shine, on his back, one hand thrown out less in defence and more in command -- and then his opponent, a bulky, cap topped shape standing over him.
Boston was out of the car while it was still sliding to a halt, drawing his gun as he ran, yelling, "Freeze! Police!"
The man turned with impossible speed, springing out at him, and Boston fired entirely without thinking. The man twisted with the impact, bullet tearing through the jacket, no blood spray, and stumbled backwards, falling, cap coming free.
In direct light, he still looked young, although less like a he, less like a person at all. The eyes were too large and the pupils too big, the ears too low, the teeth too many, too sharp. He -- it -- he growled, pulling at his jacket and then just ripping it off, standing -- no, Boston thought, unfolding, limbs too long, oddly jointed, hands splayed, claws sharp and curving and painfully familiar.
"You're under arrest for assaulting a police officer, and on suspicion of murder," Boston heard himself say, gun up and steady.
It's -- his, Boston reminded himself again, he's still a he -- his head twitched, mouth stretching, lips drawn back to show off the teeth.
"Lay down on the ground!" Boston yelled.
"Are you insane?" Katrina yelled from the cab. "Shoot it!"
"No!" snapped Nylar.
The man turned on him in an instant, claws slashing, sending Nylar falling into Boston's line of fire; in the second it too him to get clear, the man had bounded off. Boston went to check on Nylar, only to find him barely touched. "What are you, made of smoke or something?!"
"Go!" Nylar yelled, shoving him after the man.
Boston did, throwing himself around the corner, low and fast. The attack passed harmlessly a foot above his head; he let his momentum carry him into the opposite wall and set his back against it for protection, swinging his gun up, trying not to wince as the brick rubbed against his bandages. The man was hanging from a projecting window-sill opposite -- holding on with his feet, Boston realised, which would have been pretty cool under other circumstances -- hissing down at him. Boston just grinned.
"You always attack from above," he said. "Jump and slash, jump and slash; is that all you've got?"
The man growled in response and jumped, not towards him, but up and over, trying to get to the roof. Boston fired, hitting wall. The man caught the wall and then yelped, dropping back, injured arm not taking his weight; mid-fall, he turned somehow, kicking off a wall, landing and rolling and up and gone all in one smooth movement that left Boston temporarily stunned.
Just like before, he was faster, but the man knew the terrain better and, apparently, could see at night with ease, leaping things Boston could only tell were there when they hit him in the knees.
Just like before, he thought, and grabbed his phoned out, hitting the speed dial. "Where's the Common?"
"Wh-what?" Katrina asked.
"The Common; you said it moved, you always know where everything is, it's where this guy is going to go: attack from above or run to home!"
He heard her swear and Nylar say something too low to understand, and then Katrina was back with, "If he's going for the Common, he'll go to the old subway station on--"
"Got it," Boston said, snapping the phone off and dodging out of the alleys onto the main streets, running harder. He ignored the phone when it rang, pushing against the burn in his legs and his lungs. He turned the corner in time to see a flash of movement at the subway's entrance. Panting for breath, he charged towards it, barely having time to glimpse the broken chains before he was barrelling down the steps inside.
There were emergency lights on, small bulbs in red plastic covers, that meant he could see but only the barest little: enough to make out he was in long entrance hall, cut in halve by a line of ticket-gates, all shut. He tried them anyway. They rattled, locked. He doubted the man could have squeezed past, and none of them seemed forced. Boston doubled back, gun ready, getting his breathing under control.
An 'Maintenance Admittance Only' door hung just open. Boston nudged it wider to find it led to a set of offices paralleling the hall outside. There were a couple more of the small red lights in here, but white light was spilling out from under the far door. He closed on it as quickly as and as quietly as he could, and nudged it open. It led into the wider open area, the base of a stairwell to one side, a set of familiar looking double doors with circular windows in them at the far end.
