could see, and along the route Levona had visualized. Maybe fast enough and light enough not to trigger the grid.
Throughout the couple of hours it took them to find the opening of an abandoned culvert, Levona kept her extended senses on high alert, felt herself sweating through her shirt and jacket. By the time she reached the broken concrete exit and crawled through dirt into a gully in a park, her nerves had frayed enough that she curled into a ball and breathed until her heartbeat calmed. She closed her eyes but heard Pizi’s commentary.
Stranger, shorter grass. It’s softer on My paws! Ooooh, toys! Pieces of paper litter, chased, pounced upon and shredded. Yuck, doesn’t taste good.
Fur sliding by her nose. Are you ready, Levona? We should go, into the lights and the streets and the peoples.
They’d hit the city in the early hours of a Saturday evening. Yeah, people would be out. Levona rolled to her feet. Time to change her appearance so she could fit in, from mountain survivor woman to city dweller.
As an outsider she needed to hook up with a contact of the psi-mutant community to learn the news, what areas of the city were more dangerous than usual, and when they anticipated the next mob attacks on the ghetto. Most of all, to figure out how to get passage onto the starship for Pizi and herself.
She’d been self-indulgent in taking that break. She couldn’t afford many more moments like that. Think next time.
Moving to the darkest shadows of evergreens, she stripped and used a cheap cleanse-cloth to wipe down.
She dressed in her other set of clothes, slightly newer, more citified, and added a hat that would partially hide her face. Used lingering febrile energy for a psi-spell to gather humidity from the air and clean her previous clothes of dirt and grime and sweat and chemicalized mud. Another spell to whip them dry.
She undid the string tie holding back her curly hair and fluffed waves-curls-friz. She wore her hair long to conceal her features.
Levona clamped her forged id bracelet around her right wrist and activated it, stood still to see if the update would out her as an illegal. The band held a warning spell that discreetly heated if anything went wrong.
All okay. For now. She’d make sure just to lurk around, not go anywhere or do anything that required the id to be scanned or shown or verified in any way.
They moved out. Levona and Pizi slid from shade to shadow and blackness to shade … through quiet neighborhoods of people afraid to come out during failing sunlight and falling dark. Strolled to a busier area of a city, not quite the closest one to the psi barrio, but one where mutants had always kept a low presence.
People sauntered on the street, glanced at her and away, and she realized her clothes appeared out of fashion and downright shabby. Nothing to do about that right now. No one seemed to notice Pizi, a relief, but Levona wondered why not. She and the little cat were still discovering Pizi’s psychic talents. As far as mutations went, Pizi had jumped a few generations, was an outlier.
And Levona’s own gifts expanded with the interaction of the cat to prod them.
The heavy smell of too many people, too much tech, filtered into her lungs, the rise in ambient noise thrummed in her ears, and the pure psychic buzz of people both irritated her nerves and excited them. Instead of being in the mountains alone, she’d joined other humans in a large city. She swallowed, realizing that though she had no family and no good friends, she’d missed people, been lonely.
Finally she reached the small business district and the correct street. Here she could find out how to connect with the psi mutant resistance. The mutants had bought the ship, she and Pizi were mutants, and she wanted on board.
As a safety precaution for both of them, Pizi split off to wander on her own and thrillingly look around.
Because Levona didn’t know how many previous images the gov might have of her in their databases, she took out a floppy brimmed hat — always in fashion to confound the gov cameras and observers — and let it droop around her face, with a carefully constructed upcurve that didn’t block her vision.
With each rambling step, she pushed anxiety into the ground so she’d appear casual. Stopping at a food window, she dropped a bill for coffee, getting a standard disintegrating