Ghosts of Punktown Read Online Free Page A

assured him that everything without and within had been fully restored, but the skin of his chest still seemed too tightly drawn to him. As he paced he would occasionally rotate his arms in their sockets, or stretch them high above or far behind him, as if to loosen his confining, claustrophobic flesh.
     
         He hadn’t been looking for a job; not yet. He had his pension. He would live frugally, draw it out. It paid his rent. And it had paid for the young woman who lay on the bed he kept trying not to look at as he paced.
     
         He wore nothing but the goggles. His bare feet were stealthy as he padded, back and forth, like a tiger in its cage. There was one little window and he paused at it, nudged aside the shade to peek out at the city of Punktown. In the evening light, the hovercars swarming at ground level and helicars that drifted along the invisible web of navigation beams sparkled like scarabs. The lasers and holographs of advertisements strobed and flashed as if the city were full of bombings and firefights. And through his goggles, the entire city was blue, and even darker and more ominous than it would have been, like a metropolis built on the bottom of a deep arctic sea.
     
         Leaning against the window’s frame was the rifle he had bought last week from a black market source, along with the pistol he carried with him when he ventured onto the streets. He lifted the rifle now and couched it in his arms, a familiar and strangely soothing sensation. It was inferior to the one he had used over there, which had been able to fire both solid projectiles and beams. This rifle fired beams alone. And yet, in that area this weapon was a bit more advanced. He stepped away from the window and let the rifle’s barrel hold back the lip of the shade. He could fire a bolt of dark purple light right now, and i t would pass through the windowpane without shattering or even scorching it. It was only one of the gun’s tricks.
     
         Through his goggles and through the rifle’s scope, he tracked one helicar for a moment before shifting to another. He increased the magnification, traced his gaze from window to window on the building directly across the broad street. At last, he lowered his view further and zoomed in on a man walking along the sidewalk. He zoomed until the man’s unaware face filled his vision. He was a wide-mouthed native Choom, even if the goggles made his face appear as if his skin were blue.
     
         Lowering his rifle a little, Cal twisted around and glanced over at the bed at last.
     
         The woman was of Asian lineage, with beautiful almond eyes and black hair down to her waist, tiny like the female Ha Jiin, but he had learned quickly not to be deceived by that. They were deadlier than the men.
     
         “What are the goggles for?” she had asked him.
     
         Lying there, staring at the ceiling and smiling a little as if to mock him, she was as blue-skinned as a Ha Jiin woman. Even though she wasn’t one.
     
         Cal dropped his gaze to the blood spattered and drying on his belly and legs. It looked black through the goggles. But then, he became conscious of something for the first time. The realization horrified him, and he almost dropped the rifle in setting it aside. He clawed the goggles off his head.
     
         Through their lenses, his own flesh had appeared blue to him, too.
     
     
     
    3
     
         The giant’s head thrust up out of the earth, but Corporal Jeremy Stake knew there would also be an entire body below the surface, its form just as intricately covered in a mosaic of colorful tiles even if no one would ever see them. The giant’s mouth was open wide, and gave access to a metal spiral staircase that wound like a corkscrew down through the titanic body, down into the caverns below the jungle. There, in galleries of stone, writhed the bluish gases that the Ha Jiin worshipped as their ancestral spirits – but which the Earth