Ivan was either a genius or an idiot.
'No,' Chaisi thought. 'Maybe he's a mix of both. I've heard that when a fool has a flash of brilliance, even a genius can be caught off guard.'
"Are you trying to get yourself killed? Don't drag me down with you!" In her panic, Huangli forgot her deference to a superior and yelled, "This isn't a Nest, it's the Human World! There are consequences for driving like this! You'll go to prison if you hit someone—can't you hear those sirens?"
Just a few minutes after he'd started breaking one traffic law after another, he heard the sirens.
The wailing sirens were like a cluster of spinning blades, slicing through the sky behind them. At times they would fade, making Chaisi think he'd shaken off a patrol car, but they would roar back to life as new cars joined the chase from other directions.
But the police could never manage to cut him off. They couldn't drive as brazenly as Chaisi, jumping the curb, driving against traffic through red lights, and blasting through intersections as if no one else was on the road.
He'd lost count of the panicked pedestrians he'd seen diving out of the way, and the number of times he'd heard the sharp screech of tires on pavement.
Everywhere the car went, it left a wake of chaos, panicked running, blaring horns, and screams. It was nothing short of a miracle that by the time Chaisi finally got back on a clear stretch of road and floored it, he had only managed to knock a side-view mirror crooked and dent a headlight, without causing any major accidents.
"Hold on tight," he said, glancing at the sea of flashing red and blue lights in the rearview mirror. "I'm speeding up."
"Faster? You—"
Before Huangli could finish her sentence, she was slammed back into her seat by the car's sudden acceleration.
Chaisi whipped the steering wheel, swerving around the car ahead and then cutting sharply in front of it, drawing a chorus of angry horns. "The search I asked you to run earlier, you still have it open, right?"
Huangli sighed and pushed her lavender hair back from her face.
"Still open," she said, holding her phone up so Chaisi could see it in his periphery. The screen was, indeed, displaying a map app. "Fine. It's not like I'm the one in the driver's seat. Where on earth are we going?"
"Brooklyn Community College," Chaisi answered curtly as he shot through the gap between two more cars.
"…Why?"
"Back where you felt the Illusion for a split second, I saw a subway sign for the D Line—Fulington Station. Brooklyn Community College is the last stop on the D Line heading in this direction."
Huangli processed this information, blinking several times.
"Wait, are you saying you suspect that bodyguard hid the Illusion in the subway station at Brooklyn Community College?"
"No," Chaisi replied. "I suspect he hid the Illusion on a train."
Huangli's jaw dropped. It took her two full seconds to snap it shut. "The subway? The Blackmoor City subway? Is—is he out of his mind?"
Somehow, he felt like she had originally meant to ask, "Are *you* all right?"
The Blackmoor City subway was world-famous, you could say, though not for being busy and crowded.
Aside from ordinary commuters and tourists, the cars were always teeming with a bizarre cast of characters: cult recruiters, fake newspaper peddlers, people announcing the death of a living public figure, doomsday prophets, performers changing costumes in public for money… The list went on and on.
It was often said that you could tell if someone was a true Blackmoor City native by whether they could get on the subway and ride it to their stop without batting an eye.
No one's first instinct would be to hide something in a place like that.
Besides, once the train pulled away, how would Ivan ever retrieve it?
"There's a lot I don't understand," Huangli said, thinking. "On his way into Blackmoor City, Ivan stopped, entered a subway station, and then quickly came back out. That part's easy to understand; he had time for it. But how do you know he hid the item on a train?"
"You said you sensed the Illusion for 'a split second,' right? If your sensory ability is as reliable as you claim it is, that means when you detected it, the object was already on the very edge of your range and moving at high speed. An instant later, it was gone.
"In other words, it had already been traveling at a constant speed within your sensory range for some time *before* you started your scan. That's why, at the exact moment you began sensing, it happened to be reaching the edge of your range, resulting in that 'split-second' detection."
Her sensory range was huge. A pedestrian, a cyclist, or even a car sticking to the city speed limit wouldn't be fast enough to leave her range in an instant.
From what they had pieced together so far, Ivan hadn't contacted anyone. So what, in the middle of the city, could move at a continuous high speed, unhindered by traffic, and carry the Illusion out of Huangli's sensory range?
When Chaisi's eyes fell on the sign with the letter "D," he remembered: Fulington Subway Station was right there.
While they were searching for it fruitlessly, a train deep in the earth beneath their feet was carrying the Illusion, roaring off into the distance.
For the moment, neither of them considered the chance that another Illusion had coincidentally appeared on Ivan's route—"possibility" and "probability" were two different concepts, after all. Even with countless Hunters tirelessly trying to bring Illusions into the Human World, the number of Illusions in existence was still incredibly small.
Huangli glanced back at the police cars still in hot pursuit, resigned herself to her fate, and gripped the overhead handle. "No wonder you were cutting across streets and driving against traffic… You're racing a subway train. A normal shortcut wouldn't have been enough. Still, this is terrifying. How ironic would it be if I didn't die in a Nest, but in a car crash?"
