Page 37
Machine Man
On the sidewalk below me, the mother yanked her son’s arm. This kid was no toddler: he was seven or eight. I have seen women wrestling with children of this age before, in supermarket aisles and parking lots, and usually the kids don’t budge. But apparently a man plummeting out of the sky changed everything, because this kid flew through the air like he was hollow. It was a convincing example of the strength-boosting properties of adrenaline.
My legs could not correct my flight path, and thus were forced to abandon their original plan to use the boy and his mother as shock absorbers. I impacted the sidewalk ten inches from them. The concrete split beneath my feet. Dust burst into the air. My spine bent in a way that felt very, very wrong. I lost my breath and sucked in a lungful of dust. I felt the Contours moving beneath me, and tried to tell them to wait a second, because I had to apologize to the mother, and check she and her son were okay, and so was I. But the legs didn’t care. Their world was defined by a location, a destination, and the optimum path between the two; everything else was a waste of time. I was pretty sure now they were going to kill me.
