"Gateway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Shinn Sharon)

THREE

THE GROUND SURGED and shattered under Daiyu’s feet. The twilight sky bloomed to nuclear brightness, then went utterly dark. Blind, she cried out and stumbled to her knees, cutting her palms on a stony surface. She whimpered, but the sound was lost under the ongoing percussion of urgent explosives.

Then suddenly her vision cleared and the booming noise stopped, and Daiyu lifted her head. Had that been an earthquake? Had a barge on the river blown up when its fuel tank caught fire? Where were the sirens? Where were the frantic onlookers? Why was no one screaming?

Instead, all she heard was the comfortable, indistinguishable mutter of a cheerful crowd-a few giggles, a high-pitched squeal, the sound of another firecracker detonating, and some appreciative cheers. Someone tripped over her and hastily apologized. A woman’s voice asked, “Is she all right?” and a man’s voice answered, “Drunk, I suppose.”

Daiyu pushed herself to her feet and gazed around.

For a moment, she thought she was still at Fair Saint Louis. Here was a brightly colored mob of people gathered on a summer evening on a stretch of land overlooking a river. But… but… the river was so small, not even half the width of the Mississippi. There were no booths selling sandwiches and soda; there was no smell of roasting meat and fried dough. And the people! Everyone was oddly dressed-not in shorts and halter tops, but in brightly colored shirts over formal black skirts and trousers.

Everyone was Chinese.

Daiyu looked around slowly, not believing her eyes. But everyone was Chinese.

She pivoted swiftly to glance behind her and clapped a hand to her mouth to silence the scream. The Arch was gone! In its place was a towering pagoda-shaped gate made of some sleek ma- terial that looked like red lacquer. It was maybe half the height of the Arch, but its gorgeous color made it equally impressive. More brightly dressed Chinese men and women stood near it, laughing and talking.

A short report in the air made her gasp, but the whipcrack of sound turned out to be another firecracker bursting over the diminished river. The mob of people murmured and applauded as streaks of green and blue and red rained down.

“What’s happened to me, what’s happened to me,” Daiyu whispered, turning in a slow circle to take in the rest of her surroundings. The familiar tall buildings of downtown St. Louis -gone-replaced by a crowded, crazy-quilt collection of buildings in stone and wood and steel. The well-tended lawns of the Arch grounds-gone. In their place was a swath of green grass bordered by a broad expanse of gravelly stones laid out in interlocking patterns of light and dark. Yin and yang, Daiyu thought wildly. I’m in China. Somehow she had been flung across thousands of miles to the country of her birth-but that was ridiculous-that couldn’t happen-she must have fallen, she must have hit her head, perhaps she was still dreaming, no part of this day had actually occurred-

She shook her head but could not shake herself awake. Unaccustomed panic began building inside her chest, crowding the air out of her lungs. She started pushing her way through the throngs, not sure what to do, where to go, but feeling the need for motion. “This is crazy, this can’t be happening-”

With each phrase, her voice got a little louder. In a minute she would be shrieking and running. Where was she? What cataclysm had overtaken her? “Someone help me,” she panted, pushing past staring girls and curious couples, not pausing long enough to allow anyone to offer comfort or reassurance. “Someone-anyone-I don’t know what’s going on-”

Behind her, from the direction of the river, came a single resounding boom, so loud that Daiyu froze and let out a little cry. It was followed by such a flurry of explosions that everything else was drowned out. She clapped her palms over her eyes and screamed as loud as she could.

A hand slapped itself around her right wrist and pulled it away from her face. She was so startled, she stopped screaming and opened her eyes. She was staring at a tall young man, who leaned close enough to yell into her ear over the sound of fireworks.

“I know you’re terrified,” he called. “But everything will be all right. I’ll take you home.”

And just like that, Daiyu stopped being afraid.

For a long moment, Daiyu simply stood there, trying to recover her habitual composure. She stared up at the young man. He was thin, Caucasian, and serious; his brown eyes were framed by thick lashes. His hair was dark and curly, his mouth generous, and he wore a single gold stud in each ear. She knew she had never seen him before, and yet he looked familiar to her, as if someone had told her about him and she had been waiting all this time to meet him.

“Who are you?” she whispered. Her throat felt too raw for normal speaking. “What’s happening to me?”

“I’m Kalen,” he said. “And you’ve stepped through one of the gateways into another world.”

