It was almost six in the morning and the autumn sky was only now beginning to brighten with the pink glow of dawn. Chris drummed his fingers on Lady Diablo’s dashboard in time to the drumbeat thumping through her bass system. Next to him, Lance was twisting away in what little space he had, undoubtedly trying to recover face after his effeminate outburst the previous day. He still looked like a moron, though.

“Dude, it’s almost time!” said the blond idiot in the brief silence between electrance tracks, “We should get ready for the waves!”

Chris checked the rear-view monitors and noted a blip towards the south, growing steadily closer. In a few more minutes the world around them would be buffeted by the airship’s turbulence. For Lance it was a moronic, childish thrill, but for Chris it was a sign of power – a sign of humanity’s determination to conquer and control the elements. Outside the cities there was no greater proof of that power than in the giant hulks of metal that cut through the air, defying nature’s very laws with their existence.

With the airship approaching, the two boys slipped out of the Lady’s up-swept doors and slid themselves onto her bonnet, the self-polishing red metal healing any scuffs they made in an instant. She was the next best thing to an airship in Chris’s eyes: a machine unmatched in a hundred miles.

“Man, I’ve been thinking about Mr Adonis…” began Lance as they settled into their usual positions, “NOT LIKE THAT, DUDE! I mean, like, what does he do outside the Academy? Does he dance everywhere he goes? Maybe his whole life is like one big musical and he sings songs about making the toast!”

Chris knew what was coming. He winced in embarrassment as Lance slipped into his high-pitched ‘singing’ voice.

“Hey mister toastie man, would you like some butter? I’ve got some butter for you on my toastie knife, yeah, yeah!”

“I…don’t think he’d sing songs about his toast,” replied a droll Chris.

“You know he does!”

Chris couldn’t win this argument – Lance was too dumb to know when to stop – and changed the subject, if only slightly. “He’s probably the sort of guy that goes jogging at five in the morning for two hours,”

“No way, Mr Adonis is way too refined to go out jogging at five in the morning, dude!” replied Lance, “I bet he’s got his own gymnasium! He’s probably some kind of celebrity. How can he not be?”

“I don’t know who the hell he is,” said Chris. He’d wanted to sound irritated – Lance’s slavish obsession was beginning to grate – but his feelings were diffused as the words slipped out of his mouth. Curiosity had overcome them. “Lady,” he said, activating the voice recognition in the car’s computer, “Can you do a background check on a Mister Adonis? Cross-reference with the records I compiled yesterday,”

“Stand-by,” replied the seductive female voice of the car’s system. Her probes would be patching into the local public networks within nanoseconds, hopping from node to node in a few seconds more, and reaching the Malkuthian library within five. Chris wasn’t confident any of those databases would contain much in the way of useful information, but if there was even a trace of a ‘Mr Adonis’ he would soon know about it.

“Records?” asked an inquisitive Lance, lips trembling with suppressed giggles.

“Yeah,” replied Chris, “Records. You know I’ve been keeping track of everything lately,”

Lance, however, couldn’t contain his immaturity much longer. “You’ve been stalking Mr Adonis!”

“Search results negative,” said the computer, saving Chris long enough for Lance’s attention to wander elsewhere, as it inevitably did.

“Dude, you’re not gonna find Mr Adonis in Malkuth,” spluttered the blond boy with a giggle, “He’s so totally from the outside world. He might even come from across the sea!”

Chapter 59
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