Necropath by Eric Brown Page A

others sat at the bar, waiting for trade and ignoring Sukara, which suited her fine. She thought of Pakara, and wondered what she might be doing now.
     
    She finished her meal and tossed the tray behind the bar. The yahd was making her feel as though only her body was in the here and now. Mentally she was somewhere else, viewing this reality as if on a vid-screen.
     
    With luck, she would have only two or three more customers before dawn, when she could go home. If her luck was even better, those customers would be Ee-tees. 
     
    At times like this, having seen Dervan and experienced the dreams, and with the yahd performing its special magic, she told herself that she could do a lot worse for herself. For instance, she could still be working for the first bar owner Pakara had approached—or she could be dead.
     
    They had lasted one year at the first bar.
     
    There had been many times during that year when Sukara wished she were back in the village, working at the factory. From time to time she spoke to Pakara about going back, but her sister had looked at her with a wisdom beyond her years and told her that there was no going back. “We can’t go back. They’d punish us for running away. We’re okay here.”
     
    Pakara might have been okay. She had regular customers attracted to her youth and beauty, men who treated her well. She even told Sukara that she loved one or two of them. Sukara didn’t know whether to believe her, didn’t know whether Pakara was putting a brave face on the situation she was responsible for getting them into. Also, she didn’t know how Pakara could bear what some of the men did to her. If, that was, they did the same things to Pakara that they did to her. Perhaps because Sukara was older and not pretty, she attracted the type of men who abused her, treated her badly. She desperately wanted to meet a man who would show her genuine affection, someone she could say that she loved.
     
    Then five years ago, a year after arriving in Bangkok, Pakara told Sukara that she was leaving.
     
    “I’ve had enough of work here, Su. We’ll go, okay?”
     
    She had it all planned. Pakara would slip away from the bar at the end of her shift at three in the morning. Su, being older, worked until dawn. At six, Su would leave the bar and meet Pakara at the bus station across town. She told Su that she had been talking to someone who said that for two hundred baht they could buy a raft on the coast of the Indian Ocean and sail away to start a new life. They would do this. They had three hundred baht saved between them.
     
    “But a raft on the ocean? You’ll drown, or a shark will get you!”
     
    “You’d rather stay here?”
     
    “No. But there must be better places to go.”
     
    “I’ve decided! A bus leaves for the coast at seven. See you at the station, Su. Okay?”
     
    That night, at three, Pakara had found Sukara and hugged her before leaving.
     
    Later, as dawn was lightening the sky outside the bar, Sukara packed her belongings and slipped through the window of her bedroom, climbing down the fire escape and heading through the crowded streets to the bus station. She lost her way once, found herself in a square she didn’t recognise, and realised with panic that she had only ten minutes to reach the station before seven o’clock. She climbed aboard a taxi, waving baht in the driver’s face, but the traffic was so congested that she was quicker on foot. She jumped out and ran, following the driver’s directions, and didn’t stop until she arrived at the glass-covered terminus, the air blue with exhaust fumes, and looked up at the big clock to see that it was five minutes past seven. She tramped from bay to bay, hoping that Pakara had waited for her. But there was no sign of her sister, and Sukara sat on her pack, too devastated to cry, and wondered what to do now. Should she get the next bus to the coast? But the coast was long, and dozens of buses headed for the coast each day,