Wild Cards. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and don’t get to throw shade.” She turned the page. “If one of your kids has been kidnapped by our reptoid overlords, that’s your problem.”

      “I’m more worried about those asshole protesters, who do exist, than about the reptoids, who don’t.”

      “Spoken like a reptoid stooge. And I don’t think they’re protesting assholes.”

      “When there are real aliens in the world, I don’t know why you feel the need to invent—” He stopped himself. “Antonia’s a dark-haired girl, about five four, black gloves.”

      Jan raised the tabloid between them.

      “Fine.” He turned from her, covered the mic again—the hold line had started playing what he really hoped was not a Muzak cover of James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy.” “Wally, have you seen Antonia?”

      The enormous pile of iron whose birth certificate read Wally Gunderson, and whose ace name was Rustbelt, though most people shortened it to Rusty, shrugged. Joints creaked and red flakes drifted down to the lacquered wood floor Rusty was trying not to scuff with his enormous boots—or were those feet? Rusty didn’t need to wear clothes, but Robin was glad he made the effort, even if his sharp metal edges pressed disconcertingly against his lime-green polo shirt and dad jeans. “Oh, she’s here for sure, yeah. We brought them all in from the van, right through the door, and then Bubbles told off those jerks outside. The kids are fine. Have you got through to that delivery company there about our bags yet?”

      Robin didn’t know what he expected an enormous metal man to sound like, but the strong North Range accent always caught him by surprise. “I’m listening to the hardest working hold music in show business.” Outside, the protesters’ roars gained a rhythm: Hell no, jokers gotta go. Christ Jesus. “I just—I really need to know where everyone is. Okay?” How could he have lost a kid already?

      “Well, that’s Yerodin right there.” Rusty pointed through the crowd, past mounds of instrument cases, to his adopted daughter, Yerodin, who he hadn’t let out of his sight all day. Yerodin, who the other kids called Ghost, hovered over the arm of a couch, hugging one leg as she talked with Adesina Pond, who looked like an animate obsidian statue with cobalt wings.

      “That’s two out of seven, at least.” The speaker on Robin’s Nokia hadn’t worked right since he dropped the phone in a vat of acid six years back, but even with the pops and fuzz he could hear the bad synths had marched on to “Try Me.” “Hold this.” Wally took the phone with the care of a man trying not to break a butterfly wing, and raised it to the geared pit where his ear should have been.

      Robin craned his neck over the crowd. He was six feet two, and would have had a decent angle on the lobby even without playing his card—especially since most of the crowd were teenagers. But he was here to chaperone the students of Xavier Desmond High, and he’d just shouldered through a horde of angry nat protesters after an armed standoff. No use pretending to be normal.

      So he stretched.

      Body mass pressed up into his neck. Skin expanded. The bones he was very good at pretending to possess stopped mattering. His chest caved in, his arms grew frail, his watch clattered to the floor, and it all felt so relaxing. He smiled, and made himself stop when his neck was only twelve feet long.

      From up here he could see most of his students, though the Xavier Desmond High School Jazz Band—the Jokertown Mob—was certainly living up to the “Mob” part of its name. Lanky Peter Jacobson, aka Segway, zipped through the crowd on his wheels. Morpho Girl, there, was still talking with Ghost—a ten-year-old girl raised, if you call it that, by people who hoped she’d one day be a weapon. Ghost, intangible, glanced over her shoulder at the crowd beyond the hotel doors. Marissa, aka something—she changed her handle every few weeks—had struck up a conversation with a Chinese girl wearing a bright silver cross and a Detroit Detonators T-shirt. He spotted Asti and Sean showing something he really hoped was not a fake ID to the lobby bartender, and—

      “How’s it going, Mister R?” Jacobson hopped over a luggage cart, spun midair, and landed with a squeal. A bellhop glared.

      “Fine,” Robin called down. “Segway, have you seen Antonia?”

      Jacobson beamed at being called by his card name. Robin often wondered what it was about drawing the card that triggered an obsession with pseudonyms. Not that Robin Ruttiger himself, aka (no matter how he tried to forget it these days) Rubberband, had a leg to stand on in that regard. “She looked tired. Maybe she, like, went upstairs for a nap?”

      “Thank you.” He snapped back down to size. Segway swept past, bent down, and tossed Robin his watch. He stretched his wrist thin to slide it on. “Wally, can you watch the door? And stay on the phone?”

      “You bet.” Rusty stuck up his thumb, ground his jaw, and listened to James-less Brown.

      Robin flattened himself, everything except his feet. (He didn’t need shoes, but he liked wearing them.) He caught his watch in his hand this time—no sense testing the “full shock-absorbing power” any more than necessary—as he snaked through the crowd. “Excuse me. Pardon. Pardon me. Passing through.” The mothers and kids and hotel employees didn’t notice, or did and didn’t care, or did and recoiled in horror, for which he didn’t blame them. Flattened out, he looked like people did in cartoons after they’d been bulldozed by an enterprising coyote. He wriggled to the stairs, stretched his arms up fourteen feet—ten years of practice and it still felt weird reminding himself he didn’t have shoulder joints anymore—caught the overhead railing, pulled his skin like a, well, like a rubber band, and snapped up through the air to land on the second floor in a tangle of overextended limbs.

      The mezzanine, at least, was quiet. He sorted himself out, adjusted his watch, and straightened his collar.

      Antonia Abruzzi stood alone by the window, staring down in silhouette at the protesters’ flags and signs. Her long dark hair perched on her head, wound in intricate braids. She looked fifteen and fifty at once. She wore gloves, even if her hands didn’t fill them right. She had removed her left glove, and the long thin tentacles she had instead of a hand fanned over the window like brush bristles mashed flat.

      He approached. The chant rhythm outside had changed; he couldn’t guess the words, now. Below, Sean led the kids in a chant of their own:

       Jokertown, Jokertown, Jokertown Mob!

       Stick that bullshit in your gob!

      “Hey,” Robin said. “I know it’s a mess down there, but Ms. Oberhoffer and Ms. Pond and Mr. Gunderson and I really need to know where everyone is.”

      “You know where I am,” Antonia said.

      “I do now, yeah.”

      She didn’t turn.

      “Would you like to talk?”

      “No.”

      “Antonia, I know walking through that crowd was hard. They’re small-minded, angry people. But we won’t let anyone hurt you.” It was hard to keep the anger from his voice. “Until Ms. Pond has us all checked in, we really need to know everyone’s in the same place, and safe. Could you please come join the others?”

       Jokertown, Jokertown, Jokertown Mob!

       There aren’t many СКАЧАТЬ