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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," Ramon said. "That was her."

"She seemed okay."

"I don't know. I never talked to her."

Elena's eyes narrowed, her lips thinned. Ramon 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," Ramon said. "You're fucking crazy," she said.

Ramon 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 Ramon and not Ramon is aubre ."

"What's that mean?"

"Damned if I know," Ramon said through a grin. "It's just something a friend of mine used to say."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It was a crisp clear day in Octember. The van's lift tubes whined, and one of the rear pair lost power sometimes. If Ramon didn't keep an eye on it, he'd wind up flying in a long, slow circle, the terreno cimarron 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 S?o 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, Ramon 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.

The police were making it quite clear that they had their eyes on Ramon. He couldn't go to the store without seeing someone in a uniform lurking nearby. On the few occasions he did go into a bar, a constable always seemed to materialize a few minutes later. Twice, he got pulled in for questioning over some petty crime he'd had nothing to do with. Both times he'd had alibis that even the police couldn't deny. But it was clear enough. They wanted him out, and he wanted to oblige them. He would have, if he had any money.

Instead, he stayed at home and drank a little of Elena's whiskey. When he got a little buzzed, he'd get on her link and snoop through the records and boards for answers to idle questions. It was how he learned that Martin Casaus had died three years before in a wreck, that Lianna was married and had a kid. It was where he discovered that the European's name had been Dorian Andres, and that the trade agreements he'd been working to broker - agreements that wouldn't be signed in this generation or the next - were being sent back to Europa in hopes that the process wouldn't have to be postponed for another hundred or thousand years, followed up by the children of children whose parents hadn't yet been born. Space was too large for these things to mean as much as the politicians wanted them to.

And it was where he discovered that the Silver Enye were moving on. The eaters-of-the-young had finished trading, and they were heading out to the next colony. Searching for their prey, though no woman or man on the planet knew that besides himself. The afternoon they were scheduled to go, there was another big carnival downtown in their honor, but instead of attending, Ramon got a couple beers, crawled up onto the