The enforcement sirens screamed higher and nearer until they didn’t. Cooper lurched in their direction on a bridge of planks across a canyon. For a second, the opposite rim was right there, but he couldn’t creep over before the bridge plunged in. He needed help, real live help, even if it came with uncertain correctives for infractions as yet uncertain.

  The city still hanged its criminals, but only the truly bad ones. Cooper hadn’t always lived the law, but never done anything that wrong. He wouldn’t have shot off, if not for his surround sound egging him on in reckless folly. He blamed the outcome on the chant. It hadn’t helped, it had only harmed! The more he heard it, the more he heard its evil!

  “Come and catch me!” Cooper yelled.

  Now that he had decided to give it all up, he felt better. At the end times, it was nice to feel alright. To him, such was the sole purpose for living, the lone meaning of life. Never seeking any better, he knew nothing as the best feeling of all.

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  “Hello? Here! Help!” Cooper yelled louder than he thought he could.

  He could only yell a word at a time, but he expelled each word loud enough to matter. The sirens wailed higher or maybe lower, unreliably louder, near and far, nearly here but faraway across the snaking alley maze.

  Cooper shouted down the alleys and over the walls. He shouted into a thundering nightfall, past the storm blowing, rain bullets clinking the harsh gleam, the orchestra hacking madly, whitewater surging down gutters, all intent on wiping him out.

  He tried screeching like a girl, in an ear-splitting pitch, but didn’t have it in him. He feared that if he didn’t deploy his resources just right, the Circuit could lose interest in their mission and ditch him, even after the brutal pursuit.

  In a dark hole, deep under a brain fold, Cooper enjoyed their suffering caused by him. He tormented them with the analogous suffering caused to him by the surround sound. What if they couldn’t catch him, under its evil sway?

  His voice battled its boom and flash for aerial supremacy over molecular motion. Its chant had long ceased egging him on, but called only to kill his will to flee its overpowering pressure. Cooper reveled in puncturing its malicious pall, as if his chasers could sense it with him.