"Ellen Datlow - SciFiction Originals vol.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Datlow Ellen)

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They were halfway up the five flights of fire stairs to the roof when the alarms went off. The racket was almost bad
enough to stun. He tried to take the stairs even faster. The little girls had no problem keeping up-sometimes some of
them were in front of him-and Vic was so hopped up on adrenaline he stopped taking time to look back and make sure
she was okay.
 He was afraid that the door to the roof might be locked, and it was, but only on his side, and only with a plain old
uncomplicated bolt. He slammed the door open and hurried everyone out. He could hear helicopters approaching,
searchlights sweeping the darkness. In the distance, sirens started up, then faded under the swelling noise of
propellers.
He turned to the girls. "Okay, you're out. Fly away. Or something."
Vic looked at him as if he were crazy.
"They couldn't-move is the only way I can put it-in an enclosed space. But out here-" He gestured at the night sky.
The rain had stopped and the clouds were blowing away. He turned back to the girls and was about to say something
else when they all lunged at him again and grabbed his arm.
"No!" he screamed, and the light was so bright, he could feel it press against his face and his body. This time, it
was as if the power was sucked out of him rather than building up by itself and it was so much stronger this way, there
was so much more of it, it seemed, more than he would ever have been able to muster up on his own, because he
lacked the know-how and the experience.
The sensation of the roof pressing against his feet vanished. His mind became a silent howl of protest. Of course
they had to take him along-he should have realized that from the way it had worked with Vic. Except he was pretty sure
that while they had managed to survive here, he wouldn't do nearly as well in their world.
Don't take it personally, said Jeremy's voice in his mind.
The world doesn't know you exist. As an epitaph, it sucked.
He was suddenly flailing in some kind of turbulence before he fell a short distance and landed on his back. His
head rolled over to the right and he saw his arm was gone. The small, wormlike fingers on his stump twitched. He
closed his eyes again. Well, that was slightly better than dying in a hostile dimension. If all they needed was the arm,
he could thank them for not sacrificing his life to save their own. Now he could get in a lot more practice at trying not
to take the world personally.
Vic pounced on him and grabbed his arm. His right arm. He opened his eyes and saw that, yes, it was there. If it had
been gone before, it was back now. He raised his right hand and stared at it stupidly. All right, then; not only was he
through taking the world personally, he was done trying to understand it.
"Come on!" Vic screamed over the roar of the helicopters and pulled him to his feet. The wind was whipping at
them, battering them as one of the helicopters turned and hovered almost directly over them, shining searchlights
down on them. Talking was impossible. Danny pushed her behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist again.
She understood and held on tight while he stretched out his arm and concentrated on feeling the power begin to build
in his shoulder.
He was still concentrating, with Vic clinging to his waist, when building security made it up to the roof and took
them.
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By dawn it was all over.
Danny spent the night locked in a windowless storeroom among several crates of very lousy instant vending
machine coffee. He drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming about nine-year-old girls and helicopters and faceless people
in uniforms cuffing his hands behind his back. Sometimes he dreamed that he felt the power building up in his
shoulder again but he always woke up just before the flash of light and knew that was one sensation he wasn't ever
going to feel again. Not that he was complaining, even to himself. At least they'd left him the arm, and it still worked
just fine as a plain old arm. So that was all right.
Unless, of course, Ciel decided to cut it off him as compensation.
He dreamed about that, too, faceless people in uniforms taking him to a white room where Dr. Sibelius was waiting