headbutt, the only move—from watching the kids—that I reliably knew in a fight, and then it was just a mad tangle, him throwing me easily to the floor, the casters of the desk chair bumping into my ribs. But Johnny got a hand in, somehow, and drove his head against the side of the desk with a horrific crack. He slumped next to me, and we stared at each other for a moment before his eyes slowly, dreamily closed. I tried to get to my feet and found that I couldn’t.
Johnny pulled the chair away and stood panting while I got my back against the brick wall and clumsily walked myself back up. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I gasped. “Holy shit. What the hell was that? What is this, a kung-fu movie? How are you still alive?”
“Don’t jinx it!” she wheezed, quickly frisking herself. Bruises were already developing, and there was a small, dripping wound on her temple where a fingernail had caught her. She stooped and I strode over and hip-checked her.
“We are not travelling with a gun,” I said. “Especially a stolen cop gun.”
“But what if we need it?” She fished one out anyway, and—I assumed, having never seen it done in real life—put the safety on, then tucked it into the waistband of her khakis, where it promptly tried to pants her, exposing penguin-print panties that I looked away from in horror, too late. The fate of the world rested on someone in novelty underwear.
“I’m gonna need some eye bleach.”
“For what?”
“This is going to end so badly,” I said. “Come on, get me loose and let’s bail.”
She cracked the plastic ties on my wrist using a boxcutter from the desk, and then went for the door, where we both stopped. I bit down a rising scream as blood returned to my dead fingers, shaking my wrists to distract myself from the pain.
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” she murmured.
“Plan B?”
Plan B wasn’t as terrifying as I had expected—I was thinking air ducts, squeezing along past whirring fans, like in Aliens or something. But we simply stacked boxes till we had stepped shelves high enough to reach the high, small window that led outside. We reluctantly played rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first.
The cop was stirring and moaning by the time I managed to get the painted-shut clasp open. I could have fainted in relief. When you knock someone out for more than a couple of seconds, that’s bad shit. We would go from whatever minor crime faking a passport entailed to a manslaughter charge and—whatever came with that. Helping or whatever.
“Move it!” Johnny hissed, as if reading my mind. “I don’t want to hit him again.”
“No, because you might kill him this time,” I muttered. The window had one of those levers on the side that could, in theory, prop it open, but it was bent and not working. I let out a few other choice phrases as Johnny started to mount the boxes behind me, her next words drowned out by banging on the office door. I whirled just in time to see her start, lose her footing, and fall the few feet to the tiles, the gun sliding out of her waistband. It hit butt-first and went off, so loud I yelped, a puff of brick dust floating down onto my hair.
We were still staring at the hole in the wall, a foot from my face, when the cop finally either unlocked the door or busted the lock. Then he stared at it for a moment too.
“Get down, little dog; and you, too,” he said sharply, a youngish guy, thin, with sharp black facial hair, as if it had been drawn on with a marker. “You are being moved to Station Zoor. For... protection.”
“Please, protect me from her,” I murmured as he approached us with another set of zip ties.
“But that’s halfway across town,” Johnny said, frozen in what seemed like shock as he bound her wrists again.
“Very good. Move.” He glanced down at the unconscious cop, then looked up again, at me. I shrugged.
“You don’t understand,” Johnny said. “We can’t.”
“Uh huh.”
Shit. I didn’t know how big the city was, but her worry couldn’t be good. The time to transfer us there, whatever time she needed to break us out, whatever time to get back to the library...
“Who gave the order to move us?” she said.
“Move, I said.” He still hadn’t pointed his own gun at us; it seemed inert, heavy,