Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

attractive. But I’d known lots of women who worked in the Merchant City, and I’d discovered the hard way that they weren’t my type. Too mercenary, too concerned with piling up the beans. So when we got to the door, all I said to Ollin was, “Thanks for your help.”
    I expected her to return my pleasantry with one of her own. Instead, she said, “You know, you were one of my favorite players when you were with the Eagles. I never missed one of your games on the Mirror.”
    “Really,” I said.
    “Really. In fact, I was present at the game against Yautepec—the one in which you got hurt.”
    “You were?” I asked, a little surprised.
    “Absolutely,” she confirmed, smiling a tight little smile.
    I frowned. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that—”
    “It was five cycles ago, and I don’t look twenty-five.”
    Ever since a boy of fifteen cycles was killed at a match between Yautepec and Ixtapaluca, you had to be twenty to get through the gates. “Well,” I said, “yeah.”
    “It’s all right,” she said. “I get that a lot.”
    “Where were you sitting?” I asked, hoping to get past my little gaff.
    “The corridor.”
    Corridor seats were hard to come by—even for me, and I still had some contacts. At a championship game, they were nearly impossible. With his connections, Oxhoco might have gotten his hands on them, but Ollin was too young to have been working for Oxhoco back then.
    So her family had had a few beans.
    “You had a good view,” I said.
    “I did—of the game, and also of what happened to you.”
    I didn’t remember everything that had happened to me in the ball court, but the gods knew I remembered that . Lands of the Dead, I remembered it every day.
    “You were down a goal,” she said, as of to prove to me that she had been there, “and the Yautepec defenders had the ball right in front of me. You were trying to dig it out before time expired. It was two against one, but somehow you wrestled it away from them.”
    And set my eyes on the goal, with only the center to beat, and the seconds spinning away like leaves trapped in a flood.
    “You pretended to kick from where you were, hoping the center would move up to block you. He did. You took advantage of the fact, making a quick move around him.”
    The fans were counting down, their voices like thunder in the confines of the Arena. Six, five, four . . .
    I pulled my leg back to make the shot, but before I could bring it forward I saw someone come at me from my left. It occurred to me that he might be in time to block my shot. But I didn’t rush.
    I put all my concentration into driving the ball through the hoop.
    A fraction of a second before I made contact, I felt something hit my plant leg from the side. Not the ball, but my leg.
    And more specifically, my knee.
    “It must have hurt,” she said.
    More than you can imagine, I thought. But what I said was, “I guess. It was a long time ago.”
    She studied me for a moment. “You hungry?”
    It was the second time she had surprised me in the last couple of minutes. “Sure,” I said.
    It was almost dinner time, after all. And if anybody wanted to get me, I had my radio on.
    “I know a place,” she said. “My treat.”
    I couldn’t have asked for a better deal than that.
     
    I expected Ollin’s “place” to be one of the nicer restaurants along the River of Stars in District Fifteen. That was where you saw all the up-and-coming, young merchants after they left their offices in the Merchant City.
    It was a restaurant all right, but it wasn’t in District Fifteen. It was in the heart of the Merchant City, the kind of establishment where the menu had tomato stains on it and the piper in the corner was playing for tips.
    “Try the salamander,” Ollin said, plucking some complimentary popcorn from the cracked wooden bowl that sat between us. “They put honey and yellow chiles in the batter.”
    I shook my head. “I get my salamanders from only one place—a