Вероника Рот – The End and Other Beginnings: Stories from the Future (страница 8)
I pinched his blanket between my first two fingers, suddenly shy again.
Heartbeat picking up again, faster and faster. “So,” he said, quiet. “Say it, then.”
“Okay.” I cleared my throat. “Okay, I will. I will say it.”
He smiled, broad, lopsided. “Claire … do you love me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I love you.”
He closed his eyes, just for a second, a soft smile forming on his lips.
“The bra is a nice touch,” he said, “but you didn’t need to stack the odds in your favor.” He smiled, if possible, even wider. “Everything has always been carrying me toward you.”
I smiled. Reached out with one hand to press play on the CD player. Eased myself next to him on the hospital bed, careful not to hurt him.
He ran his fingers over my hair, drew my lips to his again. Quiet, no need for words, we listened to “Inertia” on repeat.
“I didn’t come here to skewer you,” she said, low and throaty. “Unless you give me a reason.”
She uncurled her fingers so the weapon would retract. It made a
She was in a bar. A dirty, hot one that smelled like smoke and sweat. The floor was covered in a layer of stale peanut shells, and every surface she laid a hand on was sticky. She had busted her way in the locked door a minute or two earlier, since it was much too early for the place to be open to customers, just shy of 10:00 a.m.
The only person inside it wasn’t human—which wasn’t a big deal, unless they were trying to pretend to be one. Right now they were standing behind the bar with a rag in hand, as if it stood a chance against the grime.
“Not afraid of getting skewered by some kid,” they said. If she hadn’t been who she was, she would have called them an average man, even a boring one. Their face was rough with a salt-and-pepper beard, and there was grease under their—very human-looking—fingernails. But they had all the telltale signs of digital skin: flickering when their eyes moved, a still chest, and a shifty quality, like they didn’t belong in their body.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “I find a healthy amount of fear improves somebody’s likelihood of survival.”
Flickering, flickering, as their eyes moved.
“What can we do to improve yours, then?” they said.
She smiled, all teeth. “Why don’t you take off your little costume so I can get a good look at you?”
The ET shrugged. Twice. The first time was a human shrug, a
For a time, as a kid, she’d thought the skin was just a projection, like a hologram. But Mom had explained that wouldn’t work—if it was a bigger creature, it would get itself into trouble that way—knock glasses off countertops, hit its head on doorframes, jab people with a spiked tail, whatever. The digital skin was more like … stuffing some of its matter into an alternate dimension. The skin was real, but it also wasn’t. The ET was here, but it was also someplace else.
She didn’t have to understand the science of it, anyhow. She just had to know what to look for.
The ET burst out of its skin like stuffing coming out of a busted couch cushion. Matter bubbled up from the split, gelatinous and glowing purple-blue. For a second it just looked like a heap of purple crap, but then it started to take shape, a massive torso that oozed into squat legs, a bulging head without a neck to hold it up. And stuck on the front of that head like sequins from a Bedazzler, a dozen shiny black eyes.
The smell hit her next, like a cross between stinkbug and sulfur. It was lucky Atleigh had come across a few purpuramorphs last year, because she knew to keep her face passive. They were harmless unless you commented on or otherwise reacted to their stench. Then things could get ugly.
Well.
“Thanks for obliging,” Atleigh said. “You know, most ETs don’t bother to wear a digital skin unless they’ve got something to hide.”
She lowered her weapon, slow, and slid it back into the holster on her belt.
“What is it that you want, kid?” the purpuramorph asked her, in a low rumble, almost subvocal. Purpuramorphs were one of the few offplanet races that didn’t need some kind of tech to speak like a human. Their vocal cords—buried somewhere in that purple mush—were actually similar to her own, somehow.
Atleigh took her phone out of her pocket and lit it up. On the screen was a picture of a woman with long hair—the same auburn color as Atleigh’s own. She had deep lines in her forehead, and a glint in her murky green eyes, like she was telling you to get to the goddamn point.
“You seen her? She was in here last week sometime.”
A dozen glittering eyes swiveled toward the phone, and Atleigh schooled her features into neutrality as a wave of odor washed over her, so pungent it almost made her eyes water.
“And if I have?”
“I just need to know if you spotted her talking to anybody,” Atleigh said.
“My customers are guaranteed a certain level of
Atleigh’s smile turned into more of a gritted-teeth situation.
“First of all, I’m a little girl who can make your insides come out of you before you even notice it’s happening,” she said. “And second, that woman is my mom, and she’s dead now, so if you don’t tell me who she was talking to, I might do something out of grief that we’ll
She rested the heel of her hand on the holster at her side.
“So what’s it gonna be?” she said. “Carrot, or stick? Because I gotta tell you …” She drew the modified gun, hooked her middle finger in the metal loop just under the barrel, and tugged on it so the mechanism extended the needle again.
A couple of minutes later, Atleigh slid into the driver’s side of an old green Volvo, patted the urn buckled into the seat next to her, and started the engine. She knew exactly where she was headed next.
Atleigh Kent was a bounty hunter, and her bounty was exclusively leeches.
Not all extraterrestrials were leeches—in fact, 99.9 percent of them weren’t. Most of the ETs who settled on Earth were decent enough, and made things more interesting. When Atleigh saw pictures of the way her planet had been when there were only humans on it, she was always struck by how boring it was, all the same texture, like a bowl of plain oatmeal. It was better now, with beings of all shapes and sizes and colors, hearing half a dozen languages burbling or beeping or buzzing when you walked down the street.
She mostly dealt in the ones who had something to hide. Digital skin was illegal for a reason—mostly people wore it when they were on the run from something. But leeches …
Well. Leeches were a different story. They were a predatory race. They attached their silvery, centipede-like bodies to a person’s spinal cord and took control of their body and brain. As long as they kept the back of their neck covered, they could pass for human perfectly, absorbing the host body’s knowledge and experiences and integrating it into their new, joint self.
Meanwhile, the host suffered in silence, suppressed by the alien until they apparently fizzled out of existence. If the alien was attached too long, and then detached, the person was just a vegetable. Their bodies could go on living, if cared for, but their minds were gone.
All the alien races were vulnerable to leeches, but none more than human beings, their ideal prey. The easiest hosts to suppress, for whatever reason.
It had happened to Atleigh’s father. He—well, it hadn’t really been him, but they hadn’t known that at the time—had lived among them for weeks, dodging their mother and pretending at fatherhood. Then their mom had discovered the thing on their dad’s neck, and tried to stab it with a kitchen knife, and he had bailed.
They had gone on the hunt, as a family, the two little girls too young to remember much before the endless road trip their childhood turned into. Their mom had learned everything she could about the thing that had claimed her husband. It had taken her years to find him, in a lonely gas station in Iowa. Then she had ripped the thing off his spinal cord and gutted it. But their dad never came back to himself.
Atleigh had helped dig his grave, right there on the side of the road, by the mile marker, so they would always know where to find him. And since that day, she had been determined to save the human race, one leech at a time.
Lacey Kent’s hand went to her throat, to the buttons that fastened her collar closed. Just checking on them, as she had done a dozen times in the past ten minutes as she waited for the shuttle to reach the station.
There weren’t many students on the shuttle from the American Selenic Military Academy, and none that Lacey knew personally. A few teachers—including the famously volatile arachnoid, Mr. Zag—a few parents visiting ailing or troublesome children, a couple of fulguvore emissaries from their home planet, and of course, Lacey herself. She was in her sixth year, a secondary school transfer, so she didn’t quite have the posture that the lifers had—she could stand up straight, sure, but when no one was looking, she sagged like an old tree.