Coyote Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaving only an afterimage of blue.
    “Why are you here?” the woman asked.
    “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Allegra said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
    “Sorry for what?” The eyes grew sharper, yet the voice was hollow. Like her face, it was neither young nor old. She spoke English rather than Anglo; that caught Allegra by surprise, and she had to take a moment to translate mentally the older dialect.
    “Sorry for trespassing,” she replied, carefully speaking the English she’d learned in school. “I was—”
    “Trespassing where?” Not a question. A demand.
    “Here . . . your place. I know it’s probably not . . .”
    “My place?” A hint of a smile that quickly disappeared, replaced bythe dark scowl. “Yes, this is my place. The Eastern Divide, the Great Equatorial River, Midland, the Meridian Sea, all the places he sailed . . . those are Rigil Kent’s places. My son lives in Liberty, but he never comes to see me. No one in Shuttlefield but thieves and scum. But here . . .” Again, the fleeting smile. “Everything is mine. The chickens, the stars, and everything in between. Who are you? And why are you here?”
    The rush of words caught her unprepared; Allegra understood only the last part. “Allegra DiSilvio,” she said. “I’ve just arrived from the . . .”
    “Did Rigil Kent send you?” More insistently now.
    In a flash of insight that she’d come to realize was fortunate, Allegra didn’t ask whom she meant. What was important was her response. “No,” she said, “he didn’t send me. I’m on my own.”
    The woman stared at her. The rain was falling harder; somewhere in the distance, she heard the rumble of thunder. Water spilled through a leak in the tent, spattered across her sleeping bag. Still the woman’s eyes didn’t stray from her own, even though the rain was matting her grey hair. Finally, she spoke:
    “You may stay.”
    Allegra let out her breath. “Thank you. I promise I won’t . . .”
    The face vanished. Allegra heard footsteps receding. A door creaked open, slammed shut. Chickens cackled briefly, then abruptly went quiet, as if cowed into silence.
    Allegra waited a few seconds, then hastily closed the tent flap. She used the discarded food wrapper to plug the leak, then removed her boots and pushed herself into her sleeping bag, reluctant to take off her clothes even though they were filthy. She fell asleep while the summer storm raged around her. She hadn’t turned off the light even though common sense dictated that she needed to preserve its chemical battery.
    She was safe. But for the first time since she’d arrived, she was truly frightened.
     
    The next morning, Allegra saw her neighbor just once, and only briefly. She awoke to hear the chickens clucking, and crawled out of her tent to see the woman standing in the pen behind her house, throwingcorn from an apron tied around her waist. When Allegra called to her, though, she turned and walked back into her house, slamming the door shut behind her. Allegra considered going over and knocking, but decided against it; the old woman clearly wanted to be left alone, and Allegra might be pushing her luck by intruding on her privacy.
    So she changed clothes, wrapped a scarf around her bare scalp, and left to make the long hike into Liberty. She did so reluctantly; although there were no other tents nearby, she didn’t know for certain that she wasn’t camped on some group’s turf. Nonetheless, her stomach was growling, and she didn’t want to consume her last food bar unless necessary. And somehow, she had a feeling that people tended to leave her strange neighbor alone.
    The road to Liberty was littered with trash: discarded wrappers, broken bottles, empty cans, bits and pieces of this and that. If Shuttlefield’s residents made any effort to landfill or recycle their garbage, it wasn’t evident. She passed farm fields where men and women worked on their hands and knees, pulling