Species Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the same time as her escape.
    “Those trains passed through here over two hours ago,” Fitch said thoughtfully. “She could have stayed on . . . or gotten off . . . anywhere.” Where was the girl now? Perhaps she’d been leaping onto a Utah-bound car even as that foolish search-and-destroy gunner in the Apache chopper had gotten all their hopes up by locking on a target with his chaingun, then pulverizing something in the brush that had turned out to be only a coyote. Fitch recalled the young man’s face and how it had turned scarlet when he’d had to report that he’d discharged several hundred .30mm rounds through his chaingun at a twenty-pound canid. He wondered what would have happened had the gunner’s target been authentic and found himself shying away from the thought.
    The replacement aide assigned to Fitch was Robert Minjha. Dark-skinned and watchful, Robert was younger than Kyle Jacobson and ignorant of the more . . . delicate aspects of the project. Kyle had known everything about Sil, and it annoyed Xavier to be forced to pick and choose the bits of information he should feed his new assistant. Robert’s bright eyes took it all in and hinted that he understood more than what was said, but he didn’t question Fitch’s orders as much as Kyle had; Fitch thought he was as dull as the sand-colored landscape around them. This time, though, Robert did have a question.
    “Is she that fast?”
    Fitch hesitated before answering. He could lie, but it would be ludicrously obvious—after all, why else were they looking so far out in the desolate Mojave? All the aides had known about the project from its onset anyway; the current replacements simply hadn’t been able to get as close to it before the . . . accident.
    “Yes,” he admitted softly. “She’s that fast.”

6
    B righam City, Utah reminded Sil, in the most tenuous way, of the complex in which she’d been born, and when the freight train had finally stopped in the rear of the train yard, she had been drawn in spite of herself to the busiest part of the station. Clean, bright, and filled with neatly dressed, freshly scrubbed people, even the travelers seemed to have left their road dirt behind, not daring to bring it into this tidy little metropolis. Sil knew there must have been other hobos in the surrounding boxcars; she had sensed a group of them only one car away, waited to see if their roady curiosity would lead them down the same trail as their now dead comrade. When no one else had come, she had eventually slipped into a fragmented sleep, troubled by broken bits of her previous nightmare.
    She didn’t know where the hobos had gone this morning—perhaps they had stayed in the boxcars, waiting for the train to carry them to another town or larger city in which they could blend more naturally. Standing on the cleanly swept sidewalk next to the train station, Sil was a flagrant outsider amid the carefully tended pots of marigolds and petunias. Everything about the people milling past was different from anything she’d ever encountered—their clothes, the pleasant expressions on their faces, the way they smiled at each other. Looking down at the smudged and greasy pants and shirt she’d found in the hobo’s bag and at her bare feet, Sil realized her hands had started to shake. How long before someone in . . . authority began to question her? This was no dark and private boxcar speeding through the desert at night; retaliation and escape would not be so effortless in Brigham City at midmorning.
    But it was so fascinating. Dozens of people hustled through the station carrying everything from shoulder bags and briefcases to overstuffed suitcases they could barely lift. Others stood in line to talk to a woman on the other side of a window above which was a sign labeled TICKETS, while yet another line had formed at a cart painted gaudy red and yellow with western-style wheels that were far larger than necessary. Her gaze sharpened as she