The man he was hunting was tugging at them desperately. They wouldn't open. Through one of the windows, Boston could see Mayor Stone looking back at him. She winked, dangling keys from her finger. The man caught the look, swung to see Boston, and then dived for the stairwell.
Boston swore, chasing after, forcing his legs to move, to climb every step while the man somehow went up the middle, leaping awkwardly and one-armed from flight to flight. Fumbling, Boston managed to get the phone back out, dialling Katrina again.
"Subway," he gasped out. "Heading. Roof."
"Can't talk, driving," she snapped back and hung up.
The man crashed out through the door four flights above him. Boston swore again, grabbing at the handrail, pulling himself up. By the time he'd reached the roof, the man had already leaped the gap to the next one and was running like greyhound, just loping away casually into the distance.
Sucking air in, Boston managed a yell that should have been "Police!" and was more of a "Hey!", bringing his gun up, firing.
The man came to a sudden halt, and Boston, leaping across to the building, actually thought for a second that the shot had been true; then Nylar yelled, "Hold!" and he could see the other man stalking forward from the opposite end of the roof, hands raised and outstretched.
Like herding, Boston thought, and, he's going to scare the sheep, and yelled "No!" a second to late, as the man twisted to the side and just threw himself off the edge of the building.
Nylar and Boston hit the guard wall at the same time, looking down. Boston had half-expected to find him clinging to the wall, not lying brokenly on the ground below.
"Damn," Nylar said. He was holding his weight on the wall one handed, the other holding his chest.
"You're hurt," said Boston stupidly and then, realising, "His claws -- I think they're poisoned. You need to--"
"You need to get down there," Nylar said.
"Down--" Boston looked. The man was moving. He was actually moving, slowly pulling himself up, lurching away. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"
And then, in a great squeal of tires, Katrina's cab came whirling around the corner and sent the man flying.
[ Full Headers | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | E | Read on DW ]
"Seriously," Katrina laughed. "You've lived here how long that you don't know this?"
They'd found a local Coffee Bee, all black and yellow striping, and Katrina had ordered for both of them and then stared at him pointedly until he rolled his eyes and offered to pay for her.
"How do you know all this?" Boston complained.
"Everybody knows this," Katrina insisted. "The Common moves. It helps keep things neutral -- you know, not spending too long in anyone's territory."
"Do they teleport?"
Katrina grinned at him. "Sometimes they compete over who can put their stalls up and bring them down the fastest. It's pretty awesome: woosh!" She made little 'poof' movements with her hands before going back to picking the chocolate chips out of her muffin.
"They sell them without," Boston said.
She shrugged. "I like it this way. So, the thing that attacked you--"
"We're not calling it a thing."
"I'm calling it a thing."
"Then I'm not talking about it at all," Boston groused, sipping his coffee. It was sweeter than he usually took it, nutty and a little frothy, like someone had got confused in the middle of making it and tried for a milkshake for a bit. "Can we get back to the part where the guy lurking at a crime scene shows up watching me and then runs off to a place full of the very people who are getting harassed and killed?"
"Do you think this witness is important?"
"Okay, see?" Boston pointed at Nylar as he took a seat. "This is what I'm talking about. The ninja entrances. You both have to stop that."
"I told you to pay more attention," Katrina said, waving the remains of her muffin at him. "You've got to listen to your instincts, Red; that's the universe communicating with you."
"The guy's clearly following me," Boston said to Nylar, "and he's just as clearly connected to something. If the harassment and the murders are all the same thing--"
"Everything is connected," Katrina said sagely, taking the lid off her coffee so she could shovel in the extracted chocolate chips.
"Yeah, I wasn't so much thinking philosophically as actually connected. And," Boston added to Nylar, "I am not on the take."
"Mm," Nylar said.
"If you were on the take, you'd say the same thing," Katrina said, "so let's go get him!"
"I, you, what?"
"Your guy!" She waved a hand vaguely. "Suspect/Witness Number One!"
