An open highway is just a long, unlit hallway with no doors. It is the worst possible place for a ghost to hide.
We were pinned to the blacktop of Route 17, fleeing south toward the Kaohsiung border. The dark fields of sugarcane flanking the road were a solid, breathless wall of black. The night swallowed everything, but the Yamaha Cygnus-X tore through the heavy air, screaming its rusted cry.
My hands were locked on the grips. The engine vibration shot directly up my arms, grinding into my bones and the wind ripped at my dirty fishing vest. It felt less like air and more like icy water. Heavy. Smothering.
I pushed the throttle as far and hard as I could. We were operating well beyond the safe parameters of this junk transport, but slowing down was a death sentence.
〔 VELOCITY: 96 KM/H 〕
〔 RPM STATUS: REDLINE ENGAGED 〕
〔 THERMAL CORE: OVERHEATING 〕
"Hold the center!" I screamed over my shoulder, the rushing wind tearing the words right out of my mouth. "Keep your mass low against the fairings!"
Behind me, A-Lan was glued to my spine. Her tight, thin arms were wrapped completely around my ribs like a vice. Every time the tires hit a divot in the asphalt, the hard plastic of her pink backpack slapped violently against my back.
She leaned in close, the plastic rim of her oversized helmet knocking against mine. "Wei! You're weaving! Stabilize!"
"It's the crosswind!! It's making me lose control!" I gritted my teeth.
The blue text in my peripheral vision flickered ominously, stuttering across the humid dark.
〔 TACTICAL MAP UPDATING... 〕
〔 ERROR: TAINAN BORDER PASSED 〕
〔 ENTERING NO MAN'S LAND 〕
A blinding, radioactive white light erupted from the steel scaffolding of an overhead bridge.
It hit my eyes like a physical blow. The world turned to an empty, stinging white for one terrifying fraction of a second. The handlebars jerked in my grip. The front tire wavered dangerously on the slick blacktop.
"Sniper!" I roared, throwing my weight down against the dashboard, trying to weave the bike defensively into a zigzag trajectory.
"Dad—Wei! It's just a camera! A speed camera!" A-Lan shrieked directly into my ear. Her grip tightened until it literally squeezed the breath out of my collapsing lungs. "STRAIGHTEN OUT! Don't look at the light! Keep looking at the yellow sunflower! Just look at the flower, PLEASE!"
I locked my stinging, watering eyes onto the center console. The tiny yellow sticker. My holy relic in this unholy world, a world full of sinners. My hope.
Focus.
Follow the flower.
They want you to crash.
"Not snipers..." I rasped, wiping my streaming eyes on the collar of my jacket.
"Orbital surveillance. They're pinging our transponders with infrared flash-turrets. We just broadcast our location to the entire global grid!"
"I told you....." her voice broke. Just for a single, desperate syllable. The strict Handler's mask cracked over the rushing wind, exposing a terrifyingly young girl hiding underneath. "....I told you we were driving too fast. Now she has the signal."
"What, She?"
I didn't have to wait for the intel to confirm.
A heavy vibration began to pulse through the vibrating mirror brackets of the scooter. I flicked my eyes to the rear-view mirror.
Rising out of the deep ink of the highway behind us were twin pinpricks of pure light. It was Cold. Blue. Powerful.
Binary stars hunting in an artificial galaxy. And they were locked onto my trajectory.
〔 THREAT DETECTED: PURSUIT VEHICLE 〕
〔 ARCHETYPE: THE SHADOW 〕
〔 CLOSING DISTANCE: 500 METERS 〕
The Shadow. Ms. Lin.
She hadn't abandoned the chase at the Night Market. The weeping Matriarch, the braised pork—all of it had been a diversionary stall. The grey suit had simply melted into the dark at the sector border, waiting in her transport for the extraction vehicle to trigger an orbital flash.
"We have hostile company, six o'clock!" I yelled, burying my helmet behind the pathetic aerodynamic curve of the plastic windshield.
"How fast are they coming?!!" A-Lan shouted back, twisting her small torso just a fraction of an inch to check our blind spot.
"They're faster than us! It's a high-grade interceptor. Massive displacement!" I forced the throttle, trying to wring non-existent power out of the dying 125cc engine. "Prepare the pyrotechnic countermeasures!"
"But we don't have any countermeasures, Wei!"
"I'm initiating a structural dump. Hold on to the lead!"
"WEI, NO!!!"
The highway ahead pitched left, following the long, jagged black curve of the ocean. I didn't brake. I banked hard. I leaned the scooter closer to the pavement than the physics of this junk machinery ever intended to.
The rusted center-stand slammed down onto the blacktop at a hundred kilometers an hour. A blinding fan of golden-orange sparks violently erupted backward into the dark, spraying a massive fountain of light directly toward the headlights of our pursuer.
