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All of the pickers had stopped to watch the small red vehicle's madcap approach.
«Good,» Amanda grunted. «I can collect the insurance, get a decent van with the money.» She flinched as she realized Guy was giving her a confused look. Her son was only nine; at that age fu
The pick-up's horn sounded again, blatantly distressed.
«All right,» Amanda said. She pulled her wide-brimmed hat back on her head, wiping the sweat from her brow. «Jane and Le
«Yes, Mum.» He started scampering across the orchard's shaggy blue-green moss that was Nyvan's grass-analogue, heading for the sheds at the far end.
«The rest of you, we've got two-thirds of the trees left, and only eight days.»
The remaining pickers drifted back to their trees and the white cartons piled round them. They weren't the usual group of easygoing travellers who visited the farm for summer. Govcentral's Employment Ministry was causing them a lot of grief with new taxes and regulations concerning mobile residency permits for their caravans. Then the fishing ports had begun investing in automated plants, cutting down on the manual gutting and packing work available in the winter months. Like many communities, the travellers were begi
Blake was still doing fifty when he drove round the stone farmhouse and into the tree-lined back yard. He braked to a sharp halt outside the kitchen's open stable door.
«Give me a hand here!» he yelled.
Amanda, Jane, and Le
«Hell!» Amanda started to run. The two young pickers were easily faster than her.
The man Blake had brought was in his late twenties, dressed in a green onepiece overall with an elaborate company logo on its breast pocket. A very grubby light-brown waistcoat hung loosely, containing several tool pockets. His skin was dark enough to suggest a Latino ancestry, black curly hair framed a round face with a blunt nose. He wasn't tall, shorter than Amanda, with swarthy limbs.
Amanda stared in shock at the wounds on his legs, the bloody cloth which had been used to bandage him. «Blake, what happened?»
«Found him just off the main road. He said his horse threw him. I patched him up as good as I could.» Blake gave Le
«Yeah.» Le
«Blake!» Amanda wanted to strike him, or perhaps just banish him from the farm. How could he have been so stupid? «For heaven's sake, what did you bring him here for?»
«What else was I supposed to do?» he demanded petulantly.
It wasn't worth the effort of arguing. Blake would never admit he was wrong about anything. His basic flaw was his inability to learn, to think ahead.
Blake was one of Arthur's more distant relatives, fostered on her by the rest of the family who were convinced a woman couldn't run the farm by herself. There are three orchards, they argued, over five hundred trees. Guy's whole future. You'll never manage to prune and fertilize and irrigate them properly, not with the other fruit fields as well, and there's the machinery, too. So Blake had come to live with her and Guy. He was twenty-two, and too quiet to be hot-headed, though he could be astonishingly stubborn. Of course, her biggest mistake was letting him into her bed. He'd interpreted that as some kind of partnership offer to give him an equal say on the way the farm was run. But the nights out here in the countryside were achingly long, and it had been nineteen months since Arthur's funeral. It wasn't even the sex she wanted, just the warmth and touch of having him there, the comfort she could draw from a warm body. So far she'd managed to contain and deflect any potential clashes over his new attitude, but this folly could not be overlooked.
«Well?» Blake insisted.
Amanda glanced at Jane and Le
«All right. Le
She didn't dare look at the two pickers in case it triggered a rebellion. Don't give them the chance to refuse, she told herself. «Le
The pickers moved hesitantly, expressing their reluctance through complete silence. Amanda climbed up into the back of the pick-up and crouched down beside the injured man. As she slid her hands under his back ready to lift him up she felt a hard lump inside the waistcoat, larger than a fist. Her hand reached automatically towards it.
The stranger's eyelids flipped open. His hand caught her wrist. «No,» he grunted. «Do what you said. Patch me up. Then I will go. It is the best for us both.» He glanced round at the figures clustered over him. A sharp frown appeared as soon as he saw Le
Jane and Le
«I ca
Between them, they hauled him into the kitchen. He made no sound during the whole process, not even when one of his legs was knocked against the doorframe. Amanda knew she would have cried out at such pain. Such control made her wonder at what electronic implants he was using. Nerve fibre regulators were not cheap, nor did ordinary citizens have any use for them.
«I'll fetch my bag,» Le
Amanda looked down at the man again, uncertain what to do, his eyes were tight shut again. Even Blake's confidence had ebbed in the face of such robotic stoicism.
«If I could have some water,» the man said huskily.
«Who are you?» Amanda asked.
His eyes fluttered open as she filled a glass at the sink.
«My name is Fakhud. I thank you for bringing me into your home.»
«I didn't.» She handed him the glass.
He took a sip and coughed. «I know. But I still thank you. I have many friends in the city, influential friends, they will be grateful to you.»
«I bet you've got friends,» Jane muttered softly.
«It's the bank we need help with,» Blake said with a dry smile. «Those bastards are bleeding us dry with their interest rates. Not just us, all the farms are suffering.»