have spat, but she wasn’t about to lift her helmet aside. “I’m not scared of you, Nick.”
“You’re not scared of much.” He smiled, all smooth. “It’s part of your charm.”
She turned her head, staring away west across the sun-soaked desert and the roofs of abandoned houses, abandoned lives. Nevada had always had a way of making ghost towns out of metropolises. “What happens if I say no?”
“I was hoping you weren’t going to ask that, sweetheart,” he said. He reached to lay a hand on her right hand where it rested on the throttle. The bike growled, a high, hysterical sound, and Nick yanked his hand back. “I see you two made friends.”
“We get along all right,” Harrie said, patting the Kawasaki’s gas tank. “What happens if I say no?”
He shrugged and folded his arms. “You won’t finish your run.” No threat in it, no extra darkness in the way the shadow of his hat brim fell across his face. No menace in his smile. Cold fact, and she could take it how she took it.
She wished she had a piece of gum to crack between her teeth. It would fit her mood. She crossed her arms, balancing the Kawasaki between her thighs. Harrie liked bargaining. “That’s not the deal. The deal’s no spills, no crashes, no breakdowns, and every run complete on time. I said I’d get these cells to Sacramento in eight hours. You’re wasting my daylight; somebody’s life could depend on them.”
“Somebody’s life does,” Nick answered, letting his lips twist aside. “A lot of somebodies, when it comes down to it.”
“Break the deal, Nick—fuck with my ride—and you’re in breach of contract.”
“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”
She laughed, then, outright. The Kawasaki purred between her legs, encouraging. “There’s always time to mend my ways—”
“Not if you die before you make it to Sacramento,” he said. “Last chance to reconsider, Angharad, my princess. We can still shake hands and part friends. Or you can finish your last ride on my terms, and it won’t be pretty for you—” the Kawasaki snarled softly, the tang of burning oil underneath it “—or your bike.”
“Fuck off,” Harrie said, and kicked her feet up as she twisted the throttle and drove straight at him, just for the sheer stupid pleasure of watching him dance out of her way.
Nevada had been dying slowly for a long time: perchlorate-poisoned groundwater, a legacy of World War Two titanium plants; cancer rates spiked by exposure to fallout from aboveground nuclear testing; crushing drought and climactic change; childhood leukemia clusters in rural towns. The explosion of the PEPCON plant in 1988 might have been perceived by a sufficiently imaginative mind as God’s shot across the bow, but the real damage didn’t occur until decades later, when a train carrying high-level nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain storage facility collided with a fuel tanker stalled across the rails.
The resulting fire and radioactive contamination of the Las Vegas Valley proved to be a Godsend in disguise. When the War came to Nellis Air Force Base and the nuclear mountain, Las Vegas was already as much a ghost town as Rhyolite or Goldfield—except abandoned not because the banks collapsed or the gold ran out, but because the dust that blew through the streets was hot enough to drop a sparrow in midflight, or so people said.
Harrie didn’t know if the sparrow story was true.
“So.” She muttered into her helmet, crouched over the Kawasaki’s tank as the bike screamed north by northwest, leaving eerie, abandoned Las Vegas behind. “What do you think he’s going to throw at us, girl?”
The bike whined, digging in. Central city gave way to abandoned suburbia, and the highway dropped to ground level and straightened out, a long narrow strip of black reflecting the summer heat in mirage silver.
The desert sprawled on either side, a dun expanse of scrub and hardpan narrowing as the Kawasaki climbed into the broad pass between two dusty ranges of mountains. Harrie’s dosimeters clicked steadily, counting marginally more rads as she roared by the former nuclear testing site at Mercury at close to two hundred kph. She throttled back as a sad little township—a few abandoned trailers, another military base and a disregarded prison—came up. There were no pedestrians to worry about, but the grated metal cattle guard was not something to hit at speed.
On the far side, there was nothing to slow her for fifty miles. She cranked her music up and dropped her head behind the fairing, and redlined her