immediately gathering a swarm of skitterlings. Ramon watched it like it was all happening someplace else, to someone else. He'd known, hadn't he? He'd known she wouldn't be able to hear him. That even if he explained himself the best way he could, she wouldn't understand. If lions could speak, he remembered Ibrahim saying.
"It's not happening," Ramon said, his voice gentle and matterof-fact. His calm seemed to startle Elena out of her rage. He saw her trying to get it back, and rose to his feet. "You're not a bad person, Elena. You're a little crazy, but I don't see how anyone lives in this fucking city all the time without getting a little crazy. But this ..."
He gestured at the food dripping down the wall, Elena's small hands curled tightly into fists, the apartment. He gestured at their life together.
"This isn't going to happen anymore," he said.
Elena tried. She baited him, she screamed. She shouted obscenities at him and taunted him about his sexual inadequacies, all the things she had done before, the familiar, habitual sickness. When it was clear that he was going to leave, she wept and then grew quiet as if she were thinking through a puzzle. She barely raised her head as he closed the door behind him. An hour later, Ramon was walking down the riverside, listening to the music coming off the boats. He had a satchel packed with two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a few documents that he'd left at her apartment. Everything he owned. The sun shone on the water, and the air was cool with the first bite of autumn. It was like being born again. He had nothing - and yet he couldn't stop smiling. And somewhere nearby, in one of the small apartments with their weedy courtyards and leaking roofs, Lianna was making her life. She wouldn't be that hard to find. And he was a free man.
First, though, there was Manuel Griego and the problem of the van. There was a future to create. And now, he had a plan to do it.
"Ramon Espejo?"
Ramon stopped, looking back over his shoulder. The man looked familiar, but it took the two uniformed brutes coming from the van behind him to give the face and voice context. The man from the constabulary. The cop. Ramon considered running. It was only a few yards to the river; he could dive in before they caught him. But then they could also get boats out and haul him up like the world's ugliest fish. Ramon raised his chin in greeting.
"You're that cop," Ramon said. His mind was racing. Elena. It had to be Elena. She'd called the cops and passed on all he'd told her about the European. Johnny Joe Cardenas had just gotten his prayers answered.
"Ramon Espejo, I have a warrant from the governor for your detainment for questioning. You can come with us of your own free will, or I can put you in restraints. Any way you want."
There was a glitter in the cop's eye, a lilt in his voice. He was having a very good day.
"I didn't do anything," Ramon said.
"You aren't accused, Se?or Espejo. We just need to talk to you about something."
The station house was one of the oldest in Diegotown, grown when the first colonists had arrived, and not updated since. Where the chitin superstructure showed, it had become gray with time. The plaster and paint had been freshened for the Enye, but the building still seemed old and sad and brooding, ominous.
The interrogation room wasn't entirely unfamiliar territory for Ramon. Dirty white tiles lined the walls, marred by unidentifiable stains and threatening dents and cracks. A long table set just a little too high, a metal chair bolted to the floor and set just a little too low, so you felt like a kid. The light was too bright, and blued to make anyone look dead. The air was stale and close and still as the grave; Ramon felt like he'd been breathing the same four lungfuls since he'd entered. There was no clock, no window. Nothing to tell him how far the hours had stretched. His only company had been the uniformed guard who'd told him he couldn't smoke, and the old flat-black surveillance camera set into the wall at the corner of the ceiling. The design was intended to make a man feel small, insignificant, and doomed. It worked pretty well, and Ramon found his resentment of it fueling his anger.
Anger at