Light punched first. A sheet of it gathered in the big craft's open throat and tightened to a column the color of a bruise seen through milk. The driver didn't wait for science to finish. He put the bus into the gap under the overpass and asked the engine for all the forgiveness it had left.
Heat broke across the roof in a long sigh as the beam kissed concrete. Dust came down like new weather. The sign bolted to the arch—CLEARANCE 12'–0"—disintegrated into glitter and paper. Hawke dropped flat, then folded through the hatch on his forearms as the ceiling shed a curtain of grit. Concrete spalled. Somewhere overhead rebar twanged.
"Down!" he barked into the aisle.
The kids were already the thinnest versions of themselves. Peter had three of the smallest tucked under his arms with their backpacks pulled around like shields. Flash had become two forearms, a jaw, and a voice that had decided to be useful.
The beam swung behind them, tasting for a line. It found a support pillar, carved a neat, terrible smile through it, and moved on. The pillar didn't fall right away—buildings are polite about the moment they choose to fail—but the overpass coughed dust and changed the sound of the road. The driver kept the wheel straight with both hands and all his faith.
"Eyes," Hawke said. Peter threw him the cheap red hammer; Hawke caught it and popped back up through the hatch into grit brighter than daylight could explain. He pulled the hatch most of the way down, leaving a sliver to see through, and let it be a shield that had never expected the job.
At the mouth of the underpass the air went white. The big beam washed past the exit and plunged into the open day beyond, burning a chalk line through evening. It didn't hit the bus. It hit the street five car lengths ahead and made the asphalt lift in blisters. A Corona of steam and pulverized stone came back the wrong way, blowing into the tunnel and hammering the bus with hot breath.
Windows popped. Not all of them—safety glass has pride—but enough that the bus filled with sugar-fine sparkle and the sound of thirty throats remembering they were connected to lungs. The driver didn't flinch his hands. He drove into the bright and through it.
They punched out of the underpass into a world that had lost the idea of horizon. Smoke stacked in vertical columns where buildings had started arguments with their windows. Sirens crisscrossed and decided against chords. The big craft hung to the south, belly open, plates flexing like it had learned a new word and wanted to say it to everything.
Two seedlets zipped across the avenue at rooftop height, drawing as they went. One saw the bus. It tilted, curious. The other kept hunting the distance.
"Street's blocked!" the driver yelled. Ahead, a pile of cars had executed a choreography of panic and ended six different bad ways. Nothing moved except hazard lights thinking they could be brave.
"Left," Hawke said.
"Left is a fire hydrant."
"Better than a wall."
The bus mounted the curb and took the hydrant with a shrug. Water roared straight up and then slumped into a sideways geyser, knocking a trash can into the lane. The spray hit the bus in a hard, honest slap that steamed where dust had been cooked onto metal. Kids screamed, then laughed because screaming had to end up somewhere.
The seedlet slipped down the block, tracing them. It wasn't in a hurry. You don't hurry when your quarry is a rectangle with wheels and the sky agrees with you.
"Hatch!" Peter shouted from below, and Hawke yanked it farther down as the seedlet's beam stitched a line of heat across the street they had just been in. The hatch took a lick; the cheap plastic went glossy and then dull. He could smell it without needing to look.
"Front right feels funny," the driver said, practical.
Hawke listened to the rim chatter more than it should against the road. The front tire had been kissed earlier and now it had opinions. "Keep it for two blocks."
"What's in two blocks?" the driver demanded, not stopping either the bus or the question.
"Tree cover and an angle," Hawke said. He had no tree cover. He needed the city to provide it.
The city, generous by accident, offered a median with young plane trees and a bus shelter with a roof built for snow it seldom received. The driver swerved around a stalled sedan, bumped a curb, and threaded the bus between a lamppost and the line of trees with inches to spare.
The seedlet came in low on their right, beam mouth wet. Hawke didn't have a mirror arm left, only the hammer and the hatch and whatever the world would lend. He flipped the hatch up at the last second, making a slanted plane, and the light hit plastic and scattered into a scribble on the air. The seedlet overcorrected, angry at being made stupid, and bit into the bus shelter instead. Plexiglass exploded into cards. An ad for toothpaste went confetti.
"Cut through!" Hawke pointed with the hammer at a side street narrow enough to be a dare. The driver took it because nothing wider remained. They bull-rushed a drifting recycling bin, crushed paper into a plume, and shoved through.
