Nearing the ocean, the freeway rose above the surrounding streets on massive concrete pylons, splitting and spreading in off-ramps and on-ramps and fly-overs and fly-unders like some parody of a river delta. Traffic was a constant crawl on the streets below, and at this time of night it began to clog up the ramps and spread upwards. Falling Blossom didn’t even ease up on the accelerator. She shifted her weight back and up and under its black cowling the skeleton of the bike adjusted accordingly. The chassis sucked in its metal gut and the tires pulled up the edges of their thick contact patches, built for road-hugging speed, to give her more maneuverability.

She shot between cars that might as well have been parked, kicked back and forth across lanes and soon she was through the crush and climbing the slow rise of the bridge stretching out over the Pacific to the lights out across the water. Lemuria, the strip’s answer to the problem of overcrowding. Normally Falling Blossom loved watching the lights over the water at night, but tonight her attention was on the shore to the north, where the lights and barbed wire of the pirate compound were clearly visible.