Read Online Flinx in Flux by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online Page A

could hardly blame her.
    “I’m not here to hurt you.” He spoke slowly, soothingly. “I’ll help if I can.”
    Her eyes shifted from him to the flying snake. Slowly she bent to recover the knife, placed it on the antique dresser nearby, and laughed nervously.
    “That doesn’t make any sense, but neither does anything else that’s happened to me in the past few weeks. Besides, if half of what I’ve heard is true, a knife’s pretty useless against a minidrag.”
    “Not half,” Flinx corrected her. “It’s all true.” He kept his distance. “Would you like to sit down? You’ve been unconscious for several days.”
    She put a hand to her forehead. “I thought I was dead. Out there.” She indicated the window that looked over the town. “I was never so certain of anything in my life. Now I’m not sure of anything anymore.” She blinked and tried to smile at him. “Thank you. I will sit down.”
    There was a lounge chair made of epoxied lianas. Under the epoxy, the wood flashed a rainbow of colors. It was the only brightly colored piece of furniture in the room. Flinx sat down on the edge of the bed while Pip curled herself around one of the short bedposts, looking like a carved decoration. Scrap settled in his lap. He stroked the back of the small flying snake’s head absently.
    “How old are you, anyway?” the woman asked him as she slumped into the chair.
    Why do they always ask that? he wondered. Not “Thank you for saving me” or “Where do you come from?” or “What’s your business?” His reply was the same one he had been using for years.
    “Old enough. Old enough not to be the one who was lying out in the Ingre making a meal for the millimite bugs and dying of exposure. How’d you end up like that?”
    “I escaped.” She inhaled deeply, as if the cool air in the room was an unexpectedly rich dessert. “Got away.”
    “I didn’t think you ended up there by choice. You weren’t dressed right. Alaspin’s not a forgiving place.”
    “Neither were the people I was with. What did you say your name was?”
    “Didn’t, but it’s Flinx.”
    “Just Flinx?” When he did not respond, she smiled slightly. It was beautiful to see. “All right. I know there are limits to questions in a place like this.” She was trying to act tough. At any moment she might start cursing him—or burst out crying. He sat quietly, stroking the lethal creature snuggled in his lap.
    “You said you escaped. I thought maybe your vehicle had broken down. Who’d you escape from? I’d assume whoever beat you up.”
    Her hand moved instinctively to the half-healed bruises beneath her left shoulder. “Yes. It doesn’t hurt as bad now.”
    “I’ve been giving you first aid,” he explained. “I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to take care of others as well as myself. My resources were as limited as my knowledge, I’m afraid. You were lucky. No broken bones, no internal injuries.”
    “That’s funny, because it feels like everything inside me is busted.”
    “Whoever worked you over didn’t want to kill you. What did they want?”
    “Information. Answers to questions. I told them as little as I could, but I had to tell them something . . . So they’d stop for a while.” Her voice had grown small. “I didn’t tell them everything they wanted to know. So they kept at me. I feigned unconsciousness—it wasn’t hard, I’d had plenty of practice. Then I got away from them.
    “They had me in a place out in that jungle somewhere. It was at night, and I made it to the river. I found a broken log and just started drifting downstream. I had no idea it was so far from anyplace.”
    “I found you high up on a beach. You’d dragged yourself out of the water.”
    She nodded. “I think I remember letting go of the log. I was losing my strength, and I knew I had to get to dry land or I’d drown.”
    “You’d be surprised how far you crawled.”
    She was looking down at her hands. “You said