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Max-7.”
    “You’re sure they’re following us, too?” Jin asked.
    “Positive,” Lorne told her. “He was parked around the corner when we first got to the Island. He, or they,” he amended. “I never saw who was in it.”
    “Perhaps we should try to get another look,” Paul said, his voice going a little darker. “How’s your slingfrog technique these days?”
    “Haven’t done one in years,” Lorne said, frowning as he looked around them. Out here in the open in the middle of a wide street, a slingfrog would be next to useless.
    An instant later he grabbed at his restraints as his father abruptly veered off the boulevard onto an exit ramp. “Where are we going?” he managed.
    “Aunt Thena’s old neighborhood,” Jin said. “She’s been driving through the area every time she goes to the Dome for the past twenty years. I’m guessing I know it a lot better than either of our friends back there.”
    “Both of whom got off Cavendish along with us,” Paul reported, studying the image in the mirror. “They’re keeping their distance, but we’ve still got a parade going. Where do you want to do this?”
    “Three blocks straight, then take a right,” Jin said, pointing ahead. “The hairdressers’ at that corner has a deep setback doorway—Lorne can duck in there after he jumps out.”
    “Okay.” Paul looked over his shoulder at Lorne. “You game for this?”
    “Sure,” Lorne said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. The slingfrog was one of the military tactics they’d practiced a few times back at the academy. While many of those techniques had been adaptable to the Cobras’ predator hunts, the slingfrog wasn’t one of them.
    Still, the maneuver was pre-programmed into the nanocomputer nestled beneath his brain. As long as he keyed into it properly and let the computer and servos do their job, he should be all right.
    “Almost there,” Jin called over the seat.
    Unfastening his restraints, Lorne got a grip on the door release with his right hand and the edge of his mother’s seat with his left. Rolling onto his right hip, he bent his knees and braced both feet against the center storage console. “Ready.”
    The soft click of the turn signal went on. Lorne took a deep breath. The car made a hard right around the corner—
    And as the corner shop momentarily blocked the lines of sight from the pursuing vehicles, Lorne wrenched open the door and shoved it open, straightened his knees convulsively, and leaped out into the night.
    The move would have been impossible for a normal human, fighting upstream against momentum and inertia as the car finished its turn. But the servos implanted in Lorne’s arms and legs had the strength, and the ceramic laminae made his bones strong enough to take the sudden stress. He shot out of the car in a shallow arc, the door edge nearly smashing into his shin as it slammed shut behind him. The angle of his jump had put him into a sideways position relative to the ground, but his nanocomputer was already on it, having added just the right amount of spin to his body as he pushed off the center console. Even as he reached the top of his arc and started down he found himself swiveling around, and by the time he landed on the walkway his feet were positioned to take the impact and turn him upright again.
    The deep doorway his mother had described was ten meters straight ahead. Using the residual momentum of his jump, he sprinted into the shadowy alcove and braked to a halt, turning to face the opening and dropping into a crouch. As the sound of his parents’ car faded away, he heard the growing rumble of the first pursuing car. Keying his optical enhancers for light-amplification, he pressed against the side of the alcove and held his breath.
    A second later, with a squeal of tires, the Savron with the bad headlight roared into view. There were two men in the front seat, he saw, with the passenger holding a set of night binoculars to his eyes. The engine