Even though she hadn't taken the same care with her appearance as she had the day she'd met with Lydecker, Max was confident she wouldn't be recognised, the simple act of tucking her hair away combined with a little dull makeup and a flawless fake Sector Pass being enough to get her by without much scrutiny.
Still, when the stumpy little cop she handed the I.D to took his time examining both her and the Sector Pass, she wanted to kick herself for not being more careful as she watched him trying to connect a familiar face with the proper memory.
After a moment, or maybe an hour, the cop shrugged his shoulders and handed the Pass back to her, the tired, annoyed look more common on a man in his position returning as he turned away from her. As Max pulled away, she looked back over her shoulder to be sure, and saw him shaking a little and raising his eyes to the sky, apparently cursing the unusually long winter. Before she rounded the nearest corner, Max saw him reach into the Guardhouse, his hand emerging a second later holding a coffee cup.
Get your head in the game, soldier!
The rebuke in her head came in Zack's voice, which she blocked out furiously, forcing all thoughts of where he might be now and what he must be doing from her mind. Despite the circus life had become, one thing Max still allowed herself to believe despite more likely scenarios was that Zack was happy, living oblivious to what he was, and to what others like him were going through.
The command itself remained, and Max's eyes darted to and fro in every direction, scanning all around for anything slightly out of the ordinary. All she saw around her, however, was perfectly ordinary, normal people going about their daily business. People darted in or out of shops; a bunch of kids who had apparently thought better of going to school sat on the bonnet of an old wreck outside a pool hall, thoroughly bored expressions on their faces as they tried to think of something better to do. On the corner outside a coffee shop an old man stood beside an amp, his voice booming around for quite some distance as he spoke authoritatively into the mike in one hand as he held up a bible in the other. What was rare was that instead of the usual fire and brimstone spiel most like him were so fond of, damning everyone around him to the point where almost nobody could pass by without thinking of turning a fire hose on the live amp just to see if it was as funny as the cartoons, this one instead asked what it was that they had all done that had condemned them all to hell. And he answered: nothing. Although Max doubted many would stop to listen throughout the chilly day, it still made a nice change from the 'You're all screwed because you're not me' routine most of the curb-side preachers attacked the populace with.
It was all so ordinary she almost felt compelled to grab the mike from the old man and scream at them all to ask what made them feel they were entitled to such normalcy.
Given the time of day, traffic on the roads was fairly light, and it didn't take long before Max had reached the second of three checkpoints on the way to Sector Four, where Logan was holed up these days. This time the guard barely looked at her or her Sector Pass, simply waving her on impatiently while checking his watch.
It happened a couple of minutes later, as she was turning onto Pike Street. For no reason at all other than the fact that she somehow knew something was wrong, she turned sharply, pulling hard on the breaks as she did so, cutting off a taxi cab as she careered off to the left instead of the right.
The cab driver stopped in the middle of the intersection, screaming at her as he stepped out of the cab. "What the hell is WRONG with y- oh, shit!" Glancing at the side mirrors on her bike, Max saw him dive head first back into the cab in the nick of time. Had he not, he might have been sent flying across the street along with his door when the first of four SUVs rocketed by, too quick to even attempt to swerve, unless they wanted to park upside-down in the lobby of a hotel on the corner.
Weaving around the slightly heavier traffic of the Downtown area, Max made her way downhill towards the Farmer's Market as she summed up the situation best she could. Whoever these guys were, they'd somehow been tracking her from the moment she left Terminal City – or maybe even before. That meant a possible spy within the assembled group of freaks, which didn't seem very likely, or some kind of electronic surveillance. The first thing she thought of was her phone. If somebody had tapped into the computer network in Terminal City, they could be reading the same signal her own people were using to track her movements. She'd have to ditch the phone pretty soon, though hopefully not before she got a chance to call in and let Alec and the others know what was going on.
Her next concern was how they even knew she was alive following the bombing. She'd considered beforehand that any semi-competent Alphabet Soup outfit might have seen through the deception, but this was too overt a move to be a government job. Also, if anyone in the media had even an inkling that she or Alec had survived the attack, it would be all over every network.
Outside of Terminal City – and excluding government-types – the only people who knew the truth were Logan, Original Cindy, Sketchy and his new girlfriend, Herbal, Normal, and Lydecker. It was doubtful the leak had come from Logan or any of her friends, although she supposed it was possible Logan's efforts to re-establish the Eyes Only Informant Net hadn't been as discreet as they could have been, and he'd been spotted. By keeping watch on Logan, the wrong people could have found out quite a lot… but then Sketchy's story never would have seen the light of day, and Logan would have suffered a very public death as a message to everyone who knew him as Eyes Only.
Melissa? She found herself unable to give serious thought to the girl Sketchy had landed being the traitor, despite having only met her once. For all Max knew, she could be the spy of the century, but for some reason her mind told her it couldn't be so – and, inexplicably, she suddenly knew where the blind trust was coming from. Kinship. Sketchy's new girlfriend was a Transgenic.
