Chapter 13

It was the sound that made Kit Bexter open her eyes.

It was a small sound, to be sure, but it was repetitive, and her first thought was that she wished it would stop.

Her second thought was that there was bright sunlight creeping in around the around the edges of the thick dark curtains in the hotel room,

"'which meant that he had let her sleep until morning.

"'She sat bolt-up right in indignation

"'and discovered that the small sound she had been hearing

"'was the Red Panda on the floor doing push-ups.

"'He had clearly been at it for a while,

"'as his breathing had become audible,

and this had been the very small noise that she had heard in her sleep.

"'I knew it,' she said crossly.

"'Good morning, Kit,' he said as much as possible as if he had not broken a promise to wake her

after three hours to take the second shift. They had been quite some time making it back to their

hotel, as neither of the transportation options they had used in getting there were really

available to them for the return journey. Absent a significant height to throw herself off of,

the flying squirrel couldn't hope to pull off a glide like the one that had brought her there.

And while stealing one of the cars at the

old house would have been child's play, it also would have tipped off their rivals to their presence.

If one was very good with the controls for their static shoes, one could adapt the system that

they used when running over rooftops to land travel, alternating attraction and repulsion

with the powerful field generators in the shoes.

...