With that out of the way, it was time for sheer, unrestricted, all-out speed.

Forty-Second Street was a half-second’s blur. Left on Park Avenue, a left so sharp that she ran up the side of a building, feet smashing third floor windows as she executed her turn. Right onto Thirty-Ninth Street, and the world was a blur of banks and sandwich shops and phone stores. Almost instantly she ran into the mass of cars still trying to escape the city. But the sidewalks were clear, and she tore along, leaping piles of bagged trash, running through mostly empty intersections. She was going so much faster than her Google Maps app that she missed a turn and had to skid to a stop and back up.

Down a winding ramp with concrete walls high on both sides, beneath an overpass, and she took a sudden plunge into the nicotine-tiled Lincoln Tunnel, which was wall-to-wall cars moving at three miles an hour. The walkways that ran along the sides of the claustrophobic tunnel were too narrow for her to stay on them and keep up her speed. She had to slow so much that a man squeezing around cars on a motorcycle actually passed her.

Shade hopped onto the nearest car roof. Cars are generally under five feet tall, and the tunnel was just over thirteen feet. Plenty of clearance. She was going to dent some roofs, probably break a few windshields, and almost certainly scare the hell out of some motorists, but she’d just killed a man, and none of that minor mayhem was worth worrying about. She ran in great, bounding steps, roof to roof, bouncing across lanes to  bypass trucks and buses.

All at once she was in the open air. She leaped down onto solid ground, moving like a compact hurricane beneath a dozen overpasses, then skidded to a stop, realizing she’d taken an off-ramp by mistake. She backtracked, slowing to allow the maps app to catch up. She crossed a river, crossed a marsh, crossed another river, and was suddenly in downtown Newark with nice, wide, uncluttered sidewalks.

Turn coming up.

Shade skidded into a sharp left turn, and there it was, an ugly concrete building that bridged over the road, marked with tall gold letters: Newark Penn Station.

It was smaller inside and nothing like as grand as its Manhattan counterpart. She stopped in the midst of a crowd on its way here or there, seeming to materialize out of nowhere, unless you’d noticed coats suddenly flapping, hats flying off, shopping bags almost torn from hands by the wind of her arrival.

Hero, Chapter 34