Cooper sighted the Circuit, only after they sighted him. By the time he looked, turned, took off, and sped up, they were running him down. Four men stormed out of a rover that seemed too small to fit them. The figures menaced, threatening danger, behind the sheets of rain.

  They had parked noncommittally in the center divider, as if awaiting any resident of any structure inside a radius of their position. Cooper knew they had come for him. He dodged multiple shots by the Circuit firing in his direction. He flinched at his memories roiling up, reloading his little mistakes that day.

  “Stop! Stop where you are!” an enforcer shouted through the storm.

  The voice blurred into the wind, snapping apart with the slicing rain. Another missile shot by. Missed! It splattered against a tree trunk. Like blood, the stain flowed down the furrows in the bark. Dark, red, pink, clear, watered down by the rainfall, damped to gone.

  A superior shot hit Cooper someplace. He heard a whoop, followed by “Got him!”

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  The harmless warning splotches colored his white shirt bright red at several distant sites, but the markers bled into a single screaming mass, accelerated by the torrents. If he hadn’t caught the chant and run, fast enough to outrun his chasers, they could have caught him bumbling into an ambush and done what, he didn’t know, so naturally feared the unknown.

  Entirely immersed in ignorance, Cooper knew next to nothing except his scant life story. He didn’t grasp the way his world worked and wasn’t dying to pick it up.

  “Run! Run! Run!” the chant beat the rhythm of fast, light footsteps striking the mobile pavement.

  Cooper darted down a side street, legs tuning a flying stride to match the local glide speed. He veered into a skinnier lane, gliding slower. He leaped from an elevated conveyor onto a stationary alley. Small rivers filled it. Paved in patterns of tiles, its mosaic glistened slippery in the storm.

  Blinded by a downpour, blind to the hazards, Cooper streaked through. Inside his surround sound, he detected the enforcement sirens. Speakers screamed, ordering him to give it all up or else!

  Wildly, crazily, in unsound abandon, he sped on and on!

  He sped like he couldn’t live otherwise!

  Speeded by words he knew!

  “Cooper…Cooper,” he chanted, as he carried out his commands to him.