foundation soaked in. She picked up the clear brown nail polish and carefully painted a thin coat over the picture on her PID.
Even when she tilted the card toward the descending sunlight, it didn't make any difference. There was no way the brown-haired, white-skinned girl in the picture could be taken for mixed race. The police would look at an ID card whose owner was visiting a prisoner in their jail. Particularly if they couldn't run it on the net.
Kelsa wiped off the still-wet polish, and after a moment's thought poured a small amount of polish into a cup, then squeezed a few drops of temp color out of the bottom of one of the packets and stirred. It certainly got darker.
She painted the mixture over the plastic card and held it up to the light once more. The blue backdrop had turned a sickly green, but there was no standard background color, so that didn't matter. The severely braided hair looked darker - it could have been black. The skin was darker too, not beautiful mixie gold, but muddy gray. Still, that could have been caused by bad lighting. PID photos were notoriously hideous, anyway.
Kelsa looked into the bike's mirror. The foundation had sunk into her skin, as advertised. It wasn't as dark as she'd hoped, but the color was even and looked surprisingly natural. Her mouth and nose weren't right, but she knew several mixie kids who'd drawn paler skin and Caucasian features out of the genetic lottery. She didn't look like a white girl anymore, and her PID photo looked more or less like her.
She quickly cleaned up the color packets. She wanted Charlie to get well out of town before the police tried to call him, but she had another task to perform, and she wasn't sure how long it would take.
After a final check to make sure the dark coating on her PID was dry, Kelsa biked toward town.
Her father had liked taking his bike down small, unnamed roads, so Kelsa knew what she was looking for. Eventually she spotted the double track of an off-pavement service vehicle heading into the hills. It could have been a forest service access road, or even a loggers' trail, but for once she got lucky. Only half a mile from the pavement, she crested a rise and saw the town's com tower.
Surrounded by a chainlink fence, with a locked gate.
Kelsa took off her helmet and pulled out the bike's tool kit. Her conscience might flinch, but if you were planning a jailbreak it was stupid to worry about vandalism. And at least there were no cameras. Places like this relied on seclusion for their security. Seclusion, and the fact that there was no reason for anyone to sabotage a small-town satellite link.
The wire cutters were designed for the bike's thin electrical wires, and by the time she'd finished cutting a gap in the fence her hands ached. But once she was inside the fence, the screwdriver worked just fine to pry the cover off the master board.
Kelsa had no idea what the blinking lights indicated, what the various wires and circuit boards did. It would be nice to do something clever, to make the damage look like an accident ... if she'd been a trained electrician and had the tools she needed and all the time in the world.
If she couldn't be clever, Kelsa decided, she might as well go for maximum damage. She was committed now.
She ripped out thin plastic circuit boards, leaned them against one of the tower's metal legs, and stamped on them to break them. Then she cut every wire she could reach. By the time she finished, all the lights were dark. But there was one final test.
Kelsa pulled out her com pod and tried to access the net.
No signal.
Good enough. Now she'd better get out of here before the repair crew arrived. Kelsa reached the paved road in minutes and headed into town, keeping well within the speed limit. There was no way for anyone she passed to know she was a vandal ... and planning a jailbreak.
The police station was on the main street, marked with a sign. It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, even after centuries of independence and almost two centuries after the advent of the automobile.
Kelsa parked her bike in the lot and walked through the front door, like any law-abiding citizen. The police couldn't know that her heart was hammering against her ribs. There were only