“Drones confirm armed men loading up more SUVs in both parking garages, Ben,” Amir tells me. “I can’t get them in any farther. Closed doors. We really need to make some with thumbs.”

  I don’t say anything. Negative entropy aethings are swirling around Asymmetry like the base of a black tornado.

  “I’ve alerted Cal,” he says. “Uh, she recommends you wait for backup.”

  With the Sidorov’s preparing to leave? No. “‘Recommends?’ Not ‘ordered?’” I’m picking up enough velocity to earn me quite a speeding ticket on the downward slope of one of Akron’s seven hills. Asymmetry is before and below me, sitting on the far side of a cross street where it dead ends. The off-center railing going up the short flight of steps is a wide, smooth metal beauty, straight as a die, and slanted right at the picture window. The accessibility ramps are no good. They’re to each side of the stairs, twisting and turning as they do, only at different angles and points. Asymmetrically.

  “Yeah,” says Amir.

  Though I’m technically not FBI, I do work for her. She could have ordered me. Her wording was specific. She’s as worried about Monica as I am.

  “Yep.” I stick the skateboard’s remote back to my forearm, trading it for the slingshot, which I load at the bottom of the hill.

  Everybody’s seen skaters hop up on a rail and slide down it, but I’ve never tried it myself. I was never that committed to the sport. Time to Push, though how much this is a matter of luck, I don’t know.

  I have to slow down a bit before I can Ollie onto the curb. The leap up to the wide railing has to be done in quick succession, and it’s a lot higher up, but I’m more athletic after training with the FBI than I’ve ever been. The board comes up with my feet, my knees up around my ears, and I reach down to grab it with my free hand, the loaded pocket of the slingshot between my teeth. For a moment, I’m certain that I’ve missed, that I’m going to splat myself against the tasteful white brick mini-wall, getting a taste full of whatever brick’s made of and my own gray matter, but the wheels grip the cold metal, and off I go.

  I’m moving at a slower rate of speed than my deck, and I almost teeter off to break my neck on the concrete stairs, but I’m able to correct it, lean in, and shoot up the railing, my thumb white on the accelerator button on the remote. All I need to do now is stay on the damn thing, which is only just wide enough for the wheels.

  I was never going for the main entrance. They’re probably locked anyway and there’s probably vestibule. I could get caught between two sets of doors, a classic kill box, so that’s out.

  The railing sings as the rubber wheels of my board rumble up it faster than I expect. Then I’m flying off almost before I can fire my slingshot at the big window. I pull my feet up, Push my luck a shade harder, and let the slingshot dangle to grab the board with my hand.

  With the glass cracking, spiderwebs fading into being from the shot, I kick out, all four wheels hitting at once. The shattering roar of the window collapsing hurts my ears. Shards tinkle and glitter around me, spinning out and down, hissing onto the floor.

  There’s a red spray and the dim figure of a man falls away to my right.

  Movement everywhere.

  It’s dark in the restaurant, the only light coming up from the level below some hundred feet distant. The city lights made it brighter outside, and so I’m left with impressions and silhouettes until my eyes adjust.

  Somehow, I keep my feet when I land, but the wheels hit something, and I’m bucked off. The board shoots out backwards from under me to fly up and chop a man in the neck before its rubberized edge causes it to carom off somewhere.

  There are gunshots, but I don’t feel any of them. I land on my back, losing my air, roiling my stomach.

  There’s a touch on my leg.

  Angled at my knee, the barrel of a gun.

  I grab it, pushing it up. It kicks in my grip, the pressure and the sound so close to my ear it hurts. I pull it away, causing it to fire again. I guess the quiet guns are only for the snatch and grab teams. Only then do I see the Sidorov goon fallen beside me, his face illumined by the outside streetlights, a red wet hand clamped around his neck, and blood everywhere. The fight goes out of him when I finally get the gun from him. Disarmed, he’s content to bleed out on the glass. It’s an AR-15.

  I Push, point, and fire into the dark without minding what I’m aiming at. And it isn’t any three-round burst, either. Damn thing’s fully automatic! Naughty Sidorovs, using illegal weapons like this.

  Rolling away from the dying man, I send bullets this way and Push.

  I hate this. Hate guns. Hate killing or doing anything that might kill somebody, but Monica’s in here some place, the clock is ticking, and these assholes dealt the play. I get up, firing at any movement, or whatever could cause a bullet to ricochet, or more mess. Chaos is my ally here.

  When the gun’s empty, I discard it. I take the one from the man my skateboard hit in the neck. He’s kicking and thrashing, clutching his windpipe. His face is purple. I look away.

