"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Room of Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

I haven’t, mostly because I never had the chance. But I don’t tell her
that. Instead, I say, “You spoke to my father.”

She nods. “He’s happy to know you’re still alive.”

I’m not sure I’m happy to know that he is. I prefer to think of myself as
a person without a family, a woman without a past.

“Quite honestly,” she says, “he’s the one who recommended you for
this job. I first approached him, but he said he was too old.”

I slide my plate to the edge of the table to hide my face as I do the
calculations. He turns seventy this year, which is not old at all.
 “He also said you have all the skills I need for this job.” She hasn’t
touched her food. “He says he doesn’t.”

That much is true. He’s never gone diving—at least that I know of. He
captained a ship, but in the old-fashioned way—not as a hands-on pilot, but
as a planetbound owner, who told others what to do.

We were on some kind of pleasure cruise, I think, when my mother
and I wandered into the Room. Or maybe we were moving from one
system to another.

I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember and I never asked him.

He wasn’t around much anyway. After Mother vanished into that
Room, he dumped me with my maternal grandparents and went in search
of the very thing Riya claims she found: a way to recover people from the
Room of Lost Souls.

“It makes no sense that he has refused to help you,” I say as a bus
tray arrives, sends out a small metal arm that sweeps my plate into its
interior, and then floats away. “He’s always wanted a way into the Room.”

“He says the problem is not the way in, but the way out.” She finally
picks up her fork and picks at her now-cold food.

A chill runs through me. Does my father speak with that kind of
authority because he has sent people in after my mother? Or because he’s
thinking of what happened to us all those years ago?

“And yet you claim you have that way out.”

A serving tray appears with an ice cream glass filled with red and
black berries separated by layers of cream. My coffee steams beside it. My
standing order. I shouldn’t take it, but I do.

“I do have a way out,” she says.