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Mandy
was still missing. What did that mean?
    Jen and I sat there, sharing a
moment of befuddlement, contemplation, and the thirsty pleasure of simply
looking.
    Then I heard a noise somewhere in the darkness behind
us.
    ************************************
    I tugged my eyes away from the
shoe, looked up at Jen. She'd heard it too.
    Glancing into the dark, I realized that my night
vision had been wiped out by staring at the sunlit shoe. I was blinded but
guessed that whoever was down there with us could see perfectly.
    "Oh, shit," I said.
    With a soft rustle of paper Jen picked up the shoes
and quickly laced them together. She draped them around her neck.
    I stood up and realized that one foot had gone to
sleep. Not surprising. I could have happily died of starvation, staring at
those shoes.
    Little lights danced at the corners of my vision, rods
and cones trying frantically to get back online and help me see again. A shape
moved in the blackness between us and the stairs, someone big and graceful.
Absolutely silent.
    "Hello?" I said, my voice cracking in manly
fashion.
    The figure stopped moving and faded back into the
dark. For a moment I was convinced it had been a hallucination.
    Then Jen made her move.
    She kicked one of the pieces of chained plywood,
opening the gap wide for a blinding second, the sunlight streaming in behind
me. It revealed a big guy with a shaved head—intimidating but less terrifying
than the phantom I had imagined—covering his eyes against the glare.
    "Run!" Jen shouted, and I bolted forward
just in time for the tower of falling shoe boxes, her next brilliant move, to
miss me. Mostly. They scattered into my path, and my own suddenly unspeakably
lame shoes crunched into their virgin cardboard in a way that caused me pain.
(Antoine had always taught me to prize the original box as highly as the shoe.)
But I managed to get past the guy, arriving at the stairs just behind Jen.
    We ran upward, pounding the steps. Jen slowly pulled
away from me, and I heard our pursuer coming up behind. I ran blindly, clawing
at the dirty stairs with my hands to pull myself up faster, bouncing off the
walls as the flights turned in a slow clockwise circle, my twisted ankle
throbbing with every step.
    After four stories I was panting, and he was close
enough that I could tell he wasn't breathing hard at all.
    Fingers grasped at my ankle on the last flight but
slipped off, the grip not firm enough to bring me down.
    I burst out into the sun, blinked away the blinding
light, and faced the six-foot climb between me and the next roof. Jen was
already standing atop it, and I wondered if her rising-sun laces gave her
special powers of running and jumping.
    "Hunter, duck!" she yelled.
    I did.
    The coolest shoes in the world passed over my head,
tied into orbit around each other, spinning like a bola. I heard a grunt and a
thump as they wrapped themselves around my pursuer's feet and brought him down,
as heavy as a sack of doorknobs.
    If it hadn't happened so fast, I'm sure I would have
said, "Don't save me. Save the shoes!"
    But instead I scrambled up the wall and saw Jen
already pulling on the cage door of the next building.
    "It's locked!" she cried, running farther
down the block, disappearing as she jumped down to a lower roof. I followed in
a limping run.
    Three buildings later we found an open roof door and
made it down to the street and into a cab.
    Which is when I realized I had dropped my phone
somewhere back in the darkness.
     
      Chapter 7

"MY
PHONE!"
    The usual panic reaction: as if electrocuted, my body
stiffened in the back of the cab, hands plunging farther into my pockets, down
to the domain of lint and pennies.
    But the marvelous Finnish phone didn't magically
reappear down there in the fluff. It was gone.
    "You dropped it?"
    "Yeah." I remembered scrambling in the dark,
using my hands to claw myself up the stairs. I'd never put it back into my
pocket.
    "Damn. I was hoping you got a picture of that
guy."
    I