Her breath caught, and for a minute she felt panic make another hard charge against her ribs. Another world? One of the gateways? “I don’t understand,” she said, still in that whispering voice. He leaned close enough to hear it over the noise of the crowd and the fireworks.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “This isn’t the place to explain. Are you hurt? Can you walk?”

“I fell,” she said. He still gripped her right arm, but she held up her left hand to show him the scrapes.

“Ouch,” he said. He released her wrist to pull items from a nondescript bag he carried over his shoulder. In a moment he was dampening a scrap of cloth with the contents of what appeared to be a water bottle.

“There,”he said, gently daubing at her palm. The water was soothing to her raw skin and his voice was soothing to her jangled nerves. “Does that feel better?”

Only marginally, but the act of compassion lifted her spirits just a little. “Yes, thank you,” she said.

He dropped his rudimentary first-aid kit into his bag, took hold of her arm again, and urged her forward. They stepped toward the green area, away from the river, away from whatever celebration was going on around the red gate. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you arrived, ”he said.“We only just realized you’d be coming tonight.”

All her goodwill vanished and she stopped dead. “You were expecting me?”

He glanced down at her. “Aurora and Ombri have been looking for someone like you for a long time,” he said.

She jerked her hand free. “Who are Aurora and Ombri? Who are you? What’s happening?”

“Daiyu-”

“And how do you know my name?”

“People have crossed from this time and place to your world, looking for someone like you to make the journey here.”

She shook her head and put her hands to her face again. “I still don’t understand.”

“No,”hesaid,surprisingher,“Idon’ treally understand it either. Aurora and Ombri can explain it better than I can. Let me take you to the house and get you something to eat. I promise you, everything will be all right.”

For a moment she hesitated. If she truly was in a different world-however impossible that seemed to be-how would she know whom to trust, what to believe? If she followed this stranger to some isolated location, would she suddenly be in mortal danger?

“I promise no one will hurt you,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “Truly, it will be better if I can get you to the house.”

She had no reason to trust him. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to summon fear. He watched her gravely, and something in his expression struck her as simply kind. Again she experienced the sense that she knew him already, that he had watched over her at some point when she was injured or in danger. Daiyu was used to meeting strangers; her father brought them home all the time. But she had never before met a stranger who had made her feel this instant sense of connection. She put her hand out again, and he took it with great care.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He led her across the greensward and onto one of the streets cluttered with a mishmash of buildings. Traffic was heavy, but it consisted mostly of people on foot or riding contraptions that looked like bicycles crossed with carts. There seemed to be thousands of people crowded into the streets and on the sidewalks. By the time Kalen had turned a couple of corners, Daiyu was hopelessly lost; she couldn’t even orient herself by the placement of the river. She hoped they didn’t have to walk far. She was feeling pretty worn.

A clattering sound caught her attention, and she looked up to see a long, narrow trolley heading their way, slowing down as Kalen raised a hand to signal it. She couldn’t tell what powered it-not horses, at any rate, and she couldn’t smell gasoline fumes-but she didn’t greatly care. She climbed on behind Kalen and sank gratefully onto a hard wooden bench between Kalen and an older woman.

“It’s not that far,” he told her in an encouraging voice.

She nodded wearily and looked around. Her fellow passengers were almost all Chinese, most of them more shabbily dressed than those who had been at the red gate. Of the other thirty or forty people crammed onto the trolley, Daiyu saw only five besides Kalen who were Caucasian and two who were black. One of the white women was middle-aged, dispirited, and dressed in layers of ill-fitting clothing. If she’d been back in St. Louis, Daiyu would not have been surprised if this woman had come up to her asking for a handout.

If she’d been back in St. Louis…

Where was she?

The trolley made a cheerful racket but fairly slow progress as it wound its way through a maze of streets, stopping every few blocks to pick up or drop off passengers. As it moved into an increasingly residential district, the makeup of the ridership changed, and soon almost all the passengers were white. It was quickly clear that this particular neighborhood was not for the affluent. Most of the buildings were small and squat, built out of a dull gray stone or an even drearier brown material. Here and there, filling in gaps between sturdier structures, Daiyu spotted what looked like tents-heavy cloth strung over avariety of makeshift supports.

“People live there?” she asked Kalen.

He nodded. “Most of the cangbai laborers make their homes in this district.”

“The what?”

“Cangbai. Like me. Pale.” He gestured in an indeterminate direction. “Across the river is where most of the Han live.”

