Hunter's Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

That hadn’t been
about making peace; Elena had convinced herself that Ramon had taken a woman
with him when he went out in the field. She hadn’t stopped raging and ranting
until she found the girl on whom her paranoia had fixed still in town and
involved with one of the magistrates, and even then she still seemed to hold a
grudge. Ramon had had to spend almost half the money he’d gotten from his
survey work just buying beer and kaafa kyit for all his business contacts whom
she’d alienated.
     
    Griego didn’t laugh with him.
     
    ‘You know she’s crazy, don’t you?’
he asked instead.
     
    ‘She does get pretty wild,’ Ramon
said with a half-smile, trying the expression out like it was a new shirt.
     
    ‘No, I know wild girls. Elena is
fucking loca. I know you like that girl down at the exchange. What’s her
name?’
     
    ‘Lianna?’ Ramon asked, disbelief
in his voice.
     
    ‘Yeah that’s the one. Lives over
on the north side. Used to be you had a thing with her, didn’t you?’
     
    Ramon remembered those days, when
he’d been a younger man, new to the colony. Yes, there had been a woman with
coffee-and-milk skin and a laugh that made a man happy just listening to it.
Maybe he had even dreamed about her a few times since. But that had carried its
own slice of hell with it. Ramon scratched at the scar that striped his belly.
Griego raised an eyebrow and Ramon coughed out a laugh.
     
    ‘She’s…No. No, she’s not like
that. There couldn’t be anything between someone like her and someone like me.
And don’t ever let Elena hear you say different.’
     
    Griego gestured his discretion
with a wave of his bottle. Ramon took another pull. The thick, earthy taste of
the beer was growing on him. He wondered how much alcohol the brew carried.
     
    ‘Lianna was a good woman,’ Ramon
said. ‘Elena’s like me, though. We understand each other, you know?’ His voice
filled with a sudden bitterness that surprised him. ‘We deserve each other.’
     
    ‘If you say so,’ Griego said, and
the van chimed, its self-test complete. Ramon levered himself up and followed
Griego to where the results floated in the air. The power and variance checked
at each level, just edging down below optimal on the highest range. Griego
waved a crooked finger at the drop.
     
    ‘That’s a little weird,’ he said.
‘Maybe we should take another look at - ’
     
    ‘It’s the cable,’ Ramon said. ‘Salt
rats ate through the old one. I had to get gold for the replacement. Couldn’t
afford the carbon mesh.’
     
    ‘Ah,’ Griego said and clicked his
tongue in something between sympathy and disapproval. ‘Yeah, that would do it.
Too bad about the rats. That’s the problem with scaring away all the predators,
eh? We wind up protecting all the things they used to eat, like salt rats and
flatfurs, and then they’re everywhere.’
     
    ‘I’ll take a few rats if I don’t
have to worry that there’s chupacabras and redjackets in the street
every time I go out for a piss,’ Ramon said. ‘Besides, if we didn’t have
vermin, how would we know we’d made a real city, right?’
     
    Griego snapped off the display
and shrugged. They settled the account; half from Ramon’s available credit,
half into an interest bearing tab that the salvage yard’s system kept track of
automatically. The sun was setting; the sky pink and gold and blue the color of
lapis. Stars glimmered shyly from behind daylight’s veil. And Diego-town spread
below them, its lights like a permanent fire. Ramon finished the last of his
beer, then spat out the sediment. It left grit between his teeth.
     
    ‘The last mouthful’s not the best
one,’ Griego said. ‘Still. Beats water.’
     
    ‘Amen,’ Ramon said.
     
    ‘How long you going out for?’
     
    ‘A month,’ Ramon said. ‘Maybe
two.’
     
    ‘Miss the whole festival.’
     
    ‘That’s the idea,’ Ramon agreed.
     
    ‘You got enough food for that?’
     
    ‘I got hunting