"Nancy Kress - The Most Famous Little Girl in the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"No," I said. "Of course not."

Angie said, "That's not what I heard."

Carter said, "So it's just gossip? You can hurt people that way, Angie."

"God, Carter, don't you ever let up? Holier-than-thou!"

Carter mottled red. Hannah, who likes him even though Carter doesn't know it, said, "It's nice that some
people at least try to be kind to others."

"Spit it in your soup, Hannah," Angie said.
Jack and Hannah exchanged a look. They really make the decisions for the group, and for a bunch of
other groups, too. Angie's too stupid to realize that, or to realize that she's going to be oozed out. I don't
feel sorry for her. She deserves it, even if being oozed is really horrible. You walk through the halls alone,
and nobody looks directly at you, and people laugh at you behind your back because you can't even
keep your own friends. Still, Angie deserves it.

Hannah looked at me straight, with that look Jack calls her "police interrogation gaze." "Amy … is Kyra
Lunden your cousin?"

Kyra sat alone at one end of a table. A bunch of kids, the really cobra ones that run the V-R lab, sat at
the other end, kind of laughing at her without laughing. I saw Eleanor Murphy, who was elected Queen of
V-R Gala even though she's only a junior, give Kyra a long cool level look and then turn disdainfully
away.

"No," I said, "I already told you. She's not my cousin. In fact, I never even met her."



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2018

I stared at the villa with disbelief. Not at the guards—everywhere rich is guarded now, we're a nation of
paranoids, perhaps not without reason. There seems no containing the lunatic terrorists, home-grown
patriotic militias, White Supremacists and Black Equalizers, not to mention the run-of-the-mill gangs and
petty drug lords and black-market smugglers. Plus, of course, the government's response to these, which
sometimes seems to involve putting every single nineteen-year-old in the country out on the streets in
camouflage—except, of course, those nineteen-year-olds who are already bespoken as lunatic terrorists,
home-grown militia, White Supremacists, et al. The rest of us get on with our normal lives.

So the guards didn't surprise me—the villa did. It was a miniaturized replica of a Forbidden City
palace—in Minnesota.

The chief guard caught me gaping at the swooping curved roof, the gilded archways, the octagonal