“I was just thinking about something,” Ramón said.
There was a long pause. The supervisor hunched over like they were both prisoners in the same cell.
“You gonna change your story?” he asked.
Ramón took a long draw on his cigarette and sighed slowly, releasing a long, gray plume of smoke. A half-dozen smart-ass comments came to mind. Things he could say to show them he wasn’t scared of them or of the aliens for whom they’d made themselves into hunting dogs. In the end, he said simply, “No.”
“Your call,” the supervisor said.
“I still get the food?”
“Sure. And do yourself a favor. Reconsider. And do it fast. Paul’s got an idea how he’s going to show the Enye you’re full of shit. And if they ask to take you back to their ship, you’re gone. And then you’re doomed.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Ramón said.
“De nada,” the supervisor said, making it clear by his tone that it really was nothing to him. One way or the other.
Chapter 28
Time was a strange thing in the cell. The darkness had left him feeling discarded and forgotten. Now that the LED was on, Ramón had the sense of being scrutinized. The light was unforgiving; it made every squalid stain and scratch and chip in the cell perfectly clear. Ramón considered his wounds and came to the conclusion that while he would ache and piss blood for days, he wouldn’t be the last man Johnny Joe Cardenas had killed. He would recover—if the Enye let him.
There were stories, all officially denied, about what happened to men who transgressed against the crews of the transport ships. Ramón had heard his share and believed them—or not, depending on who told them and when and where. Once he’d reached the colony, they had the same status as ghost stories. They were pleasantly frightening and grotesque, but nothing to spend time thinking about. Now, though, he wondered. If they took him, would he hold out?
There wasn’t any advantage to him in keeping Maneck’s secret if the Enye would wrench it out of him anyway. The slaughter that followed would be the same whether Ramón offered up the information or had it taken from him. Except, of course, to Ramón.
On the other hand, he was a tough sonofabitch. So maybe he could stand it, even if they tried to break him. No way to know without trying.
Instead of obsessing about it, Ramón attempted to pinpoint the moment when he’d stopped thinking of Maneck and the aliens beneath the mountain as his enemies. It had to have happened. He had dedicated himself to killing them for the indignities they’d heaped upon him, and now here he was, wondering if he would be strong enough to die to protect them if the need arose. It wasn’t a small change of heart, and yet he couldn’t say when it had happened. Or why it felt so much like the moment he’d spoken up for the woman in the bar. Or why the prospect of his own torture and death didn’t fill him with some greater dread.
But there had been no promise of survival with the European either. He could have died in that alley as easily as he had killed. The result wasn’t the point. It was all about being the kind of man who would do the sort of thing he was doing. It was a reason to be, a reason to die a good death, if that’s what it meant. And maybe he had a thing for lost causes. Like that guy in the telenovela.
And then there were also long stretches when Ramón knew that if anyone had asked at that particular moment, he’d have told them anything. Everything. Just as long as they’d let him go. As the hours passed, he came to fix Maneck’s chances at maybe sixty-forty against. Depending on what part of its cycle of heroism and cowardice his mind was in when they came, and whether they pissed him off enough that he’d be willing to sacrifice himself out of spite.
When the door opened and the guards stepped in, the supervisor was with them. He’d changed his suit, so Ramón figured at least a day had passed since he’d been hauled into the cell. That seemed plausible.
Once he was shackled, the guards marched him—one before, two behind, and all of them with electric batons out and charged—to a small meeting chamber. It was nicely appointed. None of the slaughterhouse feel that the rest of the station maintained. The Enye from before, or else one enough like it to fool Ramón, stood against one wall, its slick tongue darting contentedly over its body. The governor was there, and, to Ramón’s surprise, the woman from the bar. The supervisor had the guards lead Ramón to a chair bolted to the floor and chain him to it. The governor looked at him with a mixture of disgust and shrewd evaluation. The woman glanced at him once, her expression profoundly bored, and turned back to her datapad.
