Gravel hissed under the ruined front rim and the river kept pace like a black conveyor. The helicopter's spotlight floated ahead, never quite on them, painting a ribbon of pale on the service lane and taking it away before a beam could follow it. Wind off the water brought metal and cold and the breath of something burning upstream.
"Everyone low," the driver said, steady, the way you tell people there's a step they can't see.
Bodies stayed small on the floor. Seat backs made a forest of vinyl hills. Peter moved as a count with legs, lips ticking, fingertips touching heads that tried to vanish and couldn't. Flash had planted himself opposite the rear door, one knee wedged against a seat base to turn himself into a brake if the bus forgot how to be a bus. He looked wrong in the best way—no audience, no joke to land, just a kid who had chosen a spot and kept it.
Hawke gripped the top of a seat with his bandaged hand and rode the shake as the right rim struck a seam and jittered. The burn bit when it had something to polish itself against, then dulled when the road smoothed. Somewhere under the noise, a bead moved once inside him and settled. Not a gift. A position.
"North," the bullhorn voice said from outside, shredded by wind and rotor slap. "Stay in shadow. Do not break out to the open."
The lane tucked under a low run of iron—bridge girders in a lattice that cut the night into a grid. Pigeons that should have been asleep hopped from beam to beam, brains refusing to accept new rules. A seedlet slid along the river at speed, wake V-ing in the light like a bright wound. It didn't see the bus; or it did and decided the moral satisfaction of raking an empty lane wasn't worth a turn.
"Front right's going," the driver said, an apology to physics. The rim thumped and threw sparks in a steady metronome. "I can hold it."
"You can," Hawke said, and believed him.
Peter popped up to the lower edge of the safety hatch, the way a diver finds a window and lets his eyes be a periscope. He flinched when river wind flexed the rubber along the frame and then adjusted to it. "Two blocks," he called, "a chain-link swing gate. Half open. After that, looks like a boat launch. Slippery."
"Launch will drop us to the river," the driver said.
"Lane continues left past it," Peter said. "Narrow."
"Thread it," Flash muttered, the word making a small circle back to them.
Hawke moved forward, using seat tops as handholds to keep his weight from throwing the bus new problems. The kids nearest the aisle watched him the way small animals watch weather—curiosity without responsibility. He checked the front windshield where spider cracks webbed the upper corner; the lower pane was a film of city and fog. The wipers dragged and smeared more story than they cleared.
The gate appeared—a rectangle of chain-link pitched like a crooked grin. A padlock dangled snapped on one leaf. The other leaf sagged, its hinge bolts pulled long from the post like bad dental work. The driver did not slow in any way that would invite an argument from whatever might be above.
"Left leaf," Hawke said, judging the angle. "Brush it. Don't fight it."
The bus shouldered the hanging chain-link with the indifference of a large animal meeting a thorn bush. Metal skittered along the side windows; the kids flinched and then didn't because flinching had to end somewhere. The right rim jerked in the gravel at the boat launch lip and then found the narrow continuation—a band of cracked asphalt shoved between riprap and warehouse wall.
The helicopter's spotlight swept the river, then the lane ahead, then off them again. Somewhere over the blocks inland, the big craft's throat pulled light in slow breaths that made the air thick enough to taste. A building failed with a noise like a piano thrown down a stairwell. The bus ran.
"Okay," Peter said to nobody and everybody. "Okay."
"Talk me through it," the driver said.
"One dumpster dead ahead," Peter said. "Angle right two feet. Lamp post at the corner—cut early. The lane pinches—three parked service trucks. The second has its back end in our path. You can kiss it or move it."
"Moving it," the driver said, which meant he was trusting that a school bus had learned bulldozer as a second language.
They kissed it first anyway—an angry metal smooch at bumper height that made the truck lurch like it had been woken rudely. The bus rode the bounce and returned to itself. The right rim screamed thin and metallic, then shut up as the driver straightened.
"Underpass," Peter said a breath later, head canted to keep the hatch rim from taking his eyebrow. "Low. Wet. Clearance says eleven, but the sign at the last one lied."
