of false. "You're the one that blew up the yunea?"
"The what?"
You only get one slip like that, Ramon told himself. Hold it together, cabron. At least until you have the knife.
"The flying box thing. That's what they called it."
"Uh," the other man said. "Yeah. I'm the one. I saw you, too. I was watching."
"So you saw the thing they put in my neck."
The other man seemed reluctantly to agree that Ramon's story had some truth to it. Ramon could see it in the man's stance when he decided not to kill him.
"How'd you get away?" the other man asked.
"Chupacabra killed the alien. Came out of nowhere. The leash came free while they were fighting, and I got out of there."
The other man smiled to himself. Ramon decided to let him think they hadn't seen through his plan with the flatfurs. Better that the other Ramon spend his time thinking how clever he was, and how stupid everyone else could be.
"What's your name, anyway?" the other man asked.
"David," Ramon said, pulling a name out of the air. "David Penasco. I live down in Amadora. I'm a banker with union Trust. I was camping by myself, maybe a month ago. They took me when I was sleeping."
"union Trust's got a branch in Amadora?" the other man asked.
"Yeah," Ramon said. He didn't know if it was true, didn't know if there was some other memory that hadn't grown back yet that would rip his story apart, so he plain bare-faced lied it through and prayed. "Has been for about six months."
"Sonofabitch," the other man said. "Well, get off your ass, David. We got work to do if we're going to get out of here. I got maybe a third of a raft finished. If there's gonna be two of us, you better get to work. Maybe later you can tell me what you know about those pinche motherfuckers."
The other man turned and started walking back into the forest. Ramon followed.
The clearing was twenty meters or so into the woods, and the man hadn't bothered to make a shelter or a fire pit. This wasn't a place to live, it was a construction site. Four sheaves of bamboolike cane lay bound with strips of iceroot bark, the red skin of the cane glittering as it died as if it had been lacquered. Pontoons, Ramon thought. Laced together with thin branches and saplings young enough to be hewn with the serrated back edge of the field knife, they would float. It wouldn't be anything near watertight - the river would be splashing onto their legs and asses the whole way down if they didn't have something to cover the raft floor. And the sheaves were too small and too loosely bound. It was damn impressive for some crazed pendejo out by himself with a wounded hand and a demon out of Hell trotting after him, but it wouldn't get one of them to Fiddler's Jump, much less two.
"What?" the man said.
"Just looking," Ramon replied. "We're going to need more cane. You want me to cut it? Just show me where you found it... ."
The man considered the offer with a pinched, sour face. Ramon knew the calculation going on behind those dark eyes. Ramon - or David, whatever his name was now - was going to harvest faster than the injured man himself, but it meant giving him the knife.
"I'll do it," the man said, nodding toward the deeper forest farther from the river. "You go see if you can find some good branches to put between them. And some food, maybe. Be back here before sundown. We'll try to get this sonofabitch ready to haul down to the water in the morning."
"Yeah, okay," Ramon said. The man spat and stalked off to the south, leaving him alone. Ramon scratched at his elbow where the knot of scar tissue was growing back and turned to walk into the gloom beneath the trees. He realized he'd never asked the man his name. Of course he hadn't; he already knew. The dread grew in him that the other Ramon would think the omission strange. He had to be more careful.
The rest of the day was spent dragging fallen branches and wide iceroot leaves back to the campsite and making up the story he could tell his twin. He stopped once to crack open some sug beetles and eat the raw flesh. Uncooked, they were saltier and the meat slick and unpleasant. There wasn't time, though, for anything