"Charles Stross - Escape" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

unexpected. I won't say unwelcome. But I've had to do lots of thinking."

"What happened?" I ask. I hold out my arms.
"What happened --" she bites her lower lip. Looks at me, with a speculative expression I've seen before
that shocks me with its directness. She takes my fingertips and lets me pull her closer, until I can feel her
breath on my face.

"You know about the goon squad?" she asks.

"The goons? Didn't Anubis make them out of --"

A finger stills my lips. "She's dead, now," says Raisa. She doesn't sound desolate: she's managed to reach
the stage of looking back on it from that level of equanimity that lets us keep our sanity in return for a
certain coldness in the soul. "Anubis took her, along with the other over security specialists. All except
Mikhail, in fact, turned into ... weapons. I heard this later. I never saw Amina again, not as anyone I
could recognize. You die a little when that happens. We'd been together years before the evacuation,
thought we'd be together afterwards, one way or the other ... wrong. That was the big mistake I regret:
assuming there'd be time to say goodbye. It was years ago, when I first arrived, and there were other
people in mourning. That's why we never did anything about the goons before. But you wouldn't know
anything about that, would you?"

"Wrong," I manage. "I think --" I look her in the eye, remembering the scene in the lobby of Anubis's last
retreat, and suddenly I can't think of Ivan any more. "I may have been there too. Once. The worst is
knowing that you'll never know what happened, isn't it? What they -- what Anubis -- did. Death is the
ultimate unfinished story, isn't it?"

"'Death is the ultimate unfinished story'; I like that." She strokes my hair absently. "That's what made you
so abrupt?"

"There are no second chances."

She sighs. "Maybe not." Then she looks me in the eye and I see something there, some stoicism that I
hadn't recognized before: she's tougher than I am, I think, able to live with the consequences of her
mistakes in a way that I'm still vacilating about. "What do I mean to you, Oshi? You don't know me, I
don't know you. What is it?"

"You're very attractive," I say, automatically and truthfully. "And also --"

"Thank you, but I'd rather leave that unfinished," she said, smiling faintly. "You get defensive when you're
not in control of the situation, don't you?"

"What situation?" I demand.

She leans closer and I can feel her heartbeat, her proximity. I'm really tired, I ache with it, but I can't let
go now. She's too important. "This," she says, lightly touching my forehead. "If you'd ever put down roots
in a world, then had them lopped off, you'd know what real loss was about."

"But I have --"

"Roots?" she's so skeptical it runs through me like a knife. "You've never been loved, Oshi, that's what it