"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Chimera" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

·····


Gen felt numb as she stepped out of the shop, looking both ways as Moya told
her to. Moya had been worried about snipers; apparently attacks on chimera
scientists were so common they weren't reported any more.
But no one took a shot at Gen, and she had gone half a block before she
realized she was walking away from her car. She wasn't thinking. Her mind was
preoccupied. It was as if parts of her had been cut off from the rest. She
recognized this feeling; it had been with her in the first months after the
accident.

When she finally got into the car, she hit a preprogrammed route home. The car
took her down side streets, past the rivers and Portland's famous bridges. Her
stomach clenched as the scenery grew more and more familiar. The scenery of
her dreams.

She ordered the car to stop on Burnside. It pulled over, and she got out.
Her legs wobbled. She was nauseous and dizzy at the same time. But she went
forward. Around the corner was Dar's favorite playground, in what had once
been a brewery. The sky was grayer than it had been before, as gray as it had
been that day.

She stopped at the crosswalk, looked down the empty street. In her mind, it
wasn't empty at all. The car—blue and gold, without a driver—careened around
the corner, bounced off the curb, and kept coming. She had one foot in the
intersection. Dar was pulling her across.

The car hit them both and she went flying—above everything, spotlight on her,
the world watching—like she had been when she leaped on stage. Only on a
stage, someone always caught her. Someone caught her and held her up and
twirled her while she arched her back and kept her toes en pointe.

But there was no one to catch her now. And when she looked down, on that
agonizingly long flight, she saw Dar, crumpled, destroyed, bleeding, and she
knew that she should have brought him with her, brought him into the air,
where it was safe.

It was safe.

And then she landed.

Gen leaned against the edge of the building, the nausea so strong that she had
to breathe deeply to hold it back. The second hit had happened, but not in the
way she remembered it. She had been flying, she landed, and then the car spun
into her.

And still she had crawled toward Dar.