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A crumbling barn on a marginally functional farm in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She had found it in the midst of a storm and had gone in to take shelter from the rain. In one stall there was a shelf stocked with food.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! What was food doing in a deserted barn? If she had been thinking, she would have run and risked the lightning, but she was tired and hungry. Her guard was down. She reached for a bag of chips, hit a trip wire, and a spring-loaded steel cable wrapped around her wrist. She was caught like a rabbit. She tried to tug free, but the slipknot cable was designed to ratchet tighter and tighter the more she pulled.
The parts pirate had been careless enough to leave various farm tools within her reach, but none of them were of the type to cut a steel cable. After an hour of struggling, Risa realized there was nothing to do but wait—and envy wild animals who had the good sense to gnaw off their own limbs to escape from traps.
That was last night. Now as morning comes, Risa, having not slept at all, must face a fresh hell. The parts pirate comes an hour after sunrise. He’s a middle-aged man with a bad scalp job. His mop of boyish blond hair doesn’t make him look boyish, just creepy. He practically dances a jig when he sees that his trap has done the job.
“Been there for months and nothing,” he tells Risa. “I was ready to give up—but good things come to those who wait.”
Risa seethes and thinks of Connor. She wishes she could have been more like him last night. Connor would never be so foolish as to allow himself to be captured by an imbecile.
Clearly this guy’s an amateur, but as long as he’s got the goods, the black-market harvesters won’t turn him away. He doesn’t recognize her. That’s good. The black market pays more for the infamous—and she doesn’t want this man to get paid what she’s worth. Of course that assumes he gets that far. Risa has had all night to come up with a plan of action.
“Selling you might just get the banks off my back,” he tells her jovially. “Or at least get me a decent car.”
“You have to cut me loose first before you can sell me.”
“Indeed I do!”
He looks at her a little too long, his grin a little too wide, and it occurs to Risa that selling her to a black-market harvester is only at the end of his list of planned activities. But whatever his plans, he’s the type who has to have everything just right. He goes around the stall and begins cleaning up the mess Risa made in her frustrated attempts to escape.
“You sure were busy last night,” he says. “Hope you got it out of your system.”
Now Risa begins to taunt him. She knows what sorts of things will push this man’s buttons—but she begins with some easy, glancing blows. She begins with slights against his intelligence.
“I hate to kill the dream,” she says, “but the black market won’t deal with morons. I mean, you have to know how to read if you’re going to sign a contract.”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, maybe you should have gotten some brains to go along with that hair.”
It only makes him chuckle. “Bad-mouth me all you want, girlie. It’s not gonna change a thing.”
Risa thought there was no way she could possibly hate this man more . . . but calling her “girlie” opens up a whole new level of loathing. She begins her next round of attacks—this time against his family. His gene pool. His mother.
“So did they slaughter the cow that gave birth to you, or did it die of natural causes?”
He continues his stall tidying, but his focus is gone. Risa can tell he’s getting rankled. “You shut up. I don’t gotta take crap like that from a dirty Unwind bitch!”
Good. Let him curse at her. Because the angrier he gets, the more it plays in Risa’s favor. Now she delivers her final salvo. A series of cruel assertions about the man’s anatomy. Assertions of severe inadequacy. At least some of them must be true, because he loses it, getting red in the face.
“When I’m done with you,” he growls, “you ain’t gonna be worth what you are now—that’s for sure!”
He lunges for her, his big hands out in front of him—and as he throws himself forward, Risa raises the pitchfork that she’s concealed in the hay. She doesn’t have to do any more than that: just hold the thing up. His weight and momentum do all the work.
The amateur parts pirate thoroughly impales himself and pulls back, taking the pitchfork with him.
“Whad’ya do to me! Whad’ya do!”
The pitchfork flails back and forth like an appendage in his chest as he curses and screams. Risa knows it’s hit some vital organ because of all the blood and the speed at which he goes down. In less than ten seconds, he collapses against the far wall of the stall and dies with his eyes open and staring not quite at her, but off to her left, as if maybe in his last moments he saw an angel over her shoulder, or Satan, or whatever a man like him sees when he dies.
Risa considers herself a compassionate human being, but she feels no remorse for this man. She does, however, begin to feel a deepening sense of regret. Because her hand is still caught in the cable. And the only human being who knows she’s here is now lying across the stall, dead.
And Risa cannot believe the situation she’s put herself in. Again.
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