This is all your fucking fault. He projected the thought toward the woman. If you had stood up for yourself instead of counting on us to do your fighting for you, I wouldn’t be in this fucked-up situation.
“Okay,” the governor said, sounding annoyed. “Can we get this over with?”
“They’re just getting her into the interrogation room now, sir,” the supervisor said.
“Who?” Ramón asked. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“What I told you, hijo,” the supervisor said. “End of the line.”
A wall screen popped once and then hummed to life. The hellish little interrogation room came into being, canted at a disturbing angle. He could see the back of the constable’s head and the place where the man was just starting to bald. Across from him, Elena was looking annoyed and fidgeting with a cigarette. Ramón coughed.
“Hey! Hey, wait. No fucking way. No way! I just broke it off with her. She’s fucking loca! You can’t believe a thing she says!”
The governor shot a glance at the supervisor. The Enye’s wet oyster eyes seemed to flicker as it considered Ramón. The woman pretended she hadn’t heard him.
“Señor Espejo,” the supervisor said. “Extradition hearing needs the governor, a representative of the foreign power, a representative of the police, and the accused. That’s you. Doesn’t say a goddamn thing about the accused getting to talk. With all due respect for your rights as a citizen, this is your chance to shut the fuck up before I gag you. Okay?”
On the screen, the constable and Elena were going through the motions—stating her name and address, whether she knew Ramón Espejo.
“But she’s a liar!” Ramón said, embarrassed to hear the whine in his voice.
“I known that ass-wipe for seven years,” Elena said from the screen. “Whenever he comes to town, he stays with me. Eats my food, leaves his crap on my floor. I even washed his pinche clothes, you believe that? I got a good job, and I’m spending my time off-shift making sure that slack-ass cabrón has clean socks!”
“So you would call your relationship with Señor Espejo an intimate one?”
Elena glanced at the constable, then down at the floor, shrugging.
“I guess,” she said. “I mean. Yeah. We were intimate.”
“In your time with Señor Espejo—seven years, you said? You washed his laundry often?”
“Sure,” Elena said.
“She never—” Ramón began. The supervisor shook his head once—left, right, stop—with a sense of threat that made Ramón go quiet.
“And in that time,” the constable said, “did you ever come across this garment?”
With a flourish, he produced the robe. Ramón looked over at the Enye. Its gaze was on the screen, its tongue moving restlessly, darting in and out of its mouth, the fringe of chartreuse cilia that lined its body squirming like worms.
I’ve got to tell them, Ramón thought. For fuck’s sake, I got to tell them now before they give me to that thing. Secondhand visions danced through his mind—the Silver Enye on their path of slaughter. What methods would they devise to wring information from a human? All he had to do was talk, say a few words, and condemn Maneck’s people to death. How fucking hard could that be?
“That rag? All the time,” Elena said. “Leaves it on the floor of the fucking bathroom whenever he takes a shower. And you know why? Because he thinks I’m his goddamn maid! Pendejo. I’ll tell you what, I’m way be
tter off without him. Kicking his ass out was the best thing I ever did!”
Ramón’s panic had deafened him, so it took a moment before the meaning of her words came to him. He turned to the screen, his jaw slack. In the interrogation room, silence stretched. The constable’s mouth moved as if he were speaking, but no words escaped. Elena scratched herself indelicately. Ramón’s head spun. It was bullshit. Elena couldn’t have seen this robe, not even after he’d come back from the hospital. She was lying, and lying in just the right way to save his sorry ass. He couldn’t understand it.
“Are you sure of that?” the constable asked. His voice sounded a little strangled. “Please take a very close look at this. You’re sure you’ve seen this particular piece of clothing?”
“Yeah,” Elena said.
“But in your deposition, you said that Señor Espejo doesn’t own a robe.”
“That’s not a robe,” Elena said. “Robe is like, down-to-your-ankles long. That would only go to just under his knee. It’s more like a smock.”