  I see another rifle on the floor, so I sling the first and prepare the second.

  For now, it’s quiet. Nobody firing.

  They might not know where I am, or maybe they’re regrouping, or both?

  The inside of the restaurant proper is fascinating. Its top level here is done up like a rain forest. The carpet is a dark green and brown pattern, suggesting a forest floor. All the tables are rich hardwood in a spectrum of different hues, none of them quite square, not one chair matches another, and yet it’s all lovely and very foresty. There’s a goddamn waterfall off to my left. Water running out of what looks like a deep cave on the side of a hill, burbling down through real rocks…. Actually, I’m pretty sure most of the décor is real here because there are wide patches of dirt that’ll get planted later. An enormous series of windows on the ceiling, now that I look at them, will probably make it as much of a greenhouse as place to eat. I wonder what the heating and cooling bill’s going to be.

  Anyhow, the stream runs down from the left to tumble off the balcony. A rickety-looking, lop-sided covered bridge fords it, wide enough to allow servers and customers access both ways. Clever geographic features like boulders or tumbledown fence fragments border the creek, and should keep people from falling in or getting wet.

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  All the light is coming down from ahead, from below, the only movement around me from dark shapes on the floor, but I put that right out of my mind. I feel sick, but I can’t deal with that either.

  Monica is here somewhere, probably below in the kitchen.

  Amir is saying something, but I tap my helmet over my right ear and he cuts off. Being able to hear my immediate surroundings is the priority.

  There’s a staircase leading down from this balcony on the opposite side of the room, starting a bit off-center and slanting down at an odd angle, the banisters uneven, and the railing down the middle askew. The metalwork matches the outside.

  A similar gap exists in the guardrail around the balcony over here, also off-center of course, from the other, indicating a way down here too. I find my skateboard by the wall of the waiting area, step on, and get going.

  When I Ollie onto the center railing of the stairs, I notice two things. The dark shapes of heavily armed men are creeping up them toward me, and second, that while the first set of stairs on the other side of the restaurant lead straight down with the banister doing the same only at a slight angle, these do not. It’s got a landing. My banister turns at a sharp, but less than ninety-degrees because of course. Asymmetry.

  It’s almost as if they didn’t figure skateboarders into their plans. I mean, if there’s a way to navigate that turn and keep my feet on fiberglass, I don’t know it. My wheels will catch and catapult me off, probably over onto the outside railing where I’ll break my back.

  I Push and leap up, hoping the skateboard comes with me like it should, and firing my gun blind at the Sidorovs.

  There’s the chattering of answering gunfire, and I feel a tug at my jacket. No burning punch, but I’ve been shot enough already to know that’s not a clear sign of anything at all. Maximum street cred, right?

  I fly over the railing and out over the bottom of the restaurant. It’s surreal. The floor is the distant blue of the summer afternoon sky. Fluffy white chairs surround white tables in strange, flowing angles, looking like clouds. They grow gray and darker as they approach a miniature upside down anvil-headed storm cloud where the waterfall from above rains on it. Below that, worked into the immense cloud, is the bar. For a moment, I feel like a giant falling up into the heavens.

  By sheer luck, I hit a table with the skateboard still under me. There’s not enough space to land and stop, so I have to kind of hop over on top of the next, then the next, until I can get safely onto the floor by the far wall.

  Something moves to my right, so I spray a bunch of bullets that way, feeling sick about it. I don’t look. I don’t think I’m able. Yeah, these are Sidorovs. Professional kidnappers, rapists, human traffickers to the Betans and whoever else will pay for people’s lives to turbo charge their spell-casting, but I don’t killing. I don’t like what they’ve done to Monica even more. I hate what they’ll do to her if I can’t get to her.

  I hate them.

  These psychopathic motherfuckers. Doing what they do. Forcing me to do this. Animals. Bugs.

  I shake with rage, like I’m a cage too small for it, and it wants the fuck out. My jaw hurts from clenching and I’m making a kind of growling noise that scares me.

  What did they expect when they do this to people? Like I said, they dealt the play. They decided to do this stuff, so I’ll stop them. Whatever it takes.

  The gun clicks empty, and I toss it away to unsling the other. Bending low on my board, I take the remote from its place on my forearm, and thumb the accelerator.

  Zooming across the cloudscape, I find myself dissociating again, examining my surroundings. How’d they do that? The blue of a clear sky is different from blue anywhere else. I figured it was its depth, right? I mean, you’re not looking at a solid surface, but the diffused light of the planet’s atmosphere. It’s the depth. The floor has depth.

