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

(The chip lay cold against her skin, irritating, like a grain of sand
in her eye.)
-- Found a young man playing guitar beside a fountain, who looked as
if he'd been dipped in gold. Gold hair, gold skin, gold eyes. As the light
shifted, his colors deepened. She filmed a while, catching his transition from
gold to bronze, bronze to brown. She didn't know what he used, and didn't ask
when she flipped him his plastic. Someone would know, and someone would pay,
several someones, depending on how she put it across the nets.
(The chip tingled, as if it were a live thing. Reminding her...)
-- Had the palmtop out, already filming an androgen's roped
fingernails when she saw the identical twins, captured in miniature, holding
their keeper's hand. They strolled through the park wearing frilly white,
their eyes old and bored and --
She shut the vid off, slid her hand across her belly, and pressed the
chip.
_KD's dying_.
She shoved the palmtop in her pocket, and headed out of the park.
To Leo's.
****
Leo worked out of his apartment in a rundown condominium complex at the cross
of Riverside and West 94th. The building dated from the 1980s when it was
posh. A lot of the original owners still lived in the buildings, but children
and grandchildren who inherited had no respect for history. Leo was one of
those. He liked the space and the old charm, but he hated the snobbishness
that went with it.
Hence the little dive shop he ran out of his first floor apartment's
kitchen.
She used the code he'd given her five years before to subvert the
security system. It too was once state-of-the-art, in the post-doorman, high
tech days, but even with updates, a street kid could get in with a few
security chips and a beeper. Most of the residents wore their own security
these days and didn't care, but a handful of the elderly ones had no idea how
people like Leo compromised their safety.
People like Leo, and people like Steffie.
She knew a few electronic tricks of her own, and had used them often
enough to gain a flop in a high security building. She never took anything
except a little space and a little privacy, and she was sure the residents
never noticed.
They always had space and privacy to spare.
Leo kept his door unlocked. After her fifth visit to him, she realized
he didn't live in the apartment, only worked there, and didn't really care
about the credits he made. Someone could -- and often did -- rip him off, and
he continued, as if nothing had changed. She finally realized he was like her.
The credits didn't matter; the challenge did.
She slid through the oak door and ran a hand over the motion detector
that controlled the lights.
"Leo?"
"Kitchen, babe," he said, voice floating past the vintage mid-twentieth
century furniture. His tastes ran to chrome and plastic, stuff once considered
cheap by the very people who initially lived in this building. Not cheap any