"We're lower than eleven," the driver said without looking up. He lifted his chin anyway, human reflex.
"Lights down," Hawke said, and the driver killed the interior glow. The aisle became a soft black with heads as darker shapes. The only light was the thin dawn faked by the helicopter ahead and the wrong silver bleeding under the city's skin.
They slid into the underpass where the river's breath lives on damp stone. The bus roof scraped a sign at the entrance—WARNING—something—HEIGHT—something—and the scrap wrote a new word across their roof in sparks and flakes. Everyone inside lowered themselves the inch their bodies had to spare, superstition or math, it didn't matter. The world tightened in a sound like a long zipper.
Hawke took the first row and braced his forearm against the bar where a stop request cord should have been. The bandage wicked the damp and cooled his skin. He listened for anything under the bus that was no longer attached properly and heard only the steady murder of the front right.
Halfway through, the tunnel brightened. Hawke's scalp crawled. Light didn't belong under here. Peter saw it too and went still.
"Stop," Hawke said.
The driver didn't stop, he bled speed until the bus crept. Hawke leaned to the glass. Ahead, where a ventilation opening should have been a dark square, a pod had pried the grate and latched itself to the mouth. Its stalk probed in, blinked, and painted a little coin of wrong light on the opposite wall like it was taking samples of this new animal.
"Peter," Hawke said, "hammer."
Peter had already pressed it into his palm. "Low, right," he whispered, as if a camera cared about volume.
Hawke slid the front door, stepped into wet air so close the bus's front bumper was his second spine, and let the dark come back around him. The pod's lens peered down. It had the innocent persistence of a one-eyed insect. He didn't throw the hammer—throwing gave it an angle to read. He reached up and hooked the claw into the pod's underlip and used the bus's forward drift as his friend. The metal lip of the vent did the rest, shearing the pod from its foot with a sound like a coin hitting tile.
It bounced twice and sparked in a way that declared itself broken. Hawke dragged it out of the lane with his shoe without stepping past the bus's nose. He slid back inside. The driver exhaled through teeth. The bus rolled.
They came out of the underpass into wind again and a slice of view across water. Manhattan was a bruise with stitches. The seam in the sky went diagonal against all the good lines. On the Queens side, the river road ahead lifted to cross a snaggle of tracks and then dropped, doing city-owner things. The spotlight moved. A voice on the bullhorn went staticky and harsh—north, keep north—and then lost to rotor noise.
"Eyes right," Peter said. "Seedlet paralleling. It hasn't committed. It might."
"It will," Flash said, not with fatalism, just as someone who had been shoved by a universe and learned its habits. He twisted in his seat to glance back where the windows let the river in at shoulder height. The seedlet's glow crawled along the water like a bad star.
The road pinched where a concrete plant had spilled piles of aggregate onto its own life. The bus bumped onto a line of packed gravel beside an orange mesh fence that had never wished to matter. The fence tore and swatted like a useless flag. The right rim skated on larger stones with a sound like a scream with sore throat. The driver hauled the wheel, and the bus obeyed because pretending not to would have killed everyone.
The seedlet nudged closer. A long daisy mouth yawned under its belly, iris turning.
"Left," Hawke said.
"Into the plant?" the driver said.
"Into their geometry."
It sounded like nothing. It was something. The bus nosed between two beige mounds like powder dunes. Steel chutes angled above, a dinosaur skeleton half assembled. Dust sheets hung, heavy and damp, and made the path seem narrower than it was. The seedlet followed because predators like lines.
The bus broke into a yard where cement trucks slept in a ring, some with drums tilted skyward like open mouths. The water made a low slap at the docks beyond. A stack of rebar lay like dropped pencils between two stacks of pallets. The seedlet took the corner wide to bring its ribbon to bear for an easy, cocky rake across the roof.
"Brake," Hawke said, and the driver stomped. The bus's momentum shoved weight into the front suspension and the nose dipped a head's worth. The beam squealed across six inches of air where the roof had planned to be and wrote a hot rune across the drum of a cement mixer instead. The mixer took offense and bellowed as a strap parted and the drum listed. The seedlet drifted, adjusting. Hawke grabbed the emergency latch on the nearest hand-cranked yard gate and yanked. The gate leapt on its rollers and slid out like a giant's drawer.
