"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Disappeared" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

The Disappeared, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.The Disappeared
A Retrieval Artist Novel
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Year: 2002
For Spike, with love always


Acknowledgments
I owe a lot of gratitude to Stan Schmidt for his comments on The Retrieval
Artist, the novella that got this series started; to Laura Anne Gilman for
believing in the series and for her insightful suggestions; to Merrilee
Heifetz
for all her help on everything; and to my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, who
always
seems to know which stories are going to capture my heart.
1
┬л^┬╗
She had to leave everything behind.
Ekaterina Maakestad stood in the bedroom of her Queen Anne home, the vintage
Victorian houses of San Francisco's oldest section visible through her
windows,
and clutched her hands together. She had made the bed that morning as if
nothing
were wrong. The quilt, folded at the bottom, waiting for someone to pull it
up
for warmth, had been made by her great-great-grandmother, a woman she dimly
remembered. The rocking chair in the corner had rocked generations of
Maakestads. Her mother had called it the nursing chair because so many women
had
sat in it, nursing their babies.
Ekaterina would never get the chance to do that. She had no idea what would
happen to it, or to all the heirloom jewelry in the downstairs safe, or to
the
photographs, taken so long ago they were collector's items to most people but
to
her represented family, people she was connected to through blood, common
features, and passionate dreams.
She was the last of the Maakestad line. No siblings or cousins to take all of
this. Her parents were long gone, and so were her grandparents. When she set
up
this house, after she had gotten back from Revnata, the human colony in Rev
territory, she had planned to raise her own children here.
Downstairs, a door opened and she froze, waiting for House to announce the
presence of a guest. But House wouldn't. She had shut off the security
system,
just as she had been instructed to do.
She twisted the engagement ring on her left hand, the antique diamond winking
in
the artificial light. She was supposed to take the ring off, but she couldn't
bring herself to do so. She would wait until the very last minute, then hand