The block was tighter, brick close on both sides, windows low and open. People looked out and then didn't, fast. Laundry blew where it had no business being and tried to help by becoming flags. The bus howled down the alley-length between buildings that had started before parking was an idea.
"Eyes," Hawke said again, because Peter had a way of seeing corners you forgot to check. Peter pinned his chin to the seat top and became a periscope. "Left roofline!" he yelled. "Air conditioner unit—loose!"
Hawke flattened over the hatch. The driver jinked and the unit fell short in a clang that would have killed a person who hadn't been a bus. The seedlet came up at the end of the block, patient, and set for a clean shot where the street opened like a throat.
"Brake," Hawke said.
"That's a terrible word," the driver said.
"Trust me."
The driver stabbed the pedal. The bus's front dipped. The right rim bit hard into hot asphalt, spat sparks, and the hood ducked. The seedlet's beam shaved the air where the roof would have been if the bus had still been proud of itself. It cut a straight shoelace into the far building's cornice instead. Brick burped. A cascade of decorative stonework clattered like bones down a staircase.
"Now go," Hawke said, and the driver did, tires howling like a choir of angry cats. They shot the gap under the falling rock before rock remembered what falling was for.
The street opened into a little square the city had carved out for sunlight to visit. An old fountain sat dry and annoyed in the middle, pigeons airborne over it like someone had unplugged their roost. The big craft's shadow swallowed the square, then eased off as it drifted a block. Wrong light pooled; the seam above winked like a slow wound deciding its size.
The front tire gave up with a short, ugly sigh. The bus sank a degree and became stubbornly hard to convince.
"We're not maintaining highway speeds," the driver observed.
"You're maintaining alive," Hawke said.
The seedlet circled high, rethinking angles. It seemed to favor precision over spectacle. It picked a line that would let it rake the side windows. Hawke saw the line, hated it, and chose a worse idea: bait.
He popped the hatch wide and stood half out into air. He lifted the hammer, not brandishing, just there, visible. The seedlet understood challenges; they all do, even the ones that have never had pride. It dipped, took him as center, and came in hot to erase the insult.
"Down!" Peter screamed, and wasn't sure who he meant.
Hawke held. He waited until the beam mouth went from syrup to wire to needle and then he dropped like a bad idea through the hatch. The beam cut the empty air where his head had been and carved a smoking notch into the lip of the opening. Heat flashed the hair on his neck into smell; he didn't flinch. He shot an arm back up and slammed the hatch to send the beam back toward the seedlet's eye, not as mirror, as nuisance. The light flicked. The craft jolted half a degree. The beam licked the roof and left a new welt. It wasn't enough to break anything. It was enough to ruin aim.
The driver hauled the wheel hard right around the dry fountain. The bus leaned and complained. The right rim threw sparks that drew a comet tail. They took the corner by force and found an exit on the far side: a downhill block toward the river, the street pinched by scaffolding on one side and a delivery truck that had chosen to sleep where it died on the other.
"Too narrow," the driver said.
"Thread it," Hawke said.
"You and that word," the driver said, but he aimed anyway, shoulders soldered to intent.
They slid past the truck with a scream of metal that made every tooth in the bus ring. The scaffolding showered bolts. A plank came down and missed the hatch by a foot. Hawke reached up and swatted it with the hammer like he was swatting a thought.
Sirens fattened ahead—four, five, a braid. Then a new sound entered, heavier, lower, a promise rather than a plea: rotors. A helicopter chopped the light into slices. It wasn't military—wrong paint, wrong shape—but it was a presence with a loud voice. It dropped a spotlight the size of a decision into the street and found the bus.
"Stay with us," a voice crackled from an external speaker, distorted by wind and the distance between intentions. "Get to the river. Do not stop in the open."
"Copy," the driver said, though the speaker wasn't for him.
The seedlet didn't like competition. It shot up to swat the helicopter out of the sky and discovered the pilot had seen the same movies everyone else had. The chopper stepped sideways in air like a matador and the beam ate nothing. The pilot swung the spotlight into the seedlet's face like a fistful of noon. The craft veered, offended, not hurt.
"Bridge ramp ahead," Peter called. "Left fork. Cars—lot of cars."
"Right fork goes under," Hawke said, calculating blindfolded. "Take under."
