So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online Page B

explosives in the knapsack. Several vines snapped from his weight and he staggered toward me. I pointed the pistol at him. For a moment Renee wanted to shoot him down like a dog, but I didn’t. “Tell me.”
    “After they worked you over I remember you screaming my name . . . like a prayer, but you never betrayed me.” He stared at the gun until I finally lowered it. “For a time you forgot everything, but if somebody touched you, it was the rape happening again.” He looked far away though I was close enough to smell his fear. “Doctors said you might never remember. It was a miracle you got out alive.”
    “You call that a miracle?” My voice was hollow. I felt like a spirit unhinged, floating above this body.
    “Your mind came back without those memories, but you couldn’t stand to be touched – until now.” He shivered. “I would have told them anything, but you. . . .”
    He waited for me to say something. He pleaded with his eyes, with all the tiny muscles of his face for contempt, forgiveness, something. I teetered at the edge of chaos, vertigo claiming my senses. “I gotta get out of this hole, now.” I pushed through him and the vines. The air outside was a welcome relief. I drew myself back into Renee’s flesh. The sun had disappeared behind distant hills. Birds sang love suites and battle sonatas. I took out a Soya Power Bar and chewed at it furiously.
    After a few moments he emerged from the tree, mumbling something about the Perez woman and the damn Mission. I forced myself to listen. “Blowing up a bunch of trees. She could’ve done this bizarre shit herself.”
    Shop talk. I could do that too. “Perez is a biologist or something. These trees are old souls, a couple thousand years even. Maybe Perez didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”
    He stared at me. “You sounded like her just now. That was exactly her little speech, when she hired us.”
    I shrugged. “Good memory.”
    “You weren’t there.”
    “You told me.”
    “Right. But you sounded just like her .”
    “Your mind is playing tricks on you. How could I sound just like Perez?” Unless I’d been her, but I couldn’t share that suspicion with him.
    “Of course.” Methodically, he pulled explosives out of my pack, fussed over detonators, and every hundred feet buried a bundle in the roots of a giant tree. He didn’t ask for my assistance and I didn’t offer. So much history behind and between people, one moment was always a nasty echo of another time, most of who you were already scripted. That was Renee. Axala was outside of history, dropping in for samples, but not really taking part. Not committing to the lives she became. More of a gig slut than Renee could ever be. And sick to death of it.
    “Are you setting us up?” He looked up from the last detonator, hand on his pistol, eyes frantic. “You and Perez, setting me up? Some kind of final revenge?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    He stared at me, fighting with something inside himself. I touched his hand. “Sorry. You’d lay down your life for me, I know that. I’m just being paranoid.” He brushed his lips across my damp palm and headed for the dense new growth beyond the trees. “You got the map to ‘the final shore’?”
    “Like I told you.” I started after him, but stumbled over roots and fell back against a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of me, slapped my brain against its skull, and I lay a moment plastered against smooth bark, seeing stars.
    “What’s the matter? Come on!”
    I couldn’t speak or move. The tree wouldn’t let me go. It snagged me in a magnetic field, lined up my electrons, and started generating current. Energy rushed from my toes out through the fuzzy ends of my hair, like a lightning bolt sparking into the ground. The tree was a body historian, this rain forest, a jungle of galactic griots, roots intertwining underground, branches interwoven above, and their fields all lined up. Perez