"Through," Hawke said, pointing at a slit between trucks that led back to the river lane. The driver threaded it with an inch on each side and a promise. The seedlet corrected again, slow to commit because of pride and angle; then the drum the beam had kissed let go and toppled, metal-on-concrete, half full of water, heavy with indifference. It rolled into the yard on a course that didn't know them and almost killed them by accident. The seedlet banged it with its flank, annoyed, and kinked its angle—just enough.
The bus shot the seam and found the river again. The seedlet popped out behind them with something like a sulk and a little more hate.
"Underpass in thirty," Peter said, voice flat, managing his own panic by making it math. "Short, low. Then the lane goes behind a warehouse. The fence is broken—there's a cut. We can make it."
The helicopter's light went out for a breath, then returned a block ahead, thin again. Somewhere, new rotors stitched night to different night. The big pressure to the south tugged and let go and tugged again, like a giant testing the quality of the city's seams.
They hit the short tunnel and rubbed their roof on old graffiti. The bus came out to find a chain-link stretch with a gap where a blue sedan had already cut it for them. The bumper wore an imprint of its choice. The bus didn't ask permission. It took the gap and a fender flare squealed like an animal with grievance.
A cluster of people in construction vests froze in the wedge of light between warehouse and river. One of them lifted a hand that wanted to mean stop and then turned it into something like benediction when he saw the kids' eyes flash in the bus windows. Another pointed up. Hawke didn't need the gesture. He heard it in his teeth.
The big craft had slid north by a block, belly flexing, throat beginning another polite slow inhale to write a new answer on the world. Shadows under the bridge got shorter with a suctions' logic.
"Next cover?" the driver said.
Peter scanned, fast-fast. "Boat house," he said. "Low roof. Door's half up. You can get the nose under and—" He stopped. "And it's full of boats."
"We're taller than boats," the driver said.
"Go," Hawke said.
They made the door with maybe a hand to spare. The roof kissed a bolt and the bolt turned their shared breath into a wince at the same second. The seedlet chose then to lift and try to pour heat across the door. Heat licked the top of the roll-up and made the metal cry like it had emotions. The driver tucked the nose under the low eave and held there, half in, half out, engine a low complaint.
Inside, fiberglass hulls nested like bird bodies. Oars hung in orderly suffering. A faded poster showed a lake, calm and lying. The air smelled of gasoline and lake water despite the river being ten steps away. The beam washed the edge again and Hawke could see the paint blister along the eave in a neat little line of loss.
"We can't stay," Peter said.
"We aren't," Hawke said. He shoved off the seat back and went forward. "Driver—when I say, straight and then left, tight. There's a pedal boat chained near the ramp—hit it with the corner."
"That a plan?" the driver asked.
"It's a sentence," Hawke said. "Sometimes those work."
He threw open the door and stepped into heat that tried to be a wall and was only a curtain, for the second. He took the chain on the pedal boat in both hands and pulled it sideways until the link bit the corner of the bus's bumper, then nodded up at the driver through the corner of the glass.
"Now."
The driver gave it a breath of throttle and a steady hand. The bumper shouldered the boat into the world. The chain shrieked around the post it had thought was its forever. The seedlet angled to take the moving rectangle, shot its ribbon—and Hawke lifted the pedal boat's blunt nose and tipped it so the light ate the plastic instead. The boat went bright and ugly and parted like melon. The beam stuttered to spit heat again; by then the bus was through and left, skimming the launch's lip, back on the narrower band of asphalt where river meets warehouse wall.
Peter slid the door with both hands and then put his shoulder to it as if muscle could keep the world small. He found Hawke's sleeve as if to count him and then let go.
"North," the bullhorn said, voice now somewhere overhead. "Stay on the lane. Evac at Pier—" the rest chopped in rotor teeth—"—ty yards."
"Copy," the driver said, because saying it gave the hands something to do.
