"James Patrick Kelly - The Edge of Nowhere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Rain had not been completely honest with Chance. It was true that Will hadn't shown her the novel, but
she had read some of it. She had stolen glimpses over his shoulder or read upside down when she was
sitting across from him. Then there was the one guilty afternoon when she had come back to their
apartment and gobbled up pages 34-52 before her conscience mastered her curiosity. The long passage
had taken place in a bunker during one of the Resource Wars. The President of Great America,
Lawrence Goodman, had been reminiscing with his former mistress and current National Security
Advisor, Rebecca Santorino, about Akron, where they had first fallen in love years ago and which had
just been obliterated in retaliation for an American strike on Zhengzhou. Two pages later they were
thrashing on the president's bed and ripping each other's clothes off. Rain had begun this part with great
interest, hoping to gain new insight into Will's sexual tastes, but had closed the binder uneasily just as the
President was tying his lover to the Louis XVI armoire with silk Atura neckties.

Will closed the other open binders and stacked all five into a pile. Then he pulled the pencil from behind
his ear, snapped it in two, and let the pieces roll out of his hand under the picnic table. He gave her an
odd, lopsided smile.

"Will, what's the matter?" Rain stared. "Are you okay?"

In response, he pulled a baggie of cookie dust from his shirt pocket and jiggled it.

"Here?" she said, coloring. "In plain sight?" Usually they hid out when they were eating dust, at least until
they weathered the first rush. The Cocoa Peanut Butter Chunk made them giggly and not a little stupid.
Macaroon Sandies often hit Rain like powdered lust.

"There's no one to see." Will licked his forefinger and stuck it into the bag. "Besides, what if there was?"
He extended the finger toward her, the tip and nail coated with the parti-colored powder. "Does anyone
here care what we do?"

She considered telling him then what Chance Conrad had said about small towns but she could see that
Will was having a mood. So she just opened her mouth and obediently stuck her tongue out. As he
rotated the finger across the middle of her tongue, she tasted the sweet, spicy grit. She closed her mouth
on the finger and he pulled it slowly through her lips.
"Now you," she said, reaching for the baggie. They always fed each other cookie dust.

Rain and Will sat on the tabletop with their feet on the seat, facing the slope that led down to the edge of
Nowhere. The world beneath the impossibly high cliff was impossibly flat, but this was still Rain's favorite
lookout, even if it was probably an illusion. The land stretched out in a kind of grid with rectangles in
every color of green: the brooding green of forests, the dreaming green of fields under cultivation and the
confused gray-green of scrub land. Dividing the rectangles were ribbons the color of wet sand. Rain liked
to think they were roads, although she had never spotted any traffic on them. She reached for Will's hand
and he closed it around hers. He was right: she didn't care if anyone saw them together like this. His skin
was warm and rough. As she rubbed her finger over the back of his hand, she thought she could make
out a faded blue spot. But maybe it was a trick of the twilight, or a cookie hallucination.

The rectangles and the ribbons of the land to the southwest had always reminded her of something, but
she had never quite been able to figure out what. Now as Eddie's magic cookie dust sparked through her
bloodstream, and she felt Will's warm hand in hers, she thought of a trip she had taken with her father
when she was a just a kid to a museum in an old city called Manhilton, that got blown up afterward. In
the museum were very old pix that just hung on the wall and mostly didn't do anything, and she
remembered taking a cab to get there and the cab had asked what her name was but she wouldn't tell it