22 - Nico
Nico ran into the hardscape triangle between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, past a news ticker running along the curve of a building facade that read:
#ALIENSAREREAL S CIENTISTS P REDICT I MPACT
He darted through crowds posing for Armageddon selfies with the car-sized ice sculptures representing all twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac.
BAMP—PHSSST!
Nico lurched left, away from a whoosh of air close by his ear.
BAMP—KHUTCH!
He turned to see what had just missed him. A red dart, two inches long, stuck in the neck of the ice horse right behind him.
Nico ran, past an ice goat and monkey. A rooster was next, but white steam rose from a striped stack ten yards to the right. He dashed toward it.
BAMP—PING!
Nico rolled into a somersault, just as another red-tipped dart ricocheted off the red-and-white stack inches from him and skittered to the street, stopping an arm’s reach away.
Nico snagged it as he got up, running southeast past all the abandoned cars on Broadway. Was it poison? Why not a bullet? He’d thought they were shooting bullets. Nico stashed the dart in his jacket pocket and ran an irregular zigzag to be a harder target.
He passed the Times Square TV studio with its street-front window they used for live crowd shots and kept going.
Another block and Nico raced past a street actor dressed as the Statue of Liberty.
There was a ransacked clothing store on the right.
He could get a different color jacket to try to throw off whoever was shooting at him, but the whole storefront was glass—they’d see him in there.
And he didn’t want to get cornered, or get anyone else hurt.
The main subway station for Times Square was a half block ahead at Forty-Second Street.
Nico dashed down the stairs, tore past the turnstiles and raced back under Broadway, coming up on the east side.
He paused halfway up, looking through the stairway’s iron railing and people’s legs hurrying past, watching to see if the shooter followed him into the subway.
So many tourists. A lot of them losing their shit, others with no clue anything sinister was going on… Except for the alien invasion they were all expecting.
One guy was running with purpose down the sidewalk Nico had just been on, and something about him seemed familiar.
Baseball cap low on his face, hand stashed inside a jacket that could easily hide some kind of pneumatic dart gun.
He looked over his left shoulder as he ran down the subway stairs and Nico saw his face.
Person of Interest from Goldstone, Noble One!
They were trying to get rid of Nico. Incapacitate him? Drug him? He’d have to get Byron to find out what was in the dart.
The instant Noble One disappeared underground Nico was out and sprinting to Sixth Avenue. He turned north at the corner, pressing flat against the building wall. He snuck a glance back. Sam wouldn’t think a subway fake-out was Bond-worthy, but it looked like it had worked this time.
Sam.
Godeane’s out-of-control department was behind all this alien fuckery, and they were going after Sam and their friends at the apartment.
So Nico couldn’t go back there. But it also meant Godeane wasn’t involved.
At least in that part of it. Nico knew that much.
She would never betray him and Sam like that.
But was Sam okay?
Nico had to get a message to him.
Because being hunted like this was bullshit.
It was time to play offense.
Nico didn’t have his phone, and didn’t know how to get back on the secure audio channel Ari had set up—though he still wondered how secure it was if they’d tracked him through that. Or maybe Noble One just tailed him visually from Columbus Circle through Times Square.
He pulled out the controller for the bee drones. He still had it, and his hummingbird, but no bees—like they’d planned if anything went wrong, the bees had gone to a single tree in Central Park, so Byron could recover them there.
Nico pulled out the hummingbird drone and pressed A CTIVATE on the controller.
The hummingbird drone didn’t move—he hadn’t changed the controller over and it was still set to bee drones.
But a small buzz of rapidly flapping wings came from somewhere close—on him?
In his clothes? Nico searched, and there under his jacket collar was the queen bee drone.
Wings beating at 230 times a second like a real bee, it flew out and hovered over the controller, waiting for his orders.
A plan started forming in Nico’s mind.
That TV studio was just a couple of blocks north.
And Byron had said bees dance to communicate.