"I'm actually pretty down with this plan," Boston agreed. "I just don't get how it relates to if I'm corrupt or not."
"If we catch him and he points at you and goes 'Hey, my illicit cop partner, what is this not murdering and harassing people thing you are doing', that'd be a big clue," Katrina said.
Boston stared. She stared right back, smiling, just a little.
"You're not right in the head," Boston said, and then yelped when she kicked him in the shins. "Okay, okay! Sorry!"
"You should be," she groused, shaking her leg. "That hurt my toes."
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have kicked me, then."
"Maybe I should've put my boots on first."
"You'll use yourself as bait?" Nylar asked, sipping at his coffee thoughtfully. Boston nodded. "I have other lines of enquiries to follow; Katrina--"
"Whoa, whoa, no," Boston interrupted. "She's not a cop. Frankly, I'm barely sure you're a cop, but at least you have a badge."
"I have dozens of badges," Katrina said cheerfully.
"I am filled with confidence," Boston said wryly, and wasn't at all surprised to find Nylar had vanished when he turned back.
*
It turned out he hadn't left them entirely empty-handed; a Manila file full of copies of notes by Angelina about the harassment problem. Not having a MDT to hand, and with Katrina insisting she never used maps, Boston had to make do with a tourist leaflet. By apologising repeatedly, he managed to get more information out of Louise and, between her and Angelina's notes (and with Katrina helpfully pointing out the right spots on the map) he soon had a pattern of incidents marked down. It didn't help much: he'd already surmised 'every poor neighbourhood' as being the ones under threat.
"He's following you," Katrina sighed, shifting restlessly in her seat. "Does it really matter where you are?"
"It has to be somewhere he might be that I would also go to," Boston said, "and I can't believe he'd come back to Angelina's or the crime scene."
"Which one?" Katrina asked, drumming absently on the steering wheel. He gave her a quizzical look. "More than just Matthias died, remember?"
"Good point," Boston said. "But I don't know--"
Katrina leaned right over him, digging under his seat and coming back up with a scrapbook, waving it triumphantly at him. It had gotten dark enough that she had to turn the car lights on to show him the articles on the other murders.
"This one is the closest to us. Rhonda Gaye, twenty three, pink-haired belly-dancer, tries to take a short cut home -- you know how that ends." She shuddered. "People should just take cabs. It's statistically safer and it keeps the economy going. And if you're smart about your fares, it's even better environmentally. Hey, don't be giving me that eyeball. I can show you the numbers."
"Okay, okay." Boston raised his hands in surrender. "Show me the crime scene."
She did; or, rather, she drove him to the spot, kicked him and handed him a phone. "What? I like it in my cab. You're the police officer here."
It was Matthias all over again. An alley in a built-up neighbourhood, just far enough off the street, out of the line of sight of working cameras, out of the light of working streetlamps. And like people said, only tourists looked up. Boston looked up. Nothing. Whole lot of nothing. He crouched, examining the floor, trying to see old blood stains and finding only dirt and trash.
First button speed-dial got him Katrina. "You see anything from back there?"
"Some dumbass crouching in dirt, talking on a phone."
He sighed. "You're real funny." She laughed agreement. "...you know what Stone said to me?"
"Mayor Stone," Katrina said chidingly.
"Whatever. She said Nylar speaks for the dead."
"I sure hope the dead aren't speaking for themselves."
"You're not dead."
There was a pause at the other end of the line. He resisted the urge to look back towards the darkened cab, to try and see inside it.
After a long moment, she said, "If that was supposed to be a question, the answer is 'none of your business' and also, 'I can drive off and leave you here, asshole'."
"Leaving me to die would be a bit of waste of that time you saved my life."
"What the lady gives, the lady can take away."
"I just want to know about the guy," Boston said. "You don't have to be detailed."
"We met at a crap time in my life, he was nice, he helped out," Katrina said sharply. "What more do you need to know?"
