The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) by Quil Carter Page B

cigarette smoke. As I waited for him to come back I lit myself a cigarette and brought out a chocolate bar. It was warm in this bar and with my body heat they would melt soon, even with it still being winter.
    The kid came back with my order plus a bottle of beer for himself. He sat down and looked me up and down. “You’re a Skyfaller aren’t you?”
    I stared at him helplessly, but I gave him a bit of leave because my hair was still mostly silver and my clothing, though now sweaty and dusty, were still good quality.
    I gave out a loud sigh and cracked the seal on my beer bottle.
    “I’m from Aras, but I... got shot and I had a Skyfaller friend who had good docs. I then...” I paused; I didn’t want to say escaped. “Well, I left my fiancé and I missed home and... Aras isn’t quite my home anymore.”
    His eyes widened as I lifted up my shirt so I could show him my war wound. “Holy shit... we heard what happened in Aras too. King Silas shot the mayors and it’s under legion law now. Are you going to settle here? You don’t have any family?”
    I have tons of family, just my biological family is doing their own thing and my real family is off being heroes.
    I shook my head. “I’ll be staying here until I heal up I guess. This seems like a friendly town. Aras was too far off to be a drop-in town like this place. You guys get a lot of travellers?”
    Since Aras was so far away from the other greywaster towns and too close to the blacksands we didn’t really get people dropping in. If you came to Aras you usually stuck around or were looking to settle.
    The kid nodded and brushed his hair away from his eyes. Sandy-coloured hair on a triangle shaped face, gaunt from missing too many meals, like a proper greywaster.
    “Yeah, most of our money is from travellers,” he said. “The locals have their own taverns and the travellers or merchants have separate ones. You came to the right one.”
    I took another drink, the cold beer doing a number on my mood. There really wasn’t many things alcohol couldn’t cure, at least temporarily. “Yeah, some little girls pointed me in the right direction.”
    This made him laugh; he had a cute laugh. “That’s Tiara and Misty, my cousins. Most of the shops here are run by some cousin, or aunt, or uncle. We’re the Saint James family.” He held out his hand. “And my name is Jesse.”
    I snorted and with that I got my first narrowed eye look. I waved a hand at him. “Sorry. Jesse Saint James sounds like a comic book hero or something. Are you a super hero, Jesse?”
    “Far from it!” Jesse Saint James tipped back in his chair and waved one of the lady bartenders over. “Get us some meat chips, Maya.”
    Oh, meat chips. Ground up rat meat mixed together with salt and flour, pounded and cut into chips and then deep fried. In Skyfall we had potato fries but here we made due. I wouldn’t say I missed greywaster food but the nostalgia was still there.
    And he was being friendly which I appreciated. I had a knack for picking out the more cordial of greywasters and if they were cute, well that was just a bonus. Anything to try and snap me out of this slump.
    Maya came back with a plate full of brown chips which I shared happily with Jesse, also insisting on paying for it but he haggled me down to me just buying him his beer.
    Over the next couple of hours hanging out with him I learned that indeed a couple of our residents had abandoned Aras in favour for a free town. None of them were my friends though which I was almost glad for. I didn’t want to have to tell Sadii, Matt, or any of the other sentries that Reaver was a mutant, clone fugitive, and we couldn’t find Killian.
    Which was another thing that I learned. The Legion had been coming in and out of Tintown and the smaller surrounding communities looking for Reaver Dekker, Perish Dekker, and Killian Massey. Which I obviously knew nothing about. They had a rather big bounty on their heads, over ten thousand dollars.