Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman

Чтение книги онлайн.

      P.B. was exhausted. There was no reason for it; he’d just been puttering around the apartment, playing with color swatches of paint and fabric, wondering what Wren’s reaction would be if she came home and found her apartment-white walls painted Victorian Mint, or Honeybear Brown. A terrifying thought, but hardly an exhausting one. And yet, all he wanted to do right now was crawl onto his cot in the office, and take a nap.

      He resisted, standing in the hallway and doing stretches, feeling his thick muscles creak and complain while he worked them. His body was not designed for yoga, but it seemed to do the trick: he was still tired, but it wasn’t quite so overwhelming.

      The delicate, hand-painted fabric on the wall in front of him—a gift from their friend Shig, a Japanese businessbeing—stood out like a sore thumb. Or, more accurately, it stood out like a perfectly formed thumb on a gnarled, battered hand. P.B. had asked Wren once why she never actually bothered to do anything about her apartment, and she had simply shrugged. How a woman partnered to an art dealer could be so blasé about home decoration P.B. did not understand, and had threatened more than once to call an intervention on her design sense.

      Their most recent discussion—too much to call it an argument—had been two nights before, and she had finally told him to do what he wanted, so long as he left her alone on the subject already. He had barely waited until she was out of the apartment this morning before pulling out the paint and fabric swatches. But he hadn’t gotten beyond her office when the exhaustion hit.

      Once he felt confident that he wasn’t going to collapse in a pile, P.B. went back into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the fridge. Diet, of course—didn’t Valere know those things were going to kill her?—and downed it in one long gulp. Only after he had crushed the now-empty can in his paw did he realize that it was caffeine-free.

      “Christ, woman, what’s the point?”

      He paused, feeling something shift, even as he spoke her name.

      “Valere? Wren?”

      Silence, not unexpected, answered him.

      If he really needed to, he could reach her; they had shared enough of a connection the times she had grounded in him that he could find her, anywhere, if need be. He considered it, then shook his head. Probably his imagination, that shift. She should be well into the job by now, whatever it was. She’d only spent a day preparing for it, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was no need to be concerned. And if she ran into any real trouble outside that, she could handle herself. There was no need for him to worry.

      That decided and put to rest, there was no reason at all for the sound of a high-pitched buzzer blasting through the apartment to send him a foot straight into the air.

      “What the hell?”

      The intercom. That’s all it was. Sergei had gotten it fixed, but they never used it: if anyone wanted in, they could ping, or climb up the fire escape, the way he did.

      Except Wren wasn’t here, and Bonnie’d gone to work, so nobody was around to hear a ping, you idiot, he told himself, going to the door. Which meant that whoever was out there knew it was just him in the apartment, and didn’t feel like climbing the fire escape to gain access.

      “All right, all right, hold your horses, I’m coming,” he grumbled, trying to remember where the intercom controls were.

      “Right. There you are.” Right by the front door, which made sense. Two buttons to talk and listen, and one to unlock the building’s front door.

      Not thinking, he hit the buzzer to let them in.