"Steven Gould - Jumper 02 - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

Drying off, he looked in the steel mirror over the sink and shuddered. The scar on his chest, a
semicircular curve starting an inch below his collar bone, had the red, raw look of still-healing tissue.
A smaller straight version, healed to the same degree, was midway up the left side of his neck. He
wanted to claw through the skin and yank it out, whatever they'd put in there, but judging by the scar,
part of it was very close to the jugular.

He looked up at his eyes. The scars were awful in and of themselves and also in what they
concealed, but what he saw in his eyes was even more terrible, more frightening. He had to look
away and it was beyond his strength, just then, to look back.

When he returned from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, he found a pair of what looked like
hospital scrubs on the bed. He held them up and found that the outside pants seams were Velcroed
from cuff to waist and he could actually put them on despite the chains. On the short-sleeved shirt the
Velcro was on the side seams from the waist to the underarm side of the sleeve. He could pull them
on over his head and seal the sides.

He liked wearing pants again, but thinking about the forethought his keepers had put into this
bothered him. It looked like they didn't expect to take off the chains anytime soon.

The room stank, and his mess and footprints were still on the floor. Like in the shower, he
washed the floor several times more than necessary.

It's not the mess you're trying to erase, is it, Davy? No matter how many times you wash
the floor, it won't undo it. It happened.

And it's probably going to happen again.




SEVEN
"This isn't exactly what we had in mind, you know."



Millie armed Sojee with a stack of flyers and the stapler, then dropped her on Columbia, near
Christ House.

"I'll make the rounds," Sojee told her. "I'll call you if I hear something."

Millie gave her some change. "Call me around five, even if you don't hear anything, okay?"

Sojee's lips smacked several times and she finally said, "Well, okay. About five."
 Millie had the taxi drop her back on the street in front of Interrobang. She walked slowly down
the street and around the corner, back toward what she was coming to think of as the "departure
zone"тАФthe place where Brian Cox had died and, possibly, the place where Davy might have been
seen last.

Hopefully, Davy had "departed" that place in a different manner than Cox.