Free Railhead by Philip Reeve Page A

who
fancied
Motos. But he liked her company, and she served as a stand-in for all the real girls he’d meet when he was far away and rich.
    “
Tell me about when you were little
,” she said, inside his head.
    “Why?”
    “
Because I’m interested
.” She turned and faced him, smiling, speaking aloud now. “That’s the difference between people like you and people like me. I’ve always been like I am now, but you were little once. The child you were is still inside you somewhere, peeking out through your eyes.”
    Zen snorted. “Not me. I had to grow up fast. I don’t remember much.”
    But he did. The memories had been all around him during these days in Desdemor. He told her some of them as they walked on. He told her about his acting lessons, and the model trains he used to build and paint, and the view from the first bedroom window he remembered. He had never told anyone about that stuff before. He started telling her about Ma and Myka, but those were not comfortable memories; it made him miss the times when he had been too small to notice Myka’s anger or Ma’s madness. He had loved them then, but that had faded somehow, and he knew he was a disappointment to them. He talked about games he remembered instead.
    “I used to play a game sometimes,” said Nova, as if she were remembering some childhood of her own.
    They stood on the promenade. The tide was out, the wet sand reflecting the green crescent of Hammurabi. “I’d walk way out there on the sand and start dancing,” she said. “Flinging my arms about, whirling and twirling, laughing and shouting… And then the rays would notice me, and come swooping down. And I’d wait till the very last moment, then I’d drop flat and lie completely still, and the stupid things would go whooshing over me and flap about the beach, wondering where I’d gone. And I’d lie there still as a statue, laughing at them. They only strike at things that move. It’s a funny instinct for predators to have evolved, but of course they didn’t evolve, they were designed. Poor rays.”
    Zen had not yet seen the rays up close, although he had heard them calling. With no hunters to keep the population down, they were spreading inland from the offshore reefs, nesting in the penthouses of the abandoned towers at the southern end of the island.
    “Let’s try it,” he said, in his best Golden Junction drawl.
    “I don’t think Raven would…” Nova started to say, but he had already scrambled over the railings, dropped down onto the sand, and started running toward the far white lacework of the surf. He thought that was what Tallis Noon would have done.
    She ran with him. Each stride took them one or two yards. Their deep footprints filled quickly with water, a chain of little mirrors stretching away behind them to the promenade. They ran past tide pools and the wrecks of pleasure boats half buried in the sand. They were almost at the sea’s edge when Nova shouted, “Zen!”
    He looked round, and was startled by how close the ray was, how large, how silently it had come swooping down from its aerie in the old towers. Brown, it was, with patterns on its wide wings like the markings on spiders’ backs. (The creamy speckles still held a blurred echo of some gene-tech outfit’s corporate logo.) Its hooked beak opened to let out a fierce hoot, designed to freeze Zen’s blood, or maybe announce to the flock following behind it that Zen was its prey and they would have to make do with the leftovers.
    Then Nova crashed into him, knocked him flat. She didn’t say anything, but her voice came into his head like the voiceover on a video, or the voices his mother heard. “
Lie still, remember!
”
    So he lay as still as he could, half his face pressed into the wet sand, tasting the salt of Tristesse’s ocean, smelling the hot leather stink of the ray as it swooped overhead, lashing its barbed tail. He wasn’t pretending to be Tallis anymore. The shock had jolted him out of