Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master Read Free Page A

far
away to be distinct, but their urgency was unmistakable. Soon there would be a
paper amongst every cluster of neighbors on every stoop. Kit Baxter preferred
to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
    She threw the main door of the building open and raced up
the three flights to her apartment. She locked the door behind her and turned
the radio on softly, just enough that it might seem like there was someone
there, should anyone be listening, but not enough to attract attention should
she not return to shut it off for several days.
    Like a flash, she was at the far end of the apartment,
sliding open the window in the little sitting room at the end of a narrow hall.
The fire escape was on the other side of the building, and a quick glance
confirmed there were no eyes on her. She stepped out onto the narrow ledge and
slid the window closed behind her. The jump to the rooftop next door was only a
few feet across a very narrow alleyway, but even three flights up, it was more
than enough to give most people pause. Kit Baxter was not most people.
    She hopped the gap and raced over two rooftops before she
reached the next gap. This was a similar jump onto an escape ladder that hung
from the building at the end of the street. Kit made the leap easily, secure in
the cover of darkness, as little light from the streetlamps spilled this high.
She climbed the escape ladder up two stories until she reached another window,
which she slid open and shimmied through in seconds flat.
    She found herself in a long, narrow hallway of offices, none
of which appeared to have been rented in many a day. At the end of the hallway
was a door that read, “T. Conroy. Investments.” The door did not appear to have
been touched in months, and Kit did not disturb the doorknob now. She opened a
panel beside the door which would have never been visible to one who did not
know it was there, and turned a key in a sophisticated mechanism which seemed
completely out of place in these surroundings.
    Suddenly, silently, the entire door frame slid back into the
wall itself, just far enough and long enough for Kit’s slender form to slip
through before the mechanism swung shut behind her. A touch of another panel
revealed the object that had set her on this wild chase above the streets: the
entrance of a long, clear tube, constructed of an unknown material of
extraordinary resilience. It ran from floor to ceiling, and was easily three
feet wide. She touched the smooth, cold surface and a section of the wall of
the tube opened up to admit her. Just before the panel in the office wall closed
behind her, plunging the hidden tube into darkness, the floor opened up beneath
her feet and Kit Baxter disappeared in an instant.
    She tried, at first, to contain her cries of delight at the
ride. There were few people in the world who could stomach speeding through the
darkness beneath the city in a giant pneumatic tube, riding a carefully
engineered tide of compressed air at tremendous velocity. There were even fewer
people who would find it fun. The burbles of wild laughter that escaped the
girl’s lips as she rode made it clear that she was the exception.
    She braced herself momentarily, knowing that there was a
jarring bump ahead where this new section of tube joined the main downtown
line. He had been apologetic about it, of course, but getting such a thing
built in the first place was a major undertaking, to say nothing of the dozens
of workmen whose memories he had to alter through hypnosis. She wasn’t about to
complain. He had said that he wanted to build an entrance to their top-secret
underground lair that was closer to her home so that she could lead a slightly
more normal life – to take more time away. But she knew the truth. He
built the tube to bring her back to him faster.
    She felt the pressure slacken, the rolling tide of air
gathering at her feet to slow her approach, and knew that she was almost there.
Her feet touched solid ground and with one motion, she