had solved itself. He was safe now. He could feel it.
It was almost two weeks before Ramon found out what he'd overlooked.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ramon walked out of the hospital eight days later, unsteady on atrophied legs. He wore one of his white shirts and a pair of canvas pants that Elena had brought by one afternoon when he was asleep. The shirt was too big; wide across the shoulders and through the chest, a measure of how badly he had been reduced by his time in the wild and on the river. His new scars ached sometimes if he turned wrong. The Enye ships still hovered high above the planet, but here among the street vendors and the gypsy boats, the rheumy-eyed buskers with almost-tuned guitars and the truant children smoking cigarettes on the corners, the alien ships seemed less of a threat.
He'd intended at first to make his way to Manuel Griego's shop. Ramon was going to need a new van. He didn't have the money to buy one outright, and there wasn't a bank on the colony or off that would front him a loan big enough to cover the expense. That left making deals, and Manuel was the one to start with. But his shop was far from the center of the city, at the edge of neighboring Nuevo Janeiro, where most of the Portuguese lived, and Ramon found himself growing tired more quickly than he'd expected. He had no money and only a temporary emergency identification chit from the hospital. More trivia that he'd have to address in the days ahead. At the moment, it meant that when he sat on the bench at the edge of the park, he could smell the sausages, onions, and peppers cooking on the cart's grill but couldn't buy any.
In a sense, this was the first time he'd seen his adopted hometown. This particular pair of eyes had never looked down these narrow brown streets or at the faded yellow grass of the park. These particular ears hadn't heard the demanding blatting of the urban flatfurs, or the tapanos scolding from the tree branches on the edge of the canal like amphibious squirrels. Ramon tried to concentrate on how he felt about that, examining his own soul for unease or some sense of dislocation greater than usual. But what he really felt was tired, impatient, and pissed off that he was too weak to walk to where he wanted to, and too broke to take a fucking pedicab or bus.
The obvious place to go was Elena's. He didn't have any place else to sleep, and she'd brought him clothes, so the fight they'd been having when he left was probably forgotten. And she'd have food and maybe sex if he was up for it.
He was half tempted to go to the El Rey first, thank Mikel Ibrahim for keeping that knife away from the police. But then he remembered again that he had no money, and trying to hustle a free beer seemed like a piss-poor way to express gratitude. Ramon took a long, deep breath - nostrils filling with the ozone stench of city air - and heaved himself back up from his bench. Elena's place it was. And with that, Elena.
It wasn't a long walk, but it felt that way. When he reached the butcher's shop that squatted below her apartment, Ramon felt like he'd tracked a full day through the underbrush, Maneck at his side. He wondered, as he made his way up the dingy, dank-smelling stairs, what Maneck would think of this wide, flat human hive that lay open to the sky. He thought the alien would think it naive, like kyi-kyi grazing in a meadow where a chupacabra was sunning itself. The Enye ships stuttered in and out of existence high above, vanishing only for a moment before returning.
At the top of the stairs, Ramon punched in the code, hoping that Elena hadn't changed it in a fit of pique when he'd slipped out on her. Or if she had, that she'd changed it back. And when the last number shifted the status light to green, the bolt clicking audibly and the hinges hissing as the door swung open, Ramon knew he'd been forgiven.
Elena wasn't home, but the cabinets were stocked with food. Ramon opened a can of black bean soup - one of the self-heating kind - and ate it with a beer. It tasted of the heating element, but not so much that