"Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smedman Lisa)

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and nei-ther the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."


March 19,2060
The day it ended ... And began ...
09:45:05 PST
Seattle, United Canadian and American States
They'd come for Pip in the middle of the night. Sneaked in the door of the squat, past the bars and locks and
the mean old dog that slept in the hallway and that would'a chewed the arm off anyone but Pip and Deni.
Skulked their way past all of the magical wards Deni had set up to keep his little sister safe, past the howler
sensors that he'd rewired to run off a power cell taken from the abandoned car out back. Stolen Pip right
off the mattress she shared with Deni, right out of Deni's arms.
Nothing about it made sense. Deni and Pip were nobodiesтАФjust a teenage kid and his eight-year-old
sister trying to scrape by in one of the roughest neighborhoods of the Puyallup Barrens. They got by as best
they could and stayed clean. Mostly. Deni hired out his shamanistic talents, running astral recons for the
scavengers who raided the nearby Black Junk Yards. Pip stayed safe in-side the squat, playing with the
MatrixPal learning com-puter that Deni had given her to try and jazz her into talking, to break through the
silence she'd blanketed her-self in since their dad died.
Pip and Deni didn't bother anybody, and nobody both-ered them.
Until now.
Now Deni was racing after Pip, pumping his mana to the max to follow her trail. His meat body was still back at
the squat, curled in a ball, nose to knee. But his astral body was loping like Dog, nose to the ground, tracking
Pip's as-tral spoor.
The snatchers had taken Pip out across Hell's Kitchen, the wasteland of ash dunes and crusted lava that
was left behind after Mount Rainier blew its lid. Pits of hot mud that would'a boiled the skin off your bones
bubbled like open sores, and sulfurous wizz-yellow steam rose into the
air. It all passed by in a blur below him as Deni zipped along at maglev speeds.
He passed a nature spirit, its astral form a beastlike cloud of swirling ash. The thing glanced at Deni with lava-red
eyes, but Deni was past it before the spirit could attack. He was moving at nova speed, burning up his body's essence
at a furious clip. Bit of a brainwipe thing to do, but he had no choice. Pip's life was at stake.
He could see where they'd taken her now. Her scent led to an abandoned power plant. He slowed a tick and took in
the sprawling complex of gray concrete walls, massive black pipes that disappeared into the ground, and skeletal
towers whose dead high-tension lines lay sprawled on the lava fields like limp snakes. Then he circled the complex
once, giving it a quick sniff in about the time it took for one wag of a tail. Satisfied that no nasties were guarding the
site, he loped in through the graffiti-smeared wall near-est to the spot where Pip was, moving at a more cautious pace
than before.
He was expecting cold gray walls and rusted turbines, dark stairways and garbage on the floor.
Instead he found a toy store.
The rooms were lit like day, the floors clean. The walls were covered in, holopics of simsense stars and the floors
were knee-deep in toys, all of them new and expensive. Huggable, mood-inducing "feeling foam" dolls sat propped
against walls, and miniature maglev trains raced along tracks that wound from room to room. A model space sta-tion
bobbed gently in mid-air in a darkened office, a holo-graphic spread of twinkling stars surrounding it, and a
floor-to-ceiling doll house filled another room. One area held a knee-high table set with toy plates that projected a
three-dimensional display of grub, and under it two Battle-bots tussled back and forth across the floor, their metal fists
making tiny clanking noises as they traded punches.
Deni saw all of this in a heartbeat as his astral body flashed through the abandoned geothermal plant, bearing down
in a laser-straight line through walls toward Pip. It confused him. He'd figured the goons who snatched his sister to be
body boosters or pimps. If so, they made their captives pretty drekkin' cozy.
He was close now. Pip's astral scent was strong. Deni flashed through a heavy door of metal-sheathed plastic, then