Free Darwin's Paradox by Nina Munteanu Page B

glittering sunlight.
    She didn’t hesitate this time. Her shot missed and he returned fire.
    Her right upper arm exploded in a blaze of pain. The next thing she knew she was sliding uncontrollably down the slope, smashing into jagged rocks on the way down. She heard the pistol that must have flown from her hand clatter far from her. Had she cried out? When she finally came to a stop on the dry creek bed, she pushed herself up with trembling hands and shook her head to clear it.
    The nervous chirping spiked. She dropped on one knee and scanned for her assailant. He’d already moved off the slope top. Nauseous with the shooting pain in her arm, she looked at it and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach twisted in alarm at the site of the large burn that had angrily carved through muscle. Shiny blisters and black flakes of burnt flesh boiled up and wept plasma and dirt. Fighting the urge to throw up, Julie scrambled unsteadily to her feet to bolt for cover.
    “You’ve led us quite a chase,” said a calm voice close to her. “No need to run anymore, Ms. Crane.”
    She spun toward the voice, squinting at the sun, and whipped out Aard’s weapon from her back holster. She didn’t get very far with it. Something hit the back of her head. The pain arced and shafts of brilliant light lanced the image of a man with tidy blue hair looking at her with an amused smile. The last thing she saw as the ground rushed toward her were several size-nine, freshly made boot prints. Then the darkness took her.

9
    It took her a while to realize that the thunder in her head came mostly from outside. Some motor was pulsing to the rhythm of the sharp pain that resonated through her head. Her whole body ached, she felt sick to her stomach and her arm smoldered with a brooding pain where the laser shot had burned her. She cautiously opened her eyes and when her vision cleared she saw that she was slumped in a curled position in a back passenger seat of a skyship. A pilot in front of her was doing diagnostics on the ship and the blue-haired man sat next to her, regarding her with a faint smile.
    “Ah, welcome to the living again, Ms. Crane.”
    She straightened up and winced from the painful jolt in her right arm. “Who are you?” She noticed that the wound in her arm had been bandaged.
    “Inquisitive. Good. You must be feeling better. Don’t worry about the arm. Raymond treated it topically with mitigin and gave you some ambrosia to ease the pain.” That explained her nausea, she thought—Icaria’s drugs had always made her sick. “But we’ll soon get you to a Med-Center where they’ll treat it properly and clean you up. I’m Greg Tyers.”
    The ship shuddered, beginning its ascent. Julie looked outside and caught a glimpse of Aard lying in a heap. She watched his dark corpse recede into the vast heath. Seen from this vantage point, the heath’s brilliant purple and green patchwork blazed with breathtaking beauty on either side of the widening river with its thousands of islands and the lake beyond. Then she could no longer make out Aard’s body from the heath’s multi-coloured quilt-work.
    As the skyship skirted along the shore of Lake Ontario, Julie gazed to the north. Like pointillist paintings, the ancient remains of the old roads and buildings revealed themselves from the air in an abstract network of light green lines and shapes. The history of human habitation spoke in subtle whispers of shade and texture.
    Just as with humankind’s many artifacts, the heath would reclaim Aard into its fractal fabric of colour and filigree, while she hurtled toward the dark and sterile halls of Icaria. She couldn’t help feeling that her journey and her end lay in those dark halls, not in the heath below, where her sweet child was born and belonged. Not me , thought Julie. It seemed her own destiny lay along a path different from Angel’s or Daniel’s. A darker path. She’d cheated destiny, after all. She’d fled and raised a