"Holly Lisle - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

To Jeannie Dees

Thanks for being there when being there mattered.




Chapter One

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The corpse's left eye squinted at me from mere centimeters away. Decomposition lent her face an
increasingly inscrutable expression; the first time I'd regained consciousness, when I found myself tied
to her, she looked like she had died in terror. After a while, she started leering at me, as if she had
reached the place where I was going and took perverse pleasure from the thought that I would join her
there soon. Now, having had her moment of amusement at my expense, she meditated; beneath
thousands of dainty auburn braids, her face hung slack, bloated and discolored, the skin loosening.
Threads of drool hung spiderwebbish from her gaping mouth. Her eyes, dry and sunken and filmed over
beneath swollen lids, still stared directly at me.

For a while, when I'd been hallucinating, the corpse had talked to me. She'd whispered that they would
come back and throw me out an airlock, into the hard vacuum of deep space; that my vile mother was
stalking me; that I could never run hard enough or far enough to find freedom—that death would be my
only freedom. But my mind was clear now. No hallucinations. No talking corpses. Just me and horrible
pain and aching, tantalizing thirst and a stench that even several days of acclimatization couldn't
minimize; the stink of decomposition, of piss and shit, of the gangrene that I suspected was starting in on
my right leg. Me… and all of that… and the body of the young woman who had waited on me during
my business dinner with Peter Crane in the members-only club Ferlingetta.

I think it's important not to overlook her. She and I, after all, were sisters of a sort. Kindred spirits. She
was dead, and I was almost. We were bound together by our plight, and by flexible moleibond-braid
wrist restraints that had been spot-grafted to our skin. And I figured we were where we were because we


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 Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood

had something more than that in common. I didn't know what, but something.

I guessed that I had been without water for almost three days. I could see the shifting of the station's
light cycles through the slats in the narrow metal door against which my rotting companion and I leaned.
I recalled two separate spans of darkness and two of light. Two days that I knew of, plus whatever time
I'd spent unconscious, and that felt like a lot. The gag in my mouth—permeable to air moving in but not
to air moving out, so that I wouldn't suffocate as long as I could exhale through my nose—didn't prevent
my tongue from turning into an enormous ball of hot sand. The worst thing was that my thirst didn't