"Mary Rosenblum - Jumpers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

blossoms as it punched through and up into the sky.

"You promised me two weeks," Joaquin yelled after him.

"He does what he says, Silvano." Zlia's voice right behind him nearly sent Joaquin headfirst off the limb.
"Don't do that." He faced her, sweating.

"Your head hurts." She tilted her face up to meet his gaze. "Sit."

He sat because he was feeling dizzy and this was not a place to be dizzy, but he couldn't hide his flinch as
she laid claw-tipped fingers across his forehead.

"I bother you." She pulled something from her thick, black hair. He thought at first that it was a crimson
flower or some kind of ornament, but suddenly he realized it was a small brilliant frog with black legs and
belly, shiny enough to be made of polished plastic.

It stared at him with black beady eyes, its ruby throat pulsing. "No." He pushed her hand away. "No
thanks."

She grabbed his wrist with her free hand and dug her thumb into his flesh. Joaquin's arm went instantly
numb to the elbow. Before he could react, she had placed the frog gently on his shoulder. He yelped as it
leaped onto the side of his throat. The cold grip of its tiny feet filled him with clammy horror, and he
swallowed, dry-mouthed.

The pain in his head stopped. Just like that.

Zlia smiled as if he had thanked her. "Endorphins," she said as she lifted the creature from his neck.

Endorphins? Joaquin watched the frog burrow into her hair again. His head felt fine. Great. Even the gash
in his scalp had stopped hurting. "It soaked through my skin," he said. "Are they тАж" His brain groped for
words. "Are they natural?"

"Silvano buys the eggs," she said and shrugged. "I take care of them and they grow." Then she gathered
herself and leaped for the platform.

White-knuckled, Joaquin waited for her to miss, to fall, because you couldn't just jump across. She
landed lightly. In balance. Suddenly, her long limbs and skinny-child body made sense. She was created
to move like this. Just as the frog had been created to exude an endorphinlike compound from its skin.
Because nothing here was naturalтАФnot the trees, not the creatures. "Drugs," Joaquin said with disgusted
comprehension. "That's what Silvano does here, isn't it? Black market naturals." The current fad.
Lucrative. He glanced around at the stark platform and wondered what Silvano did with his money.
"How do I get over there?"

Across the chasm, Zlia crouched, her face expressionless in the dim light. Silently she uncoiled a thin line
from around her waist. With a practiced snap of her wrist she whipped the free end at an overhead
branch. It wrapped around the limb and held. "Like this," she said, and stepped off the branch. The line
was invisible in the twilight, so it seemed that she glided weightlessly through the air toward him. She
landed lightly beside him and handed him the pliable handle on the end of the line. "Silvano calls it
tarzanning. It is a joke." Her smile transformed her face the way a shaft of sun transformed a blossom
from dull crimson to a blazing scarlet. Her face was тАж beautiful.