CHAPTER SIX

Zee didn't wait for Bennet to begin a melodramatic speech. Slamming the door shut, he grabbed Ro by the arm and fled.

"What was that all about?" Ro shouted, nearly tripping over her own feet as she tried to keep up with Zee. She felt the papers she'd shoved under her shirt beginning to shift. Crossing her arms over her waist, she tried to keep them from falling out.

"It's another setup!" Zee declared, leading her towards the staircase. However, shouts of security officers made them double back. "Looks like we'll have to find another way out, "Zee astutely, and needlessly commented.

Taking a sharp turn around the corner, they saw the doors of the elevators open. It might have been a great opportunity to escape, but it seemed Zee had other plans. An elderly gentleman stepped out of the elevator in front of them. In his hands, he clutched a large black umbrella, damp with water.

With sincere apologies muttered over his shoulder, Zee snatched the umbrella and continued to run with it down the hall—towards a dead end.

"Zee! Where do you think you're going!" Ro tried to steer him around, except when she looked behind her, all she saw were the V-cut, tailored jackets of Bennet's agents. She saw no hope for getting out of this mess whatsoever.

Before the agents could pull out their side arms and start firing, Zee pulled Ro into the shelter of a doorway. Utilizing his "breaking and entering" feature, he unlocked the heavy door and pulled Ro inside of the small office.

It was a corner office, with a heavy oak desk cluttered with papers, and an entire wall of old-fashioned filing cabinets. The computer woke up from hibernation due to the rumbling of footsteps in the room and brought up the prompt for a password. As much as Zee wanted to access its files and research Edmund's supposed spoof of a hearing, the agents were less than a minute from the door.

Toppling one of the filing cabinets, spilling its meticulously folders and papers all over the floor, Zee shoved the metal bulwark against the door to buy them some time.

Feeling panicked and in a frenzy, Ro paced the room looking for something she could use as a club to fend off the agents with. Zee seemingly had other plans besides a stand-off, as he stepped up to the window and began deactivating the security locks on it.

The window squealed as it had not been opened in several years. The door to the office similarly groaned as the agents tried to force it off its hinges.

A gale of wind caught several papers in the room and threw them around. Another gust sent raindrops rattling like gunfire across the window pane. The weather had greatly declined since they'd entered the courthouse.

"Come on Ro!"

Zee offered his hand to her, his leg perched on the window sill, his body already halfway through the opened frame. Ro's eyebrows arched into a quizzical stare. Did he intend to have her jump two stories to the ground level? Was his motherboard fried or short-circuiting? With laser blasts blowing holes in the door, Ro didn't look back . Taking Zee's hand, she put her life in the mercy of gravity.

The speed of the wind blowing outside nearly sucked her out of the window. Zee repositioned his grip to Ro's waist to better stabilize her on the exterior ledge of the court house.

Standing with their backs to the wall, her toes hung over the open air. Rain dripped from the roof onto them, soaking them as with a garden hose.

They were standing on a small strip jutting out less than six inches. Zee handed her the gentleman's umbrella with explicit instructions, "Hold on, and don't let go!"

Ro gripped the umbrella as though Zee had just handed her a live grenade with the pin pulled. It was up to her to hold the hammer down or else be blown to pieces. Actually, the analogy might not be too far from the truth. With the agent's right behind them, she might very likely be blown up—or at least shot by something if she didn't do as Zee told her.

Zee took her by the waist—a circumference about the size of two jars of mayonnaise. He lifted her out towards an utility pole which had a series of wires running from it toward a building across the street.

"Hook the umbrella over the cable!" he urged her.

Ro stretched her arms, extending the curved handle of the umbrella over the coaxial wire. Hardly waiting to see if she was ready, Zee let go of her waist. Screaming shrilly, Ro coasted down the zip-line to safety on the far side of the street. The papers she hadn't been able to stuff into her pockets, mostly the ones under her shirt, fell out in one big bunch a few seconds before she reached the end of the line—the corner of another building.

With her legs, she braced herself and kicked against the wall to cushion her impact and spare herself the feeling of being a bug splattered across the windshield of an express train. She dropped several feet to the ground as the umbrella unhooked.

Ro hurried to the sidewalk to see if it was too late to gather up the papers Zee had printed. Most had already blown down the street. Those that hadn't were now floating in puddles or being carried down the sidewalk in the gutter stream-soggy and useless. She'd lost over two thirds of the stack.

When she looked back to the corner of the courthouse, she saw Zee extend his radial arm saw and cut the top of the utility pole off. Now no one could follow them in the same manner now. The wires sparked and flying in all directions like the frayed ends of a ribbon. Some of the electrical discharged resonated with Zee's hologram dispelling it.

The rain ran down his silver body, unable to cling to him. Ignoring his blown cover, Zeta shot his grappling hook to the rooftop of the courthouse. Hopping down the side, he scaled the wall, sending bits of brick and dust flying with each bounce. Several of Bennet's agents leaned out the window and fired at him from the window, but all had lousy aim.

Ro breathed a sigh of relief. By the time they agents got to the ground floor, Ro knew she and Zee would already have too much of a head start for them to catch up.

Zeta resumed his hologram appearance and met her on the other side of the street. Wrapping his arm possessively around her shoulder, he drew her in close. Taking the umbrella, he opened it overhead. Huddled together, they walked down the street, their umbrella shielding them from the view of the helicopter flying overhead. The umbrella also served well as camouflage since many other people had black umbrellas to shield them from the rain which had started. With a side through a corner store and out the back exit, they'd lost the agents.

