“What do you want, kid?” She stood with her arms crossed, legs squared.
“You buy jewelry?” Cat asked.
“If it’s not stolen. Put it on the counter.”
Cat pulled a matched pair of the smaller diamonds out of her pocket. “These were my grandmother’s.”
“Of course they were.” She unfolded her arms and picked one up. She looked at it for a second, then grunted. “If you want me to give you an estimate, I got to put it in the machine.” She gestured with her head at grey metal box on the back counter. “It does the estimating for jewelry. I don’t know nothing about it.”
Cat squinted at the machine in net space. She didn’t see anything sentient. Would it match the diamonds against a database of stolen jewelry? She had no idea how these things worked, but she had to take the chance. “Go ahead.”
The woman put the two diamonds on clear plastic tray, and slid it into the machine. She turned back to Cat. “I’m Jo.”
“I’m Catty.” What the fuck. It was the best she could come up with. Her own name had come out of her mouth before she was ready. She needed to be thinking ahead about this stuff.
“It takes a couple minutes. Look, I can only offer you street price.” She looked genuinely sad at the thought of buying them.
“It’s OK.”
The machine hummed behind her. “If they really are your grandmother’s, I can do it as a loan. You come back in a month with the money plus twenty percent, you can have them back.”
“That’s OK. I’m not gonna have the money. I’ll just sell them.”
The woman grunted. “I had a daughter about your age, you know. If she took off for some reason, I’d want to know. I’d want to find her.”
Oh Jesus, could the woman just stop talking? “I’m not a runaway. I just need the money.”
The machine finally beeped. She turned around and checked it. “I can give you $2,200. That’s if you give me your ID, which I see you’ve got masked. If you want it in payment cards, I can give you $1,750.”
Cat figured the diamonds were probably worth tens of thousands. But $1,750 was a lot of food. “I’ll take the payment cards.”
Ten minutes later, after a bunch of meaningless paper work and a shakily signed paper legal agreement, she walked out with a thick clutch of payment cards in her hand.
She hoofed it ten blocks east, hopped on a bus for four stops and got off at a street market, mouth watering and stomach groaning at the smell of food. She turned in at the first vendor and ordered half the things on the menu, impatiently waiting as they filled her plates. Grabbing the loaded tray, she found the nearest table and shoved steaming yakisoba noodles into her watering mouth, and smiled. Food at last.
19
The trouble started outside of Memphis.
Leon and Mike were on I-40 headed west, having passed the halfway point of their trip several hours before. Mike drove, one hand on the wheel, lost in his thoughts. Leon huddled down low in the passenger seat, avoiding the worst of the air turbulence. The convertible Caddy had been fun for the first few hours, but thirteen hours in, Leon was exhausted from the non-stop buffeting and roar in his ears.
They came around a long slow curve onto I-240, with short scrub trees off to the right, and a large clover-leaf off to the left. The Caddy hummed along at a steady seventy-five in the right lane while modern cars zoomed by at speeds around a hundred in the two left lanes.
A hover approached on their left, given away by the thunderous current of air it blew beneath its skirts to keep it afloat. Leon, watching the trees whiz by, grew curious when the thunderous sidewash didn’t go away. He turned to watch the vehicle pacing them.
From the squared off angles of the body, Leon guessed the hover might be eight or nine years old, one of the first commercial models. It had a four-passenger compartment up front and a utility bed in the back. On the right side, a blond man stared out the window, then pulled out a handheld to take a photo of them. He excitedly pointed them out to the driver of the hover.
Leon stretched up to look over the higher windowsill of the hover and saw the driver of the hover doing the same thing in reverse. The other man’s eyes went wide, and his face turned angry. Leon saw the hover start to move away from them, and he shouted a warning to Mike. “Brake! Brake!”
Mike, oblivious to all this, tapped the brakes, and turned to Leon with a puzzled look. But Leon was glued to the hover as it turned into their lane, engines howling, and tried to ram them off the road. With just inches to spare, the hover spun in front of them, exactly where they would have been if Mike hadn’t decelerated.
Lacking any traction with the ground, the hover was slow to turn and slow to stop. It rotated hopelessly in front of them, and slid off the side of the road in a cloud of dust.
Mike hit the brakes harder, still confused by all that happened.
Leon shook his head. “No, speed up. They were trying to run us off the road.”
“What?”
“They saw us, they took a picture, and the driver was pissed as all hell. Look, it’s like Rebecca said, the People’s Party is watching for us. Just hit the accelerator.”
Mike looked doubtful. “Are you sure?” He glanced back over his shoulder.
“Yes, now go!”
Mike hit the pedal, the Caddy accelerating smoothly up to ninety miles per hour, the electric whine of the motor barely audible over the increasing roar of wind noise. Leon turned to look out the back. “If those guys are the extremists, we’re going to be in a shitload of trouble.”
“I think you’re overreacting. No one is going to randomly recognize us on the road.”
Leon pulled up a half dozen web sites he’d been browsing while Mike drove. He displayed them in net space, guiding them to the periphery of Mike’s vision so as not to obscure the road. Every page shared one thing in common: large photos of Leon and Mike.
Mike’s eyes went wide. “Rebecca wasn’t kidding when she said they thought we were public enemy number one.”
“Yeah.” Leon looked in the rearview mirror. “That hovercraft is back on the road, and catching up to us. How fast can we go?”
Mike jammed the accelerator to the floor and the Caddy leaped forward. The speedometer hit a hundred, then kept going. They passed one-ten and still the hover gained rapidly on them. “It’s got to be doing one-fifty or more.”
The Caddy shuddered as the speedometer hovered around one-twenty. Mike’s face was ashen, his knuckles whiter. The hovercraft was behind them now, the roar of its turbine vastly louder than even the wind noise of the open-topped convertible. The vehicle seemed set to ram them.
Their antique manual drive car now exceeded the speed of traffic. The other self-driving cars automatically gave way, so Mike barreled down the center of the road. The hovercraft followed them, driving a sloppy path, the dynamics of a vehicle relying on air rather than ground friction.
Leon, desperate to do something, researched evasive driving maneuvers online. “Do this!” he screamed, throwing up a learning diagram in front of Mike’s field of vision. The hover was less than a hundred feet behind them. The front bumper appeared impossibly wide, square and massive.
Mike nodded, peered at the diagram for a second, then stomped on the emergency brake, and twisted the wheel to the left a quarter of a turn. The Caddy’s rear wheels lost traction, and the car spun to the left. They turned 180 degrees and slid backwards into the center grassy median. Halfway through, Mike released the brake and fought the steering wheel to arrest their rotation.
The hovercraft followed them off the highway into the median, but turned too slow. Leon watched the hovercraft pass by, the Caddy going backwards at about eighty, the hovercraft forward at one-fifty. A flash of the driver and passenger of the hovercraft, and then the hover zoomed up the opposite embankment, its cushion of air sending it airborne, over the oncoming lanes and off the far side of the freeway.