"Anything." Boston wandered further down the alley, stepping carefully through the shadows.
"It's been one day," she complained. "Can't you just wait for you guys to bond? These things don't happen instantly."
"Rate he talks, I'll be dead of old age before we have a proper conversation." Boston stopped at what he thought would be a great place for someone to go for him, and stood about trying to be all 'innocent, easily accessible victim'. Nothing much happened. "Maybe we should try one of the other crime scenes."
"It's your money," Katrina said. "By which I mean, you're paying me for the gas."
"Fair enough." Boston snapped the phone closed as he returned to cab, opening the door instead. "Where's the nearest?"
"Skin-flint."
"It's more efficient to do them in geographical order," Boston said, bracing himself.
Katrina pulled away with pointed smoothness. "Just because two spots are closest doesn't mean the over-all journey will be the smallest. There might be a better optimal path." He gave her a look. She shrugged. "I'm just saying. Obvious assumptions are not always right, and sometimes the simplest solutions aren't the right solutions."
Boston snorted. "In my experience, it's pretty much always the obvious solution. The guy most likely to have done it did it ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the time."
"That's still one in a thousand. These things accumulate. I'm just saying," she added, "that maybe we're going about this wrong. If he's following you, then why does it matter where you are?"
"Because both times I've seen him before, I was at or investigating--" Boston broke off, frowning. There was something else, something he'd missed. "Nylar."
"You were investigating your boss?"
"What? No, I mean, Nylar was at the scene, the guy was at the scene; Nylar was at Angelina's, the guy was at Angelina's. What if he's not following me at all?"
"I know where Nylar is," Katrina said, and whipped the cab around in a tyre-squealing one-eighty.
Acceleration slammed Boston back into his seat and held him there as the city became a blur outside; the street sign strobe left him barely caught glimpses of gaping faces, of ignored stop signs. Horns sounded and were lost way behind in the same moment.
"Did you learn to drive in the Grand Prix?"
"Formula One is for chickens," Katrina said. "Love me some rally-cross -- whoa!"
As she slammed on the breaks, the beam from her headlights swung in a sharp arc across the steps of the courthouse to capture first Nylar -- grey turned white in the shine, on his back, one hand thrown out less in defence and more in command -- and then his opponent, a bulky, cap topped shape standing over him.
Boston was out of the car while it was still sliding to a halt, drawing his gun as he ran, yelling, "Freeze! Police!"
The man turned with impossible speed, springing out at him, and Boston fired entirely without thinking. The man twisted with the impact, bullet tearing through the jacket, no blood spray, and stumbled backwards, falling, cap coming free.
In direct light, he still looked young, although less like a he, less like a person at all. The eyes were too large and the pupils too big, the ears too low, the teeth too many, too sharp. He -- it -- he growled, pulling at his jacket and then just ripping it off, standing -- no, Boston thought, unfolding, limbs too long, oddly jointed, hands splayed, claws sharp and curving and painfully familiar.
"You're under arrest for assaulting a police officer, and on suspicion of murder," Boston heard himself say, gun up and steady.
It's -- his, Boston reminded himself again, he's still a he -- his head twitched, mouth stretching, lips drawn back to show off the teeth.
"Lay down on the ground!" Boston yelled.
"Are you insane?" Katrina yelled from the cab. "Shoot it!"
"No!" snapped Nylar.
The man turned on him in an instant, claws slashing, sending Nylar falling into Boston's line of fire; in the second it too him to get clear, the man had bounded off. Boston went to check on Nylar, only to find him barely touched. "What are you, made of smoke or something?!"
"Go!" Nylar yelled, shoving him after the man.
Boston did, throwing himself around the corner, low and fast. The attack passed harmlessly a foot above his head; he let his momentum carry him into the opposite wall and set his back against it for protection, swinging his gun up, trying not to wince as the brick rubbed against his bandages. The man was hanging from a projecting window-sill opposite -- holding on with his feet, Boston realised, which would have been pretty cool under other circumstances -- hissing down at him. Boston just grinned.