“And this smock…” the constable said, then trailed off. Ramón almost felt sorry for the little shit. What was there left for him to say?
“He’s had it since I met him,” Elena said. “I kept telling him to throw the fucking shabby thing out, but did he ever listen to me? Never. Never once, about anything. Pinche motherfucker.”
“Ah,” the constable said. And then, hopelessly, “You’re sure?”
“Do I look stupid?” Elena asked, frowning.
A sense of unreality washed over him. Someone had gotten to her. Someone had gotten to Elena between the time she gave her deposition and now, and coached her on how to pull Ramón’s sorry balls out of the fire. He wondered how much it had cost. Knowing Elena, probably a fair amount. He didn’t let himself laugh, but the relief was like taking a drink of the best whiskey he’d ever had. Better, maybe.
Standing beside the governor, the straight-haired woman looked over at him, her face empty of any expression.
The problem with aliens, Ramón realized, was that they could never truly understand all the subtle ways that humans could communicate with humans. A hundred years of talking, and Ramón would never have been able to explain to anyone else how exactly the woman raising her chin a few millimeters meant “you’re welcome” and “thank you” and “we’re even” all at the same time. Ramón imagined the European’s soul, trapped somewhere in Hell, keening his anger as Ramón escaped.
On screen, the constable limped through a few more pointless questions and then closed the interrogation. The governor tapped at his datapad once, and the wall-screen image faded. Ramón rubbed his hand against his thigh, trying to hide his elation by feigning impatience and rage.
“So you still want to gag me, pendejo?” Ramón asked. “I don’t mean to be, you know, unreasonable or anything. But now that you fuckers have locked me up, kicked the shit out of me, and tried to hand me over to that great glob of snot over there, can someone unlock these fucking shackles so I can go talk to a lawyer about how much I can sue you for?”
“His account is consistent,” the Enye piped. “He is of no interest.”
Never in his life had Ramón been so thoroughly pleased to be of no interest. The governor, his assistant, and the Enye all left while Ramón was being processed out. The supervisor went through the forms and procedures with a bored efficiency; only his continued presence indicated that he wanted to be sure nothing else about all this went wrong. Within an hour, Ramón stepped onto the street, worse for wear but grinning all the same. He paused to spit on the ground at the base of the station-house stairs, then strode out into the city, making it almost half a block before he realized that he had nowhere to go.
He had been on his way to find Lianna and create some kind of new life for himself. He was maybe two hours’ walk from there now, still with the wristband identification they used when he was in custody, bruised and beaten from his time with Johnny Joe, and not feeling up to a long walk anyway. He kept moving until he found a public square—a sad little plot of dirt in the shadow of an administrative complex. He sat on a bench; just for a few minutes, though. He didn’t want the police to hassle him, and he figured he looked like a bum.
A bum. Without a place of his own. Without a job. He had nothing, only a half-baked plan to rebuild himself and a secret he couldn’t tell anyone. High above, the Enye ships flickered, their forms dimmed by the haze of smoke that squatted over the city. The sun would set soon, and the few stars that could struggle against the city lights would come out. Ramón shoved his hands in his pockets.
Lianna seemed like a dream now. An idea he’d had when he was drunk only to find it nonsense when sobriety returned. He tried to imagine what he would say to her, how he would explain that the beaten-up, penniless prospector without a van or even a place to sleep was someone who had worth. Never mind that he’d just gotten out of the station-house jail and probably smelled like it. Never mind that he’d just become the new Johnny Joe, first on the list of usual suspects to be rounded up the next time the governor needed someone to take the fall for some inconveniently unsolvable crime. He knew what Lianna would see when she looked at him.
She’d see Ramón Espejo.
It was still twilight when he reached the butcher’s shop. It had been closed for hours, metal bars hugging the door and windows. He took the side stairs up. There were lights on in Elena’s apartment. He stood in the gloom at the top of the stairs for a long time. There were cats in the alley—another species imported from Earth. Lizards skittered up the wall and took wing. The scent of old blood rotting in the alley mixed with the wood smoke and van exhaust; the odor of Diegotown was acrid and familiar. The tension in his shoulders and gut was also familiar. Up in the night sky, Big Girl was peeking out from behind the high clouds. The boom and blare of distant music.
