Escapology by Ren Warom

sleep for about a thousand hours.
    And she’s definitely not going to talk to Deuce.
    * * *
    Fine as a rice noodle from a distance, the Mono writhes its way around the towering pinnacles of the city in what looks to the uninitiated like an incoherent tangle. Mono trains are slender and efficient. Operated by computers overseen from the Hive, the central nervous system of Slip, where the Hive Queens have absolute authority.
    Amiga likes ants in general, but she hates the Queens. Theoretically they’re locked in Hive by Emblem, the key holding Hive to Slip to RL, but they’re clever and determined and every now and then they manage to find a way around Emblem into Slip. It’s never pretty. Before she saw for herself what they can do, she used to think it was some kind of cliché—the mad AIs. Now she knows better. A cliché is not so trite when it’s right there in the distance, huge enough to give you a nosebleed just looking at it, and trashing everything in its path.
    Exhausted, she waits for an empty shoot and changes as it carries her up to the platform. Slipping into a streamlined, double-thickness orange jumpsuit and a pair of peacock-blue Bladers. Her work gear she stuffs into her empty backpack. She’ll have to chuck the damn thing like always. You can wash blood out in cold water but you still know it was there.
    At the platform she waits under sputtering lights in the evening chill for the .351 to arrive. She’d have been on the track already given the chance, but with only minutes before this mono hits platform that’s asking to be catapulted off and thrown to the ground several hundred feet below. Not exactly how she wants to spend her evening, smearing her innards all over the pavement. She’s fucked up, not fucking suicidal.
    The mono’s approaching whine fills the station, setting off a scramble for readiness that’s guaranteed full-on entertainment. Monos are sardine cans from five forty-five P.M. to eleven P.M. at night and this mass of straining idiots might as well be clamouring for mummification as the .351 comes haring into the station in a whirl of wind and leaves.
    There are no trees this high up. The mono brought them all the way from Sendai, where trees are everywhere, and almost all of them real. Amiga loves how wind has a mind of its own, how it seems to pull the leaves along purely for fun. There’s a stampede for the doors, a scuffling and thumping as passengers fight for a place to sit or stand before the whine builds, accelerates, and the mono explodes out of the station in a burst of stunning speed.
    Amiga’s ready.
    She leaps, catches the back draft and, as her blades touch down on the track and the magnets activate, she’s crouched, her legs moving fast, keeping her within sight of the mono’s red-and-white striped backside as it practically flies to the next station. Between the faceless visages of bright ’scrapers and dull ’rises, too fast to see her reflection in the glass as anything more than a blur, she holds steady in the mono’s wake through Hangoon and Norii, neither station on the .351’s stop schedule.
    Next stop is Ginzo, but Amiga’s not going that far. The track runs through Sakkura, right through the middle of several ’scrapers, disappearing with hollow pops of sound into long, dimly lit and treacherously narrow tunnels lined with the grimy windows of cramped apartments. The mono does this all over Foon Gung, where it couldn’t go around or between, it goes through; and some tunnels hide secrets. Her ’rise, Jong-phu, is one of them.
    Under the rails, in the secret space between mono and building, are a series of squats cobbled together by the Hornets. Home. Reaching out, her hand encased in a thick, plastic cast with a catchlock set into the wrist, Amiga hooks onto a zip wire as she flies past, whipping off the track and spinning down into the waiting arms of a webbed sling, curling her body to minimize impact.
    Unhooking herself, she grabs the bottom