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wailed in the distance. She had to hurry.
    She dashed to the crumpled cab, where the gasoline fire had flowed out across the asphalt and was beginning to die down as the fuel burned away. She circled the truck and climbed up the passenger side to retrieve her backpack through the shattered window.
    Jebbie's body was crushed and burned inside the mangled truck, but she checked his pulse anyway. He was gone.
    "I'm sorry," she whispered. His death was entirely her fault. As her adrenaline faded, guilt replaced it. "I'm so sorry. You didn't deserve this."
    She dropped from the wreckage and stood for a moment in the heat and firelight, checking for more attackers. Then she broke down her rifle, stashed the extender inside her backpack, and reloaded the pistol.
    Raven walked back up the road to where the first rider lay burning on the handlebars of his bike. She kicked his body until he toppled to the pavement. The bike itself had suffered some damage, but still seemed operable.
    She climbed onto it and opened up the throttle, flying north on the interstate, the bike's fuel-cell engine as quiet as a sleeping kitten. Taking enemy equipment was dangerous, because it could have a hidden tracking device, but she had to take the risk. She wouldn't get very far on foot before the local authorities arrived to investigate the carnage.
    Her dark hair blew back from her face as she rode away at a hundred and sixty miles per hour, her solid black sunglasses facing the night ahead.

Chapter Four
     
    She rolled into Cincinnati at an hour past midnight, and the sight of the city amazed her--no tin and scrapwood slums stretching to the horizon, no tent cities pitched inside industrial ruins. The tree-lined suburbs appeared peaceful, and the towers and bridges at the city core stood intact, their lights glowing under the night sky.
    She ditched the bike in the concrete shell of a condemned old factory. If it had a tracking device, her pursuers might lose her trail here, provided she was out of town long before they found the bike.
    She jogged away down a street of brick storefronts that were empty or closed for the night. She slowed as she passed a few cars in a parking lot. For some reason, all of them seemed to be antique models. Stealing a car was tempting, but it could lead to police reports and a data trail the security agents could follow. She needed to vanish without a trace.
    "Transportation, transportation," she whispered to herself.
    Inside her sunglasses, tiny text flashed at the upper right corner of the lenses:
     
    LOCATING WIRELESS LINK...
    INTERFACING WITH LEGACY SYSTEMS...
    SEARCHING...
     
    Four icons popped up on the inside of the lenses, showing simple cartoon images of an airplane, a train labeled AMTRAK, a bus, and a car with a dollar sign and the words BUY/RENT. The text TRANSPORTATION IN CINCINNATI flickered below them.
    "Hey, thanks," Raven said to her glasses.
    She quickly determined the bus was the most low-key way to move between cities, requiring no identification or credit card. She could take buses all the way to New Haven without leaving any kind of data trail.
    When she reached the Greyhound terminal, she thought the buses didn't look very secure--no armored plating, no cages on the large windows. She didn't know how they expected to travel from city to city without getting robbed.
    She bought a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. It would have been cheaper to buy a single ticket all the way to New Haven, but she wasn't sure she would go the entire way by bus. In any case, buying separate tickets from city to city would better cover her trail.
    She waited on a bench, her nerves jittery, expecting another drone or more armed agents at any moment. She felt sorry for Jebbie. The poor man had given her a lift and ended up dying for it.
    She purchased a national newspaper, hoping it would jog her memory, but it read like gibberish. She didn't recognize the politicians and celebrities, and all the news stories were strange, as