Blood Moon Read Online Free

you till the smell of dusty flesh and hot bone surrounded you. I’d ended it with a sunlit shower of rain, the red-brown greening from the horizon and the onlooker suddenly realising they were smelling flowers and grass.
    Today, as an apple farmer’s lover, I knew that this drizzle meant little. A little green fuzz on the hills, perhaps, that would melt away in two days’ sun. No deep moisture for the roots of trees. The small dams would stay dry, the big dam that supplied the orchards and the community would stay half empty. No wonder the Centaurs had come down from the dry hills.
    What would it be like to be a Water Sprite and watch your dam dry up? I wondered. Water Sprites…they’d be long-haired and ethereal, I decided, with blue eyes and delicate fingers.
    At least the drizzle was a change from blue sky so high you thought it had been doing stretching exercises.
    I wished…I wished Neil was waiting for me, instead of an empty house.
    I wished it would rain enough to water the garden, so I didn’t have to bother this afternoon, standing wet andstupid in the rain because the damn stuff couldn’t be bothered to do its job properly.
    I wished Michael was…what? Properly ashamed? No, properly anguished, that was the word. As anguished as I had been over the death of my friends, over the brain death of Melanie, but even more anguished than me because it was he who had betrayed us, betrayed us, betrayed us…
    I closed the paddock gate behind me (there was no sign of either cows or Centaurs, but I had learnt to keep gates as I’d found them) and began the climb up the hill.

Chapter 5
    T he clouds hung low and grey till evening. I made myself a boiled egg (from the hens at the Utopia—Realfood was still a luxury, even after a year in the Outlands) and cut slices from the loaf Elaine had given me the day before, and ate it with a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. When I looked out the window, the heavens were clear again; stars salted and peppered through the sky, more vivid, now that the full moon had waned to a cheese rind.
    The next day was blue and hot and gold, and the next day and the next. Michael didn’t call again. Neil did, but our conversations in Theo’s office seemed incomplete or perhaps, I decided, I simply wasn’t used to the limited communications a Terminal allowed. Perhaps it would be different, I thought, when my manual Terminal arrived and I could talk in the familiar intimate surroundings of our home. But by then Neil should be home.
    The beach design was complete. The site was pegged out. The contractors would start work in the next day or two, with their supervisor, a capable woman I’d worked with before. My role was finished until the basic work was done.
    The beach would be fresh water, not salt—the only area where I’d deliberately not been accurate, but it would smell and taste salty to anyone microchipped and capable of receiving Virtual signals. In other words, everyone in the Utopia except me. The project wouldactually increase the water storage capacity of the community.
    Five days till Neil returned. Not that I was counting…
    It was time to start planning another project. There had to be something Faith Hope and Charity needed, or at least some luxury they’d enjoy. A teaching project for the kids perhaps—a miniature of the entire planet, maybe, to help the study of geography. Or a medieval farming village. That would be relevant and useful—for a three-hour lesson perhaps…
    If only I’d been sent to a less prosperous Utopia, one that really needed my skills—or at least my money.
    Maybe I should concentrate on our own house for a while. Add a Roman bath, perhaps. Maybe make it a Garden of Eden design, with apple trees for Neil…
    It would be fun and it would occupy me. For a time.
    I pulled my sketching pad towards me (it had taken weeks to get used to drawing on paper, to using a pen instead of transferring the image directly to the Net from my mind)