"Charles Stross - Red, Hot and Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

one of the kin, who'd helped her change her life ...

They'd been lucky to find her. Not so much gone to the dogs as abandoned to the
humans ... twenty-nine, addicted to heroin, living as a street prostitute, a member of the
officially non-existent underground encouraged by the Brezhnev faction during their
twenty year reign of hypocrisy. My, but they did a good job of westernizing us fast! All
the vices and none of the virtues ... lost in her memories, she blinked, astonished by the
strange value systems her own mind was capable of throwing up. Hey, live among
humans for long enough, you even start thinking like one --

It had been pure coincidence. One of the street-sweeps they'd been so keen on under
Andropov; the weerde who finally found her was a militia lieutenant assigned to mopping
up the untouchables who weren't meant to contaminate the crime sheets of the
squeaky-clean new order -- after all, prostitution and drug abuse were western
problems, weren't they? She remembered the cigarette smoke rising in spirals from the
ash tray on the scarred desk, the long interviews by lamp light as they tried to work out
who she knew and why she had been tolerated for so long: unable to admit publicly that
all cultures have a dark side, that everyone needs something to be afraid of, to lust after,
some forbidden fruit ...

The woman in the fur coat, black mini-dress, tights and make-up that weren't even in the
shops for people to queue for; the first thing that had caught the policeman's attention
was how attractive she was. Thin, but not gaunt, young-looking but not a child. She
shouldn't be pretty, not with the kind of life-style she led -- a three needle a day habit,
not to mention the chalk mixed with the damned Afghan dust by her scumbag dealer.
"We know all about you," he said, tapping her folder meaningfully, and she had laughed
at him like a wolf in the depths of the winter forest.

"No matter how much you think you know about me you will never know all about me,"
she said. She stared at him with black, glittering eyes, ice cubes that didn't melt under the
lamp.

"Really?" he asked. To a human it would have sounded like something between a cough
and a grunt.

Her eyes had widened, but not from fear: he had seen her fingers flexing to strike, and
tensed. "If my brother sent you to get me back," she had said, "you can tell him I'm not
interested."

The cop had leaned forward, exposing his throat: "really?" he asked. "And why would
your brother do a thing like that?"

"Because he loves me. Or he thinks he does. I don't think he would know love if it bit his
throat out. All he's in love with is the dark." She relaxed her hands, looked down; noticed
for the first time how bony they looked. As if her skin had become a translucent film, a
winding sheet for her skeleton, in the undead time since she came out of the forest.
"That's why I left. After our parents died."

The cop had leaned back, the hardest bit of the interview over: making her decide to
talk. "And since leaving, is that when you began to hang out on the street?"