Lila grabbed his chin, her eyes wide. “No. You can’t shoot people. We’re not Roman barbarians.”
Dixon batted away her hands. He retrieved his darts and shoved them into his pockets, then spun around in his seat, watching the parade of cruisers following them. He cocked his gun, popped out of the window, and brought the revolver up to fire.
His scarf slipped. He didn’t bother to fix it. His gaze had stopped on a teen in an overstuffed indigo coat, standing on the corner. Her blonde hair shook back and forth as she watched the chase.
He mouthed something, a curse with no breath behind it.
“She’s right. You can’t shoot out their tires without hitting someone on the street. Who’s out at one o’clock in the morning, anyway?”
“They are,” Lila said, pulling out her computer.
“Yeah, well, they need to stay home next time.” He yanked his palm from his pocket and tapped out a number. “I need teams two and three down on Harris now,” he ordered, voice much calmer than his driving. “I’ll be passing through in two minutes. Be there.”
He dropped the palm computer into his lap and jerked the wheel, turning down a street whose lamps still functioned. Mostly. The militia cruisers did not follow as closely any longer, but Lila heard more sirens on the way.
The entire third shift of the Wilson militia must have been sent out to capture them.
Lila opened the laptop and stretched her fingers.
“What a
re you doing?” Tristan asked.
“I’m going to try and scramble the Wilson’s communication system. I just need you to drive back around to—”
“Are you serious?” Tristan slammed the laptop shut and shoved it to the floorboard. “I’m not turning around.”
“Right now, they have the advantage. They’re going to work together to lead us somewhere and corner us. If they can’t talk to one another, then they can’t do that, and we’ll have the advantage.”
“I’m not driving back!”
Lila leaned back into the seat. “Shortsighted little—”
“Same to you,” Tristan snapped, sneaking a peek in the rearview mirror. “I can’t believe they’re doing this for a stupid B&E.”
“It’s not for a B&E. Someone detonated a bomb two nights ago in front of the capitol, or have you forgotten? They don’t know that we weren’t planting a bomb in that restaurant. Any security chief with any sense will do whatever it takes to capture us now in case we did. If she’s on duty, she’ll be at the scene or in one of those cruisers, tailing after us.”
“So this is all my fault?”
“Do you know of someone else who detonated a—”
“What will they find if they review the network logs?”
“Nothing. My snoop programs scrubbed them clean as soon as I slipped out of Liberté. They changed the logs to make it look like I had downloaded a flood of tentacle porn.”
“Tentacle porn?”
Tristan and Dixon’s heads swiveled in unison.
“Keep your eyes on the road, damn it!”
“I am,” Tristan yelled. “How long will it take for them to figure out what you were really up to?”
“If they were really good and they guessed what I was up to? A few weeks. However, the Wilson militia has never been that great at computer security.”
“What do we do then?”
“If we get out of this, then we don’t do anything at all. I do. I go and talk to Chairwoman Wilson. I push her to do something stupid.”