  Oh shit, I think it’s transparent. Below that, God knows how far down, is blue flooring maybe, or there’s blue fog or something? Both? The glass or whatever it is has got to be thick because I’m pretty sure it’s been shot a few times this evening. There aren’t any tables or chairs tumbling down or blue gas rising up, though that might be a matter of time. My guess is that the shooting isn’t done yet.

  There’s no movement I can see.

  Better to keep them honest. I fire a few bursts at a few likely spots anyway, especially at the floor above, where anybody looking down would have a good angle on me.

  I’m getting close to the corner of the room, near a darkened gap in the wall, probably something leading to the meal prep area, so I slow and stand halfway up to see where I’m going.

  There, maybe fifty feet away, is an angled hallway ends at the double swinging doors of the kitchen.

  I get low again and hurl myself towards them, thumb mashed down on the accelerator. Towards, I hope, Monica, shivering in a walk-in.

  The image infuriates me.

  I’m just entering the hall when a man steps through the doors, gun out, pointed at me.

  There’s nowhere for me to go, no way to dodge. He’s got me cold. His finger is on the trigger, his broad, bearded face composed, content, and I know he was waiting for me. I watch his hand flex on the grip.

  I’m going to die right here.

  Monica.

  Without slowing, I Push and fire my own burst, just as he fires his.

  When I don’t fly back off my deck and he’s still standing, I fire again, turning the Sidorov’s neck and lower face into a red mess.

  There’s a burning on my collarbone.

  Fuck it, whatever it is.

  I step off the board to run along behind, sending it full speed through the flapping doors before I follow into the kitchen.

  The lights are off. A dark shape picks itself off the floor to my right, too tall to be little Monica. I shoot it and it falls.

  Quiet.

  Nothing moves.

  To my left is the line. Two big, stainless steel griddles, squatting one after the other, wait below a chest-high counter under heat lamps form a side of a narrow walkway for cooks. On the other, where the grill, or ovens, or fryers will eventually go, is a jungle of tubing, plumbing, and wiring. I know the place is brand new, but it seems haunted there in the dark. Menacing.

  The burning’s getting worse and I feel something hard in there, in my shirt, pressing against my neck. I take cover beside the stove to fish it out with my left hand, the right aiming the gun down the line between the counter and the cooking area.

  I pull out a bullet. Deformed, hot, and….

  No, it’s two bullets smashed together.

  I bet if I went back through the doors and looked, I’d find two more.

  Holy shit.

  I’ve got to get Monica.

  The walk-ins won’t be far from the cooks.

  Popping my head out, I look for movement. I don’t see any.

  What I do see are the stainless steel outlines of a walk-in refrigerator, or freezer, I don’t know, at the end of the line, further down on the right. Listening with all by being, I stalk toward it.

  Fat lot of good it’ll do. My ears are ringing.

  If I’m going to be around all this gunfire all the time, I’ve really got to keep those ear buds on me we used when we raided the church. The ones which protect your hearing but still let you hear. Hell, they should probably stay in, maybe get them surgically implanted, or I’ll be deaf before I’m thirty.

  I pull open the walk-in. The refrigerator. It’s empty.

  There’s got to be a second one, right? One’s a freezer, the other a fridge, but it’s not here by the cooking area. Keep looking.

  Around the corner is a window. Through it, the tiny manager’s office is visible. Empty. Beside that, is the freezer.

  Inside are frosted boxes and cans on metal shelves all wrapped in plastic sheeting, but there’s no Agent Monica Ochoa. When I turn to go, my foot hits something, causing whatever it is to skitter into a corner behind thin racks of bread dough. I find a pair of mirrored glasses. Not sunglasses. Monica’s glasses.

  The bastards had her here, in this fucking icebox.

  Where is she now? I have to find out. I have to—.

  I have to take a breath. “Amir?” Then I remember I turned off my com system.

  “—peat, two. One from the garage by the restaurant, one from the mall,” Amir’s saying when I switch it back on.

  “Say again.” My voice sounds rough. Like I haven’t used it in a hundred years.

  “Ben? You okay? You’re in the restaurant?”

  “Yeah. Monica’s not here. Where is she?”

  “There’s two separate motorcades or caravans or whatever leaving the parking garages now. If she’s not there, she must be in one of them, right?”

  “Which one’s bigger?” I ask.

  “What? The one that’s left the mall’s got two more vehicles. They’ve turned left. Looks like they’re heading toward the interstate.”

  “Copy. I’m in pursuit.”

  “Is the restaurant clear?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I put Monica’s glasses in a shirt pocket and button it. Time to go.