Read Crossover for Free Online

headphones, but that signature was slight and inoffensive. Traffic flowed by below. Huge lighted neon proclaimed the superstore chain's name in letters five storeys high. Thunder grumbled, rolling over the traffic and store-music sounds like a wave across a sandy shoreline, and fading gently away.
    The mall was enormous. Shops fronted onto open walkways around the central atrium, the full nine storeys high. The transparent roof overhead let in the light. There were glass elevators and escalators by the dozen, all buzzing with people, voices echoing together in their hundreds and thousands, competing with the speaker music.
    The red-to-blue flowing shapes now slid past Sandy on all sides. She moved purposefully, her strides even, processing data. The crowds were a distraction to her and a cover for her enemies, if they existed. But they offered protection too.
    She stopped by a databoard and pressed some icons at random. Directories flashed up but she spared them little attention, scanning instead through her peripheral vision, searching for followers. Nothing but the crowds of shoppers, carrier bags swinging. Somewhere within the open atrium an amusement-ride was operating, an echoing clatter of machinery and the screams of excited children. Her finger found another icon and the floor display changed again.
    And felt a faint flicker of recognition at the periphery of her consciousness. Her eyes flicked up, scanning the open atrium. She immediately registered the spectrum disturbance, a faint shading upon her retinas ... and found the source a moment later, a man standing at the opposite railing, wearing dark sunglasses. Indoors.
    Sandy turned and walked on, her stride now a fraction brisker. Her throat was tight. She'd been found. Who or how was not important, she was certain that they intended no good. They never did. She pushed impatiently past a dawdling couple admiring the window displays. Shrieks from the amusement-riders echoing off the high atrium roof. She tucked her folded umbrella into her overcoat pocket, leaving her hands free, and turned right, stepping quickly across the path of oncoming pedestrians and into the adjoining corridor.
    Only now realising that something didn't make sense, that if someone had wanted to get her, their best bet would have been at her hotel room when she was asleep. Not in a crowded shopping centre. Unless, of course, they'd only just found out where and who she was. And had decided not to waste another hour. It was possible that they thought her that important. It was very possible.
    Her datalinks were running as she walked, sifting through the regional database, through the official traffic flows that hinted of police movements and security alerts ... and thought, as she pressed briskly through the corridor crowds toward the road overpass, to check back to her hotel records. Found them barricaded from just beyond the public perimeter, and her presence triggered an alarm ... she fried the trigger system in a burst of anger, and sent her killer systems speeding out, scanning for electronic target IDs.
    Frightened now at the speed things were deteriorating. She knew only too well what was happening. And she knew that moving slowly would gain her nothing — they had her pinged, and no casual pretence would make it otherwise.
    She sprinted straight for the overpass opening in the wall ahead. And inside, colliding hard off the railing through the nonexistent gap past some pedestrians, bodies sprawling as she raced onward up the tube, weaving fast through the traffic as yells and shouts broke out around her, ordinary people, startled and angry. She hurdled a small child at nearly thirty kph, and saw through the merging bodies that the narrow exit was blocked by a random convergence of shoppers ... planted a foot and leapt — astonished, frightened faces ducking for cover as the woman in the long coat went flying low overhead. Collected someone's head with her hip, then hit down on her legs