Pier something showed ahead as a row of square shadows and a strip of sodium light that had not yet been stolen. Figures moved there—high-vis vests, dark jackets, white helmets—human geometry. Between the bus and the pier, the lane ran under a loading crane that held a container swung half in air, half on a cable, frozen by the idea of gravity negotiating with it.
The seedlet, insulted by everything, came again on a fast low track, wake ripping past pilings. Its iris yawed. It meant to rake the bus on the open stretch before they could tuck under the crane.
"Brake in three," Hawke said. "Two."
"On your one," the driver said, and did it.
The seedlet spat. The beam wrote a line across the lane exactly where the windshield had planned to be. Heat lapped the nose and went to go ruin the side of a warehouse. The bus's suspension rebounded. The driver fed throttle again and they shot under the crane's steel. The container above shifted the sound of the river. A long scream of cable spoke tension. Gravity chose a side.
The cable sang itself an octave lower and the container dropped the thickness of a thumb. A man on the pier yelled and ran, then remembered all running here was small and stopped to be a signal with his arms instead. The helicopter's light skated the water and made a clock of the crane's shadow across the lane.
"Hard right," Peter said, then realized there was no right, there was only a new fence angled wrong. "—no, left-left—now—"
The bus obeyed both mistakes at once and turned into something that would have been a crash if the lane had not widened by three inches at exactly that spot. They skimmed a piling, kissed a stack of pallets, and stole a corner of the fence, dragging it three feet before it remembered it was a fence and let go.
Pier men in vests pounded forward and then stopped themselves short of the lane because you don't run into the teeth of a machine. One of them pointed the white halo of a flashlight into the bus and flinched at the flash of eyes that had never seen this room and never should have. He shouted something that wasn't words and became a bridge with his arms anyway.
"Evac," the bullhorn said, now above and behind. "Hold cover. Move quick. Do not look up."
Nobody looked up. Everybody did. The seam wore the width of a promise and the belly of the craft went slate-dark at the edges like it had decided day lived inside it.
The bus shot the last twenty yards across skinned gravel. The rim threw a ribbon of sparks that made its own weak meteor shower. The driver lined the nose on the mouth of the pier where a low awning turned the world into a throat and never once glanced at the fancy of putting tire on river.
Hawke planted his burned hand on the stanchion and let the bus carry him the last yard into shadow. Peter's breath hitched in and out and in, keeping count of staying alive. Flash had his hands flat on two small backs and his face a little sideways so the kids would see cheek, not eyes.
The bus's nose ducked under the awning. Hands reached. Voices said things that were probably instructions and were really prayers. The helicopter's light moved off the river and away so it wouldn't frame them, would only paint what was ahead.
Behind them, the crane protested something loudly; cable slurred and corrected. The seedlet cut a vicious arc to pounce on the pier mouth and met a hail of bright sparks that weren't sparks at all—someone on the pier had a tool that chewed metal and spit light, official and loud. The craft veered because even predators dodge random if you throw it with conviction.
The driver set the brake as if the pedal were a throat. The bus sighed and became a room again. For the three heartbeats Hawke let himself count, nothing moved but the river and the breath in the aisle.
Then the big craft found them again. The pressure changed; the light behind the city pinched into white thought. The awning above his head vibrated as if remembering storms. A voice on the pier shouted a name that had the shape of a rank.
"Off," Hawke told the driver. "Not out. Off." He put a palm on the door lever. "We don't give them a shape to paint."
The driver nodded. His forehead touched the wheel for the length of a blink and then he sat up, hands where they needed to be to lift the latch and make a mouth for the kids to flow through if the world demanded it.
On the river, the seedlet pivoted like a fish deciding either you or the shadow next to you is food. Above the roofs, the seam brightened, choosing its next sentence. The helicopter's rotor thumped a new pattern that meant motion.
A man in a dark jacket leaned into the door space with a voice that didn't shake. "Stay put," he said. "We're going to pull you into deeper cover. When I say move, you move. You do not let go of whoever you grab. Copy?"
"Copy," Hawke said, and felt the bead inside him slide one notch, right when the river wind turned colder, as if the city had just held its breath.