"Holly Lisle - World Gates 01 - Memory of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

“You’ll ride in the back of the hay-wagon, covered with a few blankets—if you decide you want to try
to escape, you can do it in your bare feet in the snow.”

“You can’t talk to the Vodi like that,” one of the other men said.

“No one knows if she’s the Vodi yet. Right now, she’s the creature who crushed Byarriall’s chest and
snapped Loein’s leg in two. What sort of Vodi would do things like that?”

Molly didn’t know what a Vodi was. She didn’t care. “How about one that got kidnapped from her bed
in the middle of the night?” she said, but they no longer seemed to be listening to her. The mob picked
her up and shoved her into the back of the wagon, and most of them clambered up there with her—
bending down to twist soft rope around her ankles, and then around her wrists. When they had her
bound, they wrapped blankets around her, and tucked her deep into bales of straw. Instantly, she was
warmer. Hell, she was warm. But as the wagon lurched and creaked and began to rattle forward, she
heard lines of marching feet forming on either side of the wagon. She knew the creak of boots and pack

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straps, the soft bitching, the sound of feet moving in rhythm while weighted down by gear and weapons.
She remembered basic training all too well—and if Air Force basic was pretty easy compared to the
Army or the Marines, she’d still got enough of marching to know the drill. She had a military escort.

What the hell was going on?

But the people who had come to get her weren’t soldiers. They were too unprepared for resistance, too
sure of themselves. Soldiers knew that trouble could be anywhere, and took precautions. More than that,
though, she couldn’t get over the feel of those hands on her—hot, thin, dry hands.

She decided she wasn’t going to just wait for them to haul her where they were going and then…do
things to her. She’d learned in the Air Force that the best way to survive a hostage situation was to not
be a hostage. She started to work on the rope on her wrists, and managed by dint of persistence and a
high pain tolerance to free her hands. She’d done some damage—she could feel rope burns and scratches
from metal embedded beneath the soft outer strands, and the heat and wetness where a bit of her own
blood trickled down her hand—but she wasn’t worried about any of that.

Fold and wrap a blanket around each foot and bind it in place with the rope, she thought. It won’t make
great boots, but it will get me home. Turn the other blankets into a poncho, get the hell out of this place
and back home. She could follow the tracks in the snow.

Except there were the niggling details she hadn’t let herself think about while she was fighting, while
she was getting her hands and then her feet untied, while she was folding boots out of blankets and tying
them in place. She hadn’t heard an engine since she came out of the tunnel of fire; she hadn’t heard a car
pass, or seen anything that might even be mistaken for an electric light; nor had she heard a plane fly
over. In the darkness, she could make out the vague outlines of trees overhead, but not much else—not a
star shone in the sky, which felt close and pregnant with more snow.

She suspected that if she managed to escape the soldiers that marched to either side of the wagon and
succeeded in tracing the wagon tracks back to the place where she’d come through the tunnel of fire, that
tunnel wouldn’t be there any-more. And she was very, very afraid that there would be no other way to