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

lost, not as a person in his own right. Oh, he has history, but it’s history
without her, and therefore not relevant.

“No one knows,” she says.

Someone always knows. And if that someone is no longer alive, the
answer would probably be in the records. Something this modern is easy to
trace; it’s the old stuff, like the Dignity Vessels, whose histories got so lost
to time that they are difficult to figure out.

She’s finally hooked me and she probably doesn’t even know how. I
don’t want to return to the Room for my mother—I barely remember her and
what I do remember is vague. I don’t even want to return to face my own
past.

I want to solve this mystery she has unwittingly presented me with. I
want to know why a famous man, a man who won some of the most
important battles of an important war, disappears before the war ends, and
winds up in a place he knew better than to approach.

For the first time in years, the historian in me, the diver in me senses
a challenge. Not like the old challenges, the ones that cost me so many
friends and colleagues.

But a new challenge, one that will threaten me alone.

One that has the risk I miss combined with the historical mysteries
that I love.

I try not to let my sudden enthusiasm show. I ask, as coldly as I can,
“What are you paying?”

Her eyes light up. She seems surprised. Maybe she thought she’d
never catch me. Maybe I am her last hope.

She names a figure. It’s astoundingly high.

Still, I say, “Triple it and I’ll consider the job.”

“If you can get him out,” she says, her voice breathless with
excitement, “I’ll give you one hundred times that much.”

Now I’m feeling breathless. That’s more money than I’ve earned in
two decades.
 But I don’t have a use for the money I have. I can’t imagine what I’d
do with a sum that large.

Still, I negotiate because that too is in my blood. “I want it all up front.”

“Half,” she says. “And half when you recover him.”