He knocked.
When she opened the door, he could see the question in her eyes. There were any number of reasons he might have come. To say thank you. To get some of the shit he’d forgotten and leave again. To stay. Each one had a different greeting to match it, and she wasn’t sure which to use. He wasn’t either.
“Hey,” he said.
“You look like shit,” she said. “The cops do that?”
“Get their fucking hands dirty? No, they had a guy do it for them.”
Elena crossed her arms over her breasts. She hadn’t stood aside—afraid, he guessed, that he wouldn’t accept the invitation.
“You give as good as you got?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” Ramón said. “I didn’t kill him, so I’m not in trouble or any shit like that. But he was there because of me, and they killed him. I figure that means I won.”
“Tough cabrón,” Elena said, half mocking, but only half. “Dangerous to cross.”
An orbital shuttle throbbed up into the night. Ramón smiled; it hurt a little, around his eye. Elena looked down, smiled shyly at his knees, and stepped back. He went inside, closing the door behind him. She’d made rice gumbo. It was the kind of dish she could tell herself she made so she could eat the leftovers through the week. Or it could be meant to feed two. Ramón sat at the table and let her serve him a bowl.
“You were good,” he said. “With the cops, I mean. That thing about how it’s a smock?”
“You liked that?” Elena asked. “That was my idea.”
“It was good,” Ramón said. “Only thing was, with the camera like that, I couldn’t see his face.”
Elena grinned, made a bowl for herself and sat down. The atmosphere surrounding them seemed as fragile as blown glass. Ramón cleared his throat, but didn’t have any words to follow up with, so he took a mouthful of gumbo. It wasn’t very good.
“That rich lady,” Elena said. “The one who came and talked to me? She was the one at the El Rey?”
“Yeah,” Ramón said. “That was her.”
“She seemed okay.”
“I don’t know. I never talked to her.”
Elena’s eyes narrowed, her lips thinned. Ramón felt the distrust emanating from her like heat. He shook his head.
“No shit,” he said. “She never said a fucking word to me. I only ever heard her name because one of the cops said it.”
“You got in a knife fight with a guy over some woman you never even talked to?” Elena’s voice was incredulous but not angry.
“Well. He didn’t know it was a knife fight,” Ramón said.
“You’re fucking crazy,” she said.
Ramón laughed. Elena laughed with him. The fragile moment passed; the fight they’d had was just another fight now. One of a thousand before and a thousand still to come, too insignificant to remember. He reached out and took her hand.
“I’m glad you came back,” she said.
“I fit here,” he said. “I thought for a while I was someone else, but this is where I am, you know? To be Ramón and not Ramón is aubre.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Damned if I know,” Ramón said through a grin. “It’s just something a friend of mine used to say.”
Chapter 29
It was a crisp clear day in Octember. The van’s lift tubes whined, and one of the rear pair lost power sometimes. If Ramón didn’t keep an eye on it, he’d wind up flying in a long, slow circle, the terreno cimarrón below him going on until his fuel cells ran down. It was especially a pain in the ass because the winter night fell early this far north, and he would have liked to put the van on autopilot and get a little sleep. Instead, he stayed humped over the bullshit instrument panel running diagnostics and telling himself that his days of fifth-rate rented vans were going to end. Just four or five good trips in a row. And after this trip, four or five good runs should be easy.
The Enye had remained parked above São Paulo for two months, shuttles rising into the sky and dropping back down, sometimes as often as a dozen times a day. As the weeks went by, Ramón had found it harder and harder to stay in the city. Once his latest set of wounds had more or less healed, the impulse to get out of the city and into the wild returned. His patience with the people around him grew shorter and shorter. And to make things worse, he didn’t dare get drunk.
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