“Han?”

“Like you,” he said.

Chinese,she thought. What kind of world had she stumbled into?

He smiled as if a thought had occurred to him. “Well, the poor Han live across the Zhongbu River. The rich ones live in big houses on this side of the river.”

Sheofferednoanswer, and they made the rest of the journey in silence. They finally got off at a tumbledown street corner and walked three blocks to a one-story building of tired white stone. The two windows that she could see were open to allow in the sultry air. It was pretty clear there wasn’t going to be air-conditioning inside.

There wasn’t-and not much else, either. Daiyu stood just inside the doorway and took along, comprehensive look. There was one main room that seemed to serve as kitchen and common area. Three doors, all closed, probably led off to other rooms, and she hoped one was a bathroom. The furnishings seemed to consist mainly of rag rugs over a scarred wood floor, a couple of benches close to a sturdy table, and shelving units holding an unclassifiable assortment of objects. If there had ever been any paint on the interior of the stone walls, it had long since peeledoff. Her father would be absolutely in his element trying to rehab this place.

The thought of her father gave her a sharp stab of pain, and she turned rather fiercely on her new acquaintance.

“My parents-they’ll be so worried about me,” she said. “I don’t know why I was brought here, but I don’t want to be here. How can you just take people away from their homes? What do you want with me?”

“Your parents will have no reason to fear for you,” said a deep, rich voice, and Daiyu spun around to see a black man stepping in through the door behind them. He was shorter than Kalen and at least fifty years older, with closely cropped hair that had turned entirely gray. He was dressed in black pants and a sleeveless black shirt that showed off powerful arms. “You will be returned to them unharmed, only seconds from when you saw them last. Your iteration does not vibrate in synchronicity with this one. You exist here, as it were, outside of time.”

Daiyu pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “What?” she said faintly.

“This is Ombri,” Kalen said helpfully. “He can explain everything.”

Daiyu dropped her hands to glare at Ombri. “Are you the one who brought me here?” she demanded.

“I would more truly say I invited you here and you accepted,” Ombri replied.

“There was no invitation! There was no acceptance! How can you say that?”

He pointed to her hand. “You wear the dragon ring. Only someone who is willing to sojourn between iterations can wear the ring on her finger.”

“I’m not willing to-to sojourn between worlds!” she said. She tugged the ring off and flung it across the room.“There.It’s gone. Now, take me home.”

Kalen loosed an exclamation of dismay, looking between Daiyu and Ombri as he spoke in some rapid, unintelligible language. Ombri kept his dark eyes on Daiyu as he responded, his voice much calmer than Kalen’s, though equally impossible to understand.

Daiyu threw her hands in the air. “I have no idea what you’re saying. I don’t care. Just take me home.”

Kalen turned to her with a pleading look and spoke even more urgently. Again, she couldn’t make out a word. Now Daiyu felt another spike of fear. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder how she was able to understand these strange people in this utterly strange place. If she had somehow lost the ability to communicate with them-

Kalen dove across the room to search the pile of shoes and papers where the dragon ring had landed. As soon as he found it, he hurried back to Daiyu, offering the black jade circlet to her with a single pleading word.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

Kalen slipped the ring on his finger and then spoke into it as if it held a concealed microphone. Then he held it up to his ear and his expression of exaggerated bewilderment cleared up. “Oh!” he exclaimed, followed by a few more happy words.

The ring appeared to be a translator. Daiyu could certainly use some translating right about now. She slipped it back onto her finger, where she was annoyed to find it made her hand feel just right.

“I’m not wearing this to tell you that I accept your invitation to travel to your world,” she said icily. “But if it lets me have a conversation with you-”

“Yes, that is exactly what it does,” Ombri said, and Daiyu felt a rush of relief when she was able to understand him again. “We also have a pair of black jade earrings, if you would be more comfortable wearing them.”

“I don’t want to wear your jewelry!” she exclaimed. “I just want to understand what’s happening, or I would take the ring off right now!”

“For now, we will agree that the ring does not constitute any kind of offer or acceptance, and let it serve only its more practical purpose of interpreting speech,” Ombri said. “As long as you wear it, you will be able to understand any of the dialects in our iteration, and your speech will be comprehensible to any individual you encounter.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” she demanded. “What’s an iteration?”

Ombri gave her a sober smile. “That, Daiyu, is the very essence of existence. Let me tell you our story.”