Hunted Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’re all written in doctorese. Big complicated words that are intentionally invented so people can’t understand them.)
    Eventually I found something to smear on: an antiinflammatory, the ship-soul said, and that sounded like just what I wanted. By then, I was worried the swelling might be more than a simple infection; there might be eyeball nanites under my skin, or hunter-killers that had got carried away when they were cleaning me off. Supposedly the hunter-killers knew enough not to chop up human tissue…but if they noticed an eyeball burrowing its way into me, they might decide to claw in after it.
    That’s not something you want to think about too long.

    The infection got worse over the next day. My hand swelled up; I tried icing it, but after a while I couldn’t stand the pain of anything touching my skin. The red flush of inflammation started creeping past my wrist and slowly up my arm. I wondered if I should put on a tourniquet or something…but that seemed like a lot of work, and I was deep-to-the-bone tired. No energy to care about stupid red flushes. I felt freezing cold, too—now and then I’d get so shivery, my teeth would chatter. Eventually I pulled myself over to the captain’s bed, dialed up the heat to maximum, and wondered why I still wasn’t warm enough.
    Sick and dizzy, jumbled and confused. Sometimes I thought I was back on Troyen again, where I’d spent a year in and out of my head with a disease called the Coughing Jaundice. My sister had come by every day—wasting time on me when she should have been solving the little crises that were piling up into one big disaster. For years after, I wondered if I was the one to blame for the civil war: keeping Sam from her work, because I’d caught some alien flu. Me, lying in a special royal infirmary, woozy and out of touch, while the streets filled up with mutineers…
    I tried to keep my mind off the bad times. Soon, I couldn’t think of anything else.
    Every so often, I’d hallucinate there was someone else in the captain’s cabin, trying to talk to me. For a while it sounded like Samantha and Queen Verity, asking why I hadn’t saved them. Then it turned into a male voice I didn’t recognize, telling me it was time to wake up, that I’d slept long enough and people would suffer if I didn’t come to my senses soon. I decided it must be the ship-soul trying to snap me out of the shivers…except for one little snippet of pleading that must have been completely inside my head.
    “Please, Edward. Innocence needs us. Both of us.”
    That’s what the voice said. And it wasn’t the ship-soul speaking, because Willow’s computer couldn’t possibly know about Innocence. Nobody did, except me and Verity and a few other people who were bloodily murdered twenty years ago. So it must have been my own brain talking, babbling all mixed-up and bleary.
    Well…yes and no.

    Two days of that, all spinning and confused. Then I woke and it was over. My head clear. My shivers gone. Even a bit of energy and appetite.
    But I’d sure made a mess of the captain’s bed.

    While I cleaned up the sheets, the ship-soul gave me an official report on the status of Willow. Most of the words just bounced off my brain—there was a big long recitation of statistics, fuel, battery power, and what all, which I guess the captain was supposed to listen to every few days. The ship-soul absolutely refused to talk about anything else till I’d heard the whole checklist.
    I nodded and said, “Oh, is that right?” now and then, the way my sister taught me when I didn’t understand much of what someone was saying. You’d be surprised how seldom you get into trouble that way. Most times, when people go on and on, they aren’t talking about things you have to do anything with, they’re just emptying their heads.
    After the ship-soul finished its spiel, I wanted to, say, “How much of that is normal, and is there anything that’s really broken?” But if something