It was amazing—Zee's foresight to plan their escape and remain a step ahead of the feds. Except, their escape had almost been luck right now. Their meticulous plan to break into the courthouse had gone awry. Somehow, they hadn't known it was a trap.

Again.

Huddled close, they walked until they reached an unoccupied bus shelter. Zee closed the umbrella and shook the water off.

Ro closed the umbrella and shook the water off. "What was that right now? How could Bennet have known we were coming?"

"I'm not sure. We need to find a phone or a computer and warn Bucky. Someone on the inside knows we hacked their system and if they can trace it back to Bucky, he might be in danger."

Ro felt her gut clench. They'd wasted all of these weeks waiting for this moment, and now it was gone. They'd never stood a chance.

She turned to Zee. The water spilling over the slanted roof of the shelter splashed him occasionally. But his clothes still remained dry. His hologram didn't reflect the wetness.

That was the way he was though. No matter how bad things let, he always let the water roll off his back.

She wrapped her arm around his. Maybe so that they'd look more natural waiting together, or maybe because his internal heater would help keep the chill from seeping through her skin.

It didn't matter how many times they ran or were chased by the feds, she was not immune to shock and fear. Having him close like this really helped calm her nerves, but she wouldn't admit that to him. She couldn't let him know how scared she was back there. If he knew her inner turmoil, he'd think of a way to leave her again. More than anything, she didn't want to be without him.

"Are you alright?" Zee turned to her, worry etched in the wrinkles he mimicked on his forehead. It looked so real, but she resisted the urge to brush the locks of hair in his eyes out of his face.

She chewed on her lower lip, and ultimtely decided to not respond to his concern. "Is it possible that the hearing might still be today, but in a different courthouse? Or could Bennet be there because he was going to be guarding Edumund?"

Zee shrugged her arm off and turned from her. "Ro,I really don't know. All traces of his case have been deleted from the system. This was our last hope and it was just another setup."

Zee was not being very optimistically helpful at the moment.

"You don't know that. Maybe it won't be easy to gain access to the Sub Rosa Terminal without Edmund's help, but that just means we'll have to try harder to find another way in. It may take a lot more time, but we'll make it work some how."

Zee continued to avoid looking at her. It bothered Ro how he seemed to be shouldering all the blame for their failed mission today. When would he get it through his thick head they were in this together? It's not like she knew it was a setup either.

"Time is always against us. A lot of time has passed since Bucky gave us the original date and location. It's possible that something could have changed and that Bucky failed to catch it and inform us. I cross referenced all of the other scheduled hearings for the day. Edmund's case was on Judge Scarfotelli's agenda, and it's clear that was a fake tip. For all we know the case may already have happened and we missed it. The NSA is getting too clever. "If they suspect they've been hacked, they will likely have taken counter measures to contain the breach of security. I think we should consider this a failure and focus on getting out of town. We need to hurry and get in touch with Bucky and warn him."

Ro grabbed his shoulder and turned him to face her. The expression she wore was sour, like she'd bitten into a rotten orange. Impossible things didn't happen to people who refused to believe in them. If he was going to learn one thing from her, it would be that the true measure of the human soul, is it's ability to hold onto hope. Love was also a good canditate, but she might just be fooling herself to believe he'd ever understand something that complex. She wished it, but being realistic, she knew she could at least teach him to have hope.

"This was not a failure. We learned something important. We've learned that we need to step up our game too. If the NSA is hiding their info, then we'll have to be sneakier and find a way to get it. Even if we have to figure out a way to infiltrate the NSA headquarters in person and do a manual search, we'll find away."

Zee interrupted, "Something like that would be..."

"Suicide."

"I was going to say difficult."

Ro laughed. "Yeah, well, that's the story of our life, isn't it."

As if chiming in on their bleak situation, the wind picked up spraying rain drops into the bus shelter. It was biting cold. Wet weather was one of Ro's least favorite things about the East coast—that or how everyone dropped their R's and half of their vowels when they talked.

Zee reached to take the umbrella from her hand. No—he didn't take it from her but stood behind her and reached around her to open it, almost like he was embracing her in a hug from behind. His chin brushed her ear as he leaned over her shoulder and pressed the slide release button for the umbrella. The umbrella sprang open in front of them creating a frontal shield from the slanted rain.

"Ro! Look!" Zee cried in alarm.

Her skin pebbled and her heart leapt into her throat. What now? Had the agents found them?

"Look at the umbrella handle," Zee clarified, turning the shaft so that she could see the hooked knob more clearly.

She hadn't noticed earlier (how could she when she was too busy worrying about falling to her death) but it was a wooden handle carved in the shape of a horse head. The nose of the stallion jutted out straight, with the mane and neck forming the curves that rounded the handle into a shape of a hook.

She turned to shove him in the chest. "Don't scare me with such an alarmed voice like that! I thought there were agents..."

The wind picked up again and tore the umbrella out of her fist before she could finish scolding him. It carried the parachute-like contraption high into the air. The umbrella spun and twirled, rolled, and flipped in the air like a trapeze artist.

Ro lurched to chase it, but Zee held her back. The wind didn't throw it back to the ground, but kept carrying it higher and father away. It was like it was flying.

"Ro," Zee said solemnly, "It's the second omen."

"What are you talking about?"

"The Pegasus in Greek mythology is known as a winged horse. A horse with wings, is essentially the same thing as a flying horse. There's no mistaking the coincidence, Ro. You just had a ride on a Pegasus when you zoomed down the zipline on the umbrella."

Ro's heart banged, her skin chilled, and she wished the ache she felt in her stomach was the sort that could be clamped down with something like a bowl of Coco Pebbles.