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Malik’s lidded eyes met hers in the mirror.
She drove in real time, and the CHP vehicles caught up and the helicopters actually had to slow down.
“Stop the car and pull over immediately,” came a very authoritative voice through a bullhorn.
In response, Cruz looked up, smiled, and waved. Like they were just some crazy kids driving to Mexico on spring break.
Shade was indescribably relieved to be in her own head alone without company. But she had no time to waste and did not wish to see military-quality helicopters joining the news choppers, so after a few minutes of relative normalcy, she gritted her teeth and morphed again. The Bentley leaped away as she easily threaded through cars going a third of her speed.
Then it was off the freeway and onto what Californians call surface streets. She could blow through red lights, finding the split-second gaps between cars and threading them effortlessly, but there were no more two-hundred-mile-an-hour stretches. It was terrifying to Cruz, who had created permanent divots in the dashboard where her fingertips dug in. It might perhaps be terrifying to Malik, but Malik was silent, looking fixedly ahead, eyes unfocused.
Shade knew where Malik was now. She knew he was locked in battle with them. A battle he could escape from only by de-morphing into agony.
Nothing you can do, Shade, she told herself. Each time she managed to push away the guilt it came back, though it occurred to her that she felt it far less when she was in morph, just as she had been immune to Malik’s blast of pain while she
was in morph.
Which meant Malik’s power wasn’t going to be of much use against other mutants. But against regular humans? Like the regular humans running the Ranch?
Will he do it? Can he do it? Can he control it? Do I have any right to ask it of him?
He’s a tool for me to use.
He’s a boy who loves me. Or did.
He’s a boy I loved. And may still.
It was dark by the time they reached Carmel Valley, what Dekka had said was the entry to the Ranch. Now they drove more slowly still—barely over a hundred and twenty-five—searching for the unmarked road Dekka had described. There were three helicopters overhead, the CHP chopper and two news stations, watching eagerly, seeing the narrowing of the roads and imagining that the long chase must be reaching its end. In that they were correct.
“There,” Cruz said, pointing to a road marked with a sign that said No Thru Traffic. Of course, Shade had had plenty of time to see the sign, and Cruz’s elongated th-e-e-e-r-r-r was irrelevant.
They turned onto the road, tires screaming in protest, and within seconds they were confronted by three armored vehicles racing to meet them. Racing to meet them and being easily passed despite their effort to form a roadblock. Armored cars might do as much as fifty miles an hour; the Bentley was still doing almost three times that.
Up and up the winding road through the trees they went, and now a fourth helicopter, faster, sleeker, and far more dangerous, had been added to the chase. But even military helicopters have trouble with a vehicle able to take hairpin turns at a hundred miles an hour and twice that speed on the straightaways.
The dark helicopter, an Army Apache, gave up pursuing and instead dipped its nose and raced ahead, able to take a straight line while the Bentley twisted and turned, and as Shade came tearing around a curve, she found herself face-to-face with the Apache hovering over the road just a dozen feet off the ground like a falcon waiting for a mouse, the blast of its rotors kicking up a whirlwind of dust and debris and bending saplings.
Shade slammed on the brakes, and the car fishtailed madly. She was about to leap from the Bentley to rush the helicopter herself, but at the last second she saw the flash of fire and smoke and yanked the car sharply left as the missile flew past, missing them by inches and exploding in the trees.
The Bentley slewed wildly, and not even Shade’s speed could control it. The car plunged off the side of the road, crashed through a guardrail, and went airborne like some steampunk flying machine, and off the side of a hundred-foot drop. The slope was almost vertical, blanketed in pine trees and punctuated with rock outcroppings.
“Shade!” Cruz screamed in slow motion.
The Bentley was in the air, the heavy engine dragging the nose down, plummeting toward trees and rocks and annihilation. Shade snapped her seat-belt release, stood with one foot on the dashboard and the other on her headrest, bent down, grabbed Cruz under the armpits, and hurled Cruz upward against the force of gravity.
Cruz flew and screamed in what to Shade was comically slow motion, hung in the air for a very long time, then was captured by gravity and began to fall. In that time Shade rolled into the back seat, grabbed Malik under one arm, and launched herself backward as the car fell away from her.
Rising, Shade slammed into Cruz, twisted in midair, snatched her friend, yanked her close, put her free arm around Cruz’s chest, and with both her friends in her arms had time to consider how to lessen the impact of the inevitable hard landing.
The car fell, engine lowest, its wheels spinning just a foot away from the jumbled cliff face. It smashed through a small tree, banged into another, twisted and smashed sideways through a third.
The slope of the cliff came out to meet Shade as she fell, and she slid and ran, skidded and hopped on her disturbing insectoid feet, bleeding off speed, dodging trees, absorbing the energy into her inhumanly powerful legs, fighting the mass of herself and her two friends.
The car passed her now, smashed into a tree thick enough to destroy the hood, slammed nose-down into a boulder, flipped end over end, and skidded the rest of the way on its back, trailing a debris cloud of expensive trim in all directions.
Shade, still carrying Malik and Cruz, neared the bottom of the cliff and turned skidding into running across gentler grades and finally slowed enough to drop Cruz and Malik onto the pine needles. Through the trees Shade could make out glimpses of barracks-style buildings ahead and below, just as Dekka had described it.
For Cruz and Malik, it had all taken about seven seconds.
