Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Read Online Free PDF

the same; one bite and they’re doomed. Any human eating a benesha-fed animal will die, just as the animal eating the frog or butterfly dies. We know this, so we don’t eat any bird or beast with a taste for it.”
    “ Then if a jaguar eats a marmoset that’s eaten benesha, the jaguar dies?”
    Mawgis sighed noisily. “You should pay better attention. Benesha is poisonous only to humans.”
    Jak e’s thoughts spun. No people had eaten meat from benesha-fed animals. Instead the scientists had used dogs, feeding them meat from benesha-fed mice and analyzing the canine urine to establish the overall value of the protein. Human trials were scheduled to begin soon.
    “ You have an expression,” Mawgis said. “‘Your days are numbered.’ With benesha it’s truly so. Death comes when a certain number of days have passed. So many days that none would guess benesha is the cause.”
    “ How many?”
    Mawgis shrugged. “More than the moon, less than the sun. The perfect amount.”
    More than a month. Several months, probably. Less than a year. Jesus.
    “ But if benesha makes the meat poisonous for humans, then—”
    “ Then,” Mawgis said, “the hungry will die.”

Three
     
    A low-pitched sound, like a cell phone humming on vibrate, buzzed in Jake’s ears. The hazy light filtering through his tent’s yellow canvas was wrong for evening, the time he reasoned it should be.
    He used his arms to lever himself into a stand and stumbled stiff-legged the few steps to the flap door. His mouth and throat were parched. He pulled back the flap and peered out. Dawn was inching its way into the forest. His skull felt like someone had poured hot coals inside. He squinted his eyes against the slim light and let the flap fall back.
    The last thing he remembered was sitting with Mawgis, green mud smeared over his chest and forehead like badly applied icing. He peered down the neck of his shirt. No trace of mud lingered on his skin.
    Bits and pieces of what had happened—the vision of President Delacort, Mawgis telling him that benesha was poisonous to humans—rattled in his brain. Was anything he remembered true, or was it all hallucination?
    His canteen lay on the floor next to the small pack that held his clothes and supplies. Jake uncapped it and sloshed water around in his dry mouth. He grabbed two high-dosage aspirin from the med kit and used a thin razor blade to cut each tablet in quarters, swallowing the pills in separate gulps. He dressed quickly, worried the Tabna chief would disappear into the forest again before he could corner him and drag out the truth. Subtly, of course. With finesse.
    A dead scorpion and a couple of crickets fell from his boots when he shook them out. Jake tugged on the boots and tied the laces. His toes felt cramped, his feet swollen. It would be just like the old fox to get him stoned, scare him half to death, and then disappear into the forest. That’d put him one up on the American.
    He pulled open the tent flap again and was surprised to find the man in his thoughts waiting for him, a translator already wedged in—visible by the hair-thin antenna that poked out only millimeters from his ear canal. Mawgis wore a bright smile on his face. A bulging cloth pouch dangled from a thick string around his waist. He held out one of the blue-and-red-glazed mugs Jake remembered from the day before.
    My mirror image, Jake thought again , seeing how Mawgis needed two hands to hold the mug, just as he would have needed two hands. Seeing again what others saw when they looked at him. Remembering the many meetings he’d sat in, using two hands on the coffee cup that others handled with ease one-handed. Those unavoidable meals with others who watched him struggle in public with adult-sized cutlery. Did they want to lean over and cut his meat for him, butter the roll? All of which were nothing compared to the looks of shock he’d seen too many times when he first walked into a room. No one expected a