Eland and Jeanne (Tales of the Shareem) Read Online Free PDF Page A

heart tore. No.
    “Jeanne?” Tara asked, concern on her face. “You all right?”
    “Yes,” Jeanne growled, then, “No. Sorry. No, I feel pretty crappy.”
    “Tell the shift leader, and go the hell home.” Tara peered at her, clearly not liking what she saw. “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’re not that far behind. I’ll make sure everything gets done.”
    Tara would. She and Jeanne covered for each other all the time. It was nice to have a friend who had your back.
    But even Tara might not understand if Jeanne told her she’d not only helped out a fugitive Shareem, but she wasn’t ashamed of it and wasn’t about to go blabbing to the patrollers either.
    Also, if Jeanne told Tara, Tara might get pulled in by the patrollers if Jeanne’s part in Eland’s escape was discovered. Her friend, who supported several members of her family with this dockland job, couldn’t afford that.
    “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll go talk to the shift leader.” Jeanne abandoned her lunch tray, worried by how shaky she was. Her stomach roiled. Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten so much.
    “I’ll check on you later, all right?” Tara said.
    “Sure.” Jeanne couldn’t say anything more. She noticed, as she left the canteen, that her fellow dockworkers pounced on her untouched food and divided it between them. She didn’t blame them. None of them were rich enough to let food go to waste.
    Jeanne checked out with her shift leader, who was sympathetic and understanding. The woman was good to work for—actually took care of her workers instead of exploiting them for the company’s benefit.
    Jeanne left the dockyards and hurried through the scorching streets of Pas City. She didn’t go home. She started searching for Eland, wanting to warn him, to help him sneak to a transport if she could, to get him the hell out of here.
    But though she prowled the streets until well after dark, she found no sign of him.
    ***
    Eland had no clue where he was. He’d landed in a dark, damp place without actually breaking anything, and he couldn’t see worth shit.
    It was cooler down here, which was a good thing. Out of the wind and the sun. A tiny trickle of water sloshed under his thin shoes, but Eland wasn’t about to scoop it into his mouth. It smelled metallic, which was better than human waste, but it was still stinky and likely poisonous.
    He walked for about an hour, one hand on the wall next to him. As far as he went, Eland found no openings, no way out of this tunnel.
    At first he’d thought he was in the kind of tunnel trains ran though—not something he wanted to meet right now. After a time, though, he realized that there was no rail or hum of electricity, nothing for a train to run on.
    But if this were a maintenance tunnel, it had been abandoned a while ago. He saw no lights, heard no sound, came upon no sign of anyone hurrying down here to fix something.
    The air moved, which meant fans or shafts somewhere. He wouldn’t suffocate. Starve to death or die of thirst, but not suffocate. Wonderful.
    Eland kept walking. The tunnels had to go somewhere , he reasoned, if only to another maintenance hatch. Eland couldn’t imagine that workers, even long ago, would want to walk for miles to find an electric problem under the city. They’d have had doors or hatches every so often so they could descend relatively close to the breakage.
    Nice theory. Eland kept looking for hatches, but nothing so far. Oh well, if he didn’t find any walking this direction, he’d turn and walk back, feeling his way along the opposite wall. Of course, he’d fallen from above, so all the hatches might be fifty feet up. Maybe lift shafts had brought the workers down, and the lifts didn’t work anymore, which was why Eland had fallen.
    He sure knew how to comfort himself.
    Was this his end? To escape the confinement and constant experiments of DNAmo, to wander until he starved under the streets of Pas City? Alone, thirsty, and horny? If he’d had Jeanne with