the policeman traveled? Three days the man had been running before Maneck had led Ramon into the hunt. Another day since. If the man had spent a single night at the first campsite and two here, that meant he now had only one day's lead on them. Ramon silently cursed the cop for dawdling. Everything depended on the bastard getting to the river, floating away to the south, and bringing back help. The governor, the police, maybe even the Enye and some alien security force from the Enye ships that would be arriving any day now. That would be best - humanity's great alien patron species rolling through like moss-covered boulders and licking Maneck to death.
Ramon chuckled, but the alien ignored him, continuing its inspection.
There were several places, Ramon saw, where the policeman had ventured out into the forest, and several where he had returned. Broken branches and scuffed, turned litter showed it as clearly as if he'd left signs. This was a base of operations, then. The man had some plan or thought deeper than simple flight. Perhaps something he was searching for. Could the constabulary have an emergency beacon hidden somewhere nearby? It seemed too great a coincidence, but the thought alone was enough to make Ramon's heart beat faster. Or perhaps the man was an idiot, and still thought himself the hunter and Ramon the game. In which case, Maneck would surely find him, kill him, and return Ramon to the sickening darkness and noise of the alien hive, never to be heard from again.
Maneck stopped at the lean-to and reached down, stirring the leaves the man had used as bedding. Something among the green and blue leaves tumbled - dirty white and the black-red of old blood. Maneck leaned forward and made a rapid clicking sound that Ramon interpreted as pleasure. Ramon scratched his elbow, vaguely uneased by the sense that something had gone wrong.
"Que es?" he asked.
The alien lifted a scrap of cloth - a shirt sleeve soaked in blood. The cloth was wrinkled and bunched where it had been tied as a bandage or tourniquet and then hardened as the blood dried.
"Looks like you hit the poor pendejo pretty good," Ramon said, trying to sound pleased.
Maneck didn't reply, only dropped the bandage back into the disturbed litter. It paced off toward the fire pit, the sahael extending and narrowing, but still pulling Ramon to follow. Something glittered in the dirt beside the rough, gathered stones of the pit. Silver and blue. The alien paused, considering it. Ramon walked up to the thing's side, and then, divided between wonder and fear, he knelt and put the tips of his fingers on the cigarette case that Elena had given him.
"This is mine," he said softly.
"It is the artifact of the man," Maneck said, as if agreeing.
"No," Ramon said. "No, this is mine. This belongs to me. The police, they couldn't have got this unless they found ..."
He half scrambled back to the lean-to, scooping up the bloodsoaked sleeve. The cloth was rough canvas, designed to last for months in the field. The button at the sleeve's end was half shattered.
"This is my shirt. The pendejo's wearing my shirt!"
Ramon turned to Maneck, a sudden towering rage roaring in his ears. He waved the bloody cloth in his clenched fist.
"Why does that fucking sonofabitch have my shirt?"
The quills rose and fell on the huge alien's crest; its oil-sheened skin swirled. Only the knowledge that the sahael would visit him with unimaginable pain kept Ramon from attacking it.
"Answer me!"
"I do not understand. The garment with which you were provided - "
"Is your shirt," Ramon shouted, plucking at the alien robe. " Yo u fucking devils made this. You make me wear it. This is my shirt. Mine. I wore it from Diegotown. I bought it. I wore it. It's mine, and some ... some ..."
Martin Casaus appeared suddenly before his mind's eye, a memory as powerful and transporting as a drug flashback. Her name had been Lianna, the one he'd told Griego about. She'd been a cook at the Los Rancheros Grill down by the river. Martin had thought he was in love with her, and for a week he'd made up poems that started by comparing her eyes to the stars and ended near dawn and after a bottle of cheap whiskey, talking about what it would be like to fuck her. Ramon had seen her in the sleazy all-night bar they all called Rick's Cafe Americain even