fan on the left-hand arm of the sofa was turned to the right, causing the whole contraption to veer in that direction. And almost collide with a floating Pot Noodle Shop in the process.
“That is why,” Rashid said dryly.
“I do not know how to drive one of these,” Louis-Cesare informed him, just before we were bumped by a careening taxi, which resulted in us scraping along a levitating sidewalk for half a block before I could get the sticky control mechanism to put us back into what passed for a road.
“Neither does she,” Rashid replied, holding on white knuckled to the side of the rickshaw.
He said something else to Bahram, but I didn’t understand since it was in Arabic. That was probably just as well. My backseat driver had been kibitzing ever since we left the rent-a-rickshaw place, and I was getting tired of it.
I didn’t clap back, however, because I was busy keeping us alive. The rickshaws were kept in the air by standard levitation charms, but that was the only thing about them that was standard. They were powered by huge fans in the back, like the ones on airboats, and they were dangerous as hell.
Ours had a safety cage over the wildly whirling blades, but plenty of those around us did not, and there weren’t a lot of road rules in Hong Kong. That had always been true, but it was especially so now, as the usual land arteries had been mostly severed by damage from the battle, and people had been forced to take to the skies. That had resulted in a much more crowded airspace than I had seen before.
And the damned pirates didn’t help.
“Not today,” Louis-Cesare said, and brought up an arm, knocking a would-be thief back onto his flying rattletrap.
It was a casual gesture, but it must have been damaging, because it really pissed off the thief. He was a vampire, if a very stupid one, who didn’t bother to check out the power signature of the guy he was attacking. The rattletrap swerved away, and then abruptly swerved back, and the bastards actually tried to board us!
Bahram and Louis-Cesare made quick work of them, which was good as I was busy accepting the fact that we were lost.
“God damn it,” I muttered, and fished the map out of my jeans again.
I’d had the guy at the rickshaw place print it out for me, because my phone’s tiny screen was hard to read, but it didn’t help much. Especially not here. I stared around, looking for a reading light, and wondering where all the animated ads had gone.
Once upon a time, the skies would have been full of transparent fish swimming across the darkness, their glowing sides advertising sushi bars and sashimi places, or if said fish was also wearing a monocle, possibly fish and chips shops. There would have been cuties in miniskirts waving from the sides of buildings, trying to lure people into clubs and karaoke bars; fake, neon rain pattering down for half a block, only to have a swirl of branded umbrellas come flying to the rescue; and actual, physical ads jumping off their billboards to harangue passersby.
You haven’t really lived until you’ve been chased down a sidewalk by a human-sized bowl of noodles that is brandishing chopsticks menacingly.
But there was nothing like that now. There were still billboards scattered around, what looked like hundreds of them. But most contained script only, without an image in sight. And many were completely empty, with just a few, ragged pieces of paper fluttering in the breeze.
It made me wonder why anybody would bother to remove old ads in a time of war, but there was no one to ask, at least not until we figured out where we were going.
I finally parked us by a huge, neon yellow sign advertising beer. It was a human-style LED variety, of the type that was still spotting the darkness here and there. But while it was bright, it kept switching things up every minute or so, sending alternately yellow, blue, pink and aqua tinted light dancing over the car, and making the map almost impossible to read. And that was before a passing rickshaw clipped us and sent us spinning into the stream of traffic again.
Rashid gave a sharp little scream when I abruptly dropped us the hell out of there and looked for another bolt hole. That wasn’t easy as my requirements were: no crumbling buildings, no neon, and no pirates, which left