"Evasive PROTOCOL!" I roared, a breathless, hysterical laugh tearing from my throat. I was untouchable. An ace operative in the final act of an impossible theater. "Blind the sensors! Break her targeting locks!"
"NO!! Stop doing that!" A-Lan shrieked, pressing her face entirely against the worn fabric of my vest.
"The wheels are lifting! You're going to kill us! We'll lose the tires!"
The engine wailed a high screech. I wrestled the bike back to the vertical, pulling the burning tires flush with the road. But it cost me heavily.
A deep, violent pulse suddenly struck at the back of my skull and it felt like someone had driven a long, hot iron spike directly into the center of my brain.
The HUD glitched horribly.
It hurts.
The pain was similar to accidentally biting your tongue as hard as you can, but inside your brain. It was a sharp, pain that made everything else disappear.
The crisp blue text in my vision shuddered, tearing itself violently apart into crimson fragments.
〔 ALERT: COGNITIVE FIREWALL BREACH 〕
〔 REDUCE CPU LOAD IMMEDIATELY 〕
〔 WARNING. WARN
#&#&#@
###
#-@+#&--- 〕
RED. The system was bleeding.
It was dark. The edges of the road lost their shape, melting down into long, weeping lines of coal. The pain seized my optic nerves until darkness swarmed my vision. I bit down on my lower lip so hard the hot taste of iron flooded my tongue.
"Breakage!" I gasped, the wind stripping the sound from my raw throat. I couldn't pull air into my lungs. My heavy fingers began to uncurl from the grips. The entire earth was pitching cleanly off its axis.
"Handler... Handler! The network is completely crashing... I can't feel the.... the right quadrant of the manual controls!....I.. can't do i-"
"No! Wei! Not here! We're doing ninety! DO NOT LET GO!"
A-Lan's tiny hands instantly detached from my ribs. She slammed her arms forward, stacking her frozen, trembling little fingers securely over my failing knuckles. She pressed them back down into the rubber, manually pinning the throttle wide open through sheer, terrified force of will.
"I have the lead!" she screamed. She pressed her helmet hard against the space between my shoulder blades. The professionalism was entirely stripped away now; she was a frightened child bracing for the impact of a shattering world.
"Just follow the YELLOW, DAD! Do it for the mission! FOR ME!! Look down! Don't let the DARKNESS TAKE IT!!"
I stared blindly through the red glitches. Through the agonizing pain that was tearing my thoughts apart.
There it was. A singular pixel in the breakage. Small. Bright. Trembling. The little yellow sunflower on the silver plastic fairing.
I closed my jaw shut and I seized that image and chained it to the center of the chaos. I pulled the clogged circuits of my broken brain together and dragged myself away from the devouring darkness.
The red text stuttered heavily. The pixels reversed, shuddering into purple before snapping harshly back into blue.
〔 SECONDARY NEURAL PATHWAY REROUTED 〕
〔 VITAL SIGNS STABILIZING 〕
I exhaled a shaking breath. My grip finally solidified beneath A-Lan's little fingers.
Kaohsiung City suddenly materialized out of the heavy black mist ahead. A chaotic fortress of sprawling lights and brutalist modern architecture. Huge industrial smokestacks release fire into the low clouds, and towering metal cranes guarded the coastline. A beautiful city designed perfectly to hide ghosts.
But the twin lights of the Shadow's pursuit vehicle were closing in, washing us in their cold, unforgiving glare.
"Approaching sector gate!!" I warned, coughing blood into my teeth.
There were two roads separating the highway. To the immediate right, a deep, impossibly narrow maintenance chute plunged straight under the colossal pillars of the Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit elevated tracks. The angle was sharp. Too tight and far too steep for a four-wheeled interceptor to follow.
"Brace for negative G-force!" I yelled.
I squeezed both brakes instantly.
The back tire locked in rebellion. It shrieked, dumping a cloud of burning rubber into the heavy sea air. The scooter fishtailed wildly into the dark before diving abruptly off the edge. We dropped heavily down the maintenance road, speeding under the bottom of the city's huge overpass.
I glanced up. In the sky between the heavy overpass and the asphalt, I watched the furious blue headlights of the Shadow shoot right past the overpass above us. The piercing screech of heavy brakes echoed down into the dark, screaming out in frustration as it realized it had completely overshot the prey.
We didn't slow down. We went deeper and deeper. Soundlessly navigating the absolute dark beneath the tracks. Away from the pursuing light.
We had outrun the Shadow. We were untouchable once more. But inside my own skull, the dull, hot ache radiating from the iron spike reminded me of an uncompromising truth, I was failing fast, and there were things far more brutal than Ms. Lin rapidly catching up to us in the dark.