Chapter 11: I Come Looking for Booty

The outdoor mall smells like fried meat. She can see the various shoppers and feel the bracelet on her wrist. It’s broadcasting. Always broadcasting.

She’s moving smoothly and steadily through the crowd, darting between a pair of goat-men merchants arguing over purple melons. A panda girl points. Someone cheers her on. Someone else whistles. “That’s her. You’ve only got one more day. You can do it.” She gives a flick of her silky black tail in acknowledgment but doesn’t look back. Looking back is how you lose.

The black shape is still there.

Tall. Masculine. Just a silhouette that has been tracking her for the last hour, face concealed, hooded, the whole outfit cut from the same matte black as the void between stars. Just the sense of weight and patience moving through the open market, as if he had all the time in the world.

One more day.

The thought hits her. One more sunrise and the prize money is hers. It’s not like she really needed the money. It was more about the challenge, the prestige, to be the second woman to outlast the Booty Hunter. She can almost taste it: victory, the look on their faces when the werewolf who wears power suits and files quarterly reports wins the contest.

Her calves burn. Somewhere, trillions of viewers are watching the way her shirt clings, the slight limp she’s been hiding since yesterday’s rooftop escape. She knows exactly how she looks on their screens: athletic, with long black hair, late thirties, still pretty enough to turn heads even when she’s running for her virtue. The same woman who sat in a corporate office last week signing contracts is now sprinting past a stall selling bootleg hollow chips while a galaxy cheers for either her escape or her capture.

She cuts left into a narrower lane where the awnings almost touch. The black figure follows without hurry. That sexy, smug bastard is going to have to work for it. She bets he already knows where the exits are.