The Man between my crosshairs (girl X assassin)

Chapter 21/The grass sea

 Image/Video - moving sidewalk incase you have never been on one.  This we get a little SciFi geeky - forgive us. 

Outside the Styles building: Main Street Architgram city

Out of the elevator, there was a moving sidewalk. They stood gingerly on it.  The wind rustled through Zoe's hair as they slipped through the city. They could look down on the city street below. 

"This place is more packed than a rush hour Japanese metro train going to a black friday sale" Zoe said to Jerrico looking down on the crowd.

Jerrico looked down "Yeah this isn't a good city if you put a high price on your personal space." 

 Zoe noticed that when Harry travelled he had a number of guards, mostly robots. Two went forward clearing the way. The rest moved around not in formation. A few had umbrellas which would shield Styles and others from the sun or being seen. This would make shooting him on the walkway difficult. You wanted your first bullet to be a kill. If you missed, then the machines might detect it and get him under cover. You wanted him at some event where he would stand preferably motionless. Zoe considered the classic, kill someone else important, get him invited to the funeral and then shoot him while they stood for the national anthem.

Cathy whispered and Ryder laughed. Zoe couldn't get Ryder and Cathy out of her head. This was starting to affect her. She thought the error in the plan was Styles probably wouldn't attend if busy. As they travelled down the long spin of the city she slow discarded the notion of sniping him.

"Originally this city wasn't called Archigram, it was called Zarminaoplise" Styles said to Zoe

They passed through midtown it felt like the city was the love child between Hong Kong and an Ocean Cruise liner. 

"When we built the first large crawlers my wife was the one who put a street down the middle. She was the Engineer and chief architect. I was the one who named the street Archigram. People would say I'm going to the Gap on Archigram. So eventually the name stuck. This is the only city in all of known Space with one street." Styles paused for a moment.

Zoe noticed the eyes of the people on other moving sidewalk which went backwards. Some ignored or pretended to ignore him others looked at them with all the generosity knocked out of them. Jerico darted from one umbrella to another clearly worried in case someone would see him with Styles.

"Before we started, people just drove in self driving trucks." Styles said proudly. "We were the one who built them big and then started to link them together like a train. Now you can walk all the way from the industrial section near the back. Up through down town, midtown all the way to uptown, fifty-three miles ... Look this is the sector capital building."

The backbone street veered to the left side. This made  space to the right for a large white building. It was old but had many elements built from old Earth buildings. The twelve huge columns make to look like stone but probably made from carbon fibre.

 Cathy and Ryder were giggling together.

'Why is it You never have a flamethrower when you need one' thought Zoe.

"Cathy behaviour your self," Zoe heard Styles say. 

As the moving sidewalk slid along they looked down to see people protesting outside the parliament. The protesters waved signs like 'Can't pay- won't pay.' , 'Rent controls now!' 'why is it cheaper to commute from orbit than live here?' There was a small buzzing storm of reporting drones flying around them filming the protesters. Jerico looked down. He would normally be with them and clearly wondered if he should really be in this nest of snakes.