Read Online Roo'd by Joshua Klein - Free Book Online Page A

door next to the corrugated pull-down opened and a tiny little Asian man leaned out. He was wearing a filthy baseball cap on backwards, but his smile when he saw Cass on the bike was big and genuine. She revved the engine a few times before stabbing a thumb at the doorway. The little man nodded and disappeared, reappearing a moment later as the garage door pulled upwards. He was wearing filthy blue service overalls, and was shortly joined by three other, identical little men. Cass pushed the bike inside and shut it off, stepping back to admire it with the rest of them. Cass started swapping notes with them in language Fede didn't understand, but he could tell by the tone of their voices and the low soft whistles that they were impressed. After several rounds of laughing and pointing grimy fingers at various parts of the bike she grabbed a socket wrench and a screwdriver. With a few deft twists of her wrist she pulled open a side panel and started popping screws. Her fingers flew over the polished metal housing, sculpted pieces of aluminum-bonded carbon fiber panels neatly lining themselves up to reveal the bare metal skeleton of the bike. Cass suddenly stood up, her hands on her hips. Even Fede was impressed - revealed, the bike was a pure racing machine. He could see wield marks where extra struts had been put in to support additional stress, and at least two extra shock plates. The Japanese men whistled again, loud and low. Cass nodded.
    "Who did that?" asked Fed. The men ignored him, pointing and murmuring among themselves.
    "I did" said Cass. "Come on." She tossed the first guy the keys and gestured for Fede to follow her. They exited via the front door past the big plastic dragons and crossed over to enter Greener Pastures. Mil was working in the front room, this time setting up some muscle boxes. The square red plastic cases contained all the ingredients needed to shock muscle groups into sudden growth, and Mil was busily strapping them to a rangy redheaded man. The guy had a split tongue he was sucking on through his teeth as the muscle box stabbed and massaged the hormones into his chest. Having something cut into your muscle a thousand times a second wasn't fun, but Fede understood that the pain was part of the procedure. It was a rite of passage.
    They nodded at Mil as they entered, Fede following Cass towards the back of the store.
    "You made that bike?" Fede asked.
    "I modded it. The design is good, but when you bore out the pistons and amp up the carburetor you have to put in extra supports and… " she paused, glanced back at Fed.
    "You have to hack it a little" she summarized.
    "Who were those guys?" asked Fed.
    "They let me use their shop" said Cass. "I worked there originally until I started at Greener Pastures, after I came up from California. Just basic chop shop work."
    "You speak Japanese with them?" asked Fed.
    "They're Chinese. They speak Mandarin. Mandarin slang, really - folks around here come from a lot of places, so they drop a lot of weird verbiage in from other places" she said.
    "Where did you learn that? Are you Chinese?" he asked.
    "Swiss" she said without turning. Her voice was flat, a studious neutral. "Swiss French. From Sion." She stopped and turned to look at him. "You know where that is?"
    He'd kept his goggles on after the bike ride, not in small part because he felt nervous about not understanding what the guys at the garage were saying. His buffer had caught her comment, and now he keyed against the text string, chose a visual representation of the data. Suddenly he was staring at a map of Switzerland. "Yeah. About… two hours from Zurich?" No, four hours - his fingers fluttered against the chord in his pocket, saw a swarm of train schedules fly by, an agent resolve an answer. "No, sorry. Two hours twenty-five minutes by train from Zurich. Looks like they're not using the maglev there yet, huh?" Fede smirked.
    She smiled out of one corner of her mouth, turned and continued down the