Survival Read Online Free Page A

licking the last of the rice from his fingers.
    'Good,' he said. 'Excellent. It is always best to eat outside, after work.'
    'Work?' said Li, cheekily. 'You?'
    Paulo smiled at her fondly. 'Ah, yes, I work. Back in Argentina, on our ranch, I go out with the vaqueros—'
    'The what?' asked Amber.
    'The – how do you say—? The ranch hands? The cowboys, yes?'
    'OK,' said Amber. 'Got you.'
    'We go to round up the cattle. The ranch is—' Paulo spread his arms wide to show how big his family ranch was. 'We are out for days. At night, we camp. We cook on the fire and the food, it always tastes so good.' He turned to Li. 'You must come to stay. I will take you out camping and cook for you.'
    'Been there, done that,' said Li. 'We don't have holidays in the Cheong family – we go on field trips. I've eaten plenty of meals under the stars after a day spent trekking through some wilderness or other.'
    'Outdoor meals are best,' agreed Alex, remembering his own, solitary camping trips in the remoter parts of Northumberland. There was nothing better than a freshly-caught rabbit, roasted on a spit over the fire, or a trout slow-baked in the ashes.
    'Hmmm. Best outdoor meal I ever had?' said Amber, her eyes dreamy with remembering. 'We'd been out on the yacht – me, Mom and Dad – and we found this little cove. Deserted. We had a barbecue on the beach. Man, that was some evening . . .' She smiled softly, then her mouth turned down at the corners and her hand went up to touch the twist of gold at her neck. She turned to Hex and a cruel, hard edge came into her voice. 'You're pretty quiet. Anything to share with us? No? I guess the only outdoor eating street-rats do is out of other people's trash-cans.'
    The boat rocked as Hex started to move. His fists were clenched and the muscles in his arms stood out like ropes, but then his gaze shifted to the twist of gold around Amber's neck and he stopped halfway to his feet. For a long moment there was silence, then Hex made himself relax back into a sprawl. 'Food doesn't do it for me,' he said. 'Food is fuel, that's all. Something I can slam in a microwave and then eat without getting drips all over my keyboard.'
    'A junk-food junkie too,' sneered Amber, but the hard edge had left her voice. The lack of response from Hex had knocked some of the fight out of her.
    'So, if food doesn't do it for you, Hex, what does?' asked Li. 'Hacking?'
    'Yeah.'
    'Why?' asked Paulo, gazing at Hex with genuine puzzlement. 'What is the fascination with this – hacking?'
    Hex narrowed his green eyes and considered them for a moment, trying to decide whether it was worth getting into an explanation. 'What the hell,' he sighed, leaning forward. 'Patterns. Puzzles. Codes. You with me? Binary. Morse. Sequences of numbers, or letters, or shapes. They fascinate me. Always have. Cracking them. Figuring them out. Finding what's hidden inside.'
    Alex looked down at Hex's hands and saw that the fingers were jumping, keying the air as he spoke.
    'When I was a kid, they thought I was slow,' continued Hex. 'They used to take me out for special lessons. They thought I couldn't read. I could, though. Just didn't want to. Once I understood how to do it, I was bored. So I'd sit in lessons, working stuff out in my head, cracking codes, playing with number patterns instead of listening to the teacher. Then I got into computers. A whole new, beautiful code to crack. A whole new language to learn. I was hooked.'
    'So you turned into one of those sad, geeky types who sit in front of a screen all day and don't have any friends,' said Amber.
    'I have lots of friends,' snapped Hex. 'Real friends. It doesn't matter to us where anyone lives, or how rich they are, or what they look like, or what sex they are. We even choose our own names. That's one of the things I love about hacking. Everyone's equal. You live by your wits.'
    'Correction,' said Amber. 'You live by breaking into other people's systems and stealing data – or destroying it for