Blood Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be no sitting down. You’ll have every Pali Boy eye watching you in less than five minutes. You need to start planning. You need to start doing .”
    Kavika knew she was right. He also knew that he felt sick to his stomach. He imagined the look on his mother’s face as they were evicted, all because he couldn’t come to terms with his fear. Bile rose in his throat as his face tried to turn green. It took a moment, but he managed to swallow it back down. When he finally had control of himself, he turned to Donnie and thanked him. Then he turned back to Spike.
    “You ready?” she asked.
    He nodded.
    “Just to be sure, tell me what we are ready for,” she said.
    He licked his lips. His mouth had gone suddenly dry. “To find us a Boxer?”
    “Seriously? Is that the best you can do?”
    He tried again, with only the most minute of improvements.
    “Your father would have been scared too, Kavika,” said Donnie Wu. “Being a Pali Boy isn’t just about being scared to do something. It’s often about being scared not to do something. This might be your chance—your only chance.”
    Kavika stared out the door of the container to the open water far below.
    Some chance.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    P IECE OF SHIT Puta!
    Lopez-Larou seethed. It’d taken her weeks to scrape together three hundred grams of waffle dust. The others like Paco Braun and Sanchez Kelly produced that in a day, but they’d been around. They were established and had multilevel source networks to deliver their product. Sanchez Kelly had more than a dozen runners and could deliver whatever someone wanted to the farthest reaches of the ship. It was rumored that he even had customers aboard the Nip Ship, a tale that Paco Braun tried continuously to quash, reminding everyone that the Japanese were his customers and his alone.
    How was a girl to get ahead?
    Favor chits, that’s how. Both Kelly and Braun had chests of favor chits, each one annotated with individual signs and sigils. They might as well be kings, for all the people of the floating city owed them. Lopez-Larou snorted at the thought of lard-ass Braun and sleek Kelly wearing robes and crowns like she’d seen in the picture films. But then she sobered as she realized that for all intents and purposes that was the reality. They had all the food and sex they wanted and lived without fear of Boxers, blood rape or the Neo-Clergy, and were as untouchable as the Nips.
    She stared into the heights of the Japanese Freedom Ship at the center of her floating metropolis. She could just make out figures moving on the top deck beneath a high, hot sun in an almost cloudless sky. She wondered what favors Kelly was owed from the likes of those living on the freedom ship. She’d heard they had running water, electricity, and all the food they desired. For a moment she tried to imagine herself there, but it was just too impossible. She ripped her gaze away and focused once more on the task at hand. She had things to worry about that the high-living Nips could never realize. To get ahead, she had one choice and that was to steal from the dead.
    She stood in the shadow of the prow of a small Chinese junk. Like her, it was out of place. Made of polished woods, it was a drop of beauty among the gray metal hulls and decking that made up the rest of the city. A reminder of a time when luxury was as important as functionality. Few knew that the owner, Joey Li, liked certain pictures and had a taste for old-school meth. What should have been obvious was hidden by the beauty. She understood this tactic of obfuscation, which was why she now wore a dress and more makeup than any self-respecting Tiburón would. For her kind, travel in the city on the waves cost. Los Tiburones owned the trade in making life livable. Their reality wasn’t cheap, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Whenever they traveled it was assumed they were carrying, which was why she’d reached out to one of the aggravatingly acrobatic Pali Boys. No