"Under isn't a road," the driver said.
"It's a service lane."
"How do you know that?"
"I don't," Hawke said. "Please."
The bus took right because please and because the left fork was a field of red taillights frozen in shock. The service lane was a concrete throat between the underside of the bridge and a retaining wall. It hadn't been meant for anything wider than a city truck, but the bus had stopped caring about permission.
They dropped into the shadow under the bridge. The world became gray and echo. The river smell came up cold and metallic with a stale harbor note. Ahead, the service lane bent, then bent again, and the light beyond it was a thin card slot of sky.
The helicopter peeled off to play chicken with the seedlet in open air. The big craft shifted, paying attention to whatever thing humans made when they insisted on movement.
The bus ate distance. The right rim spat sparks on concrete and left a bright breadcrumb trail. The kids were quiet now, that hush the body makes when it has spent the easy noises.
"End of lane," the driver said, calm-shot. The slit of light ahead resolved into a maintenance gate kinked half-open by some prior trucker's ambition. Beyond: a narrow ribbon of gravel along the river, chain-link fence, then water.
"Through the gate," Hawke said.
"That's not a bus-sized decision."
"Today it is."
The driver didn't debate because seconds argue by themselves. He centered the nose, lifted off the throttle, braced, and let the bumper do negotiations. The gate gave up with a squeal that put four new sins in the world. The bus lurched over the lip and found gravel that wanted to behave like marbles. They fishtailed once, twice, then held.
The seedlet knifed down between bridge supports, furious at losing the theater of streets. It took the shot it had wanted for blocks—a clean rake along the bus's flank from nose to tail.
Hawke didn't have steel left, only a cheap hammer and the hatch on hinges. He kicked the hatch open, leaned out into river wind and bridge shadow, and met the craft with the only weapon he had that wasn't an object: timing. When the beam mouth turned from promise to line, he shoved the hatch up into it. Light sheared and slipped, washed the chain-link with a white brush, and ate a stripe into fence instead of children. The fence screamed and fell toward the river in a loose wave, taking three warning signs with it.
The bus slid along the gap it had just made, studs showing through rubber on the right front, the rim now a grinder. The driver saw a service ramp ahead that stepped down into a maintenance lot where trucks slept under sodium lights.
"Ramp," Hawke said, already moving. He would have to get off the roof soon; the next turn would be tight enough that staying meant falling.
"Hawke," Peter called up, voice small and very not small. "Don't die."
He didn't answer with words. He hooked the hammer into his belt by the claw, planted both hands on the roof lip, and swung himself through the hatch like he'd been built for that aperture. He landed on the aisle runner in a crouch and took the bar of a seat back to bleed speed out of his legs without hitting a person.
The bus hit the ramp with a bounce. The lot opened, ringed with chain-link and freight. The river lay to their left like a long bruise. The big craft slid into view between bridge beams, lazy with its own gravity. Plates rolled across its gut, overlapping like scales. The throat in the middle found them again and began to gather.
"Under!" Hawke said, and the driver put the bus under an awning built to keep rain off pallets. Metal screamed as the roof kissed bolts. They were in shadow now so tight that even wrong light had to ask permission.
The kids held. Peter crouched by the hatch with his fingers on its hinge like he could pray through aluminum. Flash had his hand on the smallest kid's shoulder and didn't realize it.
The throat above deepened, patient. The big craft had learned their trick and decided to teach the concept of roof to itself. Light thickened into a spine.
The driver's knuckles were bone-white on the wheel. "Tell me where," he said, voice small the way a wrench is small—useful and real. "Tell me where to put this thing."
Hawke looked at the lot: a forklift asleep at the end of the awning, two stacks of pallets, a steel roll-up door half-open where a loading bay waited, black inside. The river fence gone along a run of twenty feet, open water beyond. No good choices.
He pointed at the loading bay. "There."
"That's a building," the driver said.
"It's a mouth," Hawke said. "Like everything tonight."
The driver turned the wheel. The bus angled toward the black.
Overhead, the big throat pinched in, almost ready. The shadow under the awning brightened like a lie. Hawke's burnt knuckles pulsed once, twice, and he set his feet without thinking.
The roll-up door rattled as the bumper met it, climbed it, and shouldered it up with an angry shriek. Darkness opened. The bus climbed the lip, nose first, heavy.
The big craft fired.