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

 "Maybe," he said. "But you haven't yet. And you have more than enough
to live on. You don't need to be on the streets, but they're in your blood."
She was so thoroughly chilled now that gooseflesh had risen on her
arms. No one knew this much about her. No one. She had made certain there
wasn't much information about her anywhere. Sometimes she wasn't sure she had
that much information about herself.
"What do you want?" she asked for the third and final time.
He spread out his hands. They were empty. "Let me up?" he asked.
She took her foot off his chest. He stood, brushed himself off, and
adjusted the silver jacket. His cummerbund had twisted so that the
self-sealing seam showed.
This time he kept his distance, and eyed her warily.
"Fashions have come and gone in the time it's taking you to answer this
question," she said.
He wiped the mustard stain from the side of his mouth, glanced at his
fingertips, winced and rubbed them together as if he could make the mustard go
away.
"Your family sent me," he said.
She went hot, then cold, then hot again. She hadn't thought of her
family in years.
Not true.
She thought of them every day.
She hadn't spoken to them in years.
"Really?" she asked, with the right amount of sarcasm.
His smile was patient. "I didn't expect you to believe me," he said.
"And neither did they. They set up a home site accessible only to you, with
names and numbers you'd know, they said. And the only way you can locate it is
with this chip."
He held out his palm. In it was a red chip case the size of a sequin.
She stared at it. "For all I know that could scramble my system or blow
me away."
He didn't move. "They told me to tell you that KD is dying."
Those hot/cold flashes ran through her again. "KD?" she said before she
could stop herself. "That's not possible."
"That's what they said."
She squinted, unsure whether to trust, unsure whether to try. "And you
are?" she asked.
"Unimportant," he said and flipped the chip case toward her.
She caught it in her left hand as he disappeared into the park.
****
She put the chip in the special nip pouch she'd had carved below her belly
button. Nip pouches were expensive, because they were for the criminal or
paranoid. Hers was big enough to hold a wrist-top and the surgeon had been
good enough so that the pouch's opening looked like part of her belly button
itself.
Then she went back to work.
-- Caught a middle-aged woman topless, showing off surgically enhanced
breasts. Micropoodles -- dyed pink and gold -- were leashed to her nipple
chains. Steffie hated it, but knew it would catch on with the fifty and older
crowd, the aging Gen Xers who loved to torture their already burdened flesh.