Realising that whoever this 'Melissa' was, she must have been working with Logan, Max allowed herself another brief flash of anger at this new deception before turning to the last, most obvious suspect. When she'd met him in the coffee shop, he'd kept his distance, knowing how easily he could have had his neck broken by Max, or been shot to pieces by any of those watching the meeting if he made a wrong move. All eyes had been on them the entire time, and after the meeting, two of the Transgenics who had been watching had followed Max for a time to make sure nobody else was following her. She considered the people now on her tail, and wondered what they had been up to when she'd met with Lydecker. If any of them had been close by, they wouldn't have gone unnoticed by Transgenic eyes.
Before she had time to give it much thought, she'd reached the end of the street, and was just outside the old market place. The Farmer's Market might be a decent place to lead these guys on a wild goose chase, she thought, unless they were directly tracking her, which she would soon determine. If they were, it had to be her phone, which could easily be tossed once those in Terminal City had been appraised of the situation.
Deciding this was as good a time as any to get a better measure of her pursuers' intentions, Max once again pulled down on the brakes, and spun a 180. As she screeched to a halt, the lead pursuit vehicle broke just as quickly, and she could make out the driver crying out in anger and alarm as he thought he was about to hit her.
Knowing they wanted her alive gave her an advantage she could definitely press. Being captured alive meant more cages, more labs, and who knows what else, and she decided to show them what she thought of that. Before the SUV had come to a standstill, Max had already leapt from the seat of her bike, caught hold of the rack on top of the vehicle's roof, and crashed through a side window into the back seat. The man in the passenger seat reacted quickly enough to draw a tazer, and was rewarded for his good reaction time with a crushed windpipe. He might still live, if he was lucky, but his companion's neck snapped like a pencil when Max caught him from behind and twisted.
Gunfire erupted from open windows of the other cars as they pulled up alongside, but by the time most of them had even taken aim she was already gone from the back of the car, a streak of black disappearing inside the market grounds.
"What WAS that?!" Gottlieb bellowed as he emerged from the last car. "Orders are to take her alive, not cut her to pieces and scoop what's left into a Ziploc bag!"
"My fault, sir," a tall black woman who looked like she could bench press him responded, stepping forward. "I saw what she did to Ivers and Rake, and I reacted without thinking. The rest just followed my lead."
"Not being able to think for themselves is no excuse," Gottlieb snapped impatiently. "She winds up dead, we're screwed." He turned to the two men in the first car. The one in the passenger seat shook convulsed violently, coughing up blood on the dashboard as he tried and failed to draw breath. The other was facing them, vacant expression gazing stupidly at nothing in particular. He'd died before he even knew he was in trouble. "Call an ambulance," Otto ordered. Turning to the woman who'd spoken before, he added, "Try and get him an airway, and stay with him until you hear sirens, then follow us inside."
"What's the quickest route to Sector Five?" Alec demanded as soon as he hung up the phone.
Mole and Joshua had already run to gather weapons, and Lin was organising a small group of X-4s, 5s, and a couple of 6s – eight in all, including herself and Alec. Lin objected to Alec's joining the group, as he would be too easily recognised, whereas she and the others had presumably never been spotted by a news camera, but Alec ignored her, and she went back to filling the team in on what little they knew from Max's call.
"We were tracking her by her cell phone signal, but now she's had to ditch it to avoid detection by hostiles," she told them. "We can expect this to make the news pretty soon, since gunfire has already been reported on the scene, and a 911 call for EMS just went through. People will already be guessing it's Manticore-related, and if anybody recognises Max's face, we can expect the full circus.
"Do no engage hostiles unless necessary – they shouldn't recognise us," she cast a quick glance at Alec, "so keep your weapons concealed and avoid a firefight unless absolutely necessary. Until the Police show up to evacuate the civilians, most won't leave even when the guys chasing Max run by waving a bunch of guns around. For the most part they'll just stop and stare. No Police or civilian casualties – if the cops engage, use non-lethal force only. The primary hostiles are assumed to be mercenaries, which means their lives are worth precisely dick, but gunfire in the area is likely to hit all the wrong people."
"We'll be cutting directly through Sector One into Five," Alec interrupted. "There's a heavy response coming from Municipal Police Headquarters in Sector Six, so going that way will be too much trouble. ETA to target zone fifteen minutes.
Since they couldn't exactly hop in a van and drive out the main exit, they were taking motorcycles down the tunnel and out through the house. "If Max is injured, and we need another transport option," Alec told Lin, "that's your baby."
"Got it. You should follow a little distance behind. If we're all at a checkpoint and somebody recognises you…"
"Right," Alec agreed reluctantly.
It was pistols and Micro-SMGs all around, and once all weapons were properly concealed, the team of seven took off down the narrow tunnel in a beeline. Two minutes later, after trying to get hold of Logan again with no result, Alec called over his shoulder to Mole, ordering an update if any major change in status occurred. Dix and Joshua were tuned into the two separate bands for Municipal and Sector Police, and Mole was observing the news channels on the stacked screens as Alec's motorcycle roared down the tunnel and disappeared from sight.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For anyone who's curious, as a reference for the layout of post-Pulse Seattle, I used a comment made by the mercenary team working with Lydecker in 'Meow', trying to track Max using the residue of the Red Series chip in her neck. "We've covered Sectors One through Eight and everything south of Seneca." Using this as a reference point, I searched out Seneca Street on a map of Seattle, and divided the area to the north into the various Sectors - Sector One being central, with the others spaced around it. This may be innaccurate according to some cannon I'm unfamiliar with, but I'm sticking with it.