Free Water From the Moon by Terese Ramin Page B

her pack over her shoulders, tightening its webbed belt around her waist as she sidled sideways into the brush. "New day, new game, new ground rules. Can you use it?"
    Cameron followed her, ignoring the question. "Worse than yesterday? Bad enough that you think I’ll need to use it?"
    "Yes."
    The simple answer rocked him, and his fingers tightened on the gun. It was an admission he hadn’t expected her to make. If she couldn’t handle it alone, it was bad. "What are we running from?"
    Acasia cast an eye at the forest canopy and melted deeper into its gloom, drawing Cameron after her. The helicopter flapped closer, no longer distant, dangerously audible. "A mercenary hired to find you and bring you back to Sanchez alive." She exercised patience she didn’t have and couldn’t afford and stopped long enough to ask, "Can you—
will you
—use the gun?"
    Did he have a choice? Cameron pocketed the extra bullet clips she offered him. "If I have to."
    He met her eyes, and Acasia saw him through the shadows, saw him for the first time as the man he’d become.
    And understood fully for the first time that he wasn’t who he’d thought he’d be by now either.
    "Good," she said. Then she hefted up her gun and ran.

Chapter 5
    T HE RIVER FOAMED over rocks, roared at its banks and laughed at Acasia as it strained fiercely to burst its seams. Above them, the helicopter hovered so close that she could make out every line in Dominic’s face.
    They sat in a lush copse of trees at the river’s edge, silent and alert, while the big green bird sat there whipping the already–raging current into a frenzy. Fear etched the pilot’s face when Dominic spoke to him, pointing forcefully in the direction of the small village clearing where they could set down. Acasia’s lips moved in silent prayer, emotions jockeying for position. Anger, hatred, guilt, disgust—each charted a path visible to Cameron, who looked from the dark–faced man in the see–through bubble to Acasia and back again, noting the physical resemblance to himself, seeing Acasia swallow when she recognized it, too.
    She turned to Cameron, an expression like an apology mixed with fear in her eyes before she ducked away. An inner chill dried the sweat on his skin with uncanny suddenness, leaving in its place a grainy film he wanted to wash away. With a single look she had told him what she’d guarded him against last night, what she’d hidden from him this morning. He was the hunted, but she was the prize. He reached for the nine–millimeter, looking up in time to see the helicopter lift slowly and move away, leaving behind it the sound of the river and a thundering silence. Acasia rose without preamble and prepared to move on.
    Cameron grabbed at her arm. "A word in your ear, Jones…."
    Acasia only glided deeper into the forest, where the overhead canopy became thick and impenetrable once more. She shut him out, closed herself up out of habit, out of practice. She told herself that she was allowed to care, but he was not. She wanted him to behave the way her script said he was supposed to, going where and when he was directed without question or hesitation. But there was more to him than that, damn it, and she knew it.
    Nobody ever becomes who they think they will.
Something Fred had said to her once, right before she hit rock bottom and knew the only way out was to reach for "up."
The only way to get to there from here is to grow into yourself, make use of what ails you, and get beyond it.
    Sometimes she hated her brother’s perceptiveness.
    She disappeared behind a curtain of hanging vines and mosses, and Cameron followed. Sweat trickled down his back and glued his khaki shirt to his skin. Heat and pain from the neatly dressed head wound made him suddenly nauseous, and he stumbled and fell against a tree.
    "Sorry," he muttered as Acasia caught him, pulling him away from the red–and–white caterpillar that fell past his bare hand.
    "Concentrate on something,"