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to completely demolish the passenger side and send me violently off course.
    Bright red warning lights flashed on the dashboard, and the shrill beep of an alarm sounded.
    “We’re under attack, sir!”
the interactive pilot announced.
    Sometimes artificial intelligence doesn’t quite live up to its name.

Chapter 16
    “NO IMMEDIATE DANGER to personnel on board,”
chirped the pilot computer as the pod righted itself and avoided what would have been a most unpleasant, and possibly deadly,
     impact with the front of a tinny-looking warehouse.
“Damage to vehicle will not impair operation.”
    “No problem then,” I muttered.
    I swung the pod around in a tight arc and zeroed in on the running human. With a touch, I sent off a heat-seeking tracer round
     from my front gun port.
    The skunk vanished in an explosion of red vapor.
Sayonara, you pitiful sack of crap.
    I was going to have to show some restraint from here on though. Just like before, I needed to take at least one of these killers
     alive to be interrogated at headquarters. That was myonly mission now—to find out why eleven Elites had been murdered and eviscerated.
    As I closed in behind the next target, he banked suddenly into a sharp right turn. In fact, he leaned the bike almost horizontally,
     then brought it back out and whipped into a dark alley. This one was very good, a superior athlete and rider.
    The gap was too narrow for my car, but I had another idea. He wouldn’t be breaking any motorbike speed limits on these narrow,
     twisty side streets, after all.
    So I screeched to a halt.
    “Take over,” I snapped to the pilot, popping open the hatch and vaulting out.
    “Be careful, Hays,” Elle called after me.
    How about that.
She’d never used my first name before.
Should that make me extra cautious? Was I in worse danger than I thought?

Chapter 17
    I HIT THE ground running, and I mean
running very fast
. I estimated the fleeing rider’s distance at thirty-seven yards and his bike’s speed at forty-one miles per hour. I could
     more than match that on foot.
    The alley was an unlit black hole of warm, heavy stench that fouled my nostrils, but my night vision picked out every detail,
     right down to the sweat beading on the skunk’s neck, just below his crimson and black helmet.
    Within three seconds I’d reached my top foot speed of nearly fifty. By now I was using ten-yard strides. It was almost like
     flying—my feet barely touching down before I was gone again.
    I realized now that I was fully in the human slum as I stretched to dodge a pile of sludgy food scraps covered in maggots,
     and a microsyringe and bloody bandages from ahyper-meth junkie. Then I whirled up in a horizontal twist, bounded off the side of a building, and barely cleared a row of
     overflowing Dumpsters. These humans were absolutely disgusting.
    I almost screamed with the sheer, glorious power of the chase. My muscles tensed and sprang like flexing steel bands, the
     wind rushed past my ears and through my hair, and my teeth clenched in anticipation as I closed the gap on the fleeing killer,
     hopefully the gang’s leader.
    A few more seconds and he’d be
mine—
my captive, mine to interrogate.
    Then, just as I leaped at him, the sonofabitch yanked his front wheel completely off the ground and bounced up onto a stack
     of rotting containers.
What in hell?
He used the containers like a springboard to hop over the waist-high wall of an old-style parking garage.
    I sailed on past, landed with both heels digging in, spun around, and dove back into the garage after him.
    It was so low-ceilinged and full of pilasters and parked vehicles that my own agility was impaired—I couldn’t jump, only run
     in a crouch over the car tops.
    Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump…
    He’d started pulling away from me again, racing furiously up the circling ramp. By the time I got to the ramp myself, he’d
     already reached the third level.
    He would find himself trapped on the roof, ten