Ghost of a Chance

He resisted the urge to hold his breath while she appraised him with cool eyes. She raised an eyebrow, and then a subtle smile returned to her lips.

“Sounds like fun,” she said. “The Lucky Dragon is in the Core, right? We can take the Lightning Lord’s new line.”

Alex was confused for a moment, but then remembered the construction on Central Park west where the workmen were building Barton’s new elevated crawler rails.

“I thought they were still testing that,” he said, remembering the story he’d read in the paper.

“It opened today,” she said. “It’s supposed to be faster than anything in the city.”

“Well,” Alex said, leading her through the gate and into the front yard of the shop. “Then we simply have to try it.”

He wasn’t sure if her enthusiasm for the crawler ride was genuine, or if she was putting it on so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. Her face was unreadable, and Alex decided then and there not to play poker with her. In either case, he was grateful for her easy, friendly, sexy manner, and he realized he was grinning like a mental patient.

Alex toned his smile down to a quirky grin that Leslie would think it made him look dashing. As he did so, he realized that their conversation had lagged.

“How goes the elixir brewing?” he asked and immediately felt like an ass. She was taking a much-needed break from her very demanding job, and he was asking her to bring it along.

Idiot.

“Let’s not talk about that,” she said, her smile never slipping. “How’s it coming with the kidnapped man?”

Even as the words came out of her mouth, Alex caught a flash of chagrin in her expression. It disappeared almost instantly, but Alex could tell she’d regretted it as much as he had his own awkward question.

“Let’s not talk about work at all,” he said, remembering not to grin like a loon.

She smiled back at him and leaned close so that her arm and shoulder were pressed against him.

“I think I’d like that,” she said.

* * *

By the time they reached the elevated crawler station a few minutes later, Alex was desperately glad to see it. So far, their non-work conversation had dealt with the weather and the few front-page stories in which Alex wasn’t involved.

He really needed a better angle. It was like he was a teenager on his first date.

Kathy MacMillan. She’d thought he was an idiot too.

The station at the end of the test line for Barton’s elevated crawler was a platform built over the northbound side of Central Park West, across from the museum. Two sets of shiny metal rails about four feet apart ran along the street, supported by thick steel poles every half block or so. They didn’t look like the heavy square rails that trains ran on, but more like polished rods. They seemed flimsy, and Alex wondered how they could hold up a crawler in the first place. To say nothing about how a crawler could navigate them without falling off onto the road below.

As Alex and Jessica watched, a crawler came into view, speeding along the outermost set of rails. It was moving much faster than the ones Alex was familiar with and its legs weren’t blue but a rather violent shade of purple. Sparks of energy crackled and popped where the hundreds of energy legs touched the rails, but the vehicle showed no signs of slipping.

“That’s amazing,” Jessica said with a look of wonder and delight.

“Come on,” Alex said, taking her by the hand and hurrying toward the stairs that led up to the platform. A few minutes later they sat side by side on the crawler’s upper deck, watching Central Park fly by at an unbelievable sixty miles an hour.

Alex had never spent much time in the park, despite the fact that the brownstone was only six blocks from the east side of it. Jessica, however, seemed to love the park and happily commented on the various points of interest as they passed.

It was strange to move so fast without the noise or vibration of machinery. Alex could hear the crackle and hum of the electrified rail that fed power to the crawler directly from Empire Tower, but that and the wind were the only sounds.

A regular crawler would have taken half an hour to get to the core from the museum, but the elevated one dropped Alex and Jessica off at the end of the line, Empire Tower, in just over ten. By the time they got there, they were both laughing and chatting happily about their experiences in New York.

“You know people used to live in there,” she said, looking up at Empire Tower as they headed east toward the Lucky Dragon.

“Some still do,” Alex said, telling her about Bickman and his wife, who now had apartments up above Barton’s etherium capacitors.

“Is he as handsome as everyone says?”Jessica asked with a grin.

Alex laughed and described Barton, studiously avoiding any details that might lead to a work conversation. The talk took them three more blocks and right to the door of the Lucky Dragon.