"Elizabeth Moon - Aura2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

pink roses around the rims, not linked blue squares; Aunt Sarah was funny about
that, and never used both sets on the table at once.

She remembered the faint clean smell of Uncle Sam's shaving lotion, the men's
strong hands gesturing as they talked in that language she had never heard, a
language full of blocky, angular sounds. It sounded old, she thought, older than
anything she spoke, older than Spanish, or the Latin the priests spoke in her
friend Mary's church. She had liked the language, but she had not really liked
the other men that much. They were ignoring her. Uncle Sam and Aunt Sarah never
ignored her; they had no daughter and she fit neatly between their sons in age.
She enjoyed a special position in this house; she often pretended she really was
their niece, that she belonged to them. So even though she had been told to
leave the men alone to talk, she wished they would all look at her, recognize
her as part of the family, even approve of her, as Uncle Sam did.

It was in that context she had leaned forward, flicked a flirtatious glance at
Uncle Sam, and asked what she had asked. About the numbers.

She woke sweating from that nightmare again. She never quite heard her own
voice, never quite remembered which intolerable words she had used to ask that
intolerable question. If she heard herself, she sometimes thought, she could not
bear it. She pushed the covers aside, and sat up. Over forty, and still caught
in that old disgrace -- ! Ridiculous. Her friends told her that, and had told
her that, and still once or twice a year she woke in a panic, like this, with
the full weight of it still on her head. She knew, as they did not, that nothing
could undo the pain she had given, and if an innocent child could thrust so
sharp a sword into so wounded an adult, what hope for adults? What hope for her,
who had made so many stupid mistakes, not only that one, and not only from
opening her mouth to ask stupid questions . . . though that was, even now, a
constant failing.

Brad was asleep; the cry she remembered giving must have been in the dream for
he had not stirred. She pushed herself off the bed and blinked hard, trying to
see in the darkness. Flickers of light, not quite enough to signal a migraine on
its way, but a warning. She found her slippers by feel, and shuffled down the
hall, running her hand along the wall. No sound from Lee's room, and none from
Tina. They both slept heavily; she'd been lucky that way, too. Glimmers danced
in her sight, linking into shapes she didn't want to see. Migraine aura, she
reminded herself firmly. It's not really numbers, and certainly not those
numbers; she had never been able to remember the numbers, not even when she
could see the man's arm, the cigarette in his fingers, and the line at the wrist
where the brown hand became the white arm. She could see the fine dark hairs,
the white skin below, and the numbers...but not which.

She staggered into the kitchen doorframe, and clung to it. The glimmers
twitched, pulsing: with her heartbeat, edging into almost coherent patterns. No
longer strings of numbers . . . now they made headlines, glowing in nasty
lime-green, of the most stupid or creel things she had ever said, and now