"You always attack from above," he said. "Jump and slash, jump and slash; is that all you've got?"
The man growled in response and jumped, not towards him, but up and over, trying to get to the roof. Boston fired, hitting wall. The man caught the wall and then yelped, dropping back, injured arm not taking his weight; mid-fall, he turned somehow, kicking off a wall, landing and rolling and up and gone all in one smooth movement that left Boston temporarily stunned.
Just like before, he was faster, but the man knew the terrain better and, apparently, could see at night with ease, leaping things Boston could only tell were there when they hit him in the knees.
Just like before, he thought, and grabbed his phoned out, hitting the speed dial. "Where's the Common?"
"Wh-what?" Katrina asked.
"The Common; you said it moved, you always know where everything is, it's where this guy is going to go: attack from above or run to home!"
He heard her swear and Nylar say something too low to understand, and then Katrina was back with, "If he's going for the Common, he'll go to the old subway station on--"
"Got it," Boston said, snapping the phone off and dodging out of the alleys onto the main streets, running harder. He ignored the phone when it rang, pushing against the burn in his legs and his lungs. He turned the corner in time to see a flash of movement at the subway's entrance. Panting for breath, he charged towards it, barely having time to glimpse the broken chains before he was barrelling down the steps inside.
There were emergency lights on, small bulbs in red plastic covers, that meant he could see but only the barest little: enough to make out he was in long entrance hall, cut in halve by a line of ticket-gates, all shut. He tried them anyway. They rattled, locked. He doubted the man could have squeezed past, and none of them seemed forced. Boston doubled back, gun ready, getting his breathing under control.
An 'Maintenance Admittance Only' door hung just open. Boston nudged it wider to find it led to a set of offices paralleling the hall outside. There were a couple more of the small red lights in here, but white light was spilling out from under the far door. He closed on it as quickly as and as quietly as he could, and nudged it open. It led into the wider open area, the base of a stairwell to one side, a set of familiar looking double doors with circular windows in them at the far end.
The man he was hunting was tugging at them desperately. They wouldn't open. Through one of the windows, Boston could see Mayor Stone looking back at him. She winked, dangling keys from her finger. The man caught the look, swung to see Boston, and then dived for the stairwell.
Boston swore, chasing after, forcing his legs to move, to climb every step while the man somehow went up the middle, leaping awkwardly and one-armed from flight to flight. Fumbling, Boston managed to get the phone back out, dialling Katrina again.
"Subway," he gasped out. "Heading. Roof."
"Can't talk, driving," she snapped back and hung up.
The man crashed out through the door four flights above him. Boston swore again, grabbing at the handrail, pulling himself up. By the time he'd reached the roof, the man had already leaped the gap to the next one and was running like greyhound, just loping away casually into the distance.
Sucking air in, Boston managed a yell that should have been "Police!" and was more of a "Hey!", bringing his gun up, firing.
The man came to a sudden halt, and Boston, leaping across to the building, actually thought for a second that the shot had been true; then Nylar yelled, "Hold!" and he could see the other man stalking forward from the opposite end of the roof, hands raised and outstretched.
Like herding, Boston thought, and, he's going to scare the sheep, and yelled "No!" a second to late, as the man twisted to the side and just threw himself off the edge of the building.
Nylar and Boston hit the guard wall at the same time, looking down. Boston had half-expected to find him clinging to the wall, not lying brokenly on the ground below.
"Damn," Nylar said. He was holding his weight on the wall one handed, the other holding his chest.
"You're hurt," said Boston stupidly and then, realising, "His claws -- I think they're poisoned. You need to--"
"You need to get down there," Nylar said.
"Down--" Boston looked. The man was moving. He was actually moving, slowly pulling himself up, lurching away. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me!"
And then, in a great squeal of tires, Katrina's cab came whirling around the corner and sent the man flying.
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