Chaisi didn't respond, only glancing at the time. "You detected the Illusion at around 10:03."
He had a compulsive habit of needing to know the time at all times, down to the exact minute.
After more than twenty years, his internal clock was nearly flawless, even without looking at a watch. He knew it was 10:13 before he even glanced at the time; he had already been racing from the police for almost ten minutes.
An unknown number of red lights waited for him up ahead. Each one presented a choice: stop and get caught by the police, or punch it and risk getting T-boned by oncoming traffic?
'I need a plan,' he thought. 'How do I carve a clear path through the bustling streets of Blackmoor City?'
Chaisi asked, "How often are the D Line trains running right now?"
Huangli glanced at the map app on her phone. "Every seven minutes," she replied.
"Check your map app. When does the next train leave Fulington Station? And how long does it take to get to the terminus?"
"The next one leaves in two minutes, and the ride to the terminus is thirty-five minutes."
As she said this, understanding dawned, and her eyes lit up. "Ah, so the train with the Illusion will reach the terminus at 10:36! We just have to get to the platform before 10:36."
Anyone who could make a career out of "hunting in Nests," rather than just a hobby to try before you die, was naturally quick on the uptake.
If the next train left at 10:15, that meant the previous ones had departed at 10:08 and 10:01. When Huangli began her scan at 10:03, the 10:01 train would have been just about to exit her sensory range. And a thirty-five-minute ride from Fulington Station would put its arrival at the terminus at exactly 10:36.
"But I have one more question," Huangli said with a frown. "How do you know the train was headed toward Brooklyn Community College Station, and not in the opposite direction?"
"I don't know," Chaisi said.
Huangli whipped her head around to stare at him.
"I only know one thing," Chaisi explained, showing more patience with his own Household Hunter than he did with others. "When you go down into Fulington Station, the first platform you reach, on the upper level, is for trains heading to Brooklyn Community College Station. The lower-level platform is for trains going the other way."
"Oh," Huangli said, her brow relaxing as she nodded. "So you're betting the bodyguard just took the most convenient train. Hmm, that makes sense. His detour only added thirteen minutes to the GPS-estimated travel time. Factoring in parking, walking, and waiting, he must have been in and out of the station in a flash."
Ivan would only need to ride for one stop. Once he'd stashed the Illusion, he could get off at the next station, cross the platform, and catch a train heading back in the opposite direction without even having to wait.
"But you know the layout of a random subway station, just like that? It has two levels of platforms?" Huangli marveled. "You must have been born in Blackmoor City to be this familiar with it."
Chaisi didn't answer, only giving an order: "Make a call. To the police."
Huangli blinked, unable to resist glancing back at the pursuing police cars. One was so close that its swirling lights bathed their rear window in red and blue.
"We're not exactly short on cops," she pointed out.
"Don't waste time." Chaisi didn't slow in the slightest, continuing toward the red light at the intersection ahead. "Call the police. Tell them you're in the speeding car, and that they have ten minutes to block off the area from Columbia Avenue and East 106th Street to Cherry Street."
"You're the boss," she grumbled, opening the dialer on her phone.
Huangli had just finished dialing three digits when her eyes snapped up from the screen. A large truck had just entered the intersection from their right and was now rumbling toward them, about to T-bone their black Mercedes.
"Truck—!"
Far from stopping, Chaisi floored it, pressing the accelerator until it was flat against the floorboard. The engine let out a desperate-sounding roar as the car shot straight forward at a suicidal speed.
An involuntary scream from Huangli filled the cabin, only to be drowned out by a tremendous CRASH from the rear of the car. Although it was just a corner of their bumper that had been clipped, the impact sent the car lurching violently, nearly causing it to spin out and stop sideways in the middle of the intersection.
A pair of strong hands wrestled with the steering wheel. Amid a symphony of groaning metal and a trembling engine, the car pulled out of the intersection and onto the street ahead. Behind them, the truck screeched to a halt at an angle, and a chain reaction of rear-end collisions instantly created a wall of steel, blocking the pursuing police cars on the other side.
"I joined the Hunter Family Faction for the job security!" Huangli yelled, recovering from her terror. "Not to risk my life just to get to work! This isn't a Nest—"
"911," a woman's voice asked from the floor amidst the chaos, "what's your emergency?"
"Hurry," Chaisi said, hitting the gas again while snapping his fingers in front of Huangli. "We might not be so lucky at the next intersection."
"H-Hello! Hi!" Huangli said, scrambling to pick up her phone. "I'm in the car that's rampaging through the Brooklyn District!"
She quickly relayed Chaisi's demands, paused, glanced at him, and then answered the dispatcher's question. "…You're asking who I am? Um, I've been… I was kidnapped and forced into the car. He's making me make this call at gunpoint. He says that if you don't block off the roads… um, he's going to throw a bomb into traffic."
Chaisi shot her a glance and cracked a smile, his white teeth flashing.
"I'd say it's been a pleasure working with you," he said in a low voice after Huangli hung up the phone, "but our collaboration is just beginning."